Side hustle- not a doom and gloom thread

[rivermobster]

If you and I sat down an addressed the fraud issue, I think we could come up with something.

I too thought about the holes in my idea. Basically it is fraud when no service is provided. So how do you ad a service? One idea I had to overcome this……… I would buy $5 floral arrangements and ship them to every campaign in America. A few months later, I would send the $832,76 invoice for the Campaign Services floral arrangement, delivered on xyz date, in invoice.
Do you think that overcomes the fraud issue?LOL





Again, to those reading this, I am only being funny with no plans of actually doing the above. The 1st Amendment allows me to discuss it. So please, just take it with the levity of knowing that there is no real intent to actually do this. Thank you.

"Basically it is fraud when no service is provided. So how do you ad a service?"

Let's ask Black Lives Matter. Sure seems like They have figured it out.

And not to appear racist...

Think about all the other libtard orgs out there, getting rich, by providing bogus services?

The Center for Biological Diversity has to be top of the food chain, when it comes to fraudulent bullshit.

No wait...

That would be George Soros and his DEI initiatives.

The problem for us is...

Republicans work hard for their money, so we don't easily give it away.

Rant off.

 

[bonesfab]

"Basically it is fraud when no service is provided. So how do you ad a service?"

Let's ask Black Lives Matter. Sure seems like They have figured it out.

And not to appear racist...

Think about all the other libtard orgs out there, getting rich, by providing bogus services?

The Center for Biological Diversity has to be top of the food chain, when it comes to fraudulent bullshit.

No wait...

That would be George Soros and his DEI initiatives.

The problem for us is...

Republicans work hard for their money, so we don't easily give it away.

Rant off.

Oh they provided a service. Demolition was their service

 

[JL95]

I flipped weld racing wheels pretty heavily and made about $12k in monopoly fake money to help with the house down payment. That whole boogie isnt worth it anymore. Got too saturated. Buying something for $150 and selling it for $800 or more before you get home was fun though. That was pre paypal tax stuff though.

 

[Sportin' Wood]

If you and I sat down an addressed the fraud issue, I think we could come up with something.

I too thought about the holes in my idea. Basically it is fraud when no service is provided. So how do you ad a service? One idea I had to overcome this……… I would buy $5 floral arrangements and ship them to every campaign in America. A few months later, I would send the $832,76 invoice for the Campaign Services floral arrangement, delivered on xyz date, in invoice.
Do you think that overcomes the fraud issue?LOL





Again, to those reading this, I am only being funny with no plans of actually doing the above. The 1st Amendment allows me to discuss it. So please, just take it with the levity of knowing that there is no real intent to actually do this. Thank you.

Hypothetically; I'm pretty sure we could craft a solid strategy. I bet there is a sweet spot on the invoice amount. The key would be finding the amount that does not get escalated to leadership for approval. I bet under $5,000 and you could sneak in under the wire. It would be a really interesting exercise.

 

[Socalx09]

Since starting this post, I made an additional $125. It’s not much, but that’s the tank of gas to get to havasu in a few weeks. My goal is to just offset costs to counter the rising costs.

Huge thanks to @lbhsbz for taking time out of his day to talk to me about eBay and some very helpful tips. I really appreciated it.

 

[DMF]

Since starting this post, I made an additional $125. It’s not much, but that’s the tank of gas to get to havasu in a few weeks. My goal is to just offset costs to counter the rising costs.

Huge thanks to @lbhsbz for taking time out of his day to talk to me about eBay and some very helpful tips. I really appreciated it.

That's rad, I love the hustle!

 

[Orange Juice]

I knew someone who would buy up every Hot wheels Batman cars at Walmart for a buck or two, and sell them on EBay for $10-15.

He has a few other items that work great as well. $120k a year net.

