Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Nick Loper: Side Hustle Secrets Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Needs to Know | Entrepreneurship | E325

Episode Date: December 23, 2024

From launching a comparison shopping site for shoes to creating a directory of virtual assistants, Nick Loper is the king of side hustles. Although he started out during the early days of the internet, when there were fewer resources and less user-friendly tools, he figured it out and kept experimenting. Nick tried many different side hustles, earning lessons from each one and refining his approach. Eventually, he created Side Hustle Nation, his hugely successful platform for empowering aspiring entrepreneurs to build profitable side hustles. In this episode, Nick and Hala discuss how to create and execute a successful side hustle, no matter your skill set. In this episode, Hala and Nick will discuss:  (00:00) Introduction (02:04) The Rise of Side Hustles (04:20) Nick's First Side Hustle Experiments (06:32) Making Money from Podcasting (10:38) Why Everyone Needs a Side Hustle (13:49) Thriving in a Recession with Side Hustles (20:11) Is AI the Future of Side Hustles? (24:04) Launching a Service Business (27:57) Turning Ideas into Products (30:05) Does Dropshipping Still Work? (32:01) Real-Life Side Hustle Scenarios (43:06) No-Skill Hustles That Actually Work (49:02) How to Track Your Profitability Nick Loper is the founder of Side Hustle Nation and the host of The Side Hustle Show, one of the top podcasts for entrepreneurs. His journey started while juggling a corporate job and building a footwear comparison shopping site on the side, which eventually led him to full-time entrepreneurship. Nick is the author of bestselling books like Buy Buttons and $1,000 100 Ways, offering actionable insights into building sustainable income streams. His work has been featured in Forbes, CNBC, and Entrepreneur, and his Side Hustle Nation community is a hub for thousands of hustlers worldwide.  Resources Mentioned: Nick’s Podcast, The Side Hustle Show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-side-hustle-show/id655135292  Sponsored By: Airbnb - Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host Found - Try Found for FREE at found.com/profiting  Shopify - Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period at youngandprofiting.co/shopify     Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap  Youtube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting  LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/  Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/  Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com  Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new  All Show Keywords: Entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship podcast, Business, Business podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal development, Starting a business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side hustle, Startup, mental health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth mindset.  Career & Entrepreneurship Career, Success, Entrepreneurship, Productivity, Careers, Startup, Entrepreneurs, Business Ideas, Growth Hacks, Career Development, Money Management, Opportunities, Professionals, Workplace, Career podcast, Entrepreneurship podcast

You're one layoff away or one bad meeting away from having your income go to zero. That's a really stressful way to live. The realm of potential side hustles has expanded in the last 10 years. You are famous for having a lot of side hustles. What are some side hustles that do well in tough economic times? My very first side hustle was... How do you think AI is transforming the side hustle world? It has improved certain processes, has made things more efficient.

But an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps. off the cliff, it figures out how to build their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. Even if you don't have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life. Is drop shipping a thing anymore? Whoa. Yeah, fan, welcome back to the show. And today's episode is especially for my entrepreneur, newbies and wannabes, because we are lasering in on the topic of side hustles. Side hustles are very popular nowadays. Seems like everybody has a side hustle. And of course, Of course they do, because side hustles enable security and freedom and allow you to follow your passion while making money.

Who wouldn't love having a side hustle? I actually started Yap Media as a side hustle six years ago, and I'm so happy that I dedicated the time and effort it took to get this side business off the ground because now it's my main hustle, and I make millions of dollars a year off of this business, and I have so much security and freedom and live in my dream. So side hustles are awesome. I'm an advocate of side hustles. Nick Loper is a side hustle expert. He is the side hustle king. He knows everything about side hustles. He's had so many side hustles himself. He's been blogging about side hustles for over a decade now at the side hustle nation. He's also the host of the very popular podcast called The Side Hustle Show and he interviews people with really unique and cool side hustle ideas all the time. So he's a wealth of information. He's got so much to share on how we can create and execute a very successful side hustle. Let's dive right into my conversation with Nick

Loper. Nick, welcome to Young Improfiting Podcast. Happy to be back. Thanks for having me. Of course. So fun fact, I was looking back in the archives and I realized that you came on the podcast back in 2018, episode 10. You were one of the first podcasters and people in general that I've ever interviewed. And I think it's just so awesome because you were somebody that I looked up to. And now everything is still full circle because I'm not only interviewing you again on the podcast. You're in my podcast network. We work together. And so I just feel like it's just a beautiful moment right now. It was one of these things where I think you reached out, whatever that was, 2017, 2018. And it's like, this girl's a go-getter. You know,

she's going places. You know, what I'm just, you know, want to watch this journey. And it's been really inspiring to see what you built starting as a side project and into this media behemoth conglomerate that you got going on now. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I appreciate you taking a chance on me. And so when we first spoke in 2018, side hustles was not necessarily new, but it was becoming this trend. And we were talking about the gig economy. And we were talking about remote work and the future of remote work, not even realizing that two years later, everything would accelerate with COVID. And so my first question to you is give us the evolution of side hustles. How did it start? When did it start to pick up steam? And where are we at now?

Yeah, I don't think it's a new concept by any means. I think previous generations would have called it moonlighting or having a second job. And it might have looked like bartending on the weekends or delivering pizzas or having a rental property. But the realm of of potential side hustle has absolutely expanded in the last 10 years with the rise of peer-to-peer gig economy type of apps, plug-and-play side hustles, sign up for Uber and go drive around or do DoorDash and stuff like that. There's a peer-to-peer platform for just about anything. If you have an underutilized asset in your life, whether it's your house or your car or watching other people's dogs, there's all sorts of different things that you can do.

and side hustle nation has been a beneficiary of that rising tide of interest in side hustles over the last 10 or 12 years. And it's become much more mainstream. And I think that's one part out of necessity where like housing, healthcare, education, some big ticket expenses have not got any cheaper. Wages by and large have not kept pace with some of those big ticket increases in expenses. And so approaching it out of necessity, on the one hand, and then approaching it out of this proactive desire to spend your free time more effectively, more productively. Like if your day job isn't scratching that creative it, maybe something outside of your nine to five

can do it. And we see people really tackling it from both sides. Side hustles have totally taken over. I feel like everybody I know has a side hustle. So you are famous for having a lot of side hustles. And I know in the past you used to like break down how much money you make on your side hustles. So talk to us about the side hustles that you did six years ago, 10 years ago versus the ones that you're doing today. My very first side hustle, aside from painting houses in college, like I don't know if that counts, but the first online side hustle was a comparison shopping site for shoes.

