6 Side Hustles Students Can Start in 2025

in this video I want to break down six side hustle ideas for students although I'm hoping these will apply even if you're not a student but before we go there I want to do my usual philosophizing about side hustles because I think one way of watching these sorts of videos I do these videos a bunch of other YouTubers do these sorts of videos one way of watching these is to just be like oh I just want to click ahead and I just want to see what side hustle idea this this magical way of making money

but there is no magical way of making money the only way to make money is by providing value to people who can pay for that value that is the first law of making money but because a lot of people are looking for this magic bullet they'll just kind of skip ahead maybe if you want there's going to be timestamps below feel free to skip ahead in this video you'll see the stuff it'll be fairly basic stuff you'll be like cool yep nope this isn't for me I couldn't do this and you'll continue to be broke

because you don't understand how making money actually works and the thing is making money is a skill when you understand the skill when you understand the laws of making money when you understand how they work you won't need to watch videos about how all these different side hustle ideas instead you'll be able to apply the principles to your own skills in your own life in your own context that maybe a few from now you might be making videos like this teaching people how to make money on the internet so let's start with a big question

why are we even talking about this I'll see I see occasionally I see a comment on my video being like Oh my God Alia doll is so obsessed with money the only videos he makes are talking about side hustles it's like no it's not the only videos I make I also make videos about productivity and about health and about sleep and about relationships and about dating and all this but I do enjoy making videos about side hustles and passive income why because side hustles have completely and utterly changed my life and I'm hoping that if

you're watching this then you're potentially interested in building another source of income because it's not really about the money it's about the freedom that that money can buy you and ideally you want your mechanism for generating money to not be tied to one single source of employment a lot of people found that they lost their jobs during the pandemic and there was this whole boom in people realizing oh crap Reliance on a single source of income is actually not a particularly anti-fragile way of living especially in places like the US where your health insurance is

also tied to your employer and now you've even you've got even more of these shackles attached to the job and if you enjoy the job and it brings you meaning and fulfillment and joy and you love hanging out with your co-workers and you look forward to Mondays then great fantastic but you are in the lucky one percent of people who have those boxes ticked when it comes to their jobs for most of the rest of us yes we might enjoy our jobs and I certainly enjoyed my day job when I was working as a doctor

you might enjoy the job but you still would appreciate an extra 2K a month coming in the bank account all of this means that if you can get to a point where you've got one or two or three or maybe a few extra sources of income coming into your bank account every month you just unlock the ability to live life on your own terms you get freedom from doing the things you don't want to do and you get freedom to do the things that you do want to do in my case I started out doing

side hustles when I was 13 years old with web design that was my first side hustle that I did for about six years and that was how I made my first few hundred dollars on the internet my second side hustle was Private tutoring and I was helping people in real life I was teaching them maths and science for their exams I was making somewhere between five and twenty dollars an hour from the age of like 14 to like 21 when I was doing private tutoring my third side hustle was when I was in medical school

I started a company that helped people get into medical school so I ran courses up and down the country and this side hustle which I did while I was a student made around 40 000 dollars a year in profit for me personally so that was the amount I was taking home now this was amazing because it meant that a I didn't have to worry about money while I was at University but B it also meant that again while I was a student I managed to combine incomes because I had an income with my brother who

had a real job and we managed to get a mortgage on a flat and then my most recent side hustle was starting this YouTube channel way back in 2017 and after three years of doing it this YouTube channel started making over a million dollars a year while it was a side hustle while I was a student while I was working full-time as a doctor and the fact that the YouTube channel was making so much money and the business around it which started off as a side hustle meant that I decided you know what I'm going

to take a break from full-time medicine and I'm going to go all in on this YouTube channel and so the reason I'm so passionate about talking about side hustles is because they have genuinely changed my life from the age of 13 up to the age of 26 when I quit medicine and I'm hoping that you'll think you know what I'm going to make it a point to start some sort of side hustle because I want extra sources of income my friends are going to tell me you're obsessed with money you're a greedy Pig et cetera

et cetera why do you need money why not just enjoy your job why not appreciate the simpler things in life and you'll think I do appreciate all those things but I also like the idea of living life on my own terms and therefore I'm gonna to create an alternative stream of income to my day job or to my student life or whatever the main thing is that you're doing okay so that was the why behind side hustles let's now talk about the how so we talked about the first law of making money you make money

