100 Free Business Ideas from The Hustle

Hey, thanks for joining for another week of New Venture Weekly.

This week, I’ve partnered with HubSpot to give you 100 free side hustle ideas that you can start today. Follow the link in the next section to access them.

I’m going to break down my favourite (albeit least unique) idea from the list - Social Media Advertising

Before you click off, I know what you’re about to say and no this won’t be some SMMA bullshit.

I’m going to break down 4 social media advertising opportunities and I guarantee that you’ve probably never considered (and maybe never even heard of) at least 2 of them.

Also, you can still get 25% off the Problems & Pain Points Database with code “2025”. This offer ends on the 31st of January.

Let’s jump in!

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🗂 Overview:

I’ve probably spent over $10m on social media advertising in my career - both on my own businesses and for clients.

I’ve worked for brands spending $5k/m and brands spending $500k/m just on Meta.

This is a world I know a lot about.

Meta’s three main recommendations to advertisers right now are:

• Creative diversity

• Creative volume

• Account simplification

Gone are the days of multiple campaigns and ad sets with different audiences. Nowadays, you can have just one campaign with one broad audience and all your ads within it.

What does this mean? Advertisers need to make a lot of ads, all of the time - some brands test thousands of ads every month.

That takes time, money and skills that a lot of businesses (especially smaller ones) don’t have.

It also makes it harder to analyse ad performance. Not only because now you have so many ads but the way ads work together within the campaigns is now very different.

⭐️ Examples:

• Gridbank - Stock UGC content library for ads and social content

• Insense - Influencer & UGC Marketplace

• Billo - UGC Marketplace

• Trend.io - UGC Marketplace

• CreativeOS - Massive library of winning ad templates

• Nice Ads - Newsletter breaking down 3 winning ads (upsells to an ad creation agency)

• Foreplay - Find inspiration

• Motion - Visual analytics for paid social channels

• Atria - Foreplay + Motion combined along with some AI ad creation features

🧐 Opportunities:

#1. UGC Creator

This first idea is not for everyone but hear me out.

Firstly, UGC creators can earn thousands every month (trust me, I’ve paid a lot of them).

Secondly, don’t confuse this with being an influencer. You don’t need a single follower to do this.

What does UGC mean? User Generated Content.

It’s meant to look like organic social content that you’d actually see on Instagram/TikTok - in other words, it’s not meant to look like an ad.

When done right, these types of ads crush it.

You don’t have to be super comfortable in front of the camera to do this. But obviously, if you are it’s gonna be a lot easier for you.

If you don’t want to get in front of the camera, a few months ago I wrote a breakdown of how you can create ads using AI thanks to tools like HeyGen, Argil, Arcads and Elevenlabs. You can use sites like Gridbank for b-roll.

You can find clients via marketplaces like Fiverr, Billo, Insense, Trend.io or on social media like TikTok and Twitter.

Make a portfolio of ads (you can just use products you already own) and send cold emails and DMs to businesses.

Here’s a video breaking it down even more.

#2. Creator Marketplace

Don’t wanna make content? You can make a marketplace like the ones I mentioned above.

But those already exist?

Oh no! Looks like you’ll have to make it unique.

How do you do that???

Niche down.

Make a creator marketplace specifically for:

• Travel creators

• Health & Fitness creators

• Beauty creators

• SaaS/Digital Product creators

Or maybe there are markets that don’t have their own UGC marketplace. For example, finding UK or European marketplaces is a lot harder than finding US ones. It’ll be even harder for LATAM, Asia & Africa.

You can use tools like Sharetribe to create a marketplace in a day.

Reach out to creators in your niche - you can find them by searching “UGC creator” on Twitter, TikTok, Fiverr, and UpWork.

Creators are always looking for new ways to find clients so they’ll always be keen to sign up if your site looks at least half professional.

Once you have a handful of creators start pitching brands via DM and cold email.

There are a few ways you can monetise this:

• Subscriptions

  • The brand pays you to access the creator talent pool

  • The creator pays you to access briefs and leads

• Percentage of sale

  • If your marketplace processes the payments you can take a % of each sale or include a fee to the brand on top of each sale (that way the creator gets paid exactly what they want).

• Done-For-You

  • Offer a DFY service where you create the briefs, find the creators and deliver the content for the brand in return for a higher fee.

#3. Ad Templates & Content Libraries

I broke this down in a little more detail a few months ago. You can read that here.

Here’s a tl/dr plus a few other things I didn’t mention:

• Create a library of ad templates designed for Facebook/Instagram. Think carousel ads, video templates, static image ads, and Story/Reel formats.

• Use both Canva & Figma for the templates and expand based on demand.

• Offer niche-specific packs to tailor solutions for different industries.

• Sell these packs on LemonSqueezy, Gumroad, Etsy, and/or your own website.

Example: CreativeOS

But I also recently discovered Gridbank and I think you could clone it.

Create loads of generic content people can use for their ads and videos and charge a monthly subscription to access it. Partner with other creators to expand the library.

You can also use Sharetribe for this but also Shopify with a marketplace app and probably Webflow + Memberstack.

#4. Ad Analytics and/or Ad Inspiration

Examples: Foreplay, Motion and Atria

Create an analytics app for paid social channels (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn).

Include a feature to discover and save ads from other brands.

Include AI features like customer review analysis, transcription, script-writing, voiceovers, and AI avatars (like Arcads)

Atria does most of that already (but not all of it) and it’s pretty darn good.

But how can you do better?

• Niche down for a specific industry (e.g. only beauty brands)

• Have an enormous library of winning ads already saved and organised

• Offer ad creation services

• Weekly newsletter with the most popular or best-performing ads

• Deeper analysis features

🔥 Cool Stuff

(Bookmark these)

• Find problems that need business solutions - Access the Problems & Pain Points Database.

• Want to grow your business? Here’s a database of tools that can help.

• Want to promote your startup for free? Here’s a database of free places to promote your startup.

• Want to turn your idea into a business? Check out this business idea checklist.

• Want to differentiate from your competitors? Check out this Differentiation Strategy Guide

• Want to run ads for your business? Use these proven psychological ad positioning strategies.

• Like the newsletter and want to show your support? You can buy me a coffee here.

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