The fastest way to make $50k - 20 most profitable side hustles revealed

Whenever you hear people chatting about making money online, the $50k mark is always considered a milestone. It’s a pretty respectable income regardless of where you live, and it can be life-changing for people in countries with low cost of living.

That’s why I want to go over the fastest and best way to make $50k, no matter where you’re from or your skills. This will be a long one, as I’ll be covering a bunch of different lucrative side hustles and business ideas, so sit tight, and let’s get to it.

How fast can you make $50K?

Let me start off by saying don’t expect to make $50k in your first month when you’re just starting out. If you want to make that much per year, you’ll have to reach the $4k/month mark first, which can take 1-2 years alone.

Based on my experience, you can make $50k in a couple of years if you’re starting from scratch. It’ll take you around 6 months to a year to find the side hustle or business idea that suits you and another year to scale it to 50k.

Of course, you might not be starting from scratch. If you already have the skills or money to get started, you can reduce the time needed quite a bit. Say you already have some great writing skills and $1k-$2k to invest in your writing business, you can expect to reach the $50k mark within a year.

But, in reality, not everyone is that fortunate. That’s why I’ve compiled a few ideas to earn your first buck online (and offline), which you can then use to get to the ultimate milestone.

Top 10 most lucrative side hustles to make your first few bucks

Before you can get up to 50k, you’ll have to make your first bucks. These are a bunch of different side hustles you can try out that will cost you very little (if anything) and will help you get your foot in the market.

If you find success with any of these, you can then scale them up to 50k.

1. Start a creative personal project

Any type of creative personal project is a great way to make your first money online. This can be anything from running a blog and creating graphics to digital art, or selling stock photos and videos. Any passion or hobby you have can be turned into a side hustle, and creative ones are definitely one of the most lucrative.

For one, you’ll be able to make a few bucks without spending anything. For instance, a blog will cost you no more than $100/year, and you’ll be able to make some profits through ads, sponsored posts, or affiliate marketing (more on this one below).

But that same blog can be your gateway to freelance writing. You can use it as your portfolio to secure deals with companies that need help with their blogs. You’ll have plenty of leverage here, as you’ll have first-hand experience with uploading, sourcing images, and handling the backend of the site, in contrast to most writers, who focus on just writing the posts.

The same goes for any other creative project. For instance, you can sell your digital art but also get commissions from companies or influencers later on. Or, you can upload your stock photos and videos and turn them into a photography or videography freelance business.

2. Take part in the gig economy

If you’d rather make money now and think about business later, you can take part in the gig economy in different ways. The gig economy, in general, is a great way to make money fast without needing any special skills. But, it does have a caveat in that it’s not as scalable, as you’ll earn a fixed amount hourly rate, and there are only so many hours in a day.

Still, if you just want to earn your first few bucks, it’s one of the best places to start. If you have a car and want to drive people around, check out Uber or Lyft and become a rideshare driver. If you live in a small, bike-friendly area, delivery apps will happily pay you to deliver food or groceries to customers.

Now, is the money going to be great? It depends. You’ll usually make slightly above minimum wage, but you’ll also be able to work as much and whenever you want. And, this will be a great step to get into the mentality and routine of running a business, which will inevitably be the fastest way to get to 50k.

3. Try pet sitting

Another lucrative side hustle that you can do without any skills is pet sitting. Many people look for pet sitters to keep their pets company while they’re away on a trip. So, your job will be simple; make sure their pets are safe and keep them company.

I’ve raved about pet sitting plenty of times, as you can do it pretty much passively. There are apps, like Rover, where you can get started, but you can also take a more traditional route through word of mouth.

The key here is to fit in as many pet-sitting gigs in a day as possible. You can, for example, go to 4 different houses in 8 hours to take dogs on a walk, make sure they have food and water and play with them for a bit. If you charge around $20-$25/hour, that can be a solid $160-$200 for a day’s work. It won’t be that consistent, but it’ll surely be a great starting point.

4. Sell meal plans

This one’s something I wanted to try out before I got into writing. I was always a fan of cooking, and I could make simple meals in big batches. If you’re the same, all you need to do is find people who will pay you to make them a meal plan and deliver their meals to them.

This can be great, even when you’re in college. You can make the meals and sell them to fellow students at a high enough price so you can make money, and they get a discount compared to getting takeout.

So, in essence, if you can make a big batch of 20 meals in 4-5 hours and can profit $3-$4 per meal, that’s basically $15-$20/hour. And, you can then scale this if you find “richer” students and sell them higher-quality meals at a premium (so that you profit closer to $10 per meal).

