Millennials grew up before the internet existed, helped build the social web, and then got handed the most expensive era of adult life on record. Inflation at its highest since the 1980s. Rent above $1,700 a month for an 894-square-foot apartment. A median home price of $387,500 compared to $280,600 just four years earlier. Student loan balances averaging over $37,000. And a median household income of $74,500 sitting underneath all of it.
A single paycheck does not cover that math. That is why side hustles are not optional anymore, they are infrastructure. In this video, Alston Godbolt walks through the five best side hustles for millennials to start right now, including three that cost under $100 to launch, and one stacked strategy that can bundle three income streams into one.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- The exact economic data that explains why one income is not enough in 2024
- A practical strategy for fitting a side hustle into a full-time schedule with kids
- Three side hustles you can start for under $100 today
- How affiliate marketing put $130 in Alston’s account within 12 hours of starting
- A step-by-step freelancing roadmap using skills you already have at work
- The stacked content-plus-course-plus-coaching model that pays you three ways at once
- Not sure which hustle fits your specific skill set? finder.platformproof.com gives you a personalized answer in under two minutes
The Real Millennial Money Problem
Before Alston gets into the side hustles, he grounds the whole conversation in hard numbers. The goal is not to be dramatic about it. The goal is to make clear that this is a structural problem, not a personal failure, and that side income is a rational response to real conditions.
Inflation hit an all-time high in June 2022, according to CNBC. Even as it slowed, it stayed at its highest level since the 1980s. That means every dollar you earn buys less than it did when you started your career. For anyone who got their first job in the 2010s, the real purchasing power of a salary has quietly eroded without anyone officially announcing it.
Rent tells the same story. As of November 2023, the average rent for an 894-square-foot apartment had climbed past $1,700 per month. That is money that builds zero equity and comes before groceries, utilities, car payments, or childcare.
Homeownership is not an easy exit from that problem either. The median home price in November 2023 was $387,500. In March 2020, that same median was $280,600. That is a 38 percent increase in under four years. Wages did not move 38 percent in that window. The gap between what homes cost and what people earn widened significantly during a period when most working adults had no way to build a down payment while also paying record rent.
Student loan debt is the other weight on the scale. The average borrower carried just over $37,000 in student loans at the end of 2023, a figure that represents more than a 100 percent increase compared to earlier decades. That monthly payment comes out of the same paycheck already stretched by rent and groceries.
The median household income according to the Census Bureau was $74,500 in 2022. That is the number underneath all of the above. A side hustle does not fix the structural causes of any of this. But it does give you a second line of income that is not tied to one employer, one salary review cycle, or one job market. That is why Alston calls this a must, not a nice-to-have.
How to Find the Time When You Already Have a Full Schedule
The question Alston hears most often is not “what should I do?” It is “when am I supposed to do it?” He is specific about this because he lived it. When he started his first side hustle, he was working full-time and had just had twins. Not one baby. Two. Two sets of clothes. Two sets of car seats. Two cribs. Three million diapers, by his count.
His answer was to work in the margins. Not in theory. In practice. He used the first half of his lunch break to eat and the second half to write outlines for blog posts. When he got home, he already knew what he needed to write. The efficiency was built into the day before the day started. He also wrote notes while feeding one of the twins in the middle of the night. The time existed. It just had to be identified and used deliberately.
For the website-building side of his hustle, he worked from 8 p.m. to midnight, or until a kid woke up, whichever came first. He was clear-eyed about it. It was not comfortable. But it was finite, and it was pointed at a specific goal.
His recommendation for anyone starting out: get a time-tracking sheet and write down what you actually do across a full day. Commercial breaks during a show. The 15 minutes Little Johnny is at soccer practice. The lunch break. The commute if you are not driving. The margins are there. Most people just have not mapped them yet. Once you can see them on paper, you can assign a side hustle task to each one.
With social media in the picture, this is actually easier now than it was when Alston started. If you are an affiliate for TikTok Shop, you can record a short video on your phone during a lunch break. You can create content during a commercial break. You do not need a studio or a full afternoon. You need fifteen minutes and a plan for those fifteen minutes.
Side Hustle 1: One-on-One Coaching
The first side hustle Alston recommends is one-on-one coaching, and he leads with it because it has the lowest barrier to entry and the fastest path to a first payment. You share knowledge you already have with people who want to learn it. That is the entire model.
You can coach on almost anything. Video games. Management skills. Public speaking. Resume writing. If you have spent the last ten years in a corporate leadership role, there are people who will pay you to teach them what you learned. The skills you developed on someone else’s clock are yours to monetize.