Like in the early days of the internet, 10 different stores have this pair of shoes that you're looking at. We'll tell you where to find the best price. It was an affiliate marketing type of business where those stores would pay a finder's fee. they would pay a commission for driving sales to their sites. That was a good one I started a virtual assistant directory in review platform called Virtual Assistant Assistant, started in 2011, sold in 2020, that was really born out of my own experience and anxiety around working with virtual team members. Of all of the different companies, which ones are legit?

Are they going to steal my idea? How does it work with paying them and taxes? All of these rookie questions, but then putting the directory and kind of having a front row seat as that industry really grew and expanded over that time, too. That was the hypothesis in the early days of Side Hustle Nation, where I'm going to be the guinea pig, I'm going to be the tester, but try out all these different things and report back on the results. And in the early days, that was freelance writing,

a little bit of freelance book editing for nonfiction authors. Started with like a gig on Fiverr. Hey, I'll proofread your book. And as most books are a lot more than 500 words, it ended up to be some pretty sizable gigs. I did a lot of like Amazon FBI clearance arbitrage in those early years because somebody told me about it on the podcast. It's like, there's no way in the era of big data that this is actually a thing. But sure enough, you go to Walmart, you scan the products. You're like, oh, okay, it says there's profit here.

Then you ship it and it sells immediately. And you're like, okay. I guess this is a thing. Yeah. Doing that kind of thing. Selling digital products, creating online courses on UDEMI, doing the self-publishing thing, trying my hand in a bunch of different areas. And it was a ton of fun to play around and do those experiments.

Now today, one of your biggest side hustle is podcasting. So talk to us about how you monetize your podcast. Well, this is the dream job. If I can show up and get paid to do my hour, hour and a half of radio every week, I don't know why I would ever give that up. I get such a kick out of scooping side hustle stories and connecting with people with really inspiring businesses that they've built. I mean, the show is primarily monetized through sponsorships. Most of them are coming through YAPMedia these days. And it took years to be truthful before that could meaningfully be called a full-time

income from the show. What was more helpful early on was recognizing podcast advertising is is amplitude and frequency. How big is the audience and frequency? How often can you reach them? And so if you have an entrepreneur is on fire, a daily show with a big audience, yeah, absolutely. You're going to kill it on advertising. But if you're doing at that time, a weekly show with a modest audience, you know, does this really pencil out? But using it as a content marketing channel to build up an audience, build up an email list, build relationships and trust, it still was absolutely worthwhile to do in the early days. And you still get all those benefits, even though the show is now monetized primarily with pre-roll or mid-roll ads,

rather through sponsorships. And to your point, podcasting is no easy route. It's not like you're going to start a podcast, get really rich. However, if you can build an audience, it is very lucrative, and there's really not that many podcasts out there that get a lot of downloads. And so filling up your sponsorships is a lot easier than one might think. The key is just growing that audience, which is the hard part. That's the hard part. I think of it in terms of what I call the listener pyramid.

You know, pyramid with four levels, you have strangers. Unfortunately, that's the biggest section of the base of the pyramid. Strangers, people who don't know you exist. You've convinced some of them to become listeners. You've convinced some of them to become subscribers. And then ultimately, what you're shooting for at the top of the pyramid is fans. These are the people who listen to everything that you put out. They're the people evangelizing for you.

They're spreading the word. They're taking your recommendations. and with every piece of content that you create, like trying to ascend people on that pyramid, you know, from really compelling titles and topics to hopefully get a stranger to give you a chance and listen to you for that first time. And then hopefully they do

and they're compelled to click that subscribe button to that follow button. And hopefully, if they spend enough time with you in their earbuds, they become fans of ears and help spread the word. Now, Nick, I sell your ads and you're sold out. And I'm always like, hey, Nick, can we? do a newsletter series or can you drop another episode per month or I'm always like trying to convince you what else can we monetize we need more inventory right because that's how my brain works

and you're very much chill you're like you know what I'm happy with the number of ads and I just I'm curious how do you decide whether or not because it's basically like another side hustle I'm saying like hey Nick are you willing to do webinars I can sell you webinars you know and you're like well let's just slow down here what do you start thought process A friend of mine in a mastermind group posed decision framework, and it stuck with me ever since. With every decision you make, does it add complexity or reduce complexity? And if it adds complexity, okay, is it permanent or is it short term? And is that tradeoff going to be worthwhile?

Obviously, like making money, it's fun, but at a certain point, you're like, well, you still have to do right by the audience. 100%. And I feel like some of our best creators in the network, like you and Jenna Coucher, for example, your mindset is always there. How can I make sure that, A, it's worth my time. It brings me joy. It's something that I want to spend my time doing. And B, how do I make sure that I'm, you know, have integrity with my audience?

So I feel like that's why you guys are sold out and do such a great job. So aside from loving what you do, being passionate about side hustles, what are some of the other benefits of doing one? My boss might disagree, but I think it made me a better employee where at my day job, my old age of I was at the bottom rung of this Fortune 500 company. But by nights and weekends, I was the CEO of my own little project. And there's some entrepreneurial upside to it that maybe it doesn't scale to quit your job. But there's still some benefit of doing that. And you can think of it in terms of the side hustle snowball is a framework that we talk about, where you've itemized out your expenses from smallest to largest. It's like everybody wants the side hustle that erases their

mortgage or their rent, and that's a great goal to have. But like, could you pay for your car insurance? Could you pay for your cell phone bill? Could you erase your gym membership or whatever? Celebrating those small wins, because I think there's some value in that too, like erasing those expenses with new income. And I have to say, I think side hustles also add a layer of security. I have been talking to some of my girlfriends who have recently lost their job. And I feel like so many of my friends that had a nine to five are finding themselves jobless right now. And these are women that are so talented. They've always been employed.

