Cat boarding.

Got privvy to the idea when we needed to find boarding for our cat when going on a holiday. Scoped out a few businesses and they were costly, so explored private. All the private ones we visited were simply a largish cage with 3 or so levels, all with litter + bowls within cage. Ranges from $30-40 per night (Australia).

I have a spare room. I looked up Cat Cages and purchased 3 for $150 each. Then I considered what could happen (Vets, abandonment, etc.) and consulted with a lawyer to help write up a contract for customers. (~$1000)

The bare minimum work required is about 20 minutes per day for breakfast, dinner, water top up & scooping the litterbox.

The 3 cages all are booked out about 200 days of the year each for about $18,000 yearly.

Yes I have had 2 people abandon their pets. This was difficult to go through.

edit: I should add - There may be some business hours work required if a cat falls ill and vet trips required.

For most folks, focusing on doing your full time job well and getting promoted/finding a better paying job is _significantly_ less effort than starting a side hustle that pays you meaningful money.

That being said, if you feel like grinding and learning a lot about sales and marketing, consider launching an app in a marketplace (Shopify/Airtable/App store/Play store, etc) to get started (hell of a lot easier than starting a SaaS, ask me how I know).

Why not use the time to figure out what you actually want to do?

And if you actually want to do anything at all?

To put it another way, the best side businesses -- and indeed the best jobs -- are getting paid for things that are like the things you would do if you did not get paid.

Things that you are enthusiastic about...and if you are enthusiastic about the idea of making money, the simplest thing is to buy and sell physical goods. Good luck.

If you speak two languages, you can look into translating books from one to another.

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