Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Nick Loper: The Art of Side Hustles | Entrepreneurship | E10

Episode Date: November 12, 2018

Thinking about starting a side hustle or looking to side hustle harder? You’re not alone! Side hustles are becoming more and more popular—in fact, according to bankrate.com, more than half of millennials in the US report having a money-making side hustle. Technology has made it easier than ever to start your own business! In this episode, Hala explores the art of side hustles with Nick Loper, founder of the popular blog and podcast, Side Hustle Nation. Nick currently makes his living off 15 different income streams, and so he’s the perfect guy to give us practical advice on how to make some extra cash on top of our 9-to-5s. Stay tuned for tips on how to launch a side hustle, the most lucrative side hustles to start now and how to turn a side hustle into your main hustle. Young and Profiting podcast is brought to you by audible. Get your FREE audiobook here: www.audibletrial.com/YAP Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: http://bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG @youngandprofiting and Twitter @YAP_Podcast Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

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I'll stick the link in the show notes to make it super easy. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and grow. I'm your host, Halitaha, and today's episode is all about the art of side hustles. We've invited Nick Loper on the show, who is the chief side hustler at Side Hustle Nation, a popular blog and podcast. Nick currently makes his living off of 15 different income streams, And so he's the perfect guy to give us practical advice on how to make some extra cash on top of our nine to fives. Stay tuned to find out what it takes to start a side hustle and how to turn a side hustle into your main hustle.

Hey, Nick, thanks for yapping with us. You bet. Thanks for having me. So I thought that we could get started with getting acquainted, so an icebreaker, if you will. I was on your website and I saw this list of 25 facts about yourself, one of which I found really interesting. you took a cold shower for 500 days in a row. Can you tell me about that? Why on earth did you do that? I know. It sounds awful now. So this was kind of in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe, started actually with a guest of mine on the side hustle show who was talking about, you know, taking cold showers, starting out as a fat-burning hack to boost your metabolism for the rest of the day because you're going to expend calories like heating your body up long after the shower is over. But then what he found was it was effective for that. But what he also found it was effective for just like motivation.

And he's like, if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard because it sucks. You feel like you're ready to tackle anything. And I kind of found the same thing. And I said on air is like, you know what? That sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might have been totally placebo, but at that time started to get more coaching clients.

Like traffic started to pick up. I don't know, like for any reason, I was into it. And so it did it for over a year. I guess it was effective. Maybe it was what I needed at that time. Would you recommend it to others? Absolutely. Get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Do it for 30 days or even maybe the baby steps away to do it would be to end your showers cold, which is kind of what I tend to do today because that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water. That's funny. That sounds horrible. So how did you become the chief side hustler at Side Hustle Nation? Tell us about yourself, your journey, you know, how you got started with it all. My original side hustle was when I was working corporate was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called Shusniper.com. And it would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you can find.

the best price on your next pair of shoes, and it earned money as an affiliate. So, you know, if somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission. And while I was running that, and the site had almost a 10-year run, we was always looking for stuff on the side. And it was kind of like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul searching, me like, well, what do you want to be known for when people Google you? What do you get excited about talking about? And it was that prospect of lower risk, entrepreneurship, you know, how do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that, you know, really never gets old and still doesn't get old? Because there's a million and one

creative ways that people are doing it. And that's kind of where the side hustle show and the Side Hustle Nation blog kind of were born from. So right now, are you a side hustler? Like, how many side hustles do you have? A lot of them overlap. And so my days of experimenting with a lot of this stuff are kind of limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e-commerce experiments with like Amazon and eBay. And I still do a little bit of that, but that's kind of taken the back burner. The side hustle blog has kind of become in the podcast, so kind of become the main focus. But there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that through self-publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I

still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists. But some other sites that were started during that time are still around, starting some experiments in the investing world. And it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income, having like a single point of failure. Yeah. So to that point, why do you prefer or recommend having side hustles over a nine to five job? Well, not necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom, right, is control over your calendar. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your days. And if you can piece together an income on your own terms, rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's kind of where it came from for me.

