Nick Loper
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Yeah, this is probably, you know, tier three, you know, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid, you know, content based business, audience based business where it could be a social following. It could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And. once you have people paying attention, like the entire playbook opens up. Yeah, sure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
You could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last 10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because yeah, The scale is almost infinite, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people. And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, we came across one that would probably not check this box. It was called Porch Pumpkins. You know, you can check her out on Instagram at Porch Pumpkins. You're selling a million dollars a year worth of decorative, piling up pumpkins on people's porches for Halloween and Thanksgiving. I don't know if I would call that a recession-proof business, but... Fantastic.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Good on you for tapping into this demand where, you know, you kind of go down Maslow's hierarchy, right? Where, you know, food and shelter all the way up to self-actualization. And so the harder times get, the more people are focused on basic needs. And so if you're providing something...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
In that realm, even if it's a food delivery service or maybe the food delivery budget gets cut back, but like you're lowering, going lower down on that hierarchy of needs. It really comes down to solving people's problems. I think about what I spend money on in my own day to day. It's like, make this pain go away.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You know, it's so much easier to sell pain pills than it is to sell vitamins, even if the vitamins might be better for you long run. But if you can figure out what people's pains and problems are, and especially solving those for a business customer generally has more money to spend, that's probably where I would play. Everybody knows at least one entrepreneur and you can start that conversation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
What's really bothering you these days? Or what are the biggest bottlenecks? Or what are the biggest pain points? And even if you got nothing to sell right now, but it's just, you're trying to probe for potential issues and pain points and get that conversation going.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah. So maybe the gold rush here is a Pinterest trend around nice looking porches or holiday decor. She's like, well, shoot, you know, I can get pumpkins by the dozen. I'll pile them up. I'll make them look nice. I don't know if she has a background in interior or exterior design or landscaping or anything, but you're like, I get it. They look nice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But is that something that's people, I mean, she found, booked out a million dollars worth of business sold out by August. And it's like, There's a niche for everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Those are the ones that always are super fun to share. It's like, nope, never knew you could make money doing that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Maybe another example is the world of podcasting, especially during the pandemic. Well, everybody and their brother is starting a podcast. And so what shovels could you sell into that gold rush? Maybe it's editing services. Maybe it's the ad broker sales. Maybe it's the recording platform software.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you have more technical development side of things, microphones, thinking of what are those trends and gold rushes that you could go and provide some type of service for.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Sure. Maybe you're an early adopter. How can you use AI tools to provide some sort of service to somebody who either doesn't know how to do it, doesn't want to learn, and they can improve some process flow in that way. We've seen people piggybacking on the popularity of other software tools, where if you are a
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You're one layoff away or one bad meeting away from having your income go to zero. That's a really stressful way to live. The realm of potential side hustles has expanded in the last 10 years.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Notion expert or a pipe drive expert or HubSpot or HoneyBook was one that we had on the show recently. You can help other companies implement this. You've already got the proven templates. And the advantage is there's already some level of awareness and search demand. People are typing in questions into YouTube about these different software tools. Well, how do I do such and such in this thing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You create that video content and, you know, hey, I'm an Asana consultant and today we're going to learn how to do blah, blah, blah in Asana or HubSpot or QuickBooks or whatever it is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Totally, totally. Yeah, the furnishings, everything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Oh my gosh, the most profitable one that comes to mind from recent memory, this guy must have just been printing money. This is a web design service called 180sites.com. I think because he started initially charging 180 bucks, I think the pricing has changed, but focusing almost exclusively on building websites for pressure washing companies. So take this and run with this in any niche imaginable.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If he's doing this, just focus on building sites for pressure washers. Like typical web design might be sold as $5,000 upfront cost to be able to do this website. Flips that on its head, hey, I'm just gonna charge you 180 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month for a two-year contract and then ongoing maintenance. After that, we're gonna host the site. If you need any updates, we'll get those done.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
We'll make sure it's secure and represents your business well. And because his customers, well, it only takes one extra job or half of an extra job to pay for this fee every month. It was a pretty easy sell. And when we recorded, he had just had his first $100,000 month. And it was this recurring revenue business model. And it gets easier.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
With every client you do, you add that to the existing template. You're not starting from scratch every single time. It's like, it probably doesn't take you. very long to recoup your costs. He's like, no, after month two or whatever, we're broken even and the rest is gravy. It's like insane profit margins run by a primarily overseas team.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think if somebody outside of a pressure washing company came to him and asked him to build a site, he'd absolutely do it. But that was the bread and butter. And because you had, at this point, several different templates, we'll pick or choose which one you like, and we'll build that out for you. And so that added to the economies of scale and efficiencies of it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Happy to be back. Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's a really interesting place to be right now because on the one hand, as a content creator, as a user, it has improved certain processes, has made things more efficient. At the same time, the AI snippets in Google are taking some of our traffic. It is a challenging place to play. Like a year and a half ago, we recorded this episode on doing faceless YouTube content.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
try and win the viral lottery, create a video around some topic that's already trending. And it was hire a script writer. It was hire a voiceover artist. It was hire a video editor and then hire a thumbnail designer. And we talked to the guy a year later. It was like, well, now we got ChatGPT writing the scripts. Now we've got AI narration.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Now we've got, I think he still had a human video editor compiling stuff. It was like several of these different roles had been replaced by AI or 80% of it replaced by AI. I still go in and edit that script to make sure it is correct. But it was really interesting to see how some of the previous freelance talent at the low end got evaporated within a year.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
More worried about like deep fake stuff is somebody with hours and hours of their voice on the internet. Have you played around with 11 Labs at all? And like the voice cloning?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, it's crazy. And maybe it's just me. It's like, I know that I didn't speak it, but it sounds pretty good. Like, yeah, that sounds like me. I'll give it to you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, that was an episode concept we were thinking of throwing out for Halloween. Like, could we do 100% zombie Nick episode? Through 11 knobs and like, ah, we ended up going with a different concept for that episode. But you could do little segments.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And absolutely, if you need to tweak something in that commercial and you don't have your recording equipment handy, it's like, oh, just, okay, we'll swap out that word for that word. And it sounds just fine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
One cool one that we're using on the video front, the bottleneck is still in scripting. And so we're still working on ChatGPT, like how to turn this blog post into a compelling video script and priming it in such a way. It's like you wouldn't just read off the blog post, like that wouldn't play very well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But there's this tool called Pictori, which we've been using for the last several months, where you... Upload the script, you upload your voiceover narration, and it pulls in hundreds of stock video clips that would have taken me or a human editor hours and hours and hours of tedious manual labor to do that and splice that together. It does it in just a few minutes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think it creates a pretty visually compelling video without you having to be on camera. I'll introduce the topic, you know, talking head so they like know that it's an actual person for the first time. five or 10 seconds. And then it's just rolled this tape and it's pretty visually compelling. And some of those videos have done pretty well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Victoria. I got to do a whole, I need to do a whole video kind of demo on our use case for it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The most common pushback that I get is, well, yeah, but you're still trading time for money. I'm doing that at my day job. Why would I want to do that as a side hustle? That's the most common pushback that I get. Nathan Berry has what he calls his ladders of wealth creation.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it starts with you trading time for money, either at a job or as a freelancer, consultant, service provider of some sort. You almost have to start there to build up some entrepreneurial skill set and build You know, you can skip to the end, like his top ladder is products and software and all the recurring revenue types of passive income businesses that everybody wants.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You can skip some steps, but you can't skip learning the skills. And so you've got to work your way. And I was a little bit surprised to find that more guests started with a service business than any other business model, because it's like it doesn't have that allure of passive income, but it's not necessarily where they end up. It's like, OK, that's where I start. And then it sparks customers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
some other idea or it sparks this conversation or you meet somebody through that and the businesses start to evolve, the opportunities become visible once you're already in motion. But most people do start in that. I mean, there was me painting houses in college, trying to figure out how to sell something and go through all the steps in that process.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It was one of these things where I think you reached out, whatever that was, 2017, 2018. And it's like, this girl's a go-getter. You know, she's going places. You know, want to watch this journey. And it's been really inspiring to see what you built starting as a side project and into this media behemoth conglomerate that you've got going on now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Obviously, you can scale it with team members by having other people do the work. You can scale it by raising rates. You can scale by productizing to a certain extent where instead of hourly, now it's just a fixed monthly cost. And you have a sense of what your deliverables are going to be. So you can sell it maybe without even talking on the phone with a customer.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like they just click the buy button and there's a level of trust that's built up. you could scale through referral partnerships where it's almost like white labeling. Like this isn't a service that we provide, but we can partner with this other agency or this other service provider. We've seen people do that. A friend of mine did, he was running like this SEO business and eventually got
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
fully booked up, sold out, and he started making money not doing the work. Like, oh, but I'll introduce you to this other guy, a friend of mine, or this other business owner, and would get a finder's fee for sending work to somebody else. I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. And that evolved into a matchmaking directory or lead gen type of directory for that type of business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like, oh, we'll answer a few different questions about your goals and your type of business, and we'll match you, or we'll introduce you to the company that's the best fit. It's like, oh, dang, you could probably do that in just about any niche.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, very common path to go, you know, have, do the thing, get the results. And naturally, you're gonna have people asking, well, How did you do that? How did you build your podcast? Or how did you get so many social followers? You get tired answering the same question over and over again. You're like, well, let me just record the answers. We'll package this up into a digital product.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Have you connected with Stephen Key from InventRight at all? No. Fascinating guy. So he'd been doing this for decades, helping aspiring inventors license their products.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And the way we kind of framed it was rather than at this time, like Amazon FBA, private label was the hot thing, like tap into this huge market on the world's largest store, Amazon, you know, build it and they'll come almost was how shooting fish in a barrel. It was, that's at least how it seemed from the outside. His argument is like, look at all this upfront risk that you have.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You've got to buy 500, 1,000 units of whatever this product is. You've got to spend additional money on marketing, advertising, collecting reviews. And then even if it hits, you're going to be reinvesting capital into inventory, sometimes for years, before you can take those chips off the table. He's like, what if instead you just...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
pitch the idea to some company that already had the marketing manufacturing and the marketing firepower to make this thing a hit. And we talked to a guy whose business was like a Pictionary-inspired card game. It's like, here's something that already exists. Here's my creative spin on it. Sold it to Mattel, maybe 5% licensing fee, which they netted like $300,000 in royalties.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This guy was like a dentist in Georgia. It was like a little side project for him. Another guest, she was like a softball player, a softball coach. And she was playing third base and her hand kept getting hurt with hard ground balls. So she had a little padded inner glove thing. She would stick inside her mitt. And that was her little licensing invention. Or somebody else had...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