when you provide value to people who are delighted to pay for that value and I'm going to underline the word delighted because that's a good frame of mind to be in when it comes to making money now there are broadly three vehicles for providing this value one two three and we're going to say that number one is Services number two is products and number three is content so with a service business you're providing a service to someone who's willing to pay for that service someone who's delighted to pay for that service with a product business

you're creating a product and selling it to people who are delighted to pay for it and with a Content business which sort of takes a little bit of both you're essentially creating free content and then you're putting it on platforms where the monetization happens through the platform and so essentially advertisers are the ones who are delighted to pay for the attention you're generating through your content now in this video the side hustle ideas we've got two when it comes to the content side and we've got four when it comes to the services side I'm not

going to talk about the product side of things in this video and I'll do that in a different video because products is an interesting kind of category and then the final thing is that generally when it comes to side hustles we want our side hustles to fulfill three specific needs for us we want our side hustles to ideally give us flexibility for example you probably don't want your side hustle to be working shift to the local supermarket because if you do that's not very flexible you are tied to a specific location and you're generally tied

to a specific time secondly ideally we want our side hustles to be fun we want them to be things that ideally don't feel like work if you can find the thing that feels like play to you but looks like work to other people you're way more likely to a enjoy it be way more likely to be sustainable and see way more likely to make a lot of money as a result of the thing and then the third f is obviously we want our side hustle to generate some kind of Finance so we want the return

on investment to be at least reasonable over the long term generally the side hustles that people like me would recommend and I still stand by this are side hustles that are enabled by the internet because when you start a side hustle selling something digital on the internet broadly or even something physical on the internet you're benefiting from flexibility because you can work whenever you want you're benefiting from fun because there are tons and tons and tons of ways of doing stuff on the internet you can definitely find something that's fun and you're benefiting from the

finance as well because you can attract buyers from all around the world rather than just in your specific geographical area I'm going to be showing you lots of examples of people who've done this sort of side hustle thing the idea is not hey let me do exactly what this person did the idea is that we learn from their example and we figure out cool what are the principles we can learn from what they did and how can we apply it to our own life and our own context and our own skills and our own enjoyment

and how can we turn that into some kind of extra source of income so having said all of that and I have literally no idea how long this video is going on for let's now go on to the actual six side hustle ideas for students and we'll see how they fit into this broad framework so let's start with side hustle idea number one which is to be a writer and this fits very nicely into the content branch of what we're trying to do here and the example I want to use here is a guy called

Jack Reigns who has a fantastic newsletter that he started while he was a student and I actually think he still is a student at Columbia business school so around two years ago Jack decided to start a newsletter talking about Finance talking about travel basically topics that he was interested in and at this point now that he's been doing this for over two years he's got a few tens of thousands of readers on his blog and every time he sends a newsletter he's able to charge around fourteen hundred dollars per ad and so if he does

four newsletter issues a week that's 1400 times four which is five thousand six hundred dollars a month by writing on the internet as a side Hustle but essentially what Jack is doing is following the classic content model of a writer which is that you write things regularly and over time you build an audience of people who are interested in your work and then you can start to monetize by selling sponsorships on your work to companies who are then delighted to sponsor your newsletter for example but Jack isn't just limited to making money from his newsletter

he also makes money from Consulting calls so he has a little tab on his website called Consulting calls and you can book a 45-minute meeting with him for 300 and honestly this is a really solid business model in total this is how writers are making money on the internet and if you want a way more detailed dive into the five different ways to make a million dollars on the internet as a writer you should check out this video over here which is an episode of my deep dive podcast that I did with Nicholas Cole and