They have no reason to not be employed. And then I think back to Young Hala, starting Yap Media side hustle and the podcast for three years while working corporate and all the hard work I did to get it off the ground. And it makes me realize, wow, I'm so blessed because I'm so secure. because I took that risk and I put in that work. What are your thoughts around the security piece around it? Yeah, there's some element of that whole digging your well before you're thirsty thing. There's a lot of stress.

Your one layoff away or one bad meeting away at some cases from having your income go to zero. It's a really stressful position to be, like a really fragile way to live. So I think there's definitely some of that security benefit. it's not going to be immediate, probably, but it's something you can stack up over time. I think Reid Hoffman has the quote about, you know, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off the cliff and figures out how to build their airplane or their parachute on the way down. What side hustles allow you to do is just reduce the height of the cliff. That sounds terrifying.

It's like, well, we can make it just a step off instead of this huge leap of faith. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. at Yap, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence. We even call ourselves scrappy hustlers. And I'm really picky when it comes to my employees. My team is growing every day. We're 60 people all over the world.

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worth of decorative piling up pumpkins on people's porches for Halloween and Thanksgiving. I don't know if I would call that a recession-proof business, but fantastic. Good on you for tap it into this demand where you kind of go down Maslow's hierarchy, right, where, you know, food and shelter all the way up to self-actualization. And so the harder times get, the more people are focused on basic needs. And so if you're providing something in that realm, even if it's a food delivery service or maybe the food delivery budget gets cut back, but like you're lowering, going lower down on that hierarchy of needs, it really comes down to solving people's problems. I think about what I

spend money on in my own day to day, it's like, make this pain go away. It's so much easier to sell pain pills than it is to sell vitamins, even if the vitamins might be better for you long run. But if you can figure out what people's pains and problems are, and especially solving those for a business customer generally has more money to spend, that's probably where I would play. everybody knows at least one entrepreneur and he could start that conversation of what's really bothering you these days or what are the biggest bottlenecks or what are the biggest pain points? And even if you've got nothing to sell right now, but it's just you're trying to probe for potential issues and pain points and get that conversation going.

I love what you said in terms of start with the basic needs. When things are going bad, people still need to eat. People still need shelter, all those kinds of things. So the pumpkin thing was really a good one. it also lines up with some advice you give around having the shovel for the gold rush. Can you tell us about that tactic when thinking about side hustles? Yeah, so maybe the gold rush here is a Pinterest trend around nice-looking porches or holiday decor. She's like, well, shoot, I can get pumpkins by the dozen. I'll pile them up. I'll make them look nice.

I don't know if she has a background in interior or exterior design or landscaper or anything. But you're like, I get it. They look nice. But is that something that's people, I mean, she found, booked out a million dollars for the business, sold out by August. And it's like, there's a niche for everything. Yeah. Those are the ones that always are super fun to share.

It's like, nope, never knew you can make money doing that. What other examples of getting the shovel for the gold rush can you give? Maybe another example is the world of podcasting, especially during the pandemic. I can see, well, everybody and their brother is starting a podcast. And so what shovels could you sell into that gold rush? Maybe it's editing services. Maybe it's the ad broker sales. Maybe it's the recording platform software. If you have more technical development side of things, microphones, thinking of what are those trends in gold rushes that you could go and provide some type of service for? AI might be a good one now. Sure. Maybe you're an early adopter. How can you use AI tools to provide, some sort of service to somebody he either doesn't know how to do it, doesn't want to learn, and they can improve some process flow in that way. We've seen people piggybacking on the popularity of other software tools,

where if you are a Notion expert or a pipe drive expert or HubSpotter, yeah. HubSpot or HoneyBook was one that we had on the show recently. You can help other companies implement this. You've already got the proven templates. And the advantage is there's already some level of awareness and search demand. People are typing in questions into YouTube about these different software tools. Well, how do I do such and such in this thing? You create that video content and, you know, hey, I'm an Asana consultant.

And today we're going to learn how to do blah, blah, blah, in Asana or HubSpot or QuickBooks or whatever it is. Also, Airbnb is a great example. When Airbnb got popular, then you have the Airbnb management, the Airbnb cleaners and stuff like that. Yeah, the furnishing, everything. Okay, so what about the most profitable side hustles or maybe some of the hottest new side hustles that you can talk about? Oh my gosh. The most profitable one that comes to mind from recent memory, this guy must have just been printing money. This is a web design service call 180 sites.com, I think, because he started initially charging 180 bucks, I think the pricing has changed.

but focusing almost exclusively on building websites for pressure washing companies. So take this and run with this in any niche imaginable. If he's doing this, just focusing on building sites for pressure washers. Like typical web design might be sold as $5,000 upfront cost. We'll be able to do this website. Flips that on its head, hey, I'm just going to charge you $180 a month, $200 a month for a two-year contract and then ongoing maintenance. After that, we're going to host a site.

If you need any updates, we'll get those done. We'll make sure it's secure. and represents your business well. And because his customers, well, it only takes one extra job or half of an extra job to pay for this fee every month. It was a pretty easy sell. And

when we recorded, he had just had his first $100,000 month. And it was this recurring revenue business model. And it gets easier. With every client you do, you add that to the existing template. You're not starting from scratch every single time. It's like, it probably doesn't take

you very long to recoup your costs, he's like, no, after month two or whatever, we're broken even and the rest is gravy. It's like insane profit margins run by a primarily overseas team. Is he just targeting those businesses or he's targeting multiple industries? I think if somebody outside of a pressure washing company came to him and asked him to build a site, he'd absolutely do it. But that was the bread and butter. And because he had at this point several different templates, we'll pick or choose which one you like and we'll build that out for you. And so that added to the economies of scale and efficiencies of it.

