ATHLLC4000769996

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00:01:34.640 | Hello, and welcome to another episode of All The Hacks, a show about upgrading

00:01:44.920 | your life, money, and travel.

00:01:46.880 | I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you join me as I try to find all the

00:01:51.280 | deals, hacks, and tricks there are.

00:01:53.040 | And today we're talking about side hustles, ways you can monetize your spare

00:01:57.760 | time and hopefully start to build the foundation for some real passive income.

00:02:01.680 | And we're joined by the chief side hustler himself, Nick Loeber.

00:02:06.120 | He's the founder of Side Hustle Nation, the host of the Side Hustle Show podcast,

00:02:12.560 | and has quite a few side hustles under his belt, including self-publishing a

00:02:16.640 | book, flipping products on eBay, and starting multiple online businesses.

00:02:20.840 | In our conversation, we'll talk about easy side hustles to get started with, how to

00:02:25.200 | think about bigger opportunities that could replace your job, and how to come

00:02:28.640 | up with your next business idea.

00:02:30.000 | So let's jump in.

00:02:31.160 | Nick, thanks for being here.

00:02:33.600 | What is going on, man?

00:02:35.760 | Happy to be here.

00:02:36.640 | Yeah, I'm excited.

00:02:38.800 | I want to jump right into how you became the side hustle guy.

00:02:42.040 | I became the side hustle guy by coming out of a low point, like a soul-searching

00:02:49.520 | low point of what do I want to do?

00:02:51.360 | What do I want to be known for?

00:02:52.920 | What do I want people to find when somebody Googles you?

00:02:55.280 | And you kind of go through all of these business startup questions that I have

00:02:59.000 | posed to my audience hundreds of times.

00:03:00.760 | Like, what do you never get tired about talking about?

00:03:03.120 | You know, what lights you up?

00:03:04.400 | What do people come to you for advice for?

00:03:06.720 | But it was kind of going through a low point and, you know, I'd started a bunch

00:03:10.000 | of other projects on the side and was looking for the next thing.

00:03:13.520 | And this idea of a lower risk brand of entrepreneurship, because that was my

00:03:18.680 | background look, start something low risk, started on the side, build it up as you

00:03:22.520 | have time and deconstructing, like, where does the money come from?

00:03:26.360 | Deconstructing business ideas and business models was and still is fascinating to me.

00:03:31.560 | And with that, I rebranded my long running personal blog that nobody ever read.

00:03:36.400 | Rebranded NickLoper.com, DecideHustleNation.com in kind of spring

00:03:40.640 | 2013 and fired up the old podcast mic and started asking other people questions.

00:03:46.280 | And it's been an incredible journey since then.

00:03:51.440 | Yeah, you've done hundreds of episodes, talked to so many people.

00:03:54.800 | I guess I just want to start off so people understand one of the cool things you said,

00:03:59.160 | you know, and me coming from a background where starting an entrepreneurial endeavor

00:04:02.640 | in Silicon Valley can often be something that takes millions of dollars and you hire

00:04:06.840 | lots of people.

00:04:07.640 | How do you tell people what a side hustle is as opposed to other entrepreneurial

00:04:11.520 | endeavors?

00:04:11.960 | Yeah.

00:04:13.000 | And that's a good point because that was kind of the narrative that I was hearing.

00:04:16.160 | An entrepreneur is somebody who raises venture capital, eventually takes this

00:04:20.280 | company public like they want to go big.

00:04:21.960 | And I was like, well, there's this other flavor, this like lifestyle entrepreneur

00:04:26.680 | who, you know, maybe they don't even ever want to quit their job, but they still want

00:04:29.840 | to, you know, use their free time more effectively, more productively.

00:04:33.120 | Maybe they want to, you know, scratch this creative itch on the side.

00:04:36.760 | But yeah, so side hustle broadly defined anything that you're doing outside of

00:04:42.160 | traditional job to make extra money ranging from bartending, delivering pizzas,

00:04:47.400 | driving Uber, all the way up to, you know, starting a company, starting a business.

00:04:51.600 | I will say there is more of an entrepreneurial connotation to it rather than just

00:04:57.120 | taking on a second job.

00:04:58.280 | So generations ago, this might've been known as moonlighting, but today it's more

00:05:02.720 | like, okay, this is my side hustle.

00:05:05.000 | This is something that maybe long-term has the potential to be a little more time

00:05:09.760 | leveraged.

00:05:10.440 | It could be something that maybe replaces that day job income if you want it to.

00:05:14.840 | There's this positive upside connotation that doesn't necessarily come with that

00:05:20.480 | second job.

00:05:21.080 | And was there a, an original side hustle that got this all started for you?

00:05:26.560 | It was called shoesniper.com and its latest iteration.

00:05:29.960 | I don't think it exists anymore because it's been shut down for several years, but

00:05:34.080 | this would pull in the product catalogs from Zappos, Amazon, all these other footwear

00:05:40.120 | retailers, and it would spit back out where you could find the best price on your next

00:05:45.560 | pair of shoes.

00:05:46.160 | This was, you know, in the early days of the internet, some of your listeners might

00:05:50.640 | be young enough to remember, like comparison shopping was a thing back in the day before

00:05:55.000 | everyone just went to Amazon by default.

00:05:57.040 | It was like, oh, there are several stores that sell this thing that I want.

00:06:00.640 | And so the big idea for me was, well, what if instead of trying to compare every

00:06:06.160 | product under the sun, like, what if we focused on this one niche and we did it

00:06:09.640 | better than everybody else by, you know, having product level integrations and tighter

00:06:14.160 | kind of like comparison algorithms and more accurate algorithms.

00:06:17.520 | And that was the thing that was, I kind of naively thought I could be the shoe guy.

00:06:22.960 | Like, that's just this, I just, I'm the dude who sells shoes on the internet.

00:06:25.920 | But that was the thing that let me quit my job after three years of nights and weekends,

00:06:30.480 | like try to hustle that thing to the point of sustainability.

00:06:34.440 | I don't even think it had replaced my day job salary by the time it was.

00:06:39.800 | It was time to quit, but it had at least it was at least covering my monthly expenses.

00:06:43.920 | And I could see with an extra 40, 50 hours a week to dedicate to it, how you'd get to

00:06:48.920 | that level and beyond.

00:06:50.400 | And at that point, had you figured out that this whole space was where you wanted to

00:06:55.520 | spend time, you had a side hustle, it turned into a full time thing, and then side

00:06:59.800 | hustles became your side hustle?

00:07:01.400 | It did. That was like five years later.

00:07:05.520 | So I quit my job, started the shoe operation like in '05, quit my job in '08, started

00:07:11.720 | Side Hustle Nation in 2013.

00:07:13.400 | So it's just, you know, had a few years of entrepreneurial experience.

00:07:18.440 | I called it retired at 25, but it turned out to be anything but a retirement.

00:07:22.920 | It was like, I'm still working all the time.

00:07:25.360 | There's a lot of maintenance required.

00:07:26.600 | Like shoes is very seasonal, like constantly turning over inventory and stuff.

00:07:30.720 | So there's a lot of upkeep involved in that.

00:07:33.240 | But it was still a pretty fun operation to try and optimize all of the inventory and

00:07:38.480 | ad listings and the conversion rates on the page and stuff.

00:07:41.920 | It was a cool, it was definitely a cool first business.

00:07:44.600 | Yeah. And so that was your first one.

00:07:47.880 | When you talk to people who are probably most often working a full time job and

00:07:52.920 | they're thinking, wow, I could generate some side income, I could pursue some

00:07:56.400 | passions. Are there things you advise them to do to get started?

00:08:01.840 | The passion question is an interesting one, and maybe we could start there.

00:08:05.200 | Because Nick Huber, who runs a podcast called Sweaty Startup, was on the Side

00:08:10.480 | Hustle show last year.

00:08:11.680 | And he said, Nick, under no circumstance should you start a business around your

00:08:15.720 | passion? I was like, well, why not?

00:08:18.080 | You know, that seems like reasonable advice.

00:08:20.560 | He's like, look, if you're passionate about it, other people probably are too,

00:08:24.640 | right? Yoga, craft beer, whatever it is.

00:08:26.640 | The world doesn't care about your passion necessarily.

00:08:29.160 | And when people are passionate about things, they behave irrationally.

00:08:32.520 | Like they work for free.

00:08:33.760 | It's like, no, no, no. Under no circumstance, start a business around your

00:08:36.800 | passion. Start a business around solving a problem instead.

00:08:39.840 | And bonus points if it's a problem that you're at least somewhat interested in or

00:08:45.520 | excited about.

00:08:46.520 | And then, because I found that passion tends to follow doing the work.

