Top 14 Under-the-Radar Passive Income Ideas to Try for Millennials Burnt Out on Hustle Culture
Are you tired? Not just "end-of-a-long-week" tired, but a deep, soul-level exhaustion from the relentless pressure to hustle. For years, our generation has been sold a dream packaged in #RiseAndGrind hashtags and Gary Vee soundbites. The message was clear: work harder, sleep less, and monetize every waking second. The result? A collective case of millennial burnout so widespread it’s become a cultural meme.
The irony is that the traditional advice for escaping this cycle—building passive income—often sounds suspiciously like starting another demanding, full-time job. "Start a blog!" they say, glossing over the months of content creation. "Launch a YouTube channel!" they cheer, ignoring the hours of filming and editing. While these are valid paths, they aren't exactly a vacation from the hustle. They are the hustle in a different font.
But what if there was another way? What if you could build income streams that are genuinely passive, or at least, significantly lower effort? This isn't about getting rich overnight. It's about strategically building systems that work for you, not the other way around. It’s about reclaiming your time and energy. Here on the Goh Ling Yong blog, we champion building sustainable wealth, and that includes your well-being. So, let’s explore 14 under-the-radar passive income ideas designed for the generation that's officially over the grind.
1. Create a Digital Product "Vending Machine"
Think of this as setting up a digital vending machine. You stock it once with a great product, and it sells on its own, over and over again. The product? A simple, high-value digital file. This isn't about writing a 300-page ebook; it's about solving a very specific problem with a simple solution.
The key is to niche down. Instead of a generic "budget planner," create a "Budget Template for Etsy Sellers" or a "Meal Prep Planner for Vegan Athletes." Use platforms like Etsy, Gumroad, or Stan Store, which handle the payment processing and delivery for you. Your job is the initial creation and setup. After that, the platform becomes your 24/7 salesperson.
- Actionable Tip: Use a free tool like Canva to design beautiful PDF checklists, planners, social media templates, or trackers. Spend a weekend creating a handful of high-quality products for a specific audience you understand, list them, and then focus on minimal, targeted promotion.
2. Niche Affiliate Marketing on Pinterest
You don't need a massive blog with thousands of daily visitors to make money with affiliate marketing. Pinterest is a visual search engine, and users are often there with an intent to buy or plan a purchase. This makes it a goldmine for targeted affiliate links.
Instead of writing long-form content, you create beautiful, eye-catching Pins that link directly to a product using your affiliate link (on platforms that allow it, like Amazon Associates). The strategy is to create boards around a hyper-specific niche, like "Minimalist Home Office Decor," "Eco-Friendly Camping Gear," or "Apartment Gardening Essentials." You curate great products, create visually appealing Pins, and let the platform's algorithm do the work of showing them to interested users for months, even years.
- Actionable Tip: Sign up for the Amazon Associates program. Create 5-10 Pinterest boards around niches you love. Use Canva to create 3-5 different Pin templates. Spend an hour a week pinning products you genuinely recommend to your boards.
3. Sell Your Unused "Stuff-as-a-Service"
You likely own assets that are sitting idle most of the time. The modern sharing economy allows you to turn these liabilities into income-generating assets with minimal active management. This goes way beyond renting out a spare room on Airbnb.
Think about it: Is your car parked 95% of the time? Rent it out on Turo. Have a driveway or parking spot in a busy area? List it on SpotHero or JustPark. Got a nice camera, a drone, or specialized tools collecting dust? Rent them to local creatives or DIYers on platforms like Fat Llama. Even your backyard pool can be rented by the hour on Swimply. The platform handles the booking, insurance, and payment, making it a surprisingly passive way to monetize what you already own.
- Actionable Tip: Do a quick inventory of your underutilized assets. Pick one—your car, your parking spot, your bike—and list it on a relevant platform. Spend 30 minutes creating a good listing with clear photos and rules.
4. License Your Authentic Photos and Videos
If you have a smartphone with a decent camera, you have a potential passive income stream. Stock photo and video sites are no longer just for professional photographers with high-end gear. In fact, there's a huge demand for authentic, "real-life" content that looks less staged.
Companies and content creators are always looking for photos and short video clips for their websites, social media, and marketing materials. Upload your best shots of everyday life—making coffee, working from a laptop, walking in the park, your pet being cute—to platforms like Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, or Twenty20. Each photo or video is an asset that can be sold an infinite number of times without any more work from you.
