Making Money from Side Hustles with Nick Loper
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I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm excited to have you join me as I try to find all the deals, hacks, and tricks there are. And today, we're talking about side hustles, ways you can monetize your spare time and hopefully start to build the foundation for some real passive income. And we're joined by the chief side hustler himself, Nick Loeber.

He's the founder of Side Hustle Nation, the host of the Side Hustle Show podcast, and has quite a few side hustles under his belt, including self-publishing a book, flipping products on eBay, and starting multiple online businesses. In our conversation, we'll talk about easy side hustles to get started with, how to think about bigger opportunities that could replace your job, and how to come up with your next business idea. So let's jump in. Nick, thanks for being here. What is going on, man? Happy to be here.

Yeah, I'm excited. I want to jump right into how you became the side hustle guy. I became the side hustle guy by...

Coming out of a low point, like a soul-searching low point of what do I want to do? What do I want to be known for? What do I want people to find when somebody Googles you? And you kind of go through all of these business startup questions that I have posed to my audience hundreds of times. Like, what do you never get tired about talking about? You know, what lights you up? What do people come to you for advice for? But it was kind of going through a low point and, you know, I'd started a bunch of other projects on the side and was looking for the next thing.

And this idea of a lower risk brand of entrepreneurship, because that was my background look, start something low risk, start it on the side.

build it up as you have time. And deconstructing, like where does the money come from? Deconstructing business ideas and business models was and still is fascinating to me. And with that, I rebranded my long running personal blog that nobody ever read, rebranded nickloper.com, decidehustlenation.com in kind of spring 2013 and fired up the old podcast mic and started asking other people questions. And it's been an incredible journey since then.

Yeah, you've done hundreds of episodes, talked to so many people. I guess I just want to start off so people understand one of the cool things you said, you know, and me coming from a background where starting an entrepreneurial endeavor in Silicon Valley can often be something that takes millions of dollars and you hire lots of people. How do you tell people what a side hustle is as opposed to other entrepreneurial endeavors?

Yeah, and that's a good point because that was kind of the narrative that I was hearing. An entrepreneur is somebody who raises venture capital, eventually takes this company public, like they want to go big. And I was like, well, there's this other flavor, this like lifestyle entrepreneur who, you know, maybe they don't even ever want to quit their job, but they still want to, you know, use their free time more effectively, more productively. Maybe they want to, you know, scratch this creative itch on the side. But yeah.

Yeah, so side hustle broadly defined anything that you're doing outside of traditional job to make extra money, ranging from bartending, delivering pizzas, driving Uber, all the way up to starting a company, starting a business. I will say there is more of an entrepreneurial connotation to it rather than just taking on a second job. So generations ago, this might have been known as moonlighting, but today it's more like

okay, this is my side hustle. This is something that maybe long-term has the potential to be a little more time leveraged. It could be something that maybe replaces that day job income if you want it to. There's this positive upside connotation that doesn't necessarily come with that second job. And was there an original side hustle that got this all started for you?

It was called Shoesniper.com in its latest iteration. I don't think it exists anymore because it's been shut down for several years. But this would pull in the product catalogs from Zappos, Amazon, all these other footwear retailers, and it would spit back out where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes.

This was, you know, in the early days of the internet, some of your listeners might be young enough to remember, like comparison shopping was a thing back in the day before everyone just went to Amazon by default was like, oh, there are several stores that sell this thing that I want. And so the big idea for me was, well, what if instead of

trying to compare every product under the sun. Like, what if we focused on this one niche and we did it better than everybody else by, you know, having product level integrations and tighter kind of like comparison algorithms and more accurate algorithms. And that was the thing that was, I kind of naively thought I could be the shoe guy. Like that's just this, I just, I'm the dude who sells shoes on the internet. But that was the thing that let me quit my job.

After three years of nights and weekends, like try to hustle that thing to the point of sustainability. I don't even think it had replaced by a day job salary by the time it was, it was time to quit, but it had at least it was at least covering my monthly expenses. And I could see with an extra 40, 50 hours a week to dedicate to it, how you get to that level and beyond. Yeah.

And at that point, had you figured out that this whole space was where you wanted to spend time? You had a side hustle, it turned into your full-time thing, and then side hustles became your side hustle? It did. That was like five years later. So I quit my job, started the shoe operation in 2005, quit my job in 2008, started Side Hustle Nation in 2013. So it was just...

You know, had a few years of entrepreneurial experience. I called it retired at 25, but it turned out to be anything but a retirement. It was like, I'm still working all the time. There's a lot of maintenance required, like shoes is very seasonal, like constantly turning over inventory and stuff. So there's a lot of upkeep involved in that, but it was still a pretty fun operation to try and optimize all of the inventory and ad listings and the conversion rates on the page and stuff. It was a cool experience.

It was definitely a cool first business. Yeah. And so that was your first one. When you talk to people who are probably most often working a full-time job and they're thinking, wow, I could generate some side income. I could pursue some passions. Are there things you advise them to do to get started?

