Should You START Or BUY A Side Hustle In 2025? (The TRUTH About Each Option)
Updated on May 30, 2025
Transcript
Most people try to build a side hustle and fail before making their first thousand dollars. But what if you could skip that entire soul-crushing first 18 months and jump straight to making money from day one? Well, today I'm going to show you why buying a small online business might be the smartest move you're currently not making right now.
Right now, regular people are acquiring these profitable side hustles and adding in $1,000 to $2,000, $3,000, and sometimes even $10,000 in net profit income every single month by buying a side hustle that already makes money versus going out there and trying to start one from scratch. Now, if you're not familiar with why buying a business is so advantageous over starting one, let me catch you up to speed here.
First of all, if you start a side hustle, you're looking at maybe two months, three months, maybe even six months before you even make anything—if you make anything at all. As we all know, most businesses fail. But if you buy a business instead that is already making money, you are literally making money from day one. The moment you acquire that and it's transferred over to you, you are making that money. So instead of waiting for three months to be making three grand a month, you can be making $3,000 a month today once you acquire that business.
The other cool thing about buying a business, other than the massive time advantage of actually making money right away, is that you are also acquiring something that has built at least somewhat of a system. Now, these are smaller businesses, so they don't necessarily have the most optimized system out there, right? But you are buying something that is obviously and clearly working, which means it already has somewhat of a product-market fit.
Not being familiar with product-market fit is probably the most challenging thing to deal with in business. It's where you are actually able to sell a product or a service at a sustainable markup so that not only can you grow by reinvesting that profit you're making into the business, but you can actually pay yourself something that you can, you know, go to Walmart and buy something with, right? And hopefully pay your rent. So these are all the massive advantages of buying a business.
Now, as you buy bigger businesses, the massive advantages become way more advantageous. But that doesn't mean they don't exist with little tiny side hustles as well. Most people think you need crazy amounts of money to buy a business, but you really do not. You can go on EmpireFlippers.com right now, look at our marketplace, and there are tons of businesses that you can get into for less than $300,000, sometimes less than $100,000, sometimes less than $50,000. All of these little profitable side hustles are just waiting for someone like you to come and acquire them.
So I went on Empire Flippers, just to our public-facing marketplace, and all I did was type in, you know, maximum price $300,000. And I started looking, like, okay, what do we have for sale right now? I pulled up three of them here. And, of course, if you want to go deeper, you can do this yourself as well. You don't need an account with us at all to browse our marketplace—the public-facing one. But here are just three businesses I found.
The first one, listing 82457, is an e-commerce store making a little bit over $10,000 per month in net profit. It's at a 25x monthly multiple, so that's lower than the normal multiples that we're seeing right now. You can acquire it with a starting asking price of $250,000. So that's pretty incredible. If this business stayed at its current performance, that means in less than two years, or right around two years—a little bit over two years—you'd be making all your money back and then more.
Now, as we all know, when you acquire a business, it is one of the best types of investments you can make because it allows you to really control the investment. You can increase paid ad spend, you can do CRO, and there are so many different things you can do with this investment. You might buy or start off with making $10,000 net profit per month, but it can actually grow much faster and much more significantly, where you can make your money back in way less than that two years, and with extra profit on top. So that is one of the beautiful things about buying a business—it's not a static thing. It's not like buying, say, a rental property where if you're making $500 a month on rent, it's not exactly possible to suddenly make $1,000 a month in rent on that place. Usually, you can't do that with real estate, but with buying a side hustle you absolutely can.
Here's another one: listing 76777. This one is a digital product business—so no tariff issue with this one—and it's making $4,285 profit per month. Now, I know people all around the world, even in developed countries, where $4,285 per month is more than their full-time paycheck, right? You can acquire this business at a 25x monthly multiple with a starting asking price of just $111,000. That's wild. And you probably don't have to put all the money up front.
Now, with these side hustles, with these smaller businesses, I usually say that if you don't put all cash up front on any deal that is less than $200,000, there is a very strong chance that you will not get the deal simply because you'll be beaten out by an all-cash buyer. But that is not always true, and that doesn't mean you can't try to get some seller financing in there. Or maybe you put, say, $40-50,000 down to get into this business, and you pay out the rest over, say, six months, a year, or something like that, right? That way, you can also use the profits from the side hustle you acquired to basically pay for itself—to pay for its own purchase as you get into the business.
And speaking of $50,000, you don't even need $50,000 to do an all-cash offer, because the last listing I have here is 78664, which is a newsletter making $1,300 per month with a monthly multiple of 31x and a starting asking price of just $40,000. I know people with bigger credit card limits than that. You can buy this business—I wouldn't recommend buying with a credit card, just to be clear—but you can buy this business for really, really cheap and it is in a pretty awesome niche.