- Actionable Tip: Go through your camera roll right now. Select your 20 best, highest-quality photos and videos. Sign up for an Adobe Stock contributor account and upload them with descriptive keywords. Make it a habit to upload a new batch every month.
5. Create and Sell a Unique Font
For the artistically or design-inclined, creating a custom font is a fantastic one-time project that can pay dividends for years. Every time a designer, brand, or creator wants to use your font, they purchase a license. Your single creative effort becomes a product sold worldwide.
You don't need to be a master typographer. Sometimes, quirky, handwritten, or niche-themed fonts are the most popular. Think of a font for wedding invitations, a retro '80s-inspired font, or a clean, minimalist font for tech startups. Tools like Glyphs, FontLab, or even free options like FontForge can help you turn your designs into a usable font file. You can then sell it on marketplaces like Creative Market or MyFonts.
- Actionable Tip: Sketch out a unique alphabet on paper. Use an app like iFontMaker to easily turn your handwriting into a font you can sell. List your first font for a low price on Etsy or Creative Market to get started.
6. Automated Curation Newsletters
The internet is overflowing with information. The new valuable skill is not creating more content, but curating the best of it. An automated newsletter does just that. You pick a niche (e.g., "The Best AI Tools for Small Businesses," "Sustainable Fashion News," "3D Printing Innovations") and use tools to help you find and format the content.
Tools like Feedly can gather articles, and newsletter platforms like ConvertKit or Mailchimp can be set up with templates. Your job is to select the best few links each week and add a brief personal insight. Once you build a dedicated audience, you can monetize through small sponsorships, affiliate links for relevant products, or a premium paid tier. The effort is focused on a short burst of curation, not long-form writing.
- Actionable Tip: Choose a niche you're passionate about. Sign up for a free MailerLite account. Use Feedly to follow 10-15 top sources in your niche. Commit to sending one curated 5-link roundup every week.
7. Sell Print-on-Demand with Evergreen Designs
The print-on-demand (POD) market can feel saturated with trendy, fast-fashion designs. The anti-hustle approach is to ignore trends and focus on timeless, "evergreen" designs that will sell consistently for years.
Think about passionate hobbyists and communities. Create simple, text-based, or graphic designs for niches like knitting, Dungeons & Dragons, book lovers, specific dog breeds, or inside jokes for professions like nursing or engineering. Use platforms like Printful or Printify, which integrate with Etsy or Shopify. You upload the design once, and they handle the printing, packing, and shipping whenever an order is placed. No inventory, no logistics.
- Actionable Tip: Brainstorm five passionate communities you know well. Come up with a simple, clever phrase or design for one of them. Use Canva to place it on a t-shirt or mug mockup, and upload it to a free Printify account to see how it looks.
8. Create a Low-Content Book for Amazon KDP
This is one of my favorite "set it and forget it" ideas. Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) allows you to upload and sell books, and they'll print and ship them on demand. "Low-content" books are things like journals, planners, logbooks, or guest books. The interior is mostly blank, lined, or has a simple repeating template.
The real work is in the research and cover design. You identify a need—a logbook for home brewers, a daily gratitude journal for new moms, a mileage tracker for truck drivers—and design a compelling cover that speaks to that audience. Once uploaded, your book is listed on the world's largest marketplace, and you earn a royalty on every sale without ever touching a single physical copy.
- Actionable Tip: Search on Amazon for "[Your Hobby] logbook" or "[Your Profession] notebook" to see what's already selling. Use Canva or Book Bolt to create a simple interior (like lined pages with a custom footer) and a beautiful cover. Upload your first book to KDP.
9. Invest in Music Royalties
Want to own a tiny piece of a hit song? This is one of the most unique passive income streams out there. Platforms like Royalty Exchange and anote allow accredited and non-accredited investors to buy shares in the royalty streams of songs from famous artists and songwriters.
When the song is streamed on Spotify, played on the radio, or used in a movie, you get a small cut of the earnings, paid out in regular dividends. It's a non-traditional asset class that is uncorrelated with the stock market, providing a unique form of diversification. You're not just investing; you're participating in the culture you love.
- Actionable Tip: Browse the marketplace on Royalty Exchange to see what kind of assets are available and how they are valued (often as a multiple of their last 12 months' earnings). Start small to understand how the process works.
10. Stake Your Cryptocurrency
If you already own cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, Cardano, or Solana, you might be letting them sit idle in a wallet. Staking is a way to put those assets to work to earn more crypto, similar to earning interest in a savings account.