00:08:52.520 | Like in college, I was painting houses as like my college job, my college side

00:08:58.040 | hustle, and I had no passion for painting houses.

00:09:01.280 | But by the end of a couple of summers of doing this, you couldn't help but walking

00:09:05.880 | through a neighborhood and looking up under the eaves and like, oh, there's a

00:09:08.600 | paint job waiting to happen.

00:09:09.640 | I'll scrape that, I better make a note, come give these guys an estimate on the

00:09:13.040 | weekend. It came from doing the work, it came from embedding yourself in that

00:09:17.280 | space. And same thing with podcasting.

00:09:19.680 | I had no passion for podcasting.

00:09:21.200 | When I got started, it would have been impossible to.

00:09:24.160 | I didn't know what I was doing, how it all worked.

00:09:26.360 | But over the course of now eight years of doing it and 450 episodes of the side

00:09:30.720 | hustle show, it's become a part of my identity.

00:09:34.160 | It's definitely become a huge passion of mine.

00:09:35.800 | Yeah, well, I'm not sure I took that advice because this entire podcast was I'm

00:09:40.520 | passionate about finding all the deals, all the hacks, and I turned that into a

00:09:45.040 | project. But for me, I guess it doesn't make a lot of money.

00:09:48.000 | So it's not a it's not a side hustle yet.

00:09:50.000 | It's more of just an outlet for creativity.

00:09:52.400 | Well, I like that. I like that approach, too, though.

00:09:54.440 | It's like, here's something that I'm curious about.

00:09:56.400 | Here's something that I'm interested in.

00:09:57.920 | And here's a unique medium to to go out and explore that.

00:10:01.960 | Right. Because that is kind of the second part of the equation.

00:10:05.520 | OK, what's what's the problem in my life?

00:10:08.000 | I need more hacks. And then the second part is like, well, how do I go find them?

00:10:11.920 | I'm going to go. I'm going to go talk to people.

00:10:14.160 | Yeah. And one of the reasons when I talk to all of our listeners about why they're

00:10:19.680 | really excited about a lot of different hacks is that they end up saving money.

00:10:23.280 | They save time. It allows them to go travel places.

00:10:26.200 | So I think one of the coolest things about side hustles is allows you to generate

00:10:29.760 | that extra income. And you have a challenge I saw on your site, a five day, five

00:10:33.680 | hundred dollar challenge. I assume the premise is that anyone can get started

00:10:38.760 | doing this and make some extra money in a short period of time.

00:10:42.520 | Are there specific types of side hustles that are easy to get started for a

00:10:46.760 | beginner to make a little bit of extra cash?

00:10:50.040 | Yes, absolutely. So at the very low end of the spectrum, like, what can I do to

00:10:56.320 | kind of just toe dip into the side hustle world?

00:10:59.240 | Right. So this is like credit card rewards.

00:11:01.840 | Like you're the expert on this stuff.

00:11:03.760 | This is like cashback apps.

00:11:05.800 | This is just no brainer stuff to add to your phone.

00:11:08.200 | These are online market research studies.

00:11:11.800 | I just did one last week where I got paid 50 bucks in Amazon credit to talk about

00:11:17.680 | my video editing process. I was like, this is anybody can go do this stuff.

00:11:22.800 | Where are you finding them?

00:11:24.120 | What are there? Is there a list of them on your site?

00:11:26.600 | And do you have ones that you recommend checking out when it comes to some of

00:11:29.640 | these market research things?

00:11:30.640 | My top two are userinterviews.com and respondent.io.

00:11:36.840 | But the advantage that both of these have over like a swag box or something is that

00:11:43.640 | they like they are looking for industry professionals and will usually pay for

00:11:48.760 | that expertise, you know, 50, 100, 150, 200 bucks an hour versus, you know, three

00:11:54.280 | to three dollars an hour or whatever the equivalent would be just like doing these

00:11:57.160 | kind of brainless little surveys while you're watching TV.

00:11:59.520 | So a little bit more involved, but, you know, from the comfort of your home, I've

00:12:03.800 | done a handful of these different studies and I find that stuff interesting.

00:12:07.520 | And it's like, well, shoot, if I can qualify for it, somebody else with more

00:12:10.600 | professional credentials could probably qualify for even more of these.

00:12:14.000 | Those would be kind of low hanging fruit stuff.

00:12:16.120 | On the product side, we see people just getting involved in the eBay or Facebook

00:12:21.920 | marketplace game where it's, you know, start by clearing out your garage,

00:12:25.640 | clearing out your attic, you know, what is all this stuff that's collecting

00:12:29.320 | dust where it could be collecting dollars.

00:12:30.800 | And then we see people kind of taking that to the next level where, you know,

00:12:34.080 | it would be sourcing at garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, Craigslist.

00:12:38.280 | We've even seen people going like from the free section of Craigslist

00:12:41.240 | onto Facebook marketplace.

00:12:42.480 | There's like this weird arbitrage thing that's going on right now.

00:12:44.600 | But those would be kind of the very low hanging fruit type of side hustles

00:12:49.040 | without getting into the freelancing or consulting or like selling a service

00:12:53.840 | type of operation, which probably be the next level up.

00:12:56.920 | And of course, another one to consider is just all of the gig economy apps.

00:13:02.440 | Maybe your long-term upside potential isn't really strong with a DoorDash or

00:13:07.920 | an Uber Eats or something like that.

00:13:09.320 | But if you need to make money in the near term, like it's hard to beat this

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00:13:21.040 | the cracks start to emerge.

00:13:22.840 | Things that you used to do in a day are taking a week and you have too many

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00:16:22.760 | And do you have a metric for how you compare these in your mind?

00:16:27.360 | Is it dollars per hour?

00:16:29.040 | Is it things you can do in small blocks of time?

00:16:32.720 | How do you think about that?

00:16:33.720 | Yeah.

00:16:35.400 | So think about dollars per hour is a good kind of baseline metric, but it can be

00:16:41.040 | misleading because you're like, Oh, I made 50 bucks an hour, but you can't, you

00:16:44.520 | couldn't do that eight hours a day.

00:16:45.680 | You know, it's like, well, the opportunity came up and I made my 50 bucks and then

00:16:50.440 | it was kind of gone and the same thing with Instacart.

00:16:53.600 | Like if you're, you know, cranking out Instacart orders and it's like, Oh,

00:16:57.200 | you know, you may have spurts where you're making 25, 30 an hour and you're

00:17:01.160 | like, this is great.

00:17:02.120 | And then you might have hit kind of this drive spell where you're like, uh, you

00:17:05.000 | know, maybe I'm making 10, 15, I got to pay for gas on top of this.

00:17:08.280 | So there's this natural downward pressure and any of these like driving related

00:17:12.160 | services is a natural downward pressure on price because it's a skill that almost

00:17:16.600 | everybody has, you know, it's like, uh, there's only, there's only so much you

00:17:20.120 | can do to, uh, to differentiate yourself there.

00:17:22.160 | But I do like the hourly rate metric.

00:17:24.600 | I do like kind of thinking of how can I, what can I do to fit into the gaps in my

00:17:29.960 | day?

00:17:30.440 | Even we have people on the podcast, like building online businesses, building

00:17:34.640 | these blog empires with a couple young kids at home.

00:17:37.800 | I'm like, how are you getting this done?

00:17:39.560 | And she described like the cracks in her day.

00:17:42.280 | And I was like, Oh, I really liked that metaphor where it's like, you know, the

00:17:45.440 | nap time here or the, you know, play group over here, you're, you know, you're

00:17:50.600 | responding to emails.

00:17:51.680 | I don't know.

00:17:52.520 | There's, there's always ways to get it done.

00:17:54.480 | If that makes sense.

00:17:55.120 | Yeah.

00:17:55.960 | Are there good side hustles for those 15 minute gaps?

00:17:58.920 | Obviously you're not going to hop in the car and drive to the grocery store and do

00:18:02.240 | some Instacart shopping with a 15, 20 minute gap.

00:18:04.760 | But are there things that you've seen that work really well for people who only have

00:18:09.120 | small blips of time, but maybe you could stack them over the course of a few days?

00:18:12.480 | Yeah, that's a challenging one where I might go with that.

00:18:17.320 | One that my wife is involved in is just print on demand.

00:18:20.840 | And so she has t-shirts on Redbubble and Merch by Amazon.

00:18:24.920 | And I want to say a couple other places, but you know, with a 15 minute gap, she

00:18:30.800 | could probably design a t-shirt or at least kind of get a template design and

00:18:35.040 | she was in front of her computer.

00:18:36.200 | So that's kind of one way to go.

00:18:38.040 | And then there's some like uploading time related to that.

