Other Income Ideas Mostly accurate, with one big caveat

By the Income Reality Check Editorial Team · Updated 2026-11-10 · 7 min read

8 side hustles, 13 years, one pattern: what Brooke Sears’ video actually proves

Verdict: Mostly accurate, with one big caveat. The failures are refreshingly honest and the winners are real — but every payoff leaned on an advantage the average viewer doesn’t have, and the video ends at a sales call.

Brooke Sears’ video “I Tried 8 Side Hustles. Here’s What Actually Paid Off.” does something most make-money videos refuse to do: it shows the losers. Over 13 years she says she earned as little as $25 and as much as multiple six figures, and she walks through all eight honestly. The one-sentence answer to “is this real?” — yes, mostly. The catch is what links her three big wins together, and where the video quietly points you at the end.

What the video actually claims

Sears ranks eight hustles by what she put in and what came out. Print-on-demand: roughly $200 total, not worth it. Amazon KDP: about $25 in print royalties across a book and a pile of forgotten journals, not worth it. Blogging: unmeasurable, “kind of” worth it. Standalone online courses: about $6,000, which she calls dead in the AI era. Those are the modest or failed ones.

Then the winners. Affiliate marketing: over $100,000 across a decade, spanning Amazon Associates links, Costa Rica tour commissions, and four invitation-only launches for names like Tony Robbins and Jim Kwik. Airbnb: “multiple six figures” over five years running 11 units through rental arbitrage. Freelancing: about $40,000 from tech services and yoga instruction. And her current model, coaching and consulting, which she says also pays multiple six figures “on less than part-time hours.”

She’s specific about numbers, which is rare and worth crediting. A $39 take-home on her first print-on-demand hoodie. A 32-cent commission on an Amazon book link. A $25-to-$50 commission per person on tours, up to $800 on a group fishing charter. The video closes with a pitch to book a free call with her team and possibly join her program, The Lifestyle Entrepreneur.

What the method actually requires

Here’s the thread Sears pulls on herself without quite naming it: every hustle that failed had no audience attached, and every hustle that worked came with a built-in channel she’d already paid for in time, money, or access.

Print-on-demand and KDP flopped for the same reason, and she says so — no traffic, no sales. The platform economics back her up. On KDP, a $9.99 paperback earns a 60% royalty minus printing (a 250-page black-and-white book costs around $4.00 to print), so you net roughly $2 per copy — and Amazon’s own royalty page confirms those rates and the print-cost deduction (Amazon KDP). That’s fine if you sell thousands. Most authors don’t. Sears cites the industry rule of thumb that most self-published titles sell a few hundred lifetime copies at best; whatever the exact figure, the shape is right, and it’s the same shape as Etsy, where a small top tier captures most of the sales and the median shop clears very little.

Amazon Associates is worse per click than people expect. Books pay in the low single digits as a percentage, which is why her commission was 32 cents. The real money in her affiliate story came from high-ticket items — $100-plus tour and software commissions — and from launches you can’t join unless someone invites you. She also mentions disclosing affiliate links, which isn’t optional: the FTC’s influencer guidance says a “material connection” like a commission must be disclosed clearly and right next to the recommendation, not buried in a profile or an “about” page (FTC).

The Airbnb win deserves a closer look, because “rental arbitrage” is marketed everywhere as a no-capital hack. Sears rented 11 houses long-term and relisted them short-term. That only works with the landlord’s written permission and compliance with local short-term-rental law. Most standard leases forbid it outright; operate without sign-off and you’re one screenshot away from eviction, a lawsuit, and a lost deposit. She also spends several minutes on the unglamorous reality — 3 a.m. lockout calls, stained sheets, a rented storage unit full of replacement mugs, staff on payroll. “Multiply what you’re imagining by ten,” she says. That’s the honest part. The part the thumbnail can’t hold is that her margins came from Manuel Antonio, one of Costa Rica’s hottest tourist zones. Location did a lot of the earning.

Who actually wins this game?

Look at her winners and the common factor isn’t grit — it’s a distribution advantage she already held. The tour commissions worked because she had a captive audience of Airbnb guests and a welcome book in every unit. The Tony Robbins and Jim Kwik launches happened because her business partner, Danny, got them invited; she notes the barrier to entry there is “you have to be invited.” The Airbnb margins worked because of where she lived. The coaching income works because she spent years building the audience that now watches videos like this one.

None of that is a knock on her.

It’s just the missing instruction. The people who win at these eight hustles are, almost always, the ones who arrive with an audience, a network, a location edge, or capital — and usually more than one. Sears even says it plainly in two places: “print-on-demand works if you have a massive audience,” and “you have to spend money to make money.” Believe her on both. The video’s own data shows the zero-cost, zero-audience hustles returned basically zero.

What you’d realistically earn

Strip out the structural advantages and the beginner numbers get sober fast. Affiliate marketing for someone without an audience tends to produce single-digit dollars for months; realistic estimates put YouTube-linked affiliate income at roughly $1 to $5 per 1,000 views, and side-hustle income overall skews modest and slow to build (NerdWallet). Print-on-demand and KDP can sit at $0 for a long time if nobody’s sending traffic — exactly what Sears experienced. Her own standalone-course haul was $6,000 over four years, and she now considers that model finished.

Rental arbitrage can clear real monthly profit, but only after securing landlord consent, furnishing the unit, and absorbing turnover costs — and in most U.S. cities, tightening short-term-rental ordinances have thinned the margins since her Costa Rica run. Compare that to her headline “multiple six figures” and the gap is the point: her top-line numbers are totals across 5-to-13-year stretches, not a monthly income you’d replicate in year one.

Who this is (and isn’t) for

This video is genuinely useful if you treat it as a case study in why audience and demand come before product. If you already have a following, a tourist-market location, a sellable professional skill, or a few thousand dollars to invest and lose, several of these — freelancing and coaching especially — can become real income. If you’re starting from zero audience and zero capital hoping something will “fly off the digital shelf,” the video’s own ledger tells you it won’t.

One more thing to clock before the free call. Sears is building toward a paid coaching program, which puts her in exactly the category U.S. regulators are watching. The FTC has proposed extending its Business Opportunity Rule to cover business-coaching offers, and it has clawed back millions from coaching operations that oversold the outcome — it returned over $23 million to people deceived by the coaching scheme MOBE, whose “proven” system most buyers lost money on (FTC). Nothing here suggests Sears is running anything like MOBE — her free advice is reasonable and she’s upfront that results vary. But a free call is a sales mechanism, and you should walk in knowing that, the same way you’d approach any pitch where the real product is the thing after the free thing. For a parallel on how “spend money to make money” curdles when demand isn’t there, see our breakdown of a $1,000,000 debt on a failed vending machine, and for the hustles that actually travel well solo, nine one-person businesses with more demand than competition.

What to remember

Sears is honest about her losers and her winners, and the pattern holds across all eight: the free, easy, audience-free hustles paid nearly nothing, and the lucrative ones ran on advantages — location, invitations, a partner, years of built audience — that don’t transfer just because you watched a video. Keep her four questions (resources, skills, demand, do the math). Hold the free call at the same arm’s length you’d hold any coaching pitch.