 

[The Chicken]

You have to be smart with shipping. I don't sell used stuff or one of something....I have about 10 package sizes, and if it doesn't fit in those I don't sell it. I offer free shipping (obviously built into the item price) on everything and I know the exact shipping cost going in. Took a lot of research and figuring out which carriers offer what programs that I can take advantage of, but it works at the end of the day.

Selling one off stuff constantly has to be challenge with shipping, I'm not sure how or why people do it. I take one picture, create one listing, and sell that thing 100 times. I wouldn't bother doing it if I could only sell it once.

What is it that you build/sell?

Funny long story I'll try and make sorta short.
Years ago, I ran a custom fab shop out of a large shop we built in our backyard, my main focus was stuff that went fast in the desert off road.
My dream was to eventually go legit and have a big full service custom off-road shop.
After a few years of running in the red, and realizing that every off-road shop I knew of had gone tits up within a few years, I woke up one morning to the realization that my dream had to die or I was going to go very bankrupt. It was a hard and sad pill to swallow.
I closed everything down, and put my full focus on electrical work-which I had never actually quit through all of this-because, well, everyone needs electricity, but nobody NEEDS off road toys.
As I was choking on the bitter ashes of defeat and closing everything down, in a move of sort of desperation, I had one last half-hearted card to play, and I tossed that card in the game fully expecting it to go up in smoke like the rest of my efforts.
That card?
During my time as an off-road fab shop, one thing I had been heavily involved in was building parts and custom suspensions and cages and other doo-dads for Polaris Rangers. We are talking 2003-2009 Rangers here, so pretty outdated stuff by todays standards. One other thing I had done was develop a few "kits" for people to install themselves. Several of my kits were developed to correct a manufacturing oversight, or to help people install desired aftermarket items. For example, the '09+ Rangers had a serious issue with really hot air coming off the radiator and through the foot pedal area-if you were wearing shoes, your feet would get uncomfortably warn, and if you were wearing flip flops or similar, your feet might actually get burned as the cooling fan pumped hot air off the radiator onto your feet. Polaris denied there was even an issue(but the next series of Rangers corrected the issue, LOL), but meanwhile the forums were abuzz with people complaining of burned feet and a bunch of really terrible attempts to mitigate that heat. I looked at the design of the pedals, prototyped a couple fixes for it, refined it, and turned it into a product called the Footsaver.
I also made several brackets that fit perfectly into the gloveboxes of Rangers and allowed pretty easy custom installation of stereo head units there. I had a product called the Mud Blocker that kept all the mud from filling up the underside of the bed and engine bay area with mud. And a couple of other fairly simple, but very handy little items. They had all taken a ton of R&D time, effort and money to develop, so why not quit trying to sell them via my own website and phone sales (and phone sales ate up a TON of my time!) and list them on Ebay and see if maybe I could at least sell off my remaining inventory?
It was a half-assed last attempt to save the remains of my off road fabricator dream.
And my once stellar and responsive customer service ability turned into total crap-I had to quit answering the phones, I no longer had time to interact with people on the forum I sponsored-basically it was just an ebay store. It was doomed from the start, or so I thought.
Then a funny thing happened, from the ashes of a failed business attempt, my ebay store rose into something that not only actually sold product, but for the first time ever, my company made money. For several years in a row, I grossed in excess of 70K, and was making a decent net out of that number. Not enough to live on, by any means, but a great side hustle for sure. My Footsavers in particular did very well, and I sold those all over the world to people who needed that simple solution to their heat problems.
Alas, I knew that eventually even my ebay sales would tank, as all of my products were year/make/model specific, and even back then, SXSs were changing about every 3 years, and without the time to R&D new products it was only a matter of time before my products became irrelevant.
That time came in 2015, and I made the decision to shut the last of it down coinciding with our move to a remote location out in the sticks, and us no longer having a shop to build things out of.
But it was a great lesson as to what could be, and now that we once again have a functioning shop, I hope to find some new niche products to build and sell on Ebay again.

 

[lbhsbz]

What is it that you build/sell?

Brake Caliper Parts

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