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0:00:22 The riches are in the niches, but how do you find your niche?
0:00:24 Today, I want to give you a few exercises and frameworks
0:00:28 to identify a potential side hustle niche because there’s a lot of stress.
0:00:30 There’s a lot of discussion around this topic.
0:00:32 After all, you don’t want to pick the wrong thing.
0:00:36 You want to pick a place to play where you can thrive and where you’re excited to show up.
0:00:41 And that word play is important because when you look at it as a game,
0:00:42 first of all, it’s more fun.
0:00:48 And second of all, when it doesn’t work, when your first idea and your first idea might not,
0:00:50 you can tell yourself, well, it’s just a game.
0:00:55 So finding a place to play and experiment and positioning it as such in your mind
0:00:56 is the goal of this episode.
0:00:58 Now, here’s what’s rare.
0:01:02 And I say this as someone who’s published dozens of listicles of side hustle ideas
0:01:05 and ways to make money online, ways to make money offline,
0:01:07 the best side hustles for fill-in-the-blank persona.
0:01:08 But it’s rare.
0:01:12 It’s rare for a guest to say, well, I was Googling ways to make extra money,
0:01:16 as one does, and I scrolled down to number 17 on the list and said,
0:01:16 you know what?
0:01:18 That’s the one for me.
0:01:21 In fact, the only guest I can remember mentioning that specific path
0:01:24 was Vladimir Hernandez in episode 522.
0:01:27 He talked about coming across my big list of side hustle ideas
0:01:33 and then being intrigued by the idea of getting paid to sweep up parking lots.
0:01:36 If you’re totally idea agnostic, that can be a viable strategy.
0:01:39 And then he went on to build a really nice side hustle,
0:01:41 picking up litter from parking lots in New York.
0:01:44 Now, one exception to that would be, you know,
0:01:47 if you’re looking for kind of a plug and play, business in a box type of side hustles,
0:01:52 app-based side hustles, and absolutely drawing inspiration from previous guests as well.
0:01:57 What is more common is finding that sweet spot,
0:02:03 that intersection of interests, skills, curiosity, expertise, network, and market demand.
0:02:07 And maybe you’ve seen that ikigai, Venn diagram type of picture.
0:02:09 This is a Japanese word.
0:02:13 I’m probably butchering the pronunciation loosely translates to reason for being
0:02:15 or your purpose, your ikigai.
0:02:18 It’s the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at,
0:02:22 what you can get paid for, and then what the world needs or what the market wants.
0:02:26 For example, Brian Orr, he had experience in podcasting.
0:02:27 He had this day job.
0:02:32 He had this HVAC company and really enjoyed the training aspects of it,
0:02:35 like helping his team upskill and level up their learning.
0:02:37 So he created the HVAC School podcast,
0:02:40 which turned into a super successful side project.
0:02:44 Garrett Brown, who you’re going to meet later this month on the show,
0:02:47 he had a background in hospitality, in real estate,
0:02:52 and ended up creating a profitable glamping site outside of Houston,
0:02:54 a luxury camping site, short-term rental business.
0:02:57 Debbie Gartner, she knew SEO, she knew online marketing,
0:02:59 and she loved making games.
0:03:02 In fact, I want to say she said that was her answer in school to
0:03:04 the question, what do you want to be when you grow up?
0:03:05 I want to be a game maker.
0:03:09 So she started making little printable games and selling those on Etsy
0:03:14 to the tune of around $1,000 a week when we last spoke in episode 637.
0:03:17 But how do you begin to look for that sweet spot?
0:03:20 Individually, I think the prompts are fairly straightforward.
0:03:23 You want to take an inventory of your skills.
0:03:24 What have you gotten paid to do in the past?
0:03:26 Your hobbies.
0:03:28 What do you like to do if money were no object?
0:03:29 How would you spend your time?
0:03:30 What lights you up?
0:03:33 What do you never get tired of talking about?
0:03:35 What do other people ask you for help with?
0:03:38 What comes naturally to you that other people struggle with?
0:03:40 Or to flip it around.
0:03:42 I heard this one recently and I liked it.
0:03:45 It’s what do other people irrationally suck at?
0:03:46 Is that a fun way to flip it around?
0:03:48 Because that’s a sign that, well, maybe it comes easy to you.
0:03:51 And this is the origin story of the Side Hustle Show.
0:03:56 I’d already started a couple side businesses, including one that had turned into a full-time
0:03:57 business so I could quit my job.
0:04:01 Felt like I had a little bit of street cred in that area.
0:04:07 And I loved talking business ideas and deconstructing the marketing and monetization behind creative
0:04:07 ideas.
0:04:12 So a little bit of credibility, a little bit of expertise, and the curiosity to learn about
0:04:14 other kinds of side hustles.
0:04:16 Other people will ask you, well, what’s your superpower?
0:04:19 And that puts you a lot of stress on it.
0:04:23 It’s like, I don’t know, I can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound.
0:04:24 It’s like, what’s a superpower?
0:04:26 It puts a lot of pressure on you.
0:04:30 Another way to frame it would be, what’s an advantage that you have?
0:04:32 What’s maybe an unfair advantage that you have?
0:04:36 Because the truth is, nobody’s ever really starting from scratch.
0:04:40 We’re bringing our own history, our own perspectives, and oftentimes our own baggage to the table
0:04:42 in our side hustles.
0:04:44 But you’re not starting from scratch either.
0:04:48 And if nothing else, especially in this day and age, you’ve got the advantage of learning
0:04:49 from everybody who’s gone before you.
0:04:52 Like Newton said, we stand on the shoulders of giants, right?
0:04:54 But what’s an unfair advantage?
0:05:00 You might be thinking of an unfair advantage, some proprietary technology, like some top secret
0:05:05 formula, like the recipe for Coke, or your mind might go to performance enhancing drugs or
0:05:07 a rich uncle who left you a fortune.
0:05:14 Now, I think an unfair advantage is anything you can use to get started, stay started, and
0:05:14 connect with customers.
0:05:19 It’s that fuel, it’s that fuel that fires creation, connection, and contribution.
0:05:22 It could be a new technology or some invention of yours.
0:05:26 Being first to market, absolutely, it could be an unfair advantage.
0:05:30 It could be a personality trait, like persistence or curiosity.
0:05:36 But where the magic often happens is in combining two or more traits in a unique way.
0:05:40 And I first heard this described by Scott Adams, I want to say, on the Tim Ferriss Show.
0:05:42 He’s the creator of the comic strip Dilbert.
0:05:47 I don’t remember if he had a name for this business idea method, but the premise was to
0:05:50 look for the areas in your life where you’re better than average.
0:05:51 You don’t have to be the best in the world.
0:05:53 Don’t put that kind of pressure on yourself.
0:05:56 But say you’re in the upper half or maybe even the upper quartile.
0:05:58 And then you start to combine those areas.
0:06:02 In Scott’s case, he explained he was a better than average artist.
0:06:03 He enjoyed drawing.
0:06:04 He was pretty good at it.
0:06:07 And he thought he was a pretty funny guy, perhaps funnier than most.
0:06:13 So he combined those two advantages and probably also a boatload of persistence and dedication
0:06:18 to make a truly unfair advantage in turning Dilbert into one of the most successful comic strips
0:06:19 of all time.
0:06:23 So what are a few things that you’re better at than average?
0:06:25 How could you combine those?
0:06:28 And what can you do that other people can’t or won’t?
0:06:30 Or what are you better at than the average person?
0:06:32 So that’s the introspection piece.
0:06:34 That’s the know thyself part of it.
0:06:40 Where it gets a little trickier is in aligning those skills with some sometimes unrelated pains
0:06:44 and problems or industries or markets, because that’s where the money comes from.
0:06:49 For that, you got to start to look outwards and ask, what problems are people paying?
0:06:53 And that could be conversations with other people in your network.
0:06:55 It could be conversations with other business owners.
0:07:01 Dane Maxwell had his famous idea extraction types of questions where you would be asking,
0:07:05 well, what’s the biggest challenge facing your industry over the next five years?
0:07:08 What’s an expensive problem that you’re dealing with?
0:07:11 What’s a typical day look like for you?
0:07:15 What’s the most frustrating or time-consuming part of your business, right?
0:07:17 You’re trying to uncover these expensive pains of problems.
0:07:23 And even if you don’t know the solution right away, it’s just if you can find the problem,
0:07:25 you can figure out how to solve it.
0:07:26 And that’s where the money is.
0:07:29 You could also use my what sucks exercise.
0:07:34 This could be as simple as a notes app on your phone, where you’re just making a note of everything
0:07:35 that sucks in your life day to day.
0:07:41 Things that your spouse, co-workers, partners, neighbors, kids, things that people complain to
0:07:42 you about, right?
0:07:44 Normally, you’re trying to be a little more optimistic.
0:07:47 But you got to put your pessimist hat and just pay attention to it.
0:07:53 Kind of like a be a be a magnet for negativity for a week or two and see what sucks in other
0:07:54 people’s lives.
0:07:58 Because on the other side of sucks, there might be some some dollars there as well.
0:08:04 So and then looking also at the pains and problems that you’ve overcome in your own life.
0:08:07 Another methodology from Tim Ferriss is to look at your own credit card statement.
0:08:10 What’s taken up a big chunk of your expenses?
0:08:12 Could you create an alternative there?
0:08:18 And it doesn’t necessarily need to be something completely new and novel, never before seen.
0:08:23 After all, it’s something you’ve already validated by spending your own money on it as a solution.
0:08:26 If you’re looking at that credit card statement idea as a methodology.
0:08:32 Now, you could also take your answers and your constraints and prompt chat GPT at this point
0:08:33 for suggestions.
0:08:37 For example, I might type in and obviously the more detail you give it, the better.
0:08:41 But, you know, for the sake of argument, hey, I’m looking for some side hustle suggestions.
0:08:42 I like skiing.
0:08:43 I like college football.
0:08:46 I’ve got two young kids at home and want to make sure I’m present with them on the weekends.
0:08:51 I have experience in content marketing, podcasting and in the automotive industry.
0:08:54 I have a hard time saying I’m an expert in anything.
0:08:58 But sometimes people ask me for advice on email marketing and travel hacks.
0:09:02 And given just that simple prompt, here’s what Chatty came back with.
0:09:07 They recommended an automotive insider niche content business blog, YouTube channel, newsletter
0:09:11 on car buying tricks and, you know, how to buy a used car without getting screwed, that
0:09:12 kind of stuff.
0:09:15 They recommended a weekend warrior travel hacks newsletter.
0:09:16 I really kind of like this one.
0:09:20 How to maximize school breaks and three-day weekends for affordable travel.
0:09:25 It recommended another idea as an email marketing consultant for niche creators.
0:09:30 It recommended a college football road trip guide or podcast, which could be an interesting
0:09:34 one because we try and do an away game every year with a group of college friends.
0:09:36 This year is going to be Madison, Wisconsin.
0:09:41 The point is these probably aren’t going to be perfect right out of the gate, but they’re a
0:09:43 pretty good brainstorming starting point.