It's so random. How many pressure washing companies really are out there? Let's talk about AI. How do you think AI is transforming the side hustle world? Are you worried about a lot of the typical freelance jobs going away? Or do you think it's going to augment and create more jobs? It's a really interesting place to be right now because on the one hand, as a content creator, as a user, it has improved certain processes, has made things more efficient. At the same time, the AI snippets

in Google are taking some of our traffic. It is a challenging place to play. Like a year and a half ago, we recorded this episode on doing faceless YouTube content, try and win the viral lottery, create a video around some topic that's already trending, and it was hire a scriptwriter, it was hire a voiceover artist, it was hire a video editor, and then hire a thumbnail designer. And we talked to the guy a year later. It was like, well, now we got Chat GPT right in the scripts. Now we've got AI narration. I think he still had a human video editor compiling stuff.

It was like several of these different roles had been replaced by AI or 80% of it replaced by AI. I still go in and edit that script to make sure it is correct. And it was really interesting to see how some of the previous freelance talent at the low end got evaporated within a year. Yeah, I know. AI, it's really helpful, but it's also really scary. Because I do feel like a lot of people need to figure out how they can level up and differentiate outside of what AI can do, especially if you're like a graphic designer or a copywriter. I also feel like it's going to create a lot of competition because now anybody can be a graphic designer because you can use all these different tools and suddenly offer graphic design services. Are you worried about that at all?

More worried about like deep fake stuff is somebody with hours and hours of their voice on the internet. If you played around with 11 labs at all and like the voice cloning? Yes, I have my AI voice. We used it when I'm sick. And if I like miss my commercials or something, we'll use it. Yeah. It's crazy. And maybe it's just me. It's like I know that I didn't speak it, but it sounds pretty good. Like, yeah, that sounds like me. I'll give it to you. They're not getting the tonality right, though. I feel like we still got that over the machines for a little while. while. Yeah, it was an episode concept we're thinking of thrown out for Halloween. Like, could we do 100% zombie Nick episode? Through 11 lobs and like, ah, we ended up going with a different

concept for that episode. But you could do little segments. And absolutely, if you need to tweak something in that commercial and you don't have your recording equipment handy, it's like, oh, just, okay, we'll swap out that word for that word and it sounds just fine. Maybe one day I'll never have to record commercials again. One cool one that we're using on the video front, the bottleneck is still in scripting. And so we're still working on chat GPT, like how to turn this blog post into a compelling video script and priming it in such a way.

He wouldn't just read off the blog post. Like, that wouldn't play very well. But there's this tool called Pictori, which you've been using for the last several months, where you upload the script, you upload your voiceover narration, and it pulls in hundreds of stock video clips that would have taken me or a human editor hours.

and hours and hours of tedious manual labor to do that and splice that together. It does it in just a few minutes. And I think it creates a pretty visually compelling video without you having to be on camera. I'll introduce the topic, you know, talking head so that you like know that it's an actual person for the first five or ten seconds. And then it's just rolled this tape. And it's pretty visually compelling. And some of those videos have done pretty well. Oh, wow. I can't wait to use that. Victoria. It's called. Cool. Yeah, Victoria. I got to do a whole, I need to do a whole video. kind of demo on our use case for it.

Okay, so let's talk about how we can get started with some side hustles. So I know that service-based side hustles are the easiest to get started. So I started that way. I was good at social media, and then I started a social agency, and I started to just do that for other people. But talk to us about some of the disadvantages. I know they're easy, but sometimes easy doesn't necessarily mean better. What are some of the disadvantages of starting a service-based?

side hustle. The most common pushback that I get is, well, yeah, but you're still trading time for money. I'm doing that at my day job. Why would I want to do that as a side hustle? That's the most common pushback that I get. Nathan Berry has what he calls his ladders of wealth creation. And it starts with trading time for money, either at a job or as a freelancer, consultant service provider of some sort. You almost have to start there to build up some entrepreneurial skill set. And you know, you can skip to the end, like his top ladder is products and software and all the recurring revenue types of passive income businesses that everybody wants. You can skip some steps, but you can't skip learning the skills. And so you've got to work your way. And I was a little bit

surprised to find that more guests started with a service business than any other business model, because it's like it doesn't have that allure of passive income, but it's not necessarily where they end up. It's like, okay, that's where I start. And then it sparks some other idea, It sparks this conversation or you meet somebody through that and the businesses start to evolve. The opportunities become visible once you're already in motion. But most people do start in that. I mean, there was me, painting houses in college, trying to figure out how to sell something and go through all the steps in that process. Yeah, totally.

And I can even think about it from my perspective. When I first started social media and my agency, I was pretty hands-on. I'd be involved with the accounts, leading the strategy, even writing. the posts, I think, when I first started. And then you build an agency, you build a team under you, now there's pods that manage my accounts, and you can scale it. So any other ideas in terms of, aside from the agency model of how you can scale a service-based business? Obviously, you can scale it with team members by having other people do the work. You can scale it by raising rates. You can scale it by productizing to a certain extent where instead of hourly,

now it's just a fixed monthly cost and you can have a sense of what your deliverals are going to be so you can sell it maybe without even talking on the phone with a customer. Like they just click the buy button and there's a level of trust that's built up. You could scale through referral partnerships where it's almost like white labeling.

Like this isn't a service that we provide, but we can partner with this other agency or this other service provider. We've seen people do that. A friend of mine did, he was running like this SEO business and eventually got fully booked up, sold out. And he started making money not doing the work. Like, oh, but I'll

introduce you to this other guy, a friend of mine or this other business owner, and like, would get a finder's fee for sending work to somebody else. I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. And that evolved into a matchmaking directory or lead gen type of directory for that type of business. Like, oh, well, answer a few different questions about your goals and your type of business and we'll match you or, you know, we'll introduce you to the company that's the best fit. It's like, oh, dang, you could probably do that in just about any niche. Yeah. And also, I guess you could turn your expertise, whatever you were doing into a course or an info product and sell that. Yeah, very common path to go. You know, have do the thing,

get the results, and naturally you're going to have people asking, well, how did you do that? How did you build your podcast? Or how did you get somebody social followers? You get tired answering the same question over and over again. You're like, well, let me just record the answers. is we'll package this up into a digital product. And speaking of products, there's lots of different products, side hustles. Can you talk to us about product licensing and how that works? Have you connected with Stephen Key from Invent Wright at all? No.

