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A little bit of top-line revenue. Today it's all about the side hustle. I bring you an interview with Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and today is Monday, January 19, 2015. This is the show where we teach you how to make money today, how to make a little bit of extra money on the side and inspire your creativity in the hopes that you'll go out and improve your cash flow.

And today, I'm going to primarily give you ideas for unique ways to accomplish that. My guest today is a man named Nick Loper and Nick is the author and the founder of Side Hustle Nation. The website is sidehustlenation.com. He hosts a show called the Side Hustle Show, a podcast.

And the entire focus of his site and of his work is clearly indicated in the title. He's all about how to build up something on the side that will allow you to increase your income for whatever purpose you have for increasing your income. And maybe that would lead into a new business of some kind.

One of the things that we explore on the show quite a bit is income, how to improve and increase your income. There's probably a point of diminishing returns at which this is simply not a priority. But for many of us, that is a major focus and there are many ways to produce income.

We talk a lot about ways to produce income at your current job, in your current business. But one sure-fired way of creating additional income is to do more work. And for many people, that's more effectively done with some sort of side project, some sort of side job. And the market for side projects, side jobs has dramatically changed.

Now, whether this is something that you need to do temporarily or it's an ongoing focus, whether it's something that you're doing as a way of transitioning from what you are doing into a new business, that's up to you. And obviously, you'll have to decide that within your own context.

But I've watched over the last few years just some really exciting trends of just new opportunities that have never existed. In general, I see a transition available to people to do more and more work in unique niches. And you'll hear in the interview that Nick and I talk a little bit about that, about how to put together full-time income from multiple side projects.

And there's an increasing trend in this direction in industry. My hope is that today's interview simply sparks your creativity and gives you some ideas so that instead of simply going and delivering pizzas, which is certainly a valid option, you can use that as a metaphor and find something that might lead to broader exposure, might lead to more opportunities.

This can be a really, really helpful strategy to just get you over the hump. Perhaps you're working a job that you love and in a career in an environment that you really enjoy, which by the way, I've got a show on my show list that I've been meaning to do of all the amazing benefits of working at a steady job in a steady corporation.

I have tried to balance the tone a little bit on the show instead of focusing so much on entrepreneurship, just simply recognizing that there are pros and cons, because I really do believe there are pros and cons. And for me, I prefer entrepreneurship, but there are many people and there are many advantages to working in just a steady corporation where you have a steady paycheck.

But continuing with the point, whether it's something you're doing as a temporary method, just increase your income or whatever your reason, that's up to you. But I hope this interview with Nick will bring you some ideas and I encourage you to check out his content. One of the things I'm trying to do on the show, I hope you find it helpful.

If there's a particular topic that I'm not going to create the side hustle nation, Nick's already done it. I don't see any reason to spend any of my energy trying to create that. And so I love to profile people who might be a resource for you. And if you are in need of a way to earn some extra income, go check out his show and listen to a bunch of his episodes, and maybe that will fuel your creativity and help you.

And then feel free to come on back over here when you need to. That's why I bring you some of these shows, is to profile some resources that might be helpful for you. Again, I don't see any point in trying to do something that somebody else is doing well.

There are so many massive needs, especially with regard to finance, that I prefer to focus on the things that I don't see being done well. And so although I want to bring you ideas from time to time, I thought the best way to bring you some of these ideas would be in the context of an interview.

And now for more information, if this is of great interest to you, then go on over and check out some of Nick's content. Enough talking, let's get to it. So Nick, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. I appreciate you being with me today. What's happening, man? Been looking forward to having you on.

We met originally at Podcast Movement, was that six months ago at this point? And I was intrigued with the concept of your site, Side Hustle Nation. And I wasn't previously familiar with it. After meeting you, though, I had gone back and looked through some of your content and just was fascinated with what you're doing.

I thought it would be extremely valuable content to bring to my audience. So what I'd love to start with, though, is introduce the genesis of Side Hustle Nation. What's your story? What were you doing and how did Side Hustle Nation come out of that? This was my way of spreading the gospel of this lower risk brand of entrepreneurship, saying, hey, you don't need to jump off the cliff into the unknown.

You can start a business on the side. You can ramp this thing up as slowly, as quickly as you want, but do it in a way that you're comfortable with. Because that was my experience. It was three years of nights and weekends for me before I felt comfortable quitting my job.

And even then, it took a couple of beers to get up the nerve when I was talking with my boss at dinner. And I don't know how people do it. I'm going to find a way to pay the rent next month. And they just go. And it's like, well, that's not me.

And I don't think that's for the percentage of the population that's more risk averse like me. This is the site for you. How to earn money outside of your day job while keeping that day job. What was the business you were engaged in previously? I had a comparison shopping site for shoes called Shoesniper.com.

