When Kyle Stockford went a few months without selling a painting, he decided to pick up a side hustle.
It was 2021, and Stockford was a full-time abstract artist making colorful collages. Without sales, he needed another way to subsidize his living — so he turned to his brother, who’d been doing people’s yard work and helping assemble Ikea furniture through gig site Taskrabbit.
Stockford signed up to do similar gigs, making “$16 to $18 an hour,” he says. But the real money was in helping people move: The 29-year-old now charges as much as $98 per hour on Taskrabbit to load up his Chevy Express van with other people’s belongings and transport them across the Boston area.
College move-in season is his busiest time of year: Stockford’s side hustle brought in $9,740 in August 2023 revenue alone, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. It brought in between $3,000 and $5,000 most other months, leading to a total of just over …