00:18:41.480 | And what's cool there is once it's created Amazon or Redbubble or these other

00:18:46.480 | marketplaces are handling all the shipping and fulfillment, you set your own price.

00:18:50.600 | You're just making a little margin on top of that.

00:18:53.280 | And it's like, OK, it's not a huge moneymaker, but she had like some Father's

00:18:58.080 | Day related one that just recently sold.

00:19:00.560 | And she's like, yes, you know, get a little sale notification.

00:19:02.960 | It's just, you know, it's play money.

00:19:04.560 | But if you took it seriously and you were consistent about creating that type of

00:19:08.440 | stuff, it can definitely add up.

00:19:10.120 | And same thing with the online business.

00:19:13.040 | If you are going to commit to writing a book, I want to go the self-publish

00:19:16.720 | route, if you want to start this blog or online based business, you have 15

00:19:22.000 | minute gaps, which it's easy to dismiss and say, I've only got 15 minutes.

00:19:25.480 | What am I going to get done?

00:19:26.240 | If you sat down and use those 15 minutes to outline content or to draft your next

00:19:32.400 | email or to start creating this blog post, you kind of start chipping away at it.

00:19:37.280 | And I find that momentum tends to build a little bit.

00:19:40.920 | And I've definitely found that when tackling really, really long articles and

00:19:45.560 | blog posts, like one of the things I think put Side Hustle Nation on the map in its

00:19:49.760 | earlier days was like these mega list posts where it's 5,000 words and it has all

00:19:55.440 | these ideas.

00:19:55.960 | But some of these, I've got 40 hours into some of these posts, but the only way to

00:20:00.000 | tackle it was kind of like, okay, one step at a time in the, in the gaps that are

00:20:03.880 | allowed.

00:20:04.240 | Yeah, it's funny you say this.

00:20:06.800 | So I have tried to start a blog for, I don't know, almost a decade.

00:20:11.480 | And I I've always gotten like a one post in and then realized that I'm not going to

00:20:15.280 | keep doing this.

00:20:16.160 | But I also realized like that one post could be valuable.

00:20:19.640 | Is there a way for someone who's not ready to commit to blogging full time, but

00:20:25.240 | might have something interesting that they want to put together or something?

00:20:28.680 | Is there an easy way to do that on like a one or two post basis without starting a

00:20:32.520 | blog?

00:20:33.920 | Yeah, I would just put it up on Medium, put it up on LinkedIn versus going through

00:20:38.440 | the trouble of setting up your own domain and hosting, and then it goes stale and

00:20:43.200 | then the domain expires and all that stuff.

00:20:45.680 | So I would just go to some of these writing marketplaces as they were.

00:20:49.440 | Cool.

00:20:50.680 | And I want to go back to the, the side hustle your wife has.

00:20:53.840 | Was it t-shirts or what kind of things is she designing?

00:20:56.880 | Yeah, she's made t-shirts, she's made the socks, she's made mugs, I think she made

00:21:03.280 | stickers, like I think she sold a crapload of Eclipse stickers.

00:21:06.840 | What was that like 2017, 2018, whenever that big Eclipse was going on, she had a

00:21:10.840 | great month and we were like, we just need another Eclipse to come along.

00:21:13.880 | I got to wait another 37 years or whatever it was.

00:21:16.720 | How does that work?

00:21:18.000 | So I actually, for our anniversary this year, I got my wife this funny t-shirt on

00:21:22.080 | Amazon that just said Epic Wife since 2012.

00:21:24.800 | I couldn't help but think, how is this happening?

00:21:27.480 | Like, are these even designed?

00:21:28.920 | Did someone just make a logo and as soon as I order it, it gets printed?

00:21:31.960 | Is that something that if you had a idea for a funny mug or a cool sticker, like

00:21:37.320 | you obviously don't have to go buy a printing press or anything like that.

00:21:41.320 | How does that hustle work?

00:21:42.280 | Right.

00:21:43.160 | It's all print on demand.

00:21:44.520 | So no, no screen printing machine in your basement or anything like that.

00:21:47.880 | You upload this digital file.

00:21:49.840 | So you create some clever saying, most of these are like just text based.

00:21:54.440 | So not, you know, no crazy artistry required.

00:21:58.080 | Upload that digital file to Amazon.

00:22:00.360 | Set your price, set what kind of colors, t-shirts you want it to be on.

00:22:03.120 | And they have a whole lot of other products now as well.

00:22:05.800 | And then when somebody orders it, it's all, it's completely hands off.

00:22:10.240 | And then it just shows up in your report as royalties earned.

00:22:13.280 | When we first got started on this, it was like right around Trump's inauguration.

00:22:17.760 | So the meme of the day was alternative facts.

00:22:20.240 | You know, the, I forget who it was, like the press secretary was like, Oh, the

00:22:23.080 | president presented an alternative fact.

00:22:25.520 | And we were like, that's just an alternative fact.

00:22:28.640 | It's like such an interesting way to phrase it.

00:22:30.560 | And so we made like, I went to the gym today, hashtag alternative facts or

00:22:34.320 | something, it's, it's kind of a creative outlet and it doesn't take a ton of time

00:22:40.280 | to create, like the people who are doing really, really well at it have thousands

00:22:44.360 | and thousands of designs where it becomes very much a volume game.

00:22:47.840 | And of course there's an 80/20 distribution to everything that sells,

00:22:51.720 | but you know, for one-off stuff, it can be fun.

00:22:54.160 | And she's, and she's done custom stuff for, for family and friends too.

00:22:56.880 | Like, cause now, you know, other people know that she's into it.

00:22:59.800 | Like our buddy's going to his golf tournament.

00:23:01.920 | Hey, would you put, would you put this picture on a shirt?

00:23:04.320 | It was just like his buddy like passed out or something.

00:23:06.360 | I don't know.

00:23:06.600 | And they just, she listed it on Amazon.

00:23:08.320 | Yeah.

00:23:09.400 | And he, you know, he may be the only person who ever buys it, but it's just

00:23:12.400 | like, yeah, I'll make you a custom shirt.

00:23:13.800 | It's kind of a fun like distribution center to have in your backyard, basically

00:23:18.520 | where, you know, it's all prime eligible and pretty affordable because I don't

00:23:22.240 | know how they're making money on it, but very, uh, it's pretty cool.

00:23:24.800 | So the shirt I got was less than $20 for a shirt that I, I, now that I think

00:23:28.720 | about it, I noticed there are a bunch of styles of the same kind of shirt.

00:23:31.440 | And I'm wondering if it was just someone uploaded 10 different

00:23:33.520 | designs of the same shirt.

00:23:34.720 | Uh, yeah, we would be remiss if we didn't mention like once something

00:23:39.480 | sells the software and the bots kind of come out and say, Oh, this is a hot

00:23:44.800 | seller.

00:23:45.120 | Let's make a copycat.

00:23:46.120 | Let's make a duplicate of it because there's so little barrier to entry.

00:23:49.560 | It becomes kind of like, well, I got to keep coming up with the next design

00:23:54.040 | rather than fighting copyright trolls and stuff.

00:23:57.160 | Yep.

00:23:58.040 | You mentioned another side hustle about, you know, delivery.

00:24:01.160 | And one of the challenges is it's such a low barrier to entry.

00:24:04.120 | Are there any skills that, you know, taking a quick course or getting

00:24:08.640 | registered to do something kind of unlocks some side hustle income?

00:24:12.640 | I know when we purchased our home, I talked to the person who came to our

00:24:17.080 | house to do our notarizing for the home purchase said that this was their

00:24:20.520 | little side hustle, you know, a couple, couple of days a week they do evening,

00:24:23.720 | evening, things like that.

00:24:24.840 | I have no idea how hard it is to become a notary.

00:24:27.160 | I don't know if that's a good one, but are there things like that, that can

00:24:30.240 | generate income that have a little bit higher barrier to entry that might make

00:24:33.880 | the sustainability of making more money higher?

00:24:37.080 | Yeah.

00:24:38.320 | The notary one is actually a perfect example.

00:24:40.600 | That's one of the most, I don't know, I don't know why I say surprising,

00:24:44.280 | but out of all of the episodes that we've done, the one that I get an

00:24:48.120 | outsized feedback response to is on this mobile notary side hustle, because it's

00:24:53.040 | not, it's not zero, but there's, there's a little bit of startup costs in terms

00:24:57.080 | of education, equipment, and certification, but like, you know, maybe

00:25:00.080 | you're a thousand bucks and then you're going out and making a hundred

00:25:03.160 | bucks for every signing appointment.