0:09:47 I think you could probably do something similar after you complete these kind of know thyself
0:09:48 type of questions.
0:09:52 And the more details you can feed into the AI prompt, the better these results are going
0:09:53 to be.
0:09:54 And then you can start the conversation, go back and forth.
0:09:56 Hey, well, how would you get your first customers for that?
0:09:58 Or let’s flesh this out a little bit more.
0:09:59 What does that really look like?
0:10:04 Are you looking for a flexible income stream and one with real career potential?
0:10:08 I’m excited to partner with Intuit for this episode because they’re actively recruiting
0:10:13 Side Hustle Show listeners to join their world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts.
0:10:17 You know Intuit as the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, and maybe you’re one of the 100
0:10:19 million people who use those products yourself.
0:10:24 I know TurboTax has made a few of my Aprils a little bit easier, but as an Intuit expert,
0:10:28 you can work virtually on a flexible schedule and get the support you need from an experienced
0:10:29 and credentialed team.
0:10:35 Plus, you’ll get free access to Intuit Academy, their free self-paced training program where
0:10:39 you can build your confidence in tax prep and bookkeeping skills to start or grow your career.
0:10:43 Whether you’re looking to grow a side hustle or switch things up full-time, Intuit helps
0:10:46 you chart your own path and connect with customers in meaningful ways.
0:10:48 Sound like your next move?
0:10:52 Head to intuit.com slash expert to learn more or apply now.
0:10:58 That’s intuit.com slash expert, I-N-T-U-I-T dot com slash expert.
0:11:03 So, so far we’ve been doing some soul-searching and taking inventory of our skills and perceived
0:11:08 areas of expertise, but now we need to pair that up with a pain or problem because that’s
0:11:09 what people spend money on.
0:11:10 Spend money on painkillers.
0:11:11 Make this problem go away.
0:11:16 Here’s how Noah Kagan described part of his idea-generating process in episode 237.
0:11:18 But personally, solve your own problems.
0:11:19 It’s more interesting and more sustainable.
0:11:23 The other thing, this is a common mistake I’ve seen, Nick, is that, well, there’s someone else
0:11:27 is doing it, you know, like, oh, this other guy’s already got this or girl’s got this.
0:11:30 And I’m like, how many Mexican restaurants are in your town?
0:11:30 Right.
0:11:31 There’s a lot.
0:11:33 And I’m sure more than one of them makes a profit.
0:11:37 So if there’s someone else doing it and you’re not using them, then there’s probably some opportunity
0:11:38 for you.
0:11:41 What would you say to the person that says, well, I don’t know what my strengths are?
0:11:45 So two things that I would recommend, and let’s take some of your ideas and we can talk
0:11:47 about how to validate them because I think that’s always helpful for people who are like, well,
0:11:48 how would I actually start as a business?
0:11:49 So let’s come back to that afterwards.
0:11:53 If you don’t know what your strengths are, the two things that I have found, and I’m only
0:11:56 telling you what’s worked for me, well, I’ll do two and a half.
0:11:59 But number one is I just think about the last six months.
0:12:02 What have I done that I felt the best working on?
0:12:03 What have I done?
0:12:07 So when you said, hey, I would work for free on my podcast because I just enjoy it.
0:12:09 That is a strength.
0:12:10 That’s a strength.
0:12:14 A strength is something that you have done that you would basically work for free or
0:12:18 you just feel in the zone, meaning you wake up early, you stay up late, you’re just excited
0:12:19 to be doing it.
0:12:23 So having conversations like this, it’s exciting for me because I get new ideas, I get inspired,
0:12:24 I get energy.
0:12:26 And it’s like, oh, cool, that’s what a podcast is.
0:12:27 Let me do more of that.
0:12:29 And then promoting things.
0:12:31 I’m like, oh, I love promoting things on my email list.
0:12:32 All right, let me do more of that.
0:12:36 So think about, go make a list of everything you’ve done in the past six months that you really
0:12:36 enjoy doing.
0:12:37 Make that list.
0:12:40 A second thing that you can do if you don’t know your strength is think about someone
0:12:44 who you like, someone who knows you really well, and ask them via text right now.
0:12:45 And I’ve done this before.
0:12:49 And it’s generally like, yeah, you seem really good at marketing.
0:12:51 I’m like, all right, why don’t I just do more marketing?
0:12:52 So just text them right now.
0:12:54 Hey, I’m trying to figure out what I want to work on next.
0:12:55 This is an even better one.
0:12:57 I’ll even make it even next level for people out there.
0:12:59 Text someone that knows you.
0:13:01 Hey, if I were to start a business, what kind of business do you think I should start?
0:13:05 And they’ll actually tell you a business that you’re like, damn, yeah, I guess I should
0:13:05 start that.
0:13:07 So text a friend.
0:13:11 Anyone that knows you well, it can’t be some random like, hey, Jimbo, what do you think I
0:13:11 do?
0:13:12 It’s like, I don’t know, work at Walmart.
0:13:17 But the point being is like your friends actually have a pretty interesting and if they’re I think
0:13:19 most good friends have a good perspective about what you probably should be doing.
0:13:23 And if you don’t have any good friends that do that, go join an online group, go get involved
0:13:27 in Side Hustle Nation, whatever it is, and you can find someone there that can start to
0:13:29 know you better, like maybe set up a weekly call.
0:13:33 But that person then can help reflect from an outside opinion what that is.
0:13:35 Lastly, it could be therapy.
0:13:37 I’ve done that numerous times over the past 10 years.
0:13:42 You know, I go for a year off and on and I definitely find having kind of like a third
0:13:47 party person reflect on what I say helpful to help me understand what I want and the things
0:13:47 I like to do.
0:13:53 What I love about this clip is the super obvious in hindsight, but we still kind of need to
0:13:56 hear it, call out of how many Mexican restaurants are in your town.
0:14:01 It doesn’t take a never before seen business idea to make a successful side hustle.
0:14:05 There’s room for multiple players, especially if you can get specific on who you serve and
0:14:10 how you do it differently, because if you can become a market of one, even if it’s just
0:14:13 in the minds of your customers, that’s a really powerful place to be.
0:14:15 Here’s John Lee Dumas to explain.
0:14:18 Is there such thing as being too niche?
0:14:21 Like, I’ve seen some successful podcasts.
0:14:25 We had a guest on recently who had like a laundromat podcast, like how to run a laundromat
0:14:26 business.
0:14:28 And he was like, it’s done surprisingly well.
0:14:30 And I said, well, why do you say surprisingly?
0:14:32 And he’s like, because it’s a laundromat podcast.
0:14:37 But I’m curious, have you seen anything where it’s like, I don’t know if that’s a big enough
0:14:38 market to try and serve?
0:14:39 It is impossible.
0:14:42 And I mean, impossible to be too niche.
0:14:45 People always go the other way because they’re scared.
0:14:46 They’re fearful.
0:14:48 They have their own self-doubts.
0:14:50 And they think, I just need to be able to serve everybody.
0:14:51 I want to resonate with everybody.
0:14:55 I want to just create a podcast that just inspires other people, to inspire other people, to inspire
0:14:56 other people.
0:15:02 And that fails because that is a weak, pale imitation of other successful podcasts that
0:15:04 are out there that are actually doing something specific.
0:15:07 And that’s why people lose.
0:15:12 Why people win is because they say, I’m going to create the best solution to a real problem.
0:15:16 I flippin’ love that laundromat podcast idea because guess what?
0:15:21 He is the best laundromat podcast in the world.
0:15:22 He’s also the worst.
0:15:24 He’s the only.
0:15:28 And that’s why you win in this world, because you become the best.
0:15:33 However that is, if that takes you being the only to be the best, that’s giving you a chance
0:15:38 to win because people will beat a path to your doorstep if you’re number one.
0:15:42 If you’re number two, if you’re number 10, if you’re number 200, you will lose.
0:15:44 Yeah, where can you be the only?
0:15:46 That was a line that stood out to me from the book.
0:15:52 It was like, hey, when you started Yo Fire, I was the best daily interview podcast for entrepreneurs.
0:15:54 I was the worst daily interview podcast for entrepreneurs.
0:15:57 I was the only, and that’s an interesting place to play.
0:16:03 Now, it makes for a great soundbite, but obviously at a certain point, there probably is such
0:16:05 thing as being too niche, where the market is just too small.
0:16:10 But the sentiment, I do agree with, and that’s essentially to create your own category.
0:16:15 If you remember the book, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, I think was the title.
0:16:17 I think they call this the law of the category.
0:16:20 You want to own it, and if you can’t be first, be different in some way.
0:16:22 Create your own category.
0:16:27 One of my favorite examples of this is April Whitney, who runs a fitness business for petite
0:16:27 women.
0:16:30 It’s called Petite Power now, P-W-R.
0:16:34 Specifically, fitness and nutrition for women 5’4 and shorter.
0:16:38 Purposely excluding a huge segment of the population.
0:16:38 Nope.
0:16:39 Those are my people.
0:16:44 It’s not that petite women were even necessarily seeking out this type of information and training,
0:16:48 but when they came across April on social media, it resonates like nothing else because she’s
0:16:50 speaking exactly to them.
0:16:51 Best.
0:16:51 Worst.
0:16:52 Only.
0:16:58 In that episode with JLD, I shared the on-air conclusion that I unintentionally followed that
0:17:03 best-worst-only advice with pretty much all of my most successful side hustles.
0:17:08 When I started my comparison shopping site for footwear, best game in town, only game in town,
0:17:09 worst game in town, right?
0:17:10 Best, worst only.
0:17:12 Same thing with my virtual assistant directory.
0:17:16 It was the first review platform for those types of businesses.
0:17:19 First directory where you’re trying to bring them all under one roof.
0:17:20 Best, worst only.
0:17:25 And same thing with Side Hustle Nation, the first podcast dedicated to part-time entrepreneurship.
0:17:31 So, and recently you met Hannah Morgan from Heron House Management in a recent episode.
0:17:33 Fully remote house management service.
0:17:38 So rather than start a general project management service, rather than start even a general virtual
0:17:41 assistant service, Hannah went niche.
0:17:46 And she spoke to a pain point that she knew other moms and parents were experiencing.
0:17:51 And part of what separates Heron from a general virtual assistant service is that unique positioning.
0:17:56 Hey, busy parents, let us handle your to-do list and we’ll carry your mental load.
0:18:00 So like Noah said, if somebody else is already doing the thing you want to do, don’t let that
0:18:01 discourage you.
0:18:06 But if you can find a way to make it your own through your own branding and positioning or
0:18:10 customer targeting, that’s how you’re going to create your own category.
0:18:15 Now, hopefully these exercises have uncovered a bunch of potential side hustle ideas and options
0:18:16 for you.
0:18:18 Options are great, but options don’t pay the bills.
0:18:19 You got to pick one.
0:18:20 You got to take action.
0:18:25 That’s why next week I’ll share 10 questions to help you narrow down your focus and objectively
0:18:27 pick the best one.