And then the business that you transitioned to was Side Hustle Nation? So it's transitioned. So I should back it up. So on my first day of self-employment, of all days, Google decides this is the day they're going to crawl my site for quality scores. And as luck would have it, it's also the day that the server decides to crash.

And so, of course, they crawl the site. They say, hey, look, this is horrible. It doesn't even load. We can't let you advertise with us. Like, whatever. This is temporary. This is fine. We'll get it fixed. And then even then, once the site was back up and running, it had kind of raised this red flag for them.

So the site was monetized through referral relationships, affiliate relationships. If somebody bought a pair of shoes through the site, the store would send a finder's fee or commission back to me. And so they looked at the site and said, this is a crappy affiliate site. Your sole purpose of existing is to drive traffic to other websites.

And I said, that's the sole purpose of Google for existing. Who are you to talk? But they were serious because that was like 80 percent of my traffic. So it took the whole summer. And so that was a very stressful summer. I used to have hair before that time.

Trying to get back into their good graces and learn how to make a site that was acceptable to them in terms of the value add for their users. But I guess it opened my eyes. Because my whole shtick is on diversification. If you're relying on one source of income, your day job, for example, you're in an inherently risky position.

And then once I quit, I was in essentially the same risky position because I was relying on just the shoe business as my one source of income. And worse than that, that one source of traffic determined a big percentage of it. So from there, I was always interested in starting other side hustles, other websites, other experiments, other projects.

And so that was kind of and that's accelerated with the Side Hustle Nation blog and podcast to have an outlet, to have an excuse to talk about all these different things that people are doing. - One of the reasons why I was most excited to bring you on is because your entire focus is helping people build part-time, build side income.

And I guess the modern way of saying a part-time job is the side hustle. I like the nomenclature. I don't know where it came from, but it seems like that's the standard way of referring to it. And one of the themes that on my show, I continually talk about is the wheel of financial planning.

And the amount of income that we earn is one important component of financial planning. In order to increase our wealth, we only have a few levers that we can push. And one of those levers that we can push is the amount of income that we can earn. But for many people, it feels difficult to generate extra income simply out of employment.

Perhaps they're on a salaried basis or on an hourly basis and there aren't overtime opportunities available. And so in this scenario, you're pushed in the direction of needing to find some kind of extra work. And so that means part-time job, that means some sort of side business. What intrigues me though is how what I've observed in the last five or 10 years, the just massive proliferation of opportunities that has come about.

It used to be, Dave Ramsey is famous for saying, "Go deliver pizzas." And he means that as a metaphor for some kind of part-time job. But to me, those part-time jobs, whether it's delivering pizzas or waiting tables at night or bartending bar, things like that, they have some potential.

But they're not, they all have a cap on them as far as the amount of income that can be earned. But there are many more exciting opportunities emerging. And especially with some of the electronic connectivity that we all enjoy now. So what I'd love to spend the bulk of our time today talking about is discussing some of the opportunities that you see in your work that are really exciting of how people are generating income on the side with their side hustle.

What are you seeing as some of the biggest growth areas of the types of businesses that people are starting? There are the different types of services that they're offering. What are you seeing as having the biggest growth right now? You bet. And I like to focus on the earning potential side because the other part of the equation is your spending.

And you can only save so much before you're living in a grass hut. And there's only so much you can cut, right? Okay, I stopped cable, I stopped buying my coffee, whatever it is. But your earning potential is potentially limitless or hopefully in theory, limitless. And I like the idea of delivering pizza.

I think that's a good metaphor because it is, even though it's not something that's time leveraged, it's something that's immediate. There's instant gratification. And you're going to find similar things with a lot of the freelancing stuff, the sharing economy stuff, the Airbnbs, the Uber drivers of the world. A friend of mine sent me a note a couple months ago and said, "We made, him and his girlfriend, have made two grand in the last few months dog sitting." And there's a couple of sites, dog.ak is one and rover.com is another.

They're like Airbnb but for dogs. And I was like, "Oh my gosh." And hearing that totally made me want to set up shop and try it out because it's like, "Oh shoot, we already got one dog. I can walk two of them at the same time too. That's fine." So those are some of the fastest ways I think to get started is to tap into some of those existing marketplaces or the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, like driving for Uber and Lyft and doing the Airbnb, the dog sitting.

I think of what would be another one. Shoot, I had a guy on the show who makes his full-time living just buying and selling stuff on Craigslist. It's nuts. And he does appliances. Think about the biggest, bulkiest, hard-to-transfer item that you can think of. You're talking about Ryan Finlay, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I also interviewed him on my show some months back and I was fascinated with his blog for at least a couple of years. And he's got such an amazing story of just, again, creating a business off of this thing that I would never think of doing. And yet, he supports his income and he got out of debt and he's built a nice little business for himself buying and selling appliances on Craigslist.

