Could I make six figures from my couch? Influencers said yes – so I tried

Illustration: Raúl Soria/The GuardianView image in fullscreen Illustration: Raúl Soria/The GuardianCould I make six figures from my couch? Influencers said yes – so I triedI was seduced by creators hawking passive income hustles. Like the language used in MLMs, it seemed too good to be true

A very specific kind of content began taking over my social media feeds at the end of last year.

I had just finished out a short-term contract and returned, with some reluctance, to the financial masochism of freelancing. As I mourned the end of steady paychecks and paid days off – as well as finally having enough money for regular haircuts – I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the glow of the screen.

A typical video starts with an ordinary-looking woman doing ordinary things: typing on a laptop, sipping coffee, perhaps doing some light cleaning. Bright, optimistic music blares in the background.

Then text stretches across the frame: she has made thousands of extra dollars each month, working just a few hours a day from the comfort of her home.

Sometimes the woman – and it’s almost always a woman – speaks directly into the camera. She was able to quit her job and spend more time with her family thanks to her side hustle! It allowed her to pay off debt, cover her mortgage and travel, all while setting her own hours! And with her tips and tutorials, you too can begin making money like her.

Read moreAcross the screen come promises like:

“Lazy girl side hustles that have made me over $100K …”

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The gospel of making money on the side, answering to no one but yourself and with no prior training or special skills, has gone global. As of October, Instagram alone had 8.5m posts tagged #sidehustle and 25.6m tagged #passiveincome, with content creators posting from kitchens in the midwest, beaches in New Zealand, country rambles in the UK and hammocks in Bali.

“It’s the perfect hybrid of labor and leisure, where the money comes in as you are going about your day,” said Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell University who studies the impact of social media on creative work and labor. “The term ‘passive income’ puts an especially seductive spin on this. You don’t have to do anything and you just reap all of the benefits.”

These women were offering ways to make money that seemed doable: designing and selling stationery, earning commission on goods I already use, creating products with little to no overhead. The “passive” part would come in after a few hours of upfront work: you set up your hustle once, then sit pretty as the profits pour into your bank account.

With my financial future looking a lot more uncertain, I decided to put some of their hustles to the test. I went in with cautious optimism: I wanted to know how realistic these schemes really were, and whether I could actually make money from any of them.

What I found instead was what I believe to be the new face of multilevel marketing – and the future of scamming and getting scammed.

It’s easy to understand the allure of side-hustle content.

Plainly put, things are looking grim. In 2026, amid an affordability crisis, a few extra hundred dollars a month can be life-changing. It can mean paying down debt, being able to take a sick day or ordering a pizza when you’re too tired to cook.

But influencers rarely present side hustles as a response to global financial insecurity. They sell them as easy freedom, attainable without even getting out of bed. It’s easy to see why people buy in.

“On TikTok, I see reels that go insanely viral of just girls of all ages, being like, ‘how can I make money from home?’” said Erin McGoff, a career advice content creator who has more than 7m followers across platforms.

I had a few rules for what I was and wasn’t willing to do. I didn’t want to put my face on any social media, and I didn’t want to use AI to create any products or videos.

Making and selling digital templates – probably the hustle that resurfaced the most during my nightly doomscrolling – checked all these boxes. The idea is simple: use the graphic design platform Canva to create invitations, planners or ebooks, then sell them on marketplaces such as Etsy. And according to the influencers, the earning potential is enormous:

“Use Canva to pay off your debt in under 45 seconds …”

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I like pretty stationary and enjoy putting together E-vites centered on ridiculous party themes, so I decided to try it out and go all in with a boozy bachelorette aesthetic, heavy with bright colors and graphics of alcoholic beverages. I named my store GirlyGirlStationary and focused on putting together invitation templates that looked like a Barbie fever dream after a night of drinking pink prosecco.

But a professional graphic designer, I am not. I got overwhelmed quickly, second-guessing every design decision. I felt myself clenching my jaw trying to align my images and format my borders. In one instance, I had a listing up for several weeks before I realized that I had placed the goose illustration comically off center.

To make things worse, a quick Etsy search turned up thousands of templates that looked better than mine, many clearly using the same Canva artwork and styling. Some shops had more than 2,200 templates for sale; it had taken me eight hours to make eight and another five to fix them after realizing I had used Canva Pro elements that buyers would have to pay to download.

I made my first sale 12 days after I officially launched my Etsy store – an addictively giddy feeling that was undercut by the fact that I didn’t really make any profit.