Income range runs from a few hundred dollars to $10,000 or more, depending on your skills, your niche, and how you position what you offer. You can charge per session or sell a bundle of sessions at a package price. The startup cost is effectively zero. You need a payment processor like Stripe or PayPal, both of which are free to set up. You do not need a website on day one. You do not need a certification. You need to be one or two steps ahead of the people who want to learn from you.
The key insight Alston shares is that expertise is relative. You do not need to be the world’s foremost authority. You need to know more than the person sitting across from you on the Zoom call, and you need to be able to explain it clearly. If you can do that, coaching is a side hustle you can start this week.
Side Hustle 2: Digital Products
The second low-cost side hustle is digital products. Ebooks. Workbooks. Planners. Budget trackers. Packing lists for international travel. Templates for anything people need to organize. The format does not matter as much as the problem it solves.
You can create all of these for free using Canva, Google Sheets, or Google Docs. There is no printing cost, no inventory, no shipping. Once the file exists, it can be sold an unlimited number of times without additional work from you. That is the core appeal: you build it once and it keeps selling.
Platforms like Etsy will host and sell digital products for you, which is convenient when you are starting out. Alston’s recommendation is to eventually sell them yourself. When you sell through a third-party platform, that platform takes a cut and controls the customer relationship. When you sell directly, you keep more margin and you own the buyer’s contact information, which opens the door to future offers.
To find a product worth building, start with the problems you know how to solve. If coworkers always come to you with the same questions, that question is probably a product. If you have a system for something that most people find overwhelming, that system is probably a product. The research process is simpler than most people think: look at what people are already paying for on Etsy in your area of knowledge, and build a better or more specific version.
Side Hustle 3: Tutorial Content on YouTube or TikTok
The third low-investment side hustle is creating tutorial videos based on skills you use at work. If your job requires deep knowledge of Excel, Salesforce, AutoCAD, or QuickBooks, people are actively searching for someone to teach them those tools. The skills you use every day to earn a salary are skills other people will pay to learn.
The startup cost here is a laptop or desktop and some recording software. Many free options exist. Once you are recording, you upload to YouTube or TikTok and the platform handles distribution.
Both platforms have monetization programs that pay you when advertisers buy placements before your content. On YouTube, this is the YouTube Partner Program. The current requirements are 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers. On TikTok, the equivalent is the Creativity Program, which has its own eligibility thresholds. Payment scales with the number of advertisers competing to appear in front of your audience. Niche technical skills tend to attract advertisers willing to pay more per view, which means a smaller audience in a specialized topic can sometimes earn more than a large audience in a crowded general topic.
The deeper play here is that tutorial content is not just a revenue source on its own. It is also a funnel. Viewers who trust your tutorials are the natural audience for your digital products, your coaching sessions, and eventually a full course. You are not just making money from the platform. You are building an audience that pays you in multiple ways.
Side Hustle 4: Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the side hustle Alston describes as his second favorite way of making money online, and he has a specific memory attached to it: $130 earned within 12 hours of starting.
Here is how it works at a basic level. You identify a product you genuinely want to talk about. Golf clubs. A software tool. A course. Anything with an affiliate program. You apply to that program, get accepted, and receive a unique link. You then create content, whether that is a blog post, a YouTube video, or a social media post, built around the real questions your audience is asking. If someone clicks your link and buys, you earn a commission.
The example Alston uses: golfers searching for “best golf clubs for women over 50” are already buyers looking for direction. A video or article walking through five strong options, with honest assessments and affiliate links to each, earns a cut of every sale that comes through it. You are not pushing a product. You are answering a question that someone already had.
Alston is clear that affiliate marketing is much more than just promoting someone else’s product. It is content creation built around customer need. The affiliate link is just how the value you provide converts into income. The content is the actual work, and that content can live on a blog, a YouTube channel, or across social media platforms depending on where your audience already is.
He started his affiliate side hustle years into building his first income streams, and it became the second-biggest earner in his portfolio. It also compounded with everything else he was building, since the same audience watching his tutorials was the audience clicking his affiliate links.
Side Hustle 5: Freelancing With the Skills You Already Have
Alston’s first side hustle was freelancing, and the specific version he started was building five-page WordPress websites for small businesses and churches. He was not a trained developer. He learned what he needed, charged $2,500 per project, and found clients by cold-calling from a database of every business in the United States. Some said no. A few said yes. He also posted about the side hustle on Facebook and got referrals from that.