And I would definitely advocate focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second. So, you know, try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things, you know, with an unfocused effort because I think that's harder to see results from. Why don't you give some context to our listeners about side hustle nation? So like what is side hustle nation? Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, it could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this very. vision, this hope, this dream, that it could become something bigger as it definitely did for me

with the shoe business. I have a little trouble distinguishing a side hustle from a part-time job or a second job. How do you personally define what a side hustle is? Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential like that. It's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, okay, I drive for Uber, or I'm delivering pizzas, or I'm doing Instacart deliveries or something like that, right? Like that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind, but at the same time, like you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting the podcast,

it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people, and that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged and I think there's a lot more upside. even just like starting a freelancing business. Like, I'm going to do freelance writing, I'm going to do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is. So I was doing a bit of research on the show, and I found out that more Americans are working a side hustle than ever before. And to be exact, there are 44 million Americans with a side hustle today.

Why do you think the motivations to start a side hustle are so much stronger than they were in the past? That's a weird, it's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great. Unemployment is at record lows. Why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or health care, like all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages. So that's a driving factor, like just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt.

that's maybe the negative way to look at it. And the more positive way to look at it is, I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch, that is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about. That's probably driving some of that as well. And those are kind of the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like, well, I need to make rent next month. You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint. Yeah, and from my perspective, I really think it's all about the digital innovation that's going on. Like there's so many different digital platforms where people can do freelance work, whether it's fiber or upwork and mobility.

You know, like you can just make money off your phone now while you're on the train. You know, I used to do that years ago. But I just feel like it's easier. There's so much more space to play because we've got the internet now and there's just so much more. that you can do with your free time to monetize it. So I think it's also like digital impact too. Yeah, that word play that you just use is really key in approaching it that way saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way, you know, lessens the sting of failure and kind of

puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out. If it works great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing. I also read that half of millennials report having a side hustle. So this is really big for the younger millennial generation. Why do you think it's so attractive to younger millennials specifically? Most of my listeners are younger millennials. Yeah, I think it's that, you know, cash-strapped nature. You know, look, we're dealing with a debt load. We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to, use my free time more productively. When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job. Didn't have any friends, like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV. So how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it? Yeah. You mentioned that you have a

blog. It's a very cool blog. That's actually how I found you. I was looking for ways to monetize my podcast and came across one of your blogs. Oh, nice. And one blog that I saw that I thought might be interesting to kind of recap for our listeners is this three laws of side hustle physics. Do you mind explaining what those three laws are? Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton. So somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who, you know, are on the sidelines looking

to get into the game. Like there has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on Upwork, to try and get that first client, to put yourself out there. And, you know, maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned. Like, one of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer, a journalist I had on the show. He, you know, had just won, you know, international sports photographer of the year or something. Like, his highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review. And his boss is like, man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise.

And he's like, you've got to be kidding me. He's making like 30 grand a year doing this. He's like, this is not going to work. And so that was the motivating factor to kind of get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about starting his side hustle. So that's kind of the first law. And it goes both ways. Like once you're in motion, we see this over and over again,

ideas start to pop up that you never would have had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research. And it's really powerful. like this inertia and momentum law. Law number two is this law of force and impact. And so this is Newton's law of like acceleration. Acceleration of an object occurs, you know, based on the force that was applied to it. So the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack. And so it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry. He told me he would have been happy with 10%. And so like that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change

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Incorporated, licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Yeah, this was kind of like hit home. We were at this like beach vacation this summer and you're at the pool all the time and you're like, man, I really should hit the gym more because I see all these people who are super fit. And so like maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health. You could see it in business. You could see it in relationships. It happens all over the place.

