8 Profitable Side Hustles For The Halloween & Christmas Season (#381)

About this video

Sam and Shaan discuss the commercialization of Halloween and the business opportunities it creates, from Spirit Halloween’s pop-up model to haunted houses and novelty items like the viral 12-foot skeleton. They explore how retailers built Halloween into a $10 billion annual holiday, analyze niche businesses like pumpkin stencils and costume manufacturing, and brainstorm new ideas like VR haunted houses. The episode also touches on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, a viral prank involving fake Twitter layoffs, and the emerging Humane wearable device company.

Key takeaways

• Spirit Halloween generates over $1 billion annually by leasing vacant properties for just 2-3 months, proving that seasonal pop-up retail with extreme operational efficiency can be massively profitable—a model now replicated in haunted houses and other holiday businesses.
• Halloween spending has more than doubled in the last 15+ years ($3 billion in 2005 to $10 billion today) driven by retailer marketing, social media’s ’look at me’ culture, and the holiday’s appeal as a creative, anti-corporate alternative to traditional holidays.
• Niche Halloween businesses like Zombie Pumpkins (stencils for 2 million annual visitors), pumpkin Steins (90,000 orders generating $4-5 million in sales), and the 12-foot skeleton craze demonstrate how viral novelty items and filling unmet needs can generate substantial revenue with low overhead.
• Shaan proposes that wearable devices will eventually replace phones as the primary computing interface, solving real problems like ’text neck’ while unlocking demand for continuous content capture and sharing—though he notes most secretive, heavily-funded moonshot companies (citing Magic Leap, Quibby, Humane) tend to fail due to hype and lack of transparency.
• A local entrepreneur executed an elaborate viral prank during Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover by posing as a fired engineer named ‘Rahul Ligma’ (a reference to an internet joke), fooling major news outlets and demonstrating how media credibility and viral moments can be weaponized with minimal effort.

Episode details: published November 1, 2022 · 13K views · 1:02:27 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. The business ideas, figures and results discussed are the hosts’ and guests’ own claims, shared as brainstorming and entertainment — not verified facts and not investment advice.

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