The Only Side Hustle That Fits in 1 Hour a Day (I Tried the Rest)
A busy engineer’s honest account of what failed, what embarrassed him, and what finally worked
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Let me save you some time — and some money.
Because I already wasted both. Generously. On your behalf, let’s say.
I’m an engineer with a full-time job, a large family, a mortgage, a dog with expensive taste, and a city that taxes me like I personally offended the municipal government. As I explained in my [last post], my salary looks good on paper and performs terribly in real life.
So like a lot of people in that position, I went looking for a way out.
What followed was a multi-year education in what doesn’t work — funded entirely out of my own pocket, conducted entirely in the one or two hours I have left after a full day of work and a commute that eats my evenings alive.
Consider this post the condensed version. You’re welcome.
Attempt #1: Teaching English to French Engineers
This one actually worked. Sort of.
I’m bilingual, I work in a technical field, and there’s genuine demand from French-speaking engineering consultants who need to sharpen their professional English. A training company connected me with clients and I started running sessions on the side.
The pay was decent. The problem was everything else.
Every session required preparation — real preparation, not “skim a few notes” preparation. Then the actual delivery time. Then a bit of follow-up. By the time I added it all up, I’d essentially taken a second job after my first job. Which, if you recall, is exactly what I was trying to avoid.
And then, in the way that life enjoys punctuating your plans with irony, the training company closed.
Just like that, the sideline was gone. I had no platform of my own, no client relationships I owned, no recurring revenue. I had traded my evenings for someone else’s business — and walked away with nothing to show for it.
Lesson learned: if you’re building on someone else’s platform, you’re not really building anything.
Attempt #2: The Karate Blog
Yes, really.
I have a background in karate. I enjoy it. I thought — in the optimistic haze of someone who had just discovered that “affiliate marketing” was a thing — that I could start a blog, throw some Amazon affiliate links around, and watch the commissions roll in.
I want you to understand how innocent this thinking was. I genuinely believed that affiliate marketing was: write content, paste links, collect money.
Spoiler: it is not that.
Six months later, I had a blog, zero sales, and a very polite email from Amazon informing me that I had been removed from their affiliate program for inactivity. I had been kicked out of a free program that requires no skill to join. That stings in a specific way.
What I didn’t understand then — and what nobody had bothered to explain — is that affiliate marketing is a *skill set*. A real one. With multiple components that all have to work together: traffic, trust, list building, copywriting, funnels, follow-up. You can’t just throw links at a blog and expect results any more than you can throw wires at a circuit board and expect it to work.
I was trying to do electrical engineering without knowing what electricity was.
Attempt #3: The ClickBank Campaign
Emboldened by my karate blog failure — as one is — I decided to try a different approach. I picked a product on ClickBank, ran a paid ad, and waited for sales.
You can probably guess how this ended.
Several campaigns. Zero sales. A smaller bank account. And the slowly dawning realization that I was not, in fact, a natural at this.
The problem was the same as before, just more expensive: I didn’t understand the mechanics. I didn’t know how to match an offer to an audience. I didn’t understand what makes someone click, trust, and buy. I was operating the controls of a plane I’d never been taught to fly and acting surprised when the ground came up fast.
At this point, I had tried three different approaches. All three had failed. And in each case, the root cause was the same thing:
I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
But What About Dropshipping / YouTube / Crypto / [Insert Guru Obsession Here]?
Fair question. Before you ask — yes, I looked at the usual suspects.
Here’s my quick, unsentimental tour of the most popular “make money online” options and why, for someone in my situation, they didn’t make the cut.
Dropshipping
The dream: set up a store, sell products you never touch, retire to a beach somewhere. The reality: you’re running a customer service operation, managing suppliers across time zones, fighting razor-thin margins, and babysitting ad campaigns that need constant attention. Dropshipping doesn’t need one hour a day. It needs you on call. Hard pass.
E-commerce (selling your own products)
More control than dropshipping, more headaches too. Inventory, logistics, returns, product sourcing, platform fees. This is a real business — which means it needs real business hours. The people crushing it on Shopify are not doing it in the margins of a 9-to-5. At least not for long.
Freelancing
This one is seductive because the skills are already there. I’m an engineer — I could theoretically sell consulting hours online. Except that freelancing is, by definition, trading time for money. You don’t work, you don’t get paid. Worse, finding clients, managing projects, and delivering work all require synchronous availability I simply don’t have. And as I already learned from the English teaching experiment — once the client is gone, so is the income.
YouTube / Content Creation
Love the idea. Hate the math. Building a YouTube channel from zero to monetization takes most people 12 to 24 months of consistent publishing — and each video requires scripting, filming, and editing. That’s not one hour a day. That’s a part-time film production company you’re running after dinner.