But there are many people doing that actually, not only with appliances but all these little niches. Have you had exposure to other people doing something similar on Craigslist? It's not something I've tried myself. Actually, my Lyft driver in Dallas for a podcast movement, we got in touch. I said, "Hey, I'm going to this podcast conference." He's like, "Oh, my God.

I'm driving all day. Every day, I love podcasts. I'll check out your show." And so, he sent me a note after the episode with Ryan and was like, "Oh, my gosh. I found my first thing. I got it on the free section of Craigslist and I made like $300 this week." I was like, "Oh, my gosh.

That's awesome." So, people taking action and I like Ryan's approach. I want to make $50 a day. I want to make $100 a day and just looking for those deals to go out and go after. So, let's talk about the sharing economy because this is a topic that fascinates me.

The big ones are Uber and Lyft for the car services. Do you think those are viable ways for people to build some part-time income as it stands today in January 2015? Yeah, absolutely. I think you can get started right away and especially if you live in or near a big metro area.

The demand just keeps going up for that stuff. So, that's a pretty cool one. What are the requirements for somebody who has a car? Is it any person with any car can sign up as a driver or what are their requirements to get started as a driver? Well, thankfully, I was asking Harry Campbell who's like the rideshare guy.com about this and he says you got to have a car that's 2006 or newer in pretty good shape and I think they do some sort of background check or like test drive with you with somebody who's local on the ground.

But, you could be up and running within a week if you submit your application and get it done. Okay. Also, then Airbnb. So, we all at this point, I would assume we're probably familiar with this. The idea of just renting out a part of your house. Are people doing this and generating substantial income from it?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I found a guy who actually has an apartment in Amsterdam and so he started out renting out a room in it, renting out two rooms in it. And then he was like, "Forget that. I'm going to rent out the whole thing and I'm going to go travel myself." And so, he's actually ended up making a full lifestyle business out of it.

I think he cleared like 60 grand last year from this one apartment and he was in Brazil when I talked to him. It's just nuts. So, you never know. And he made the episode because my beef with that was like, "Look, we're out in the suburbs. Who would want to stay here?" And he's like, "Look, if you have hotels in your town, then there's obviously a demand for it." And I was like, "Well, I guess you're right because there's a handful of every chain hotel two miles away from us.

So, maybe there is a market." So, not something that I've tested out yet, but it's something to think about for sure. Are there other sites that are coming online to compete with Airbnb that you're aware of that people are starting to use? The other one that I've heard of is like Wimdo, which is like a European knockoff of it.

I don't know if they have the same traffic. Okay. Other of the sharing economy, you mentioned dog walking. Are there any other variations of this? Sharing your boat, sharing your yard, sharing your parking space, things like that that you're aware of that people are using? Oh, my gosh. There's one for every niche imaginable.

The one I wanted to try was airport parking. What was it called? Relay rides. They're out of San Francisco Airport. And they wouldn't take my car because it was over 100,000 miles. But they offer free airport parking and they would rent it out to somebody while you're on your trip.

And so, you have potential to park for free and earn money if somebody actually rented your car. But they wouldn't take mine because it was too old. But for everything imaginable, like park atmyhouse.com, I believe is one of them. There's just a ton. Rent your snowboard while you're not using it.

I forget the sites for all these. But for any kind of asset you have, which is cool in the big picture, right? Because we can get by with owning less stuff and become more efficient with our resources, more minimalist and stuff. So, I think that's really cool. Talk to me about some of the online freelancing kind of service offerings and explain how, if I'm looking and saying, "Well, I don't have any stuff that I'm not going to share my apartment with friends, but I do maybe have some skills." What would be the process of going through and figuring out how to find some clients and generate some skills with some of the new online listing sites?

You bet. You bet. There's... So, I had Brian Harris on the show recently from videofruit.com. Super, super smart guy. And so, he makes the argument that there's three main ways to make money online. He said, "You can sell advertising. You can sell affiliate stuff, which typically requires a ton of traffic to make it interesting.

You can sell a product. You could sell a physical product. You could sell an e-book, a course or something like that, which is cool. That's something that I've done. And it still requires a little bit of an audience, a little bit of a platform. Or you can, unless you really hit it right with Amazon or some of these other places, he's like, "Or you can sell a service." He makes the argument that selling a service is the fastest way to get started because you don't need a website.

