My Side Hustle Journey

My Journey

I have been working on side hustles
for most of my life.

Ever since I brought generic sodas
to school to sell for 50 cents.

I got them for 11 cents.

Dented, sticky soda covered, fallen
out of the box generic soda cans.

At this local “Redemption Store” it was called
in ol’ Scarborough, ME.

When my middle school banned soda
I was positioned to own the underground
soda market. 😎

Fast forward to adulthood and I started my development career by building a music downloads website called DigitalDubbed.

That site specialized in dubstep, triphop & chill
genres of electronic music.

That cost me $300/mo to keep the servers up and I was never able to turn a profit, but learned more dev skills.

I continued to try random ideas, but one that stuck and was reasonably successful around 2012 was MobileWeedApps.

Just making iphone and android apps for dispensaries right when they were starting to become legal.

That one was pulling in $5k/mo profit and was looking good, but I decided to focus on a new job at Magento and let it fade.

The next years were soooooooooo many failed attempts at business ideas & strategies.

But I did keep learning efficient ways to make websites, apps, do seo & do digital marketing.

Even though the business ideas were not fruitful, the tech & marketing lessons were getting built.

Looking for a house I ended up making a PITI calculator android app which was kind of fun.
Currently at 33k+ downloads!

Didn’t figure out a way to make money from it,
but during that process came across the Brave browser referral program.

This was paying out $5-$7.50 for each person that
kept the browser installed for 30 days.

After playing around with a few blog articles I found a loophole in Microsoft Ads that allowed the brave referral link right in the ad.

It looked like a legit link (this was banned by Adwords,
and has since been banned by Microsoft Ads).

This allowed for TONS of users to download the browser
through my referral link for very cheap.

Ended up getting enough profit to put a small down payment on a house in the mountains.

I got the house during Covid, and started a plow company.

That lasted about a week and
I realized I was in way over my head.

However, I had a sweet domain of mtnplow.com and figured I’d make a directory for snow removal service providers.

I broke it down to individual neighborhoods
which has been quite helpful.

That idea ended up really catching on and has been
steadily growing since 2021 (900+ instagram followers!).

While it was cool to have identified a real need
I did see limitations of targeting mountain regions.

I started researching the best business verticals to target using the same strategy of growing a community interest around a niche set of service providers.

In addition, I researched the most lucrative areas.

I settled on running my own junk removal business targeting the Southern California areas with the brand 760 HAUL.

And I kept a mountain brand going with MTN HAUL covering Lake Arrowhead & Running Springs.

That went decent until about January of 2025.
Now I’m shooting for more.

Las Vegas, San Diego & Gilbert are now my new areas under the HAULS brand.

Feeling proud of what I’ve built these on, and excited about the future!