The passion question is an interesting one. And maybe we could start there because Nick Huber, who runs a podcast called Sweaty Startup, was on the Side Hustle show last year. And he said, Nick, under no circumstance should you start a business around your passion. I was like, well, why not? You know, that seems like reasonable advice. He's like, look, if you're passionate about it,

Other people probably are too, right? Yoga, craft beer, whatever it is. The world doesn't care about your passion necessarily. And when people are passionate about things, they behave irrationally. Like they work for free. It's like, no, no, no. Under no circumstance, start a business around your passion. Start a business around solving a problem instead. And, you know, bonus points if it's a problem that you're at least somewhat interested in or excited about. And then eggs I've found,

That passion tends to follow doing the work. Like in college, I was painting houses as like my college job, my college side hustle. And I had no passion for painting houses. But by the end of a couple summers of doing this, you couldn't help but walking through a neighborhood and looking up under the eaves and like, oh, there's a paint job waiting to happen. I'll scrape that. I better make a note. Come give these guys an estimate on the weekend. It came from doing the work. It came from embedding yourself in that space.

And same thing with podcasting. I had no passion for podcasting. When I got started, it would have been impossible to. I didn't know what I was doing, how it all worked. But over the course of now eight years of doing it and 450 episodes of The Side Hustle Show, it's become a part of my identity. It's definitely become a huge passion of mine.

Yeah, well, I'm not sure I took that advice because this entire podcast was I'm passionate about finding all the deals, all the hacks. And I turned that into a project. But for me, I guess it doesn't make a lot of money. So it's not a it's not a side hustle yet. It's more of just an outlet for creativity. Well, I like that. I like that approach, too, though. It's like, here's something that I'm curious about. Here's something that I'm interested in. And here's a unique medium to to go out and explore that. Right. Because that is kind of the second part.

part of the equation. Okay. What's, what's the problem in my life? I need more hacks. And then the second part is like, well, how do I go find them? I'm going to go, I'm going to go talk to people.

Yeah. And one of the reasons when I talk to all of our listeners about why they're really excited about a lot of different hacks is that they end up saving money. They save time. It allows them to go travel places. So I think one of the coolest things about side hustles is it allows you to generate that extra income. And you have a challenge I saw on your site, a five-day $500 challenge.

I assume the premise is that anyone can get started doing this and make some extra money in a short period of time. Are there specific types of side hustles that are easy to get started for a beginner to make a little bit of extra cash? Yes, absolutely. So at the very low end of the spectrum, like what can I do to kind of just toe dip into the side hustle world, right? So this is like credit card rewards, like you're the expert on this stuff.

This is like cashback apps. This is just no brainer stuff to add to your phone. These are online market research studies. I just did one last week where I got paid 50 bucks in Amazon credit to talk about my video editing process. It was like, this is any, you know, anybody can go do this stuff. Where are you finding them? What are there? Is there a list of them on your site? Do you have ones that you recommend checking out when it comes to some of these market research things?

My top two are userinterviews.com and respondent.io. But the advantage that both of these have over...

like a swag bucks or something is that they like, they are looking for industry professionals and will usually pay for that expertise, you know, 50, a hundred, 150, 200 bucks an hour versus, you know, three, $3 an hour, whatever the equivalent would be just like doing these kinds of brainless little surveys while you're watching TV. So a little bit more involved, but,

from the comfort of your home. I've done a handful of these different studies and I find that stuff interesting. And it's like, well, shoot, if I can qualify for it, somebody else with more professional credentials could probably qualify for even more of these. Those would be kind of low hanging fruit stuff. On the product side, we see people just getting involved in the eBay or Facebook marketplace game where it's, you know, start by clearing out your garage, clearing out your attic. You know, what is all this stuff that's collecting dust where it could be collecting dollars?

And then we see people kind of taking that to the next level where, you know, we'll be sourcing at garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, Craigslist. We've even seen people going like from the free section of Craigslist onto Facebook marketplace. There's like this weird arbitrage thing that's going on right now. But those would be kind of the very low hanging fruit type of side hustles without getting into the freelancing or consulting or like selling a service type of operation, which probably be the next level up.

And of course, another one to consider is just all of the gig economy apps. Maybe your long-term upside potential isn't really strong with a DoorDash or an Uber Eats or something like that. But if you need to make money in the near term, it's hard to beat this kind of plug and play functionality that they've built.

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Yeah, so think about dollars per hour is a good kind of baseline metric, but it can be misleading because you're like, oh, I made 50 bucks an hour. But you can't you can't do that eight hours a day. You know, it's like, well, the opportunity came up and I made my 50 bucks.

And then it was kind of gone. And the same thing with Instacart. Like if you're cranking out Instacart orders and it's like, oh, you may have spurts where you're making 25, 30 an hour and you're like, this is great. And then you might hit kind of this dry spell where you're like, maybe I'm making 10, 15. I got to pay for gas on top of this. So there's this natural downward pressure. And any of these like driving related services, there's a natural downward pressure

on price because it's a skill that almost everybody has. It's like there's only so much you can do to differentiate yourself there. But I do like the hourly rate metric. I do like kind of thinking of what can I do to fit into the gaps in my day? Even we have people on the podcast like building online businesses, building these blog empires with a couple young kids at home. I'm like, how are you getting this done? And she described like the cracks in

in her day. And I was like, oh, I really like that metaphor where it's like, you know, the nap time here or the, you know, play group over here, you're, you know, you're responding to emails and,

I don't know. There's always ways to get it done, if that makes sense. Yeah. Are there good side hustles for those 15-minute gaps? Obviously, you're not going to hop in the car and drive to the grocery store and do some Instacart shopping with a 15, 20-minute gap. But are there things that you've seen that work really well for people who only have small blips of time, but maybe could stack them over the course of a few days? Yeah.