You don't need to create a product. And you can just go out and find a customer, find your first customer. All of a sudden, you're in business. And so, he's like, "What do you...?" It's kind of the classic question. "What do people ask you for help about? And what are you more knowledgeable about than the average person?" But beyond that, he said, "Look, if you can find the epic how-to resource guide that somebody has posted on their blog, you could be the guy that just does that.

You don't even need to invent this service necessarily. Somebody has spelled out the step-by-step thing. And the one I found recently was, "How to get your website SEO penalty removed," or something like the 12-step thing. And it's time-intensive to do that. But here it is. It's all spelled out for you.

So, if you have some working knowledge of the basics of this stuff, go find a customer who would be interested in this. I like it. One of the things I see, and those three categories make a lot of sense to me, because even with my experience with Radical Personal Finance, I originally started off and simply said, "The most direct way for me to earn income off of my efforts here would be to sell my own services, to sell my own financial planning services." And I received lots of inquiries for that.

And that actually would be the most direct way for me to earn income. Products have their place. They're less direct. And I have to create something that solves the needs of the audience. But it's more direct than, I don't need quite as big of an audience as I do for mass advertising or affiliate links.

But all of them can be effective and functional. But just by focusing on the service, to me, this seems much more genuine. Because essentially what's happening is the role of the doorkeeper is diminished. And it used to be that if you were going to get involved in an industry or get involved in an industry or in a job, in a profession, you needed to get past all of the gatekeepers.

And you needed to get the stamps of approval put on you by the powers that be. You needed to get the job. You need to get in with the company. You need to get all of this external proof. Because it was difficult for one individual to start to be able to publish and publicize their services on an inexpensive basis.

The closest parallel that we had for being able to do this was, the only way you could do it previously was advertising, which was traditionally through mainstream channels, would have been very expensive. Or through things like direct marketing, direct mail. All of those things are fairly expensive. But now when with minimal cost you can get your message out there, then if you can help your message, there's a whole new challenge to it, but if you can help your message get found by the right person, then you cut down the barrier.

You don't have to go through the Washington Times for them to approve your ad and run your ad and you pay their fees to gain access to the customers. You have Google. You have the ability to get in front of the people that matter. And so I think one of the skill sets that we need to gain as a population of people paying attention is that skill set of self-marketing.

Always managing our brand, managing the skills that we're marketing, whether that's unique technical skills or whatever they are, we've got to take that on. And this is a whole new skill set that's never existed in the past because we just went and found the job doing something for somebody else.

My friend Julian Gordon has a quote. He says, "We're all already entrepreneurs. Our employer is just our biggest client." And it's kind of the mindset shift of, "Okay, look, I'm going to have to go and get this done and make something happen." In most cases, all it is is an email to say, "Hey, I saw you might be interested in such and such a service.

I've worked with blank insert name here to build trust." And then you're off to the races. I've always been interested in the idea of doing things like putting a wrap on my car and selling that service. I used to drive a lot and I always thought that would be interesting.

What do you know about things like that? I know I had my virtual assistant research. I wanted to put a shoe sniper sticker or something on my car. They're like, "Then every mile I drive could be a deduction. It could be advertising expense." And they were very much like, "No, no, here's the IRS regulation.

That's not how it works. That's not allowed." But there are companies out there. I've yet to find a super, super legit one. So I found a couple that were kind of shady. So I'm not sure if it's a fragmented local market for people. Somebody used to park in our neighborhood.

It was like some juice company their car was wrapped with. So I assume they were getting paid for that unless they worked for the company. But those ones have always been intriguing for me. So if you know of any legit operators in that space, definitely let me know. No, I haven't found one.

When I researched it in the past with my car, I found, A, your car has to be pretty new and fancy, and mine wasn't. And B, nothing felt fully legitimate. Everything just felt a little bit shady to me. And it seemed as though the people in the middle weren't quite legit.

What about Fiverr, Odesk, Elance, these types of services? If I've got some specific skills, how can I get started with those types of sites, publicizing my work and making a little bit of side money? So I really like the idea of tapping into these existing marketplaces, these existing platforms.

Because when you're just starting out, whether you're a blogger or a freelancer or anything, getting those first customers can be tough. And so it makes sense to go where the buyers already are. For e-books, that's Amazon. For courses, in my case, that was udemy.com. And I talked to a gentleman last year on Fiverr.

And so he had the claim to fame or the sound bite, "You earned enough money on Fiverr to buy a house within a year, in cash." And I was like, "This is just nuts." Because I had used Fiverr for years as a buyer, but never had even given a second thought to selling stuff.

What could I possibly sell for $5 that wouldn't make me go crazy? And he made the point, "Look, this is the marketplace of goods and services starting at $5." Which was, I didn't think I'd bought any of the upsells at that point, so I didn't really realize that. So starting at $5.