I had kept the prices of my products low to drive upfront sales, with each template going for $2. Not taking into consideration the one-time $19 fee I paid to set up the shop, but adding in the processing fee, the transaction fee and the listing fee of $0.20 per listing, I made about $1.25 on that one sale.

In total for my first month on Etsy – about 23 and half hours of work – my net profit was negative 32 cents.

I grew up in the type of middle-class Massachusetts suburb where multilevel marketing (MLM) schemes had a foothold.

I remember listening to my mother complain each time she returned from what was supposed to be a casual social gathering but had turned out to be an acquaintance’s sales pitch for tupperware or cubic zirconia jewellery. After graduation, I watched from afar as a number of my former schoolmates began guilting their Facebook friends into buying “buttery soft leggings” and sisterhood-empowering mascara.

So when I started watching side-hustle influencers, some of the language felt immediately familiar, particularly in the way they present something nonsensical in a sensical way, making the aspirational seem easily achievable.

Take this Instagram video: “Instead of watching Netflix tonight, take 30 minutes, open Canva and create a digital product that you can sell 1,000 times a month for $17. That’s $17,000 each month.”

Yeah, OK – the math checks out. And I do watch a lot of Netflix. But wait, will I actually sell this product 1,000 times a month?

Most audaciously, some had found another way to monetize the hustle itself. If at first you don’t succeed, buy my masterclass, pdf, ebook or training program, they told their followers. Many of those products traced back to the same small ecosystem, with influencers spawning new micro-influencers who repeat the same scripts.

“There are thousands of accounts that are like ‘make money with Katie’, ‘make money with Marie’, ‘make money with Stephanie’, and they all are selling $7 courses,” said McGoff, the career advice content creator. “It’s a digital marketing or digital products course, but what the course does is it upsells you to a more expensive course and then that course just incentivizes people to sell the course.”

These courses immediately sent up a red flag for me. And yet, I reasoned, these women weren’t just trying to get me to buy questionable courses, nor were they dangling the prospect of private jets or luxury beach vacations before me. These weren’t get-rich-quick schemes, but a chance to make some extra cash without putting on a bra or changing out of my sweatpants. They boasted flexible hours that work around nap times and school pickups for mothers and homemakers who already feel exhausted. The upfront costs were minimal: all you needed was an internet connection.

I reached out to Stacie Bosley, an economics professor at Hamline University who specializes in the MLM industry. She confirmed that, at face value, these side hustles did not meet the definition of an MLM.

In an MLM scheme, Bosley said, “you’re contractually buying the right to sell a company’s products but you’re also getting compensated for recruiting people and that compensation is not really tied to legitimate sales.” She continued: “It’s just sort of dressing around a pyramid scheme in that it’s really not about retail sales, but about recruitment.”

These side hustles don’t have one big bad overlord at the top of the pyramid. Each is supposed to be an independent venture: you make a product and sell it. Yet influencers promote them with the cultish zeal of Mary Kay saleswomen. With digital templates, that enthusiasm defies basic economics: if everyone follows their advice and starts selling Canva templates on Etsy, the market becomes flooded, making it harder for anyone to stand out.

“It’s a deceptive offer, that somehow you can just do this and that it can work for everybody without any acknowledgment of demand,” Bosley said. ***

Next up was affiliate marketing, another popular hustle that met my personal rules. This one has you promoting a brand’s products through a personalized link that earn you commission whenever someone makes a purchase through it. It’s like a referral code, except you get paid instead of getting a discount.

The side hustlers kept telling me that I didn’t need to have a huge follower count or social media presence to become an affiliate marketer, with companies such as ShopMy, LTK and Amazon Associates making it easy.

But like the digital template scheme, it just didn’t make sense. Why would anyone bother to buy a product through me, with my hyperlink, if they didn’t know me?

I didn’t want to use my personal social media accounts, but influencers had a workaround: create a new account dedicated to affiliate marketing. Several recommended Pinterest, where you can post images linking directly to products, and DigiStore24 as the affiliate network that provides links to products you can earn commissions on.

Sadly, most of the products on DigiStore24 are the sort of garbage you would send to your spam folder: shady supplements, weird energy pendants and online courses on how to be a better lover. I decided to try my luck with a light therapy mask – the only product I do use on a frequent basis. I made three pins that all together got 79 impressions in their first six weeks – and no sales.

After a few weeks of nothing, I decided to try another affiliate marketing site, FlexOffers.com – and I was almost immediately rejected. The email told me I should get back in touch with them should I “later have more traffic sources”.

So I went directly to brands I knew. Sephora’s affiliate program directed me to Rakuten Advertising, where I applied to promote Wet ‘N Wild and Dr Brandt, this time using my actual Instagram account. Both applications were rejected the same day for failing the company’s social media network policy, with no explanation of what that meant.