Yeah, that's a challenging one where I might go with that. One that my wife is involved in is just print on demand. And so she has t-shirts on Redbubble and Merch by Amazon. And I want to say a couple other places, but you know, with a 15 minute gap, she could probably design a t-shirt or at least kind of get a template design if she was in front of her computer. So that's kind of one way to go. And then there's some like uploading time related to that.

And what's cool there is once it's created, Amazon or Redbubble or these other marketplaces are handling all the shipping and fulfillment. You set your own price. You're just making a little margin on top of that. And it's like, okay, it's not a huge moneymaker, but she had like some Father's Day related one that just recently sold. And she's like, yes, you know, get a little sale notification. It's just, you know, it's play money. But if you took it seriously and you were consistent about creating that type of stuff, it can definitely add up.

And same thing with the online business. If you are going to commit to writing a book, I want to go the self-published route. If you want to start, you know, this blog or online based business, you have 15 minute gaps, which it's easy to dismiss and say, I've only got 15 minutes. What am I going to get done? If you sat down and use those 15 minutes to outline content or to

draft your next email or to start creating this blog post, you kind of start chipping away at it. And I find that momentum tends to build a little bit. And I've definitely found that when tackling really, really long articles and blog posts. Like one of the things I think put Side Hustle Nation on the map in its earlier days was like these mega list of

posts where it's 5,000 words and it has all these ideas. But some of these, I've got 40 hours into some of these posts. But the only way to tackle it was kind of like, okay, one step at a time in the gaps that are allowed.

Yeah, it's funny you say this. So I have tried to start a blog for, I don't know, almost a decade. And I've always gotten like one post in and then realized that I'm not going to keep doing this. But I also realized like that one post could be valuable. Is there a way for someone who's not ready to commit to blogging full time, but might have something interesting that they want to put together? Is there an easy way to do that on like a one or two post basis without starting a blog? Yeah.

Yeah, I would just put it up on Medium, put it up on LinkedIn versus going through the trouble of setting up your own domain and hosting and then it goes stale and then the domain expires and all that stuff. So I would just go to some of these writing marketplaces as they were.

Cool. And I want to go back to the side hustle your wife has. Was it t-shirts or what kind of things is she designing? Yeah, she's made t-shirts. She's made the socks. She's made mugs. I think she made stickers. Like, I think she sold a crap load of eclipse stickers. What was that? Like 2017, 2018, whenever that big eclipse was going on, she had a great month and we were like, we just need another eclipse to come along.

I got to wait another 37 years or whatever it was. How does that work? So I actually, for our anniversary this year, I got my wife this funny t-shirt on Amazon that just said, Epic Wife since 2012. I couldn't help but think, how is this happening? Like, are these even designed? Did someone just make a logo? And as soon as I order it, it gets printed. Is that something that if you had an idea for a funny mug or a cool sticker, like you obviously don't have to go buy a printing press or anything like that. How does that hustle work?

Right. It's all print on demand. So no, no screen printing machine in your basement or anything like that. You upload this digital file. So you create some clever saying, most of these are like just text based. So not, you know, no crazy artistry required. Upload that digital file to Amazon.com.

set your price, what kind of color t-shirts you want it to be on. And they have a whole lot of other products now as well. And then when somebody orders it, it's completely hands-off. And then it just shows up in your report as royalties earned. When we first got started on this, it was like right around Trump's inauguration. So the meme of the day was alternative facts. I forget who it was, like the press secretary was like, oh, the president presented an alternative fact. And we're like,

That's just an alternative fact. It's like such an interesting way to phrase it. And so we made like, I went to the gym today, hashtag alternative facts or something. It's kind of a creative outlet.

And it doesn't take a ton of time to create. Like the people who are doing really, really well at it have thousands and thousands of designs or it becomes very much a volume game. And of course there's an 80-20 distribution to everything that sells. But you know, for one-off stuff, it can be fun. And she's done custom stuff for family and friends too. Like because now...

you know, other people know that she's into it. Like our buddy's going to his golf tournament. Hey, would you put, would you put this picture on a shirt? It was just like his buddy, like passed out or something. I don't know. Then they just let she listed on Amazon.

Yeah. And he may be the only person who ever buys it, but it's just like, yeah, I'll make you a custom shirt. It's kind of a fun distribution center to have in your backyard, basically, where it's all prime eligible and pretty affordable. I don't know how they're making money on it, but it's pretty cool. The shirt I got was less than $20 for a shirt that... Now that I think about it, I noticed there are a bunch of styles of the same kind of shirt. And I'm wondering if it was just someone uploaded 10 different designs of the same shirt. Yeah.

Yeah, we would be remiss if we didn't mention like, once something sells, the software and the bots kind of come out and say, Oh, this is a hot seller. Let's make a copycat. Let's make a duplicate of it because there's so little barrier to entry. It becomes kind of like, well, I gotta keep coming up with the next design rather than fighting copyright trolls and stuff.