5. Participate in focus groups

I thought about including surveys here, but admittedly, you won’t make that much in a year from them. Instead, by putting in a little bit more effort, you can find and participate in focus groups, which usually pay you $15-$50+ for an hour of your time.

There are platforms online, like Respondent, User Interviews, and Prolific, that will pay you good money for your opinion. Or, you could check out some others, like UserTesting, where you’ll have to test websites, share your thoughts, and, of course, make good money from them.

The premise here is very simple; you just share your opinion on the given topic and make some money for your time. Since this won’t require anything besides your time, it’s a nice one to do on the side, and it’ll make you some money to reinvest in other side hustles.

6. Affiliate marketing

Back to an online-only gig, I have to mention affiliate marketing. There are plenty of ways to do this, whether you already have some form of online presence or you’re just starting to build your personal brand.

Basically, with affiliate marketing, you’re getting paid for the people you refer to a product or service. When they buy through your links, you’ll earn a commission. Obviously, if you’re already running a blog or creating posts on social media, this can be a great way to further monetize these.

But you can also start from scratch. For instance, you can create new accounts with the sole purpose of building an audience. Find a lucrative affiliate niche, like making money online or self-development, and start posting on TikTok or other platforms (there will be a lot more on this later on).

Once you have built up a following, you can get affiliated with companies in your niche. Best of all, Whop can help you out here, as you can quickly get affiliate links to every whop on here and earn a great commission for every sale.

Become a Whop affiliate

7. Tutoring

Onto one of my favorite side hustles of my teens, I still consider tutoring one of the most lucrative online money-making methods. While you won’t need any unique skills, you’ll have to be super knowledgeable in a certain subject.

For instance, I was always pretty good at English (go figure), and I was able to capture that teaching spirit. Hence, I tried out ESL tutoring. I was still in my mid-teens without any real degree or anything, so I was making around $10-$15/hour.

But, there are plenty of platforms out there where you can tutor any kind of subject, from Math to Physics and Chem. And, with many of these, you can set your own rates. You can pretty much expect to earn anywhere from $20-$50+/hour, which is definitely an awesome starting point to get to 50k.

8. Dropservicing

No, this isn’t a typo; I didn’t mean to write dropshipping. Dropservicing is pretty much the same concept but for services instead of products. You basically secure high-paying clients and build a team of freelancers across different disciplines, whom you then outsource the work.

For example, you can charge a client $500 for a blog post, pay a writer $250 to write the actual post and pocket the difference. Yes, you’ll need some sales skills here, and you’ll have to at least be knowledgeable in the services you’ll offer through your team of freelancers.

But this is one of the few side hustles that can make you a few bucks when starting out and be scaled to a full-blown agency later on. So, while you’ll only earn close to $20/hour for the amount of work you’ll put in at the start, that can go up to 5 figures a month once you have a large clientele and an even bigger team under your belt.

9. Sell PLR digital products

Then again, you might not want to put in any of the “actual” work of creating products or fulfilling client work individually. In this case, you can create and sell Private Label Rights (PLR) digital products.

PLRs are pre-made pieces of content (think courses, articles, graphics, etc.) that you’ll create, bundle, and sell to potential buyers. Many entrepreneurs are using these to make money themselves, as they’ll only need to make some slight edits to repackage as their own work.

The more niched you make these, the better. For instance, you can create a bundle of PLRs for life coaches who are looking to kickstart the marketing strategy and sell it for a high price ($400-$500+). In just 5 sales, you’ve made enough to reinvest in another business idea or side hustle.

10. Make mobile or web games

Another side hustle I wanted to mention for any of you with some coding skills is making mobile or web games. I know this might sound vague, but hear me out. You don’t have to put in too much effort here to make something entirely new. Just follow the current trends, and try to create something slightly different.

For example, when Wordle was trending a while back, some were making similar games for football and NBA players. They simply hopped on a trend and made some really good money from it.

The key is to create several different games and apps and see what works best. You can then monetize them through ads or in-game purchases (such as extra lives or turns).

10 ways to make 50k and beyond

Now, while I did mention some ideas to help you make your first few bucks online, many of which can be scaled to $50k, I also want to cover some more in-depth business ideas that can help you reach that mark and beyond.

These are all super scalable but come with some risks. And you’ll also have to put time and money into them. But, they are the fastest ways to get to $50k and maybe even make that much in a month (although luck is a lot at play for the latter). Plus, you can do almost all of these with the help of Whop.

So, let’s get straight into these.