Fascinating guy. So he'd been doing this for decades, helping aspiring inventors license their products. And the way we kind of framed it was rather than at this time, like Amazon FBA, private label was the hot thing, like tapped into this huge, market on the world's largest store, Amazon, you know, build it and they'll come almost was how shooting fish in a barrel. It was, that's at least how it seemed from the outside. His argument is like, look, look at all this upfront risk that you have. You've got to buy 500,000 units of whatever this product is. You got to spend additional money on marketing, advertising, collecting reviews.

And then even if it hits, you're going to be reinvesting capital into inventory, sometimes for years before you can take those chips off the table. He's like, what if instead you just pitch the idea to some company that already had the marketing manufacturing and the marketing firepower to make this thing a hit? And we talked to a guy whose business was like a dictionary inspired card games. Like, here's something that already exists. Here's my creative spin on it. Sold it to Mattel, maybe 5% licensing fee, which they netted like $300,000 in royalties. This guy was like a dentist in Georgia, which is like a little side project for him. Another guest, she was like a softball player, a softball coach, and she was playing third base, and her hand kept getting hurt with hard

ground balls. So she like had a little padded inner glove thing. She was stick inside her mitt, and that was her little licensing invention. Or somebody else had like a coozy, like a can holder. The little bottom would freeze and it would fit into the dimple of your Coke can or your beer can. And it was like, these little pivots on products that already exist is just such a creative way to go about it. I love those ideas. And I love the fact that you don't necessarily need to be a business person. You could just be an inventor and then pitch it to other businesses.

So that's cool. Drop shipping used to be really hot. Is drop shipping a thing anymore? It is less popular than it once was, but still can work. Drop shipping is where you don't hold any inventory. but you partner with people who do, and usually it's going to be big ticket or bigger ticket purchases that aren't readily available nearby. Like if you've seen people doing golf simulators or giant commercial inflatable bounce houses

or maybe treadmills or treadmill desks, maybe barbecue smokers type of thing, but like typically bigger items where you don't have to hold the inventory. You strike up partnerships with the distributors or manufacturers and you collect orders. you do the marketing and then you ship it out or the distributor ships it out on your behalf or the manufacturer ships it out on your behalf. And so the appeal is, well, I don't have to buy this thing until it's sold, right? And then I just make my maybe 10%, maybe 15%, you like, you might have pretty thin margins, which you've got to pay your entire marketing budget out of that. You'll figure out how am I going to drive traffic? And the other downside is I don't really have any control over that

customer experience. If there's shipping delays, if something breaks, all of a sudden, you're a middleman. The customer thought they were doing business with you, but now you're almost powerless. You just have to forward messages or calls. Like, hey, where's my customer's order? So, definitely tradeoffs. It could be kind of a competitive place to play. But if you can drive your own traffic and you've got a partner that you really trust, it absolutely can work. And I could imagine nowadays, it's so easy to find and compare prices that that game could just be like a race to the bottom price-wise. Yeah, as you think about what's my value add layer, is it going to be customer support?

Is it going to be some sort of consultation? Oh, on your golf simulator, are you an insider in that space? Do you know which ones are actually better and help customers drive their decision rather than just purely competing on price? We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hey, young improfitors. As an entrepreneur, I know firsthand that getting a huge expense off your books is the best possible feeling. It gives you peace of mind,

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That's 30% off in 2026. Again, that's Framer.com slash profiting for 30% off, Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. Okay, let's do something fun. Let's do some scenarios. Okay. Okay. You ready for this?

I'm going to try. You are the side hustler in this case, okay? You're not Nick Loper in these scenarios. You are a side hustler with no experience. Are you ready? Okay. Number one, you just quit your job. You only have $2,500 to play with,

and you want to replace your income as quickly as possible. What do you do? I would go that service route. And if I'm thinking longer term, that agency route, we're trying to figure out pain points and problems, what can I solve? And if it's me personally, like, okay, I'll go pressure wash people's driveways or something. The machine is going to cost me three, 400 bucks, pressure wash somebody's house, three, 400 bucks. Like, you know, break even after one job.

And, you know, that's kind of off to the races. And you could even go sell the job before buying the machine. You know, hey, can I come back next week? You can do pressure washing for you? And you don't even need to spend. the $2,500 upfront, like if you pre-book it. But longer term, I'm still trading time for money. I don't have a lot of leverage in this. And so we talked to some really inspiring younger entrepreneurs recently who were doing a window washing business or, you know, car detailing business

where it's like, I can find other people who know how to do this where probably as good or better than me. I just need to be the marketing arm. I need to be the administrative arm, the scheduler, kind of being a better administrator, better operator, and then just finding trustworthy people to go out and do the work. And so similar to your agency, your social agency model, where that has got some scalability and some legs to it. I love that idea. That seems so realistic like anyone could just go out there and do that. Okay, number two, and maybe you are Nickloper. I don't know how we should think about this. You're Nickloper, but you don't have all this current side hustles that you have right now, Okay.

Okay, you have no background in e-commerce and you decide you want to sell handmade products online. How do you get started on the right foot and avoid the typical obstacles? I think for handmade products, you can't figure out where the demand is. And it's probably going to be on Etsy and maybe Amazon handmade if you can get accepted into that program. The challenge is, and there's some keyword research tools that can help you with evaluating Etsy demand. And to their credit, Etsy has a lot of public data where they'll show you the number of sales that each shop has made. They don't tell you on the individual product level as far as I'm aware. But rather than trying to create demand from scratch, it's so much easier to fill demand.

So trying to figure out what is already selling and how can you put your own unique spin on it. That's where I would go, especially if I don't have an existing audience. I'm going to be relying on Etsy's audience in this case to say, hey, these products are popular. how can I throw my hat in the ring and try and capture some of that demand? I think that is so smart. I think that is one of the biggest mistakes that I see people do that are trying to launch, especially products. I had a friend once who wanted to start a sweatshirt company,

and that's just such a hard thing to compete with, right? How is your sweatshirt company going to be different from everybody else's? And to your point, if you can find something more niche that people are actually looking for and buying already, and you could just be like that. the second or the third girl or guy who's offering that one specific thing that everybody wants. You've just got such a better rate of success. Is there any insight in terms of testing products or anything that you want to share? Well, Etsy is nice from that standpoint because it costs you as 20 cents to put the listing up.

