My Side Hustle Journey

My Journey

I have been working on side hustles for most of my life. Ever since I brought generic sodas to school to sell for 50 cents (that i got for 11 cents) when my middle school banned soda. I had employees that I’d give them to at 35 cents and they sold for 50. Really ramped up my soda business for a little while! That was the start of seeing some real profits.

Fast forward to adulthood and I started my development career by building a music downloads website called DigitalDubbed that specialized in dubstep, triphop & chill genres of electronic music. That cost me $300/mo to keep the servers up and I was never able to turn a profit (but I learned a lot about software development!). I continued to try random ideas but one that stuck and was reasonably successful about 12 years ago was MobileWeedApps. Just making iphone and android apps for dispensaries right when they were starting to become legal. That one was pulling in $5k/mo profit and was looking good, but I decided to focus on a new job at Magento at the time and ended up letting it fade.

The next years were soooooooooo many failed attempts at business ideas & strategies, but I kept learning efficient ways to make websites, apps, do seo & do digital marketing. Even though the business ideas were not fruitful, the lessons in digital technology and marketing were getting built. Looking for a house I ended up creating a PITI calculator which was kind of fun. Didn’t figure out a way to make money from it, but during that process came across the Brave Browser referral program. This was paying out $5-$7.50 for each person that kept the browser installed for 30 days. After playing around with a few blog articles I found a loophole in Microsoft Ads that allowed me to put the brave referral link right in the ad. It looked like a legit link (this was banned by Adwords, and has since been banned by Microsoft Ads), and allowed for TONS of users to download the browser through my referral link for very cheap. Ended up getting enough profit to put a small down payment on a house in the mountains.

I got the house in the mountains during Covid, and I ended up starting a plow company. That lasted about a week and I realized I was in way over my head. However, I had a sweet domain of mtnplow.com and figured I would just make a site for all the snow removal service providers in the area to handle their specific areas. That idea ended up really catching on and has been steadily growing for 4 years.

While showing me a viable interest and a small business opportunity I did see the limitations of targeting the mountain regions and started researching the best business verticals to target using the same strategy of growing a community interest around a niche set of service providers. In addition, I researched the most lucrative areas. I settled on running my own junk removal business targeting the Southern California areas with the brand HAULS. And I did still keep a mountain brand going with MTN HAUL junk removal covering Lake Arrowhead & Running Springs.

Feeling proud of what I’ve built these on, and excited about the future!