I’ve been trying to find good financial content on social media lately, and these posts landed on my feed today. They were actually excellent and really thought provoking, so I wanted to go through them and see where I’m standing with my small side hustles and whether there’s something I should pay more attention to.
So here are my thoughts about these subjects that the algorithm gods decided to serve me today.
ROI
I’m very good at predicting ROI. When I see something for 20 euros, I know what I can resell it for.
The problem isn’t “what is this item worth.”
The problem is when it will sell.
It might sell immediately, or it might sit here for years.
So yes, the ROI is usually fine unless I discount it heavily.
But the real question is whether I’m willing to let that item sit in my home for years before the money comes back.
If I buy a teapot for 20 euros and three years later sell it for 120, that beats anything a bank will give you as interest.
I would rather have the item standing in my home than let the money sit in a bank account doing nothing.
But sometimes you take a small gain or even a loss simply to clear space and move on.
Cash Flow
You can be “profitable” and still be broke.
Cash flow is the part that decides whether you survive.
I take big risks with reselling because sourcing is easy for me.
But I ignore the fact that sometimes the market just freezes.
So then you end up with 19 euros in your bank account and 900 euros in handbags sitting at home doing nothing.
CAC vs LTV
I’ve never done paid marketing, and that’s exactly why one of my online stores failed so badly.
The products were great, but I tried to drive the traffic myself through Instagram.
At the time I had around 3,000 followers on a niche account, and even that wasn’t enough. I didn’t get the traction.
I ended up paying a couple hundred euros in platform fees before I finally closed the store.
That was my first and last attempt at having my own online shop.
I don’t see the point. It’s too expensive unless you’re ready to spend money on ads.
It’s much easier to sell on platforms where you only pay a small fee when you actually make a sale. That model makes sense to me.
LTV in reselling is basically zero anyway. People buy once and disappear.
Now I’m curious to see how the snail mail club behaves — whether people buy once or come back. No idea yet.
Break-Even Point
In reselling, you don’t think about break-even points if you start small and scale slowly.
But with my snail mail club, I actually had to calculate it because there were some upfront costs.
I spent 15 euros on paper — basic printer paper and some nicer art-grade paper.
My break-even point is three people buying one letter each.
That’s it.
Three orders and the cost is covered.
Now I understand why so many girls do these snail mail clubs.
If you already have a printer and some creativity, the startup cost is extremely low.
The Cost of Time
Your time and energy are limited.
If something takes 40 hours to make 200 dollars, it’s not a business.
Whenever I look at a new idea, the first question I ask is:
How much of my energy does this require?
There’s only one me.
And you have to repeat something long enough for it to succeed.
If the work drains you, you won’t stay consistent.
That’s why I have so many ideas I never started.
Not because they were bad ideas, but because after looking at them properly, I realised:
Either there’s no money in them
or they would burn me out.
Choosing where my time goes is survival at this point.
So that’s where I am today.
I’m still looking for some other side hustle I can do, especially something related to writing, because it feels like the only direction where I might one day create actual meaningful income. Things feel bleak now, but you never know when things shift for the better.
Maybe this is the perfect time to think about these things daily and keep building small side hustles that might, eventually, turn into proper income streams.