You mentioned another side hustle about delivery. And one of the challenges is it's such a low barrier to entry. Are there any skills that taking a quick course or getting registered to do something kind of unlocks some side hustle income? I know when we purchased our home, I talked to the person who came to our house to do our notarizing for the home purchase, said that this was their little side hustle. A couple of days a week, they do evening things like that.

I have no idea how hard it is to become a notary. I don't know if that's a good one, but are there things like that that can generate income that have a little bit higher barrier to entry that might make the sustainability of making more money higher? Yeah, the notary one is actually a perfect example. That's one of the most, I don't know why I say surprising, but out of all of the episodes that we've done, the one that I get an outsized feedback response to is on this mobile notary side hustle because it's not,

It's not zero, but there's a little bit of startup cost in terms of education, equipment and certification. But like, you know, maybe you're a thousand bucks and then you're going out and making a hundred bucks for every signing appointment. We've seen people, especially with this low interest rate environment and all the refinancing that's going on, seen people making eight, nine, 10 grand a month doing this. Oh, wow. And on the side.

And it might be a full-time gig at that point for them. But like, if you're just doing it on the side, like, you know, a thousand bucks, 2000 bucks a month, it doesn't seem unreasonable, especially since, you know, it's a good gig for nights and weekends because the people presumably signing mortgage documents have jobs. That's what like the bank wants to see to lend you money. And, you know, they're working during the day, but they're available to sign evenings and weekends. Yeah.

And it works out really well. We've got a couple episodes. I can send you the links. I'll put links to those in the show notes for sure. That talk about that. But that's one that stands out. We've seen people level up their skills in like web design. We had actually one of the most popular episodes of last year was Chris Mistrick from selfmadewebdesigner.com, I think is his site, where he described...

learning from Code Academy, learning from free resources online, starting actually locally, selling the skill, going on Upwork, bidding on jobs and continuing to double his rates until he started to get pushed back or had a harder time getting clients. But it was like, you know, I don't know. I thought that was a cool example of like learning an in-demand skill, even in what would seem to be, you know, with the rise of

Squarespace and Wix. It's not that hard to design a website anymore, but plenty of people still willing to pay for it because the pie just keeps getting bigger. People who presumably need websites, he was able to do really well with that. We had another gal who

I don't know if she had a particular background in finance, but she kind of studied up on the QuickBooks certification and these other online accounting programs. And was like, I'll become your remote bookkeeper, which I thought was an interesting one. And she was doing 50, 70 bucks an hour equivalent from home doing books. And like, if you like math and numbers and I don't know, that kind of appealed to me. And then recently, this was more of a

But I thought I think the model was illustrative of kind of a broader opportunity. So we have Brad Rice and his argument was Salesforce as a software company has grown its customer base far faster than it's been able to grow its ecosystem of qualified service providers, consultants, freelancers to serve that customer base. And he's like, and because of that, there is such an in-demand industry.

And he's like, you know, it's rare to go from not being part of this ecosystem to being like...

freelancer, you know, solo remote freelancer consultant type of person. But, you know, with two, three, four years under your belt, like that's a very common career path. And he said he was making 200 grand last year working 20 hours a week or something. It's like, yeah, sign me up. You know, it sounds pretty good. But the way we framed that on the Side Hustle show was software with a service, like hitching your cart to a popular software product. Maybe it's QuickBooks, maybe it's Salesforce, maybe it's Asana, maybe it's monday.com, maybe it's

Airtable, you know, all these, you have this, all these kind of software and there's always more coming out. They have their own little ecosystem of customers. And if you can kind of become

a go-to player in that space. Like we had on the podcast, Paul Miners out of New Zealand, where he would just create these, he was kind of an early adopter in Asana. He'd create these little short videos for YouTube to say like, how to do blank in Asana. And he just introduced that like, hey, I'm Paul, I'm an Asana consultant, and here's how to do blah, blah, blah in Asana. And he was booking like thousands of dollars worth of consulting gigs because companies were like,

That's great. Could you come in and train our team? Could you come in and just help us implement these systems? So software with a service is one of these side hustle models that I think really has some potential to scale and drive some higher hours per dollar rates.

Yeah, I would say to anyone listening, if there's a piece of software or even an activity that you feel like you've mastered, there's probably a marketplace for you to turn that into a business. I know I always tell people, oh yeah, I hang TVs everywhere.

Whenever we bought a new TV, I went through the effort to learn how to mount it to the studs properly and do everything. And other people I know hire someone to do that. I don't know if there's a good marketplace for that. But if there's a thing that you've learned how to master and set up and do, other people pay for those things. And you can find marketplace for that. Is there a place for in-person things? Is there an easy marketplace for me to put myself out there as someone who can tune up someone's bicycle? Yeah.

I'd probably look at TaskRabbit or Thumbtack for something like that, especially for the home services. Even Nextdoor might be worth a look there. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I know when we launched this podcast, I wanted to have show notes. And I found this amazing woman in Canada on Fiverr who helps me write all the show notes and finds all the links for everything. I know there are a lot of things on Fiverr. If you have a microphone...

will pay as we did for the disclosure in some of our episodes for someone to just record a disclosure. And if you have a good voice and you have a microphone, you might be able to do that work in a minute. So that's another interesting one online where I found at least on the, on the, you know,

buyer side, I found a lot of tasks and projects that I wanted to accomplish. Even something as simple as we upgraded our wireless system in our house and we use Unify, which is a Ubiquiti product, which is designed for the enterprise. And so the way you set it up is just more complicated than other things. And I thought, I have two options. I could go learn everything about this and watch all the YouTube videos and

or I could find someone who does this for a living and remotely could walk me through the settings and I could pay them, you know, 25, 30, 40, 50 bucks to spend an hour and just walk through everything so I can get it completely done and save myself the...