0:18:27 That’s right.
0:18:29 Backed up by math.
0:18:33 Just hit the follow button in your podcast app and it’ll be automatically added to your
0:18:35 device when it’s released.
0:18:38 Big thanks to our sponsor, Intuit, for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:18:43 Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, is inviting Side Hustle Show listeners to join
0:18:46 its world-class network of tax and bookkeeping experts.
0:18:51 To learn more or apply now, head on over to intuit.com slash expert.
0:18:54 Again, that’s intuit.com slash expert.
0:18:55 That’s it for me.
0:18:57 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:19:00 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:19:02 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:06 Today I want to tackle the important topic of burnout. What it is, what it isn’t, how to prevent
0:00:12 it, and how to get past it if you find yourself in a state of burnout. So first of all, what is
0:00:18 burnout? Burnout is a state of emotional, mental, and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged or
0:00:23 excessive stress. It’s not just fatigue, it’s not just being tired, it’s an actual syndrome that can
0:00:29 significantly impact your personal and your work life. Symptoms include feeling emotionally drained,
0:00:36 feeling detached from work, and feeling a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. So to me, what
0:00:43 separates burnout from merely being tired is there’s this sense of underlying hopelessness and
0:00:48 maybe helplessness with burnout when you’re in a really challenging period and you’ve been there
0:00:54 for some time and there’s still no light at the end of the tunnel. I think we can all toughen up for a
0:00:59 period of time, but how long is sustainable is maybe the root of the issue. And when the advice
0:01:05 is, well, if you’re going through hell, keep going. When does it make sense to ask, well, wait a minute,
0:01:11 I think I missed my exit. Or maybe it’s time for a U-turn or a different strategy. And at the same time,
0:01:16 you also know that without struggle, there’s no progress, right? That’s Frederick Douglass from
0:01:21 150 plus years ago. There was an essay, there was a blog post back in the good old dehiss of blogging
0:01:27 from Corbett Barr, where he wrote that everybody wants the big muscles, but nobody wants to lift
0:01:32 the heavy weights. You can’t expect the result without putting in the work, but how much is too
0:01:39 much? There is, or there was for a certain period of time, this glamorizing of startup or hustle culture,
0:01:44 rise and grind, death before decaf, I can sleep when I’m dead. And I think we’ve moved beyond that,
0:01:50 recognizing that’s neither healthy nor sustainable. In this episode, I want to share some strategies that
0:01:55 have worked for me and a side hustle show guests over the years, both in terms of your day job and
0:02:00 your side hustle in preventing and overcoming burnout, should it happen to you. And one question
0:02:05 that came up when prepping for this was, well, is burnout a new thing? And we never used to hear
0:02:11 about this. So, and when I hear young people in, I’m going to young, say young as in like my generation
0:02:16 and younger, I consider myself a millennial. My gut reaction, when I hear younger people talking about
0:02:20 burnout, it’s not usually positive. Like you’re 23, how could you possibly be burned out? Do you even know
0:02:27 what work is? It’s usually my gut reaction, you know, tough times make tough people. Sometimes you got to
0:02:31 suck it up. This is what hard work is supposed to feel like. That’s why they call it work. You better get
0:02:36 used to it. And it’s hard to imagine assembly line workers from a hundred years ago or coal miners or
0:02:42 World War II Marines, like at least ever publicly complaining about burnout. Look, this is life. It
0:02:48 is what it is. I got a job to do. I’m going to do it. But I also have to imagine those workers and
0:02:55 miners and soldiers felt the symptoms of burnout or battle fatigue. And they have forever for generations,
0:03:00 even if they didn’t call it that, even if they didn’t dare voice their condition. The term burnout was
0:03:06 first coined by psychologist Herbert Reudenberger in the 1970s. So it’s a relatively new diagnosis,
0:03:11 but the causes certainly aren’t anything new. So it’s more than just feeling tired, more than just
0:03:16 feeling stressed and demotivated. It’s an actual clinical diagnosis with some real symptoms and
0:03:22 consequences. And I’m not a therapist, nor do I play one on the internet. So while I want to share some
0:03:27 strategies and ideas for you, if you’re dealing with burnout, I would absolutely recommend getting a
0:03:31 professional opinion. We’ve had better help as a sponsor of the show in the past, and there are
0:03:36 other resources as well. So like most syndromes and conditions, perhaps the best way to beat burnout
0:03:42 is to avoid it in the first place. So starting under the umbrella of prevention, prevention is the best
0:03:48 medicine. Strategy number one is to find your why. In the words of Luke Bryan from the country song,
0:03:51 do what you love, but call it work. There’s another line from Nietzsche. He says,
0:03:58 he who has a why to live can bear almost any how, right? How long are we willing to struggle? If we
0:04:01 have a strong enough why, we’re going to be able to work through that. And when it comes to side
0:04:06 hustles, most people say they want a side hustle to make extra money, but extra money is just a tool.
0:04:11 Why do you want the extra money? What will that extra income afford you? If it’s just extra money to
0:04:16 pad your savings, I’m not sure that’s going to be motivation enough when the road inevitably gets
0:04:22 harder. My typical recommendation is to go five whys deep to try and find your true deep-seated
0:04:27 motivation. And if you haven’t gone through it, a couple of prominent guests have recommended
0:04:33 this perfect average day exercise, projecting out three, four, five years. In five years,
0:04:38 what’s your perfect average Tuesday? This is Jamie Masters from episode 345.
0:04:42 So I used to also think the visioning was super, super woo-woo. And then I started interviewing
0:04:47 millionaires and it came up over and over and over and over again. So I started looking up the science
0:04:52 behind it. It is ridiculous because I used to avoid it. So I’m so grateful that you actually took the
0:04:57 time because even if it’s just knowing that you’re on the same page, it’s huge. But science is now coming
0:05:01 to fruition about the visioning side. So don’t knock it till you try it, people. Just so you know,
0:05:07 I’m a convert. I completely agree with it now too. But being able to know, one of the reasons why we have
0:05:12 you do the perfect day is not only so that way you can get clarity on it, but also to see how close
0:05:16 you are. This is the thing that was really cool is going, hey, you know what? There’s a couple small
0:05:20 tweaks that I can do on my perfect day that would actually make my perfect day right now. And it doesn’t
0:05:24 have to be in five years from now. There’s small things that you could be doing.
0:05:30 If the five-year-in-the-future version of you eats healthier, start eating healthier now. If the five-year-in-the-future
0:05:34 version of you rides their bike to work, start riding your bike to work now. I think you’ll find there
0:05:40 are little opportunities to start living your vision today. And maybe not full 24 hours, but it’s
0:05:45 a spectrum, right? I think we all would love to be in 100% control of our calendar 100% of the time,
0:05:51 but that doesn’t align with the constraints of our reality. Instead, what we can do is start carving
0:05:57 out 15 minutes here, a half hour there, and then use that time to start moving us closer to our vision,
0:06:03 to start living out our why. I remember a time when adult coloring books were super, super popular,
0:06:08 top 100 bestsellers on Amazon popular, and they were promoted as a stress reliever.
0:06:12 And I remember thinking, look, if you’ve got time to do an adult coloring book, you’re clearly not that
0:06:19 stressed. Because there have certainly been days or weeks on a few different occasions when it didn’t
0:06:24 even feel like I had time to breathe. Every waking moment was filled with work and obligations and
0:06:30 demands, and it is super stressful. I think the first time I experienced this was painting houses in
0:06:35 college, maybe bit off a little more than I could chew, maybe had a few too many projects going on
0:06:41 at once, and a few too many fires to put out. But those were some really long days. One of the
0:06:46 things that has helped me since then, and I wish I had the practice at the time, was just a nightly
0:06:52 gratitude and progress tracker. This is part of my nightly shutdown routine. This is strategy number
0:06:58 two in this episode. The first was to do this find your why or this visioning exercise. But strategy
0:07:03 number two is this nightly shutdown routine with gratitude and progress tracking. These days,
0:07:07 I use my own three-question journal for this. The third question is, what are my top priorities for
0:07:12 tomorrow? That way I can wake up and tackle those before going into reactive mode. But I find this
0:07:18 super helpful as an evening shutdown routine, recognizing tomorrow’s another day. Whatever
0:07:23 is stressing me out probably isn’t life-threatening. Hopefully isn’t life-threatening. Taking stock of what I
0:07:27 did get done, right? Maybe you didn’t check off the entire to-do list, but I did chip away at it. I got
0:07:31 something done. What am I grateful for, right? It’s not all bad. There’s certainly some good things
0:07:35 happening in my life. And then making a brief plan. How am I going to win tomorrow? What are my top
0:07:39 priorities for the next day? Really important practice for me and definitely one I recommend
0:07:45 in helping prevent burnout and possibly dealing with it if you’re in the middle of it. So that is strategy
0:07:50 number two. Number three is to build some sustainable systems, building a manageable
0:07:56 schedule and system. So we’ve talked about the importance of finding your why. You can go five
0:08:01 whys deep. You’re armed with your five-year future vision projection of your perfect average day.
0:08:07 You’ve got a positive nightly shutdown routine that includes a reflection and appreciation of
0:08:12 the work that you did do, the progress that you made, and what you have to be grateful for that day,
0:08:17 and your top priorities for the next day to move you closer to your goals. The next thing when it
0:08:23 comes to preventing burnout in the first place is to build some systems and guardrails around your time
0:08:29 and your work that feel sustainable. I think most of what makes you successful as a product reviewer
0:08:35 has remained constant. You have to, it’s work. You have to put in the time. You have to be fairly
0:08:40 consistent. There were a lot of people who started around the same time I did who worked really hard for
0:08:48 six months, made 500 videos, made $20,000, $30,000 off that, but then just burnt out. And so I think
0:08:55 the best advice I can give anyone now is set manageable goals, you know, do five videos a week,
0:09:01 but do that consistently over a period of several months. And then it starts to compound. And if you’re
0:09:07 only making pennies in the beginning, just know it’s a numbers game. And, you know, it might not be my,
0:09:13 my best product review. I did a review in my first year. I was about six months in and, and I was
0:09:18 starting to figure out what things sold better and what was trending. And I found something that popped
0:09:25 off and it made me $17,000. And I have not had that kind of success since them. However, that product
0:09:31 still makes me a few hundred dollars every single month. And if I had only done my first 400 videos,
0:09:36 I never would have had that product. And so it’s just being consistent, looking for different things
0:09:39 and improving over time, as far as your product selection.
0:09:44 That was Tyler Christensen from episode 656. Make sure to go check that one out. If you want to learn
0:09:49 more about the Amazon influencer side hustle, upload little product review videos to Amazon and make
0:09:54 some sales commission on that. But it’s this tortoise versus the hare. It’s slow and steady and consistent.