1. Become a content creator

Whenever someone asks me how to make a lot of money online, I always say that becoming a content creator is the best approach. Everyone wants to try it out, but very few people are actually getting in front of the camera and investing the time needed to build a brand.

There are several platforms and tons of different niches you can dabble in. You can create faceless YT content, short-form content around a specific niche, long-form, documentary-style videos, and influence on social media, the list is endless.

You have to find what you’re passionate about and dive deeper into it through your content. The goal is to build an audience and use it as leverage to land deals with companies for affiliate marketing or sponsored posts. Or, you can create digital products (like the ones I mention below) and funnel your followers to these.

This way, you’ll be able to make $50k in less than a year with a little bit of luck. Just stay dedicated to building one channel and, even if it doesn’t work out, use your newfound knowledge and skills to create a different one.

2. Sell an online course

Now, admittedly, I’ll say that if you don’t necessarily want to build an online presence, you can still make $50k by selling digital products. One of the best ones is online courses. And I’m not talking about that guru-style cash-grab stuff. I’m talking about actual courses that teach people a skill or give valuable info about a niche or industry.

Of course, you’ll have to be very knowledgeable to create a course that makes you good money. If you want to sell a writing course, you’ll have to be a successful freelance writer first.

The thing is, you probably already have a skill that you can sell through a course. Maybe you have tips on studying more effectively, or you know the ins and outs of video editing.

Whatever it is, present all your knowledge through a course and give useful tips on how one can improve the respective skill.

And, when your course idea is ready, you can start selling it right away on Whop. There are tons of creators who’ve created their whops to sell their courses and are making $50k+ by doing so.

3. Create a paid community

Then again, courses aren’t the only lucrative digital product you can sell. In my opinion, paid communities are a little bit better when it comes to making money. But, I put these just below courses, as they require you to be hands-on.

Now, what can these communities be about? Literally anything. If you have a look through Whop, you’ll see creators selling access to their whops that are about sports betting, trading, business tips, reselling, ecom, the list goes on.

The key with these is to, again, have a lot of knowledge in a niche. Instead of just creating a course though, you give out daily tips and help others on a more personalized level. Of course, this also means you can charge more, making it an even faster way to reach $50k.

You can start a community on Whop right away. Simply create your whop, add your “Chats”, and start selling access to it within the next few minutes.

Start a community on Whop

I’ll say that the three ideas I’ve mentioned above are hands down the best to get to $50k. But, the more diversified your income streams are, the better. That’s why I’d also suggest creating a paid newsletter, as it doesn’t take as much time as the others but can still get you to your money goal.

Remember how I said to start a creative project above? Well, a paid newsletter is step 3 of capitalizing on your audience. Instead of writing only blog posts or doing client work, you can also funnel your readers to your paid newsletters for exclusive info on your niche.

For instance, if you’re writing posts in the moneymaking niche, you can also have exclusive info on new methods or deep dives into moneymaking ways through your paid newsletter.

Of course, this can also translate to any niche and industry. If you’re creating informational trading videos, you can have your newsletter be about upcoming earnings calls or trading news for specific stocks or crypto.

5. Reselling

I couldn’t leave reselling out of this, as it’s one of the best ways to make money online in general. While you can probably make more by creating a reselling course or community, no doubt reselling in itself can get you to $50k fast.

You’ll need some capital to start, which might be a small caveat for some. But you can even start with $1k, which you’ve made using one of the side hustles I mentioned above, and invest that into reselling goods.

The great thing is that there’s plenty of stuff to resell, from shoes to trading and sports cards. If you have a bit more money to invest in this, you can even hop on a reselling whop to get the latest news on upcoming releases so you can secure the items with the most potential.

6. Become an online coach

While I did mention courses and communities above, you can also go for what I consider the middle point between the two: coaching. Being an online coach allows you to share your knowledge without having to spend as much time as you would running a community, but also keeping the personable feeling of one that you don’t get with a course.

Coaching sessions can be group or 1-on-1s, and you can usually charge a premium for these, as you’re giving out personalized help. And by a premium, I mean at least $100/hour.

The one thing to remember is that you’ll need to be an expert in something. The more knowledge and experience you have, the more you can charge (some creators on Whop charge $1000+ for a 1-hour coaching session).

Speaking of Whop, you can set up all your coaching calls directly through your whop. Just embed your calendar to allow members to select an opening and have your calls through the “Video Chat” app.

7. Rent out your car

Of course, not everything has to be online. There are a few pretty lucrative business ideas that can get you to $50k within a year or two as well. One of these is renting out your car.