00:25:05.000 | We've seen people, especially with this low interest rate environment and all

00:25:08.800 | the refinancing that's going on, seeing people making eight, nine, 10 grand a

00:25:13.120 | month doing this and on the side, it might be a full-time gig at that point

00:25:19.200 | for them, but like, if you're just doing it on the side, like, you know, a

00:25:22.280 | thousand bucks, 2000 bucks a month.

00:25:23.760 | It doesn't seem unreasonable, especially since, you know, it's a good gig for

00:25:27.360 | nights and weekends because the people presumably signing mortgage documents

00:25:30.760 | have jobs, that's what like the bank wants to see to lend you money and, you

00:25:34.440 | know, they're working during the day, but they're available to sign evenings

00:25:37.520 | and weekends and it works out really well.

00:25:40.280 | We've got a couple episodes.

00:25:41.320 | I can send you the links.

00:25:42.640 | Yeah, I'll put, I'll put links to those in the show notes for sure.

00:25:44.800 | They talk about that, but that's one that stands out.

00:25:47.240 | We've seen people level up their skills in like web design.

00:25:51.360 | We had actually one of the most popular episodes of last year was Chris

00:25:54.880 | Mistrick from self-made web designer.com.

00:25:57.920 | I think it's his site where he described learning from Code Academy, learning

00:26:04.200 | from free resources online, starting actually locally, selling the skill,

00:26:08.320 | going on Upwork, bidding on jobs and continuing to double his rates until he

00:26:12.760 | started to get pushback or had a harder time getting clients.

00:26:15.000 | But it was like, you know, I don't know.

00:26:17.920 | I thought that was a cool example of like learning an in-demand skill, even

00:26:21.160 | in what would seem to be, you know, with the rise of Squarespace and Wix.

00:26:27.040 | And we were like, it's not that hard to design a website anymore, but plenty

00:26:30.400 | of people still willing to pay for it because the pie just keeps getting

00:26:32.840 | bigger, people who presumably need websites.

00:26:35.880 | He was able to do really well with that.

00:26:37.480 | We had another gal who had, I don't know if she had a particular background in

00:26:42.680 | finance, but she kind of studied up on like the QuickBooks certification and

00:26:47.480 | kind of these other like online accounting programs and was like, I'll

00:26:50.480 | become your remote bookkeeper, which I thought was an interesting one.

00:26:54.000 | And she was doing, you know, 50, 70 bucks an hour equivalent, you know,

00:26:57.760 | from home, uh, doing, doing books.

00:27:00.760 | And like, if you like math and numbers and I don't know that kind of appealed

00:27:04.480 | to me, and then recently this was more of a career change, but I thought, I

00:27:11.080 | think the model was illustrative of kind of a broader opportunity.

00:27:15.160 | So we have Brad Rice and his argument was Salesforce as a software company

00:27:20.960 | has grown its customer base far faster than it's been able to grow its

00:27:25.640 | ecosystem of qualified service providers, consultants, freelancers

00:27:29.240 | to serve that customer base.

00:27:31.760 | And he's like, and because of that, there is such an in-demand industry.

00:27:36.400 | And he's like, you know, it's, it's rare to go from not being part of this

00:27:41.440 | ecosystem to being like freelancer, uh, you know, solo remote freelancer

00:27:45.520 | consultant type of person, but you know, with two, three, four years under your

00:27:49.320 | belt, like that's a very common career path.

00:27:51.400 | And he said he was making 200 grand last year, working 20 hours a week or

00:27:56.040 | something, it's like, yeah, sign me up.

00:27:57.880 | You know, it sounds pretty good.

00:27:58.800 | But the way we framed that on the side, also show was software with a service,

00:28:02.560 | like hitching your cart to a popular software product, maybe it's QuickBooks,

00:28:06.960 | maybe it's Salesforce, maybe it's Asana, maybe it's monday.com, maybe it's, uh,

00:28:12.680 | air table, you know, all these, you have this, all these kinds of software

00:28:16.520 | and there's always more coming out.

00:28:17.720 | They have their own little, uh, ecosystem of customers.

00:28:22.840 | And if you can kind of become a go-to player, uh, in that space, like we had

00:28:28.120 | on the podcast, Paul Miners out of New Zealand, where he would just create

00:28:32.480 | these, uh, he was kind of early adopter in Asana, he'd create these little

00:28:36.360 | short videos for YouTube to say like how to do blank in Asana.

00:28:40.040 | And he just introduced that like, Hey, I'm Paul.

00:28:41.760 | I'm a, I'm a, an Asana consultant and here's how to do blah, blah, blah in Asana.

00:28:46.120 | And he was booking like thousands of dollars worth of consulting gigs

00:28:49.280 | because, you know, companies were like, that's great.

00:28:52.760 | Could you come in and train our team?

00:28:54.240 | Could you come in and just help us, uh, implement these systems?

00:28:58.320 | So software with a service is one of these, uh, side hustle models that I

00:29:02.440 | think really has some potential, uh, to scale and drive some higher hours per

00:29:07.560 | dollar rates.

00:29:08.200 | Yeah.

00:29:09.360 | I would say to anyone listening, if there's a piece of software or even a, an

00:29:13.320 | activity that you feel like you've mastered, there's probably a marketplace

00:29:17.480 | for you to turn that into a business.

00:29:19.120 | I know I always tell people, Oh yeah, I, I hang, uh, TVs.

00:29:23.720 | Whenever we bought a new TV, I went through the effort to learn how to

00:29:27.920 | find, you know, mounted to the studs properly and, and do everything.

00:29:32.080 | And other people I know hire someone to do that.

00:29:34.240 | I don't know if there's a good, uh, marketplace for that, but if there's a

00:29:38.160 | thing that you've learned how to master and set up and do other people pay for

00:29:41.640 | those things and you can find marketplace for that.

00:29:44.000 | Is there a place for in-person things?

00:29:45.880 | Like, is there an easy marketplace for me to put myself out there as someone

00:29:49.400 | who can tune up someone's bicycle?

00:29:50.840 | I'd probably look at.

00:29:53.760 | TaskRabbit or Thumbtack for something like that, especially for the home

00:29:59.320 | services, even next door might be worth a look there.

00:30:02.040 | Cool.

00:30:02.960 | Yeah.

00:30:03.440 | I mean, I know when we launched this podcast, I wanted to have show notes

00:30:06.600 | and, uh, I found this amazing woman in Canada on Fiverr who helps me write all

00:30:11.520 | the show notes and finds all the links for everything.

00:30:13.800 | I know there are a lot of things on Fiverr.

00:30:15.840 | If you have a microphone, people will pay as we did for the disclosure in some of

00:30:21.160 | our episodes for someone to just record a disclosure.

00:30:23.880 | And if you have a good voice and you have a microphone, you might be

00:30:27.000 | able to do that work in a minute.

00:30:28.560 | Um, so that's another interesting one online where I've found at least on the,

00:30:32.680 | on the, you know, buyer side, I found a lot of tasks and projects that I wanted

00:30:38.000 | to accomplish, even something as simple as we, we upgraded our wireless system

00:30:43.680 | in our house and we use unify, which is a ubiquity product, which is kind

00:30:47.760 | of designed for the enterprise.

00:30:50.280 | And so the way you set it up is just more complicated than other things.

00:30:54.200 | And I thought I have two options.

00:30:55.560 | I could go learn everything about this and watch all the YouTube videos, or I

00:30:59.800 | could find someone who does this for a living and remotely could walk me through

00:31:03.600 | the settings and I could pay them, you know, 25, 30, 40, 50 bucks to spend an

00:31:08.520 | hour and just walk through everything so I can get it completely done and save

00:31:11.400 | myself the five, 10 hours of reading every possible thing about how to set it up.

00:31:16.640 | And so even if you've just learned how to use a particular tool that doesn't

00:31:21.280 | even feel like an enterprise system, like Salesforce, you might still be able to

00:31:25.640 | market yourself as an expert, helping someone set things up or, you know, build

00:31:29.400 | a, a well-designed presentation and keynote or PowerPoint.

00:31:32.280 | I know there's, uh, definitely a market for presentation design also.

00:31:36.040 | Yeah.

00:31:37.280 | All of those, all of those things, Fiverr is a fascinating platform where there's

00:31:42.360 | always room for new entry points because the top rated people naturally

00:31:47.680 | get busy and flooded with orders.

00:31:49.680 | And so you go and you want to book this person cause they've got, you

00:31:52.920 | know, a thousand five-star reviews.

00:31:54.400 | And they're like, well, I'm like booked three weeks out.

00:31:57.560 | And so then you're like, well, okay, well back to the drawing board.

00:31:59.720 | Like, okay, I'm going to take my chance with this guy with fewer reviews.

00:32:02.240 | So that's one way to go there.

