I've started and quit more side hustles than I've kept. That's not a fun sentence to write on a blog about side hustles, but it's true, and pretending otherwise would make this whole site a lie.
So here's the catalog. Every meaningful thing I've quit, the one honest reason it died, and — because I've come to believe this is the part that matters — what it left me with on the way out. Last week, I argued that failed hustles pay you in skills. This is that argument with the names filled in.
The $200 reselling bet
What it was: Early on, I got excited about reselling. Buy low, sell higher — thrift finds, clearance racks, the classic. I spent about $200 on inventory I was sure would sell.
Why I quit: It didn't sell. Any of it. It sat in my house for months. The real reason isn't "bad luck" — it's that I never validated demand before spending. I bought what I assumed people wanted instead of checking what was actually selling.
What it left me: The single most useful rule I have. Before you buy anything to resell, check completed/sold listings, not active ones. If it's not selling there, it's not selling anywhere. That 30-second habit has saved me far more than $200 since.
The three MLMs
What it was: Young Living, Younique, and doTERRA — joined as a broke stay-at-home parent who needed income and saw something that looked duplicatable. The full scorecard is here.
Why I quit: Different exit each time, same root. One never delivered the kit I paid for. One promoted me two ranks without paying me proportionally. One I got genuinely good at — and still hit the wall every MLM has: you run out of people. The model runs on your personal network, and networks are finite.
What it left me: This one's almost unfair how much it taught me. To try to make doTERRA work I learned marketing, video production, social media SEO, and how a compensation plan actually functions. Combined cost: about $530. I now use those exact skills to run the thing that does make money. Most expensive, most useful classroom I've been in.
The sticker shop
What it was: A digital and print-on-demand sticker shop. Stickers are maybe the single most-recommended "easy money" product on the internet, and I bought in.
Why I quit: It cost me money and made none, so I deleted it. Stickers are recommended so heavily because they're easy to make — which means the market is saturated past the point of visibility for a brand-new shop. I was one more identical sticker in an ocean of identical stickers, and I hadn't done anything to get found.
What it left me: The discipline to cut fast. I didn't let it quietly drain me for a year "just in case." I looked at the numbers, saw money out and nothing in, and shut it down. Knowing when to quit is a skill, and it's the opposite of the one the MLMs taught me — where I stayed too long.
The daily YouTube channel
What it was: Pepper Death — 365 days of daily stoic and motivational videos. 119 subscribers.
Why I quit: I posted every single day for a year and burned out. Daily posting is a trap for a solo creator with no team — it feels like momentum while it quietly drains the creative energy that made the content good.
What it left me: Content production, consistency, and a hard lesson about cadence. This is the one quit I'm actually reversing — I'm reviving it, faceless and on a sane schedule this time — precisely because the skills survived even though the channel didn't.
The ones still on life support
For total honesty: not everything I've stopped working on got a clean burial. My 30-Day Wellness Journal is still listed and still at zero sales. My print shop has two lifetime sales across fourteen listings. I didn't quit those so much as stop feeding them — which, if I'm honest, is its own decision I keep not-quite-making.
The pattern in the graveyard
Line them up and the reasons rhyme:
- The reselling bet died from no demand validation.
- The MLMs died from a finite network.
- The sticker shop died from saturation and invisibility.
- The channel died from an unsustainable pace.
Three of those four are versions of the same thing: I made something, but I didn't solve the problem of getting it seen and wanted. That's the visibility gap I wrote about yesterday, showing up over and over in my own history.
But here's the reframe that makes this a catalog of assets instead of a list of failures. Add up what these "dead" hustles taught me: demand validation, marketing, video, social SEO, content production, cost discipline, and knowing when to cut a loss. That's not the wreckage of someone who can't make anything work. That's the toolkit I used to build the twelve exam-prep apps that actually earn.
Quitting isn't the failure
The thing nobody tells you is that quitting is a skill, and quitting well is rarer than persistence.
I stayed in some of these too long — the MLMs, mostly, out of stubbornness. I cut others fast — the sticker shop, the second I saw the math. The wins weren't the ones I refused to quit. The wins were the ones where I quit the wrong things quickly enough to carry the skills forward into a right thing.
If your graveyard looks like mine, don't read it as proof you can't do this. Take inventory of what each one taught you. You're probably better equipped than you feel — you just measured it in dollars, when the real payout was in skills.
What did you quit, and what did it secretly teach you? Hit reply and tell me — the skill you walked away with is usually worth more than the money you didn't make.
Leave a comment