5-10 hours of reading every possible thing about how to set it up. And so even if you've just learned how to use a particular tool that doesn't even feel like an enterprise system like Salesforce, you might still be able to market yourself as an expert helping someone set things up or build a well-designed presentation in Keynote or PowerPoint. I know there's definitely a market for presentation design also.

Yeah, all of those, all of those things. Fiverr is a fascinating platform where there's always room for new entry points because the top rated people naturally get busy and flooded with orders. And so you go and you want to book this person because they've got, you know, a thousand five-star reviews and they're like, well, I'm like booked three weeks out. And so then you're like, okay, well back to the drawing board, like, okay, I'm going to take my chance with this guy with fewer reviews. So that's one way to go there. Yeah.

Oh, the other thing on that, like if you have a problem that you've overcome, that you've like solved this problem in your own life, record the YouTube video about it. I don't care like how boring it is. It could just be like a screen recording video. The reason is...

like these tend to, if, if, if it was a problem in your life, other people are looking for how to do it as well. I had videos on like how to download high resolution images from Instagram. It had like 9,000 views before they changed the interface. And my little trick didn't work anymore. How to create a folder in Gmail. I think that's still up there. It still generates views, generates ad revenue every month. How to, uh,

how to stop Dropbox from like taking up your local hard drive storage or something. It was like this little unsync checkbox and still generating views and ad revenue every month. So think of these little like mini digital assets that you can create. And you have to build a certain subscriber base before you can get monetized on YouTube. But if you create enough of these, like just, you know, one of them is bound to hit after a while. It's just kind of like found money. It feels like the most passive income in the world to me.

Yeah. And do you, you said you have to have a certain subscriber base. Can anyone not create a YouTube video and start to monetize? How does that work?

Your channel needs to have, I want to say, a thousand subscribers and maybe four thousand hours of total watch time. And then they'll let you turn on monetization. And then they'll let you turn on the ads. And if you had made a couple of those videos, do you do those generate subscribers or is that harder to get than than views? Subscribers are probably harder to get than views. So it's kind of have to have a concerted effort of producing content. But if you have one thing that goes viral, it tends to happen faster than than you might think. At least it has in my case.

Cool. Now, you also mentioned passive income, which is an interesting thing that I'm not sure is passive income a side hustle or is it separate? And how do you think about that? I try to think of it as like time leverage, right? So the most passive income that I have is just like, you know, straight up dividend income. Like it's going to happen, you know, quarter after quarter, whether or not I do anything. The other income streams are

like income from the blog, income from the podcast, income from YouTube. Consider those like kind of more like time leveraged income streams where it's like, okay, it takes the same amount of time to produce this blog post if 10 people read it or 10,000 people read it. It takes the same time to produce this video if nobody watches it or, you know, 10,000 people watch it. So think of the time leverage element. And if you think about your income as a pie chart today, okay,

I think it's natural for everyone to start out in their career with 100% of that pie chart being active income, like trading time for money. But if the ultimate goal is retirement or where work becomes optional, you kind of need to fill in the rest of that pie chart with passive income or time leveraged income. And this is the Warren Buffett thing. If you don't find a way to make money in your sleep, you're going to work until you die. And

It's true. So what can you do in the near term to kind of like grow that little sliver? You know, maybe it's a little sliver of dividend investments or, you know, savings account interest at 0.4% or whatever awful percent it is now. One of my favorite examples from the side hustle show in that realm was Matt Boknock, whose side hustle was repairing motorcycles in his garage. Mechanical engineer by day, father of four.

three or four by night and repairing motorcycles in his garage in Chicago, like hours for dollars service-based business add on Craigslist. Like don't pay dealership rates. Bring it to me. I know what I'm doing.

What Matt did, which I thought was genius, was setting up the camera in the corner of the garage, films himself doing the repairs. So now he's got content for YouTube. He starts selling these full engine rebuild videos. And fast forward, you know, several years of doing this by investing this little speculative amount of time where he wasn't getting paid to build this time leveraged asset. And over the course of several years, you know, now it's

He's not really turning wrenches for dollars anymore. Now he's making YouTube ad money, making affiliate income from the products he recommends. He's selling full engine rebuild videos. Insurance companies have found his channel and are now paying him to do like, would you make a video for our insurance blog? That was a really cool example of...

being proactive about growing that time leverage piece of the pie, even though it was somewhat speculative, somewhat risky. I might not see any return on this, but over time, it definitely ended up paying off. And I guess on a broader sense, you could think of, okay, how can I get paid over and over again from work that I do once? That's the ultimate time leverage. It doesn't necessarily have to be like, how does this scale? But maybe it is taking a percentage of those earnings

putting them into, you know, blue chip dividends. Maybe it is, you know, creating that tutorial demo video for YouTube, but you know, something that has the potential to reach many, many more people than just whoever you were doing it for originally.