like a koozie, like a can holder. The little bottom would freeze and it would fit into the dimple of your Coke can or your beer can. And it was like these little pivots on products that already exist. It's just such a creative way to go about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It is less popular than it once was, but still can work. Dropshipping is where you don't hold any inventory, but you partner with people who do. And usually it's going to be big ticket or bigger ticket purchases that aren't readily available nearby. Like if you've seen people doing golf simulators or giant commercial inflatable bounce houses or...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
maybe treadmills or treadmill desks maybe barbecue smokers type of thing but like typically bigger items where you don't have to hold the inventory you strike up partnerships with the distributors or manufacturers and you collect orders you do the marketing and then you ship it out or the distributor ships it out on your behalf or the manufacturer ships it out on your behalf and so the appeal is well i don't have to buy this thing until it's sold right and then i just make my
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
maybe 10%, maybe 15%. You might have pretty thin margins, which you got to pay your entire marketing budget out of that. You figure out how am I going to drive traffic? And then the other downside is I don't really have any control over that customer experience. If there's shipping delays, if something breaks, all of a sudden you're a middleman.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The customer thought they were doing business with you, but now you're almost powerless. You just have to forward messages or calls like, hey, where's my customer's order? So definitely trade-offs. It could be kind of a competitive place to play. But if you can drive your own traffic and you've got a partner that you really trust, it absolutely can work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, as you think about what's my value add layer, is it going to be customer support? Is it going to be some sort of consultation? Oh, on your golf simulator, are you an insider in that space? Like, do you know which ones are actually better and help customers drive their decision rather than just purely competing on price?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, I don't think it's a new concept by any means. I think previous generations would have called it moonlighting or having a second job. And it might have looked like bartending on the weekends or delivering pizzas or having a rental property.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Okay.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I'm gonna try.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I would go that service route. And if I'm thinking longer term, that agency route where trying to figure out pain points and problems, what can I solve? And if it's me personally, like, okay, I'll go pressure wash people's driveways or something. The machine is going to cost me three, 400 bucks, pressure wash somebody's house, three, 400 bucks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But the realm of potential side hustles has absolutely expanded in the last 10 years with the rise of peer-to-peer gig economy type of apps, plug-and-play side hustles. Sign up for Uber and go drive around or do DoorDash and stuff like that. There's a peer-to-peer platform for just about anything.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like if you don't break even after one job and you know, that's kind of off to the races and you could even go sell the job before buying the machine, you know, hey, can I come back next week and do pressure washing for you? And you don't even need to spend the $2,500 upfront, like if you pre-book it. But longer term, I'm still trading time for money. I don't have a lot of leverage in this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so we talked to some really inspiring younger entrepreneurs recently who were doing a window washing business or car detailing business where it's like, I can find other people who know how to do this work probably as good or better than me. I just need to be the marketing arm. I need to be the administrative arm, the scheduler.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Kind of being a better administrator, better operator, and then just finding trustworthy people to go out and do the work. And so similar to your agency, your social agency model, where that has got some scalability and some legs to it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think for handmade products, you got to figure out where the demand is. And it's probably going to be on Etsy and maybe Amazon Handmade if you can get accepted into that program. The challenge is, and there's some keyword research tools that can help you with evaluating Etsy demand.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And to their credit, Etsy has a lot of public data where they'll show you the number of sales that each shop has made. They don't tell you on the individual product level, as far as I'm aware, but Rather than trying to create demand from scratch, it's so much easier to fill demand. So trying to figure out what is already selling and how can you put your own unique spin on it?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
So that's where I would go, especially if I don't have an existing audience. I'm going to be relying on Etsy's audience in this case to say, hey, these products are popular. How can I throw my hat in the ring and try and capture some of that demand?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you have an underutilized asset in your life, whether it's your house or your car or, you know, watching other people's dogs, there's all sorts of different things that you can do. And Side Hustle Nation has been a beneficiary of that rising tide of interest. inside hustles over the last 10 or 12 years. And it's become much more mainstream.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Well, Etsy is nice from that standpoint because all it costs you is 20 cents to put the listing up. But we had a guy who was doing these Renaissance style pet portraits. And I think he had actual Photoshop experts on his team. You probably do this with AI now where people, customers would upload a picture of their dog and he would put them in this frilly Henry VIII type of outfit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it was all print on demand. And he'd ship these guys the products. Something like that would be really interesting, like AI-powered type of thing, where it gets, like if you're doing the print-on-demand thing, very much a volume game, where the people I see having the most success have thousands of products out there. And you're just dealing with copycats all day long. If something sells...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The bots or the other people who are watching that say, oh, we better make a copy of this shirt because somebody bought it. And it can be really challenging, but it's super rewarding when we get those Redbubble sales notifications or those merch, Amazon merch sales notifications. It's passive income once it's up there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yes. Now, the advantage to building your own audience, obviously, like you have much more control because it's Etsy's customer. It's not yours. It's Amazon's customer. It's not yours. We had a woman on last year. The site is called Strapsicle. Strapsicle is this little silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle so you can read with one hand. And the origin story was fantastic.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I was breastfeeding my son and the Kindle dropped on his head and everybody was really upset. Like, there's got to be a better way. None of the existing straps were great. So we went out and invented this thing. And what she did, which was, I thought, really smart, Lots of influencer marketing, partnering with TikTokers. BookTok was the sub-community that she found.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
People who were really into Kindle and tapping in. Hey, let me send you a free thing. No obligation, no strings attached. And here's an offer code if you'd like it. And...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
was selling the crap out of these things with you can imagine like it doesn't weigh anything almost no cost to ship almost no cost to manufacture and then when it was time to launch on amazon they had this existing audience that they could push over there to leave reviews to go and buy the product where i think most people start amazon first and then try and wean themselves off wean back onto their own shopify powered platform and so much harder to go that other direction
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, this is probably tier three, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid content-based business, audience-based business where it could be a social following, it could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And once you have people paying attention, the entire playbook opens up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, sure, you could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play. And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last decade.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because the scale is almost infinite, right? It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think that's one part out of a necessity where like housing, healthcare, education, some big ticket expenses have not gotten any cheaper. Wages by and large have not kept pace with some of those big ticket increases in expenses. And so approaching it out of necessity on the one hand, and then approaching it out of this proactive desire to spend your free time more and
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, you got to niche down. And so to say I'm a general virtual assistant, it's kind of a race to the bottom. But if you say I am your QuickBooks bookkeeping assistant, okay, now I've got a lane that I can play in. Or I am your funnel optimization assistant. I am your community manager. I am your... podcast editing provider, lots of different sub-niches.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You can even ask ChatGPT, what are a hundred different services I could offer as a virtual assistant? And there's going to be a few on that list where you're like, I know how to do that. And even if you're not completely, you know, the world's foremost expert on that, I guarantee you will be after you get a couple of clients to do the thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then you can start to agency-fy that, you can start to productize that. And I You might have some fun doing it. Or you might find, I really didn't like doing that. I'm going to try option B. Go try something else.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Oh, I like this one. This is actually my wife's side hustle. So she does wedding photography. She does family photos for holiday cards and stuff like that. What it was for them from hobbyist to professional was getting up the nerve. And this was 10 plus years ago. But add on Craigslist, we'll shoot your wedding. Her and her partner will shoot your wedding for 200 bucks.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think it was like starting super, super low because in this business, portfolio sells. if I am a bride and you don't have any wedding pictures, you're going to have to cut me a real good deal for me to take a chance on our wedding day. But that's what they did. And they booked up and I was like, who is looking for wedding photography on Craigslist?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And maybe today it would be Facebook groups or Facebook marketplace, you know, different places to play. But in that era, you know, that site had some eyeballs and sure enough, they booked up 10 or 12 weddings, you know, they raised their prices with each one. And now they charge four or $5,000 for this wedding package.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But they had to have that portfolio to build up the experience of doing it live under the pressure, like a family photography, like, okay, it didn't work. We'll just do it again next weekend. We're not going to restage this whole weddings.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
We got to get it right the first time to building up the confidence to do that and building up the confidence to charge more and more in land, higher paying clients, better venues. and all of that, and lots of cool stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
So they found a strategic partnership with one of the wedding venues in California, whereas like, and the conversation might be as simple as what does it take to get on your preferred vendor list? Who are the companies that you work with over and over again? And they're like, fill out this application or, you know, make sure you have this insurance and we'll add you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like it was not a difficult process. And now all of a sudden, kind of a steady stream of weddings come through there. It could be, One cool one, partnering with the local school PTA, like if they have a silent auction, okay, we'll auction off a photo session. So we get in front of all the parents at that school and you just kind of start the word of mouth.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like micro local influencer marketing almost. It only takes one person who knows a lot of other families to start to refer you out. Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
effectively, more productively. Like if your day job isn't scratching that creative itch, maybe something outside of your nine to five can do it. And we see people really tackling it from both sides.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This is where probably pause and first give yourself some credit. You probably have some skills by definition, like any job you've had, like that was a skill somebody thought was worth paying for. At the very low end of this, it could be those gig economy jobs. type of jobs. It could be the Instacars, the DoorDashes of the world. The downside is obviously time for money.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It could be limited upside on that sort of thing. But it could also be something like other what we call like plug and play side hustles. Like we've covered becoming a mobile notary loan signing agent. If you have an attention to detail and you can get a notary license, you're qualified to do this work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it's not, rocket science is not particularly exciting, like watching people sign papers, but it's not the end of the world either. It could be taking surveys or doing online market research, focus group type of stuff. I think these are fun. Like I probably do three, four, 500 bucks a year worth of this stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like, oh yeah, come to our online panel about credit card rewards or talk to us about your favorite video editing software. Like, All right, sure. That's totally fine. It could be a bunch of apps will pay you to play mobile games if you're into that kind of thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like another popular one in the past year or two has been this company called ShareTown, which is similar like plug and play where ShareTown specializes in product returns for direct to consumer brands that sell like bulky stuff like furniture, exercise equipment, mattresses. I think they do pizza ovens as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But like, you know, how all the mattress companies have like 100 night better sleepers free guarantee. And so a certain percentage of people were like, you know, either on night one or night 99, they're like, ah, it wasn't for us. We want to return it. And so then as the local share town rep, you get dispatched to go pick it up. You clean it up.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You resell it because Casper, whoever it is, they can't take that mattress back. They don't want it back. And so this is their way of helping the customer out. And I assume recouping a little bit of the cost at the same time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, so you mentioned Fiverr, obviously Upwork for the freelance marketplaces, Rover for pet sitting. There's a peer to peer site for just about anything. The challenge is to find one that is up and coming and less saturated or maybe more niche. What I would probably Google is the service or skill that you have in mind plus marketplace or plus platform and see what comes up and maybe
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