And he made the point that, "Look, all of your $5 gigs can just be digital deliveries, or really quick deliveries that don't take up a ton of your time. And then in the gig extras, if somebody really wants to engage with you, that's when you're going to start spending more and more of your time." And the guy is a marketing genius and cross-selling.

You're like, "Hey, if you were interested in this, you might also be interested in this. And I noticed you bought ServiceX, but it looks like we also could work together on this." And now what's really cool, for Fiverr, for people who've been on the platform for a little bit and have made a little bit of sales, you can sell whatever you want.

You can send people custom quotes. I sent somebody a proofreading or a book editing gig the other day. It's just like, "Oh, whatever it is, $140, just send it off." And they accept it. If you can engage somebody in a conversation, then you can send them whatever custom project that you want now.

So that's really cool. With Elance, with ODesk, very, very crowded. It's a global marketplace. You're competing with people in India and Pakistan and the Philippines and stuff. But that's okay, because there's always a point of differentiation. And I'll send you a link for the show notes. There's a couple really good podcasts I've heard on getting started on Elance specifically.

Think about the position of somebody who's looking for work on there. They're looking for work because they don't know somebody in their network. They don't have a guy. If I had a guy to do my whatever project I need done, I would just hire them. Instead of thinking of it as, "I'm going to do this project for this random person.

I'm going to become their go-to person for whatever skill." He ended up doing some writing projects for five bucks and then was able to really prove his worth and had a long-term client from that. I thought that was a cool story. I'll send you a link for that. The other way is to stand out.

When I post jobs for Elance, it's probably the same way for you. You get back a ton of just copy and paste crap. You didn't even read the thing. It's just like, "Oh, I'm so great. Check out my portfolio," blah, blah, blah. What this one guy started doing was sending personalized video pitches.

Being very picky about which jobs he was bidding on and then sending a personalized video pitch. Just turning on the webcam and saying, "Hey, I'm so-and-so. I'd love to help you out. I've worked with such and such client." No one else was doing that. Maybe more people are doing it now.

I've still yet to receive one of these things. It might be really, really cool to break out of the clutter in that sense. I've learned a little bit since doing my show. I'm in a position where I've never been, where all of a sudden now I've got to deal with all kinds of incoming messages.

What's intriguing to me is how something that simple is changing the medium can make a big difference. I've had listeners, even just last night, somebody on Twitter sent me a link to their YouTube video. Once I was assured that it wasn't spam, because you get these links sometimes and pretty careful about clicking on a link.

But once I was assured it wasn't actually just a virus, I went ahead and followed it and I watched the YouTube video they created. I've had listeners send me audio feedback in, send me an MP3 file attached to their email. I can't resist listening to them. If you think about changing the medium like that, I never thought of doing that and sending that to somebody.

But we all have a webcam built into our phone and built into our computer. We all have an audio recorder built into our phone and built into our computer. Something as simple as taking the time to record a personalized audio message and then attaching that to the email right with our phone, or recording a webcam, recording a video, posting it on YouTube and attaching that link to our email.

What a great idea for differentiation. Maybe members of the audience could take that and apply that to whatever their industry is. I don't see it happening a lot, but yet it's been effective when people have sent it to me. I don't know if I would be thrilled to get an audio message just from someone randomly on email.

But if you're actively pitching a product to people who are interested in it, absolutely. Do whatever you can to stand out. Right, but there's got to be an interest. Certainly, somebody spamming me from the email. They just took their telemarketing from the inbound call that was going to voicemail and attached it to an email.

That doesn't do any good. But if you're trying to reach out to somebody and share a personal message, perhaps you have to be careful where you apply it. But at least I've listened to the ones that people have sent me, and I've been surprised at how difficult it was for me to turn off.

Even lengthy messages were probably, if somebody had sent me that lengthy of an email, I might not have paid much attention. But I wound up paying attention to their audio message just because it was in a different format. What about, so you write a little bit, and you had listed, you have a site, you have a page on your site of talking about ideas for side hustles.

And one of the things that you're doing yourself, and what I'm doing, is profiting essentially off of marketing information. And I always feel like those of us who are doing this, trying to tell people how to do things, and then making money off of telling people how to do things, we've got some thin ice that we're standing on.

Because you've got to be very careful. Because it seems like the way to get rich these days is just start a blog, and make it, grow it huge, and start a podcast, and grow it huge, or start a YouTube channel and grow it huge. And certainly there are people who have done that.

But yet it's a difficult, it's not necessarily such an easy transition. How do you coach people when they come to you and say, "Nick, I'm just going to, I've got a great idea for a blog. I'm going to start a site telling people how to make money on the side." Don't start a blog, that's what I tell them.