Cole has literally written the book on how to make money as a writer it's called the art and business of online writing how to beat the game of capturing and keeping attention and one of the really nice thing things about writing as a side hustle is that the barrier to entry is so low it's basically zero you can create an account on substack or beehive completely for free and so you'll get a website you won't have to pay a penny for it all you need is like a computer or a phone with an internet connection

and you can start writing from anywhere in the world and you can reach an audience of people anywhere in the world again provided the content is good and good doesn't necessarily mean you need to write like Ernest Hemingway or whatever good just means that people get value from your content and to be honest if you want to go down this path here is a top tip if for example you want to get in touch with Jack what you could do is for example check out his blog you could read all the last 200 issues of

his newsletter or whatever however many there are and then you could drop me an email being like hey Jack I've binged everything you've ever written and because of that I was inspired to start my own and I've written 10 issues of my own blog here's a link but I'm stuck right now because I've got questions a b and c would love to hop on a quick 20 minute call with you just to ask you a few of these questions what do you say now something like that if someone like Jack were reading this they probably

think damn this guy's pretty cool hey they've read all my stuff so you know automatically that filters out like basically everyone in the population because no one bothers to read but secondly you've demonstrated that you're actually doing the work and therefore people like me people like Jack people on the internet who have done the work are way more likely to say yes to a hangout with you because they know that you have done the work as well by the way in case you didn't know I also have a Weekly Newsletter that I've been writing for

the last five and a half years since April 2018 and I've been writing that every week it's called Sunday Snippets you can check it out completely for free down in the video description or you can go to alibabel.com Sunday and that will let you sign up basically every week I share some thoughts and some lessons that I've learned and some books I'm reading and some recommended articles and stuff and people generally find it quite helpful I think we've got about 400 000 people who get that email so you know you'll be you'll be in good

company now once you've started making some money with these side hustles or anything else then you're going to need a place to invest it and that is where the sponsor of this video comes in and that is trading two one two trading212 is a fantastic app that allows you to invest in stocks and shares and funds in a commission free fashion and they've got a bunch of really cool features which is why I personally use them to manage a portion of my portfolio so firstly they've got a great pies and auto invest feature so the

Pi's thing is is basically that there's a bunch of people on the internet who do a lot of research into stocks and chairs and stuff and what they do is they they create a pie which is sort of a basket of like stocks and shares and funds and things and what you can do is you can look at other people's pies you can see what percentage allocation they've got in different stocks and chairs and you can just copy and paste it into your own into your own account and then however much money you want to

invest you can invest in that specific pie and it will automatically allocate it to those assets and you can also create your own pie with your own asset allocation and then you can see how that's performing against the other people and you can share that pie with other people as well it's a really cool feature they've also recently added support from multi-currency accounts and this is really helpful because if like me you invest a lot of your money in a U.S stock market index fund like the S P 500 then you won't get hit with

the foreign exchange fees you get when you're investing from Europe and if you have an invest or an Isa account then trading 212 will also pay you interest on any uninvested cash you have and that's in pounds or in Euros or in US Dollars now if any of this stands up your street and you would like to get a completely free share up to the value of 100 pounds then check out the link in the video description and that will guide you through this page on exactly how you can set up the app and how

you can claim your free share so thank you so much trading212 for sponsoring this video and continuing to support the channel and let's get back to the video alright side hustle idea number two is to be a Content curator now this is distinct from a content creator content creator I mean it's all semantics but a content creator I would say someone who creates content whether content curator is someone who curates what other people have already created so there's a bunch of interesting ways of doing this and one example is this guy Eduardo Morales who has

an Instagram account called pin lord and basically decided to create a business where he curates and sells enamel pins yeah it's kind of weird and Eduardo grew his Instagram account pin Lord from zero to over a hundred thousand followers on Instagram in less than two years and according to this article he makes three thousand five hundred dollars a month from this business that he's got now first point to say here is that two years is pretty quick if you're if you're watching this and thinking oh it took him a whole two years to start making

a full-time income then you have got the whole money thing completely wrong it's gonna take time especially if you are trying to make stuff in the content business or in the product business which are J curve businesses but I'll talk more about that in a second it does take time to do this stuff let's take medicine for example that is a six-year degree and then a 10-year training pathway at least in the UK to then be making 3K a month 4K a month 5K a month so you can't really have the audacity to say that

you want all this money and all this freedom and all this fun and flexibility and stuff without also putting in the work for a very long period of time but anyway I just want to read you a quote from Eduardo last month I made over 3 500 for my Instagram before starting pinlord the repost account where I curate and sell enamel pins I had no experience building a social media or online business I'm also not an influencer I'm not particularly social and I definitely don't have a fun and exciting life to show off on Instagram