page two of Google, maybe lower on page one. And then you can plug that brand name into Google Trends and see like, is it increasing? Is it decreasing? Just to try and catch something that's on the upswing rather than one that is already just loaded to the gills with service providers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I love this question because everybody is here at one point or at some point you find yourself in this exact position. What you have to remember, and I'm still guilty of this, I want you to remove the phrase, I didn't have time from your vocabulary. Instead of I didn't have time, the phrase that you need to get into your head is I prioritized something else. And it's totally fine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
to prioritize something else. But that little mental shift of being honest with yourself, I prioritized watching Netflix or I prioritized hanging out with my kids. That's all totally fine. But you might find that you're prioritizing some suboptimal things. So that's the first step. Next step is getting consistent with carving out time either daily or weekly to make progress on the thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you don't block it off in the calendar, it's not going to happen. It could be a half hour first thing in the morning. It could be 15 minutes after the kids go to bed. It could be Saturday mornings on the weekend. Do it and do it consistently because it's so hard to get that momentum spinning. It's like trying to push that boulder down the hill.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But once you get it rolling, the momentum can start to compound and the motivation can start to compound, especially if you start to see some results and then you really feel the need to keep going at it. But you carve out that time because otherwise it's like, you know, I've been guilty of having I'm a to-do list junkie, and sometimes a to-do list will say things like, write book.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
There is never, never going to be an uninterrupted eight-week block of time to go and write this thing. So instead, trying to break it down into the smallest actionable steps that you might be able to accomplish or might be able to start on in that 15, 30-minute block of time. Like, okay, maybe I can outline chapter one, or maybe I can start to chip away at this daunting project people talk about.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
My very first side hustle, aside from painting houses in college, like, I don't know if that counts, but the first online side hustle was a comparison shopping site for shoes. Like in the early days of the internet, 10 different stores have this pair of shoes that you're looking at. We'll tell you where to find the best price.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
eating an elephant, which is like the weirdest metaphor of all time. But you know, it's just one bite at a time, one step at a time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The first thing that comes to mind is actually keeping track of what I call your personal profitability. This is, even if you don't have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life. And that means you're in charge of how profitable am I as an individual, as a household? And this is simple equation, income minus expenses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And a lot of people have a sense of their salary or how much they're making. But like, have you ever gotten really honest and granular about what are my actual outflows? Because every month, my wife and I, we look at the credit card statement, you're like, whew, a little bit higher than it normally is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But it's like, oh, we bought plane tickets or we had that garage repair, you know, but it's like, we have one thing in our mind of like, you know, what the base level expenses is. And then another one that's like the reality. And so I'm trying to get honest and like, well, how profitable was it? Having that conversation and keeping track of that on a monthly basis, I think is really important.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You know, the IRS will ask you for your adjusted gross income and all these weird acronyms and measures, but they don't care about how much did you actually keep? What was the actual profitability of your household? I think it's really important to get a pulse on that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
the secret to a profitable life is, again, I wish I had like the one word soundbite. What comes to mind is this willingness to experiment. And it comes down to like this, you know, house painting thing in college where they let you get several steps down the interview process before they even tell you it's house painting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then by that time you're kind of bought in and you're like, well, do I really want to do that? And my girlfriend, you know, my future wife, she was like, It's three months of your life. Who cares? If it sucks, it sucks. It's not going to kill you. And that kind of experimenter's mentality has paid off over and over again. What's the realistic worst case scenario?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It was an affiliate marketing type of business where those stores would pay a finder's fee. They would pay a commission for driving sales to their sites. That was a good one. I started a virtual assistant directory and review platform called Virtual Assistant Assistant. Started in 2011, sold in 2020. That...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If it's not life-threatening and the upside is strong enough, it probably is worth a shot. And that's something that we've seen over and over again, separating the...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
side hustle show guests that are having success versus the people who are perpetually stuck on the sidelines, this willingness to take step one, even if they don't really know what steps two through 10 are, it's kind of that unlock that really helps people work for profits and not wages ultimately, and unlock that next level of personal freedom, financial freedom, for sure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Side hustle nation.com is the home base. We'd love to have you tune into the side hustle show. You find it in all your favorite podcast apps. I know we talked about a lot of different side hustles in this episode, but side hustle nation.com slash ideas. If you would like even more as kind of our annual updated list of the best that we found.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You bet.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It has improved certain processes. It's made things more efficient. But you know, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off the cliff and figures out how to build their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. Even if you don't have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I was really born out of my own experience and anxiety around working with virtual team members. Of all the different companies, which ones are legit? Are they going to steal my idea? How does it work with paying them and taxes? All of these rookie questions, but then putting the directory and kind of having a front row seat as that industry really grew and expanded over that time too.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
That was the hypothesis in the early days of Side Hustle Nation, where I'm going to be the guinea pig. I'm going to be the tester. I'm going to try out all these different things and report back on the results. And in the early days, that was freelance writing, a little bit of freelance book editing for nonfiction authors. Started with like a gig on Fiverr. Hey, I'll proofread your book. And as
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Most books are a lot more than 500 words, but it ended up to be some pretty sizable gigs. I did a lot of like Amazon FBA clearance arbitrage in those early years because somebody told me about it on the podcast. It's like, there's no way in the era of big data that this is actually a thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But sure enough, you go to Walmart, you scan the products, and you're like, oh, okay, it says there's profit here. Then you ship it in and it sells immediately. And you're like... okay, I guess this is a thing, you know, doing that kind of thing, selling digital products, creating online courses on Udemy, doing the self-publishing thing, trying my hand in a bunch of different areas.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think it was a ton of fun to play around and do those experiments.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This is the dream job. If I can show up and get paid to do my hour, hour and a half of radio every week, I don't know why I would ever give that up. I know. It's such a kick out of scooping side hustle stories and connecting with people with really inspiring businesses that they've built. I mean, the show is primarily monetized through sponsorships.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Most of them are coming through Yap Media these days. And it took... years to be truthful before that could meaningfully be called a full-time income from the show. What was more helpful early on was recognizing podcast advertising is amplitude and frequency. How big is the audience and frequency? How often can you reach them?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so if you have an entrepreneurs on fire daily show with a big audience, yeah, absolutely. You're going to kill it on advertising. But if you're doing at that time, a weekly show with a modest audience, I you know, does this really pencil out?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But using it as a content marketing channel to build up an audience, build up an email list, build relationships and trust, it still was absolutely worthwhile to do in the early days. And you still get all those benefits, even though the show is now monetized primarily with pre-roll or mid-roll ads rather through sponsorships.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Well,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
That's the hard part. I think of it in terms of what I call the listener pyramid, you know, pyramid with four levels. You have strangers. Unfortunately, that's the biggest section of the base of the pyramid. Strangers, people who don't know you exist. You've convinced some of them to become listeners. You've convinced some of them to become subscribers.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then ultimately what you're shooting for at the top of the pyramid is fans. These are the people who listen to everything that you put out. They're the people evangelizing for you. They're spreading the word. They're taking your recommendations.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And with every piece of content that you create, it's like trying to ascend people on that pyramid, you know, from really compelling titles and topics to hopefully get a stranger to give you a chance and listen to you for that first time. And then hopefully they do. And they're compelled to click that subscribe button to that follow button.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And hopefully they spend enough time with you in their earbuds. They become fans of yours and help spread the word.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
A friend of mine in a mastermind group posed decision framework, and it's stuck with me ever since. With every decision you make, does it add complexity or reduce complexity? And if it adds complexity, okay, is it permanent or is it short-term? And is that trade-off going to be worthwhile? Obviously, like making money, it's fun.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But at a certain point, you're like, well, you still have to do right by the audience.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
My boss might disagree, but I think it made me a better employee where at my day job, my old day job, I was at the bottom rung of this Fortune 500 company. But by nights and weekends, I was the CEO of my own little project. And there's some entrepreneurial upside to it that maybe it doesn't scale to quit your job, but there's still some benefit of doing that. And you can think of it in terms of
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The side hustle snowball is a framework that we talk about where you've itemized out your expenses from smallest to largest. It's like everybody wants the side hustle that erases their mortgage or their rent. And that's a great goal to have. But like, could you pay for your car insurance? Could you pay for your cell phone bill? Could you erase your gym membership or whatever?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Celebrating those small wins, because I think there's some value in that too, like erasing those expenses with new income.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, there's some element of that whole digging your well before you're thirsty thing. There's a lot of stress. You're one layoff away or one bad meeting away in some cases from having your income go to zero. That's a really stressful position to be, like a really fragile way to live. So I think there's definitely some of that security benefit.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's not going to be immediate, probably, but it's something you can stack up over time. I think Reid Hoffman has the quote about You know, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off the cliff and figures out how to build their airplane or their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. That sounds terrifying.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like, well, we can make it just a step off instead of this huge leap of faith.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton. So somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
are on the sidelines looking to get into the game, there has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on Upwork, to try and get that first client, to put yourself out there. And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer, a journalist I had on the show, He just won International Sports Photographer of the Year or something like his highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review. And his boss is like, man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise. And he's like, you gotta be kidding me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he's making like 30 grand a year doing this. And he's like, this is not gonna work. And so that was the motivating factor to kind of get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
starting his side hustle so that's kind of the first law and it goes both ways like once you're in motion we see this over and over again ideas start to pop up that you never would have had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research and that it's really powerful like this you know inertia and momentum law law number two is this law of force and