0:10:00 Let your efforts start to stack and compound in a way that is sustainable to you. But this call to
0:10:06 find a consistent volume of work, a steady pace that you can maintain was echoed by Shelley Marmer in
0:10:13 episode 573. Everyone’s schedule is going to be different. I always tell people like, you can’t just
0:10:19 like think you can crank out 18 articles a week forever. Like it’s not sustainable, right? So don’t burn
0:10:26 yourself out. If your limit is one every two weeks, and you can do one really, really, really good blog
0:10:33 every two weeks, then that’s where you’re at right now. And it accumulates. I didn’t start at 180. I
0:10:41 started at zero like everyone else. But eventually it just compounds. So know where your sweet spot is,
0:10:46 know what’s actually sustainable for you. That’s not going to burn you out. Because if you get burnt out,
0:10:52 you don’t make it to 180. You don’t make it to four. So be real with yourself. Know what you can do.
0:10:57 One of the most important strategies to prevent burnout and protect your mental health is to avoid
0:11:02 the comparison trap. Of course, I think you can take inspiration from others and should take
0:11:07 inspiration from others. But constantly playing the comparison game is a recipe for dissatisfaction,
0:11:11 right? In the suburbs, it’s the keeping up with the Joneses game. But John Acuff said,
0:11:16 don’t compare your beginning to somebody else’s middle comparison is the thief of joy. If someone
0:11:21 else in your niche has way more customers or followers or subscribers than you, there’s a couple
0:11:25 ways to look at it. You could say, well, shoot, they’ve already taken up all the market share.
0:11:29 Or you could say, look, that’s great. Look at all the market validation work they’ve already done. I know
0:11:34 the idea is proven now. Now I just need to get more people paying attention to me. This was in the book,
0:11:41 The Gap and the Gain, as well, which I think is a Ben Hardy book, where the author contends that we
0:11:46 spend most of our time in the gap, comparing our results to our ambitious goals or the results of
0:11:53 other people and dwelling on our inadequacies instead of living in the gain, which is to recognize and
0:11:57 celebrate how far you’ve already come. Look at the progress we made when I was a competitive swimmer.
0:12:02 It would be easy to get discouraged because I definitely wasn’t winning races and that would be
0:12:08 the gap mentality. But the gain mentality allowed me to get excited about shaving time off my own
0:12:13 personal bests and trying to get better every meet. So when it comes to burnout, prevention is probably
0:12:17 the best medicine. But what happens when you’re already starting to feel it, either in your day job
0:12:21 or in your business? We’ve got some interesting strategies from Side Hustle Show guests coming up
0:12:28 right after this. For such an important channel like Found, the software powering this important
0:12:33 channel was super outdated and clunky. We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for
0:12:40 businesses to connect with their customers through voice and text. That’s Darina Kulia, co-founder of
0:12:45 our sponsor, OpenPhone. Trusted by more than 60,000 customers, this is the number one business phone
0:12:51 system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. I like to think of it like a centralized hub
0:12:57 to receive and respond to calls and texts in your business. And I asked Darina about who’s typically
0:13:03 signing up for this kind of service. We definitely have a lot of folks who come to us and their personal
0:13:09 cell phone has become their company phone number and they’ve hired a team or they’re starting to scale
0:13:14 their business and they just find themselves as a business owner, as a founder, being the bottleneck.
0:13:22 So we see that all the time. And then we also see folks much further along where they’re using some
0:13:27 legacy complicated tools that are just not really made for how communication happens these days.
0:13:35 We also just recently launched Sona, which is our voice AI agent that can handle any missed calls.
0:13:40 If you have clients calling outside of business hours, instead of them going to voicemail,
0:13:48 it can go into Sona, which is capable to handle any replies and can also take a message. So you are
0:13:52 capturing that lead information. And it’s like, and it’s a robot, like it responds like on the fly
0:13:59 with some pre-programmed responses. It does such a great job. This way they can handle questions 24-7.
0:14:05 Now here’s a scenario for you. So let’s say I’ve committed to a certain business phone number and I’ve
0:14:11 distributed flyers. It’s printed on my business cards. It is on my local business listings on
0:14:17 directories throughout the internet. Like what’s the process to now have that ring open phone system
0:14:18 versus the current system?
0:14:24 Totally. So we see this all the time. This process is called phone number porting. We port numbers
0:14:31 from all kinds of carriers. So basically no matter what provider you’re using, we can take that number
0:14:36 and move it over to open phone. It is free. We handle the whole thing. And if you want to try
0:14:41 out open phone, we have a free trial. You can try it out, see how you like it. And if you like it,
0:14:45 you can then decide to port your existing number over and we handle the whole process.
0:14:51 Now, open phone has automatic AI call summaries, so you don’t have to worry about taking notes while
0:14:56 you’re on the call. But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging, basically allowing
0:15:03 you to quickly filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a
0:15:08 discount. So you can review those and see what worked, what didn’t and train team members on the
0:15:14 most effective tactics and language in those cases. And it’s all in the name of building a better, faster
0:15:15 and friendlier customer experience.
0:15:21 I want all open phone customers to have five stars only right now. Open phone is offering side hustle
0:15:28 show listeners 20% off your first six months at open phone dot com slash side hustle. That’s O P E N
0:15:34 P H O N E dot com slash side hustle. And like we talked about, if you’ve got an existing phone number
0:15:40 with another service, open phone will port it over at no extra charge. Open phone, no missed calls,
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0:16:53 Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. So far, we’ve been covering ways to prevent burnout
0:16:59 through finding your why, tracking your progress, building sustainable systems, and avoiding the
0:17:03 comparison trap. Another super important factor is taking care of your physical health because it plays
0:17:09 a huge role in your mental health. That means not neglecting your sleep, your diet, or your exercise
0:17:13 because it can be a slippery slope. Like Brian Johnson would say, you got to take care of your
0:17:17 fundamentals, your fundies, if you want to give yourself a fighting chance of showing up as your
0:17:22 best self. And of course, it’s easier said than done because when you’re super stressed, it’s also
0:17:28 when you’re most likely to make poor food choices, to sacrifice sleep, to skip your workout. But be conscious
0:17:33 about it and see if getting back to basics, getting back to good physical health habits doesn’t help the
0:17:39 mental load as well. Now, I want to shift into how some entrepreneurs have dealt with burnout on the
0:17:45 job to see if any of their strategies might make sense for you. First up is Heather Johnson, a hospital
0:17:51 worker who had dabbled in Etsy without a lot of success. And then January, I started posting designs.
0:17:55 I told myself, and I remember I actually wrote down on a piece of paper, I was like,
0:18:06 action plan to make six figures in 2021. But I wrote in that notebook, you know, post three to five
0:18:14 listings a day, every day for January and February. And my goal was to create a high volume listing store
0:18:20 because that’s what a lot of the YouTube gurus were saying at that time is high volume listing stores
0:18:27 are what get you more views, more visits on Etsy. And that’s how you can bring in the Etsy algorithm.
0:18:31 So I started posting like a mad woman.
0:18:35 Before long, Heather was earning thousands of dollars a month from her Etsy shop. And she shares
0:18:41 some of her strategies in episode 520, if you want to go back and check that one out. But a couple
0:18:46 things stood out to me from that episode. First was she didn’t initially have the goal to make it a
0:18:52 full time thing. She called it a must needed distraction from her healthcare work. And then
0:18:57 set the intention of consistency, three to five listings a day, every day for two months. That
0:19:01 consistent action is how you get in the reps, how you get better at your craft, even if you don’t see
0:19:07 results right away, even if you’re just doing it as a positive distraction from a potentially draining
0:19:13 day job. And bonus points here, it started as a creative outlet, like I’m going to do these designs.
0:19:18 This was something I enjoy doing in my youth. I think she mentioned being an artist or being really
0:19:23 interested in art when she was younger. And here was a way to do that as a distraction from her day
0:19:30 job and build a consistent habit with it. Now, the next clip has got to be one of the most powerful and
0:19:34 most memorable lines from 12 plus years on the show. And you’re going to know it when you hear it.
0:19:41 This is my episode with Saw L, episode 359. At this point of the interview, he’s been working
0:19:48 nine months on his side hustle insurance website, and he’s made something like $100. What kept you going
0:19:55 during this nine months before seeing any sort of monetization revenue coming in on the other side?
0:20:01 And even after that, it’s like the amount of effort relative to the payoff still seems very
0:20:09 unbalanced. Yeah. So what kept me going was my fear. I was afraid to stay where I was.
0:20:14 That’s the biggest thing for me. I’m one of those people where if I start getting afraid to stay where
0:20:21 I am, that fear is scarier to me than the fear of trying to get somewhere else. That alone just drove
0:20:29 me 100% to say, hey, no stopping. If I could sit up for 16 hours and my whole day I spoke to one person
0:20:35 and I could sell them a $35 life insurance policy that they may or may not get approved for, if I could
0:20:41 do that, I could sit up and write content all day. There’s no problem. I had 125 people at FinCon
0:20:48 commit to letting me do a guest post or a podcast or something. That’s the type of drive I have.
0:20:52 Yeah. I mean, that’s how this interview came about. I was like, this is a crazy story. Yes,
0:20:56 totally. And we’ll link to all the money pages that you want. You won’t even charge you.
0:21:01 Perfect. I appreciate it. So that was one of the drivers. And then the second thing was that it’s a
0:21:07 very lucrative space. As an insurance agent, I was still making $100,000 a year. I just hated the time.
0:21:13 It took a lot of work for me to make that $100,000 a year. And so that mindset of, okay,
0:21:18 well, I’m going to do all this work and I’m not going to make anything right now. That’s okay. I’ll
0:21:22 just keep doing both until one pans off. And once I made that first commission check, I was like,
0:21:27 oh, they send the check. Okay, great. This is real now. Yeah. Right. It’s real, right? Like,
0:21:32 okay, I see online, I have $120 coming, but we’ll see when I get that check and that check comes.
0:21:36 So yeah, it’s like that process. And once I saw it, I said, oh, I can replicate this.
0:21:41 Did you catch it? I was afraid to stay where I was. Another guest to put it like this. If I don’t
0:21:46 do something, if I don’t take action, tomorrow’s going to look like today. And I think it’s easy
0:21:51 to get caught up in the idea that somehow something is going to change on its own. And so we keep
0:21:56 waiting and waiting, but nothing happens until you make it happen. That’s why make something happen
0:22:01 has been the signed up on the show, probably from almost the very beginning. Now, I like how both
0:22:06 Heather and Saw were comfortable putting in the time and the effort in the limited time
0:22:11 that they had without seeing immediate financial results because they were learning, they were laying
0:22:18 the foundation for a side hustle they believed in. It was this balance of persistence plus patience,
0:22:23 especially in Saw’s case. When you’re afraid to stay where you are, if that five-year vision is
0:22:29 terrifying, you figure out the next steps. Dan from Tropical MBA calls it the corner office test.