00:32:04.040 | Oh, the other thing on that, like if you have a problem that you've overcome,

00:32:09.680 | that you've, you've like solved this problem in your own life, record

00:32:13.280 | the YouTube video about it.

00:32:14.920 | I don't care like how boring it is.

00:32:17.960 | It could just be like a screen recording video.

00:32:19.960 | The reason is like these tend to, if, if, if it was a problem in your life, other

00:32:24.160 | people are looking for how to do it as well.

00:32:26.480 | I had videos on like how to download high resolution images from Instagram.

00:32:32.840 | It had like 9,000 views before they changed the interface.

00:32:36.360 | And my little trick didn't work anymore.

00:32:38.320 | How to create a folder in Gmail.

00:32:40.000 | I think that's still up there.

00:32:41.080 | It still generates views, generates ad revenue every month.

00:32:43.360 | How to, uh, how to stop Dropbox from like taking up your local hard drive

00:32:48.520 | storage or something.

00:32:49.280 | It was like this little unsync checkbox and still generating views and ad

00:32:53.800 | revenue every month.

00:32:54.640 | So, uh, think of these little like mini digital assets that you can create and

00:32:59.440 | you, you have to build a certain subscriber base before you can get

00:33:02.520 | monetized on YouTube.

00:33:04.040 | But if you create enough of these, like just, you know, one of them is bound

00:33:07.880 | to, to hit after a while.

00:33:09.280 | It's just kind of like found money.

00:33:11.320 | It feels like the most passive income in the world to me.

00:33:13.360 | Yeah.

00:33:14.760 | And do you, you said you have to have a certain subscriber base.

00:33:16.960 | Can, can anyone not create a YouTube video and start to monetize?

00:33:20.400 | How does that work?

00:33:21.040 | Your channel needs to have, I want to say a thousand subscribers and maybe 4,000

00:33:26.040 | hours of total watch time.

00:33:27.680 | And then they'll let you turn on monetization.

00:33:29.400 | And then they'll let you turn on the ads.

00:33:31.400 | And, and if you had made a couple of those videos, do you, do those generate

00:33:34.200 | subscribers or is that harder to get than, than views?

00:33:37.240 | Subscribers are probably harder to get than views.

00:33:40.120 | So it's, you kind of have to have a concerted effort at producing content.

00:33:43.800 | But if you have one thing that goes viral, it tends to happen faster than, uh, than

00:33:48.400 | you might think, or at least it has, uh, in my case.

00:33:50.560 | Cool.

00:33:51.600 | Now you also mentioned passive income, which is an interesting, uh, thing that

00:33:55.640 | I'm not sure is passive income a side hustle or is it separate?

00:33:59.440 | And how do you think about that?

00:34:00.920 | I try to think of it as like time leveraged, right?

00:34:02.960 | So the, the, the most passive income that I have is just like, you know, straight

00:34:07.800 | up dividend income, like it's going to happen, you know, quarter after quarter,

00:34:11.920 | whether or not I do anything, the other income streams like income from the blog

00:34:16.120 | and come from the podcast income from YouTube, consider those like kind of more

00:34:19.480 | like time leveraged income streams where it's like, okay, it takes the same amount

00:34:23.880 | of time to produce this blog post.

00:34:26.160 | If 10 people read it or 10,000 people read it, it takes the same time to produce this

00:34:30.120 | video if nobody watches it or, you know, 10,000 people watch it.

00:34:33.960 | So think of the time leverage element.

00:34:36.560 | And if you think about your income as a pie chart today, I think it's natural for

00:34:43.160 | everyone to start out in their career with a hundred percent of that pie chart being

00:34:47.200 | active income, like trading time for money.

00:34:49.400 | But, you know, if the ultimate goal is, you know, retirement or, you know, where

00:34:54.280 | work becomes optional, you kind of need to fill in the rest of that pie chart

00:34:58.520 | with passive income or time leveraged income.

00:35:00.880 | And this is the Warren Buffett thing, like, you know, if you don't find a way to

00:35:03.600 | make money in your sleep, you're going to work until you die.

00:35:05.480 | And it's it's true.

00:35:07.440 | So what can you do in the near term to kind of like grow that little sliver?

00:35:11.800 | You know, maybe it's a little sliver of dividend investments or, you know, savings

00:35:15.400 | account interest at point four percent or whatever awful percent it is now.

00:35:19.200 | One of my favorite examples from the side hustle show in that realm was Matt

00:35:24.840 | Bochnock, whose side hustle was repairing motorcycles in his garage, mechanical

00:35:30.040 | engineer by day, father of three or four by night and repairing motorcycles in his

00:35:34.840 | garage in Chicago, like hours for dollars, service based business, add on Craigslist,

00:35:40.000 | like don't pay dealership rates, bring it to me.

00:35:41.600 | I know what I'm doing.

00:35:42.160 | What Matt did, which I thought was genius, was setting up the camera in the corner of

00:35:47.920 | the garage, films himself doing the repairs.

00:35:50.640 | So now he's got content for YouTube.

00:35:52.680 | He starts selling these full engine rebuild videos.

00:35:55.720 | And fast forward, you know, several years of doing this by investing this little

00:36:01.400 | speculative amount of time where he wasn't getting paid to build this time leveraged

00:36:06.920 | asset. And over the course of several years, you know, now it's not like not really

00:36:12.240 | turning wrenches for dollars anymore.

00:36:13.720 | Now he's making YouTube ad money, making affiliate income from the products he

00:36:17.160 | recommends. He's selling full engine rebuild videos.

00:36:20.480 | Insurance companies have found his channel and are now paying him to do like, would

00:36:24.160 | you make a video for our insurance blog?

00:36:26.240 | I thought that was a really cool example of being proactive about about growing that

00:36:31.560 | like time leverage piece of the pie, even even though it was somewhat speculative,

00:36:35.520 | somewhat risky.

00:36:36.640 | I may not see any return on this, but over time it definitely ended up paying off.

00:36:41.200 | And I guess on a broader sense, you could think of, OK, how can I get paid over and

00:36:45.920 | over again from from work that I do?

00:36:47.840 | What's like that's like the ultimate time leverage.

00:36:50.040 | It doesn't necessarily have to be like, how does this scale?

00:36:53.720 | But maybe it is taking a percentage of those earnings, putting them into, you know,

00:36:58.440 | blue chip dividends.

00:37:00.280 | Maybe it is creating that tutorial demo video for YouTube.

00:37:04.280 | But, you know, it's something that has the potential to reach many, many more people

00:37:08.200 | than just whoever you were doing it for originally.

00:37:11.440 | Yeah, I'll just say sometimes it just takes time, right?

00:37:14.800 | You make a video, it might not get found the first week, the first month.

00:37:18.680 | And but keep in mind that the barrier was low.

00:37:21.240 | So keep trying.

00:37:22.400 | I know content sometimes takes a while to catch on.

00:37:25.040 | You know, as I've been growing this podcast, I've been talking to podcasters and almost

00:37:28.400 | everyone I talked to said, you know, the first 10, 20, 30, 40 episodes were so hard.

00:37:33.280 | I can't remember the percent, but it was like if you can get to 20 episodes in a podcast,

00:37:37.720 | you're in the top five percent because most people don't make it that far.

00:37:41.360 | And so the number one piece of podcast audience growth advice I've gotten is just stay in

00:37:46.640 | the game.

00:37:47.640 | So if you're trying some of these things, recording videos of doing things, don't expect

00:37:51.480 | that if you just record a video of how to use a piece of software better, that tomorrow

00:37:55.600 | it's going to blow up.

00:37:56.940 | But over time, it might build to something that could be pretty meaningful.

00:38:01.160 | And the effort is pretty low to get started.

00:38:03.320 | Yeah, 100 percent.

00:38:05.360 | I was just pulling up my active campaign demo video that I did for YouTube.

00:38:10.560 | This was three summers ago and did pretty much nothing, you know, for the first several

00:38:15.240 | months of being out there.

00:38:18.080 | And even today, now three years later, it's only got 23,000 views, so not huge, you know,

00:38:22.840 | it's not going viral by any means.

00:38:25.520 | But my active campaign affiliate commissions, I think since that time have been five, $6,000.

00:38:32.040 | So in creating this asset, you know, it just becomes another, you know, I'd like to think

00:38:37.240 | of like creating these digital assets that go out into the world and kind of like do

00:38:40.200 | your bidding, like these little minions that come back and bring money back to you.

00:38:44.680 | And that's definitely been probably one of the more successful examples of that.

00:38:48.760 | But didn't, like you said, didn't have a ton of viral success or instant success out of

00:38:53.680 | the gate.

00:38:54.680 | But it's just one of these things.

