My 1.5+ Year Side Hustle Journey (What Worked, What Failed, and What I Learned)
This is a continuation of a post I wrote about five months ago.
Back then, I was using long breaks at work to hunt for ways to make extra income. I tried almost everything I could get my hands on.
Here’s what that journey looked like:
What I Tried Early On
- Online surveys
Made a few dollars. Quickly realized the time-to-money ratio wasn’t worth it. - Bank account bonuses
Learned how to use sign-up offers and made a few thousand dollars. Not sustainable — offers take over a year to reset. - Social casinos
Played blackjack across 20+ sweepstakes-based casino sites daily. Made around $500/month. - AMOE (Mail-in Entries)
Learned I could send physical envelopes to social casinos for free sweepstakes credits. Built a system to scale it.
• ~$10,000 first year
• ~$14,000 so far this year - Amazon (Dropshipping, FBA, FBM)
Researched everything. Opened a seller account. Bought supplies.
Result: didn’t work out. - AI Content Creation (NSFW)
Learned Stable Diffusion and ComfyUI. Created AI models and adult content.
• Grew an Instagram page to ~700 followers (mostly paid, low quality)
• Opened Fanvue → 1 subscriber → canceled
• Eventually dropped to ~530 followers, zero subs - Niche Instagram Account
Started a new niche page. First few days were dead.
One video went semi-viral.
• 0 → 1,200 followers in 8 days
• 6k–129k views per video
Where I Am Now (5+ Months Later)
My biggest income source (~$30k total) — social casinos — is now being banned in many states, including mine. That method is basically dead.
On social media:
- One viral video reached 2.1M views
- Instagram: ~19k followers
- TikTok: ~3k followers
- Facebook: 4 followers (yes, really)
Monetization Attempts
- Instagram Subscriptions
$4.99/month
~30 subscribers (only 8 currently paid, rest on free trials) - Adult Platforms
• Fanvue → banned
• Fansly → banned (ID requirements)
• Patreon → not allowed
• Settled on Dfans
Promoting adult links directly on Instagram isn’t allowed, so I used Beacons as a link hub.
Results so far:
- Dfans: 17 subscribers at $9.99
- 20% platform fee
- Conversion rate far below the “1% rule” people talk about
TikTok has been rough. Most bikini videos get flagged or removed. Appeals sometimes work, but warnings are stacking.
YouTube Shorts channel was banned entirely after a couple months.
Unexpected Wins
- A Reddit user paid me ~$600/month for custom adult content.
- Another Reddit user hired me to create ads after seeing a short film I posted.
Using My AI Skills Elsewhere
- YouTube Channel
Revived an old channel (2.8k subs, inactive for ~15 years).
Uploading 1–2 hour-long cinematic AI videos every 1–2 weeks. - Etsy Store (AI Art)
Picked a niche. Used AI-generated art.
~$150 in 1.5 months.
SEO handled with ChatGPT.
Copyright gray area — risk accepted.
Tools I Use
Suno, ComfyUI, OpenArt, Midjourney, ChatGPT — all paid.
What’s Next?
I’m just continuing.
Staying persistent.
Learning new tools.
Treating this like a real-life game with long-term rewards.
Most people quit because effort is required. I saw that clearly while doing AMOE work — free money, but no one around me was willing to put in the effort.
This isn’t a secret path.
It’s just a hard one.
To the 0.1% still reading and still trying:
Keep going.