You do not need to build websites. The framework applies to any skill. The first step is writing down everything you know, every skill and every piece of work experience you have accumulated. Then you identify one or two skills that have the highest earning potential and will not burn you out to sell. Those become your freelance offer.
Three ways to find clients once you have an offer. First is networking: asking friends and family if they know someone who might need what you do. Word of mouth is free and often faster than you expect. Second is cold outreach via direct messages. Alston is direct about this: he receives roughly 30 DMs a day from people pitching services. It works. He may not hire all of them, but the practice of respectfully sliding into a business owner’s DMs to offer a solution to a real problem they have is a proven client acquisition method. Third is freelancing platforms: Fiverr, Upwork, and People Per Hour. Alston found the most success on Fiverr, where he applied for buyer requests. These platforms are competitive, and you may not be paid your full market rate immediately. The play is to collect reviews first, then use those reviews to justify higher rates.
The honest limitation Alston acknowledges is that freelancing is a direct-time-for-money trade. You only earn while you are actively working. When the client list dries up, the income stops. That makes it a strong starting point but not an endpoint. It is the bridge you walk while you build something that pays you without requiring your direct presence.
Which of these five side hustles actually fits your specific background?
Answer five quick questions at finder.platformproof.com and get a personalized recommendation based on your current skills and schedule.
The Stacked Strategy: Online Courses as the Next Level
The fifth side hustle Alston covers is creating and selling an online course, and he positions it as a natural extension of the tutorial content strategy rather than a standalone starting point.
Courses can range from $9 to $10,000 depending on the transformation they deliver and the specificity of the niche. A broad introductory course on a popular software tool might sell for $9 or $29. A deep-dive course with ongoing support, targeted at professionals who need this skill for work, might sell for several hundred dollars. A transformation-oriented program with guaranteed outcomes in a premium niche might reach four or five figures.
You can host and sell through platforms like Udemy, which handles marketing for you but takes a significant cut and controls pricing. Or you can sell directly using a system like the one Alston references, which allows you to build landing pages, sales pages, and a membership site for course access all in one place, keeping more of the revenue.
The funnel Alston describes: create free tutorial content on social media, put a link in your bio or description pointing to a paid course, and use a system to manage the purchase flow and content delivery. The social content is the top of the funnel. The course is the conversion.
The Most Lucrative Model: Stack Three Hustles Into One
Alston ends the video with the strategy he considers most lucrative for 2024: stacking content, a course, and one-on-one coaching into a single income structure where each piece feeds the others.
He walks through a specific example using Salesforce. You start creating free tutorial content on YouTube or TikTok about Salesforce. You build an audience of people who want to learn the platform. As the audience grows, some of them want more depth. You create a course priced around $497 and sell it to people who want structured learning. Some of those course students need personalized help beyond the course. You offer exclusive one-on-one access for $2,000. Now you have three income lines from one area of knowledge: platform ad revenue from the content, course sales, and coaching fees.
The critical difference between this model and straight freelancing is that the content and course pay you whether you are actively working or not. Once a video is published and ranks, it earns. Once a course is built and the sales funnel is running, it sells. Your time goes toward creating new content and delivering coaching, not chasing the next client from scratch. That is the shift from a side hustle that trades time for money to one that builds recurring income.
Honest Drawbacks of Each Side Hustle
Alston does not oversell any of these. Here is an honest read on the friction points for each one.
One-on-one coaching scales with your time. You can raise your hourly rate, but there is a ceiling on how many sessions you can deliver per week. It is excellent as an entry point and a confidence builder, and less useful as the main income engine long-term unless you are at premium rates.
Digital products require upfront work to build and ongoing effort to market. Creating a planner is free. Getting people to find it is not automatic. You need a distribution channel, whether that is Etsy search, a social media account, or an email list. The passive income is real, but it follows a period of active promotion.
Tutorial content takes time to compound. YouTube’s Partner Program threshold of 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers is not reached in a weekend. Early content earns nothing from ads. The platform revenue is a long-game payoff, not a fast start. The earlier you start, the sooner you arrive, but you need to be willing to publish before you are paid for it.
Affiliate marketing requires trust to convert. A brand-new blog or channel with no audience produces almost no affiliate commissions. The income scales with the size and trust of your audience, which means the first months are about building both before the revenue appears. Alston’s $130 in 12 hours was possible because he already had a small but engaged audience when he started.