00:38:55.680 | It just kind of keeps churning along, keeps generating views and revenue every month.

00:38:59.840 | I know there are some larger side hustles that I'm curious how you think fit into someone's

00:39:04.640 | journey.

00:39:05.640 | Like online courses and books and starting a blog, are those things that people should

00:39:11.160 | get their feet wet with side hustles before they start something big?

00:39:14.240 | Or is that something you could just start out the gate?

00:39:17.800 | I like the process of kind of learning as you go with stuff like that.

00:39:22.320 | So if you go into that with that expectation of like, I, like you said, I'm podcasting,

00:39:28.320 | but I'm not making any money from podcasting, right?

00:39:30.000 | Like if you need to make money quickly, choose a different path.

00:39:32.960 | And I do like this path over the long run, because you're going to learn some really

00:39:37.260 | interesting skill sets, you're probably going to be networking and meeting really interesting

00:39:41.360 | people in your niche.

00:39:43.280 | And hopefully you're building up an audience and a network of your own.

00:39:47.720 | I mean, that's been the biggest, you know, speaking of life hacks, one of the biggest

00:39:50.760 | ones for me has been starting this podcast and it was, you know, $50 mic, corner of the

00:39:55.280 | living room, you know, is this thing on type of stuff early on.

00:39:59.160 | But you know, that's allowed me to have conversations with so many different people.

00:40:03.400 | That's allowed me to make friends really all over the world that I never really anticipated.

00:40:09.000 | It was just kind of like, oh, you know, people say if you want to have a personal brand,

00:40:12.720 | you got to have a podcast.

00:40:13.720 | And it was definitely not monetized or not monetized very well in its early days, but

00:40:19.120 | definitely turned into a life changing thing.

00:40:21.560 | So I am definitely pro content creation, blog, podcast, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, whatever

00:40:27.200 | your channel of choice may be, but just, you know, if you put in the consistent effort,

00:40:32.280 | it tends to either find out that you like it and you don't mind that you're not making

00:40:37.080 | any money or you find out that you don't like it and you're like, okay, you know, I'll try

00:40:41.280 | something else.

00:40:42.280 | So there's really, and it's so inexpensive to start, you really have a very limited downside

00:40:47.100 | on that stuff.

00:40:50.200 | Sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest impact and trade coffee is a great addition

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00:41:34.640 | drink coffee, do stuff in Tahoe, it's called bark the moon and it's so delicious.

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00:42:01.160 | Do you all remember episode 122 when I spoke to chef David Chang about leveling up your

00:42:06.000 | cooking at home?

00:42:07.400 | If not, definitely go back and give it a listen, but one of his top hacks was using the microwave

00:42:12.400 | more.

00:42:13.400 | I'll admit I was a skeptic at first, but after getting a full set of microwave cookware from

00:42:18.240 | AnyDay, I'm a total convert and I'm excited to partner with them for this episode.

00:42:22.800 | AnyDay is glass cookware specifically designed to make delicious food from scratch in the

00:42:27.600 | microwave and honestly using it feels like a kitchen cheat code because it speeds up

00:42:32.960 | and simplifies the process so much.

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00:42:41.080 | the same dish that happens to be dishwasher, freezer, and oven safe too.

00:42:45.840 | And if you need a recipe suggestion to kick off your AnyDay adventure, I highly recommend

00:42:50.400 | David Chang's Salmon Rice.

00:42:51.960 | It is so good.

00:42:54.200 | And if you haven't checked out the Matte Black Ayo collection they launched last year, you

00:42:58.720 | have to check it out.

00:43:00.440 | So to get 15% off our new favorite cookware, go to allthehacks.com/anyday.

00:43:06.120 | Again, that's allthehacks.com/anyday for 15% off.

00:43:13.880 | I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show.

00:43:17.700 | Your support is what keeps this show going.

00:43:20.440 | To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to

00:43:25.480 | allthehacks.com/deals.

00:43:28.520 | So please consider supporting those who support us.

00:43:31.600 | Yeah.

00:43:32.600 | One, one piece of advice, if anyone out there is thinking of starting a podcast, Ramit Sethi

00:43:36.360 | gave me the advice that when you start a podcast, you could always just say you're going to,

00:43:41.600 | you know, have season one and not have season two.

00:43:44.660 | So you could have an eight episode season one and not feel like you've necessarily committed.

00:43:49.520 | So when I was first getting going, I was like, you know what, maybe I'll just say I'm going

00:43:53.200 | to launch one season with eight episodes and see what happens.

00:43:56.120 | And by the time I'd recorded the third episode, I was like, I love doing this.

00:43:59.960 | I'm not going to stop at eight, so I don't need to create that structure.

00:44:03.280 | But anytime you're doing stuff like this, you can always set it up so that it's okay

00:44:06.360 | that it's not a forever thing.

00:44:08.200 | Yeah.

00:44:09.200 | I met the host of the Sleep With Me podcast, he goes by Scooter on the podcast, I forget

00:44:16.360 | his name in real life, and it's a boring bedtime story podcast, not a sex podcast.

00:44:22.160 | It's like, you know, plug this in as you're going to sleep, he'll tell you a super boring

00:44:25.960 | story and eventually you'll fall asleep.

00:44:28.080 | But what he told me he did was set quit dates.

00:44:30.680 | So if I am going to put this, you know, arbitrary date on my calendar, three months out, six

00:44:36.280 | months out, and I'm not going to think twice about doing my thing, practicing my craft

00:44:40.960 | until that date.

00:44:41.960 | When that day comes, I'm going to re-evaluate, say like, is this something that I want to

00:44:45.120 | keep doing?

00:44:46.120 | Yes or no.

00:44:47.120 | And that eliminated the day-to-day doubt that can creep in like, is this worth it?

00:44:52.560 | Do I really want to do this today?

00:44:53.880 | It's like, nope, it's not quit date yet, so let's keep at it.

00:44:57.600 | I like that.

00:44:58.600 | So we talked about some of these smaller things, creating some content, we talked about, you

00:45:03.720 | know, some of the things like driving for Lyft or Uber, maybe even becoming a notary,

00:45:08.400 | things that you can do in your spare time.

00:45:10.880 | When people start to think about this, eventually a side hustle kind of becomes something that

00:45:15.080 | could be bigger.

00:45:16.720 | And I know some of these different side hustles that you talk about when you interview guests

00:45:20.240 | on your show, they're bigger endeavors.

00:45:24.320 | How do you think people should think about bigger side hustles and things that could

00:45:28.200 | actually become full-time jobs?

00:45:32.920 | So one of the things I think is important to think about from the early days is, okay,

00:45:41.200 | you know, aside from just like the dabbling stuff that we talked about, but like, if you're

00:45:44.360 | like, okay, this is a business, this is something that I really want to pursue, is trying to

00:45:48.920 | find somebody, you know, three, four, five years down the road, what does their life

00:45:53.240 | look like?

00:45:54.240 | You know, they hit it, they had success, but you know, what's their day-to-day?

00:45:59.040 | And is that a win for you, right?

00:46:00.800 | Because the last thing you want to do is pursue this path, like really put your energy into

00:46:04.600 | it.

00:46:05.600 | And then, you know, get to the quote unquote destination and have it be like, ah, yeah,

00:46:11.040 | this isn't awesome.

00:46:12.040 | Like, this is not what I wanted.

00:46:13.040 | So try to think ahead to the extent that you can, like, okay, what does success look like?

00:46:16.720 | I don't think I'm the world's greatest entrepreneur, probably in the bottom quartile, actually,

00:46:21.440 | like in terms of like scaling and systems and all that stuff.

00:46:25.160 | But if you can figure out a way to remove yourself from the technical delivery of the

00:46:32.600 | work, and if you can build with that intention, if, you know, if that's your goal, right?

00:46:38.000 | Because there's, you know, different paths sometimes, like, I just, you know, I love

00:46:41.280 | cleaning houses, so that's going to be my thing.

00:46:44.760 | It may be a difference in mentality from the early days, if instead of saying, I'm a freelance

00:46:49.000 | writer, saying like, I run a freelance copy agency or freelance writing agency, instead

00:46:53.960 | of like, I walk dogs, I have a dog walking company.

00:46:57.560 | Oh, we had a woman on the show who was like, started a pooper scooper business.

00:47:02.200 | But if instead of I'm a pooper scooper, no, I run a pet waste removal business.

00:47:06.360 | And if you can build that margin and expectation from the clients, like, no, it's not going

00:47:10.200 | to be me doing the work, but you know, we're going to have qualified professionals come

00:47:13.360 | out and do the work.

00:47:14.360 | If you can set that up from the early days, then you're kind of built to scale and potentially

00:47:19.020 | built to sell down the road.