But we had a guy who was doing these Renaissance-style pet portraits. And I think he had actual Photoshop experts on it. You probably do this with AI now, where customers would upload a picture of their dog, and he would put him in this frilly Henry VIII type of outfit. And it was all print on demand. And they'd ship these guys the products. Something like that would be really interesting, like AI powered type of thing, where it gets, like, if you're doing the print on demand thing,

very much a volume game where the people I see having the most success have thousands of products out there. And you're just dealing with copycats all day long. If something sells the bots or the other people who are watching that, say, oh, we better make a copy of this shirt because somebody bought it. And it can be really challenging. But it's super rewarding. When we get those Red Bubble sales notifications or those merch Amazon merch sales notifications, it's passive income once it's up there.

Yeah. And to your point, channeling demand on a platform like Etsy is just so smart because they're already bringing the customers in. And these customers are looking for handmade. items and it's just so much easier than creating your own website and trying to generate your own traffic. I feel like a lot of people take the uphill route. Would you agree? Yes. Now, the advantage to building your own audience, obviously, like you have much more control because Setsi's customer. It's not yours. It's Amazon's customer. It's not yours. We had a woman on last year,

the site is called Strapcicle. Strapcical is this little silicoed strap that goes on the back of your Kindle so you can read with one hand. And the origin story was fantastic. I was breastfeeding my son and the Kindle dropped on his head and everybody was really upset. Like there's got to be a better way. None of the existing straps were great. So we went out and invented this thing. And what she did, which was, I thought, really smart, lots of influencer marketing, partnering with TikTok or book talk was the sub-community that she found. People who were really into Kindle and tapping in, hey, let me send you a free thing. No album. obligation, no strings attached. And here's an offer code if you like it. And we're selling the crap

out of these things. You can imagine, like, it doesn't weigh anything, almost no cost to ship, almost no cost to manufacture. And then when it was time to launch on Amazon, they had this existing audience that they could push over there to leave reviews to go and buy the product where I think most people start Amazon first and then try and wean themselves off, wean back onto their own Shopify powered platform, and so much harder to go that other day. direction. I totally agree with that. And something that I read of yours that I thought was really interesting is that you actually consider a side hustle being growing an audience, right? You call it an audience business. So talk to us about why having an audience in itself can be a side hustle with

multiple avenues. Yeah, this is probably tier three. Tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid content-based business, audience-based business, where it could be a social following, it could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And once you have people paying attention, the entire playbook opens up. Yeah, sure, you could sell services. You could sell products. You could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships. But it really is a powerful place to play.

And that's really where I spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last 10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers, and plan in that space. Because the scale is almost infinite, right? It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people. And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content. Okay, so scenario number three. And this is something I didn't realize you would have so much experience with, but apparently you do. So you want to be a virtual assistant, but you find there's too much competition. How would you stand out? Yeah, you got a niche down. And so to say, I'm a general virtual assistant, it's kind of a race to the bottom. But if you say, I am your QuickBooks bookkeeping assistant, okay, now I've got a lane that I can play in. Or I am your funnel optimization assistant. I am your community manager. I am your podcast editing provider.

Lots of different sub-nitches. You can even ask chat GPT. What are 100 different services I could offer as a virtual assistant? And there's going to be a few on that list where you're like, I know how to do that. And even if you're not completely, you know, the world's foremost expert on that, I guarantee you will be after you get a couple clients to do the thing. And then you can start to agency-fi that, you could start to productize that, and you might have some fun doing it. Or you might find, I really didn't like doing that. I'm going to try option B. Go try something else. I love that one. Okay, last one. You love photography, and you've been doing it just as a hobby for years. You want to start charging for your services, but you feel nobody will

take you seriously. How would you transition from hobbyists to paid photographer? Oh, I like this one. This is actually my wife's side hustle. So she does wedding photography. She does family photos for holiday cards and stuff like that. What it was for them, from hobbyist to professional, was getting up the nerve, and this was 10 plus years ago. But add on Craigslist, we'll shoot your wedding, her and a partner, we'll shoot your wedding for 200 bucks. I think it was like starting super, super low because in this business, portfolio sells. If I am a bride and you don't have any wedding pictures, you're going to have to cut me a real good deal for me to take a chance with you on our wedding day. But that's what they did. And they booked up, and I was like,

who is looking for wedding photography on Craigslist? And maybe today it would be Facebook groups or Facebook marketplace, you know, different places to play. But in that era, you know, that site had some eyeballs. And sure enough, they booked up 10 or 12 weddings. You know, they raised their prices with each one. And now they charged $4,000 or $5,000 for this wedding package. But they had to have that portfolio to build up the experience of doing it live under the pressure. Like a family photography, like, okay, it didn't work. We'll just do it again next weekend. We're not going to restage this whole weddings. We've got to get it right the first time. So building up the confidence to do that and building up the confidence to charge more and more in land. Higher paying clients,

better venues and all of that. And lots of cool stuff. So they found a strategic partnership with one of the wedding venues in California, whereas like, and the conversation might be as simple as what does it take to get on your preferred vendor list? Who are the companies that you work with over and over again? And they're like, fill out this application or, you know, make sure you have this insurance and we'll add you. Like, it was not a difficult process. And now all of a sudden, kind of a steady stream of weddings come through there. It could be one, uh, cool one, partnering with the local school PTA. Like if they have a silent auction. Okay, we'll auction off a photo session. So we get in front of all the parents at that school. And you just kind of start the word of

mouth. It's like micro-local influencer marketing almost. Yeah. It only takes one person who knows a lot of other families to start to refer you out. Such good tips there. Okay, so a lot of the stuff that we were talking about so far has been about skills, scaling out our skills. Even some of the e-commerce stuff takes a bit of skills. What if somebody's like, listen, like, Nick, I don't have any skills. What are some no-skill side hustles that I can tackle? This is where probably pause. and first give yourself some credit, you probably have some skills. By definition, like any job you've had, like that was a skill somebody thought was worth paying for. At the very low end of this, it could be those gig economy type of jobs. It could be the Instacars, the door dashes of the world.