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and impact. And so this is Newton's law of acceleration. Acceleration of an object occurs based on the force that was applied to it. So the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack. And so it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry. He told me he would have been happy with 10%.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change his life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, this was kind of like hit home. We were at this beach vacation this summer and you're at the pool all the time and you're like, man, I really should hit the gym more because I see all these people who are super fit. And so maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health, you could see it in business, you could see it in relationships. It happens all over the place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then the third law is this action and reaction. So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so we're recording this on election day and somebody just posted like, whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And even if nobody... theoretically reacts to your stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Because I wrote a personal blog for years and years and years that nobody really read outside of my friends and family. Well, that was a reaction. It was a reaction that told me that, hey, you better write about stuff that people care about. And it wasn't all for waste because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning WordPress and learning all this other stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But it can be depressing when on the surface, it's like, yeah, there was no reaction. Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The big three for the site right now are freelancing, like we talked about, e-commerce, and blogging and podcasting, content marketing types of businesses where you're like, okay, I'm going to set up an online presence to talk about this subject matter that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm learning this subject matter, and monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've seen it work across introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer going to be and how can I get that in front of my target customers?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So... What's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings on eBay, Amazon, Redbubble, some of these other similar marketplaces where people might be buying this stuff. If there are other people... making sales, that's a fantastic sign, right? There's money in that market.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs, I think, 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free. So you create your listing very affordably. And so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents. Etsy has on-platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. But one thing that you probably want to do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made. So you can see that with some initial reviews from friends and family.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You might even just give these away and say, I'd really prefer if you ordered this through Etsy to help out my appearance on that platform. And you find that kind of a similar strategy, not just on Etsy, but on iTunes. Hey, can you review this podcast on Udemy? Hey, could you review my course on Amazon? Hey, could you review my book?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like just to kind of seed the platform with a little bit of social proof. So the algorithms start to work in your favor. And so people, when they do land on that page, they say, okay, this isn't a ghost town. There's actually, you know, something, there's something to this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, and maybe that's feedback too. If nobody wants your thing, if you can't get your friends and family to buy it, that's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting specifically because I forget the latest stats, but it's probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is. And so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie left to go out and grow over the next 5, 10, 15 years. As people discover on-demand audio and they're probably going to react like I did, this is
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
amazing how did i waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio but i could listen to stuff that is gonna help me grow personally and professionally like really excited about that the the key then is okay how can i reach those people in the 40 that already do know about podcasts how can i reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining a friend of mine kind of gave me this was five or six years ago at a conference gave me the rule of the internet which i
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
quote all the time. People are only ever online for one of two reasons. Number one, to be entertained. And number two, to solve a problem. And you can think of it, that's Facebook and that's Google. To be entertained or solve a problem. And the podcast may bridge the gap there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Some friends have called it infotainment, where you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way, but putting the listener first. And It's a practice. It's a crap. Like the first 50 episodes of The Side Hustle Show, awful. You know, I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those, but it just took a while to hit my stride as a host.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I don't know, you're like a radio professional, so you're doing great right out of the gate, but it's a practice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that $200 to $600 a month level. What I would like to see is a track record of earnings history... six to 12 months, and other people will be more aggressive than this, of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you know you're not going to be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings, to try and get to that ramp up period. The exception to that has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck. And you say, hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely. It has to align with your goals too, right? Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. Hey, I love my work, but I do this stuff on the side because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money for whatever reason. It's building my skills.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's exercising a different side of my brain. So not everybody is out to quit their day job.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that... you kind of economic macro positioning that we talked about where it's like, you know, what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Like, why can't it be like the old days? Right. That's maybe one angle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The other angle is just like maybe the word hustle, like as the connotation of like, I'm going to scam people or something like that, not recognizing the It just means your effort, like control what you can control, work as hard as you can when you can and be smart about it. Actually, side hustle nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He's like, look, you're going to have bad days at the plate. You're going to have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps. And I was like, okay, I really like that. That stuck with me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh my gosh. So we talked about the freelancing consulting stuff. If you have a skill that's in demand, absolutely understand that your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of your value. A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making 18 bucks an hour, which was Awesome for him, like in his early 20s.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The company was turning around and charging the parents like a hundred bucks an hour. And he was like, wait a minute, I have this skill. I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that freelancing marketplace. Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet, understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside of your paycheck.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My wife and her business partner on the side from her job started a photography business, completely unrelated to her engineering job. So it doesn't have to be, I'm an accountant by day, so I'll do accounting at night. We talked about the podcasting stuff. We talked about kind of like the online...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
authority, business, blogging, content marketing businesses, I continue to see and I continue to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys are posting. I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and grow the stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had never even heard of. And I'm really excited by stuff like that. People having this new ability to kind of monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that they might be able to put out there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, make it easy for me. Make it step by step. Absolutely.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that was my initial reaction too, but I keep getting proven wrong. People starting relatively new sites. Again, another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the UK. So just even a tiny little island where apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go buy these mattresses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full-time living doing that. So, you know, on the blogging front, the trap I want people to avoid is like, okay, I'm going to start a personal blog and expect that that makes money. You know, the ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to discover this? Usually it's going to be Google. Usually it's going to be Pinterest. But thinking of these user-to-content platforms, that's a term from Rosemary Groner who runs TheBusyBudgeter.com. It's like a personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. How are people going to discover this? And if...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
you know, if it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, you know, probably nobody's going to click on that. Probably nobody's going to come and read that. And it's like, you're going to pour your heart out. You're going to pour hours into creating this stuff. Like make sure that you're setting yourself up for success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's something that somebody is looking for and, you know, you're giving them the best chance to find it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss and this had been kind of on my mind for months, really, because I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. I was out to dinner with my boss and I'm like, okay, this is the day. I'm going to break in the news. I'm out of here. I'm going to get my notice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It still took me a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it. Because it's like, is that allowed? Can I cut my own paycheck? I went to school. I have these obligations. Is this actually going to work? And I had several months of earnings history at that point. So it wasn't completely...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
you might've heard the definition of an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's going to figure out how to build their parachute on the way down. Like that was, that was not me. And it was still super scary. But after I told him it was like this huge weight off my shoulders and it just like, okay, this is real. Like, let's go, let's go do this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I would say once you have at least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business. So you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're going to free up some time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Hit up sidehustlenation.com slash ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part-time business ideas that you can start today and no opt-in required. And of course, we'd love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show available in iTunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I know, it sounds awful now. So this was kind of in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe. It started actually with a guest of mine on the Side Hustle show who was talking about taking cold showers, starting out as a fat-burning hack. to boost your metabolism for the rest of the day because you're going to expend calories like heating your body up long after the shower is over.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But then what he found was it was effective for that. But what he also found, it was effective for just like motivation. And he's like, if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard because it sucks. You feel like you're ready to tackle anything. anything. And I kind of found the same thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I said on air, I was like, you know what, that sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might have been totally placebo, but at that time, I started to get more coaching clients. Traffic started to pick up. I don't know, for whatever reason, I was into it. And so I did it for over a year. I guess it was effective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Maybe it was what I needed at that time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Do it for 30 days or even maybe the baby steps way to do it would be to end your showers cold, which is kind of what I tend to do today because that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My original side hustle was, when I was working corporate, was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called Shoesniper.com, and it would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes, and it earned money as an affiliate.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So if somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission. And while I was running that, and the site had a almost a 10 year run, was always looking for stuff on the side. And it was kind of like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul searching, be like, well, what do you want to be known for when people Google you?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What do you get excited about talking about? And it was that prospect of lower risk entrepreneurship. You know, how do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that, you know, really never gets old and still doesn't get old? Because there's a million and one creative ways that people are doing it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And that's kind of where the Side Hustle Show and the Side Hustle Nation blog kind of were born from.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
A lot of them. And so my days of experimenting with a lot of this stuff are kind of limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e-commerce experiments with like Amazon and eBay. And I still do a little bit of that, but that's kind of taken the back burner. The Side Hustle blog has... kind of become in the podcast, so kind of become the main focus.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that through self-publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists, but some other sites that were started during that time are still around, starting some experiments in the investing world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income, having like a single point of failure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, not necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom, right, is control over your calendar. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your days? And if you can piece together an income on your own terms rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's kind of where it came from for me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I would definitely advocate focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second. So, you know, try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things, you know, with an unfocused effort because I think that's harder to see results from.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, it could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger as it definitely did for me with the shoe business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential. It's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, okay, I drive for Uber. Or I'm delivering pizzas or I'm, you know, doing Instacart deliveries or something like that. Right. Like that's, that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But at the same time, like you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting today. the podcast, it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people. And that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I think there's a lot more upside, even just like starting a freelancing business. Like I'm going to do freelance writing, I'm going to do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's a weird, it's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great. Unemployment is at record lows. Why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or healthcare, all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So that's a driving factor, just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the more positive way to look at it is I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch, that is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about. That's probably driving some of that as well. Those are the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like, well, I need to make rent next month.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key. And approaching it that way, saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I think it's that... you know, cash strapped nature. You know, look, we're dealing with a debt load. We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Yeah, this is probably, you know, tier three, you know, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid, you know, content based business, audience based business where it could be a social following. It could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And. once you have people paying attention, like the entire playbook opens up. Yeah, sure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