00:47:21.160 | And if you have a business with recurring weekly customers, that can become an attractive

00:47:26.220 | acquisition target for other companies too.

00:47:28.560 | Yeah.

00:47:29.560 | So, a lot of these examples, people had a business.

00:47:32.880 | Are there ways that you suggest people start to generate ideas for a business that they

00:47:38.400 | could start on the side and maybe grow into something bigger?

00:47:41.200 | Oh yeah, I love talking business idea frameworks.

00:47:47.220 | How much time do we have?

00:47:48.220 | We've got a few of these we could actually run through.

00:47:50.000 | The first is, so everybody says, like, you know, start with your passions, start with

00:47:53.440 | your skills.

00:47:54.440 | I want to flip that and say, well, okay, that's definitely one option.

00:47:57.200 | But second option is start with pain points.

00:47:59.960 | And so normally you try and be a little more of an optimistic person, but like you got

00:48:04.520 | to put on your pessimistic hat for this one.

00:48:06.920 | I call this the what sucks method.

00:48:09.560 | And this is where you have a, I just kind of do this on like a notes app on my phone.

00:48:13.680 | Like I'm going through over the course of a day or a week or two weeks, note everything

00:48:19.340 | that bothers you, everything that's a pain point in your life, everything that somebody

00:48:22.240 | else complains to you about, put it in the what sucks file, because on the flip side

00:48:26.520 | of that, there might be a business opportunity.

00:48:29.160 | And that was Erica with her poop scooping business.

00:48:31.320 | She was out in the backyard, cleaning up after her own dog, thinking like, this kind of sucks,

00:48:36.960 | but you know what?

00:48:37.960 | If it sucks for me, it probably sucks for other people too.

00:48:40.160 | I wonder if, I wonder if people would pay to get this done.

00:48:42.880 | So that's kind of the what sucks method, trying to connect pains with what people will pay

00:48:47.120 | for like in this problem solving mode.

00:48:50.160 | Another opportunity is that I like is called the rip pivot and jam method, which comes

00:48:55.000 | from Dan and Ian in the tropical MBA podcast.

00:48:59.880 | This is, you know, step one, rip, find another business that you like, blatantly steal that.

00:49:05.880 | And then step two, really important, pivot that, you know, pivot that to a different

00:49:09.680 | audience, different niche, different industry, whatever it may be, and then jam, go do the

00:49:13.680 | work and where like, I implemented this in, in real life, like I was researching a failed

00:49:19.880 | side hustle of mine in the wine related niche.

00:49:22.600 | Like I had no, like, I know nothing about wine, I don't care about wine and no business

00:49:25.920 | being there.

00:49:26.920 | But in the process of researching that site, I came across this website that was reviewing

00:49:32.440 | wine clubs and you could kind of punch in what you were looking for.

00:49:36.640 | And they were like, you know, you could have user reviews down at the bottom.

00:49:40.960 | And of course, you know, looking back, I think these were kind of like manipulated rankings

00:49:44.560 | where they, you know, they wanted the one that paid them the most affiliate commission

00:49:47.400 | showed up on top.

00:49:48.400 | But I was like, well, it's a really cool model.

00:49:51.440 | What could I pivot that to?

00:49:53.880 | And kind of combining the, the what sucks method as well was like, one of the pain points

00:49:58.520 | that I had in growing the shoe business was like, where do I find qualified virtual remote

00:50:04.120 | outsourced help?

00:50:05.400 | How do I know which of these companies are legit operators?

00:50:08.680 | How does it work?

00:50:09.680 | Is this, uh, do I pay payroll taxes?

00:50:12.440 | Like, you know, how I do, it was totally green.

00:50:14.400 | I didn't know anything about it.

00:50:15.840 | So I pivoted the wine club review site to be a virtual assistant review site and actually

00:50:22.440 | ran that for close to 10 years before selling it, uh, at the end of last year.

00:50:27.100 | But that became the first and largest, um, virtual assistant company directory and review

00:50:31.960 | platform using that rip pivot and jam method.

00:50:35.840 | And then the final method that I'll share today is what I'll call like the sniper method,

00:50:40.880 | which I think works really well for service businesses, for e-commerce type of businesses,

00:50:46.520 | where if you look at Amazon as a shotgun business, right?

00:50:50.720 | We sell everything under the sun and we can have one stop shopping the sniper method or

00:50:55.720 | the sniper business idea method is like, well, what if we became the go-to place for a tiny

00:51:01.200 | sliver of Amazon's catalog?

00:51:03.560 | And it's kind of like how, what the shoe business did, right?

00:51:06.000 | Instead of, you know, if price grabber was the shotgun back in that day, like, okay,

00:51:10.440 | shoe sniper is going to be like, I only want to focus on footwear and I would pick off

00:51:14.440 | that little segment of your business.

00:51:16.120 | You've probably seen that meme where it's like, you know, here's, here's the screenshot

00:51:19.200 | of Craigslist and all of the different startups like that are picking off the different sections

00:51:23.140 | of Craigslist.

00:51:24.140 | Like here's Airbnb, here's TaskRabbit, here, all these different little apps that kind

00:51:28.640 | of pick off little portions of, uh, of a larger business.

00:51:32.440 | Could you give an example of one thing that someone could do just to kind of bring that

00:51:35.960 | last one to life?

00:51:37.760 | I see ads for like a general handyman type of service, but where it may be more compelling

00:51:42.880 | and maybe easier to carve out space.

00:51:44.560 | Like, what if you became the go-to person, like you mentioned for flat screen TV mounting?

00:51:49.600 | That was a, that's a great one because I feel like it's a skill that you don't need as much

00:51:56.880 | skill as a lot of the people who are doing it have.

00:52:00.960 | So it probably, you could probably build a directory of people who would install TVs

00:52:04.360 | in people's homes for, you know, under 50 bucks.

00:52:07.560 | But I imagine if you call a home theater company and ask them to come install your TV or a

00:52:11.080 | handyman, you might be paying a hundred, 150 bucks.

00:52:13.400 | So someone out there could go start the directory of people to install TVs on your wall and

00:52:18.200 | probably take a, you know, a small cut of all the transactions and have a good business.

00:52:23.800 | Yeah.

00:52:24.800 | And in the online world, you see general graphic design firms, we do logos, we do book covers,

00:52:30.700 | we do web design, like we do t-shirts, you know, we do all this stuff.

00:52:34.520 | It's like, okay, what if you could carve out a space?

00:52:36.880 | Like, look, we know book covers, you know, we've done all of these book covers.

00:52:41.680 | Look at these bestselling things in our portfolio, like be the go-to spot for that specific need.

00:52:47.880 | I think that would be an example of using the sniper method.

00:52:50.680 | And even, you could even say like, we only do, you know, vampire romance, or we only

00:52:55.280 | do, you know, self-published, self-help books, or, you know, we only do memoirs, you know,

00:53:00.040 | there's even sub-niches in there, which could get even more snipier.

00:53:03.560 | Yeah.

00:53:04.560 | Yeah.

00:53:05.560 | I mean, one thing that that just made me think about when I think about designing book covers,

00:53:09.880 | that's probably something someone does for their day job.

00:53:13.040 | Obviously, you know, if you're doing something for your day job, you should talk to your

00:53:16.720 | employer before getting in any trouble.

00:53:19.480 | But is turning what you do for your profession at work into freelance work that you could

00:53:25.600 | do for other people, something that can be a good side hustle?

00:53:29.200 | It definitely can be, but like you said, be careful with any sort of non-competes that

00:53:34.800 | may be going on, because you wouldn't want to risk your livelihood there.

00:53:38.720 | We've seen some examples, one was Daniel DiPiazza, he ran a site called Rich 20-something.

00:53:44.520 | But back in the day, he was like working for Sylvan Learning Center or something, like

00:53:47.280 | he was a tutor, and he was making 18 bucks an hour as a tutor.

00:53:50.600 | And he's like, looking at the pricing on the website, like he knows the parents are paying

00:53:53.960 | this company 100 bucks an hour, he's like, there's a lot of margin in there, like what

00:53:57.280 | if I could just go direct?

00:53:59.240 | And so what he ended up doing was like, I'm going to teach this SAT prep class, and I'm

00:54:04.200 | not going to do a one-on-one, I'm going to do it in a group setting.

00:54:06.560 | So he had like all of these people come in, just exploded his hourly rate by going one

00:54:11.960 | to many, and cutting out the middleman.

00:54:14.640 | So it's like, I don't know if Sylvan was too happy about that, but so just make sure, you

00:54:19.920 | know, that one lended itself well to that type of model.