Yeah.

I can't remember the percent, but it was like, if you can get to 20 episodes in a podcast, you're in the top 5% because most people don't make it that far. And so the number one piece of podcast audience growth advice I've gotten is just stay in the game. So if you're trying some of these things, recording videos of doing things,

Don't expect that if you just record a video of how to use a piece of software better, that tomorrow it's going to blow up. But over time, it might build to something that could be pretty meaningful. And the effort is pretty low to get started. Yeah, 100%. I was just pulling up my active campaign demo video that I did for YouTube. This was three summers ago and did pretty much nothing for the first several months of being out there.

And even today, now three years later, it's only got 23,000 views. So not huge. It's not going viral by any means. But my active campaign affiliate commissions, I think, since that time have been $5,000, $6,000. So in creating this asset, it just becomes...

It just becomes another, you know, I like to think of like creating these digital assets that go out into the world and kind of like do your bidding, like these little minions that come back and bring money back to you. And that's definitely been probably one of the more successful examples of that. But didn't, like you said, didn't have a ton of viral success or instant success out of the gate. But it's just one of these things. It just kind of keeps churning along, keeps generating views and revenue every month.

I know there are some larger side hustles that I'm curious how you think fit into someone's journey. Things like online courses and books and starting a blog. Are those things that people should get their feet wet with side hustles before they start something big? Or is that something you could just start out the gate? I like the process of kind of learning as you go with stuff like that. So if you go into that with that expectation of like,

I, like you said, I'm podcasting, but I'm not making any money from podcasting, right? Like if you need to make money quickly, choose a different path. But I do like this path over the long run because you're going to learn some really interesting skill sets. You're probably going to be networking and meeting really interesting people in your niche. And hopefully you're building up an audience and a network

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that you like it and you don't mind that you're not making any money or you find out that you don't like it and you're like, okay, you know, I'll try something else. So there's really, and it's so inexpensive to start. You really have a very limited downside on that stuff.

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Yeah. One piece of advice, if anyone out there is thinking of starting a podcast, Ramit Sethi gave me the advice that when you start a podcast, you could always just say you're going to have season one and not have season two. So you could have an eight episode season one and not feel like you've necessarily committed. So when I was first getting going, I was like, you know what, maybe I'll just say I'm going to launch one season with eight episodes and see what happens. And

By the time I'd recorded the third episode, I was like, I love doing this. I'm not going to stop at eight. So I don't need to create that structure. But anytime you're doing stuff like this, you can always set it up so that it's okay that it's not a forever thing. Yeah, I met the...

host of the Sleep With Me podcast. He goes by Scooter on the podcast. I forget his name in real life. And it's a boring bedtime story podcast, not a sex podcast. It's like, you know, plug this in as you're going to sleep. He'll tell you a super boring story and eventually you'll fall asleep. But what he told me he did was set quit dates. So he

If I am going to put this, you know, arbitrary date on my calendar, three months out, six months out, and I'm not going to think twice about doing my thing, practicing my craft until that date. When that day comes, I'm going to reevaluate, say like, is this something that I want to keep doing? Yes or no. And that eliminated the day-to-day doubt that can creep in. Like, is this worth it? Do I really want to do this today? It's like, nope, it's not quit date yet. So let's, let's keep at it. I like that. So.

We talked about some of these smaller things, creating some content. We talked about some of the things like driving for Lyft or Uber, maybe even becoming a notary, things that you can do in your spare time. When people start to think about this, eventually a side hustle kind of becomes something that could be bigger. And I know some of these different side hustles that you talk about when you interview guests on your show are

They're bigger endeavors. How do you think people should think about bigger side hustles and things that could actually become full-time jobs? So one of the things I think is important to think about from the early days is...

Okay, you know, aside from just like the dabbling stuff that we talked about, but like, if you're like, okay, this is a business, this is, you know, something that I really want to pursue is try and find somebody, you know, three, four, five years down the road. What does their life look like? You know, they hit it, they had success, but you know, what's their day to day? And is that a win for you, right? Because the last thing you want to do is pursue this path, like really put your energy into it and then, you know, get to the quote unquote destination and have it be like,

ah, yeah, this isn't awesome. Like, this is not what I wanted. So try to think ahead to the extent that you can, like, okay, what does success look like? I don't think I'm the world's greatest entrepreneur and probably in the bottom quartile, actually, like in terms of like scaling and systems and all that stuff. But if you can figure out a way to remove yourself from the

technical delivery of the work and if you can build with that intention if if you know if that's your goal right because there's you know different paths sometimes like i just you know i love cleaning houses so that's going to be my thing um it may be a difference in mentality from the early days if instead of saying i'm a freelance writer saying like i run a freelance copy agency or freelance writing agency instead of like i walk dogs i have a dog walking company

We had a woman on the show who was like, started a pooper scooper business. But if instead of I'm a pooper scooper, no, I run a pet waste removal business. And if you can build that margin and expectation from the clients, like, no, it's not going to be me doing the work, but we're going to have qualified professionals come out and do the work. If you can set that up from the early days, then you're kind of built to scale and potentially built to sell down the road. And if you have a business with recurring weekly customers, that can become an attractive activity.

acquisition target for other companies too. - Yeah, so a lot of these examples, people had a business. Are there ways that you suggest people start to generate ideas for a business that they could start on the side and maybe grow into something bigger? - Oh yeah, I love talking business idea frameworks.