I learned how to monetize my Instagram account by making an effort to understand how the platform works and putting in the work required to execute the right activities at a high level for a long period of time trust me when I say it if I can do it anyone can now I'm not telling you this example to say go and make an Instagram account and try and grow 200 000 subscribers selling enamel pins like that's not the vibe the point of this video is to give you some inspiration and to show you a few different

parts that you can use so that you can apply them to your own context another guy that I follow is called Alex and books and essentially he's built his own Twitter and Instagram and I think LinkedIn by basically curating insights and summaries from books that he read and it's really good I follow him for book recommendations it's great he posts on Instagram he posts some of the highlights from the books that he's read but he's not really creating anything which is not a bad thing by the way Alex if you're watching this he's curating this

is great you don't need to necessarily be a content creator you can be a Content curator but he's got a large enough audience now that he can basically monetize through whatever it means he wants and he's done it through content curation rather than content creation now there is a problem there is a problem with content businesses and that is that content businesses are generally what we call J curve businesses which is that at the start for an unspecified length of time you're kind of in the negative because you've put in time and effort into doing

this thing so for example YouTube is a Content business it took me 52 videos and six months to get my first thousand subscribers and I wasn't even monetized until 12 months into my YouTube Journey where every single week I was making one or two videos and those videos were getting a few dozen a few hundred sometimes even a few thousand views but I was making zero money it was is a pure sinking of time and effort and Blood Sweat and Tears into this YouTube channel it was also fun I found a way to make it

fun which is my whole philosophy that my book is around to feel good productivity wait where is it I want to show off my book feel good productivity how to do more of what matters to you it'll be linked down below feel good productivity.com if you want to check it out but my point is this is a Jacob business because it looks like a j you're you're in the negative for a long time and then you hit an inflection point and the hope is that it will then go into the positive this is the same

thing where the Jack Reigns for example and also Alex and books and any of these writer type people you tend not to make money immediately you tend to have to put in this period of like negative money because you're investing time and you're not seeing the return and you're hoping for a payoff over time that's not to say that this is a bad way of starting a side hustle it's just you have to recognize the fact that it is a J curve and in the game of content there actually aren't really any guarantees because your

work also has to be it has to be good and it has to hit the Right audience and you might not necessarily know that but this is not a very quick way of making money if you want a quicker way of making money what you're looking for is a non-j curve business which is for example let's say this is time let's say this is money and you're starting over here you cut you're looking for something that lets you make money basically immediately this is a non-jcove business and then it could it could let like this

or it could look like this like it could look like anything but the point is you don't have that period at the start where you're investing time and money and maybe effort into the thing and it's not getting your return just yet and non-j curve businesses tend to be service based businesses actually let's add some money ones here they so we've got service we've got product and we've got content we've got those three different types of business within service product and content you can have J curve and you can have non-jco businesses The crucial determining

factor is the sort of the friction of sales process and shout out to my friend and Mentor Daniel Priestley who we also had on the Deep Life podcast link up there and down here and below for like introducing me to this model of thinking about business let's say you go into the local supermarket and you want to buy some chocolate and then you go to the checkout you buy the thing and it's done cool that's a fairly low friction sales process you just walk in you pick the thing and you walk out or alternatively let's

say you want to buy something on Amazon again very low friction sales process you just go on the website you buy something and it arrives at your door when you have a low friction sales process you tend to get a j-curve business so for example a supermarket is a very very Jayco business in that you have to invest a lot of time money effort loads and loads of money into building the premises getting the stuff getting the stock and everything and everything and everything and then at some point you're hoping that the low friction sales

process means that loads of people will buy from your supermarket and eventually you'll start to make money but now imagine what does a high friction sales process look like a high friction sales process is when a business has to try and actually convince someone to part with their money so for example let's say I'm a web designer and I need to get clients I have friction to my sales process because I need to go out and find the clients and I need to hop on a call with them and I need to see what they

want I need to understand their requirements and then once I've done that I can give them a proposal and then they can choose to pay me for my services loads of friction in that particular sales process because someone is not just handing over their cash for like an easy product it's a conversation and that brings us to this whole Services stuff because service businesses tend not to be J curve businesses and there are a few different examples here so side hustle idea number three is to be a thumbnail designer now again the way we make