00:54:23.040 | But just make sure, you know, I don't want to get anybody in trouble with their day job.

00:54:26.320 | Yeah, of course.

00:54:27.320 | But, you know, if you were a designer during your day job, you could probably do freelance

00:54:31.760 | design on the side.

00:54:33.040 | I wouldn't do it for a company that competes with your primary employer, and I'd get permission,

00:54:37.080 | but yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities to spin up freelance work around things that

00:54:42.320 | you've done in the past.

00:54:44.320 | And so one thing I didn't ask is, you know, you keep having all these examples of things

00:54:48.160 | you've tried, you know, you're a full-time side hustler, I guess now, how do you make

00:54:54.120 | a living?

00:54:55.120 | Is it a stack of 20, 30 different side hustles?

00:54:57.800 | Is it one primary thing?

00:54:59.160 | How have you turned this into your kind of lifestyle?

00:55:02.880 | It is a stack, but most of the stacks are in the same deck and that's the Side Hustle

00:55:08.920 | Nation deck.

00:55:09.920 | So the two biggest pieces of the pie right now are sponsorships on the podcast and affiliate

00:55:16.200 | revenue through the site in the email list.

00:55:19.120 | The third leg of the stool historically has been my own side hustle experiments that was

00:55:22.960 | like, you know, where the virtual assistant site lived.

00:55:25.720 | That's where the shoe business lived.

00:55:27.920 | That's where like the self-publishing and the freelancing and the eBay experiments and

00:55:32.160 | like all the other stuff kind of lived in that third leg of the stool.

00:55:35.080 | That's kind of admittedly a shorter leg of the stool these days.

00:55:39.360 | Outside of just side hustles, you know, you optimize so many things in that regard.

00:55:44.280 | Are there any favorite life, money, travel hacks you have that you want to share with

00:55:48.600 | people?

00:55:49.600 | I mean, one thing that has been immensely helpful, especially with a couple young kids

00:55:55.320 | is getting the workout in first thing in the morning.

00:55:59.160 | And this is like just, you know, 10, 20 minutes, usually like body weight stuff, maybe some

00:56:03.960 | kettlebells, maybe some bands.

00:56:05.960 | But just getting that in, I feel a million times better the rest of the day when I have

00:56:10.280 | checked that off first thing in the morning.

00:56:12.880 | And then just like favorite tools wise, I mean, everybody probably knows about Last

00:56:18.080 | Pass, Text Expander.

00:56:19.760 | I was singing the praises of Gmail shortcuts just this morning, like flying through email.

00:56:25.160 | Like if you're not using the R and the K and the J and the control enter to send stuff

00:56:30.120 | like you're missing out, like I could process stuff really fast that way.

00:56:33.720 | And then other desktop productivity thing that I use all the time is called ClipX for

00:56:38.840 | Windows, which is a clipboard manager that lets you be like, we'll bring up like the

00:56:44.000 | last 25 things I want to say that you've copied and pasted, because I'm always, I don't know.

00:56:48.480 | Sometimes it's like, I want the third or fourth thing down on the list, but instead of having

00:56:51.120 | to go re-grab it again, you can just use ClipX for that.

00:56:55.160 | And I want to say CopyClip is maybe the Mac equivalent of that, but yeah, lots of different

00:57:01.360 | tools.

00:57:02.360 | Yeah.

00:57:03.360 | I use Alfred on the Mac, which is a replacement for the Spotlight Finder.

00:57:07.040 | And one of its features is that it stores your clipboard and you can go back and look

00:57:11.080 | at different things, even things like if you take a screenshot, all kinds of stuff like

00:57:14.880 | that.

00:57:15.880 | So I don't know what I would do without Alfred on the computer, it would add significant

00:57:19.680 | time to my day.

00:57:20.680 | Yeah, for sure.

00:57:21.680 | Cool.

00:57:22.680 | Well, this was fantastic.

00:57:23.680 | I feel like if I didn't start this podcast, I'd be ready to go start a few other side

00:57:27.520 | hustles, but you know, this is really the side hustle for me right now.

00:57:31.360 | And I'm excited to use some of these tactics to try to help grow it over the next few months

00:57:36.460 | and weeks and hopefully years.

00:57:38.120 | Any other parting advice?

00:57:39.480 | I mean, the big thing that I like to say is just think of it as an experiment.

00:57:44.640 | I mean, life is one big experiment and I don't think side hustles are any different.

00:57:48.320 | I read somewhere that at any given point, Amazon is testing like a thousand little variables

00:57:52.960 | on their website, trying to eke out that next like 0.002 conversion rate.

00:57:57.540 | And I think we can apply the same method to our own life, probably on a smaller scale,

00:58:02.600 | but say like, what are you experimenting with?

00:58:05.160 | What are you testing this month?

00:58:06.320 | Like maybe it's, you know, doing the workout first thing in the morning.

00:58:09.920 | Maybe it is starting that podcast.

00:58:11.880 | Maybe it's making a YouTube video.

00:58:13.120 | Maybe it's, you know, what happened if I went vegan?

00:58:16.440 | What happened?

00:58:17.440 | You know, what would happen if I, you know, quit coffee?

00:58:20.320 | I don't know.

00:58:21.320 | Like just put out some crazy experiments, just a test, see what would happen and kind

00:58:26.720 | of re-evaluate on those results.

00:58:28.920 | But in terms of side hustles, I think this experimenter's mindset just reduces the sting

00:58:34.680 | of the inevitable failures that come along the way.

00:58:36.720 | Cause it's like, you know, the first thing is probably not going to be a hit, but if

00:58:41.320 | you've positioned it in your mind as an experiment, you can kind of play scientist in the laboratory,

00:58:46.620 | you know, dust off and revisit the hypothesis and then go try something new.

00:58:52.280 | Great advice.

00:58:53.280 | Thank you.

00:58:54.280 | Where can people find more about you and all these side hustles online?

00:58:56.760 | Of course, we'd love to have you tune into the side hustle show in your favorite podcast

00:59:02.560 | app, SideHustleNation.com/ideas is a, it's my constantly updated laundry list of, you

00:59:08.760 | know, part-time money-making ideas that you could start today.

00:59:12.120 | There is no opt-in required over there to hopefully get the creative juices flowing

00:59:16.800 | beyond some of the ideas that we, that we talked about today.

00:59:20.620 | That sounds great.

00:59:21.620 | All right.

00:59:22.620 | Thank you so much.

00:59:23.620 | I really appreciate your time.

00:59:24.620 | Thanks, Chris.

00:59:26.840 | Wow.

00:59:28.760 | You should definitely check out the amazing list of side hustles on Nick's site.

00:59:32.680 | I'll link to it in the show notes.

00:59:34.400 | I know I'm definitely not monetizing my free time like I could, so I'm already trying to

00:59:38.600 | figure out what types of YouTube videos I can start recording and monetizing, of course.

00:59:43.080 | Also, I'm actually printing up some great All The Hacks stickers.

00:59:46.600 | So if you want me to mail you one, head over to allthehacks.com/stickers.

00:59:51.160 | And thank you so much for tuning in.

00:59:53.040 | If you're enjoying the show, please consider sharing your favorite episode with a few people

00:59:56.900 | you think might enjoy it.

00:59:58.080 | And if you want to get in touch, I'm Chris@allthehacks.com and @Hutchins on Twitter.

01:00:03.400 | That's it for now.

01:00:05.040 | See you next week.

01:00:16.400 | I want to tell you about another podcast I love that goes deep on all things money.

01:00:20.960 | That means everything from money hacks to wealth building to early retirement.

01:00:24.760 | It's called The Personal Finance Podcast, and it's much more about building generational

01:00:29.100 | wealth and spending your money on the things you value than it is about clipping coupons

01:00:33.440 | to save a dollar.

01:00:34.980 | It's hosted by my good friend, Andrew, who truly believes that everyone in this world

01:00:38.920 | can build wealth, and his passion and excitement are what make this show so entertaining.

01:00:44.080 | I know because I was a guest on the show in December 2022, but recently I listened to

01:00:49.320 | an episode where Andrew shared 16 money stats that will blow your mind, and it was so crazy

01:00:54.660 | to learn things like 35% of millennials are not participating in their employer's retirement

01:00:59.620 | plan.

01:01:00.620 | And that's just one of the many fascinating stats he shared.

01:01:04.040 | The Personal Finance Podcast has something for everyone.

01:01:06.780 | It's filled with so many tips and tactics and hacks to help you get better with your

01:01:10.440 | money and grow your wealth.

01:01:12.300 | So I highly recommend you check it out.

01:01:14.420 | Just search for The Personal Finance Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you

01:01:18.860 | listen to podcasts and enjoy.