The typical American side hustler earns $885 (£669) a month. Rachel Jimenez earns $14,000 (£10,580). The gap between the two figures says a great deal about what separates casual earners from those who turn a side project into a primary livelihood.
Jimenez, 37, a former higher education administrator and mother of two, said she now generates that income passively across seven streams, including her Etsy digital products shop, her personal finance blog Money Hacking Mama, real estate holdings, and stock appreciation. She said she recently reached millionaire status, according to a first-person account published byCNBC.
None of it happened quickly. Jimenez opened her Etsy store in 2019 while on maternity leave, selling downloadable printables like budgeting templates and party games. Revenue only picked up after she narrowed her focus to items that were already selling consistently, she told CNBC in a2024 profile.
By 2021, the store brought in close to $160,000 (£120,900). She quit her full-time job that June. In 2023, Etsy revenue dipped to about $77,000 (£58,200) as she dialled back her involvement to just five to ten minutes a day on the platform. The difference was that by then she had branched into other revenue sources - a blog earning roughly $24,000 (£18,100) a year through affiliate links, apaid online course, and adjunct teaching at Mt. San Antonio College in California.
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Jimenez holds a master's degree in positive organisational psychology from Claremont Graduate University. She has credited that training with shaping her approach to business - specifically the concept of a growth mindset, the idea that ability develops through sustained effort rather than innate talent.
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Her central piece of advice for aspiring side hustlers is to resist the urge to do everything at once. 'Most people I know who've built a profitable business didn't start out creating their income streams all at the same time,' she wrote in her CNBC column. She said she has watched new entrepreneurs try to juggle stocks, a Shopify store, and property investment simultaneously, and that the result is almost always burnout and debt.
Jimenez also said that paying for a structured course on selling digital products through Etsy was a turning point. She had spent months trying to self-teach using free videos and library books and had made little headway. The paid course gave her a framework and access to a community of sellers working on the same problems.
'When I invested a small amount of money into a course and a community of people working on the same thing, I was able to learn, struggle, get help, and achieve small wins,' she wrote.
Source: International Business Times UK