How much time do we have? We've got a few of these we could actually run through. The first is, so everybody says like, you know, start with your passions, start with your skills. I want to flip that and say, well, okay, that's definitely one option. But second option is start with pain points. And so normally you try and be a little more of an optimistic person, but like you got to put on your pessimistic hat for this one. I call this the what sucks method. And this is where you have a

I just kind of do this on like a notes app on my phone. Like I'm going through over the course of a day or a week or two weeks, note everything that bothers you, everything that's a pain point in your life, everything that somebody else complains to you about, put it in the what sucks file. Because on the flip side of that, there might be a business opportunity. And that was Erica with her poop scooping business. She was out in the backyard, cleaning up after her own dog, thinking like, this kind of sucks. But you know what? If

If it sucks for me, it probably sucks for other people too. I wonder if people would pay to get this done. So that's kind of the what sucks method, trying to connect pains with what people would pay for in this problem-solving

mode. Another opportunity is that I like is called the rip pivot and jam method, which comes from Dan and Ian in the tropical MBA podcast. This is, you know, step one, rip, find another business that you like, blatantly steal that. And then step two, really important, pivot that, you know, pivot that to a different audience, different niche, different industry, whatever it may be, and then jam, go do the work.

And where, like, I implemented this in real life. Like, I was researching a failed side hustle of mine in the wine-related niche. Like, I know nothing about wine. I don't care about wine. Had no business being there. But in the process of researching that site, I came across this website that was reviewing wine clubs. And you could kind of...

punch in what you were looking for. And they were like, you know, you could have user reviews down at the bottom. And of course, you know, looking back, I think these were kind of like manipulated rankings where they, you know, they wanted the one that paid them the most affiliate commission showed up on top. But I was like, well, this is a really cool model. What could I pivot that to? Yeah.

And kind of combining the what sucks method as well was like one of the pain points that I had in growing the shoe business was like, where do I find qualified virtual remote outsourced help? How do I know which of these companies are legit operators? How does it work? Is this, do I pay payroll taxes? Like, you know, how I just, it was totally green. I didn't know anything about it. So I pivoted the wine club review site to be a virtual assistant review site.

And I actually ran that for close to 10 years before selling it at the end of last year. But that became the first and largest virtual assistant company directory and review platform using that RipPivot and Jam method.

And then the final method that I'll share today is what I'll call like the sniper method, which I think works really well for service businesses, for e-commerce type of businesses, where if you look at Amazon as a shotgun business, right? We sell everything online.

under the sun and we can have one stop shopping. The sniper method or the sniper business idea method is like, what if we became the go to place for a tiny sliver of Amazon's catalog? And it's kind of like what the shoe business did, right? Instead of, you know, if Price Grabber was the shotgun,

Back in that day, like, okay, Shoesniper is going to be like, I only want to focus on footwear and I would pick off that little segment of your business. You've probably seen that meme where it's like, you know, here's the screenshot of Craigslist and all of the different startups like that are picking off the different sections of Craigslist. Like here's Airbnb, here's TaskRabbit, here's all these different little apps that kind of pick off little portions of a larger business. Could you give an example of one thing that someone could do just to kind of bring that last one to life?

I see ads for like a general handyman type of service, but where it may be more compelling or maybe easier to carve out space. Like what if you became the go-to person, like you mentioned for flat screen TV mounting? That was a, that's a great one because I feel like it's a skill that you don't need as much skill as a lot of the people who are doing it have. So it probably, you could probably build a directory of people who would install TVs in people's homes for, you know,

you know, under 50 bucks. But I imagine if you call a home theater company and ask them to come install your TV or a handyman, you might be paying 100, 150 bucks. So someone out there could go start the director of people to install TVs on your wall and probably take a, you know, a small cut of all the transactions and have a good business. Yeah.

Yeah, and in the online world, you see general graphic design firms. We do logos, we do book covers, we do web design, like we do t-shirts, you know, we do all this stuff. It's like, okay, what if you could carve out a space? Like, look, we know book covers. You know, we've done all of these book covers. Look at these best-selling things in our portfolio. Like, be the go-to spot for that specific need. I think that would be an example of using the sniper method. And even, you could even say like...

we only do, you know, vampire romance, or we only do, you know, self-published self-help books, or, you know, we only do memoirs. You know, there's even sub-ditches in there, which could get even more snipier.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one thing that that just made me think about when I think about designing book covers, that's probably something someone does for their day job. Obviously, you know, if you're doing something for your day job, you should talk to your employer before getting in any trouble. But is turning what you do for your profession at work into freelance work that you could do for other people, something that can be a good side hustle? Yeah.

It definitely can be. But like you said, be careful with any sort of non-competes that may be going on because you wouldn't want to risk your livelihood there. We've seen some examples. One was Daniel DiPiazza. He ran a site called Rich 20-something. But back in the day, he was like working for Sylvan Learning Center or something like he was a tutor and he was making 18 bucks an hour as a tutor. And he's like looking at the pricing on the website. Like he knows the parents are paying this company 100 bucks an hour. He's like, there's a lot of margin in there. Like, what if I could just go direct?