And then the third law is this action and reaction. You know, so for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so we're recording this on election day and somebody just posted like whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this, you know, there's an equal and opposite. reaction. And even if nobody theoretically reacts to your stuff, because I wrote a personal blog for years and years and years

that nobody really read outside of my friends and family, well, that was a reaction. It was, you know, a reaction that told me that, hey, you better write about stuff that people care about. And it wasn't all for waste because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning

WordPress and learning all this other stuff. But it can be depressing when on the surface, it's like, Yeah, there was no reaction. What kind of side hustles do you write about on your blog? The big three for the site right now are freelancing, like we talked about, e-commerce, and kind of like a blogging and podcasting, content marketing types of businesses where you're looking, I'm going to set up an online presence to talk about this subject matter

that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm learning this subject matter, and monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products. And do you think that there are certain personality types that thrive in this side hustle role? I've seen it work across introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer going to be and how can I get that in front of my target customers? Let's say I'm a millennial and I have this idea for a side hustle. How can I test the idea and make sure it's a good one before I either quit my day job or spend a vast. amount of time on it. This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So what's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing? Let's say selling something on Etsy. Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings

on eBay, Amazon, Red Bubble, some of these other similar marketplaces where people might me buying this stuff. If there are other people making sales, like that's a fantastic sign, right? There's there's money in that market. The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs like, I think, 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free. So you create your listing very affordably. And so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice

pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents. Etsy has on-platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their, you know, listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. but one thing that you probably want to do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is like the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made. So you can see that with some initial reviews from friends and family. You might even just give these away and say I'd really prefer if you ordered this through Etsy to help my appearance on that platform.

And you find that kind of a similar strategy, not just on Etsy, but on iTunes. Hey, can you review this podcast? on Udeme, hey, could you review my course? On Amazon, hey, could you review my book? Just to kind of seed the platform with a little bit of social proof, so the algorithms start to work in your favor. And so people, when they do land on that page, they say, okay, this isn't a ghost town.

There's actually something to this. Isn't that so funny how you could have thousands of listeners and the best personal feedback, but if you have no reviews, like you ain't shit? Yeah, and maybe that's feedback too. If nobody wants your thing, like if you can't get your friends and family to buy it, that's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into. And I know a lot of people are thinking about these days starting a podcast, starting a blog. Do you have any advice for those folks? Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting specifically because I forget the latest stats.

There's probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is. And so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie left to go out and grow over the next 5, 10, 50%. 15 years, like as people discover on-demand audio and they're probably going to react like I did, like this is amazing. How did I waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio, but I could listen to stuff that is going to help me grow personally and professionally? Like, really excited about that. The key then is, okay, how can I reach those people and the 40% that already do know about podcasts? How can I reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining? In front of mine kind of gave me, this was five or six years ago,

the conference gave me the rule of the internet, which I quote all the time. It's, you know, people are only ever online for one of two reasons. You know, number one, to be entertained, and number two, to solve a problem. And you can think that that's Facebook and that's Google. You know, to be entertained or solve a problem. And the podcast may bridge the gap there. Some friends have called it infotainment where, you know, you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way. But, you know, putting the listener first. And it's a practice. crap. Like the first 50 episodes of the side hustle show, awful. You know, I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those. But it just took a while to hit my stride as a host. And I don't know,

you're like a radio professional. So you're doing great right out of the gate. But it's a practice. Yeah, yeah. I read that the average side hustle only makes $200 a month and $600 a month if you're really knocking it out of the park. But to me, that doesn't really sound like a young improfiting type of stuff, that sounds like we could do better. Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that $200 to $600 a month level. What I would like to see is a track record of earnings history, you know, six to 12 months and other people will be more aggressive than this, of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses. So you know you're not going to be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings to try and get to that ramp up period.

The exception to that has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck. And you say, hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family. That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely. It has to align with your goals too, right? Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. I love my work, but I do this stuff on the sign because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money, you know, for whatever reason. You know, it's building my skills. It's exercising a, you know, a different side of my brain.