The downside is, obviously, time for money. It could be limited upside on that sort of thing. But it could also be something like other what we call like plug and play, side hustles. Like we've covered becoming a mobile notary loan signing agent. If you have an attention to detail and you can get a notary license, you're qualified to do this work. And it's not rocket science is not particularly exciting, like watching people sign papers, but it's not the end of the world either. It could be taking surveys or doing online market research, focus group type of stuff. I think these are fun. Like I probably do three, four, five hundred bucks a year worth of this stuff. It's like, oh yeah, come to our online panel about credit card rewards.

or talk to us about your favorite video editing software. Like, all right, sure, that's totally fine. It could be a bunch of apps. We'll pay you to play mobile games if you're into that kind of thing. Like another popular one in the past year or two has been this company called ShareTown, which is similar like plug-in-play where ShareTown specializes in product returns for direct-to-consumer brands. It's still like bulky stuff, like furniture, exercise equipment, mattresses. I think they do pizza.

ovens as well. But like, you know, how all the mattress companies have like 100-night better sleepers free guarantee. And so a certain percentage of the people were like, you know, either on night one or night 99, they're like, eh, it wasn't for us. We want to return it. And so then as the local share town rep, you get dispatched to go pick it up, you clean it up, you resell it. Because Casper, whoever it is, they can't take that mattress back. They don't want it back. And so this is their way of helping the customer out and assume recouping a little bit of the cost at the same time. Something else that bubbled up since we last talk was the advancements of all these sites that allow you to do these gig works other than Fiverr. There's all these babysitting sites and like

cat sitting sites, dog sitting sites, just all these random sites for random services. Can you talk to us about some of the popular ones that are out there right now? Yeah. So you mentioned Fiverr, obviously Upwork for the freelance marketplaces, Rover for pet sitting. there's a peer-to-peer site for just about anything. The challenge is to find one that is up and coming and less saturated or maybe more niche. What I would probably Google is the service or skill that you have in mind plus marketplace or plus platform and see what comes up and maybe page two of Google, maybe lower on page one. And then you could plug that brand name into Google trends and see like, is it increasing,

is it decreasing? Just to try and catch something that's on the upswing. rather than one that is already just loaded to the gills with service providers. So my last question to you, Nick, somebody who's tuning in, they work a full-time job, they feel like they don't have a lot of time to start a side hustle, but they want to start working on getting some of that freedom and being less dependent on their job. What is your advice to them to just get started? I love this question because everybody is here at one point or at some point you find yourself in this exact position.

So what you have to remember, and I'm still guilty of this, I want you to remove the phrase, I didn't have time from your vocabulary. Instead of I didn't have time, the phrase that you need to get into your head is, I prioritized something else. And it's totally fine to prioritize something else. But that little mental shift of being honest with yourself, I prioritized watching Netflix, or I prioritized hanging out with my kids. That's all totally fine.

But you might find that you're prioritizing some suboptimal things. So that's the first step. Next step is getting consistent with carving out time either daily or weekly to make progress on the thing. If you don't block it off in the calendar, it's not going to happen. It could be a half hour first thing in the morning. It could be 15 minutes after the kids go to bed. It could be Saturday mornings on the weekend. Do it and do it consistently because it's so hard to get that momentum spinning.

It's like trying to push that boulder down the hill. But once you get it rolling, the momentum can start to compound and the motivation can start to compound, especially if you start to see some results, and then you really feel the need to keep going at it. But you carve out that time because otherwise it's like, you know, I've been guilty of having, I'm a to-do list junkie, and sometimes a to-do list will say things like write book. There is never, never going to be uninterrupted eight-week block of time to go and write this thing. So instead, trying to break it down into the smallest actionable steps that you might be able to accomplish it or might be able to start on, in that 15, 30-minute block of time.

Like, okay, maybe I can outline chapter one, or maybe I can start to chip away at this daunting project. People talk about eating an elephant, which is like the weirdest metaphor of all time. But, you know, it's just one bite at a time, one step at a time. Yeah, such, such good advice.

I love that, Nick. Okay, so I end my show asking two questions to all my guests. You can forget about everything that we just talked about, answer these questions from your heart. doesn't have to do with the topic of today's show. What is one actionable thing our young improfitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? The first thing that comes to mind is actually keeping track of what I call your personal profitability. This is, even if you don't

have a side hustle, even if you don't have a business, you are the CEO of your own life. And that means you're in charge of how profitable am I as an individual as a household. And this is simple equation, income minus expenses. And a lot of people have a sense of their salary or how much they're making. But like, have you ever gotten really honest and granular about what are my actual outflows? Because every month, my wife and I, look at the credit card statement. You're like, a little bit higher than it normally, but it's like, oh, we bought plane tickets

or we had that garage repair, you know, but it's like we have one thing in our mind of like, you know, what the base level expenses is. And then another one that's like the reality. And so trying to get honest and like, well, how profitable was it? Having that conversation and keeping track of that on a month. basis, I think is really important. You know, the IRS will ask you for your adjusted gross income and all these weird acronyms and measures, but they don't care about how much did you actually keep? What was the actual profitability of your household? I think it's really important

to get a pulse on that. I love that. That's one that I've never heard and something that I certainly need to do because I feel like it's so different every time so it can help you really laser and in budget. And what would you say your secret is to profiting in life? And this can be outside of business, profiting in all areas of life, what do you think is the secret to that? The secret to a profitable life is, again, I wish I had like the one word soundbite. What comes to mind is this willingness to experiment. And it comes down to like this, you know, house painting thing in college where they let you get several steps down the interview process before they even tell you it's house painting.