You could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last 10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because yeah, The scale is almost infinite, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Master Audience Engagement and Create Content That Clicks | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people. And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, we came across one that would probably not check this box. It was called Porch Pumpkins. You know, you can check her out on Instagram at Porch Pumpkins. You're selling a million dollars a year worth of decorative, piling up pumpkins on people's porches for Halloween and Thanksgiving. I don't know if I would call that a recession-proof business, but... Fantastic.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Good on you for tapping into this demand where, you know, you kind of go down Maslow's hierarchy, right? Where, you know, food and shelter all the way up to self-actualization. And so the harder times get, the more people are focused on basic needs. And so if you're providing something...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
In that realm, even if it's a food delivery service or maybe the food delivery budget gets cut back, but like you're lowering, going lower down on that hierarchy of needs. It really comes down to solving people's problems. I think about what I spend money on in my own day to day. It's like, make this pain go away.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You know, it's so much easier to sell pain pills than it is to sell vitamins, even if the vitamins might be better for you long run. But if you can figure out what people's pains and problems are, and especially solving those for a business customer generally has more money to spend, that's probably where I would play. Everybody knows at least one entrepreneur and you can start that conversation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
What's really bothering you these days? Or what are the biggest bottlenecks? Or what are the biggest pain points? And even if you got nothing to sell right now, but it's just, you're trying to probe for potential issues and pain points and get that conversation going.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah. So maybe the gold rush here is a Pinterest trend around nice looking porches or holiday decor. She's like, well, shoot, you know, I can get pumpkins by the dozen. I'll pile them up. I'll make them look nice. I don't know if she has a background in interior or exterior design or landscaping or anything, but you're like, I get it. They look nice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But is that something that's people, I mean, she found, booked out a million dollars worth of business sold out by August. And it's like, There's a niche for everything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Those are the ones that always are super fun to share. It's like, nope, never knew you could make money doing that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Maybe another example is the world of podcasting, especially during the pandemic. Well, everybody and their brother is starting a podcast. And so what shovels could you sell into that gold rush? Maybe it's editing services. Maybe it's the ad broker sales. Maybe it's the recording platform software.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you have more technical development side of things, microphones, thinking of what are those trends and gold rushes that you could go and provide some type of service for.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Sure. Maybe you're an early adopter. How can you use AI tools to provide some sort of service to somebody who either doesn't know how to do it, doesn't want to learn, and they can improve some process flow in that way. We've seen people piggybacking on the popularity of other software tools, where if you are a
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You're one layoff away or one bad meeting away from having your income go to zero. That's a really stressful way to live. The realm of potential side hustles has expanded in the last 10 years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Notion expert or a pipe drive expert or HubSpot or HoneyBook was one that we had on the show recently. You can help other companies implement this. You've already got the proven templates. And the advantage is there's already some level of awareness and search demand. People are typing in questions into YouTube about these different software tools. Well, how do I do such and such in this thing?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You create that video content and, you know, hey, I'm an Asana consultant and today we're going to learn how to do blah, blah, blah in Asana or HubSpot or QuickBooks or whatever it is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Totally, totally. Yeah, the furnishings, everything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Oh my gosh, the most profitable one that comes to mind from recent memory, this guy must have just been printing money. This is a web design service called 180sites.com. I think because he started initially charging 180 bucks, I think the pricing has changed, but focusing almost exclusively on building websites for pressure washing companies. So take this and run with this in any niche imaginable.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If he's doing this, just focus on building sites for pressure washers. Like typical web design might be sold as $5,000 upfront cost to be able to do this website. Flips that on its head, hey, I'm just gonna charge you 180 bucks a month, 200 bucks a month for a two-year contract and then ongoing maintenance. After that, we're gonna host the site. If you need any updates, we'll get those done.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
We'll make sure it's secure and represents your business well. And because his customers, well, it only takes one extra job or half of an extra job to pay for this fee every month. It was a pretty easy sell. And when we recorded, he had just had his first $100,000 month. And it was this recurring revenue business model. And it gets easier.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
With every client you do, you add that to the existing template. You're not starting from scratch every single time. It's like, it probably doesn't take you. very long to recoup your costs. He's like, no, after month two or whatever, we're broken even and the rest is gravy. It's like insane profit margins run by a primarily overseas team.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think if somebody outside of a pressure washing company came to him and asked him to build a site, he'd absolutely do it. But that was the bread and butter. And because you had, at this point, several different templates, we'll pick or choose which one you like, and we'll build that out for you. And so that added to the economies of scale and efficiencies of it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Happy to be back. Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's a really interesting place to be right now because on the one hand, as a content creator, as a user, it has improved certain processes, has made things more efficient. At the same time, the AI snippets in Google are taking some of our traffic. It is a challenging place to play. Like a year and a half ago, we recorded this episode on doing faceless YouTube content.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
try and win the viral lottery, create a video around some topic that's already trending. And it was hire a script writer. It was hire a voiceover artist. It was hire a video editor and then hire a thumbnail designer. And we talked to the guy a year later. It was like, well, now we got ChatGPT writing the scripts. Now we've got AI narration.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Now we've got, I think he still had a human video editor compiling stuff. It was like several of these different roles had been replaced by AI or 80% of it replaced by AI. I still go in and edit that script to make sure it is correct. But it was really interesting to see how some of the previous freelance talent at the low end got evaporated within a year.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
More worried about like deep fake stuff is somebody with hours and hours of their voice on the internet. Have you played around with 11 Labs at all? And like the voice cloning?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, it's crazy. And maybe it's just me. It's like, I know that I didn't speak it, but it sounds pretty good. Like, yeah, that sounds like me. I'll give it to you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, that was an episode concept we were thinking of throwing out for Halloween. Like, could we do 100% zombie Nick episode? Through 11 knobs and like, ah, we ended up going with a different concept for that episode. But you could do little segments.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And absolutely, if you need to tweak something in that commercial and you don't have your recording equipment handy, it's like, oh, just, okay, we'll swap out that word for that word. And it sounds just fine.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
One cool one that we're using on the video front, the bottleneck is still in scripting. And so we're still working on ChatGPT, like how to turn this blog post into a compelling video script and priming it in such a way. It's like you wouldn't just read off the blog post, like that wouldn't play very well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But there's this tool called Pictori, which we've been using for the last several months, where you... Upload the script, you upload your voiceover narration, and it pulls in hundreds of stock video clips that would have taken me or a human editor hours and hours and hours of tedious manual labor to do that and splice that together. It does it in just a few minutes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think it creates a pretty visually compelling video without you having to be on camera. I'll introduce the topic, you know, talking head so they like know that it's an actual person for the first time. five or 10 seconds. And then it's just rolled this tape and it's pretty visually compelling. And some of those videos have done pretty well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Victoria. I got to do a whole, I need to do a whole video kind of demo on our use case for it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The most common pushback that I get is, well, yeah, but you're still trading time for money. I'm doing that at my day job. Why would I want to do that as a side hustle? That's the most common pushback that I get. Nathan Berry has what he calls his ladders of wealth creation.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it starts with you trading time for money, either at a job or as a freelancer, consultant, service provider of some sort. You almost have to start there to build up some entrepreneurial skill set and build You know, you can skip to the end, like his top ladder is products and software and all the recurring revenue types of passive income businesses that everybody wants.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You can skip some steps, but you can't skip learning the skills. And so you've got to work your way. And I was a little bit surprised to find that more guests started with a service business than any other business model, because it's like it doesn't have that allure of passive income, but it's not necessarily where they end up. It's like, OK, that's where I start. And then it sparks customers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
some other idea or it sparks this conversation or you meet somebody through that and the businesses start to evolve, the opportunities become visible once you're already in motion. But most people do start in that. I mean, there was me painting houses in college, trying to figure out how to sell something and go through all the steps in that process.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It was one of these things where I think you reached out, whatever that was, 2017, 2018. And it's like, this girl's a go-getter. You know, she's going places. You know, want to watch this journey. And it's been really inspiring to see what you built starting as a side project and into this media behemoth conglomerate that you've got going on now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Obviously, you can scale it with team members by having other people do the work. You can scale it by raising rates. You can scale by productizing to a certain extent where instead of hourly, now it's just a fixed monthly cost. And you have a sense of what your deliverables are going to be. So you can sell it maybe without even talking on the phone with a customer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like they just click the buy button and there's a level of trust that's built up. you could scale through referral partnerships where it's almost like white labeling. Like this isn't a service that we provide, but we can partner with this other agency or this other service provider. We've seen people do that. A friend of mine did, he was running like this SEO business and eventually got
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
fully booked up, sold out, and he started making money not doing the work. Like, oh, but I'll introduce you to this other guy, a friend of mine, or this other business owner, and would get a finder's fee for sending work to somebody else. I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. And that evolved into a matchmaking directory or lead gen type of directory for that type of business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like, oh, we'll answer a few different questions about your goals and your type of business, and we'll match you, or we'll introduce you to the company that's the best fit. It's like, oh, dang, you could probably do that in just about any niche.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, very common path to go, you know, have, do the thing, get the results. And naturally, you're gonna have people asking, well, How did you do that? How did you build your podcast? Or how did you get so many social followers? You get tired answering the same question over and over again. You're like, well, let me just record the answers. We'll package this up into a digital product.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Have you connected with Stephen Key from InventRight at all? No. Fascinating guy. So he'd been doing this for decades, helping aspiring inventors license their products.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And the way we kind of framed it was rather than at this time, like Amazon FBA, private label was the hot thing, like tap into this huge market on the world's largest store, Amazon, you know, build it and they'll come almost was how shooting fish in a barrel. It was, that's at least how it seemed from the outside. His argument is like, look at all this upfront risk that you have.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You've got to buy 500, 1,000 units of whatever this product is. You've got to spend additional money on marketing, advertising, collecting reviews. And then even if it hits, you're going to be reinvesting capital into inventory, sometimes for years, before you can take those chips off the table. He's like, what if instead you just...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
pitch the idea to some company that already had the marketing manufacturing and the marketing firepower to make this thing a hit. And we talked to a guy whose business was like a Pictionary-inspired card game. It's like, here's something that already exists. Here's my creative spin on it. Sold it to Mattel, maybe 5% licensing fee, which they netted like $300,000 in royalties.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This guy was like a dentist in Georgia. It was like a little side project for him. Another guest, she was like a softball player, a softball coach. And she was playing third base and her hand kept getting hurt with hard ground balls. So she had a little padded inner glove thing. She would stick inside her mitt. And that was her little licensing invention. Or somebody else had...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
