Issue No. 17 · Trust & Verification
This is the landing page for our 47-page Methodology Doc: the public playbook our editors, analysts, and dedicated fact-checker use to verify every income report we publish. It is the document journalists cite, researchers quote, and our most skeptical readers keep open in a second tab. Read the principles below, scan the chapter list, or jump straight to the questions journalists ask us most.
Table of Contents · 47 Pages
The Methodology Doc is structured so a journalist, an academic researcher, or a reader who simply doesn't trust us can jump straight to the part they want to challenge. Below is the full chapter map.
The non-negotiables we apply to every income report — including the absolute ban on unverified before-and-after screenshots, our gross-versus-net disclosure standard, our working definition of "passive" income, and the 12-month freshness rule. Pages 4–11.
What happens between a reader-submitted income report and a published article. Submission intake, evidence requests, the fact-checker's audit, editor review, and the public spreadsheet hand-off. Pages 12–24.
The exact criteria we use to accept or reject affiliate deals, sponsored placements, and course partnerships. Includes the disclosure language we require, and the $2.4M in deals we refused in 2022–2023 alone. Pages 25–34.
How the Side Hustle Scorecard tracks 312 income methods with verified reader-reported ROI, including the survey methodology, the cleaning rules, and how we handle outliers and self-selection bias. Pages 35–47.
The full PDF is available on request to journalists, academic researchers, and partner publications. Email [email protected] with your outlet and intended use.
The Four Non-Negotiables
We adopted the public version of this checklist in 2020. Every income report, every sponsored mention, and every chart on this site has cleared all four gates — or it didn't run.
No doctored dashboards, no staged payout notifications, no "this morning vs. last week" images we can't trace to a verifiable account. Every screenshot we publish is matched to a tax document, a bank statement, or a platform API export. In 2022 alone, we turned down $180K in ad revenue that asked us to soften this rule.
Every dollar figure we publish is labeled either gross revenue (before fees, taxes, software, and time) or net profit (after everything). We never conflate the two — and we never let a sponsor quietly slide a revenue number into a profit headline. If we can't tell you what hit the bank account, we won't quote a number at all.
We do not use the word passive without naming the active hours required to keep the income flowing. A dropshipping store that needs 6 hours of weekly ops is not passive. A dividend portfolio that needs quarterly rebalancing is not passive. If a side hustle needs human hours, we say so — down to the quarter hour.
No claim about "average reader earnings" older than 12 months appears anywhere on the site. The Side Hustle Scorecard is re-cut every quarter from current reader-reported ROI data. Numbers we can no longer defend with a current methodology are pulled, not parked at the bottom of a page.
How a Report Becomes a Story
Verification is not a vibe. It is a workflow with named reviewers, documented evidence, and a public paper trail. Here is the lifecycle of one verified income report — the same path every story on this site has traveled.
A reader or contributor submits through our public form with the platform, the time period, the dollar figure, and the consent to be named (or the request to be anonymized under our published methodology). Submissions are logged with a timestamp and a unique verification ID. About 38% of submissions are rejected at this gate for missing evidence.
An analyst responds within 72 hours with a specific evidence list: a redacted bank statement, a platform earnings export, a time log, or a tax form line item. We never accept narrative alone. If the submitter cannot or will not produce the underlying document, the report does not advance.
Our staff fact-checker — a dedicated role on a 9-person team — independently re-derives the headline number from the evidence, looks for gross-vs-net slippage, and flags any missing active-hours context. The audit note is filed alongside the public spreadsheet row. Roughly 1 in 5 reports is sent back for revision at this stage.
The editor-of-record publishes the report with the verification ID, the disclosure status, and a row added to the public Side Hustle Scorecard spreadsheet. Readers can pull the source row and trace any figure back to its methodology note. This is the layer that has earned us 1,847 verified income reports since March 2019 — every dollar tracked in public.
The Receipts
A methodology is only as good as what it costs you to keep. Below are four numbers we publish because they prove the verification work is real, not performative.
Verified income reports published since founding in March 2019 — every dollar tracked in a public spreadsheet.
In affiliate and course-sponsor deals refused for failing our disclosure standards (2020–2023 cumulative).
Pages in the public Methodology Doc — the playbook our editors, analysts, and fact-checker follow.
Average open rate on the weekly newsletter for 14 consecutive months, verified by a Q1 2024 Mailchimp benchmark report.
The Questions Journalists Ask First
These are the four questions we get most often from reporters, researchers, and readers who have been burned by the personal-finance niche. We answer them plainly because the answers are part of the methodology.
Every report, named or anonymized, is matched to a verifiable evidence document — a redacted bank statement, a platform API export, or a tax-form line item. The fact-checker re-derives the headline number independently and files an audit note. Anonymity protects the submitter's identity from readers, not the underlying evidence from us. Our published anonymity methodology explains the exact threshold at which a name is required (for example, any "I made $X doing Y" claim above $5,000 net must be sourceable to a real legal name on file with the fact-checker).
The fact-checker role reports independently from the editorial line. A published rejection cannot be overruled by the editor-of-record; it can only be appealed to the co-founders (Mara Chen and Devon Ortiz) with new evidence. In 2023, 23 reports were killed at the fact-checker stage and three of those appeals were granted on resubmission with stronger evidence. The fact-checker also flags gross-vs-net slippage in real time, not after publication.
We refuse any affiliate or course partnership that (a) sits behind a paywall over $1,000, (b) requires us to omit disclosure language, (c) demands a "passive income" framing without active-hours disclosure, or (d) is an MLM or high-ticket dropshipping coaching program. We have refused more than $2.4M cumulatively since 2020, including $180K in 2022 alone for violating our No Fake Screenshots policy. We publish the refusal categories, not the refusal list, because naming the declined parties isn't necessary for the methodology.
The Side Hustle Scorecard is re-cut every quarter from current reader-reported ROI data covering 312 income methods. No claim about "average reader earnings" older than 12 months appears anywhere on the site. Numbers we can no longer defend with a current methodology are pulled, not buried at the bottom of a page. Our most recent internal data freshness audit (Q1 2024) confirmed 100% of in-text figures trace to a row dated within the prior 12 months.
Send us your hardest question. Our editors and our fact-checker answer reader methodology questions directly, and the answers often end up in the next quarterly revision of this document. The methodology is a living artifact because the income methods we cover keep changing — and so do the ways people try to fake them.
Email the editors