My hourly rate from blogging is so far below minimum wage, it wouldn't be legal. It's a very, very slow path. And a blog, a blog podcast in itself, it's not a business. It can be a marketing channel for your business, but it's not, until there's something to sell, until there's a really good revenue model behind it, it's not a business on its own.

And that's the old joke, right? What's the best way to make money online? Sell people the secret to making money online. And it is a fine line, right? So in my goals post for this year, I addressed that saying, "Look, I want to be a practitioner more than I want to be a preacher.

I want to be out testing this stuff." If I had to follow my seven-step system to internet riches, I would be doing it. And so, this kind of the, you know, being out there and getting my hands dirty and like doing the work and then kind of sharing the results.

That's been the most effective way to build the blog readership and to build the podcast as well, finding other people who are practitioners. How do you coach people toward figuring out, they come to you and say, "Nick, I know I need to do something, but I just don't know what to do." Do you have some ideas for how to coach people through the process of figuring out what they're going to try when they're thinking about developing a side hustle?

Well, I think, well, I would start with kind of an inventory of, you know, skills and interests and what that could be is just, you know, writing down your or dusting off the resumes. And like, well, any job you've ever had, by definition, someone thought that was a skill worth paying for, right?

Because they were paying you for it. So that might be one list or one circle to kind of start with. You know, what you're interested in would be another circle. Like the last thing you need is another day job that you hate. Like you want to have something that you're at least somewhat interested in working on.

And then the final circle would be like, what kind of challenges have you overcome or what kind of hurdles have you overcome or what kind of problems have you solved in your own life? Because odds are other people might be facing those same issues, those same challenges. And in like in the context of the shoe site, you know, from their very early days, you know, what were my skills?

Like, so I learned a little bit about online advertising at an internship that I had learned a little bit about affiliate marketing there. I played around building very, you know, rudimentary websites in college. And so that was kind of my inventory of skills related to that business and interests.

Like I honestly was not interested in shoes or footwear or being a sneaker head at all, but I was interested in the process of building an asset, building a business, building a side hustle. And so that kind of qualified the interest box for me. And then the problem that was overcoming was just like, you kind of a frustration with the existing comparison shopping experience.

Like they weren't doing a good enough job or they weren't delivering as accurate as a result because they had to be everything to everyone rather than, you know, really focusing on being excellent in one vertical. So that was the example of the three intersecting circles, I guess. It's interesting how when you do think about overlap, by looking at various interests, one of the things I like about the concept of side hustle is you don't have to depend on one thing to create a living wage all at once.

And I think this is what makes a lot of businesses find difficulty is you've got to go from, you know, the median wage is 40 something thousand dollars. So I got to take my business to at least 40,000 dollars or I can't do anything or it's a no go.

So it's either 40,000 dollars or nothing. But with a side hustle, you can build up a nice side income and an extra thousand dollars a month might make a very significant difference toward your goals, whatever they be. Whether it's paying off some debt or whether it's creating some increasing savings or purchasing a specific item that you're working toward.

The thousand dollars a month can make a substantial difference and a thousand dollars a month is not an unreasonable number to get with a variety of different skills and interests. And so just the whole concept of being able to say where do my skills overlap, where do these different, what are my different ideas and then exploring them and see what takes off.

Have you had any guests on your show who have done various things, multiple side hustles that have become in the aggregate a full time source of income? Well that's what I'm doing. But I'll give you the example. So my wife's side hustle of choice is photography. And so her and a friend, they were hobbyist photographers doing family pictures and stuff.

And it was an interest that had grown over the years and then finally enough people were like, "You guys are kind of good." So they got the nerve up to put an ad on Craigslist and say, "We will shoot your wedding for you." I understand you're taking a big risk.

We don't have any wedding pictures in our portfolio yet, but we'll shoot your wedding. And they started at like $200, very, very, very, very low end. Got flooded with responses. Never knew what to expect. Like who's looking for a wedding photographer on Craigslist? Apparently a lot of people. And so they immediately upped it to 500 and then they upped it to 1,000 and then they upped it to 2,000 and then they upped it to 3,000.

And meanwhile, I'm out writing books and selling them on Amazon for 299 and she's like, "Oh, I just closed a $1,000 deal that I'm going to split with my partner." There's something that can scale up pretty quickly and it's a fascinating way to look at it. And it's just empowering.

If your relationship with money is I go to work, I have this commute and I get my paycheck, it's really, really empowering and this act of independence when you earn that first dollar outside of your day job. Somebody who's not my boss paid me for something. I remember I sold my first book on Amazon two and a half years ago.

It was like, "I'm a professional author." I was like, "This is crazy." And it was like 299. But it was cool. And so I got my first royalty check for $43.73. It was really, really, I don't know, it was fun. And you'll hear people's stories about like I made my first 11 cents on AdSense through my blog.