like a koozie, like a can holder. The little bottom would freeze and it would fit into the dimple of your Coke can or your beer can. And it was like these little pivots on products that already exist. It's just such a creative way to go about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It is less popular than it once was, but still can work. Dropshipping is where you don't hold any inventory, but you partner with people who do. And usually it's going to be big ticket or bigger ticket purchases that aren't readily available nearby. Like if you've seen people doing golf simulators or giant commercial inflatable bounce houses or...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
maybe treadmills or treadmill desks maybe barbecue smokers type of thing but like typically bigger items where you don't have to hold the inventory you strike up partnerships with the distributors or manufacturers and you collect orders you do the marketing and then you ship it out or the distributor ships it out on your behalf or the manufacturer ships it out on your behalf and so the appeal is well i don't have to buy this thing until it's sold right and then i just make my
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
maybe 10%, maybe 15%. You might have pretty thin margins, which you got to pay your entire marketing budget out of that. You figure out how am I going to drive traffic? And then the other downside is I don't really have any control over that customer experience. If there's shipping delays, if something breaks, all of a sudden you're a middleman.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The customer thought they were doing business with you, but now you're almost powerless. You just have to forward messages or calls like, hey, where's my customer's order? So definitely trade-offs. It could be kind of a competitive place to play. But if you can drive your own traffic and you've got a partner that you really trust, it absolutely can work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, as you think about what's my value add layer, is it going to be customer support? Is it going to be some sort of consultation? Oh, on your golf simulator, are you an insider in that space? Like, do you know which ones are actually better and help customers drive their decision rather than just purely competing on price?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, I don't think it's a new concept by any means. I think previous generations would have called it moonlighting or having a second job. And it might have looked like bartending on the weekends or delivering pizzas or having a rental property.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Okay.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I'm gonna try.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I would go that service route. And if I'm thinking longer term, that agency route where trying to figure out pain points and problems, what can I solve? And if it's me personally, like, okay, I'll go pressure wash people's driveways or something. The machine is going to cost me three, 400 bucks, pressure wash somebody's house, three, 400 bucks.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But the realm of potential side hustles has absolutely expanded in the last 10 years with the rise of peer-to-peer gig economy type of apps, plug-and-play side hustles. Sign up for Uber and go drive around or do DoorDash and stuff like that. There's a peer-to-peer platform for just about anything.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like if you don't break even after one job and you know, that's kind of off to the races and you could even go sell the job before buying the machine, you know, hey, can I come back next week and do pressure washing for you? And you don't even need to spend the $2,500 upfront, like if you pre-book it. But longer term, I'm still trading time for money. I don't have a lot of leverage in this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so we talked to some really inspiring younger entrepreneurs recently who were doing a window washing business or car detailing business where it's like, I can find other people who know how to do this work probably as good or better than me. I just need to be the marketing arm. I need to be the administrative arm, the scheduler.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Kind of being a better administrator, better operator, and then just finding trustworthy people to go out and do the work. And so similar to your agency, your social agency model, where that has got some scalability and some legs to it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think for handmade products, you got to figure out where the demand is. And it's probably going to be on Etsy and maybe Amazon Handmade if you can get accepted into that program. The challenge is, and there's some keyword research tools that can help you with evaluating Etsy demand.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And to their credit, Etsy has a lot of public data where they'll show you the number of sales that each shop has made. They don't tell you on the individual product level, as far as I'm aware, but Rather than trying to create demand from scratch, it's so much easier to fill demand. So trying to figure out what is already selling and how can you put your own unique spin on it?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
So that's where I would go, especially if I don't have an existing audience. I'm going to be relying on Etsy's audience in this case to say, hey, these products are popular. How can I throw my hat in the ring and try and capture some of that demand?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you have an underutilized asset in your life, whether it's your house or your car or, you know, watching other people's dogs, there's all sorts of different things that you can do. And Side Hustle Nation has been a beneficiary of that rising tide of interest. inside hustles over the last 10 or 12 years. And it's become much more mainstream.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Well, Etsy is nice from that standpoint because all it costs you is 20 cents to put the listing up. But we had a guy who was doing these Renaissance style pet portraits. And I think he had actual Photoshop experts on his team. You probably do this with AI now where people, customers would upload a picture of their dog and he would put them in this frilly Henry VIII type of outfit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it was all print on demand. And he'd ship these guys the products. Something like that would be really interesting, like AI-powered type of thing, where it gets, like if you're doing the print-on-demand thing, very much a volume game, where the people I see having the most success have thousands of products out there. And you're just dealing with copycats all day long. If something sells...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The bots or the other people who are watching that say, oh, we better make a copy of this shirt because somebody bought it. And it can be really challenging, but it's super rewarding when we get those Redbubble sales notifications or those merch, Amazon merch sales notifications. It's passive income once it's up there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yes. Now, the advantage to building your own audience, obviously, like you have much more control because it's Etsy's customer. It's not yours. It's Amazon's customer. It's not yours. We had a woman on last year. The site is called Strapsicle. Strapsicle is this little silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle so you can read with one hand. And the origin story was fantastic.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I was breastfeeding my son and the Kindle dropped on his head and everybody was really upset. Like, there's got to be a better way. None of the existing straps were great. So we went out and invented this thing. And what she did, which was, I thought, really smart, Lots of influencer marketing, partnering with TikTokers. BookTok was the sub-community that she found.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
People who were really into Kindle and tapping in. Hey, let me send you a free thing. No obligation, no strings attached. And here's an offer code if you'd like it. And...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
was selling the crap out of these things with you can imagine like it doesn't weigh anything almost no cost to ship almost no cost to manufacture and then when it was time to launch on amazon they had this existing audience that they could push over there to leave reviews to go and buy the product where i think most people start amazon first and then try and wean themselves off wean back onto their own shopify powered platform and so much harder to go that other direction
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, this is probably tier three, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid content-based business, audience-based business where it could be a social following, it could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And once you have people paying attention, the entire playbook opens up.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, sure, you could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play. And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last decade.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because the scale is almost infinite, right? It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think that's one part out of a necessity where like housing, healthcare, education, some big ticket expenses have not gotten any cheaper. Wages by and large have not kept pace with some of those big ticket increases in expenses. And so approaching it out of necessity on the one hand, and then approaching it out of this proactive desire to spend your free time more and
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, you got to niche down. And so to say I'm a general virtual assistant, it's kind of a race to the bottom. But if you say I am your QuickBooks bookkeeping assistant, okay, now I've got a lane that I can play in. Or I am your funnel optimization assistant. I am your community manager. I am your... podcast editing provider, lots of different sub-niches.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You can even ask ChatGPT, what are a hundred different services I could offer as a virtual assistant? And there's going to be a few on that list where you're like, I know how to do that. And even if you're not completely, you know, the world's foremost expert on that, I guarantee you will be after you get a couple of clients to do the thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then you can start to agency-fy that, you can start to productize that. And I You might have some fun doing it. Or you might find, I really didn't like doing that. I'm going to try option B. Go try something else.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Oh, I like this one. This is actually my wife's side hustle. So she does wedding photography. She does family photos for holiday cards and stuff like that. What it was for them from hobbyist to professional was getting up the nerve. And this was 10 plus years ago. But add on Craigslist, we'll shoot your wedding. Her and her partner will shoot your wedding for 200 bucks.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I think it was like starting super, super low because in this business, portfolio sells. if I am a bride and you don't have any wedding pictures, you're going to have to cut me a real good deal for me to take a chance on our wedding day. But that's what they did. And they booked up and I was like, who is looking for wedding photography on Craigslist?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And maybe today it would be Facebook groups or Facebook marketplace, you know, different places to play. But in that era, you know, that site had some eyeballs and sure enough, they booked up 10 or 12 weddings, you know, they raised their prices with each one. And now they charge four or $5,000 for this wedding package.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But they had to have that portfolio to build up the experience of doing it live under the pressure, like a family photography, like, okay, it didn't work. We'll just do it again next weekend. We're not going to restage this whole weddings.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
We got to get it right the first time to building up the confidence to do that and building up the confidence to charge more and more in land, higher paying clients, better venues. and all of that, and lots of cool stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
So they found a strategic partnership with one of the wedding venues in California, whereas like, and the conversation might be as simple as what does it take to get on your preferred vendor list? Who are the companies that you work with over and over again? And they're like, fill out this application or, you know, make sure you have this insurance and we'll add you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like it was not a difficult process. And now all of a sudden, kind of a steady stream of weddings come through there. It could be, One cool one, partnering with the local school PTA, like if they have a silent auction, okay, we'll auction off a photo session. So we get in front of all the parents at that school and you just kind of start the word of mouth.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like micro local influencer marketing almost. It only takes one person who knows a lot of other families to start to refer you out. Yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
effectively, more productively. Like if your day job isn't scratching that creative itch, maybe something outside of your nine to five can do it. And we see people really tackling it from both sides.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This is where probably pause and first give yourself some credit. You probably have some skills by definition, like any job you've had, like that was a skill somebody thought was worth paying for. At the very low end of this, it could be those gig economy jobs. type of jobs. It could be the Instacars, the DoorDashes of the world. The downside is obviously time for money.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It could be limited upside on that sort of thing. But it could also be something like other what we call like plug and play side hustles. Like we've covered becoming a mobile notary loan signing agent. If you have an attention to detail and you can get a notary license, you're qualified to do this work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And it's not, rocket science is not particularly exciting, like watching people sign papers, but it's not the end of the world either. It could be taking surveys or doing online market research, focus group type of stuff. I think these are fun. Like I probably do three, four, 500 bucks a year worth of this stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like, oh yeah, come to our online panel about credit card rewards or talk to us about your favorite video editing software. Like, All right, sure. That's totally fine. It could be a bunch of apps will pay you to play mobile games if you're into that kind of thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Like another popular one in the past year or two has been this company called ShareTown, which is similar like plug and play where ShareTown specializes in product returns for direct to consumer brands that sell like bulky stuff like furniture, exercise equipment, mattresses. I think they do pizza ovens as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But like, you know, how all the mattress companies have like 100 night better sleepers free guarantee. And so a certain percentage of people were like, you know, either on night one or night 99, they're like, ah, it wasn't for us. We want to return it. And so then as the local share town rep, you get dispatched to go pick it up. You clean it up.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You resell it because Casper, whoever it is, they can't take that mattress back. They don't want it back. And so this is their way of helping the customer out. And I assume recouping a little bit of the cost at the same time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, so you mentioned Fiverr, obviously Upwork for the freelance marketplaces, Rover for pet sitting. There's a peer to peer site for just about anything. The challenge is to find one that is up and coming and less saturated or maybe more niche. What I would probably Google is the service or skill that you have in mind plus marketplace or plus platform and see what comes up and maybe
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