0:22:34 If you eventually rise the ranks on your current path, you keep climbing that ladder and you
0:22:40 eventually take your boss’s job, you get the corner office. Is that a win? And if not, you’re going
0:22:45 to want to stop climbing that ladder. Stop climbing the ladder you’re on and looking to start building
0:22:51 your own ladder. Now, Heather and Saw took a longer term view. Another somewhat common path for side
0:22:58 hustlers is a shorter term sprint to the finish line. This definitely isn’t particularly healthy or
0:23:02 sustainable, but it can work under the right circumstances, especially if your side hustle
0:23:07 already has some traction. Here’s a snippet from my conversation with Rachel Peterson when she was
0:23:12 building her social media marketing side hustle. Now, the next bit of this challenge is delivering
0:23:18 the goods while still working that eight to five. So there’s selling strategy and selling hands-on,
0:23:23 like tactile. I will be posting on Facebook for you. I will be creating your Instagram images and
0:23:26 stuff. Is that the kind of work that you signed yourself up for?
0:23:34 Yep, exactly. I did content curation and creation and posting and strategy and all of that. And as soon
0:23:39 as I started signing clients, I realized, okay, I’m going to be hustling pretty hard here. And the moment
0:23:45 I signed all of those clients, I realized that I was very close to making the same amount of money as my
0:23:52 nine to five. So I just stepped into high gear. I said, this is a sprint. This is not a marathon. And if I hustle
0:23:59 really, really hard for just a short amount of time, I’ll be out of my nine to five and I’ll have 40 to 50 extra
0:24:01 hours per week to focus on this.
0:24:07 This sounds like a pretty intense period. This is the eight month drowning period or what time are we talking about?
0:24:11 Let’s see, that was eight months ago till six months ago.
0:24:12 You have two young kids at home.
0:24:18 Oh, I’m sorry. It was three months ago. So yes, I have two young kids. So I did not get a lot of sleep
0:24:25 during that time. It was only five months, but that time flew by and I felt like I was kind of a zombie,
0:24:30 but I just had this goal in mind of leaving. It was all I wanted. And I, there was this image I had in my
0:24:35 head of bringing my daughter to school this fall for her first year of school and picking her up from
0:24:42 school. And that was what I kept focusing on. And now she starts school this month and I’ll be ready
0:24:44 for it. It’s a weird feeling.
0:24:49 Yeah. Now you have that, like you said, that extra 40, 50 hours a week to dedicate to the business.
0:24:54 And if you were used to doing it in a quarter of the time, you got all this time in the world now.
0:25:00 Yes. So you asked what it felt like to be doing all of that client work while still trying to find
0:25:04 clients, while still working in my nine to five. It kind of felt like I was drowning while holding a
0:25:08 laptop over my head, trying not to get the keyboard wet.
0:25:11 Yeah. That’s, that’s kind of the challenge, but it’s interesting. I mean,
0:25:15 hey, it’s side hustle nation. Like we’re used to the hard work, but at the same time,
0:25:19 I think a lot of people would try and ramp that up a little bit slower to avoid that like drowning
0:25:23 period, but to each their own. Hey, you got out, you got out in record time.
0:25:27 You got it. And I don’t recommend that process for anyone unless you can handle
0:25:33 a ton for a short amount of time. And you enjoy doing things very quickly and seeing results right
0:25:39 away. That is strategy number eight, this short-term sprint strategy, if it makes sense for you. If you
0:25:43 can see that light at the end of the tunnel, maybe a sprint is in order. William Wadsworth had a similar
0:25:48 line. He said, if you’re bored walking up the hill, try running up it. Maybe speed can be a secret
0:25:55 weapon. And if I’m running away from something I hate, like a toxic job or an angry bear, I can probably
0:26:00 sprint longer and harder than I normally could. But every sprint has to have an end point. And if you
0:26:04 don’t have a specific direction and milestone to know when you’ve made it, I would hesitate to
0:26:11 recommend that strategy. One interesting twist on Rachel’s sprint strategy was Drew Ackerman’s idea
0:26:16 of setting somewhat arbitrary quit dates for his side hustle. Here’s how he explained it.
0:26:23 Hey, this is Drew Ackerman. I make Sleep With Me podcast, a podcast that helps grownups fall asleep,
0:26:30 a little bit like a goofy friend telling you a bedtime story. I started the show in 2013 just as
0:26:36 something as an experiment of like, how come there aren’t silly bedtime stories for grownups? And would
0:26:42 anybody listen? Would the idea even work? And one of the most effective things for me was setting
0:26:48 quit dates where I was like, okay, I would have a meeting every few months and say, do I want to keep
0:26:53 making this podcast or not? And usually it was like, oh, of course I want to, you know, there’s a few
0:26:59 people listening or it helps these people fall asleep. But in between those quit dates, it really
0:27:05 helps not silence my internal critic or the other parts of me that are kind of obstacles a lot of
0:27:10 times for getting stuff done. But it helped me say, hey, well, let’s just keep working on this until the
0:27:14 next quit date. Because I just have this internal critic that’s like, oh, let’s, this is a bad idea.
0:27:20 This isn’t working. This isn’t successful. And I would give my critic full voice at those meetings.
0:27:25 But in between the meetings, I’d say, hey, can we just save this for the next meeting? And that really
0:27:32 helped me keep the podcast going over, I think like three years is really where it started to finally
0:27:38 gain momentum. The second thing I did was talk to my listeners about sharing the podcast and just ask
0:27:43 them, hey, if you get value out of the show, just share your honest experience with that. And letting
0:27:48 them know how incredibly powerful word of mouth is, because I don’t think everybody knows that.
0:27:54 And then thanking people when they did share the show. And so that’s where a lot of growth happened.
0:28:01 And then after making the show for about four years or so, maybe three years, I started a Patreon.
0:28:15 I tested out a merchant podcast, merchandise, affiliates, sponsors. And in 2017, so I started the podcast in 2013 and 2017, I would say the podcast became my side hustle.
0:28:26 And I slowly started to use up my vacation at my day job and started to cut back my hours at my day job from full time to three quarter time to eventually half time.
0:28:40 And then in 2018, I was able to leave my day job as a librarian and work on my podcast to full time in between Patreon, merchandise, sponsorships, and a few other things like affiliates and stuff like that.
0:28:51 I’m able to do the podcast as a full time job, pay for health insurance, put some money aside for retirement, very similar to what I would expect if I was like looking for a job.
0:29:05 I’ve also been able to build up an emergency fund, a personal emergency fund and a business emergency fund, because a lot of my goals around finances with the podcast are making sure the podcast is sustainable and high quality and delivered on a regular basis.
0:29:10 But it started as something almost like a hobby, an experiment that I just kept going.
0:29:15 I kept working at it and trying to make it a little bit better each time.
0:29:22 Now, a couple of things here. I love Drew’s example of scaling slowly back at his day job as the podcast grew.
0:29:26 Doesn’t have to be all or nothing. And I love the idea of setting a quit date.
0:29:32 90 days in the future, six months in the future helps you avoid the day to day decision fatigue of whether or not you should keep going.
0:29:41 And I imagine had Drew come to one of those quit date meetings with himself, by the way, just him, and found he no longer enjoyed doing the show.
0:29:46 It wasn’t seeing enough traction. He would have had the discipline to say, I’m going to retire this project.
0:29:49 I’m going to see if there’s another side hustle that makes more sense.
0:29:53 So that’s strategy number nine. Put a quit date on your calendar.
0:29:55 I do this for all kinds of side hustle experiments.
0:30:01 Hey, we’re going to test out a new content strategy. We’re going to give it 90 to 120 days.
0:30:04 We’re going to see what kind of results or return on investment it generates.
0:30:08 And we’re not going to question it in the meantime, we’re just going to collect the data.
0:30:14 We’re going to reevaluate it then and see if it makes sense to keep going, to pour some fuel on it or to pull the plug.
0:30:18 Now, let’s say you’re running your business and the stress is mounting.
0:30:21 There aren’t enough hours in the day. What can you do about it?
0:30:24 I’ve got some suggestions for you coming up right after this.
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0:32:36 Hiring, Indeed, is all you need.
0:32:41 In my original Side Hustle, my online shoe business,
0:32:46 there would be times I would crank away on that site 10, 12 plus hours a day,
0:32:50 maybe even more when Brynn was out of town, maybe 14 hours a day.
0:32:52 Sometimes it was pretty tedious work.
0:32:55 Not quite data entry, but definitely not rocket science either.
0:32:59 The challenge that I felt was like every hour I didn’t work,
0:33:03 it felt like it was costing me money, especially during the busy season of Q4.
0:33:06 I was problem aware, as they say.
0:33:12 I knew I should probably get some help, but I had all the usual hangups of not knowing how it would work,
0:33:15 payment-wise, or cost-wise, or tax-wise.
0:33:19 I was afraid that any assistant I brought on would, like, steal my ideas.
0:33:21 I didn’t have the time to train anyone.
0:33:23 All the usual excuses.
0:33:28 It was 100% a case of being too busy chopping down trees to sharpen the saw,
0:33:31 which is why strategy number 10 is to hire some help.
0:33:36 And even though the website itself had leverage, it could make sales when I wasn’t working,
0:33:39 I still felt like I needed to work on it all the time.
0:33:44 When I finally hired my first assistant, it was a huge shift.
0:33:46 And that’s not to say everything was perfect right out of the gate.
0:33:52 There was a kind of a one-step-back-before-taking-two-steps-forward kind of thing,
0:33:55 where it took some time to vet and interview candidates.
0:33:59 It took some time to document processes that, up until then, had only existed in my head.
0:34:01 It took some time for training.
0:34:06 And no, they weren’t as fast or as, quote-unquote, good as me at these tasks.
0:34:11 But after that, after bringing on this person, this first assistant, something magical happened.
0:34:15 And that magic was work getting done when I wasn’t working.
0:34:17 That was a big unlock.
0:34:20 And yes, it cost some money, which was another one of my hangups.
0:34:22 I could just do it myself, was always my excuse.
0:34:26 But it was well worth having some breathing room in my day
0:34:30 and not feeling like I had to keep grinding 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day.
0:34:34 Now, to get started down the delegation path, if you’ve never done it before,
0:34:37 my recommendation is to start with a time audit.
0:34:42 This is tracking for a couple weeks what you’re actually spending your time on.
0:34:47 And if you’re anything like me, you might find that you’ve got a lot of hours spent
0:34:55 on relatively low-level administrative or repetitive tasks that, with a little guidance,
0:35:00 a little documentation, a little training, an assistant or another hire could reasonably
0:35:01 take off your plate.
0:35:04 And there’s a couple different flavors of outsourcing.
0:35:08 The first, which I just described, is when you take something you’re already doing
0:35:10 and hire somebody to do it for you.
0:35:16 The second is perhaps a little more advanced, and that’s to hire for the stuff you don’t know
0:35:16 how to do.
0:35:22 Here’s John Jonas from onlinejobs.ph and Nate Hirsch from our episode on hiring
0:35:26 your first virtual assistant, describing those critical hires.
0:35:33 So what I tell most people today for like, when do you know, is when’s the time to hire someone?
0:35:37 Because for me, at the time, it was like, dude, I don’t want to do this.
0:35:39 I don’t want to do this thing that I’m doing.
0:35:41 I hate this.
0:35:42 So I had to try and find help.