It's these little things but it's fun to work on and see what can happen. Alright, I was hoping you would even mention your example of you. I think of photography as one of those great examples. If you think about how to be a professional photographer at the high end and you think about, "Well, I got to get a studio set up.

I've got to have a portrait studio. I've got to create all these contexts." It's a little bit overwhelming. But if you just start taking pictures of your kids and posting them on Facebook and on your Instagram feed, over time a couple of your friends might say, "Man, you take some great pictures." And I've talked with even my wife and taking pictures of our family.

I'm not so inclined to say, "Let me call up Joe's Professional Photography Studio down the road and set up a session." I'm a little intimidated by how... I'm a little intimidated, frankly, by Joe and by his prices. I don't really want to pay a thousand bucks for an afternoon's photography session.

I don't know how much Joe charges but I'm less likely to actually go and hire him. But if I see my friend Katie, she always is posting great pictures of her kids and she has a real knack for getting the kid to actually smile and look at the camera.

Then I might call Katie up and say, "Listen, would you be willing to do a photo shoot with my wife and I and we'll pay you some money?" Well, Katie could very easily make several hundred dollars plus on a Saturday afternoon's work down at the beach taking some pictures.

That's much more empowering because now she's earning profit, not wages. And she's not time bound where, "Okay, I'm going to go and wait tables this certain amount. I'm going to make $13 an hour after tips." Rather, it's, "I'm going to build this skill and then I'm going to sell this skill." And that's frankly how my wife and I, we hired the friend of ours who photographed our wedding.

We just liked her pictures. We didn't want a big professional outfit of a big fancy thing. We just wanted someone to take some nice pictures and she was able to do it. And it's her part-time thing but as her skills have grown, she's certainly earned plenty of money on the side.

And these things can be integrated together. So whether it's a little bit of photography, maybe you have a skill of being able to help somebody write a resume and you market that among your friends. And when somebody's looking for a new job and you can market either among your friends or again externally, somebody's looking for a new job, they pay you 200 bucks for a resume review.

And you can tweak their resume and you get pretty good at it. And there's a little idea or people who are fitness fanatics and they just start their own boot camp. And they're not trying to build a whole school but they have a few people that like having someone who's going to show up and hold them accountable and they do their workouts on the beach.

Or whatever it is. And maybe some of these things can be integrated. So I think of somebody who's, for example, a real estate agent. Well, the income may fluctuate. You can list some houses here and there. But a couple houses every couple of months with some of these side gigs, now you've got a pretty nice living in a flexible manner.

And you're thinking about what services can I bring to the marketplace instead of who's going to give me a job. Cottage industries. Have you talked about cottage industries on your show at all? Have any interesting examples? What do you mean by that? So what I mean is, for example, someone who's making baking bread and selling it or making candles, making handicrafts, things like that, selling them on Etsy, selling them locally, those types of actual physical products for niche, crafty type of things.

I've talked with one Etsy seller and what I learned from that conversation was it doesn't actually at all have to be handmade. So she was selling digital financial planners, actually. And it's like, "Hey, I just created this template, upload a PDF file, and then you're good to go." So you don't have to be in your backyard whittling things or making jewelry or something like that, although you certainly could, to take advantage of some of these marketplaces.

So a little bit more... Because my friend was selling blankets on Etsy for a while. And it's like, "You've got to charge a ridiculous amount of money to make this worthwhile." This is an $80 blanket now based on how much time it took me to find the materials and quilt it and do all this stuff.

And it's like, "I can get the same or I can get the thing at Target for $5." And so that's a tough sell. But when it's something repeatable, when it's a digital thing, that's when I like the idea of Etsy. I think that there are some real opportunities in things like this.

I don't know anything about selling arts and crafts, but there's a story I've been wanting to mention on the show and I'll go ahead and mention. I have a friend who is involved in the bee business. And he just has this little part-time hobby of keeping some hives of bees.

But when he started telling me the numbers of the amount of money that he makes with his hives of bees, it's stunning to me how profitable this little side cottage business is. And with bees, the way that business works is you rent these hives of bees out to a farmer in order for them to pollinate their fields and you sell the honey.

And it's farming. You've got to care for your animals, your bees, and you've got to make sure that they're healthy and there's a learning curve to it. But there's a relatively low barrier to entry. But the opportunity to buy honey that's local honey, that's probably pretty close to organic, or it's at least high quality and you know it hasn't been diluted with a bunch of syrups and sugar that's just been poured into it that you're getting at the grocery store.