money is by creating value for people who are willing to pay for that value or people who are delighted to pay for that value and one category of those sorts of people is YouTubers like me we have money and we're delighted to pay money because we know about the importance of thumbnails and so if you can be a thumbnail designer for YouTubers that is a very reasonable way of making money through the internet in a way that's fun and freedom and flexibility and finances and all this kind of fun stuff and I want to share

a couple examples here so there's this guy Dill Tomah and there's this article that talks about how this guy at the age of 19 turned designing thumbnails for YouTubers into a full-time job he began making thumbnails for gaming YouTubers when he was still in school and when he started off he would sell one of these thumbnails to his clients for about 15 then after graduating high school he was looking for opportunities and he realized that some other big YouTubers were genuinely advertising for a thumbnail designer and because he had the experience and the skills and

had done the thing he managed to land that job and now he charges over 250 dollars for a single thumbnail and he's got multiple huge YouTuber clients that he's making these thumbnails for and he's probably making a stupidly insane amount of money and so this thing that started off as a side hustle him in school doing thumbnails on Photoshop probably a pirated version of Photoshop not gonna lie no shade I prior to photoshop as well back in the day but he probably just started this off as a side hustle and now he's able to make

several thousand maybe up to ten thousand dollars a month doing thumbnail design as a service the other example here is one of the alumni from my part-time YouTuber Academy his name is Matt Brighton and he's a YouTuber now but back in the day he made money on Fiverr designing thumbnails and in this article he talks about how he made over ten thousand dollars from designing thumbnails for other YouTubers that's not to say you should go and become a thumbnail designer but it is to say that it is an example of a service that you can

provide to someone who is willing to pay who is delighted to pay money for that service I've mentioned this thumbnail design thing a couple of times in videos in the last like two years and we have had lots of people now email us being like hey I've I've redesigned your thumbnails what do you think of this what do you think of that and I appreciate the hustle mostly they're not very good if you want to land a YouTuber client as a thumbnail designer just recreate some of their thumbnails and do a better job than what

their current thumbnails are already keep in mind kind of the vibiness and the brand that they're trying to create and if you can do that you're basically guaranteed to get a job still to this day we are still looking for thumbnail designers and still to this day anytime someone emails us and says hey I have redesigned three of your thumbnails what do you think we look at them and we decide do we want to hire this person or not usually the answer is no because usually they're not very good but the opportunity is there and

it's definitely a skill that anyone can learn you just need to put in some time and effort into learning skill because like we talked about there are no free ways to make money you have to provide a skill you have to provide value and sometimes it does take time to learn how to provide that value okay side hustle idea number four for students is to be a research assistant so the first example here is this guy called Drew Bernie so this guy was a student in a PhD program and managed to land a job as

Mark Manson's research assistant and here's a clip where he talks about how he did it I was actually I was in my PhD program I was taking this class that was really really hard I'd sat down for a study session with a group of students and we were waiting on a few people so I just decided I'm gonna pop open my laptop and see what Mark's been up to because I hadn't checked in for a little while and right there is big letters I'm hiring comes right up into my throat I'm like oh he's hiring

again what and I read the description and it's like I need somebody who can research I need somebody who can write I you know I need somebody who is a self-starter like and everything I'm just like oh this is this is too good to be true you can't it can't be you know at that point similarly there's a friend of us called Billy Oppenheimer who is Ryan Holliday's research assistant and he landed that gig through a cold email this is the cold email that Billy sent to Ryan to land that job now I'd recommend you

pause the video and read this in its entirety because there are a lot of lessons you can learn from this cold email about how to send a good cold email and this email just makes it so easy for someone like Ryan holiday to say yes and Billy has been working with Ryan for I don't know how long but it's been quite a while and similarly we've got people who do this sort of research assistant he type stuff on our team we've got NS we've got Alex we've got Mike they do a few different things but

essentially any big content creator and especially any author who writes multiple books will always need some sort of help when it comes to research so if you are the sort of person who can research on the internet who enjoys reading books who enjoys reading scientific articles can understand them can tease out insights from them that is an incredibly High value skill which you can provide as a service to people who are very willing and very able and very delighted to pay for that service okay side hustle idea number five is to be a remote sales

