The Side Hustle as Easy as Snap. Crackle. Pop.
I spent a lot of years as a detective, and the job teaches you a nearly universal truth: when everybody at the scene tells you the same story, in the same order, using the same words, the story has been rehearsed.
Which brings me to side-hustle advice.
You’ve read it. It’s the same story, in the same order, using the same words. The only difference is the stock photos:
“8 Income Streams You Can Build Without Quitting Your Day Job.”
“9 Passive Income Ideas That Changed My Life.”
“11 Ways to Make Money While You Sleep, You Beautiful Lazy Genius.”
The number changes. The income streams do not. It’s always digital products, freelancing, affiliate links, a newsletter, a course, content creation, and “passive” income strategies.
Look closer at these side hustles, and you’ll see an interesting pattern emerge. Every single income stream require a laptop, a Wi-Fi connection, and the promise of “scale.” But not one of them requires somebody to make something with their own two hands. Which is somehow supposed to make them seem easier. But it’s deceptive, because these side hustle are actually really difficult to implement.
The easier way.
Somewhere in America right now, a woman is selling Rice Krispie treats out of a Tupperware container at her kid’s swim meet, and she is going to clear $200 dollars cash, tax situation unclear, and nobody will ever write a Medium article about her. She has no funnel. She has no lead magnet. She has marshmallows and a nine-by-thirteen pan, and she will sell out by noon.
She does not exist, according to the side-hustle literature. Neither does the guy at the farmers market with the laser engraved cutting boards. Neither does the soap lady. Every farmers market in this country has a soap lady. And all of these invisible side hustles have one thing in common; the entire transaction completes without anyone being asked to “hop on a discovery call.”
Candles. Leather wallets. Wood carvings. Paintings. Tamales out of a cooler in a hardware store parking lot, quilts, birdhouses, cookies, pickles, pies, bread, and sourdough. Hell, you can even find service-based businesses like knife sharpening there.
These businesses can pay your mortgage, but never make the side hustle list. Why?
The allure of passive income.
I strongly suspect the reason for this is that making something tangible doesn’t feel as easy as the promise of passive income from a digital product. But these businesses are functionally simple.
A woman making Rice Krispie treats at a swim meet will never need a sales funnel, an email list, or a $97 course. She’ll never have a “journey.” She’ll just have steady customers and cash in her pocket, which is the kind of success that doesn’t photograph well for LinkedIn. It doesn’t fit the narrative. It doesn’t create a product you can sell to someone else about how to sell products.
One of the biggest myths of our time is the myth of passive income. The harsh truth; everyone pays the vig. Even the guy who owns the ATM business (literally printing money) has to work the machines, i.e., refill them, repair them, etc. It sounds passive, but it’s not.
There is another reason these companies rarely make the side hustle list.
The question of scale.
Everybody wants to think about growing or “scaling” their business before they have made their first $500. Hell, most people start to think about it before they made their first $1.
Scaling sells. It’s why the content economy spends so much time on it. The guy who builds a billion dollar company out of his garage. The e-commerce brand where the founders sold to a corporate giant and are swimming in a pool of money. And then, you start to think that could be you. But make no mistake, there is a graveyard of tens of thousands of businesses for every one that hit the big time.
But maybe—just maybe—that isn’t what it’s about.
Maybe it’s about freedom.
The invisible economy—the one that actually works, that actually feeds people—operates on a completely different logic. It doesn’t need an audience of thousands. It doesn’t need virality. It just needs to be good and available and real. And that’s precisely why nobody writes about it.
Selling Rice Krispie treats doesn’t make the list because the Rice Krispie treats are not passive and cannot scale. You can’t make a Rice Krispie treat once and sell it ten thousand times while you sleep. Every treat demands its own marshmallows. This is called a “marginal cost,” and the entire hustle-content industry treats marginal costs the way vampires treat garlic bread. It’s also not passive; you gotta make the treats every time you sell them.
But selling Rice Krispie treats works. It’s simple really. And it gives you freedom. It gives you independence.
And it works because it’s elegantly simple. The purpose of a business is to deliver something of value to your customer, and have them deliver value in the form of an acceptable payment back to you. That’s it. Everything else is a distraction.
When you sell a Rice Krispie treat, your customer knows what they are getting and are happy you are delivering it to them.
Here’s what’s really funny. It’s easier to make your first $500 selling a tangible product then an digital information product.
Closing argument
The digital-hustle genre isn’t advice about making money. It’s about selling you long shot odds. It’s advice about making money look a certain way — recurring, passive, screenshot-able, ideally involving the phrase “while I was at the beach.”
And while these hustle bros are dreaming up their next canvas, playbook, blueprint, or whatever they are putting together, the swim-meet lady is making two hundred dollars in real money.
I’m not saying digital businesses are fake. Some of them are probably terrific, and if you have genuine expertise that genuinely helps people, sell it, godspeed, invoice promptly.
What I’m saying is this: the side-hustle industry has defined “business” as “selling advice about business.” Which is perfect if you’re selling advice about business.
Meanwhile the analog world is sitting right there, un-indicted. It has customers who pay cash. It has products you can drop on your foot. It has a feedback mechanism more honest than any analytics suite ever built: either the pie sells or you take the pie home and eat your inventory, which, I’d note, is the only business failure mode that comes with pie.
So here’s my counter-list, complete:
1. Make a thing.
2. Sell the thing.
That’s it. That’s the whole thing. No paywall.
And when the internet goes down someday — really down, the big one — the course creators and the funnel architects and the framework guys will wander outside, blinking, holding laptops that have become expensive cheese boards. The soap lady will still have soap.
Buy from her now. Beat the rush.