So not everybody is out to quit their day job. I personally feel like side hustles have a negative appeal to some people, especially like the older generation that you should be more traditional, you should have a regular job. Have you faced any of that negative judgment? That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that you kind of economic macro positioning that we talked about where it's like, you know, what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Like, why can't it be like the old days, right? That's maybe one angle. The other angle is just like maybe the word hustle,

like, as the connotation of like, I'm going to scam people or something like that, not recognizing. It just means your effort. Like control what you can control. work as hard as you can when you can and be smart about it. Actually, side hustle nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine. He's like, look, you're going to have bad days at the plate. You're going to have bad days in the field. But hustle never slumps. I was like, okay, I really like that. That stuck with me. Yeah, it is catchy. And what side hustles today, like this very moment in time would you recommend to our listeners? Oh my gosh. So we talked about the freelancing consulting stuff. If you have a skill that's in demand, absolutely understand that

your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of your value. A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making $18 an hour, which was awesome for him, like in his early 20s. The company was turning around and charging the parents like $100 an hour. And he was like, wait a minute. I have this skill. I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that freelancing marketplace.

Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet, understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside of your paycheck. My wife and her business partner on the side from her job started a photography business, completely unrelated to her engineering job. So it doesn't have to be, I'm an accountant by day, so I'll do accounting at night. We talked about the podcasting stuff. We talked about kind of like the online authority business blogging content marketing businesses. I continue to see, and I continue to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys, are posting. I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a

online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business and grow the stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had never even heard of. And I'm really excited by stuff like that. You know, people having this new ability to kind of monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that they might be able to put out there. Yeah, I feel like courses are getting more and more popular and so in demand because people just want to learn. And if it's unique content that they can't find anywhere else, you can package that up and monetize it, you know? Yeah, make it easy for me. Make it step by step. Absolutely. And how about blogs? Like,

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minutes. Visit northwest registeredagent.com slash yapfrey and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwest registered agent. At northwest registered agent.com slash yapfrey. Yeah, that was my initial reaction too, but I keep getting proven wrong. You know, people starting, you know, relatively new sites. Again, another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the UK. So like just a even a tiny little island where apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go by these mattresses. But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full-time living doing that. So on the blogging front, the trap I want people

to avoid is like, okay, I'm going to start a personal blog and expect that that makes money. You know, the ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems. As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to discover this? Usually it's going to be Google, usually it's going to be Pinterest, but like thinking of these user to content platforms. That's a term from Rosemary Groner who runs the busy budgeter.com. It's like a personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. You know, how are people going to discover this? And if, you know, if it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, you know, probably nobody's going to click on that.

probably nobody's going to come and read that. And it's like you're going to pour your heart out. You're going to pour hours into creating this stuff. Like make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. It's something that somebody is looking for and you're giving them the best chance to find it. Okay. So we're going to close out with one last question. Tell us about the day that you quit your nine to five job and what made you officially decide to start your side hustle career. The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss, and this has been kind of on my mind for months, really, because I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. So out to dinner with my boss, and I'm like, okay, this is the day. I'm like, I'm going to break him the news. Like, I'm out of here. I'm going to give my notice. It still took me like a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it because it's like, is that allowed? Can I cut my own paycheck? You know, I went to school.

I have these obligations. Like, is this actually going to work? And I had, you know, several months of earnings history at that point. So it wasn't, you know, completely, you might have heard the definition. Oh, an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's going to, you know, figure out how to build their parachute on the way down. Like, that was not me. And it was still super scary.

But after I told him, it was like this huge weight off my shoulders. And it's just like, okay, this is real. Like, let's go do this. And for millennials who are working a side hustle, when should they, you know, decide to make that move? I would say once you have at least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business. So, you know, you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're going to free up some time. Awesome.

Well, I really enjoyed this. Before we go, can you let our listeners know where they can learn more about you? and side hustle nation? Absolutely. Hit up side hustle nation.com slash ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part-time business ideas that you can start today and no opt-in required. And of course, would love to have you tune into the side hustle show available in iTunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well. Perfect. Thanks, Nick. You bet. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow you app on Instagram at

Young and Profiting and check us out at young and profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single day on our new Slack channel. Check out our show notes or young and profiting.com for the registration link. You can find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn where I spend most of my social media time. Just search for my name, Hala Taha. Big thanks for the folks who helped put on the show. Timothy Tan, Daniel McFatter, Stephanie Steebs, Christian, John Sparks, Kayla, and Ryan.

I couldn't have asked for a better team. Until next time, this is Halla, signing off.