Side Hustling Ep. 11: How I Made $6,000 from a $450 Investment | How Side Hustles Evolve
Today's side hustle video is going to be one of my personal side hustles, and one of my first side hustles I got involved with.
One of the main takeaways I want you to walk away from in this story is how side hustles often start out as one thing, but through the evolution of actually doing, wind up being something completely different. They tend to grow or morph into something different as you learn more about your customers, your industry, and find other pain points to solve.
This story in a nutshell is this. A buddy of mine mentioned storage auctions to me. I was curious about them so decided to check one out. I wound up buying a unit at the first auction I attended and made a pretty nice profit. The unit cost me $450, and after everything was said and done I netted about $6,000 from that first unit.
I continued doing this for a while, and then the television show Storage Wars aired on A&E. At first I thought it was kind of cool until it brought people to the auctions in hoards. It essentially ruined my hustle as prices were driven up way too high.
Rather than accepting defeat, I saw this as an opportunity. An opportunity to make money off all these new people who didn't know where to find auctions to attend, or whom wanted some insight into what to expect when attending an auction.
I first started selling lists of Storage Auctions through forums, a blog, and on eBay. I then rolled out an eBook teaching people how to get into the storage auction business. Later came a blog and a Youtube Channel. One interesting thing about my blog was rather than charging people for lists of auctions in there area I offered the information for free and used Adsense to monetize the site.
Within a pretty short period of time the site was bringing in about $300 per month, the ebook was bringing in between $300 and $400 per month, I was also selling some lists and courses as well.
Now eventually the storage auction fad kind of died off, it was nice while it lasted but as things often do, good things always come to an end.
What was great though is that my storage auction blog is essentially what introduced me to Adsense and Affiliate Marketing and hustling online, and eventually into eCommerce as well so in a roundabout way everything I'm doing today is in many ways a direct result of simply going to check out a storage auction one day long ago out of curiosity.
My storage unit buy didn't go so well. My brother and I went in a couple of units a few years ago and it was mainly junk. We ended up making just a little off it but it was a ton of work. It was a fun experience though and I'm sure if we stuck with it, we would of gotten better I'm sure.
hey @bodyinbeta , yeah the television shows made it seemed like every unit no matter how crappy looking held some gem, not exactly accurate.
while i have hit some homeruns the vast majority of storage unit stuff is household junk. old furniture, cheap kitchenware and items, old clothes, etc. its kind of funny that people are paying money to store stuff for no other reason than to hoard it in many cases, you can tell many people have no use and are never gonna use the stuff again.
not sure when you went, i got involved shortly before all the storage auction tv shows came on and back then nobody knew about them so you got stuff super cheap and at some auctions it would literally be me and one other guy, i even showed up to some auctions where they couldn't even hold the auction because i was the only person lol.
after the shows came on it got insane. i went to an auction on christmas eve thinking it would be dead and there were over 300 people.someone dropped a grand on a unit with 3 mattresses in it and not even new mattresses old mattresses which not only can you not sell even good will wont take them because of bed bug scares. anyhow, the only thing i can figure is people really believed if they tore open the mattress it would be filled with cash or a mason jar full of silver eagles or something it really made no sense how crazy prices got.
i havn't been to an auction in quite some time but recently moved so was thinking about hitting one up if for no other reason than maybe find some stuff to stock my house with. my old house i got pretty much all my kitchenware and furniture and decor items from storage auctions lol.
i think if you really want to make money its a grind, sure there's some good items for ebay but the vast majority of stuff is either junk or is just too big to feasibly ship to someone ie the shipping cost outweighs the item cost so a lot of it is selling stuff on craigslist, offerup, flea markets garage sales so its really a grind.
I was part of the Storage Wars craze and yes there was a lot of people there. I don't live in a huge town but there was 50-100 people there.
If you found it at least fun/interesting it may be worth going back. I think the crowds fizzled out quickly after the hype of the show died down. I'm thinking about going back just for fun more so than even to make money.
Great idea on switching from buying at actions to providing a service to the buyers. Just curious though, how time does it take to buy a storage unit and get rid of all the stuff you get in it?
The actual auctions are conducted pretty quickly it will take just a few minutes for a unit to be auctioned but typically there will be multiple auctions at one facility and in many cases they will do kind of a circuit where they go to all the Public Storage facilities within say the CHicagoland area so you may go from town to town hitting like a dozen in a day.
As far as how long it takes to sell the stuff depends on how much is in the unit and how good it is. Some items are an easy sale on eBay like Bose speakers or something like that but a lot of the more household junk you either donate and take the tax writeoff or garage sale and flea market sell it all
side hustle?
a side hustle is basically some type of business or entrepreneurial venture but something which can be done with little to no money, something that doesn't really require any special skilsl or at the very least uses skills you already have and something you can start outside your 9-5 job.
i think a lot of people are intimidated by starting a business, they think it requires a lot of money or that they don't have time so a side hustle is a way of starting a business without all the baggage basically