Crypto / Trading
I’m an engineer, not a gambler. Next.
Print on Demand
Lower barrier than e-commerce, which is nice. But the margins are thin, the competition is brutal, and growing a store to meaningful income requires serious design skills or serious ad spend — usually both. Not impossible, but not efficient for someone with limited time and limited capital to burn on experiments.
Selling Online Courses
Genuinely good model — if you have an audience already. Building a course from scratch without one is like opening a restaurant in a parking lot and hoping people show up. The content creation alone would consume every hour I have for months before a single dollar arrives.
The pattern you’ll notice across all of these: they either require more time than I have, more capital than I want to risk, more technical skills I’d have to acquire first, or they trade time for money with no leverage built in.
What I needed was a model with leverage — where the work I put in today keeps paying tomorrow, that could be learned systematically, and that didn’t require me to become a logistics manager, video editor, or day trader in my spare time.
That’s what finally pointed me toward affiliate marketing — done properly, this time.
The Book That Changed Everything
Here’s where the story gets better.
I came across a book called The Iceberg Effect by Dean Holland. It’s about affiliate marketing — but not in the way the YouTube gurus talk about it. It’s about what’s actually happening beneath the surface. The stuff nobody shows you when they’re flashing screenshots of their dashboards.
I read it and had one of those uncomfortable moments of clarity where you realize that you’ve been approaching something completely wrong — and that the failure wasn’t bad luck, it was bad information.
The book gave me a framework. A map. For the first time, I could see the whole territory instead of just stumbling around in it.
It also introduced me properly to Dean Holland — not as a name attached to a program, but as someone who had failed at this for years before figuring it out, built a real methodology, and then dedicated himself to teaching it properly.
That matters to me. I’m an engineer. I respect people who did the actual work.
What I Did Next
I reached out to Dean directly and asked to become a Certified Internet Profits Partner.
And that’s when the real education started.
I finally understood what affiliate marketing actually requires. The four things that have to be in place for this to work: traffic, a list, a funnel, and follow-up. Not one of them. All four. Working together. That’s the system I’d been missing every single time.
More importantly, I found my niche. Make money online. Which, given everything I just told you, is perhaps the most on-brand niche I could possibly have chosen. I am literally my target audience.
Why Internet Profits Academy Is the One That Passed the Test
I’ve been in front of a lot of programs, courses, and “systems” at this point. Most of them teach you one thing and leave you to figure out the rest.
The Internet Profits Academy is different — and I say that as someone with a finely tuned radar for nonsense.
It’s an affiliate marketing framework built on four pillars that actually hold the thing up:
Training — structured, step-by-step, designed for people who are starting from scratch or starting over. No assumed knowledge.
Coaching — real human access to people who have done this. Not a forum full of beginners advising other beginners.
Tools — the actual infrastructure you need to run this business, without spending months stitching together fifteen different software subscriptions.
Community — a group of people at various stages of the same journey. Accountability, support, and the occasional proof that yes, this actually works for real people.
And the thing that matters most for someone in my situation: it works at one hour a day.
Not because it’s easy. Because it’s structured. There’s always a clear next step. You’re never staring at a blank screen wondering what to do with your hour. The system tells you. You execute. You move forward.
I’m still in it. Still developing. Still showing up with my one hour a day. And for the first time, I’m building something I actually own — a list, a platform, an audience — that nobody can close down and take away from me.
The Criteria That Actually Matter
If you’re in a similar position — full-time job, limited time, real financial pressure, zero interest in a second job that feels like a second job — here’s what I’d tell you to look for in a side hustle:
It has to be async. Anything that requires you to show up at a specific time for someone else is a job, not a business.
It has to be scalable. Trading time for money has a hard ceiling. You only have so many hours.
It has to be yours. If you’re building on someone else’s platform without owning the relationship with your audience, you’re one policy change away from zero.
It has to have a real system behind it. Not a vibe. Not a theory. A proven, teachable process with support behind it.
Affiliate marketing done within the framework of The Internet Profits Academy checks every one of those boxes. Which is why after everything I tried and failed at — the English lessons, the karate blog, the ClickBank campaigns — this is the system I’m still using.
If you want to see exactly what the model looks like, Dean has an 11-minute video that lays out the whole pathway — from zero to $3,000–$10,000 a month, at a pace that fits inside a real life with a real job.
Watch the free video here →The Beginner’s Business Blueprint
It won’t cost you anything but 11 minutes. And it might save you the two years I spent figuring this out the hard way.
Have your own collection of side hustle failures? I’d genuinely love to hear them in the comments. There’s something oddly comforting about comparing notes on what didn’t work.