These are just three different businesses. It took me less than five minutes to pull this up. And you could do exactly the same. If you want to get into business for yourself and you want to skip that entire startup struggle, then this is such an easy way for you to get into the game—by going out and acquiring these, you know, massive seven-figure enterprise businesses that we often talk about on this show, but by buying just little tiny side hustles. And you don't need that many. If you bought just one or two of these, there's a good chance you're at $5,000 to $10,000 in profit per month for yourself. And since these are smaller businesses, the way they're set up, they tend to be— I hate to use the word passive, but they are semi-passive. They're semi hands-off. They are, as I said, side hustles, something you can do in addition to your normal 9-to-5 that you might be working.
So, what does the buying process actually look like to acquire a profitable side hustle? Well, it's pretty simple.
Step one: You're going to define your criteria. What do you want to look for? What's your business type? What do you like? What's your budget, and what's your time commitment? Now, most of these businesses I listed off earlier, and to be honest, most businesses in this price range, you can probably pretty easily run between three to 10 hours a week—probably even less for some of them. So it's not like we're talking a massive amount of commitment here. But the first thing you need to do is, what is my criteria? What am I comfortable with acquiring, and what do I want? What maximizes the lifestyle goal that I have for myself? So these are the kinds of questions you want to answer.
Step two: You want to go find those businesses. And I'm here to help you with that, because the easiest way for you to do that is literally just go to empireflippers.com, check out our marketplace, sign up for a free account, and boom, you're off to the races. There's literally dozens of deals—both side hustles and enterprise businesses—that you can go and acquire from us.
Step three: You want to perform your due diligence. There is a common mistake a lot of newbie buyers make. They look at a platform like us, a brokerage like us, and they think, "Oh, they vetted the businesses so I don't have to do any of that." Which is wrong. Vetting and due diligence are very different from each other. Vetting is where we look at a business and make sure it is a legitimate opportunity. Due diligence is a lot more personalized, based on what you want to do and what you want to acquire.
For example, I've had people say, "Well, why would Empire Flippers ever list, say, an affiliate website that's been penalized by Google? That seems crazy." Well, it's crazy for them, but we've had buyers—that's specifically what they want. They want to find businesses that have that Google penalty because they have the unfair advantage of knowing how to fix that penalty. This is what I mean: due diligence is extremely personal. So, for you, you want to use your criteria and start doing due diligence on these businesses.
The nice thing about using a place like us at Empire Flippers is because we do vetting, it saves you a lot of the legwork. All the documentation, such as the P&L statement, the traffic analytics, all that kind of stuff, is already there for you to check out. That's the beauty of using a marketplace like us. We reject right around 94% of businesses that get submitted to our marketplace—it's pretty rigorous. If you're using another platform that's more DIY, like do it yourself, you've got to be a lot more careful and take any data they're showing you with a hefty grain of salt. But with Empire Flippers, you don't have to worry about that nearly as much.
After that, you are on step four and this is where all the fun begins: it's where you make an offer to that seller and you start negotiating the terms. Now, with buying a side hustle, you're probably not going to be doing crazy deal structuring here or some creative finance shenanigans or anything like that. Like I said, most people buy these businesses with all-cash offers. So, if that's not you, if you can't do that yet, you can certainly try to do some financing, but you will probably—well, there's a chance you would lose the deal to an all-cash buyer. But with that said, it never hurts to ask a seller, "Hey, how much would you seller finance this deal?" Even on the low end, you might be surprised that they seller finance 20, 30, or sometimes even 40-50% of the business, which will greatly cut down how much money you have to put up to buy that side hustle.
And then, of course, the last step: seller agrees, all is good to go, and the business migration begins, which we help you do, by the way. We're the only brokerage that actually manages a migration on your behalf to make sure everything is set up right. Once that is done, bam! You got a business, you might be making $3,000 a month from that acquisition, and it didn't take you three months.
The average time it takes for us to sell a business on EF is right around 93 days, and that is all businesses—right from the low-priced side hustles to the enterprise, multiple 7-figure businesses. On average, it's 93 days. Obviously, with these profitable side hustles, it goes a lot quicker. You could end up finding the deal, doing the due diligence—because they're not super complex businesses—and be done and get your business all within 30 days, probably 30 to 60 days if we're a little bit more conservative. But that means within 30 to 60 days, suddenly you have bought your first business and you're making between $1,500 to $10,000 a month. And you didn't have to go through any of the startup struggle that most people go into when they first try to get a side hustle up and going. Because getting a side hustle up and going and profitable can be just as hard as any business, right? It is a business, and businesses are tough.
So why make it so much worse, or why make it so much harder, when you can literally just go on our marketplace, find something that's already working, contact that seller, make an offer, and boom—you are a successful entrepreneur through acquisition.
So there you go. There's my lesson. Don't go and start a side hustle. Go and buy one. And preferably buy one from me. If you want to buy one from me, you can go and register a free buyer account with us. That will give you access to our marketplace to be able to do a lot more crazy filtering than what you can do on the front end of our website. So with that said, looking forward to seeing what you acquire!