0:35:47 What I’ll tell most people is, if there is something that you’re doing that you could
0:35:52 potentially teach someone else, doesn’t matter how much work it takes you to teach someone
0:35:54 else, it’s time to hire someone else.
0:35:57 It’s time to hire someone else to do it.
0:36:01 Because if it takes you a month to teach them how to do it, after that, you’ll never have
0:36:02 to do that thing again.
0:36:05 If you’ve hired correctly, you’ll never have to do it again.
0:36:10 And that is the only way that I know of that you can buy time.
0:36:15 Yeah, it’s kind of this saw sharpening moment where you have to take, again, you’re already
0:36:19 pressed for time, you’re already busy and say, well, now I’m going to take time away from
0:36:24 doing that thing to train somebody else to do it in the hopes of never having to do it
0:36:24 again.
0:36:26 Like, it’s going to take me this time up front.
0:36:28 It’s this investment in your future.
0:36:29 The only way to buy time.
0:36:31 Nate, anything to add on that?
0:36:32 Like, for when is it time to hire?
0:36:34 There’s really two schools of thoughts.
0:36:38 I mean, the first one is exactly what John said, when it’s all these things that are just
0:36:40 piling up that are taking on your time.
0:36:44 And the only way to get your time back is to pass those tasks off to someone else.
0:36:48 And how do you get five hours in your week back, 10 hours in your week back, whatever
0:36:48 it is.
0:36:54 The flip side of it is, I think the average entrepreneur is only good at one to three things,
0:36:55 their core competency.
0:36:58 Maybe you’re good at sales, you’re good at content or whatever it is.
0:37:02 And as you get farther and farther away from your core competency, sure, you could take a
0:37:07 six-month course to become a Facebook ad guru, but you can’t do that with every single part
0:37:08 of your business.
0:37:12 So at some point, you have to hire people who are better at doing things than you are.
0:37:14 And it could even be the small stuff.
0:37:16 I mean, take the bookkeeping, for example.
0:37:21 I wasn’t necessarily great at just transferring information and making sure everything’s accurate
0:37:22 and double-checking it.
0:37:24 I mean, that was very tedious for me.
0:37:26 That’s probably not my core strength.
0:37:28 So I take someone else and I put them in it.
0:37:32 And not only are they doing the job, but they’re doing it better than I could have done.
0:37:37 So I think that was a big eye-opener for me as well, when I would give someone a task
0:37:41 and maybe not right away, but eventually they would do something even better than I could.
0:37:42 And that’s very liberating.
0:37:44 And it makes you want to delegate.
0:37:50 It almost makes you want to be a lazy entrepreneur, so to speak, really just toning in on what are
0:37:50 you the best at?
0:37:52 What helps you scale your business?
0:37:59 Definitely a worthwhile episode to check out in full if you find yourself as the bottleneck
0:38:00 in your business.
0:38:06 It’s episode 343 in your archives, and I know we’ve re-aired it at least once as a Greatest
0:38:06 Hits episode.
0:38:11 And I’ve used several different sites to connect with assistants over the years, from John’s
0:38:17 OnlineJobs.ph, to Upwork and Fiverr, to more specialty services, and even our sponsor Indeed.
0:38:23 But the key is to define the role, to set clear expectations and rip off that band-aid.
0:38:25 You can’t expect to do everything on your own.
0:38:26 It’s no wonder you’re burnt out.
0:38:28 Chris Ducker calls it superhero syndrome.
0:38:31 But so if you want to go fast, go alone, like the old proverb.
0:38:33 If you want to go far, go together.
0:38:34 Get some help.
0:38:37 Really grateful for the team I have in place and all the work they do to get these episodes
0:38:38 ready for you every week.
0:38:43 For any given episode, there are four or five team members all doing their part.
0:38:48 Stuff I used to do all on my own, starting out, but slowly chipping away at the tasks where
0:38:50 I’m not adding much value.
0:38:55 Now, as your business grows, you might find yourself kind of out of your league, or what
0:38:57 made it fun early on is no longer the case.
0:39:03 When I chatted with Justin Tan from Video Husky, he took a really interesting approach in essentially
0:39:05 outsourcing himself as the CEO.
0:39:07 I was quite burnt out.
0:39:13 I think the back-to-back crises made me realize that, number one, I did not enjoy management.
0:39:18 I’m not really somebody cut out to ensure the day-to-day and the week-to-week, everything
0:39:20 aligns and we’re moving forward in the right direction.
0:39:24 And I think doing that properly for a year really taught me that lesson.
0:39:31 And so I started considering other solutions, whether it was just minimizing my own role or,
0:39:35 not really selling, just seeing ways that I could step out.
0:39:36 Yeah.
0:39:38 What was the day-to-day?
0:39:41 And that was like, so you mentioned, you know, I got to manage this huge team.
0:39:43 Am I still, are you still running marketing?
0:39:45 Like, what’s your, what’s your role?
0:39:46 Yeah.
0:39:50 So at that point, I was still running marketing and we still had our set of weekly calls that
0:39:52 had to happen to ensure things kind of ran smoothly.
0:39:56 And, and I think as we kind of went through more and more of those, as we set like a good
0:40:00 weekly cadence, I just realized that there was a pretty big disconnect for me personally,
0:40:05 between both me and our clients, because I personally, I’m not a video creator.
0:40:06 I don’t know how to film.
0:40:07 I don’t know how to edit.
0:40:09 I don’t know how to, I guess, promote.
0:40:15 I don’t particularly enjoy promoting myself or our editors because I don’t have the, a creative
0:40:15 eye.
0:40:16 As I said already, I don’t know how to edit.
0:40:24 And so I realized that lack of sort of founder market fit and founder product fit was really
0:40:28 hindering, I guess, my own ability to, to apply myself in video husky.
0:40:29 Okay.
0:40:34 So you think, well, it may not be sellable where it’s at today, or I’m not quite ready to let
0:40:38 go of it, but I do want to outsource myself from the day to day.
0:40:43 I want to like, you know, bring in somebody else to be the operator, the COO in a way.
0:40:44 Is that what happens?
0:40:45 Yeah.
0:40:50 So it was around, I think, beginning of 2021 that I started working with another coach,
0:40:50 Taylor Pearson.
0:40:56 And so working with him kind of made me realize, okay, this is really not my role.
0:41:00 Even though, of course, like at the end of it, I am responsible for video husky.
0:41:05 I feel a lot of responsibility for the team that I just could not continue on a day to day
0:41:05 basis.
0:41:10 And he kind of outlined the consequences of a person running a team when they’re already
0:41:10 burnt out.
0:41:15 And it turns out that this is a thing around the four to five year mark, a lot of founders
0:41:16 get burnt out.
0:41:21 And the key is to kind of already have a team in place that you can transition to so that
0:41:24 when that burnout inevitably happens, your team is still good to go, your business is still
0:41:26 good to go, and it can run without you.
0:41:27 Yeah.
0:41:31 And so he was the one who outlined kind of like what a sale process would look like and what
0:41:36 the multiple would be, which wasn’t all that attractive to me, just because it’s three to
0:41:39 four times earnings, five, if you’re really lucky.
0:41:44 Compared to the idea of, let’s say, bring out a general manager where I personally might
0:41:49 earn a little bit less, but it would mean that the business would continue to spend out
0:41:53 dividends, which would be enough to live off of while the GM would have the opportunity to
0:41:59 grow the business while reducing the kind of key man risk that the business was relying on
0:42:02 me, which also ironically makes it more sellable in the long run.
0:42:08 Yeah, I was, and this is an interesting kind of fork in the road, and I won’t name names,
0:42:13 but I was talking to some friends at FinCon who had gone down, not a completely similar path,
0:42:19 but they went down the path instead of doing a clean, one and done, cut me a big check,
0:42:21 I’m getting out of here, sell the business, exit.
0:42:25 They went down the path of kind of bringing on a partner with the hopes, well, maybe the
0:42:26 partner can grow the business.
0:42:28 I’m kind of in this burnout phase.
0:42:32 I don’t really want to work on it day to day, but then the partner ends up just tanking
0:42:32 everything.
0:42:35 So it’s a huge risk for you as the business owner.
0:42:40 They can take what we’ve already built, and they can take it to the next level, but they
0:42:41 can also screw things up.
0:42:43 Like, they could also upset the clients.
0:42:45 They could also upset the team.
0:42:47 They just might not be the right cultural fit.
0:42:52 Like, you know, we might have another crisis where 30% of the clients leave again.
0:42:58 Like, it’s a risky proposition versus, you know, almost taking the money in and just
0:43:01 so, you know, washing your hands of the whole thing in a sale.
0:43:02 Yeah.
0:43:06 And so I think that was something that I was willing to give a shot for.
0:43:11 So the way I figured it was the absolute worst case scenario is that if it turns out he’s not
0:43:17 a good fit after one, two, three, six months, well, I guess I’ll step back in and I’m exactly
0:43:17 where I’m at.
0:43:21 Well, at least I had a three to six month break, which maybe would be enough kind of
0:43:22 fuel to get started again.
0:43:29 But while there are downside risks of potentially doing like worse than what Video Husky was,
0:43:33 there was also the upside risk of doing better than what Video Husky was previously doing.
0:43:38 And in my head, it made sense because at the end of the day, I have limited business experience.
0:43:40 I had never managed a team of 50.
0:43:45 So I inevitably would have made a lot of mistakes versus bringing on somebody who had that experience,
0:43:49 who had already worked at a higher level than where I was at.
0:43:54 I think there was something to be said about about that kind of know-how that I really wanted
0:43:58 to bring to Video Husky and our team, because not only am I, but like our entire team is just
0:44:04 so young that we can either learn from experience or ideally learn from other people’s experiences
0:44:07 and get to where we want to go faster.
0:44:10 And that was Justin Tan from episode 540.
0:44:15 Really powerful episode on a side hustle that turned into a pretty big business in all the trials
0:44:17 and tribulations along the way.
0:44:21 Plus, did you catch the part where he said he wasn’t a video creator or a video editor,
0:44:26 but still managed to build one of the most popular video editing services for video creators?
0:44:30 Really cool example of not needing to be the expert to solve a problem,
0:44:31 but playing matchmaker instead.
0:44:33 So that’s number 10.
0:44:34 That’s the delegation piece.
0:44:39 If you’re burnt out or overwhelmed, what’s one thing you can get off your plate this week?
0:44:43 How can you start chipping away at these tasks and start leaning more on your team
0:44:47 so the business maybe can start to run a little bit less without you?
0:44:49 You start to be a little bit less of the bottleneck.
0:44:53 And you may not even need to delegate it.
0:44:56 I mean, if it’s really that important, if it’s not really that important, you could just eliminate it.
0:44:59 Or you could ask ChatGPT if there’s a way to automate it.
0:45:05 You might even upload your time log into Chatty and ask for some recommendations on what to outsource next.
0:45:06 That’s number 10.
0:45:07 Hire some help.
0:45:09 Number 11 is to sell the business.
0:45:12 Like Justin mentioned, if you can make the business less reliant on you,
0:45:17 the more sellable it becomes down the road, which might be the ultimate way to beat burnout.