That was when the logic of the side hustle economy began to come into focus.

Influencers had insisted that anyone could do this: no following, business experience or digital expertise required. But almost every hustle I tried seemed to demand precisely those things. “Affiliate marketing is a real way to make money, but it is far from a get-rich-quick secret and it is definitely not passive,” said McGoff.

What was much more reliable was the attention generated by talking about side hustles. Creators boosted engagement by asking viewers to comment words like “content” or “begin” to receive free prompts and tutorials, turning would-be entrepreneurs into hopeful followers. I watched one woman start a new Instagram account in May devoted entirely to side hustles. Six months later, she had more than 27,000 followers.

The hustle, increasingly, seemed to be selling the idea of the hustle. It’s the influencer as a possibility: if you work hard enough and follow their instructions, you too can quit your office job, be your own boss and make six figures for just a few hours of work a day.

The pyramid may look different, but by borrowing the tactics, psychology and promises of MLMs, it feels like a pyramid scheme all the same.

“What they’re selling, it’s the same as MLMs,” said Mara Einstein, a media studies professor at CUNY Queens College and author of Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics As Cults.

And yet, not everyone in this space is a scammer.

On one end, there are grifters and creators who aren’t fully honest about their earnings and partnerships. Waleed Khan, a 24-year-old financial consultant in Calgary who is reviewing various side hustles, said he discovered that one person promoting the “clipping” side hustle – when you make money by breaking down popular videos into clips and posting them on to YouTube shorts – was actually the founder behind the clipping website he was instructing viewers to use for the scheme.

And on the other end, there are people who really do make these hustles work.

After giving birth to her son, Tricia Orme, a 38-year-old mother of two in Washington state, started exploring print-on-demand. And she was “really bad at it” at first, Orme said. “My designs were terrible.”

But as she kept going, she found a hole in the market. She needed a way to show customers what her designs would look like on clothing without having to photograph models wearing each product herself. So she began using AI to generate stock images of people in blank clothing, then placing her designs on to them.

Thus, she became the @mockupmama. The digital products she sells are the stock images she created on AI, so that others pursuing a print-on-demand side hustle have ready-made mockups on which to display their products.

Read moreAfter making $146,578.22 in Etsy sales over the course of three years, she has turned her focus toward mentorship and teaching how to sell and market digital products.

“I am such a firm believer that if you have more than you need, build a longer table, not a higher fence,” she said. She has had about 300 people buy a $150-250 course from her and has about 155 active students who pay $19 a month to be in her private coaching group.

She is, by all accounts, successful – and that shouldn’t be a surprise. Success stories will happen because once you take away the social media, these hustles are basically a combination of sales and marketing – trades as old as time itself. Digital products, be they print-on-demand T-shirts or silly stationary, is just art you make on a graphic design platform.

But not everyone is an artist, or talented at sales or marketing. Orme, for example, had worked in corporate retail and had an understanding of the marketplace before beginning her venture.

“It’s like dating apps,” Einstein said. “Almost everybody knows at least one or two people who met through a dating app. So you keep pointing to them like, ‘keep trying, you can do this too.’”

“Part of their job is making it look easy,” said Duffy, the Cornell communications professor. But in reality, success in these spaces is a combination of “pluck, luck and the algorithm”, she said.

Over six months, I tried to launch five different side hustles. I made just two sales and spent more than $200 on Etsy fees, a Canva subscription and eRank, a tool Orme recommended for identifying popular search terms and boosting sales.

Khan, the Calgary content creator, also didn’t make any much from digital templates. The only big profit he’s made so far is the C$600 he got for using AI to create websites for small businesses – and that only happened when he got off the Internet and put in real world effort.

“The claim was you can make $15,000 a month doing this,” he said. “I made these websites. I called 20 or 25 local businesses and calling didn’t work. Eventually I went in physically to these businesses, to 10 or 15, and only two of them said yes.”

I had difficulty finding others struggling with their side-hustle journey, as this is not a space with a big audience for failure – but it’s very clear that Khan and I are not the only ones out there.

And then there’s the question of what all these hustles are putting out into the world.

Every day, new accounts pop up, promising new ways to make money: using AI to copy bestselling coloring books, or churning out slop videos for YouTube views. Etsy, once a haven for handmade crafts and original work, is now awash with generic templates and AI-generated goods.

I thought I had escaped the MLM trap: no boxes of garbage to store, no friends to guilt into buying it. But the garbage is still there. We’ve just moved it out of our homes and garages and on to the internet.