page two of Google, maybe lower on page one. And then you can plug that brand name into Google Trends and see like, is it increasing? Is it decreasing? Just to try and catch something that's on the upswing rather than one that is already just loaded to the gills with service providers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I love this question because everybody is here at one point or at some point you find yourself in this exact position. What you have to remember, and I'm still guilty of this, I want you to remove the phrase, I didn't have time from your vocabulary. Instead of I didn't have time, the phrase that you need to get into your head is I prioritized something else. And it's totally fine.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
to prioritize something else. But that little mental shift of being honest with yourself, I prioritized watching Netflix or I prioritized hanging out with my kids. That's all totally fine. But you might find that you're prioritizing some suboptimal things. So that's the first step. Next step is getting consistent with carving out time either daily or weekly to make progress on the thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If you don't block it off in the calendar, it's not going to happen. It could be a half hour first thing in the morning. It could be 15 minutes after the kids go to bed. It could be Saturday mornings on the weekend. Do it and do it consistently because it's so hard to get that momentum spinning. It's like trying to push that boulder down the hill.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But once you get it rolling, the momentum can start to compound and the motivation can start to compound, especially if you start to see some results and then you really feel the need to keep going at it. But you carve out that time because otherwise it's like, you know, I've been guilty of having I'm a to-do list junkie, and sometimes a to-do list will say things like, write book.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
There is never, never going to be an uninterrupted eight-week block of time to go and write this thing. So instead, trying to break it down into the smallest actionable steps that you might be able to accomplish or might be able to start on in that 15, 30-minute block of time. Like, okay, maybe I can outline chapter one, or maybe I can start to chip away at this daunting project people talk about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
My very first side hustle, aside from painting houses in college, like, I don't know if that counts, but the first online side hustle was a comparison shopping site for shoes. Like in the early days of the internet, 10 different stores have this pair of shoes that you're looking at. We'll tell you where to find the best price.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
eating an elephant, which is like the weirdest metaphor of all time. But you know, it's just one bite at a time, one step at a time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The first thing that comes to mind is actually keeping track of what I call your personal profitability. This is, even if you don't have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life. And that means you're in charge of how profitable am I as an individual, as a household? And this is simple equation, income minus expenses.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And a lot of people have a sense of their salary or how much they're making. But like, have you ever gotten really honest and granular about what are my actual outflows? Because every month, my wife and I, we look at the credit card statement, you're like, whew, a little bit higher than it normally is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But it's like, oh, we bought plane tickets or we had that garage repair, you know, but it's like, we have one thing in our mind of like, you know, what the base level expenses is. And then another one that's like the reality. And so I'm trying to get honest and like, well, how profitable was it? Having that conversation and keeping track of that on a monthly basis, I think is really important.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You know, the IRS will ask you for your adjusted gross income and all these weird acronyms and measures, but they don't care about how much did you actually keep? What was the actual profitability of your household? I think it's really important to get a pulse on that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
the secret to a profitable life is, again, I wish I had like the one word soundbite. What comes to mind is this willingness to experiment. And it comes down to like this, you know, house painting thing in college where they let you get several steps down the interview process before they even tell you it's house painting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then by that time you're kind of bought in and you're like, well, do I really want to do that? And my girlfriend, you know, my future wife, she was like, It's three months of your life. Who cares? If it sucks, it sucks. It's not going to kill you. And that kind of experimenter's mentality has paid off over and over again. What's the realistic worst case scenario?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It was an affiliate marketing type of business where those stores would pay a finder's fee. They would pay a commission for driving sales to their sites. That was a good one. I started a virtual assistant directory and review platform called Virtual Assistant Assistant. Started in 2011, sold in 2020. That...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
If it's not life-threatening and the upside is strong enough, it probably is worth a shot. And that's something that we've seen over and over again, separating the...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
side hustle show guests that are having success versus the people who are perpetually stuck on the sidelines, this willingness to take step one, even if they don't really know what steps two through 10 are, it's kind of that unlock that really helps people work for profits and not wages ultimately, and unlock that next level of personal freedom, financial freedom, for sure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Side hustle nation.com is the home base. We'd love to have you tune into the side hustle show. You find it in all your favorite podcast apps. I know we talked about a lot of different side hustles in this episode, but side hustle nation.com slash ideas. If you would like even more as kind of our annual updated list of the best that we found.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
You bet.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It has improved certain processes. It's made things more efficient. But you know, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off the cliff and figures out how to build their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. Even if you don't have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
I was really born out of my own experience and anxiety around working with virtual team members. Of all the different companies, which ones are legit? Are they going to steal my idea? How does it work with paying them and taxes? All of these rookie questions, but then putting the directory and kind of having a front row seat as that industry really grew and expanded over that time too.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
That was the hypothesis in the early days of Side Hustle Nation, where I'm going to be the guinea pig. I'm going to be the tester. I'm going to try out all these different things and report back on the results. And in the early days, that was freelance writing, a little bit of freelance book editing for nonfiction authors. Started with like a gig on Fiverr. Hey, I'll proofread your book. And as
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Most books are a lot more than 500 words, but it ended up to be some pretty sizable gigs. I did a lot of like Amazon FBA clearance arbitrage in those early years because somebody told me about it on the podcast. It's like, there's no way in the era of big data that this is actually a thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But sure enough, you go to Walmart, you scan the products, and you're like, oh, okay, it says there's profit here. Then you ship it in and it sells immediately. And you're like... okay, I guess this is a thing, you know, doing that kind of thing, selling digital products, creating online courses on Udemy, doing the self-publishing thing, trying my hand in a bunch of different areas.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And I think it was a ton of fun to play around and do those experiments.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
This is the dream job. If I can show up and get paid to do my hour, hour and a half of radio every week, I don't know why I would ever give that up. I know. It's such a kick out of scooping side hustle stories and connecting with people with really inspiring businesses that they've built. I mean, the show is primarily monetized through sponsorships.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Most of them are coming through Yap Media these days. And it took... years to be truthful before that could meaningfully be called a full-time income from the show. What was more helpful early on was recognizing podcast advertising is amplitude and frequency. How big is the audience and frequency? How often can you reach them?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And so if you have an entrepreneurs on fire daily show with a big audience, yeah, absolutely. You're going to kill it on advertising. But if you're doing at that time, a weekly show with a modest audience, I you know, does this really pencil out?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But using it as a content marketing channel to build up an audience, build up an email list, build relationships and trust, it still was absolutely worthwhile to do in the early days. And you still get all those benefits, even though the show is now monetized primarily with pre-roll or mid-roll ads rather through sponsorships.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Well,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
That's the hard part. I think of it in terms of what I call the listener pyramid, you know, pyramid with four levels. You have strangers. Unfortunately, that's the biggest section of the base of the pyramid. Strangers, people who don't know you exist. You've convinced some of them to become listeners. You've convinced some of them to become subscribers.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And then ultimately what you're shooting for at the top of the pyramid is fans. These are the people who listen to everything that you put out. They're the people evangelizing for you. They're spreading the word. They're taking your recommendations.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And with every piece of content that you create, it's like trying to ascend people on that pyramid, you know, from really compelling titles and topics to hopefully get a stranger to give you a chance and listen to you for that first time. And then hopefully they do. And they're compelled to click that subscribe button to that follow button.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
And hopefully they spend enough time with you in their earbuds. They become fans of yours and help spread the word.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
A friend of mine in a mastermind group posed decision framework, and it's stuck with me ever since. With every decision you make, does it add complexity or reduce complexity? And if it adds complexity, okay, is it permanent or is it short-term? And is that trade-off going to be worthwhile? Obviously, like making money, it's fun.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
But at a certain point, you're like, well, you still have to do right by the audience.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
My boss might disagree, but I think it made me a better employee where at my day job, my old day job, I was at the bottom rung of this Fortune 500 company. But by nights and weekends, I was the CEO of my own little project. And there's some entrepreneurial upside to it that maybe it doesn't scale to quit your job, but there's still some benefit of doing that. And you can think of it in terms of
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
The side hustle snowball is a framework that we talk about where you've itemized out your expenses from smallest to largest. It's like everybody wants the side hustle that erases their mortgage or their rent. And that's a great goal to have. But like, could you pay for your car insurance? Could you pay for your cell phone bill? Could you erase your gym membership or whatever?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Celebrating those small wins, because I think there's some value in that too, like erasing those expenses with new income.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
Yeah, there's some element of that whole digging your well before you're thirsty thing. There's a lot of stress. You're one layoff away or one bad meeting away in some cases from having your income go to zero. That's a really stressful position to be, like a really fragile way to live. So I think there's definitely some of that security benefit.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's not going to be immediate, probably, but it's something you can stack up over time. I think Reid Hoffman has the quote about You know, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off the cliff and figures out how to build their airplane or their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. That sounds terrifying.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325
It's like, well, we can make it just a step off instead of this huge leap of faith.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer, a journalist I had on the show, He had just won International Sports Photographer of the Year or something like his highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review. And his boss is like, man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise. And he's like, you gotta be kidding me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he's making like 30 grand a year doing this. And he's like, this is not gonna work. And so that was the motivating factor to kind of get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
starting his side hustle so that's kind of the first law and it goes both ways like once you're in motion we see this over and over again ideas start to pop up that you never would have had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research and that it's really powerful like this you know inertia and momentum law law number two is this law of force and impact and so this is newton's law of like acceleration acceleration of an object occurs
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
based on the force that was applied to it. So the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack. And so it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry. He told me he would have been happy with 10%. And so that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change his life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I know, it sounds awful now. So this was kind of in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe. It started actually with a guest of mine on the Side Hustle show who was talking about taking cold showers, starting out as a fat-burning hack to boost your metabolism for the rest of the day because you're going to expend calories, like heating your body up long after the shower is over.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, this was kind of like hit home. We were at this beach vacation this summer and you're at the pool all the time and you're like, man, I really should hit the gym more because I see all these people who are super fit. And so maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health, you could see it in business, you could see it in relationships. It happens all over the place.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then the third law is this action and reaction. So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so we're recording this on election day and somebody just posted like, whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And even if nobody...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
