Eight years ago, kindergarten teacher Becky Powell was growing restless on maternity leave.
A friend suggested she use her son’s naptime to make some extra cash, and pointed her toward an educational resource platform called Teachers Pay Teachers. There, Powell started making worksheets for her fellow teachers to buy and download, working largely from her couch or “kitchen table,” she says.
Teachers Pay Teachers is an Etsy-style marketplace for educational worksheets, activities and lesson plans across just about every grade level and subject matter. Powell’s store, called Sight Word Activities, specializes in teaching literacy to kindergarteners, first-graders and other young students.
At first, revenue was slow. But within a couple of weeks, Powell started earning enough to cover small bills around the house. After four months, she made enough to pay off her and her husband’s monthly student loan payments.
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Over the years, the 10-hour-per-week gig became a six-figure hustle that Powell and her husband Jerome run together. Last year, Powell’s Teachers Pay Teachers store brought in $125,500, or just over $10,400 per month, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
Her husband, a full-time computer engineer, manages another store on the platform called Editable Activities that brings in roughly $50,000 per year.
“I have worksheets that I created eight years ago that still yield thousands [of dollars] in passive income every year,” says Powell, 41, who lives in Beaverton, Oregon. “Even when I find myself not able to create … the sales still come in.”
Here’s how Powell and her husband grew their side hustle, and what they’re able to do with their extra cash.
Turning classroom materials into Disneyland trips
Powell’s classroom is the perfect lab for her small business, she says. She can identify what concepts students struggle with, create worksheets as teaching aids and test-drive the ideas with her kindergarteners before selling them online.
“I call my students my clients,” says Powell, with a laugh.
The Powells say they’ve used their side hustle earnings to pay off their student loans and take their two sons to Disneyland.
Becky Powell
After Powell made $21,000 in her first year on Teachers Pay Teachers, she recruited Jerome — no relation to the chair of the Federal Reserve — to help her build a presence on the platform. Together, they focused her store around her knack for teaching children to sight-read.
He also showed her how to study the platform’s searches, so she could see which worksheets were trending and integrate buzzy keywords into her profile, she says: “He’d always tell me, ‘Do you know where the best place is to hide a dead body? On the third page of search results.'”
After seeing her success, Jerome launched his own Teachers Pay Teachers store selling customizable PDF worksheets in 2019, Powell says. The couple’s tax consultant recommended they combine their businesses to form an S-Corp, which they did in 2021 — meaning their seller profiles remain separate, but the money all flows to the same place.
Some sellers on the platform only keep 50% of their sales. Powell and her husband are “premium sellers” who each pay an annual $59.95 subscription fee to keep 80% of their sales as profit. When teaching gets hectic, Powell scales back her side hustle work — ramping it up again during the summers to financially get ahead of the school year’s unpredictability, she says.
Together, the couple uses their extra cash “for boring things, like paying down our mortgage. We also paid off our student loans,” says Powell. “But we also took our [sons] to Disneyland, and the two of us went to Aruba. That’s something we spent the money on to be frivolous.”
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