0:45:18 Cash out.
0:45:19 Be done with it.
0:45:22 This was a fail of mine holding on too long to the shoe business.
0:45:24 In hindsight, I could have exited.
0:45:28 It might have been worth maybe half a million dollars if I timed it right.
0:45:31 And I could have used that runway to figure out the next project.
0:45:35 Because as entrepreneurs, we’re always looking ahead for the next thing.
0:45:41 And I’ve found that having an exciting new project or experiment tends to breathe some new life into an old business.
0:45:45 That’s why that’s number 12 is to change up the routine and spark some creativity.
0:45:55 And sometimes that creativity gets sparked just by changing up my routine, working from the coffee shop instead of from home, visiting a new city, going to a conference, taking some time off with the family.
0:46:08 Because it feels new and different and exciting, even if it’s adjacent to what you’re already doing, I feel like I attack it with some more energy and enthusiasm than I would if it was just the same old, same old.
0:46:14 And this is super common in startup culture and maybe should be a little more so in side hustle culture.
0:46:16 But it’s the idea of a pivot.
0:46:17 This is number 13.
0:46:25 If you’re burnt out and you’re not seeing the traction or results that you like in your current business, maybe it’s time to consider a pivot.
0:46:33 One of the most inspiring and profitable examples of that from the side hustle show comes from Abby Ashley in episode 284.
0:46:40 She’d already replaced her day job income with virtual assistant work and even built a small agency at one point.
0:46:42 But she had this itch to grow it even more.
0:46:47 She just wasn’t sure if taking on more clients was necessarily the right path.
0:46:49 I was starting to get a little burnout on client work.
0:46:55 So I got actually I got a few more clients because hey, I needed money and I knew how to do that.
0:46:57 Well, I knew how to get clients.
0:47:06 So I grabbed a few more clients and started working again and still just devoting a lot of time to trying to figure out what I was going to do.
0:47:12 I actually stumbled upon a podcast in fall of 2016 about discovering your niche.
0:47:15 And it was so funny because I had hired a business coach.
0:47:30 I had really like done so much soul searching and this one stinking free podcast like totally just made me think I just need to teach or like I need to ask my audience and teach what I’m actually good at, like what I’ve had success at.
0:47:34 So rather than creating courses, I had the idea.
0:47:39 I didn’t just say, you know, what do you want to learn in general to my email list?
0:47:43 I said, hey, I have this idea for creating a virtual assistants course.
0:47:45 I created this agency.
0:47:47 I was able to quit my job doing virtual assistants.
0:47:51 I thought up what like the modules for the course would be.
0:47:52 I just kind of listed them out.
0:47:57 And I asked if anyone was interested in that topic.
0:48:01 If so, I was going to sell the course at a lower price.
0:48:09 It was about half the price around I think it was like four or five hundred dollars where I knew eventually the course would be probably a nine hundred thousand dollar product.
0:48:11 I said, hey, you can get in early.
0:48:15 And I had about 16 people buy from my list of a thousand.
0:48:19 So I made eight thousand dollars from doing that tactic.
0:48:21 Just asking people before I even created the course.
0:48:23 Is this something you would want to learn?
0:48:23 Here’s the modules.
0:48:27 From doing the thing to teaching other people how to do the thing.
0:48:31 Here was a low risk, low overhead pre-sale validation.
0:48:32 She hadn’t recorded anything.
0:48:36 She just had outlined it and said, hey, is this something that would be a fit?
0:48:41 I think in that episode, she goes on to describe that the sales page she used was a Google Doc.
0:48:44 Really, really lean startup style.
0:48:44 Really cool.
0:48:52 So is there something new you could sell or even pre-sell to your existing audience or customer base that would reinvigorate you to the business?
0:48:58 For me, what’s gotten me excited lately is some process improvements, usually powered or assisted by AI.
0:49:05 Coming up with new episode ideas like this, new affiliate partnerships to test out or creating new digital products.
0:49:08 It was a question that came up lately with a friend of mine.
0:49:11 He said, dang, I can’t believe I’ve been doing this show for 12 years.
0:49:13 I was like, you know, time flies when you’re having fun.
0:49:17 But he asked if it got boring or felt repetitive.
0:49:20 And the answer was an immediate no, which I took as a good sign.
0:49:30 There are repetitive components to the process, but the individual stories and strategies will keep it exciting and such a fun, creative outlet for me.
0:49:35 And that creative constraint of six times a month, we’ve got to come up with some compelling radio to share.
0:49:41 And how are we going to fill in those boxes with something that is hopefully helpful on the side hustle front?
0:49:42 So that’s number 13.
0:49:46 Consider a pivot if you’re feeling burnt out in your current work.
0:49:51 Like, OK, what is adjacent to something we’re already doing that we could use the existing skills for?
0:49:57 Number 14 is this mindset shift of I get to versus I have to.
0:50:07 Now, this definitely doesn’t apply if your burnout is the commuting two hours each way to a job I hate that barely pays the bills variety.
0:50:11 But it definitely applies to side hustlers and entrepreneurs who chose their path, right?
0:50:13 It’s a it’s a privilege to get to be the boss.
0:50:18 And it might feel like we have to get up and work on our business today.
0:50:27 But we get to it’s a unique chance to help our customers, to learn new skills, to connect with people in a meaningful way and hopefully improve our financial well-being along the way.
0:50:35 Now, I remember not being a lot of fun to be around leading up to my TEDx talk where every spare moment was spent rehearsing in my head.
0:50:37 I may have been physically present, but I wasn’t there mentally.
0:50:39 I was like, you know, stressed out.
0:50:40 I was losing my appetite.
0:50:44 And at one point, my wife goes, just remember, you chose this.
0:50:45 And she was right.
0:50:46 I volunteered for it.
0:50:50 It didn’t necessarily make me any less stressed, but it did put a smile on my face.
0:50:54 And it was an important reminder of get to versus have to.
0:50:57 And that’s where I want to wrap this one.
0:51:05 So to recap, we covered how to prevent burnout and some different tactics that you might find effective in reducing it in your own life.
0:51:09 We started with finding your why and try and go five whys deep.
0:51:10 Why is it important to you?
0:51:11 Why do you want to do this?
0:51:21 Talked about your five-year Perfect Tuesday exercise, kind of this visioning exercise and how to start chipping away at that in small ways today.
0:51:23 How can I get closer to my perfect average day today?
0:51:26 Talked about the importance of a nightly shutdown routine.
0:51:30 When I get done, I’m going to recognize and celebrate the progress that I did make.
0:51:33 I’m going to be grateful for the positive things that happen.
0:51:36 And then I’m going to prioritize my next day.
0:51:37 How am I going to win tomorrow?
0:51:39 Talked about building sustainable systems.
0:51:41 We talked about avoiding the comparison trap.
0:51:42 Easier said than done.
0:51:52 Talked about the importance of taking care of your physical health, your fundies, your sleep, your diet, your exercise, and the impact that that can have on your mental well-being as well.
0:51:54 Talked about finding a creative outlet.
0:51:57 Whether or not it turns into a side hustle doesn’t have to be.
0:51:58 Don’t put that pressure on yourself.
0:52:04 Talked about this balance of persistence plus patience with the example of style.
0:52:10 Hey, I worked for nine months before I started to see any meaningful revenue here, but I was afraid to stay where I was.
0:52:12 And this goes back to the finding your why.
0:52:14 That persistence plus patience piece.
0:52:19 Talked about, in certain cases, a short-term sprint might make sense.
0:52:20 If you could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
0:52:21 Remember Rachel?
0:52:25 Oh, she’s like, I felt like I was drowning, but I could see the light.
0:52:28 I knew I could get myself out and free up an extra 40, 50 hours a week.
0:52:30 We talked about giving yourself a deadline.
0:52:35 We talked about setting specific quit dates, three, six months in the future to say,
0:52:38 I’m not even going to be allowed to question this until then.
0:52:41 Or we can address that at the next quick date meeting.
0:52:46 We talked about delegating, outsourcing the parts of your work that don’t light you up.
0:52:48 Talked about the optionality to potentially sell your business.
0:52:51 Something I did with a website of mine in 2020.
0:52:57 We talked about the idea of keeping your work fresh, changing the routine, sparking some creativity.
0:53:00 Talked about maybe doing a pivot where that might make sense.
0:53:05 And finally, the mindset shift of I get to versus I have to.
0:53:09 So if you’re battling burnout, don’t just think it’ll magically go away.
0:53:13 I encourage you to seek out some professional help beyond the advice of your friendly neighborhood
0:53:14 podcast host.
0:53:19 I will also link up the individual episodes that we heard clips from in the show in the
0:53:20 show notes for this episode.
0:53:24 Just follow the show notes link in the episode description and it’ll get you right over there.
0:53:28 As I mentioned, the Side Hustle Show recently had its 12th birthday.
0:53:29 It’s almost a teenager.
0:53:32 And like you heard, there’s a lot of gold in the archives.
0:53:33 You just got to know where to find it.
0:53:37 And to make that easier and hopefully more relevant for you, you can actually get a personalized
0:53:41 Side Hustle Show playlist at hustle.show.
0:53:46 Just answer a few short, multiple choice questions and it’ll recommend 8 to 10 of our greatest hits
0:53:49 based on your answers that you can add to your device.
0:53:52 You can learn what works and you can go make some more money.
0:53:55 Again, that’s hustle.show for that short personalized playlist quiz.
0:54:00 Big thanks to all our guests over the years for sharing their wisdom on this important
0:54:01 topic.
0:54:04 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:54:08 Where do you go if you want to see all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place?
0:54:09 Stay with me.
0:54:12 Sidehustlenation.com slash deals is that place.
0:54:14 Thanks for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:54:15 That’s it for me.
0:54:17 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:54:20 If you’re finding value in the show, make sure to text a friend.
0:54:22 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:54:26 and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.

0:00:03 It’s time for some list-building tactics that actually work.
0:00:08 With all the upheaval in the search results and the fickle nature of social media, you
0:00:11 know you need to build your email list, but how do you actually do it?
0:00:15 Today we’re taking the guesswork out of it and breaking down some tried-and-true tactics
0:00:19 with a longtime Side Hustle Show listener who’s been studying the biggest newsletters
0:00:23 and creators in the world to figure out what’s working today.
0:00:28 From growthinreverse.com and the Growth in Reverse podcast, Chanel Basilio.
0:00:29 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:31 Thanks for having me, Nick.
0:00:31 I’m excited to be here.
0:00:32 Well, me as well.
0:00:37 We’ve got lots of tactics to get into, and the first one is a really cool one that you shared.
0:00:39 It was called the One Click Unlock.
0:00:40 Tell us about this.
0:00:41 Sure.
0:00:46 So this comes from Justin Moore, who runs a newsletter called Creator Wizard.
0:00:47 He’s got an interesting name.
0:00:52 His whole ethos is helping creators and influencers get more sponsorships.
0:00:55 So he helps them make more money through their brand deals and that kind of thing.