It commands a very high premium for raw, unfiltered, local honey. And just this total tiny little niche market with stunning profit potential, not necessarily that you're going to go and compete with the guys who are running hundreds of thousands of hives, but just on this very small scale in a local marketing effort.

And I think there are a ton of these kinds of ideas that can be developed on the side, whether it's some farming venture, some handicraft, something like that, that with the ability to market, we should be paying more attention to how can I create a business rather than how can I go get a job, which is I think the essence of side hustling.

It is. It's something that we, in college I ran a painting business, actually it was through one of the national companies, but they say, "Here's your territory, go out and paint as many houses as you can." And you just go out and had to hustle door to door to find business.

And then the second year we got a little bit smarter and we set up a booth at the home show, we signed up a ton of leads and go out and do their estimates, say, "Hey, let's get this done." So yeah, I like your point on working for profits, not wages.

I was a Jim Rohn quote, "Profits are better than wages. Wages will make you a living, profits will make you a fortune." Oh, okay. I like it. It's a well articulated quote. Well, Nick, this has been fun. I'd love for people, I mean, you've got a whole podcast, you've got a blog, you've got a whole site dedicated to this.

I don't want to obviously try to rehash everything, but I wanted to give people some ideas because many times when you're thinking about earning extra income, immediately we go to, "I need to work extra." And that might have a place. For example, if your career is one where extra work can pay off, then you should probably think about that.

If your career is one where there's a high degree of potential advancement, then you should, I think, primarily be focused on using your extra time to build your skill to reach at least the top 20% or the top 4 or 5% in your career because there's a lot of growth potential for many of us.

But for many people, their careers are relatively, they're not dead end, but they're capped. They're not going to go above a certain amount that they're making and working a ton of extra hours is not going to measurably impact that. So in that situation, I think one of the ideas should be to pursue some sort of entrepreneurial side activity.

And so for those who are interested in that, I'd commend your site, SiteHustleNation. Your podcast can be a useful way to just expand the creative juices of the different opportunities that are available to us. We live in an exciting time in which the individual can reach other individuals with valuable products and services more easily than it's ever been in the history of the world.

Nick, is there a place that you would encourage people to start, some resources that you've developed, certain episodes of your show? How would you want people to start with your content if they come over and check out what you're doing? Well, on the podcast side, if you're in audio format, there's a different part-time business idea every week on the SiteHustle show.

So you can search for that. And if you go to SiteHustleNation.com/ideas, there's a whole laundry list of different ideas to get the creative juices flowing for you. I might get started. What were the dog sites you said? Rover.com, what was the other one? The dog sit-in site? Dog Vacay.

Dog Vacay. I might start doing that. I've got a big yard. I could handle the dogs. That might be one that we might have to check out. Perfect. Nick, thanks so much for coming on today. I really appreciate it. You bet. We'll talk to you soon. I hope you found that content to be useful to you.

That's my major goal is to bring you ideas that are useful. Nick's really a great guy. I found him to be just so unassuming and just a real pleasure to be with even though we only spent a brief amount of time together when we met. But his site really is a neat wealth of resources and information for you.

And so get on over and check it out. It's at SiteHustleNation.com. You can find Nick's story. You can join his tribe. You can find out some of the information that he's published. He's got a lot of really great information over there. And he's really building a really neat community of people.

And from everything that I can tell, seems to be very straightforward and just doing a good job of giving great information. That's it for today's show. I thank you so much for being here. This week, I'm going to be bringing you a couple of things. I'm going to be digging into some detailed shows on qualified tuition programs, aka 529 plans.

I'm going to give you everything that you need to know about that. I might do a little bit of tax stuff. I'm thinking about doing a show on mortgage credit certificates this week. Maybe it'll be this week or next week. I'm still working out the timing to see how many shows the 529 plan is going to be.

But it's going to be a good week on the show. I've been doing some market research with members of the irregular program, and that's been helping to guide the course of the show. I'm finding that there's a lot of interest in investment topics and retirement topics. So I'm going to be bringing more content on that.

It's starting to get a clearer vision of what I'm doing. I just want to thank you guys for the support and thank you so much for listening. If you would like to support the show, please consider joining the membership program. I'm in the process of transforming things, but put it this way.

I don't plan to run a lot of sales, but the membership program is dramatically on sale at the moment for what the benefits are going to be. It's going to be kept on sale for those members who have supported it when there's really nothing there, which there's still nothing there.

But if you want to support the show, head on over to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/membership, and you can find all the information on that and some new methods of supporting the show coming soon. That's it. Have a great day, everybody. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening to today's show. If you'd like to contact me personally, my email address is Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com.

You can also connect with the show on Twitter @RadicalPF and at Facebook.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. But your situation is unique, and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please help me by coming to the show page and commenting so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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