This sounded insanely creepy until he explained it.

He signed up on a genealogy website where people request photos of relatives' graves because they live in another state (or another country).

Instead of traveling themselves, they post requests.

If someone nearby is willing to visit the cemetery, find the headstone, take a few clear photos, and upload them, the request gets fulfilled.

Most people do it for free because they're into genealogy.

But after doing a bunch of them, people started messaging him privately asking if he'd take photos from cemeteries that weren't on his usual route, or if he could visit multiple graves in one trip.

Now if he's already driving somewhere on the weekend, he'll sometimes make an extra stop and get paid for the detour.

He told me the hardest part isn't finding the graves...

It's realizing how many people have family they've never been able to visit.

Definitely one of the strangest ways I've heard someone making extra money.

Anyone else know side hustles that sound fake until you realize they're actually a thing?

Instead, I started saying things like:

"I make product videos that help skincare brands lower CPA on TikTok." or "I edit short-form videos that online stores can run as ads."

It's a tiny change, but I noticed more replies.

Most business owners don't wake up looking for a "UGC creator." They're looking for someone who can solve a problem.

A few examples:

❌ "I create aesthetic videos."

✅ "I create product demos that make complicated products easier to understand."

❌ "I make TikToks."

✅ "I create vertical videos brands can reuse for ads, organic posts, and Amazon listings."

Even my portfolio started making more sense after I organized it by problem solved instead of by niche.

• Product demo
• Unboxing
• Testimonial
• Before/after
• Tutorial
• Lifestyle ad

Clients don't really care if your portfolio has 200 videos. They care if they can instantly picture themselves using one.

Still figuring this out myself, but changing the way I described my work got me more conversations than changing my editing style.

Has anyone else noticed that changing your positioning worked better than just making a prettier portfolio?

Everyone with a cute dog is emailing Purina or small dog-toy brands on Instagram. The inboxes

are overflowing.

If you want to actually get paid for pet UGC, pitch companies that solve pet messes.

I started pitching washable rug companies (like Ruggable), stain remover sprays, pet hair

vacuums (Bissell), and scratch-proof couch covers.

My pitch: "I have a golden retriever who sheds everywhere and tracks in mud. I can make you a

hyper-realistic 15-second ad showing how easily your product cleans up his mess."

These home-goods brands have massive budgets, and they desperately need dogs to make

their product demonstrations believable. Stop competing in the pet-food niche

A few weeks ago my friend told me he has a regular client who pays him just to make sure they actually get out of bed.

At first I assumed he meant setting up alarms or something.

Nope.

He literally calls them every morning, and if they don't answer, he'll keep calling or texting until they finally respond. Sometimes he'll even stay on the phone for a minute just to make sure they're actually awake instead of saying "yeah yeah I'm up" and immediately falling back asleep.

Most of his clients are freelancers or anyone whose work doesn't have a strict start time. He said some people have tried every alarm app imaginable and still sleep through them, so paying another person ended up being what finally worked.

It's such a ridiculously simple service that I would've laughed if someone told me about it online, but hearing it from someone I know made me realize people really will pay to solve oddly specific problems.

Has anyone else come across side hustles that are basically just "I'll do the one thing you can't make yourself do"?

One thing that helped me was organizing my portfolio by content type instead of just dumping every video into one page.

For example:

• Product demo
• Talking head
• Voiceover
• App/SaaS
• Lifestyle B-roll

Now if I'm pitching a skincare brand, I can send the skincare examples instead of making them scroll through random travel or tech videos.

It's still not perfect, and I'm always replacing older work with better edits, but it feels much easier for a potential client to see what they're looking for.

I also noticed that even spec ads can work if they're edited like they're meant for a real brand. They don't have to know whether it was paid or not—the quality is what grabs attention first.

I'm still figuring things out myself, but this made outreach feel a little less random.

Has anyone else made a small portfolio change that noticeably improved your response rate?

Every boomer has a massive plastic tote bin in their closet filled with loose family photos from the 80s and 90s, and they are terrified of losing them. I bought a decent Epson photo scanner on Facebook Marketplace for $60. I offer a local service to pick up their photo boxes, scan them in high-res, put them on a $5 USB thumb drive, and return the box to them. I charge $0.25 per photo. Most people hand me boxes with 400-500 photos in them. I literally sit on my couch watching Netflix while feeding photos into the scanner. Last week a lady paid me $220 to scan her wedding and baby albums

I know this sounds made up but it's genuinely how I made extra money last summer.

My cousin works at a small travel agency. Sometimes hotels would send them photos of rooms with "mountain view" or "ocean view" and people would complain after booking because the room overlooked a parking lot or another building.

Eventually one hotel asked if someone local could actually go there, spend a few minutes in random rooms, take photos from the window, and rate whether the advertised view matched reality.

My cousin didn't have time so he asked me.

It wasn't a secret shopper thing. They literally wanted someone with a decent phone camera and zero connection to the hotel.

I'd walk in, get escorted to a few empty rooms, snap photos from the windows, write something like:

• Room 214: partial ocean, but mostly rooftop.
• Room 308: actually better than advertised.
• Room 117: definitely not a "garden view" unless concrete counts as a garden.

It paid around $25–40 per visit depending on the hotel. Some visits took less than half an hour.

The funniest part is I started noticing how creative hotel marketing photos can be. Sometimes turning the camera 20 degrees completely changes what you see.

It wasn't life-changing money, but it's probably the weirdest thing I've ever been paid to do.

Has anyone else ended up doing a side hustle that sounds completely fake until you explain it?

A few days ago I was chatting with my friend at a local coffee shop and he mentioned a side gig I had honestly never heard of before.

He told me people looking for used cars from other cities sometimes don't want to spend hours traveling just to find out the car isn't worth buying. So they'll pay someone local to check it out first.

He's not a mechanic or anything. He just goes to the meetup, takes a bunch of photos and videos, starts the car, takes it for a short drive if the seller allows it, and gives the buyer his honest opinion. If he notices something obviously off, he tells them. If everything looks good, the buyer decides whether it's worth making the trip.

It made me realize there are probably a lot of weird little jobs that only exist because they're solving a very specific inconvenience for someone else.

Have you ever come across an offline side hustle that made you stop and think, "Wait... people actually pay for that?"