I tried to be a freelance, it is well paid but with my full-time job it's too time consuming and I'm not so ambitious.
That's your problem in a nutshell. If you don't have any time to spare, and you're not ambitious enough to find time, then there's not much you can do. However, unless you're putting in 60+ hours a week at your day job you most likely have a lot more time than you think. Even 1 hour a night can add up quick.
- I've build a number of websites businesses on the side. Most the jobs come through word of mouth and recommendations.
- A few of them have agreed to keep me on a retainer, they pay me $XXX a month and I'll host their sites and give them a couple hours of maintenance each month if needed.
- I started a little API about 5 years ago and dropped an advertisement on the homepage. 3 years went by with next to no revenue from it, as time went on though it started to pick up. It runs on a $10/m VPS and at it's peak it made $1600/m in ad revenue. These days it hovers around $600-700/m and runs on a $20/m VPS. This takes about 0.5 hours a month of my time to keep up.
- Another company wanted a web application but didn't have the budget to pay for it up front. Built out a proof of concept on my own time and presented it. They liked it, so instead of selling it outright I host/maintain it and sell them seats. They pay $X/m per employee. They're trailing it right now in a few stores but they're in talks to launch it nationally.
- About to launch a small SaaS; one of those 'scratch your own itch' things. Whether there's a market for it or not remains to be seen.
All of those things have been accomplished over the last 5 years. I have a wife, 10 year old daughter, a full time job, and coach a soccer team. I know there are many people much busier than I am out there, but if I can find time to work on side projects, so can most people. You have to want it though, and your lack of ambition is most likely the prime culprit.