Afford Anything - How to Make Money without a Job -- with Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation

Episode Date: July 10, 2017

#85: Like many people, Nick Loper used to work a full-time job that didn't excite him. Unlike most people, Loper decided to escape his uninspiring work life. First, he launched a shoe-comparison website that began collecting side income. Over time, this side project grew increasingly profitable, until -- finally -- he thought he could run this website full-time. Loper quit his job. That's when all hell broke loose. Within days, Loper's website lost 80 percent of its search traffic and advertising revenue. Loper found himself both unemployed and without a viable business. He spent several months correcting course, making his business solvent again. More importantly, he learned the importance of creating *multiple streams of income.* Loper launched multiple small side businesses in order to diversify his income. Some succeeded; others quietly fizzled out. He made enough 'small bets' that he wound up with a handful of winners. Today, his income comes from a cacophony of different sources. He's diversified. Loper joins us on this week's episode to explain how to develop a "side hustle," a small micro-business that provides a supplemental source of income.     Here are some of his suggestions: #1: Tap the Sharing Economy We've heard about Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Instacart and TaskRabbit -- popular 'sharing economy' platforms that allow people to turn their car, home and/or time into extra cash. But beyond those obvious examples, there are plenty of sharing-economy websites that niche down into higher-paying specializations, such as: http://Turo.com -- A website in which you can rent your car; no driving required. You make money from the asset, not from your time. http://EatWith.com -- A dinner-party-hosting website ideal for people who are skilled cooks, chefs, or party hosts, but don't necessarily have the capital to start their own restaurant. "Each of these is a little mini-search-engine," Loper says. 2. Freelancing / Expertise-Based Businesses The stronger your expertise, the more money you can potentially earn. After all, you're not just selling your time; you're selling your *knowledge.* Websites that help people profit from their expertise include: http://TheExpertInstitute.com -- A website where attorneys look for expert witnesses. http://Thumbtack.com -- A website for service professionals, from CAD designers to nutritionists to CPR training. http://Wyzant.com -- A website for expert tutors in every subject from calculus to piano. http://Clarity.fm -- A website for on-demand coaching or consulting from experts. 3. E-Commerce Loper outlines two models for selling physical products online:      - **The Retail Arbitrage Model:** Under this model, you find and flip items online. - **The Private Label Model:** Under this model, you design, manufacture, package and import your own product. Loper dives into details about all of these side hustle opportunities -- and also describes the biggest mistakes that he sees entrepreneurs and wantrapraneurs make -- in today's episode. Enjoy! ________________ Resources Mentioned: Side Hustle Nation http://www.sidehustlenation.com 200 Sharing Economy Platforms http://www.sidehustlenation.com/sharing-economy-make-extra-money Steve Chou episode of the Afford Anything Podcast http://podcast.affordanything.com/make-100000-year-online-steve-chou-wife-quit-job Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every dollar that you spend, every hour that you spend is a tradeoff against something else. Saying yes to something implicitly means saying no to something else. So the questions become twofold. Number one, what are your highest priorities? What do you value most? And number two, how do you actually go through the practice of aligning your day-to-day actions to reflect that which you want the most? Answering those questions is a lifetime practice.

And this is the Afford Anything podcast where we explore how to answer those questions, how to get better at living the answer. My name's Paula Pant, host of the Afford Anything podcast, and today I am interviewing Nick Loper from the podcast, Side Hustle Nation. He specializes, as the name implies, in helping people develop side hustles. So if you are interested in making some extra money on the side by starting your own business or participating in the gig economy or just somehow finding some kind of hustle that can bring in some extra dollars, you might be interested in what's up next. Here we go. Hey, Nick.

Hey, Paula. Thanks for coming on the show. You bet. Thanks for having me. Nick, I'd like to ask you about ways that the people who are listening can develop outside hustles. But before we dive into that, very briefly, can you introduce yourself and give a little bit of your story? Sure.

So I am the chief side hustler at side hustle nation.com. It was a project that started appropriately as a side project from the main business that I was running at the time, which was called shoe sniper.com. It was a comparison shopping site for footwear, which started as a side hustle to my main job, which was slinging parts for Ford Motor Company to their different dealers throughout the south and northern California as well. It's been four years. I've trying to spread the gospel of this lower risk brand of entrepreneurship and trying to figure out all the different ways to make it happen. And I don't think I've even scratched the surface. There is, you know, every week I'm constantly

amazed by different people with different stories on how they're getting a different thing. done, you know, crazy businesses. And that's really my favorite part is just learning from all these amazing guests on the sign hustle show. And I didn't even think of that. So I love it. So you had a full-time W-2 employed job and you started a side hustle in which was a shoe comparison website. Yes. And then after starting that side hustle, what happened? Like how did that, that grew, I assume, and became reasonably lucrative-ish? lucrative ish so it had lots of ups and downs so the first actually the first day where I'd you know turned in the keys to my company car and kind of had naive visions of the four-hour work week in

my head Google came and slapped me down they put me in my place and they said you're advertising account which was kind of accounting for 80% of the traffic and revenue at that time no longer meets our quality guidelines and I was like you got to be kidding me you know you you haven't had a problem for this with this for the last two years would you have mind you think you could have told me before I, you know, you quit my job? Yeah, so back of the day you quit your job was the day that your business lost 80% of its revenue. Yeah, they conveniently waited until after the two weeks notice was up and it was like literally day one of self-employment. And I was like, this is going to be great, you know, crank up the laptop.

And it was a nightmare. I was like, you know, you go through the seventh stage of, you don't denial and then anger. It was just, it was a really stressful summer. So we made a bunch of changes to the website to try and like get back into their good graces. and they wouldn't really tell you exactly what they were looking for. But they came back three months later and said, you know what, we made an error, you're good to go. And it was just like, you know, the floodgates were open again and it was fine.

But it was kind of, you know, hit me as like, you know, I thought I was diversified because I had 30 or 40 different retailers or advertisers on the site. But if you peel it back one layer, I really just had that one source of traffic. And it was pretty devastating. So immediately it was like, okay, diversify, diversify. diversify, diversify. I'm trying to figure out, you know, even during the time where I was running that business as a full-time thing, he was trying to start other things on the side to, you know, hedge or to, just because it was like, well, you know, there's only so many hours a day you can think about

shoes. So we're trying to figure out what else to do. And so started a couple, actually started probably a dozen different projects during that time. Most of those have died a quiet death in the, in the corner of the internet somewhere. But a couple of them have lived on, and one of those was the side hustle nation site. Hmm, interesting. So you became enthusiastic about side hustles because it was a way to create multiple streams of income and diversify your income sources, particularly as an entrepreneur. Right. So it started as just, you know, focus on this one thing, trying to get it up and running. And then once it is, okay, now how can I, you know, what's next? Trying to figure out, okay, how can I expand my empire or something like that. Interesting. So a lot of the people listening are interested in developing some type of a side hustle.

or a side business, but they're not quite sure what to do. Could you outline for us if you want a side hustle but you don't know what to do or how to do it, where do you begin? Well, let's dive into this stuff because this is where it gets fun. And the important point I want to make before we even get started is choosing what's next. It doesn't mean choosing what's forever. So what I was doing, I mean, the work that was doing five years ago would be unrecognizable to the work that I'm doing now and the same goes for five years before that. So just getting started, I think it's probably the most important skill set or the willingness to get started and test something out. I think we'll serve you well. And, you know, of course,

there's a million pivots and stuff down the road. And that's totally fine. But the three kind of overarching ways or maybe the fastest ways to get started I like to present are the peer to peer economy or the sharing economy or the gig economy, whatever you want to call it. And we'll talk about some ways to get into that beyond just driving for Uber or, you know, renting your spirit. bedroom on Airbnb, although that can be very lucrative. The second category would be freelancing or selling your skills or knowledge in some way. And we'll talk about how to do that for higher paying gigs and also how to do that in a time leveraged way. We can kind of package up that expertise and sell that in a one to many fashion instead of just one to one. I'm going to deliver this work. And the third way

is kind of the age-old business model of buy-low, sell high. And we've seen people build tremendous I mean, this is Amazon's business. This is Walmart's business. We've seen people build gigantic businesses, and you can start with really as much, with as little as you're comfortable investing in inventory. A friend of mine, he calls himself the flea market flipper and spends every weekend at the flea market looking for weird stuff to buy and sell. He says his wife got started in the business. She won't buy anything for more than $3. So it's like specializing in baby items. So you can get started for as little as $3 in that business or even free on the free section of Craigslist.

Those are kind of the three areas that I'd like to dive into or I'd like to share with the afford anything people. Excellent. All right. So number one, the sharing economy. Number two, the freelancing slash expertise based economy. And number three, e-commerce. We'll talk about all of those. Let's start with the sharing economy.

Go ahead. Okay. So the best known in the sharing or best known apps in the sharing economy are companies like Uber, like Airbnb, like Lyft, like TaskRabbit. where TaskRabbit, if you're not familiar, it's like a gopher service. Like, I need somebody to come and be a handyman or I need somebody to, you know, fetch my dry clean, whatever like that. When I used it, found a handyman to come over and like fix our mice problem. And knock on wood so far, no more mice.

So it was awesome. The where I think the opportunity lies in the sharing economy is like if you have a big underutilized asset to rent or to sell, right, like your spare bedroom or your mother-in-law unit that doesn't happen to be used. Like, obviously, and if you live in a desirable area, that's a fantastic asset that you're sitting on that might be able to be generating revenue for you. On the car side, like, that's another expensive asset you might be sitting on as an underutilized piece of machinery.

I met a guy in Florida who was using the rental site, Turo.com. And he started out with just like his, he had a Ford Escape that he was renting on this site. And then, you know, when it had, you know, we kind of at capacity, he was like, I was traveling for work or, you know, we didn't need two cars. So we could use, we could rent the other one out. And then he ended up taking a lease out on a couple new SUVs. He's like, I was a little bit nervous because it's like $500 a month in new lease payments. But right away, they were bringing in $1,500 a month in, you know, rental fees on this site. And so it's kind of, he's building out his own little mini fleet. So that's one way to start. It's kind of like with the asset model. But. The ones, sorry, go ahead. Well, so what's interesting about that, because when I hear you give these examples, with Truro.com, you have a vehicle which you rent out. So it doesn't, you're literally just renting out the piece of equipment without dedicating your time to it.

Whereas with, say, becoming a driver for Uber or for Lyft, the asset that you're really renting out, it's partially your car, but it's also largely your time. Right. And that's a great example with Uber, with Lyft, with driving for these services, and you've seen them constantly cut rates over the last three or four years because they're playing the supply and demand game. It's like, well, people are willing to do it for $30 an hour? Are they willing to do it for $25? Let's see. Are they willing to do it for $20?

Let's see. And you can see Uber's test driving a fleet of driverless cars. It's pretty clear, you know, where they're going. And I think that's true with all of the sharing economy out because you can do grocery deliveries for instance. to cart or ship, I think, is really big in the southeast. But if anybody can do it, anybody will do it. And it kind of puts a natural downward pressure on how much you can earn. So kind of where the, I think the opportunity lies is maybe in, maybe in the hybrid space between kind of these sharing economy platforms and then something that utilizes a little bit of your own expertise.

So an example would be like Rover.com, which is dog sitting. It's like Uber, Airbnb, but for dogs. So it's like, okay, if you have some animal loving background, like you can do that. Somebody has sent me a note and was like, I'm going to make 20 grand this year on Rover. I was like, that is nuts. How many dogs do you have it at one time? Another example would be kind of like a meal sharing platform, like Eat With. So eatwith.com.

You can host dinner parties and you kind of kind of like can play amateur. chef in your apartment. So I met a woman in D.C. who was doing this and I think she had some sort of culinary training, but was looking at, you know, kind of making a career change. And I was like, I do not have the capital to start up a restaurant, but I can fit 12 people around my table and another handful of people at the bar. And now I can do these dinner parties, you know, 50, 60 bucks a night. You get to design your own menu, kind of a fun thing. I met another guy. I met another guy. who is a mechanical engineer. So he was doing CAD design, 3D printing and CAD design

on a platform called Thumbtack.com, which is more known for local services, painters and cleaners and home services. But he was doing most of this work virtually because people were putting up bids on there. And so he was kind of using that as a way to connect with his clients. There's another platform called the expert Institute, which I actually haven't used because I don't know if I'm an expert enough in anything,

but it's basically used by attorneys to find expert witnesses for trials. You could pay like $100, $200 an hour if you're like the star expert witness on whatever topic this trial is about. So I thought that was kind of an interesting angle on the peer-to-peer platforms. So I think a couple of things that I'm hearing from you. Number one is that if you're interested in the type of gig that doesn't require any particular expertise, then you are most likely going to get trapped in a race to the bottom in terms of prices. Because as you said, if anybody can do it, anybody will do it. But if you can find a sharing economy opportunity that harnesses some expertise that you already hold, then you are much more likely to be paid well for your time.

I think you're better off in that. And that's probably the same same. seems true as like any kind of employment situation, right? So an interesting platform that I've been playing around with is clarity.fm. It's like kind of an on-demand by the minute consulting platform. Yeah. And it's primarily, you know, tech and startup and marketing based, right? But people, and what's cool about it is like there's a price floor at 60 bucks an hour, so a dollar a minute. And so you don't have the tendency that you find on Upwork or other freelancing platforms where it's like, okay, I'm going to bid super, super cheap to, you know, try and build a portfolio and attract clients. And so you kind of can automatically go in there and, you know, it's another search engine, right?

Each one of these could be considered its own mini search engine for discovery. And that's what I think is cool about it. And Airbnb is a great example of that Amazon is a great example of that. Even iTunes for podcasts, right? It's like a smaller search engine to play around in versus, well, I'm going to, I'm going to do 3D CAD design and hopefully somebody finds me in Google. It's like, well, here's a platform where people are already looking for it and I can get in front of them that way. For the people who are listening who have some type of expertise but they're not sure what website would allow them to sell that, how can they start that search?

Like, for example, if somebody was good at CAD design but had, you know, didn't listen to this episode and didn't know about Thumbtack.com, how else would they be able to find that? there's well I've got a resource for you if you don't mind linking it up in the show notes and it's got like 200 something of these different platforms so that might be one place to start is to go took a while to compile that so I'm kind of proud of the show notes yeah definitely let's move on to talking more about building out on expertise that you already have yeah we're moving we're moving up the spectrum and one way or one interesting platform is like a tutoring type of platform and you see a lot of freelance tutors and they'll post their flyers at the coffee shops and they'll get in touch with the guidance counselors and stuff. And that's totally a viable way to do it. But what kind of cool way that I've found or that people have approached me about is, you know, online tutoring platforms. And probably the biggest and best known is one called Wise Ant, like W-Y-Z-A-N-T. And you can start out there. primarily people will want to book their first session in person and then maybe once they build up that trust you can kind of graduate to doing that online but the cool thing is so I was looking for

you know math help near me and people were making decent wages you know 50 60 70 $70 an hour for this you know for this specific expertise and like all these platforms they have like a rating system right so as you build up your reputation you can increase your you know you can bump up your rate and be like, well, this guy's got 25 positive reviews. Like, I definitely want to see him versus the guy who's brand new. And so then that's one way to kind of scale that up. The other one, I actually met a dude in Boston who was an adjunct professor, which I guess you could do as a freelancer. And he was doing this at like a dozen different schools. And so some of them required him to, you know, present the lecture live. But others of them, this is what really allowed him to, to

to do this was it was pre-recorded. It was recorded once. He's like, I teach business law and ethics at all these different schools, and it's like, you know, I got to read the essays when they come in, but, you know, all of the content delivery was automated. I was like, dude, this is crazy. And he's, you know, getting paid whatever flat fee per semester or per quarter. So, you know, I think a master's degree was required.

But for highly educated people, like a really cool kind of side business. That is really cool. I've never heard of that before. Adjunct professorship. Yeah, on demand. Adjunct professorship. Yes, very cool. Automated.

Automated. Now, so the traditional model is like, I'm going to be a graphic designer. I'm going to be a website designer. I'm going to be a freelance writer and I'm going to go hustle for clients. And that's totally cool. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. Like, my wife is a freelance wedding photographer as her side hustle. She's an engineer by day, because this is what she does nights and weekends a lot of the time,

especially during the summer, during wedding season. And she actually ended up getting her first clients on Craigslist. There was an ad on Craigslist. I was like, who was looking for wedding photographers on Craigslist? You know, says the marketing major. And within a week, they'd booked up like half a dozen gigs. And I was like, all right, all right, I was wrong about that. I'll give it to you.

But it was like going, and that's probably the theme with all these, it's like going to where your customers already are, going to where they're already searching, where they're already doing business. And so where they found success later as they raised their rates was, you know, doing venue-specific wedding shows. And you can kind of look at this, you know, across any different, you know, freelancing platform.

And, you know, whether you want to bid for gigs on Upwork or Freelancer.com, which I would stay away from that site. I don't know. I like Upwork a little bit better. It seems like a little bit different clientele. But the reason people are on those sites, right, is because they don't have, they don't have a guy. They don't have a person that they can go to for when I need graphics, what I need, you know,

so that's the reason they're looking for it. And so if you can find a way in with. your network. And even if it's just raising your hand on Facebook and say, hey, guys, I do freelance web design. If you know anybody who needs, or better yet, I do freelance web design for realtors or like trying to niche it down. So it's like, oh, next time I'd come across a realtor, I'd be like, hey, I know this guy, you know, where it's easier to make that referral, kind of tapping to your network's network in that sense. So I like that kind of method of the, you know, of the freelance, kind of like selling your skills for basically, it's time for money, but it's kind of like on your own

terms. You can set your own schedule. Right. And I like what you said about raising your hand and tapping into your own network, particularly if it's a niche network, because Nick, as you and I have both seen within the personal finance community, there are a handful of people who they freelance heavily within the personal finance community and develop a reputation within this community. And, you know, once you get into the niche of people who blog and podcast about a particular topic, And it doesn't matter what that topic is, whether it's personal finance or horses or, you know, upholstree. Yeah. Or chair upholstery.

Like, it doesn't matter what the topic is. Once you get into that niche topic, the people who are content creators around it, that's a small community. And so if you get into that community and you develop a good reputation there, it's very easy to get referrals. Totally. No, we give the example of Steve Stewart for podcast editing, podcast production, and Grayson Bell for like, you know, tech support, website support. support all the time. They've done this expertly. They've kind of embedded themselves in this community. And it's so easy. Hey, I'm struggling with, you know, question X, Y, Z. How do I make this widget go on my WordPress site? And, you know, there he is raising his hand. Here's how to do it. And, you know,

time and time again, it's like, man, this guy really is the expert. Why don't I just pay him to take care of it? And he's built his whole business that way. It's been awesome to watch. Yeah. One tactic that another guest of mine shared was going into Facebook groups, made up of your target customer and using literally the search bar for words like help, struggle, challenge, trying to look for people asking questions. And hey, if this is related to my area of expertise, like chiming in on that thread and, you know, trying to be as helpful as you can, like not in a spammy way. But then, you know, there's kind of a fast track way to establish that reputation as somebody helpful. And because, yeah, people are asking because they don't know.

And then if you can kind of guide them to the answer or, you know, maybe that's a product or service that you offer, all the better. That's a very good point. It's a very good idea. All right. So what we're talking about now is still kind of like in this time for money phase. And so you might be, well, you know, I'm doing that in my day job. So how can I leverage this a little bit? And I've come across some pretty interesting examples.

Actually just last week on the side hustle show was a gentleman who was an adjunct. he was a he's the executive director for a homeless shelter in Illinois and he got asked to do some presentation at a library group so he does he does the speech and you know the the crowd i don't know it's like standing ovation like a really rowdy library crowd right and you're like we can you come train our staff and he's like no i'm doing this day job thing and you know so he's like but tell you what i'll do i'll record this youtube video and you guys can use that as training so he's like puts up this like half hour of video and checks back a couple years later, the video has like 10,000 views, 12,000 views. And he's like, man, apparently there's quite a bit of demand for this.

And so then he kind of like, the wheels get spinning. And he's like, of course, I've read the four hour work week at this time. He's like, how can I, you know, leverage it? So he puts together this whole online course about teaching librarians how to deal with homeless people in kind of a confident and compassionate way. And he's, you know, now the benefit of this is instead of selling individuals, he has like a very targeted list of customers he can reach out to and say, this is, you know, I built this explicitly for you. And he's even gone one step further and be like, you know, you can, you can test the entire course for free, you know, for one person on your staff. And if you think it's valuable, you know, then you can buy a license for it. And it's like,

man, this is like such a cool, such a cool business. Super, super niche. But a way to, leverage his expertise in a pretty cool way. And is that something that you see a lot of people get more success by niching down? I think it's so much easier to reach a target customer that way. So if I wanted to teach a course on like general freelancing, that's doable, but it's a lot harder than saying I will teach you how to become a freelance writer in the personal finance space. right it's like you know so much more well well defined another example i met a guy also a former engineer who now makes a full-time living selling piano courses like i'll teach you how to play piano

and his hook is like i'll teach you how to play modern songs on the piano in 21 days or less and i think he made like 20 grand last month doing this just nuts and so he show if you search in youtube for like how to learn piano fast or something like he owns those keywords because he's created the content around. He's created the videos around that. And he's going, I think if you're searching Google, you know, he's got ads that'll pop up for that. So he's doing really well with his business that's based around his expertise, whereas the one-to-one model would be like, oh, I could teach piano lessons in my living room. But the one-to-many model is like, okay, I can put this online and I can, you know, build it once and sell it over and over again. And that's what's great

about that one-to-many model. Or I like to think of it as one-on-one times one million. Ooh, I like it. Thank you. It's scalable. You know, you can reach so many more people and, you know, you can leverage your time so much better. Yes. Yeah. Another example was a weight loss coach who started out. You know, she'd lost a ton of weight.

Her neighbors were asking, how did you do it? And so she'd give them the recipes and all this stuff and they wouldn't take action. And so she eventually, you know, had to start charging people to, you know, have a little skin in the game. And that's when people started doing really well with it. but she's transitioned too from this one-on-one weight loss coaching to now doing group programs. It's still for a pretty high dollar amount. So she's kind of, you know, even though this is not an expertise she has by, you know, college degree or certification, it's just, hey, look, these are the results that I've seen. This is my system to get there.

I've helped other people at this point. And I believe if you follow these instructions, follow my guidance and accountability, you can get there too. And to the right people, the 15, 20 pounds are worth quite a bit of money. Absolutely. Now, let's say that a person who's listening decides that they want to develop some type of a side hustle and based around some sort of expertise or based around some idea of who their target customer is. And they pursue one of these roads. They pursue some example that sounds like it's in the vein of something that we've just discussed. but after a couple of months, they're still not meeting with any success.

At what point do you pivot? At what point do you decide that your model is wrong versus your approach is wrong, if that makes sense? I don't know if I'm asking that very well. Yeah, that one is tough. It's like it probably comes down to the number of conversations that you've had. Like if you've legitimately put out content into the world for six months and nobody has responded to it, first check your marketing. Like, have you proactively gone out and tried to get this in front of people versus like, hey, I put it up and maybe Google will find it? You know, that's, you know, the hoping and praying model is is a little bit tougher to judge.

Is this working or not? But if you can talk to somebody one on one and say, would you pay me for this, you know, that's a much easier one. And if you get two people to say no, like, I don't think that's a valid sample size either. But if you get 10, 20, okay, maybe there's not a demand for this. Or maybe I can pivot. What would you pay for? What is the real pain here? What is the problem that can help you solve? Hey, hey, we'll be back to the show in a second, but first, I want to give a shout out to Fresh Books. They have signed on as one of our main sponsors in 2017, and they have an awesome product. It's meant for freelancers, solopreneurs, small business owners. If you have a side hustle or if you're self-employed and you need to send out invoices to your clients, yeah, it's necessary. You've got to send invoices. to get paid, but it's also annoying and it's time-consuming and nobody really likes doing it.

It's just one of those costs of doing the job. Inter Fresh Books. They automate the invoicing system. You type in some basic information and their system handles the rest. It automatically sends follow-ups to invoices that haven't gotten paid. It lets you know whether or not your client has even opened your invoice or not. Basically, they take the suckiness out of invoicing. Give them a try for free for 30 days at FreshBooks.

That's freshbooks.com slash paula. That's freshbooks.com slash p a ulla. My inbox gets really overloaded. I get a lot of emails. And no matter how much time I spend there, number one, I can never keep up. Like, no matter how much I try to sort through my inbox, new stuff comes in faster than I can make sense of it. And number two, the emails that are actually important end up getting lost under all of the clutter and noise of the stuff. that's not important. And that's why I was really happy to bring SaneBox on as one of the new sponsors of this show. SaneBox is a service that prioritizes your inbox. It sorts things into inbox, which are the emails that you have to actually look at now,

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I mean, what do you have to lose? Go check them out for free. Get the free $25 credit. and then see if they offer the value that you need. See if they are making your email experience more pleasant. So S-A-N-E-B-O-X dot com slash P-A-U-L-A. So we've talked about the sharing economy. We've talked about freelancing slash expertise-based opportunities that a person can pursue. Let's move to the last piece of the puzzle or the last kind of leg of the triangle.

e-commerce. Sure. And this, I think, is very different because both the sharing economy and freelancing slash expertise based are very much built around you, your time, your existing assets, your existing skills. E-commerce is completely different. It really is. It's a new skill to learn, but it's, I think it's doable.

And I think the tools that we have in place today make it accessible, make it, I don't I don't say easy, but make it, you know, maybe faster. They kind of have bridged the gap or kind of narrowed that learning curve in a way. And probably the best example of this is Amazon. So I was shocked to learn a couple years ago that almost half of Amazon's inventory isn't owned by Amazon's owned by, you know, small business sellers like you and me. And it's a giant consignment store. And they said, we've built this world-class logistics network and it was really expensive.

but tell you what, you guys can take advantage of that. We'll list your product. It's going to be available for Amazon and we're going to ship it out on your behalf. And it's called Fulfillment by Amazon FBA. And it's made, I don't know, it's made a ton of new entrepreneurs, new businesses probably over the last five years. I think we're still in the early days, even though it's gotten more competitive. I think we're still in the early days of this e-commerce revolution and Amazon has become

kind of the de facto first search for products really of all kinds. And it's kind of an exciting one. So the easiest way, sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, that's the first time I've heard Amazon referred to not as a retailer, but as a logistics network. And I think that's a very accurate description of Amazon. It's kind of crazy what they've built. And they've built the back end and the web services.

And now they're selling off kind of like stuff they were going to have to build anyways. is, and it's a fascinating business within a business. So the easiest way to get started, the fastest way to get started is kind of the retail arbitrage, clearance arbitrage model. And this is the extent that I've played around with this is like the Amazon seller app on your phone while you're out shopping, while you're out doing your regular errands, is just like, hey, swing by the clearance section of the store, use this free app to scan a couple items that look like they're on a steep discount or they're really on sale.

and see what that might be worth online. And it's a little bit of a needle in the haystack to try and find, like probably scan, you know, 20 items for everything that's a hit. But when you do find a hit and there's like 10 of them on the shelf or in the clearance bin, it's like, oh, crap, I just made 100 bucks by, you know, packaging all this stuff and sending it in.

The general rule of thumb is if you can double your money based on, you know, what the app is telling you. And if the sales rank is like less than 100,000, So they'll give you an estimate of, you know, how they rank every item in every category, you know, from one to however many items are in the category. Number one is like the bestselling item in home and garden and kitchen or whatever. So if it's under 100,000, it just gives you an indicator that it's going to turn relatively fast. It's going to sell relatively quickly versus it's going to sit on the shelf and collect dust in the warehouse somewhere. So it's kind of a fun little thing, you know, while you're out running your errands.

I don't know. at this point, the time rewards have become a little bit harder to part with. We got a one-year-old, so it's been a little bit. I know I did quite a bit at Babies R Us while he was just born. So we were like, oh, let's go to Babies R Us. Oh, are you going to nap in the car for a minute? Okay, let's go scan some stuff. But lots of fun doing that.

And kind of the next level up or the next stage up would be kind of like the private label model. And you probably had other guests. You probably talked about, you know, people importing products or designing their own product, looking at what is already selling on Amazon and tweaking it to improve it or make it a little bit better, contacting manufacturers often in China and then bringing that product to market

and saying, hey, you know, there's already a proven demand for something that, in our opinion, is not as good of a product. So we're confident that this one will sell as well or you're trying to look at reviews of competing products and stuff. And there's people building a million-dollar businesses,

like just doing this. So it's kind of an exciting a way to do it and then also once you have got that going I mean this is the Steve Chu model you can build your own you build your own e-commerce store and you can drive your own traffic and then you don't have to pay

Amazon's processing and finder's fees and all this stuff it's just kind of a fun and the leveraged way to do it especially if you're you know buying products in bulk and you've got a decent margin on that

we had Steve Chu on an on an earlier episode episode of this show. I'll link to that episode in the show notes. But just to review everything that you've just said, so with e-commerce, there are two different models that a person can pursue. One is the retail arbitrage model. Yeah, basically playing the flipping game, except online. Yeah, so that is the retail arbitrage model. And then the other model of e-commerce is the private label model. That model is exemplified by Steve Chu, who we've interviewed on an earlier episode. So how long would, how much time would something like this take? I mean, when we're

If we're talking about the retail arbitrage model, for example, I mean, that's something that you could do whenever you happen to be in a store. You know, if you don't have any particular revenue goals and you just want to make a little bit of extra money on the side, then sure, that's something you could do whenever you happen to be in a store and the idea happens to strike you. Right. But to pursue something like the private label model or to pursue something like what we've talked about earlier in terms of eatwith.com or Rover.com or the expert institute or clarity. or a wise ant, you know, any of those expertise-based services, how much time are we talking about here? Well, you can set your own hours on most of those platforms. And so I, you know, I'm on clarity and I probably take, you know, less than five calls a month. So it's not a huge, not a huge time commitment. My brother does the tutoring thing on Wise Ant and similarly. You know, get half a dozen clients a month. And then it's kind of a legion. generation platform in a way. But just lots of, you know, that's the beauty of it is you can spend as much time or as little time as you want. And that's, you know, I guess for better or worse, I guess that's the gig economy that we're living in. What about the initial time that it takes to scale up? Like,

you know, the earlier example that you gave about going to Facebook groups that are made up of your target customer and then using the search bar to look for words like help or do you know how, That's the portion of side hustling in which you're initially laying that groundwork that will ultimately lead to having a handful of clients or customers. How much time in the beginning would a person be devoting to something like that? Yeah, this is kind of like the darkness before the light or like the pre-revenue stage. And this can be tough. And this can be really tough to kind of stay motivated during that, especially if you're just like building, I'm writing content. I'm trying to network and make connections.

And probably the best advice that I've heard on it is just to block it on your calendar, to make it a habit. I'm going to do prospecting or I'm going to do marketing for half an hour every day. I'm going to do marketing, even just 15 minutes a day and just say, okay, I'm going to put in this time. It's going to fill my pipeline eventually. It may not happen today. It may not happen tomorrow. But it's kind of like going to the gym, right? It's like I'm going to go do my workout and I'm probably not going to have a six-pack tomorrow.

I'm probably not going to have a six-pack the next day, but if I keep going, if I keep at it, I think it starts to, you know, the results start to compound. And that's why, you know, folks like Steve and like Grayson have built the businesses that they have because they continually showed up for years now. So I guess what I'm hearing you say is that even if a person doesn't have a lot of time, doing something 15 or 20 minutes a day consistently will over time accumulate. it adds up and I was guilty of this in the past until until we had a kid I was like 15 minutes there's nothing I can get done in 15 minutes now when there's a 15 minute window I'm like oh my gosh that's a lot of time I could you know outline this entire thing you know I could do you know all these different things because it's like you learn to appreciate it so much more when your time has been taken away from you voluntarily but just um you you might be surprised with what with what you

can get done in these in these blocks and in kind of prove that point it's like well you know even if you just try and cleaning the house in two minutes give yourself two minutes you're like oh it looks a lot better in just two minutes you know it's kind of like you imagine what you could do in 15 you could do that online it's just kind of a getting over that shit and I was totally the same way well I'll just go on Facebook I'll just you know do nothing and there's oh I could actually make some meaningful progress especially if you do it day after day what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see people make when they try to develop side hustles for the first time? The hope and pray model, right? Like I'm going to create content and hope somebody finds it,

hope somebody discovers it. The, let's see, other mistake. Like not telling anybody about it. Like, oh, you know, just being really shy and saying, you know, nobody knows what it is that you do. Or on the flip side, that going way too broad. Like the example, well, I build websites. Well, I think you'd be better out. Well, I build websites for realtors. I build websites for home builders or, you know, picking some sort of niche to target two first. Not getting started. That's probably the biggest mistake of all. It's just like this constant paralysis of analysis and saying, well, you know, if I just had the perfect idea, you know, I would do this. But it's like one of my favorite quotes all time on the side hustle

show came from Ryan Finley, who runs re-cregslist.com, makes a full-time living, just buying and selling, I think appliances on Craigslist, kind of crazy business. But he said the best opportunities aren't visible until you're already in motion. And at the time, I was like, you know, that's kind of like a hippie, divvy thing to say. But, you know, now with, you know, probably two and a half years removed from that recording, I was like, he is totally right. You know, once you get going in anything, it really doesn't matter what that first move is. You start to see all these different conversations, all these different opportunities that start

to pop up. And that's the really exciting thing. That's the really empowering thing. My friend Julie calls it like the game of chess. It's like, look, your first move, it doesn't matter. You're going to move upon. Your opponent's going to move upon. You know, it's not, you're not going to decide the game right there. You know, it doesn't matter. Just put it out in the world, see what kind of reaction it gets. And I love that. So probably mistake number three, just, you know, inaction. Failure to launch. Failure to launch. If you are already running a side hustle, how do you decide if it is a better use of your time to develop that particular side hustle out further and try to grow it versus diversify by starting something else? That's a good question. And for me, I guess the ADD has always kicked in and I've had to try and balance. Like the double down on what's working and the, well, but there's a shiny thing over here. I want to try.

you know, kind of what I fall back on is, well, what's going to be the most fun? If my needs are taking care of, especially if I'm kind of in this, you know, enviable position of having a day job that covers my bills or kind of being on the cusp of early retirement, it's like, well, which project is going to light me up? Which one is going to be the most fun for me? And then it's like, is that going to be a fun challenge to work on? Can I see myself enjoying that? So that's kind of the framework that I use. I don't know. What about you? I've always been committed to afford anything the brand, but within that, I definitely have some shiny object syndrome between like the blog and the podcast and the YouTube channel and the social media platforms. Now there's Instagram. So I've doubled down or I've kind of centralized my efforts by encompassing everything under the umbrella of afford anything. But inside of that there's been a lot of me just pursuing whatever. I'm more interested. in at the moment. Right. Because I suppose podcasting, blogging, YouTube, these are all just

different mediums of communication. They are. And there's a million different things to, there's always going to be more to do, right? You said like, well, there's a new social media channel. There's a new thing. And it's easy to kind of get down that rabbit hole. It's like a balance between testing it out and just like, you know, focusing on your one thing. And that's the cool thing about the afford anything and about the side hustle brand is, hey, there's a lot of, that's a big umbrella. You know, a lot of different stuff can fall under there. And we can kind of position, well, that was just an afford anything experiment. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's certainly a lot of experiments that I've started and then just gave up on like periscope, you know, I made a

couple of periscope videos maybe a year, year and a half ago and then just decided, you know what, not excited about it, not worth my time and just not into it. Yeah, me neither. Same thing. Same story. There's a few broadcasts was like, this is not for me. Now, have you done any like Facebook Live or anything like that? No, never. Never. I'm nervous. I like that's why I like the podcast. You can polish it up afterwards. You can clean it up, make yourself sound smart. Exactly, exactly. I like that about YouTube as well. It can be polished and edited. I don't like to put raw material out there. I like things. I like to edit stuff before it goes out. Sounds good. How do you determine how much to charge? How do you strike that balance, especially for people in the expertise, economy or people who are selling their time or some hybrid of the two. How do you strike the right balance between not selling yourself short and yet not overpricing? So there's a couple different ways to go about it. And so I'll share the first one was kind of the path that my wife and a partner took in the photography business. And that was pricing extremely low at the beginning because it was

like, look, this is your wedding. We haven't taken, we've never shot a wedding before. Like you're taking a risk on us and, you know, like, just like the market, that risk needs to be priced accordingly. And so it's like, you know, starting out very low to build a portfolio. And as they've now done dozens of weddings, you know, they can price themselves more in line with what other photographers are charging. The opposite angle of that is what you could call like value-based pricing. And that's, this is like really annoying when you see this on websites. So it's like, well, call us for a quote. But I totally understand why people, do that because they want to figure out, well, how expensive of a problem is this for you?

And it can be, and it's not always to like try and milk the most money out of the client. A lot of times it can be you might, and I've done the same thing when hiring freelancers. It's like eliminate the outliers high and low where it's like, okay, this guy bid $10,000, this guy bid $1,000 or everybody else bid a thousand. He must clearly have not understood the problem. He must be, you know, out in left field. So it's kind of a weird way to go about it, but trying to figure out, well, what's this, what's this worth? And it's like, if there's, if there's too big of a gap, what I guess what I'm trying to get is, like, if there's too big of a gap between, well, this is a $10,000 a month problem and you say you can solve it for $50, like, that doesn't seem in line.

Like, you must not fully understand our problem. So I guess that's kind of where you're trying to ask those probing questions of, well, you know, what are you doing to solve that today? or what have you tried in the past? Or, well, really, what is, what's that costing you? What happens if that doesn't happen? You know, trying to figure out what's that? How much does it hurt? Right.

What happens to people who are already successful at a side hustle, but then they just lose their passion for it? What next? That's not a good thing. I don't know. I'm sure it happens. I guess it's on to the next project. Or trying to figure out a way.

to re-invigorate yourself with, and maybe it's sellable. Like if you've done this to the extent you all like build out an agency and I'm no longer, you know, selling my time. I'm selling, you know, X result and I could hire somebody else to come on and deliver that for me. Like you may have built a sellable business, which is a really cool asset to be sitting on. Yeah, that's tough. You've got to find a way to make it interesting, make it, you know, make it fun to work on

because, yeah, life's too short to be working on something that drags you down. same thing. Like, you know, if you are an accountant by day and you hate it, the last thing you need is a side hustle that's doing accounting. Right. Oh, and that's actually a great point, is should a person, particularly somebody who's interested in pursuing an expertise-based business, is it wise to go into the same thing that you do in your day job? Is that typically, in terms of what you've seen, is that a recipe for burnout? Not always, because sometimes it's like the work environment that people find toxic or that they don't like or I don't like that I have to be in this cubicle from eight to five. It's like if I could do this on my own

terms or if I could do this and not have some other, not have the company like eating up 70% of the margin, like that would be fantastic. So sometimes there's a way to do that authority business or do that expertise business in a way that isn't going to burn you out. And you can be more selective about your clients too, make this, make it make the work interesting for you. Interesting. All right. Well, thank you so much, Nick. Is there anything that I haven't asked about that you want to emphasize? I don't know. We covered a lot. And I guess the parting guidance that I try and leave people with is, you know, to put on your scientist lab coat and think like a side hustle scientist. You know, all the stuff is just an experiment. And it's usually not life threatening. And so one thing that separates the people that I see having success from the people that I see kind of sitting on the sidelines. is that willingness to have an experiment, even if they don't know what the outcome is going to be and say, well, you know, that didn't work out as planned, but, you know, I learned from it and I can kind of

apply that to the next experiment. Nice. Well, thank you so much, Nick. And I will link in the show notes to your website, your podcast, and also that resource guide that you mentioned that has all of those different websites that you've put together. Thank you for that. Thank you, Nick. So what are some of the key takeaways that came out of this conversation? Here are three things that I got. Number one, I will. was struck by his comment. Choosing what's next. It doesn't mean choosing what's forever. Many people believe whatever they decide to do is the thing that they're going to be doing for a

long, long time. And as a result, I found that a lot of people have a bit of analysis paralysis. Oh, I could go into X side project and it has these pros and these cons. And people get so caught up in thinking about what to do that a lot of times people just don't start. And part of that comes from the idea that whatever they decide to do is the thing that they will get stuck doing. But as Nick said, your side project can and will evolve over time. After all, look at his own story. He began with a shoe comparison website.

And now here he is, many years later, teaching people how to develop out their own side hustles. At the beginning of his journey, he didn't see where he would end up years down the road. He just simply took the next step and then let it evolve over time. So that was key takeaway number one. Choosing what's next is not choosing what's forever. Takeaway number two came when Nick said, if anybody can do it, anybody will do it. And it kind of puts a natural downward pressure on how much you can earn. So kind of where I think the opportunity lies is maybe in, maybe in the hybrid space between kind of these sharing economy platforms. and then something that utilizes a little bit of your own expertise.

Here, what Nick is talking about is that if you are engaged in some type of a side gig that has low barrier to entry, then you face a lot of competition. If the only asset that you're selling is your time is unskilled time and unskilled labor, well, then you're probably not going to make a whole lot of money. Whenever possible, it is better and more lucrative to choose something that will harness either your expertise or your existing assets. In other words, think about what makes you unique. Is it a certain skill that you have, a certain interest, certain assets that you hold?

Whatever it is that makes you unique, whatever it is that creates some type of barrier to entry for the competition, that's where you're more likely to profit and more likely to succeed. And by the way, this too will evolve over time. I mean, when I was getting started, the thing that made me unique was that, I was, in my own opinion, if I do say so myself, I was a pretty good writer. I used to work as a newspaper reporter. And so I knew that I had a particular developed skill in writing, more so than the average person.

So I started a blog. And it was because of the blog that I later started a podcast. That wasn't something that I could have foreseen six years ago when I began the blog. I mean, how do you make the leap from newspaper reporter to podcaster, right? Like I was nowhere near the broadcasting medium. But I just found one thing that made me unique, started down that path, and then let it evolve over time. Finally, key takeaway number three that I got from this conversation is when Nick said, Going to where your customers already are, going to where they're already searching or they're already doing business.

So what Nick means by that is that your customers are already gathering in certain places. It could be certain places online like Facebook groups. It could be forums online, various websites online, could be physical places like conferences. If you are niching down and targeting a certain community, a certain muse or a certain type of like avatar customer, well, those customers are already gathering in certain places. Go where they already are. Be on the same forums that they're on. attend the same conferences that they go to, read the same websites and publications that they read.

And this is applicable regardless of whether your target customers are real estate agents in Cincinnati or RV owners on the West Coast or dermatologists who need websites. Regardless of who that target customer is, there are places where they hang out, be there. As the cliche says, the riches are in the niches. So those are three of the key takeaways that I got from this conversation. I'd love to know what you think. Head to the show notes, which are at afford anything.com slash episode 85 to leave a comment about what you got from this episode. Finally, I would like to thank everybody who responded to episode 83, the episode in which I talked about my advertising policies.

The outpouring was incredible. And I just want to take a moment to read a couple of a couple of the many, many, many, or a few of the many, many, many responses that I received because it was, I just thank you to everybody who replied and who shared your thoughts. Thank you so much. So to give a sampling of some of what I heard, overall, the general message that I heard from most people was, hey, do what you got to do as long as the companies that you represent reflect your overall values. So overall, the message that I heard from most of you was that it doesn't matter whether or not I personally use a product as long as the company that I am representing overall reflects my values and could be of benefit to you.

So, you know, don't represent any payday loan companies, duh, I think that's obvious. Don't represent anything that's like just terrible or spammy or just, you know, not something that I would be proud of representing. but if I don't personally use it, then that is okay. And actually, Aaron, my assistant, I hate to call her my assistant because that's not like an appropriate enough term for her. Like Aaron, the woman without whom I, this show and blog would not function, like the most important member of my team. I mean, like more important than me.

She actually sent me an email that said something very similar. She sent me an email that said, hey, you know, I remember the time that you turn down a company that sold eyeglasses online at a discount and you turn them down because you yourself don't wear glasses

and so you couldn't personally vouch for them she was like I remember when you did that and I looked into them at the time and I thought hey these people are great I'd like to use them so she told me that she was actually disappointed I'm kind of disappointed

that I didn't represent them because she thought they were cool and they were useful for her even though they weren't actually specifically personally useful for me. So I thought that was interesting. Somebody on Instagram sent me a note that said, and I'm quoting here,

monetize the hell out of stuff that doesn't matter. Fashion, food, coffee, etc., who cares? Like you said, as long as someone's saving a high enough percentage of income, have fun with the rest. But when you're helping us decide what financial products to use or how to set up a business, I'm much more interested in your experience rather than just your sponsor's dollars.

So I thought that was interesting as well. So this person's take is essentially, if I'm recommending a financial product, I should stick only with products that I myself use. But if it's a non-financial product, then I can be a little bit more lax. I thought that was good advice as well. In the show notes for the episode, one comment that stood out, Chad Carson says, Paula, I admire that you're struggling with this because it shows that you care about your audience.

I think your current criteria that you've used a product or service is too narrow. I think the spirit versus literal interpretation of the rule is the main consideration. The spirit seems to be do what's best by your audience. That may include products you don't use because you aren't like everyone in your audience. And everyone is at different points in their journey. Charlotte in the show notes says, Girl, you're overthinking this. You can do both.

If you use a company and like them, go ahead and promote them. If you don't use a company personally, but know that you like them and they can actually be beneficial, go ahead and promote them too. It's not a slippery slope and don't freak out. You've got a great podcast. And a few minutes of sponsorship is not a big deal. And Kirsten says, I was coming here to write basically the same thing. So I'm just going to make it easy and second it.

I love that. And actually, you know what? And I got a couple of emails from people who pointed out, they were like, they pointed out their opinion that they think that women are often trained to apologize for making money or feel bad about making money. And so they wondered if the purpose. perspective that I was coming from was maybe a little bit reflective of that, which I hadn't really considered, but I thought that was interesting. And I think there may be a kernel of truth to that.

Yeah. So those are some of the many, many comments that I got that I loved. Virginia says, maybe a compromise is get sponsorship of things you use or would use, would use being within your message of frugality, real estate savings, and so on. If I want to learn more about selling things online, I can find that out for myself. Denise says, my only hope is that your choice of sponsor will not negatively impact your content, i.e. you don't provide your true position on an issue because it might contradict to sponsor's product. Other than that, you know, she says, I think it's fine to use whatever sponsors make the most financial sense for you and still allow you to sleep at night. And I love that barometer. Like the can I sleep at night

barometer is a, I mean, you can't get a better one than that. So thank you. Craig says, I'm perfectly okay with you recommending products you believe are worthwhile without you having to use them personally. Eric says, Paula seems like she's trying to please everyone, which is impossible. If she feels good about her decision to only endorse products which she personally uses, then she should continue that track and ignore the haters who accuse her of a double standard. Her explanation of her reasoning, which was to save money and then enjoy the rest, was appropriate and reasonable and sounded a lot like Dave Ramsey.

the anger she seemed to show towards them and her anger at there inciting her own feeling the need to apologize was actually pretty uncomfortable to listen to and out of character for the show. Yeah, he's absolutely right. And I think it makes a very good point that any time that something is happening that really incites that level of negativity, oh, something's wrong, you know. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you, Eric. And finally, Kirsten says, you're wringing your hands too much over this. this. I get paid to do my job. That doesn't mean I don't love and care about my work and have a

sense of mission. That's just a sampling of some of the comments that I got that I wanted to read out loud so that I could share that with all of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much to everybody who left a comment. I think the general consensus is very clear. So I guess all I can say is thank you. I don't know how to say that in a more creative or sincere way. So I'm just going to keep repeating it. I appreciate it. And I thank you. This is the Afford Anything podcast. My name is Paula Pan and I will catch you next week.