And then by that time, you're kind of bought in. And you're like, well, do I really want to do that? and my girlfriend, you know, my future wife, she was like, it's three months of your life. Who cares? Like, if it sucks, it sucks. It's not going to kill you. And that kind of experimenters mentality has paid off over and over again. What's the realistic worst case scenario? If it's not life-threatening and the upside is strong enough, it probably is worth a shot. And that's something that we've seen over and over again, separating the side hustle show guests that are having success versus the people who are perpetually stuck on the sidelines, is willing to

to take step one, even if they don't really know what steps two through 10 are, it's kind of that unlock that really helps people work for profits and not wages ultimately and unlock that next level of personal freedom, financial freedom, for sure. Amazing. I loved hearing your thoughts, Nick. Where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? Sidehustle Nation.com is the home base. We'd love to have you tune in to the side hustle show. You find it in all your favorite podcast apps. I know we talked about a lot of different side hustles in this episode, but sidestlenation.com slash ideas, if you would like even more. It's kind of our annual updated list of the best that we found. Awesome. Thank you, Nick.

It was so fun to have Nick Loper, one of my first ever guests back on the show. And it just reminds me how far this podcast has come in the past six and a half years. And it's crazy to even think that it's been so long. I started this podcast as a side hustle. And for For two years, I would work on it early in the morning before work, late at night when I got home. I was working in corporate, and I would do all of my interviews at lunch. And I'd find, like, closets to do these interviews. And at the time, I didn't have video or phone booths or I'd even drive home if it was a really big interview and drive back.

And I never missed an episode in seven years. And it's the consistency that made me successful. I'm like tearing up. It's crazy to think how far you can go if you're just consistent. You really can go far. Here I am almost seven years later and I've got this very large podcast. I have a lot of followers not just on Apple, but on all the different apps. I'm like a really innovative type of podcaster where I didn't just grow on one platform.

So I'm making all this sponsorship money now. And I didn't take a podcast or payout for years. And my podcast made $100,000 last month. And that's besides my business. You know, I have a social media agency and a podcast network. My podcast alone made $100,000 last month. And I finally am taking my own payouts. And it's just crazy.

Like, it's crazy to think that this idea that I had seven years ago is now making a hundred grand a month. And it is the main lead gen for all of my businesses. The people that come on this show become my clients. They become my social clients, my podcast clients. So the podcast has also made me a ton of money indirectly outside of sponsorships. And it's the consistency. It's the fact that I never missed an episode. It's the fact that I did it, even though when it was really hard and I had another job. I did it when everybody told me I was too old to start a podcast. I just did it. And I think you all can do it too. If you want to start a side hustle, you should do it. All right. Let me get myself together. Side hustles, like Nick said, have been around for as long as people

have had main hustles. But the landscape of side hustles today is more varied than ever, offering so many opportunities for anyone looking to diversify their income streams. And of course, it's really not just about income. It's about building a new skill set, experimenting with something new on the side until you're ready to turn your side hustle into your full-time passion. And if you dig that well before you're thirsty, then you can avoid a lot of headaches. Like Nick said, if an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and builds an airplane on the way down, a good side hustle can reduce the height of that cliff or the difficulty of building that airplane. You just need to find your niche. And you can find some quite profitable ones in unexpected places like designing websites

for pressure washing businesses. Now, I wouldn't go that niche. I think that you have more success being a little bit more broader, just designing websites for businesses in general. Or perhaps your niche is selling shovels to gold seekers, like providing editing services for podcasts. It's such a hot area right now. You've got to just attach to what's hot. Or maybe your side hustle is building an audience for your own content and business. And then you can sell that audience whatever you want as you evolve over time. And so many of these side hustles have little or no barriers to entry. But you do need to carve out the time to make it happen, even if it's just 30 minutes in the morning or before you go to bed. You need that consistency.

to build momentum and boost motivation. Obviously, you can't spell side hustle without the hustle. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast and making this podcast one of your side ventures. If you know somebody who'd like to improve their side hustle game, then share this episode with them, spread this podcast by word of mouth. And if you listen, learned, and profited from this conversation with the hustling Nick Loper, then please take a couple minutes to drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcast. Now, I mean it when I say, I'm literally obsessed with reading your reviews. This is a podcast where I'm talking to you, but I can't hear what you're saying back to me,

and your reviews are the way that you give me that feedback. And plus, I love hearing from you guys. I work really hard on this show. I do the work. I've got a business that's about to make eight figures next year. And I'm a busy girl, but I make sure that I read the book, I study, I have good questions, and I'm prepared to make this hour as valuable as possible. It's not normal to have as many five-star reviews as we do on the podcast, and it really helps other people start listening. And it just supports the show overall. We've got a big team, and your reviews help support us. So please, if you enjoy the show, you listen, and you You listen every week.

You listen every morning while you're on the gym, while you're on a walk. Take a couple minutes to write us a review. Let me know when you listen to it. How do you listen to this podcast? What does it make you feel? How does it motivate you? Tell me, I want to hear it in the review. I get so motivated from these reviews to do a better job for everyone.

So please make my day, write a review. And if you prefer to watch your podcast as videos, all of our episodes are uploaded to YouTube. In fact, I just interviewed Mel Rock. Yes, the Mel Robbins in person, and it's going to be on YouTube soon. So make sure you go to YouTube, subscribe. I've got an interview with Gary V on there in person. And I'm starting to do a lot more in-person content. And it's so funny because it seems like the bigger the guests are more likely now

that I'll be interviewing them in person, which is so awesome. But it's been such a great learning experience because virtually I don't think I get that nervous, but meeting somebody in person, we get a lot more nervous. but it's great. It's a challenge for me. I love it. And I think I'm still doing a great job and I can't wait to get better. So we've got in-person interviews on YouTube now. Check them out. And of course, if you want to find me on social media, it's Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. And finally, I've got to thank my fabulous Yap Media team who make this production possible. Oh my gosh, guys. It takes a village to put on the show.

Paul, who's our assistant producer now, he just got promoted from the YouTube team. He's been with us for years. He is amazing. And I'm so proud of him and excited for him to take on this role. And he helps me so much. So shout out to Paul. Shout out to Sean for being like the best researcher in the world. Greta for supporting him and Paul for again supporting him.

Shout out to Christina. Shout out to Fricon and Hashan for booking the most incredible guests all the time. I also want to shout Maxie, Raven, Zoe. Thank you guys for all that you do. I couldn't do this without you. It clearly takes an army to put on this show. Like I said before, it's no joke. We work hard here at Yap.

This is your host, Halitahaha, aka the podcast Princess, signing on.