rep it's one of the new fads in the world of making money on the internet but it's actually pretty legit the idea behind being a remote sales rep is that there are a lot of companies out there who need someone on Zoom calls and on the phone to be able to sell their product to their customers and if you can be the person to field those phone calls or the zoom calls to be able to talk to customers to be able to talk them through the process and educate them on whether the product is right

for them then every time you sell the product you'll get some kind of commission on that product that is what a remote sales rep does and this is a great example of this guy wuter Tui toy Nissan I don't know how you pronounce that and this guy was a 20 year old student in the Netherlands who tweeted at Sean Puri being basically giving him some free thumbnail advice and then Sean loved the free value that he provided so he offered him an internship with his company and now this guy sells ads for milk Road daily

and has sold 250 000 worth of ads in 60 days while studying full-time he's basically being a remote sales rep this isn't really a traditional remote sales rep job but it's enough that we're using as an example and also because he's talked about his story which is just a cool example but essentially he's selling all these sponsorships on this newsletter and he probably gets a cut of some of the sponsors that he sells so if you're the sort of person who enjoys talking to people if you like the idea of like picking up the phone

or going on Zoom calls and selling things to people and you think that you might be good at that you can make tons and tons of money as a remote sales rep and this video is not going to teach you how to do it there are lots of other videos on YouTube where people specialize in being remote sales reps and actually teach you the ins and outs of how to do it but it's an interesting way of making money if you think that you might enjoy that sort of thing and then finally side hustle idea

number six for students or for anyone else is to become a web designer now this is really old school but it's still ridiculous how few good designers there are out there and how much startups are willing to pay for designers too like I was at this business conference a couple of weeks ago and one of the guys I met runs a 100 million dollars valuation startup and he was saying we're trying to hire six designers but we can literally find no one who is good so like there's such demand for designers out there I think

I I know someone who hired a web designer and they paid them four hundred thousand dollars a year to just be a web designer full-time for their startup but if you want to do it as a side hustle initially then a you've got to learn the skill and be good because you know it's money is an exchange of value and once you're good then it's very easy to find people who will be delighted to pay you for that service provided you're good and provided you find the right tool to people and the example here is

this guy called Chris mrreck now around six years ago Chris went through a split with his wife which which obviously had a huge impact on his life relationship-wise and also financially and he decided he was going to teach himself how to code and learn how to build websites and so he used the free tutorials on codecad me and once he learned how to create websites his first few clients were friends and family who he worked for for free and then he went over to upwork to find various clients and now apparently he's earning over three

thousand dollars a month I don't know if this is fully up to date and I'm pretty sure Chris could be earning way more than three thousand dollars a month if he went off upwork and he and he tried to find clients directly because I don't really like the idea of advertising services on a freelance platform like upwork or like Fiverr because there's just too much competition out there and it's quite hard to stand out the path I would take is what my friend Henry did where he decided that he was going to learn how to

design websites in webflow he spent six months learning the skills and then became so good at designing websites that he designed his own personal portfolio website with that went big on Twitter he started engaging with all the web designers on Twitter they started to respect his work as well and then he managed to land a bunch of really high paying clients including me where I paid him a lot of money to design the website for my book feel good productivity.com and for Henry this thing that started off as a side hustle he had no background

in coding he had no experience in web design and with dedicated in practice over six months he taught himself the skill to the point where people were paying him over ten thousand dollars every time he was designing a website for them now if you go to the end of this incredibly long video I would love it if you could leave a comment what did you take away and in particular is there like what action point are you going to take as a result of watching this video because you've watched this video for a very long

time now most people who clicked on this video would have clicked off in the first like minute when they saw me philosophizing so the fact that you're here and watching this means that you have a stick-to-itiveness that is like probably in the 90th percentile at least of people because I suspect only five ten percent of people will actually get to this point in the video but I think without an action point stuff like this is actually totally pointless like there was no point in watching this video if you're not going to take some kind of

action away from this so I'd love to hear in the comments as a bit of an accountability for you and for me because it's useful for me to see what people are doing so you know is it still worth making videos like this what is the action point that you're going to take as a result of this video now once you've done that in this video we talked about content and services as a way of making money but we didn't really talk about products and so in this video I'm going to break down a few

different product ideas that you can use to make money on the internet passive income side hustles all that fun stuff that'll be there thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye