Years of Failing at Side Hustles

A quick recap from memory.

During college:

The first thing I found out about was part-time work, mostly at the university cafeteria—basically carrying trays and stuff. It paid 6 RMB an hour and included free meals during shifts, which was actually pretty good since food was the biggest expense for students anyway. I did it for a while, but after the campus moved to a new location, food vendors there shrunk dramatically. Off-campus spots were just self-service stalls that didn’t need staff, and they were far from campus too, so I quit. No money saved from that, don’t remember much.

Later, because I was majoring in marketing, our courses had project assignments where we had to form groups. Most classmates were slacking off—either proposing unrealistic ideas with no way to execute, or just coasting—so I broke away and decided to build a campus WeChat public account on my own. I worked hard at it, met some developers and operators from other universities, and managed to ride the late wave of the grade-checking season to gain a large following. At its peak, around 80% of the student body—nearly 20,000 people—were following it. I made almost no money from it because I was too proud and careless about finances, and I didn’t accept the CPS model either. Because of the account, an outside property developer offered me 200,000 RMB in interest-free funding plus a year’s rent-free use of a 140-square-meter shop space to try something else (he originally approached me for sponsorship ads). I turned it down. On the other hand, the university offered me a position in the Party Committee’s publicity department or a referral to the city’s Xinhua News Agency branch. I didn’t think much of those options either and declined again (looking back now, that was unwise). Half a year before graduation, a friend from another university asked if I’d like to partner with him to acquire nearby school accounts like mine. Probably because I was broke or something, I refused again. Thinking back, that was likely my last big chance. Eventually, I sold the account to him for a few thousand RMB. (After all that hustle over one or two years, the only tangible leftovers were a phone, a few Kindles, a projector, and a good impression on my friends.)

You really shouldn’t be so naively idealistic, especially when you have nothing going for you. Blind arrogance only leads to missed opportunities. Only later did I realize how much I could’ve earned: driving schools near campus used to offer about 1,500 RMB in recruitment commissions on roughly 3,000 RMB tuition; similar margins existed for adult education and postgraduate prep programs and computer Level-2 training. If I’d hooked up with CPS offers back then and teamed them up with hometown alumni networks, the numbers would’ve been eye-opening. Based on what I later calculated, my senior cohort probably earned 800,000 RMB a year split among four alumni organizers. Before graduating, they even sold their hometown group chat for 20,000 RMB to whoever took over. Gatherings were AA, but referrals to driving schools and test-prep classes brought in serious money—nearly 200 conversions a year at a close-to-10% rate, generating roughly 100,000 to 200,000 RMB per program.

After graduation:

I went into internet operations. Early on, I got lured into a small company with no big projects, so I mostly scraped together pocket change doing side hustles. Still, I picked up some free-traffic tactics, which is why this phase was mostly CPS-driven, using Zhihu and WeChat public accounts as my main channels. On Zhihu, you could burn some effort into top answers, catch trending traffic, and earn CPS commissions. I actually made around 20,000 RMB in a single article twice—once because my answer hit the front-page recommendation, and once because SEO search traffic spiked alongside Double Eleven shopping momentum. But both times I got reported and banned within weeks, missing out on nearly two months of activity, so I stepped away from Zhihu for a while. (This shows that creators who dominate Zhihu full-time are likely earning millions annually. I had zero followers back then and still pulled in over 10,000 RMB on one article, pushing barely any product beyond JD.com’s low-margin CPS offers.)

After learning that bumping into established Zhihu cliques could get your account reported and banned, I shifted to SEO on WeChat public accounts. Back then, brushing orders wasn’t yet illegal, so I mainly promoted apps that paid rebates for tasks like real-name registration, downloads, purchases, and likes. But the network I joined was junk. Within half a year the operator vanished, my dashboard showed nothing, and the account itself got permanently banned by WeChat—a heavy loss. All I had left was pushing stable CPS products like SIM card sign-ups, which barely registered given how rarely people need them; that netted me only a few thousand RMB. I also tried parcel-cashback promotions: initially lots of orders but thin margins, later swamped with competitors, earning a few thousand before dwindling to a few dozen RMB a month now. The upside is it’s completely passive income—no maintenance needed.

It was exactly those experiences with public accounts and Zhihu that motivated me to start building a blog and nurturing it long-term, because SEO-driven free traffic really does pay off.

Running a Taobao affiliate group on WeChat has been the one side hustle I’ve consciously stuck with over the past year. Not wanting to get banned, I manage it manually—posting occasionally during downtime, and yes, I also take advantage of deals myself. It brings in a few dozen RMB a month, just enough to cover phone bills.

Those are pretty much the highlights of my side-hustle journey.