NextGen column: Side Hustle Society - the playbook for making money outside 9 to 5

If you’re under 30 in Australia, chances are you either have a side hustle or you’re thinking about starting one. Companies are being made in the dorm room, writes Rion Ahl.

If you are under 30 in Australia right now, chances are you either have a side hustle - or you’re thinking about starting one.

Every day, I find a new way that a friend is making a bit of extra money.

It could be flipping vintage clothes on a website like Depop, launching a new online business, buying and selling Instagram handles, or running social media accounts for small companies that want an online presence.

But it’s not just in the digital world.

Many will turn their sights to freelance - mowing lawns and moving houses.

Some will turn their cars into taxis or their bikes into food delivery services.

AirTasker - a freelance marketplace for these types of jobs reported that it has seen 80 per cent increases in usage year-on year.

Even high school tutoring for younger peers seems to be increasingly popular.

“I’ve tried about a million jobs in my life” says Willow Spring, 20, a university student based in Melbourne.

Side Hustles are booming in Australia. Photo: Canva

“It’s enjoyable learning new things and putting them into practice as much as I can.”

Whatever the hustle, for a younger generation, the old model of ‘get a job, work your way up’ is both unappealing and unrealistic.

In its place is a scrappier and quicker economy - one built after hours on laptops and across group chats.

To this new generation, side hustles aren’t a risky alternative but rather a logical extension of a life already lived in online workspaces.

At a time when traditional institutions are feeling increasingly shaky - political trust at record lows, corporate loyalty fading and the university degree being oversold - there is a natural attraction to the side hustle that offers something new: control, creativity and hope that you can break out of the ‘norm’.

“Young Australians are building bold companies from the dorm room”, says Jerry X’lingson, co-founder of youth-focused venture capital fund, ‘NextGen Ventures’ which has just finalised a $2.5 million funding round to help launch Australian startups.

Many companies are now born from a home office laptop, the ideation created after hours.

For them, it is about young people “executing upon their vision for a better world.”

This is something we can all buy into.

An aspirational youth looking to become increasingly business-savvy and picking up real-world skills in negotiation, management and marketing years before a traditional career track would allow them these experiences.

After all, a country of founders and innovators is what Australia needs to expand a startup culture that can rival global parallels and will help build out an ‘Australian Dream’ that accompanies ‘ownership’ beyond the home - an ownership of skills, personal branding and time that allows for holistic aspiration.

A dream that has moved from a single vision of home ownership to a puzzle that requires fitting together several different pieces but still celebrates the same spirit of success.

The most common side hustles taking over GenZ:

Digital:

• Selling clothes, sneakers and other collectibles on Depop or other sites.

• Flipping items on Facebook Marketplace

• Content creation – YouTube channels, podcasts, blogs.

• Dropshipping or online bands.

• Buying and selling digital property – crypto + NFTs, social media handles.

• Investing (ASX, Wall St and Crypto rising in popularity).

• Starting a business.

Side hustles have become the norm for Gen Z. Photo: Canva

In person:

• Tutoring school subjects for younger peers.

• Air-BNBing properties.

• House jobs – furniture moving, gardening, mowing.

• Dog sitting and walking

• Babysitting (or au pair arrangements overseas)

The 2025 playbook to getting started.

1. Figure out what skills or niche you have.

2. Utilise the 2025 toolkit you have – the internet, advice from AI and a plethora of ‘nocode’ digital platforms that allow you to build without technical knowledge.

3. Understand your tax obligations and see if you need to register an ABN if necessary for a sole trader or other arrangement. It’s far quicker than you think!

4. Always make sure that your hustle either

a. Fulfils a passion for you

b. Is efficient as a form of extra income that doesn’t overwork you.

What to watch out for:

The vision of the side hustle can be increasingly exploited in an economy where people are being pushed into working more and more to compete with an ever-unsustainable cost of living.

Let’s not forget that not everyone’s side hustle is a fun gig.

The median house price in Sydney just passed over the staggering $2 million-level. This reflects a broader housing market that is locking out everyday Australians at increasingly frightening levels even as governments attempt to reverse it.

Alongside this, the cost of living has soared in our country.

Most households in about 82 per cent of electorates are under deep financial stress (with less than 5 per cent of their cash left after essentials).

If you hustle to afford rent, that’s not innovation — its survival dressed up as ambition.

This means that in an Australia where one job doesn’t pay for a basic life anymore, the rise of side hustles is also a flashing red warning sign: the economy isn’t working for us.

In the glossy highlight reels of side hustling — the Etsy shops, the viral TikToks, the six-figure success stories — it’s easy to miss the deeper truth: many Australians aren’t just chasing opportunity - they are building lifeboats in an economy that was supposed to carry them safely towards providing for their families.

What we can look forward to:

So far, Australians aren’t waiting around amid the grim economic times.

They are building, innovating and in doing so are carving out a future in the belief that their side hustles will exist when the economic worries do not.

Their rise has held up a mirror up to a reality where working hard - and even smart - is no longer a guarantee of stability but also revealed a deep unwillingness to wait for permission or solutions from government to find a way to break through.

And in that spirit, the real future of Australia - with its innovation, belief and redefined Australian Dream - is being written one side hustle at a time.

Originally published as NextGen column: Side Hustle Society - the playbook for making money outside 9 to 5