Freelancing is the fastest path to money but the hardest to turn into passive income. You are always one project away from an empty calendar. It is a great starting point, especially if you need income quickly. It is a less sustainable endpoint unless you move toward retainer arrangements or build a team around your skills.
Online courses require a more substantial upfront build than the other options. Recording, editing, organizing curriculum, and setting up a sales system takes real time before a single dollar comes in. The payoff is high because a well-made course sells indefinitely, but the ramp is longer than coaching or freelancing.
Find Your X
Every one of these side hustles works. Which one works for you depends on what skills you already have, how much time you can carve out from the margins, and whether you need fast money or long-term recurring income. Those three variables change which starting point makes sense.
If you want a personalized answer based on your actual background and schedule, visit finder.platformproof.com. Answer five questions and get a clear recommendation for which of these side hustles fits your specific situation. It takes under two minutes and it is free.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much money can a millennial realistically make from a side hustle?
It depends heavily on the side hustle and the time invested. One-on-one coaching can range from a few hundred to $10,000 or more per month depending on your niche and rates. Freelancing income tracks directly with hours worked. Affiliate marketing and course sales can eventually generate income without direct time investment, but require months of content building first. There is no universal number, and any source promising a specific daily dollar amount without context is not being honest with you.
How do you balance a side hustle with a full-time job?
Alston’s specific advice: track every hour of your actual day and find the margins. Lunch breaks, commutes, commercial breaks, the time between a kid’s bedtime and your own. Map them, then assign specific tasks to each window. Having a prepared outline or task ready before you sit down means you can execute in 20 minutes what would otherwise take an hour of unfocused effort.
Do you need a lot of money to start a side hustle?
No. Alston started his first side hustle, building WordPress websites, using his local library’s computers and internet while he had almost no disposable income. Coaching, digital products, and tutorial content all cost under $100 to start. The main input is time, not money. That is by design: the options with the lowest startup cost are the ones most accessible to people who genuinely need extra income.
What is affiliate marketing and how does it actually work?
You apply to an affiliate program for a product you want to talk about. The company gives you a unique URL. You create content answering real questions your audience has, include your affiliate link, and earn a commission when someone clicks and buys. The key is that the content has to genuinely help the reader or viewer. Content built around a real customer question converts far better than content that is obviously just a sales pitch.
Is freelancing a good long-term side hustle?
It is an excellent starting point because it generates income quickly and requires no audience. The limitation is that it is a direct exchange of time for money. If you stop working, the income stops. Most people who start with freelancing eventually move toward building something that pays without requiring constant active effort, whether that is a course, a content channel, or both. Freelancing funds that transition while you build.
How do you find clients for freelancing if you are just starting out?
Three channels: your personal network (friends and family who can refer you), direct outreach via DMs to businesses that might need your service, and platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, or People Per Hour. In the beginning, the goal is reviews, not maximum rate. A profile with five strong reviews on Fiverr converts better and commands higher prices than a profile with no reviews at any price. Prioritize building the track record first.
What is the YouTube Partner Program and how do you qualify?
It is YouTube’s ad revenue sharing program. To qualify, you need 4,000 watch hours in the past 12 months and 1,000 subscribers. Once accepted, advertisers pay to appear before or during your videos, and YouTube shares a portion of that revenue with you. Payment scales with the size of your audience, the engagement rate of your videos, and the advertiser demand in your content niche. Technical and professional skill tutorials often attract advertisers willing to pay more per view than general entertainment content.
Should you start with one side hustle or several at once?
Start with one. The stacked model Alston describes, where content feeds a course and coaching, is a long-term outcome, not a starting point. Spreading attention across three side hustles simultaneously when you are working full-time is a reliable way to make slow progress on all of them and actually complete none of them. Pick the one that best fits your skills and current time margin. Get it generating income. Then use what you learn from that first one to build the next piece.
Read Next
Affiliate marketing comes up as one of the five side hustles in this video and Alston calls it his second favorite way to make money online. If you want to go deeper on one specific affiliate category that is paying consistently, this next post is worth your time.
Make $100+ Per Day With Web Hosting Affiliate Programs walks through a step-by-step approach to earning daily affiliate commissions from one of the highest-converting product categories online.
Sources
- CNBC: Inflation reached an all-time high in June 2022
- November 2023 rental data: average rent for 894 sq ft apartment
- November 2023 median home price: $387,500 (vs. $280,600 in March 2020, per Alston’s video)
- End-of-2023 average student loan balance: over $37,000
- Census Bureau: 2022 median household income of $74,500
- YouTube Partner Program requirements: 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers (as stated in video)
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.