A Creative Side Hustle Experiment: 60 Days of Short Videos, 219K Views, $0 Earned

Back in August, I started a side channel from zero.

It's about my old cassettes and CDs (talking about them, not selling cassette tapes). The goal was to have fun and stop worrying about whether it would make money. Here's that post if you missed it.

I gave myself 60 days. August 11th to October 11th.

A quick video most days. 30 to 60 minutes each.

Day 60 is in the books, so I pulled the scoreboard one last time. If you've been curious about creative side hustles, this is what one looked like.

Some of it really surprised me. Some of it, not so much.

Heads up: each platform reports a different window, so this isn't perfectly apples-to-apples.

A few extras: TikTok went from about 294 followers to 565, with 637 profile views. 98% of Instagram views came from people who don't follow me. And Instagram's 90-day window starts about 3 weeks before Day 1, so take that one with a grain of salt.

The Facebook Page is the one that floored me.

It was dormant before this. Compared to the 90 days before, views went from 2,899 to 73,793. Unique viewers went from 1,753 to 50,990. Engagements went from 72 to 5,571.

Same guy, same tapes. I just started showing up.

My personal Facebook profile got some love too. 20 sampled videos pulled 233 reactions and 124 comments. The top one was a simple question post about Jake E. Lee.

Questions get people talking.

But DAM… 219K views!

If you have a message, a product, a service or a skill to promote, that’s a lot of eyeballs to be in front of.

My setup is pretty simple.

First I brain-dump ideas. Then my Grok Bot video coach picks the hook, the talking points, and the call to action. Once I started doing that, views and engagement started climbing.

Then I record in Riverside ($). It does the transcript captions, cleans up the sound, and suggests edits. From there I post the export straight to Instagram and TikTok, scheduled for prime times. Then I push it to YouTube with titles and tags.

Later on, I added Meta Muse. I used it to schedule and republish reels and to get ideas based on what's trending. Thinking, what could possibly understand what’s trending on Facebook and Instagram better than Meta’s own AI?!

The less I fiddle, the more I post.

Sundays were huge on TikTok.

So I never skipped a Sunday. Near the end, Saturday was the day I'd usually skip. That's the trade I made to keep going without burning out.

Posting on TikTok also gave me my biggest surprise. On September 6th, a video about the Loudness cassette Thunder in the East spiked to about 9K views.

You never know what's going to hit.

If you think you need to start a YouTube channel first, here's a reality check: YouTube was my slowest platform.

14.9K views, and 14.7K of those came from Shorts. 137 watch hours and 39 new subscribers. The same videos that did well on TikTok and Facebook got very different results on YouTube. As for making money on YouTube Shorts, that's $0 so far.

When I started this challenge, I really thought and hoped YouTube would be the channel that performed the best.

It performed fine but… eh.

Now TikTok on the other hand, got the most traction and I never planned on using it at all. Facebook took a while but has been getting the most traction lately, especially since using Meta Muse to help me manage my account (go figure).

For YouTube, I think I need to produce more longer form content. I think that will help me more there.

I definitely need to think about doing some live streams as well. I've learned that can also help speed up the audience building.

Every platform has its own crowd. That's OK.

Here's the honest part.

Money so far is $0. I got a couple dozen DMs and 19 email signups.

As far as the zero dollars, I didn't make any money yet.

But an important thing to consider is I've never really made anybody an offer. I don't feel like this is the type of audience I can ask for support from too quickly. Other hobbies are different, where maybe you offer a consulting service or some sort of product, either digital or physical.

So $0 means I haven't asked yet.

One other thing I might mention: I do have an idea for maybe a physical product, but I haven't decided yet.

A lot of people were commenting on a shirt I wore in a lot of my videos, talking about how I still owe Columbia House money. So there may be some sort of apparel or T-shirt offer I could make at some point. I have to run the numbers on that and come up with some ideas.

The only thing with the Columbia House shirt is it could be a copyright issue, so I can't totally take that idea. But it shows that maybe the right theme T-shirt could be a way to begin monetizing.

We'll have to see.

The worst part was my email call to action. Long pitches flopped. When I switched to a very short "join the list, link in bio," I got 4 signups in 4 days.

Short wins. Every time I tested it.

Social platforms are rented land.

I wrote about that in my Day 45 update. When you post on social, you rent space. When you build an email list, you own the connection.

That's where I'm putting my energy next.

Own the audience.

Test Beehiiv ads to grow the list.

Maybe try some live streams.

If you're a Gen Xer wondering whether it's too late to start one of these creative side hustles, it isn't. I started this side channel from zero at my age, with a camera and a box of old tapes.

Day 60. Still pressing on.

Have a good one,

Corey