And so what he ended up doing was like, I'm going to teach this SAT prep class and I'm not going to do a one on one. I'm going to do it in a group setting. So he had like all of these people come in, just exploded his hourly rate by going one to many and cutting out the middleman. So I was like, I don't know if Sylvan was too happy about that, but.

So just make sure, you know, that wasn't that one lended itself well to that type of model. But just make sure, you know, I don't want to get anybody in trouble with their day job. Yeah, of course. But, you know, if you are a designer during your day job, you could probably do freelance design on the side. I wouldn't do it for a company that competes with your primary employer and I'd get permission. But yeah, I think there's a lot of opportunities to to spin up freelance work around things that you've done in the past.

And so one thing I didn't ask is, you know, you keep having all these examples of things you've tried. You know, you're a full time side hustler, I guess now. How how do you make a living? Is it is it a stack of 20, 30 different side hustles? Is it one primary thing? How have you turned this into your kind of lifestyle? Yeah.

It is a stack, but most of the stacks are in the same deck, and that's the Side Hustle Nation deck. So the two biggest pieces of the pie right now are sponsorships on the podcast and affiliate revenue through the site in the email list.

The third leg of the stool historically has been my own side hustle experiments. That was like, you know, where the virtual assistant site lived. That's where the shoe business lived. That's where like the self-publishing and the freelancing and the eBay experiments and like all the other stuff kind of lived in that third leg of the stool. That's kind of admittedly a shorter leg of the stool these days.

Outside of just side hustles, you know, you optimize so many things in that regard. Are there any favorite life, money, travel hacks you have that you want to share with people? I mean, one thing that has been immensely helpful, especially with a couple young kids, is getting the workout in first thing in the morning. And this is like just...

you know, 10, 20 minutes, usually like body weight stuff, maybe some kettlebells, maybe some bands, but just getting that in, I feel a million times better the rest of the day when I have checked that off first thing in the morning. And then just like favorite,

Tools wise, I mean, everybody probably knows about LastPass Text Expander. I was singing the praises of Gmail shortcuts just this morning. It's like flying through email. Like if you're not using the R and the K and the J and the control enter to send stuff like you're missing out, like I could process stuff really fast that way. And then the other desktop productivity thing that I use all the time is called ClipX for Windows, which is a clipboard manager tool.

that lets you, like, will bring up, like, the last 25 things, I want to say, that you've copied and pasted. Because I'm always, I don't know, sometimes it's like I want the third or fourth thing down on the list, but instead of having to go re-grab it again, you can just use ClipX for that. And I want to say CopyClip is maybe the Mac equivalent of that.

But yeah, lots of different tools. Yeah, I use Alfred on the Mac, which is a replacement for the Spotlight Finder. And one of its features is that it stores your clipboard and you can go back and look at different things. Even things like if you take a screenshot, all kinds of stuff like that. So I don't know what I would do without Alfred on the computer. It would add significant time to my day. Yeah, for sure. Cool.

Well, this was fantastic. I feel like if I didn't start this podcast, I'd be ready to go start a few other side hustles. But, you know, this is really the side hustle for me right now. And I'm excited to use some of these tactics to try to help grow it over the next few months and weeks and hopefully years. Any other parting advice?

I mean, the big thing that I like to say is just think of it as an experiment. I mean, life is one big experiment and I don't think side hustles are any different. I read somewhere that at any given point, Amazon is testing like a thousand little variables on their website, trying to eke out that next like 0.002 conversion rate. And I think we can apply the same method to our own life, probably on a smaller scale, but say like, what are you experimenting with? What are you testing this month? Like maybe it's,

you know, doing the workout first thing in the morning. Maybe it is starting that podcast. Maybe it's making a YouTube video. Maybe it's, you know, what happened if I went vegan? What happened, you know, what would happen if I, you know, quit coffee? I don't know. Like, let me just put out some crazy experiments just to test, see what would happen and kind of reevaluate on those results. But,

But in terms of side hustles, I think this experimenter's mindset just reduces the sting of the inevitable failures that come along the way. Because it's like, you know, the first thing is probably not going to be a hit. But if you've positioned it in your mind as an experiment, you can kind of play scientist in the laboratory, you know, dust off and revisit the hypothesis and then go try something new. Great advice. Thank you. Where can people find more about you and all these side hustles online?

Of course, we'd love to have you tune into the Side Hustle show in your favorite podcast app. SideHustleNation.com slash ideas is my constantly updated laundry list of part-time money-making ideas that you can start today. There is no opt-in required over there to hopefully get the creative juices flowing beyond some of the ideas that we talked about today. That sounds great. All right. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Thanks, Chris.

Wow. You should definitely check out the amazing list of side hustles on Nick's site. I'll link to it in the show notes. I know I'm definitely not monetizing my free time like I could, so I'm already trying to figure out what types of YouTube videos I can start recording and monetizing, of course. Also, I'm actually printing up some great All The Hacks stickers. So if you want me to mail you one, head over to allthehacks.com slash stickers.

And thank you so much for tuning in. If you're enjoying the show, please consider sharing your favorite episode with a few people you think might enjoy it. And if you want to get in touch, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com and at Hutchins on Twitter. That's it for now. See you next week.