Some people may know that I’ve been in the hustle game since I was a kid. My early days in this world mostly consisted of trading and selling pokemon cards on the bus from 1st grade and on. The bus as a kid was an economy, and the primary market was pokemon and yugiou cards. There are some skills that one could say I learned here like trading and making deals fast as well as learning market value and tangible value for something. You get the gist. Pokemon cards and such went on until probably 4-5 grade, and it then died down, however; another arena became popular. School fundraisers.
Another area one could say I hustled was school fund-raisers even though I didn’t receive straight up cash. Whenever we would have an assembly as kids in school, and someone would come out on stage to talk about the prizes we could get if we sold so many of “X” thing, I got excited. I would go door to door around every house in the neighborhood trying to get people to buy cookies, wrapping paper, chocolate, mattresses, etc. My friends and I would always compete to see who could get the most prizes and rewards for such selling. However, this too grew out of interest eventually.
Middle school provoked other opportunities to arise. One, for example, was “The World’s Finest Chocolate Bar Sale.” This was huge. My brother showed me this first and we both happened to get into this new “market” before it became a saturated area and lots of people got into it. Essentially, we got these boxes of chocolate bars that had different flavors and sold each bar for only $1. It worked fantastically if I do say so myself because kids and teenagers are impulse buyers which is also what I attribute to some of my hustling skills in high school too.
I also happened to make a jolly rancher venture happen in middle school. I basically bought a big 4-5 lbs bag of jolly ranchers and sold them 10 for $1. This was also a great strategy. If kids have a couple bucks or quarters on them at school and they have the opportunity to buy something, they will.
From 7th & 8th grade until the end of freshman year I would sell sneakers every once in a while. Because I was a basketball player for most of my life up until that point, I was always in the sneaker game for new shoes. The bus, once again, was a prime place to find buyers and also to sell shoes in general.
I also used to mow lawns, hosue sit, dog sit, water flowers, baby sit, lawn mowing, landscaping in general, and more. I did all this through various connections with the neighbors and tried to help them out as much as possible.
Senior was a game changing year for me in the side hustle game. I took a graphic design class which I learned how to design, screen print, and make my own sweatshirts and shirts. This class was notorious for letting students actully make and sell shirts, although not many people sold them. I happened to make a sweatshirt that said “SWAY”. I only planned to make one but then when I wore it around school, I suddenly had 15 orders for the next day at $20 a sweatshirt for people who wanted one. Random people would be wearing them around school and that feeling was incredible. This side venture ended up being more succesesful than most peoples shirts sales except a few individuals.
The last main thing that I sold in high-school was accessories. For my business Blu-Buy, I had bought a bunch of various cool gadgets and products from manufacturers to start an online store. After I realized that a regular old online store could not work, I had to find a way to get rid of the inventory. So I sold things to my classmates out of my backpack like sunglasses, wallets, wall chargers, phone car holders, FM radio transponder, etc. That was a grind indeed. For example, the Italian style sunglasses that were probably the same material as real ray bans cost me $2 a pop and I sold the glasses for $15 a pair. They were authentic sunglasses and suitable material, and I was probably making the same amount on a couple as a brand was on their glasses, so there wasn’t any real harm.
Nowadays, I am constantly looking to flip something on FB marketplace or Ebay. All in all, I suggest everyone starts some kind of side hustle which I think can help anyone out a lot. What side hustle are you interested in?