There are plenty of platforms, like Turo, that allow you to rent your car for a set daily fee that goes straight into your pocket. Admittedly, there are two ways to go about this. You either do this as a hobby and make a few bucks when you’re not using your car instead of just having it sit around.

Or, you can go the business route. The best way to go about this is to start with one car, finance it, and rent it out for the whole month. With it being on the road for so long, you’ll need to spend a bit on cleaning and maintenance costs, but you’ll be making enough to pay it off. You then repeat the process until you have a whole fleet of cars.

That said, even if you do this with one car, you can make around $50k within a couple of years. But you’ll also need to take on the risk of any significant damages that might prolong the journey to $50k.

8. Start a car detailing business

I tried to find the best two businesses that can get you to $50k quickly, and car detailing was one of them (house cleaning is another one right below). The market isn’t yet saturated, and since car detailing is a premium service, you can charge quite a lot for it.

You’ll need some equipment, hence why it’s best to have at least $1k to invest in this. The more equipment you buy, the better a service you can offer, so the more you can charge. But it’s better to start slow.

A typical car detail will cost around $100, give or take $20, for around 2-3 hours of work. When you turn this into a full-blown business, you’ll not be doing the work yourself, but at the start, as long as you have a consistent demand, $50k is feasible within a year.

9. House cleaning business

House cleaning is another lucrative business idea if done right. Again, start off slow. Go around your neighborhood with a small set of equipment and offer a thorough house clean for $50/hour.

You can scale that pretty quickly by getting a whole team and better equipment onboard, as well as reaching out to more premium clients. But, even when you’re just starting, you can make close to $2k/month or even as high as $5k/month if you’re consistently hustling. So, the $50k mark is reachable within a year and a half.

10. Low-risk investments

While everything I’ve mentioned so far is definitely lucrative, I also want to mention a fast way to get to $50k that’s a bit safer and relies less on luck: low-risk investments. Now, unfortunately, I can’t mention index funds and ETFs here, as they won’t get you to $50k that quickly.

However, you can look into some blue chip stocks or crypto. For example, you can have a portfolio of big names like Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia alongside crypto like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These 5 investments could get you to $50k in two years if you invested around $10k in total.

You might say this is a pretty slow way to make that amount, and I’d agree. The key here is that you have to spend minutes every month depositing and setting a buy order on a crypto exchange or brokerage. So, essentially, it’s the fastest way to make $50k passively.

That does come with a caveat, in that the markets can change, and your stocks might actually lose value. But this is your safest bet to reach the $50k mark in a reasonable time. For reference, you’d have to invest $500 every month in the S&P 500 for 12 years to make $50k from compound interest.

Can you make $50k a month?

Now, all the ideas I’ve mentioned above are supposed to help you reach $50k within a year. But is that feasible within a month? Well, it is possible to make $50k per month, but it’ll require a lot of effort and quite a bit of luck.

If you go down the online route, you’ll need to do everything perfectly, and even then, there’s a lot of luck at play. You’ll have to go viral consistently and be able to get people to the service or product you sell.

If you go down the brick-and-mortar business, you’ll have to put in a significant amount of money and also consistently scale your business with better equipment and a larger crew.

Think of it like this. $50k per month is equal to $600k per year. If you do that for three years, you’ll be a millionaire (taking taxes into consideration). That’s a pretty significant feat. Is it impossible? No. Is it feasible when you’re starting from zero? Yes, but it will require a lot of effort and pressure, as well as a whole bunch of luck.

Make money fast by selling digital products on Whop

While making $50k a month is going to be a pretty difficult feat, making that within a year is a lot more feasible. I wrote about 20 ideas that could help you eventually get there. As you might have noticed, though, the main ones consisted of selling some form of digital products.

And that’s for a good reason. Digital products are super scalable and are hands-down the fastest way to $50k. You can sell these indefinitely, without handling any stock, and at a premium price. The thing is, you’ll need a good platform to support you in this. The best platform for that is Whop.

On Whop, you can sell any kind of digital products or services you wish through your whop. On your whop, there are dozens of different apps you can use to make your life easier and handle your business better.

Plus, Whop can also be your affiliate marketing hub, as you can simply copy a link to any whop or category and share it with your followers. Once they make a purchase through your links, you get a great percentage of what Whop makes.

So, are you ready to kickstart your journey to $50k with Whop? Then, simply create your whop, and get started, all within just a few minutes.

Road to $50k with Whop

The fastest way to make $50k - 20 most profitable side hustles revealed

How fast can you make $50K?