Toward the end of last year, I was chatting with a few friends about side hustles. It turned out that almost everyone had something going on besides their main job—investing, food delivery, driving gigs, freelance work. I was the odd one out. When they asked what I was doing on the side, I had nothing to say.
It wasn’t because I was lazy. I just genuinely didn’t have much time left in the day.
By the time I got home from work, it was usually after seven. Then came dinner, spending a bit of time with my child, washing up, and getting her settled into bed. She loves to play, so if no one gets her into bed, she’ll stay up forever. After that, I still had laundry to deal with. By the time I finally made it to bed myself, it was around 9:30. I’d scroll on my phone for a little while and usually be asleep by ten.
Work already left me exhausted, so I never really had the energy to start another demanding job after hours. Because of that, I really admired one friend who went straight from work to delivering food. He kept at it every day and often didn’t sleep until very late. Sometimes he’d even eat a late-night meal after getting hungry on the job. He did it for two months, made some money, but also gained weight and developed health problems. In the end, about half of what he earned went to medical bills. That kind of trade-off just didn’t seem worth it, and he eventually stopped.
My wife had been putting some money into funds for a while, and later also bought gold. She never invested too heavily, and she wasn’t chasing huge returns, but over time she still made a bit here and there. Seeing that made me wonder what I could do myself.
At first, I thought about taking freelance technical work. I even found a few people to team up with. But the clients were the kind who wanted aircraft-carrier-level output for peanuts. That was a hard no for me. A person may not need arrogance, but they do need backbone. I’m not in a situation where I can’t put food on the table, so why bend over backward for scraps?
What bothers me most is seeing people grind themselves down for tiny amounts of money—pulling multiple all-nighters just to revise something again and again for barely over a hundred yuan. Maybe there are too many people willing to do that, and it has dragged down the value of pure technical work far more than it should.
Coming from a technical background, I’ve never felt especially good at anything outside of that. I’m not a talker, I can’t sing, and I don’t have much spare time. My wife even jokes that with my level of education, I still come off like I’m illiterate. I really couldn’t accept that, so I felt I had to build something of my own.
That was when I turned my attention to a public account platform and decided to give it a try. I picked the account back up at the end of last year and started learning while doing. In the beginning, what I wrote was all over the place. But little by little, things started improving.
Recently, the account seems to have entered a traffic pool, and most of what I publish now gets more than a thousand reads. My followers have grown from around 600 to over 1,000. The income has also climbed sharply. It used to be a little over 100 yuan a month; now it’s more than 1,000 yuan a month, and it still looks like it may keep rising. That’s genuinely encouraging.
Traffic has been fairly steady lately too, reaching tens of thousands every day.
Daily earnings are now consistently in the dozens of yuan as well. It’s basically stable at this point, though keeping it there will still take continued effort.
Compared with other side hustles, this one feels like the most manageable for me. It only takes about an hour a day, which is something I can live with. I had considered expanding to other self-media platforms too, but right now there still just isn’t enough time. So for the moment, I’m focusing on this one. If I ever have more room in my schedule, I may try other formats, like video editing.
The important thing is that I finally took the first step and stuck with it. Once you do that, there’s a good chance something will come from it. The money is still modest, but it gives me a real sense of accomplishment. I’m not dreaming of becoming some major internet personality. I just hope to carve out a small space of my own in the world of self-media.