In simple terms, you are "locking up" your coins to help secure and validate transactions on the network (this is for "Proof-of-Stake" networks). In return for your service, the network rewards you with more coins. It's a completely passive process that can be done directly from many popular crypto exchanges (like Coinbase or Kraken) or wallets. The risk is that the value of the underlying asset can fluctuate, but the process of earning rewards is hands-off.
- Actionable Tip: If you hold a stake-able crypto on an exchange like Coinbase, look for a section labeled "Staking" or "Earn." You can often start staking with just a few clicks.
11. Create and Sell a Notion or Airtable Template
The productivity and organization software space is booming. Millions of people use tools like Notion, Airtable, and Coda to organize their lives and businesses, but many don't have the time or skill to build complex systems from scratch. That's where you come in.
If you're a hyper-organized person, you can build the ultimate template for a specific purpose—a freelance client tracker, a content creation calendar, a personal finance dashboard, a PhD research manager—and sell it. It’s a digital product that solves a real, tangible problem. You build it once, and you can sell it an infinite number of times on platforms like Gumroad.
- Actionable Tip: Think of a system you've built for yourself in Notion or a spreadsheet that saves you time. Rebuild it as a clean, shareable template. Record a short Loom video explaining how to use it and list it on Gumroad for $10-20.
12. Lease a Digital Asset
This is a more advanced but incredibly powerful strategy. Instead of selling a website or a domain name, you can lease it out for a recurring monthly fee. This is common in the world of local lead generation.
Here's the model: You build a simple website optimized for a local service niche, like "emergency plumbing in [Your City]" or "tree removal in [Your Suburb]." You work to get it ranking high on Google for those search terms. Once it starts generating leads (phone calls or form submissions), you find a local plumber or tree service and "lease" the website and its leads to them for a flat monthly fee. Your work is the upfront setup; their benefit is a steady stream of customers without marketing hassle.
- Actionable Tip: Research local service niches in your area with low competition. Buy a keyword-rich domain name. Build a simple one-page website using a tool like Carrd or Webflow, and learn the basics of local SEO.
13. Silent YouTube Channel Automation
You don't need to be a charismatic influencer to make money on YouTube. "Faceless" or "silent" channels generate millions of views and significant ad revenue by creating videos that don't require a person on camera.
Think about channels that show rain sounds for sleeping, animated data comparisons (e.g., "Most Populous Countries Over Time"), sped-up digital art drawings, or satisfying kinetic sand videos. The content is the star. The work is all upfront in the production of the video. Once uploaded, a popular video can generate passive income from advertisements for years. As my friend Goh Ling Yong often points out, finding a sustainable niche is more important than chasing viral trends.
- Actionable Tip: Brainstorm a type of video you could create without showing your face. A channel with relaxing nature sounds? A channel that compiles time-lapses? Start with simple editing software and royalty-free music and footage from sites like Pexels or Artlist.
14. Become a Silent Partner in a Small Business
This is the classic definition of passive income: investing capital in an enterprise and receiving a share of the profits without being involved in the day-to-day operations. This doesn't have to mean investing millions in a tech startup.
Perhaps a friend is starting a coffee truck and needs $2,000 for a better espresso machine. You could offer the capital in exchange for 5% of the net profits for the first three years. Or maybe a local artisan you admire needs funding for materials to scale up their Etsy shop. The key is to invest in people and businesses you trust, with a clear, written agreement outlining the terms. Your contribution is financial, not your precious time.
- Actionable Tip: Look within your own network. Is anyone starting a small-scale business you believe in? Have a conversation. Start with a very small, low-risk investment and make sure you have a simple contract in place.
Your Escape from Hustle Culture Starts Here
The goal of passive income isn't to stop working entirely. It's about creating freedom, security, and options. It's about building a life where your time is truly your own, not dictated by the need to constantly trade it for money. The "hustle" mindset tells you to add more to your plate; the "passive income" mindset tells you to build a bigger plate.
Don't get overwhelmed by this list. The path to burnout is trying to do everything at once. Instead, pick just one idea that genuinely excites you or aligns with a skill you already have. Spend a few hours this weekend exploring it. Register the account, design the first template, upload the first photo.
The first dollar you earn while you're sleeping, on vacation, or just enjoying a quiet moment is a game-changer. It's proof that there's a different way. It’s your first step toward a richer life—in every sense of the word.
What under-the-radar ideas did I miss? Share your favorite low-effort passive income stream in the comments below!
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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