theoretically reacts to your stuff, because I wrote a personal blog for years and years and years that nobody really read outside of my friends and family. Well, that was a reaction. It was a reaction that told me that, hey, you better write about stuff that people care about.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it wasn't all for waste, because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning WordPress and learning all this other stuff. But it can be depressing when, on the surface, it's like, yeah, there was no reaction.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The big three for the site right now are freelancing, like we talked about, e-commerce, and blogging and podcasting, content marketing types of businesses where you're like, okay, I'm going to set up an online presence to talk about this subject matter that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm learning this subject matter, and monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've seen it work across introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer going to be and how can I get that in front of my target customers?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So... What's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings on eBay, Amazon, Redbubble, some of these other similar marketplaces where people might be buying this stuff. If there are other people making sales, that's a fantastic sign, right? There's money in that market.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs, I think, 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free. So you create your listing very affordably. And so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents. Etsy has on-platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. But one thing that you probably want to do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made. So you can see that with some initial reviews from friends and family.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You might even just give these away and say, I'd really prefer if you ordered this through Etsy to help out my appearance on that platform. And you find that kind of a similar strategy, not just on Etsy, but on iTunes. Hey, can you review this podcast on Udemy? Hey, could you review my course on Amazon? Hey, could you review my book?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like just to kind of seed the platform with a little bit of social proof. So the algorithms start to work in your favor. And so people, when they do land on that page, they say, okay, this isn't a ghost town. There's actually, you know, something, there's something to this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But then what he found was it was effective for that. But what he also found, it was effective for just like motivation. And he's like, if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard because it sucks. You just, you feel like you're ready to tackle anything. And I kind of found the same thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, and maybe that's feedback too. If nobody wants your thing, if you can't get your friends and family to buy it, that's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting specifically because I forget the latest stats, but it's probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is. And so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie left to go out and grow over the next 5, 10, 15 years. As people discover on-demand audio and they're probably going to react like I did, this is
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
amazing how did i waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio but i could listen to stuff that is gonna help me grow personally and professionally like really excited about that the the key then is okay how can i reach those people and the 40 that already do know about podcasts how can i reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining a friend of mine kind of gave me this was five or six years ago at a conference gave me the rule of the internet which i
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
quote all the time. It's, you know, people are only ever online for one of two reasons, you know, number one, to be entertained and number two, to solve a problem. And you can think of it, that's Facebook and that's Google, you know, to be entertained or solve a problem. And the podcast may bridge the gap there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Some friends have called it infotainment where, you know, you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way, but, you know, putting the listener first and It's a practice. It's a crap. Like the first 50 episodes of the Side Hustle show, awful. You know, I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those, but it just took a while to hit my stride as a host.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I don't know, you're like a radio professional, so you're doing great right out of the gate, but it's a practice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that $200 to $600 a month level. What I would like to see is a track record of earnings history growth six to 12 months, and other people will be more aggressive than this, of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I said on air, I was like, you know what, that sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might've been totally placebo, but you know, at that time started to get more coaching classes. clients, like traffic started to pick up. I don't know, like for whatever reason, I was into it. And so I did it for over a year. I guess it was effective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you know you're not going to be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings, to try and get to that ramp up period. The exception to that has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck. And you say, hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely. It has to align with your goals too, right? Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. Hey, I love my work, but I do this stuff on the side because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money for whatever reason. It's building my skills.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's exercising a different side of my brain. So not everybody is out to quit their day job.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Maybe it was what I needed at that time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Get out of your comfort zone a little bit, do it for 30 days, or even maybe the baby steps way to do it would be to end your showers cold, which is kind of what I tend to do today because that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that... you kind of economic macro positioning that we talked about where it's like, you know, what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Like, why can't it be like the old days? Right. That's maybe one angle.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The other angle is just like maybe the word hustle, like as the connotation of like, I'm going to scam people or something like that, not recognizing the It just means your effort, like control what you can control, work as hard as you can when you can and be smart about it. And so actually side hustle nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He's like, look, you're going to have bad days at the plate. You're going to have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps. And I was like, okay, I really like that. That stuck with me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh my gosh. So we talked about the freelancing consulting stuff. If you have a skill that's in demand, absolutely understand that your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of your value. A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making 18 bucks an hour, which was Awesome for him, like in his early 20s.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The company was turning around and charging the parents like a hundred bucks an hour. And he was like, wait a minute, I have this skill. I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that freelancing marketplace. Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet, understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside of your paycheck.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My wife and her business partner on the side from her job started a photography business, completely unrelated to her engineering job. So it doesn't have to be, I'm an accountant by day, so I'll do accounting at night. We talked about the podcasting stuff. We talked about kind of like the online...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
authority business blogging content marketing businesses, I continue to see and I continue to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys are posting. I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and grow the stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had never even heard of. And I'm really excited by stuff like that. People having this new ability to kind of monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that they might be able to put out there.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My original side hustle was, when I was working corporate, was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called Shoesniper.com. It would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes. It earned money as an affiliate.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, make it easy for me. Make it step by step. Absolutely.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that was my initial reaction too, but I keep getting proven wrong. People starting relatively new sites. Again, another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the UK. So just even a tiny little island where apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go buy these mattresses.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full-time living doing that. So, you know, on the blogging front, the trap I want people to avoid is like, okay, I'm going to start a personal blog and expect that that makes money. You know, the ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to discover this? Usually it's going to be Google. Usually it's going to be Pinterest. But thinking of these user-to-content platforms, that's a term from Rosemary Groner who runs TheBusyBudgeter.com. It's like a personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. How are people going to discover this?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And if it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, probably nobody's going to click on that. Probably nobody's going to come and read that. And it's like you're going to pour your heart out. You're going to pour hours into creating this stuff. Make sure that you're setting yourself up for success.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's something that somebody is looking for and you're giving them the best chance to find it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss and this had been kind of on my mind for months, really, because I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. So I was out to dinner with my boss and I'm like, okay, this is the day. I'm going to break in the news. I'm out of here. I'm going to give my notice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It still took me a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it. Because it's like, is that allowed? Can I cut my own paycheck? I went to school. I have these obligations. Is this actually going to work? And I had several months of earnings history at that point. So it wasn't completely...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You might've heard the definition of an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's going to figure out how to build their parachute on the way down. Like that was, that was not me. And it was still super scary. But after I told him it was like this huge weight off my shoulders and it just like, okay, this is real. Like, let's go, let's go do this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I would say once you have at least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business. So you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're going to free up some time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Hit up sidehustlenation.com slash ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part-time business ideas that you can start today and no opt-in required. And of course, we'd love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show available in iTunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission. While I was running that, the site had a almost a 10-year run, was always looking for stuff on the side. And it was kind of like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul searching, being like, well, what do you want to be known for when people Google you?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You bet. Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What do you get excited about talking about? And it was that prospect of lower risk entrepreneurship. How do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that really never gets old and still doesn't get old? Because there's a million and one creative ways that people are doing it. And that's kind of where the Side Hustle Show and the Side Hustle Nation blog kind of were born from.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
A lot of them. And so my days of experimenting with a lot of this stuff are kind of limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e-commerce experiments with like Amazon and eBay. And I still do a little bit of that, but that's kind of taken the back burner. The Side Hustle blog has... become the main focus.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that through self-publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists, but some other sites that were started during that time are still around, starting some experiments in the investing world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income, having a single point of failure.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, not necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom, right, is control over your calendar. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your days? And if you can piece together an income on your own terms rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's kind of where it came from for me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I would definitely advocate focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second. So, you know, try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things, you know, with an unfocused effort, because I think that's harder to see results from.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, it could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger as it definitely did for me with the shoe business.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential. It's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, okay, I drive for Uber. or I'm delivering pizzas, or I'm doing Instacart deliveries or something like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind, but at the same time, you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting The podcast, it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people and that is really powerful.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It becomes a little bit more leveraged and I think there's a lot more upside. Even just like starting a freelancing business, like I'm going to do freelance writing, I'm going to do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's a weird, it's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great. Unemployment is at record lows. Why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or healthcare, like all... All of those costs have grown way faster than real wages.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So that's a driving factor, like just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it. And the more positive way to look at it is I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch, that...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about, that's probably driving some of that as well. And those are kind of the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like, well, I need to make rent next month. You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint. Yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key. And approaching it that way, saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I think it's that. You know, cash strapped nature, you know, look, we're dealing with a debt load, we're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton. So somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
are on the sidelines looking to get into the game, there has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on Upwork, to try and get that first client, to put yourself out there. And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned.