More Money Podcast - 110 How to Earn Extra Income by Getting a Side Hustle - Nick Loper, Founder of Side Hustle Nation

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to episode 110 of the Mominy podcast. Yeah, I know, I know. I'm a few days late. I get it. It's Friday, not Wednesday. Enough about all of that. The next guest I have for the show is, I mean, it's kind of the perfect guest for what I've got going in my life. I interviewed Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation. He has a blog and a podcast with the same name, but he has got a thriving community of side hustlers. He's also got an awesome Facebook group that if you're into side hustles, you definitely want to check out. But we talk about how he went from the corporate world into, you know, dabbling with side hustles. And eventually, he was able to

Starting point is 00:00:46 create a full time job and thriving a company of himself based on this whole idea of side hustles. So very apropos, and I'm very excited to share this interview with Nick right now. Thank you, Nick, for joining me on the Mo Money podcast today. I'm so excited for you to be on the show. And I'm excited that I kind of hounded you at FinCon and made you talk to me and give you my card. No problem at all, Jessica. Thank you for having me. And let me be, I hope, the first to congratulate you on the podcast for becoming a full-time hustler. Thank you. I know. Oh, full-time hustler. I like the sound of that. I should probably make a t-shirt with that or maybe not. I feel like some people might take that the wrong way, but that's, yeah, no, I am super pumped to be a full-time hustler. And that's

Starting point is 00:01:34 why I really like what you're doing with Side Hustle Nation. It is totally up my alley, which is why I really wanted to chat with you. I talked to a lot of people on the show about, you know, saving and investing and being frugal and being smart with your money. But I think a really important element when it comes to personal finance is making more money. And I mean, one way I did that was I've always had some sort of side hustle. When I first, you know, finished university, I had a nine to five, but then I also had a kind of a side job as a teleprompter operator for the news

Starting point is 00:02:06 made me some extra cash and then I kept that for like three years and then then I started the the blog and started making income like that and then I'm kind of like wow this is this is great and then it led me to you know do what I'm doing right now so I think what you're doing what you're promoting and uh is great because I think a lot of and I've actually I'm totally an advocate for side hustles with all my friends and now lots of them have started little side hustles based on like their expertise or skill set which is kind of cool i love it i love it yeah so well it's a way for them to you know save some extra money make some extra money and pay down debt quicker which is uh very very cool but um i would love to know a little bit more about you and how you got into this side hustle world. So you, you know,

Starting point is 00:02:48 you haven't always been an entrepreneur yourself. You started out as, you know, work in the corporate life, right? I did my first, I mean, I graduated school and got a job, like what you're supposed to do, right? You just paid all this money, paid all this money in tuition. And at that point, I wasn't ready to go out on my own. I didn't know that was something that you were really allowed to do. And even three years later, when I eventually quit, it was still this, is this allowed? Like it was a weird, even though I had kind of a revenue history and this, you know, side income that was coming in, it was still kind of an intimidating leap to take. So my original side hustle was a footwear comparison shopping site, like super random. I'm not like a sneaker

Starting point is 00:03:33 head. Yeah, I'm like, do you really like shoes? Not at all. Like they're probably my own worst customer. So the basis of that site or kind of how it came about was I had interned in Seattle at a company that was kind of one of the pioneering online footwear retailers. And that was my first introduction to e-commerce and Google AdWords and affiliate marketing and SEO and all this stuff. And it was just kind of a fascinating place to be. And so after that internship ended, I was like, well, how can I use, you know, what I learned? And so I became an affiliate of theirs and several other online shoe retailers and started doing like direct link text ads in the search engines for very specific models of shoes. So if you go to Google, like if you go to AdWords and you bid on

Starting point is 00:04:25 shoes, you're going to just lose money left and right. Cause that's like very, very top of the top of the funnel or like very early in somebody's like buying decision process. Right. They're like very early in the research. So I was like going to target people at the very end. Like, Hey, they've decided on this specific model that they're looking for more information on. And I can link that directly to who I think has the best deal or I think is most likely to convert. And I started doing that like with a budget of a dollar a day because I was still in college and in AdWords, you could set your budget. And once that was validated, it kind of, you know, saw that people were clicking on these links that people were buying, you know, that the ad spend was profitable.

Starting point is 00:05:03 That's when I kind of plunked down and had the website built, which involved hiring an outsourced development team and kind of placing my bet in a bigger way. Wow, that's pretty smart. In hindsight, it sounds smart. It was a slow process going through it. But it's – and that business kind of was what I was working on while I was working corporate. So nights and weekends would be spent trying to figure out how to sell more shoes and working on this database and optimizing the ads and doing all this stuff that otherwise would have been spent watching TV or I don't know what else, you know, playing video games at that time probably. And so three years later, I finally got up the nerve to turn in the keys to my company car and say, I'm out of here. Nice. Ooh, company car though. It was, you know, it was a hard gig to give up. Yeah, it sounds like it. That's awesome. So you gave up your corporate job to just do that first business, the shoe business? Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:06 And then when did you decide to do your Side Hustle Nation brand and business? So during this time, so this is 2008 when I left the corporate world, started doing the shoe thing full time. On day one of self-employment, it sounds like your first week is going a little bit better than mine did. On day one of like my retirement, you know, I have visions of the four hour work week in my head. It's going to be awesome. And, you know, I had no reason to believe otherwise because up until that point, you know, it had worked. Like the site was fine. The advertising account was fine. On that first day of self-employment, the server crashes for some unknown reason. Maybe it was a power outage on the East Coast, wherever it was, in the data center.

Starting point is 00:06:51 And on top of that, Google says, this is the day we're going to crawl your account for our quality guidelines. And they find, first of all, the site doesn't load. And once it eventually came back up, it kind of raised a red flag. And they're like, this site doesn't meet our quality guidelines. You know, the sole purpose of your site, they said, was to drive traffic to other sites. And I said, yes, true, true, true story. That's how I get paid commission on these, you know, when somebody goes to these other stores and buys, but like Google, who are you to talk? The sole purpose of Google is to drive traffic to other sites. You know, you've got two years of account history or something at this point, like thousands of happy customers. Like, you know, you go through all seven stages of

Starting point is 00:07:33 anger and denial and all this stuff. And ultimately they came back. So we made some tweaks to the website and had to sink all this extra money into development costs on top of now not having a corporate paycheck. It was really kind of a stressful time. And ultimately, they came back three months later and said, looks like we made an error. You're good to go. And it was just like, you know, such a stressful time. But that was kind of an eye-opening moment about diversification, right? So something that is a really common theme on

Starting point is 00:08:05 Side Hustle Nation, something that I, you know, will continue to preach because it's like most people are really reliant on one source of income for most people, it's their job. But I found myself in the exact same boat as an entrepreneur. And I was, you know, I thought I was diversified because I had like, you know, 30, 40 different advertisers or stores, you know, that was that was in the database or that were in the on the site. But, you know, peel it back one layer and 80% of the site traffic came from Google. So it's like, okay, that is not diversified at all. So during the time of running the shoe business is when I was trying to start all these other little side hustle projects. And most of those flopped, but a couple have stuck around. And one of those was the Side Hustle Nation blog and podcast that started kind of

Starting point is 00:08:50 spring of 2013. So about three and a half years deep into that one. Oh, wow. Well, you've grown the Side Hustle Nation, you know, website and brand like crazy if you've only been around since 2013. Props to you. That that's awesome and now you have a podcast also which is i i was listening to it before uh i'm chatting with you and i loved it it's probably going to be on my regular rotation oh thank you it's uh it's it's so much fun i know you probably have the same experience like i love doing the show and it's been really the number one growth channel and kind of avenue of discovery for for the site like it's been really the number one growth channel and kind of avenue of discovery for, for the site. Like it's grown several times faster than the blog has, which is weird

Starting point is 00:09:30 because I considered myself to be primarily a writer when I launched at that point. And it, so it's kind of weird to see, you never know what's, how, how people are going to react. So apparently, um, writing not so much, but apparently interviewing. I totally agree. I've been blogging for over five years now, but it wasn't until I started the podcast that people started really paying attention. Isn't that interesting? And it was the most terrifying. And I don't know if you had the same experience, but before I launched the podcast, I'm like, oh, this is – it just felt so intimate and so scary.

Starting point is 00:10:04 People actually hearing my voice. And, know it's you can't edit really I mean so it's very I don't know I felt very vulnerable but it's been the most rewarding thing and also just like hearing from listeners and you know you feel like you have more of a connection with them I'm sure lots of your listeners you know feel like they know you yeah it really is a more valuable connection about more valuable relationship right somebody's gonna spend 30 40 minutes with you in their earbuds and if they like the content they might do that week after week after week versus oh you know they saw a clickable link on twitter or something and they spend you know three minutes reading

Starting point is 00:10:41 you're skimming your blog post like it's not as deep of a relationship. I really like I really like that. And, you know, please don't go listen to the first 50 episodes. You know, it takes a while to kind of hit your stride. Oh, my gosh. I'm I would consider myself a pretty introverted person. And that's why hosting an interview show was perfect for let somebody else do the time. I know it's yeah, I'm absolutely the same way. I'm I think on the scale of like introvert, extrovert, I'm kind of in the middle. But definitely introvert was at the forefront when it first started. And so yeah, my first several episodes. Well, you know, now I'd say like the later the newest episodes are definitely my favorites. I've definitely honed my craft a little bit more. Absolutely. But it comes with practice.

Starting point is 00:11:26 Yeah, it comes with practice. I'd love to chat about. So you started, what inspired you to start your Side Hustle Nation blog and then podcast? Was it just that you were learning so much about side hustles yourself that you wanted to share that information with people and really just kind of let people know, hey, there's another way you can make money besides having, you know, one stream of income from your nine to five. Yeah, so it was kind of a couple components of it. One was as a creative outlet for me to kind of report back on some, you know, marketing entrepreneurship stuff that was going on in my own life and, you know, a place to talk about some different experiments or experiences

Starting point is 00:12:05 that I was testing out with. And the second component of it was kind of this concept of trying to build a personal brand. You know, what do you want to be known for when people Google you? And it was just something I was really excited about, like a lower risk brand of entrepreneurship, something that was more accessible, I think more realistic to most people than the narrative that often comes out of Silicon Valley, where you're going to raise millions of dollars in venture capital, and you're going to build the next Uber. And, you know, it happens. Obviously, it happens. But I think for most people starting something on the side, probably a little bit more realistic. So trying to spread, spread the gospel of that of the side hustle. And, you know, reaching out and finding, you know, different people who were making that

Starting point is 00:12:50 happen or who had made it happen. And it's been, it's been a blast where I'm like episode 211 or something coming out tomorrow. Wow, that's amazing. Like, do you find, and it could just be me, but I feel like the idea of having a side hustle or kind of a, you know, second job a little bit is a bit of a newer concept. I feel like older generations, it wasn't necessarily a thing that they did. It was all about kind of having that one job, you stayed at 30 years, you get your pension, there you go. But now I feel like with just, maybe just, you know, being, you know, as millennials and just the economy and just all the things that we've gone through, it feels like a bit

Starting point is 00:13:29 more common. Like most of my friends have some sort of side hustle. Like it's kind of a normal thing now. Yeah. And maybe that's one reason why the site has grown. It's like, you know, tapping into a growing trend. But it is and it isn't. Right. So maybe it's been branded definitely isn't new. But you're right, the millennials have really taken hold to it. I think one part out of desire, like out of, hey, you know, maybe my day job doesn't kind of give me this creative outlet or doesn't let me scratch my own itch or, you know, whatever it may be. And so that would be kind of like the positive proactive reason. And the second part of that would be like the negative reactive reason of like, hey, there's no job security. I'm not getting paid as much as I would like.

Starting point is 00:14:31 And the cost of living, especially in terms of like housing, education and medical expenses, like all have skyrocketed while wages have remained the same. So it's like, well, I got to do something and be proactive and take matters into my own hands to make ends meet. Absolutely. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. One thing that I love on your website was you have a

Starting point is 00:15:06 lot of great resources and a lot of great information about, you know, if someone is thinking about doing a side hustle, here are some options, here are some ideas. What are some of the most common ones or maybe some of the easiest ones for people to kind of transition into, in your opinion? Let's do kind of the top three categories. So the first that I think is like really easy and fast to get started would be, um, like tapping into what we call like the sharing economy or the peer to peer economy. And this is, you know, your Uber drivers of the world, your Airbnb hosts of the world, your like Uber eats, um, caviar, you know, delivery people. Um, I met a, somebody sent me a note, like I'm going to make 10 grand this year, uh, hosting or doing pet

Starting point is 00:15:52 sitting on dogvacay.com, which is like Airbnb, but for dogs. No way. That is like, that's crazy, but that's awesome. I didn't know that was a thing. That's amazing. There's all these different platforms where, you know, you don't like the Airbnb thing is just still really, really crazy to me. It's like you if you wanted to rent out a spare room in your house 15 years ago, you would you know, your advertising options would be limited to like a sign in your yard or, you know, an ad in your classifieds. But now, you know, there's this kind of worldwide demand. And I met a guy recently for the, for the buy buttons book research. He was in New York and him and his girlfriend were like, well, let's just see, let's just see what happens. If you want to sleep in an air mattress in our living room, you can do that for 80 bucks a night. And it turned out that they were like flooded with inquiries. No way.

Starting point is 00:16:47 We didn't really want people, we didn't expect people to be here like all the time. So what they ended up doing was just renting out the place like while they were traveling. And it ended up, the cool thing is it ended up being like revenue neutral. They're like, we're going to Costa Rica for two weeks. The place is rented out and it's like paid for our entire vacation. I was like, dude, that's awesome. So I really like those, those options, kind of these built in platforms where it's really easy to kind of set up your profile and, you know, make it easy for people to do business with you in that way. Option number two or area number two would be, you know, selling some sort of freelance service and the advantage that I see here. So like, you know, selling some sort of freelance service.

Starting point is 00:17:25 And the advantage that I see here, so like, you know, if you're delivering for, you know, if you're driving for Uber, you know, they're probably the best example of this. It's like, you know, they've continually cut rates over the last three years because they can. And, you know, their argument that they make is, well, we're trying to, you know, increase the demand side. And it's going to be better for the drivers because you're going to have more work. I have yet to talk to a driver that says that's actually true. It's like, well, they just keep cutting rates. And they do that because, hey, you know, it's anybody can do it. And now they're already testing a fleet of driverless cars. So if it's something that anybody can do, anybody naturally will do it. And, you know, that drives down rates.

Starting point is 00:18:05 So the freelancing side, you have a little bit more opportunity to kind of hone in on your specific skills and talents and find some business with, you know, that you can help solve a problem for them. So I like platforms like and you can still use this, you know, buy buttons theory of, of you know going where the cash is already flowing with marketplaces like upwork marketplaces like fiverr i met a guy who his claim to fame was he earned enough money on fiverr to buy a house within his first year on the platform yeah this is this is one of the this is like a episode five of the side hustle show one of the very early episodes but really kind of put the show on the map because it was just such a crazy story. And he kind of explained, look, it's the marketplace of goods and services where everything starts at $5. It's all about the upsell. And so he told me, you know, your $5 thing is got to be something you can, you know, something, an asset you've

Starting point is 00:18:59 already created, like a PDF, like an audio file, video file, something that you can deliver in just a couple seconds. And then if somebody wants wants your time they can buy that in the you know extras in the upsells and he was a kind of pr professional uh copywriter professional and so he was like one of his examples was like i will show you the seven steps to a killer autoresponder sequence or something and then it was like, I will write message number one for you is like in the upsell. So the, you know, the pre-delivery is like the $5 thing. Fascinating thing. Like I've had a ton of fun playing around on Fiverr and it's like a top hundred website in the world in terms of traffic. So it's just lots of buyers out there, you know, looking to spend some money. So I like that one. Of course, you can set up your own kind of content marketing-based or proactive freelance hustle as well in lots of ways.

Starting point is 00:19:52 Lots of cool examples of people doing that in the archives too. And then option number three or kind of category number three is what we'll call kind of the age-old business model of just buy low and sell high. It's the same model that, you know, Walmart and Amazon, like all of these stores, you know, pretty much every store in the history of stores uses, right? The, where it kind of gets fun from the side hustle perspective is, so I met a guy who calls himself the flea market flipper and he's down in Orlando and every weekend you can find him at the Orlando flea market he says looking for the odd items and he gave he gave me the example of finding a prosthetic leg for like 30 or 40 bucks and turning around and flipping it on eBay the next day for like a

Starting point is 00:20:38 thousand bucks or finding some you know exercise bike that's like used in physical therapy offices and picking that up for a couple hundred bucks and flipping it for two grand. Just like random, random stuff. But it's like, look, anybody could do this. And you can start with whatever investment you're comfortable with. Like I haven't gone the flea market route, but I've gone the Amazon FBA route, which is a really fascinating model and kind of the gateway drug to get into it, is just like this clearance arbitrage model where you download the Amazon seller app. And as you're out running your errands as you normally would, you stop by the clearance aisle and you scan these barcodes on these items, see what they're worth online. And my general rule is if you can double your money, and if that has like a sales rank in its category, which the app will show you of less than 100,000, then yeah, I'll go ahead and buy that and package them all up, ship them in to Amazon,

Starting point is 00:21:35 they fulfill the orders on your behalf. The reason you want the sales rank under that number is it'll give you an indication of like how fast it's going to turn. So like if it's, you know, sales rank 1.2 million, like that means it might sit on the shelf for a really long time. You might not, you're not likely to see a return on that for a while. But I really like that. Seeing people do a similar thing, you know, just buying and selling stuff on Craigslist, you know, flipping to eBay. And I really as a as a way to multiply your dollars faster i have never heard of that amazon thing but that sounds genius this is one of the this is one of the hottest side hustles going and then you know people are going all the way to you know now

Starting point is 00:22:17 having their own products uh created in in china and manufactured and you know imported over here and there's this whole there's this whole, there's this whole like economy built. The funny thing about Amazon, and I didn't realize this until just a couple years ago, it's like a big consignment store. Half of their inventory is owned by people like you and me. Yeah, I didn't know that. They're kind of crowdsourcing their inventory in that way and say, hey, look, we built this logistics network and you can take advantage of that. Wow. That is so interesting. I bet lots of people listening are going to be like,

Starting point is 00:22:48 I'm going to look into that right now because that is super helpful. And I feel like definitely outside of the box when you think of side hustles, I think a lot of, or at least what I'm kind of seeing online is how to make money online. But there's so many other ways to make some extra cash. And I think that's awesome. And I think I guess, you know, the main tradeoff is, you know, you're trading your time for money. But, you know, it depends on what you're selling, what you're doing, really. So, man, I think I need some products to sell somewhere. I've got some ideas.

Starting point is 00:23:24 There you go. sell somewhere. I've got some ideas. I would love to know, because you've grown Side Hustle Nation, you know, so much in the past couple years. What are your kind of your plans as an entrepreneur? What are some of your projects that you're working on? What are some of the things that you would like to see happen the next couple years for you? Well, one thing, so I'm getting super jealous, like looking at your website right now, you know, beautifully designed. So I've had a kind of redesign or refresh on the mind for, uh, for the site to kind of, so this, this version of the site is three years old right now. So it's starting to look a little bit, a little bit dated of that redesign refresh is kind of rethinking what happens on the back end after

Starting point is 00:24:05 somebody opts in so right now i've kind of i'm dumping everyone into one general auto responder sequence which i think is leaving a lot of opportunity on the table to be more engaging more relevant where it's like okay if somebody opted in for something specifically related to e-commerce and now i'm sending them something about freelancing. They both fall under that overall umbrella of being viable and lucrative side hustles. But there might be a disconnect there. So that's kind of one thing that's on my radar is smarter segmentation and automation on that front.

Starting point is 00:24:41 The other projects, I don't know, like that's what I'm trying to figure out. What would be a good goal as the site has grown? I found my time to do different random side hustle experiments has decreased. And that's a little bit frustrating for me. It's like, you know, that's kind of how it started. Like, I'm going to go sell something on Fiverr and report back, you know, how I got on the homepage or what have. There may be some more experiments in the future or, you know, bringing on an intern or, you know, some sort of help to, you know, test out different things and see what happens. Do some public case studies and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Definitely. No, I think that'd be, I'm sure there would be lots of people that would like to volunteer for that because so many people, you know, would, you know, probably experiment on their own time, but they'd like to share the news with somebody. Maybe so. I don't know. It's a, it's kind of like, I've got an episode coming out about this. Like everybody's posting their new year's resolutions and their big goals for the year. And it's like, I don't know. It's easy to pick it up.

Starting point is 00:25:52 Like, I want to make a million bucks. But it's like, what does that mean? Yeah, why? What does that really mean? But why also? Something I've been struggling with and trying to. It was actually through the Rockstar Finance newsletter. I found a post that was about yeah the focus you know it was like i'm ditching my goals to

Starting point is 00:26:09 and that one really resonated with me so that's something that is is on on the mind for kind of this first part of the year yeah for sure awesome well uh thank you so much for chatting with me and sharing some side hustle ideas I will definitely link to a couple very useful blog posts that you have on your site that I think lots of people will get a lot out of and of course I encourage everyone to subscribe to Side Hustle

Starting point is 00:26:38 Nation the podcast that you have which is super awesome and motivating if anyone wants to figure out where to start what to do where to go that is the place to go. So thank you, Nick, for joining me. It was a pleasure chatting with you. And that was episode 110 with Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation. Make sure to visit SideHustleNation.com to learn more about what he's up to and check out his podcast on iTunes and everywhere. It's called The Side hustle show. You definitely don't want to miss it. It is awesome. And I think he just cracked a crazy record for himself, like over 300. No,

Starting point is 00:27:12 it was something even crazier. It was like 3 million downloads, something beyond my like, I just don't understand that. That's amazing. So make sure to check him out if you want to learn how to make some extra money on the side, because it's kind of a great way to get to that next level. If you budget as much as you can, and there's nothing else to kind of cut back on, it's time to figure out a way to make some extra cash. Highly recommend-y. That's really it for me. I'm going to try my best to not miss another Wednesday, because I have a couple more great episodes in the queue and then i'm taking my summer break which i hope you have plans to do as well um so thanks again for listening and i'm gonna see you right back here next wednesday i promise i promise i promise okay bye-bye

Starting point is 00:27:58 this podcast is distributed by the Women in Media Podcast Network. Find out more at womeninmedia.network.

More Money Podcast - 110 How to Earn Extra Income by Getting a Side Hustle - Nick Loper, Founder of Side Hustle Nation

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