0:00:59 His whole newsletter, the entire thing, everything he sends each week is about sponsorship
0:01:00 opportunities.
0:01:03 So he’s essentially giving you free money, if you will.
0:01:05 So he’ll give you the brand name.
0:01:06 We could plug Justin.
0:01:09 His little sponsor audit tool is really cool.
0:01:09 We can plug that.
0:01:11 We can link that up in the show notes, too.
0:01:12 That’s really good.
0:01:12 Yeah.
0:01:13 He’s got a great business.
0:01:16 But he essentially gives you away free sponsorship opportunities.
0:01:19 But this One Click Unlock is essentially his referral program.
0:01:25 But it’s a little bit deeper than that because in each email, you’ll see this like box and
0:01:27 it’s grayed out and it has like a lock on it.
0:01:31 And it says refer one person to get the secret sponsorship research.
0:01:36 And so if you refer one person every week in that email, you won’t see that box anymore.
0:01:39 You’ll see the contact info for those brands.
0:01:43 You’ll see the person’s name, some recent brand deals they might have done.
0:01:46 So he’s essentially giving you just extra information on top of it.
0:01:48 But at the same time, he’s getting more referrals.
0:01:52 So someone is just sharing his newsletter with other people.
0:01:55 And he said he’s gotten about 5,000 subscribers just from this one thing.
0:02:01 And that’s kind of a lot when you’re thinking it’s just like one extra referral per person.
0:02:08 Yeah, it’s 5,000 incremental subscribers for a low barrier to like high value, low barrier
0:02:08 to entry.
0:02:08 Oh, sure.
0:02:11 I got I know somebody else who might benefit from this.
0:02:11 Yeah.
0:02:17 Do you know how he like mechanically how he’s getting that done with some conditional content
0:02:18 or like it sounds technical?
0:02:21 He uses kit for email and he sets it up.
0:02:23 There’s like a liquid code I think he can do.
0:02:25 So you can set up a tag essentially.
0:02:28 And if this person has referred one person, they get tagged.
0:02:30 And then every email, it’ll show a box.
0:02:33 So I think you can actually do this with kits like snippets too.
0:02:38 Not sure on that one, but I know you can do it with liquid and chat GPT can help you write
0:02:38 that anymore.
0:02:40 You don’t even have to know how to code or anything.
0:02:45 But it essentially says like if they referred one person, show this extra piece of content.
0:02:51 So it’s kind of interesting to set up in the beginning, but I think it’s well worth it if
0:02:53 you’re going to end up with 5,000 extra subscribers.
0:02:54 Yeah, no kidding.
0:02:54 Yeah.
0:02:56 We set it up once and then it just kind of runs.
0:02:59 And it’s it sounds like it’s kind of a constant reminder.
0:03:03 Like if it’s in every message or every week, you kind of see it like, OK, I should probably
0:03:04 probably do this.
0:03:07 Does he have multiple tiers or that’s just like tier one?
0:03:10 He does have multiple tiers, but that’s the tier one.
0:03:13 The other ones are like a 30 minute coaching call with someone on his team.
0:03:17 And then you can go all the way up to like getting his thousand dollar course for free once you
0:03:19 get like 100 or so subscribers.
0:03:20 So that’s a lot.
0:03:21 OK.
0:03:25 But yeah, but this is just like constant FOMO, like every week you’re seeing this and
0:03:27 you’re like, well, he gave me this one piece.
0:03:31 All I have to do is refer one person and I get the contact info for this people and like how
0:03:33 to reach out to them and make sense.
0:03:34 OK.
0:03:34 Yeah.
0:03:38 Versus having it as paid newsletter tier.
0:03:41 We see some people kind of, oh, that’s going to be behind the paywall.
0:03:44 The free sample is here, but that if you want the rest of the goods, you got to pay.
0:03:47 But that’s that’s a really unique way to do it.
0:03:51 Like low, low lift, make it so stupid, simple, easy.
0:03:54 Where it’s like, yeah, OK, I can find one person.
0:03:55 I don’t know if ConvertKit.
0:03:59 Well, they bought Spark Loop, so they may have this built in at some point or like on the,
0:04:01 you know, the pro pricing tier.
0:04:05 Our buddy Pete McPherson has built a new tool called List Gadget.
0:04:10 That’s on my to do list to start messing around with because he’s got this kind of referral
0:04:15 mechanism built in where you can send you build a leaderboard and do polls, like do all
0:04:18 sorts of cool stuff with with List Gadget.
0:04:20 So that’s on my list to to play around with.
0:04:21 I don’t know that one.
0:04:22 I’ll have to check it out.
0:04:23 It’s a good guy, though.
0:04:24 So I’ll check it out.
0:04:24 Yeah.
0:04:32 He’s partnered with with Liz from from Liz Wilcox from Survivor fame, but to help get
0:04:32 that out into the world.
0:04:37 OK, that is a really cool one where just about anybody could add to your list.
0:04:38 It kind of answers the question.
0:04:40 Well, how can I turn one subscriber into two?
0:04:43 How can I make it easy and beneficial for everybody to do that?
0:04:47 And hopefully the people you subscribe or people you refer, they refer the next person.
0:04:49 It kind of becomes this this virtuous cycle there.
0:04:50 Yeah, totally.
0:04:51 I think it’s pretty simple.
0:04:55 Like anyone if you’re creating some piece of content, like just think about what that next
0:04:59 step that somebody would need or like the next piece of advice or content that they would
0:05:01 be looking for and just give it to them.
0:05:07 Yeah, obviously, the famous examples would be, you know, the morning brews and the hustles
0:05:09 of the world with like the subscriber referral program.
0:05:13 But how do you take a page out of that playbook and make it applicable to your to your niche
0:05:15 and to your subscribers and make it a win for them?
0:05:16 That’s a really cool one.
0:05:16 Yeah.
0:05:17 What’s next?
0:05:20 The next one I think we should talk about is just recommendations.
0:05:26 So a lot of people are using recommendations at this point, Kit, Substack, Beehive, those
0:05:29 platforms all have their own built-in referral recommendation platform.
0:05:32 So essentially, we can recommend each other through Kit.
0:05:36 So if someone signs up, they get a box afterwards that says like, hey, thanks for joining.
0:05:39 Here are three other newsletters I really recommend you check out.
0:05:43 Now, people can like or not like those.
0:05:47 And I’ve heard from a lot of smaller creators that they’re like, well, you know, I just don’t
0:05:51 have the big lists that people want to partner with and that kind of thing.
0:05:55 But I think if you can almost build relationships with those people and not just look at it like
0:06:00 a checkbox, like the one guy that I followed and wrote a deep dive on, his name was CJ Gustafson.
0:06:06 And he would actually just ask these creators to get on a phone call, like not expecting them
0:06:09 to recommend him afterwards, but he would talk to them for 20, 30 minutes, you know, just talk
0:06:12 about like the industry and like newsletters and stuff.
0:06:15 And then at the end, he’d be like, hey, do you want to like recommend each other on Substack?
0:06:16 Like, I’ll just go add you right now.
0:06:21 And he said the conversion rate was practically 100% because you’ve just you just built this
0:06:22 relationship with people.
0:06:23 Yeah.
0:06:24 And nobody wants to tell you no to your face.
0:06:26 Yeah.
0:06:30 But if it makes sense for your audience and like, I don’t know, as long as they have the
0:06:33 people that you would want on your email list, I think it makes total sense.
0:06:36 So I have a couple of questions for this because I saw this.
0:06:40 You were implementing this on the growth in reverse and it was you’re recommending
0:06:42 Jay Klaus and somebody else.
0:06:46 It was like, OK, this is kind of a natural if you like this.
0:06:47 You might also like this.
0:06:49 It’s like almost like, would you like fries with that?
0:06:51 It’s like a natural thing.
0:06:53 But my couple of questions.
0:06:58 One is, does it interrupt the kind of logical flow?
0:07:01 Like you have somebody who is, you know, hot to take action.
0:07:02 They just entered in their email.
0:07:03 They’re feeling excited about that decision.
0:07:09 And instead of taking them immediately to the thank you page or the confirmation page or the
0:07:13 logical next step, there’s like this intermediate thing that hits them in the face and like, well,
0:07:18 who’s who’s this Jay Klaus guy or like, you know, we almost what is it?
0:07:20 It’s like checked by default.
0:07:25 Have you seen any data on that or like the impact on kind of what the next step you want subscribers
0:07:26 to take as?
0:07:26 Yeah.
0:07:29 And that’s a great call out because it’s not perfect for every situation.
0:07:32 And I have it turned off on some forms.
0:07:34 Like I don’t have it on every single one.
0:07:34 OK.
0:07:38 And that’s the beauty of it is, well, at least with Kit, you can turn it off on specific forms.
0:07:40 Like it doesn’t show up every single time someone subscribes.
0:07:40 Yeah.
0:07:45 But yeah, I only recommend people I know the content’s great because it is.
0:07:49 It’s like taking a piece of the trust you’ve just built and giving it to someone else.
0:07:52 But on the same token, you’re getting that back when they’re recommending you.
0:07:53 Sure.
0:07:54 So a couple of pointers.
0:07:58 If someone subscribes through recommendations, you want to make sure that you have them getting
0:08:00 a separate message in your welcome email.
0:08:06 So if Jay sends me a subscriber, I want to make sure people have a different welcome email
0:08:07 than just the typical one.
0:08:09 So I’ll say, hey, you might not realize who I am.
0:08:11 Jay Klaus recommended me.
0:08:14 If you want to unsubscribe, go ahead and do that right here and put it like towards the
0:08:14 top.
0:08:18 So that because naturally some of those people are going to be lower quality.
0:08:21 Maybe they didn’t recognize what they were doing by subscribing to the rest of those.
0:08:23 So yeah, you do want to be careful with those.
0:08:27 But I think it’s a good way to kind of, I don’t know, get a couple more people on your
0:08:27 list.
0:08:30 I’ve seen good success and have had some really good ones come.
0:08:32 Yeah, that was that was the second question.
0:08:36 Like, what’s the subscriber quality like if they didn’t opt in specifically for you?
0:08:38 It was just kind of like an afterthought.
0:08:42 And then you start showing up in their inbox every day or every week.
0:08:44 Like, why am I getting this again?
0:08:45 But yeah, calling that out.
0:08:48 So I said, because I started noticing some of these, it was like, you know, from the work
0:08:52 at home woman or something like there was some other recommendations that started coming
0:08:52 through.
0:08:58 And it’s like, oh, yeah, if I’m just dumping these into some generic onboarding, like, I
0:09:00 think the default was like nothing, like no welcome sequence at all.
0:09:02 I was like, well, let me let me fix that.
0:09:06 Is there a way to customize that based?
0:09:10 I couldn’t figure out how to individualize it based on the source.
0:09:11 It was just like, hey, I’m so flattered.
0:09:13 Another creator recommended me.
0:09:14 That’s why you’re getting this message.
0:09:16 You know, here’s a little bit about sign hustle nation.
0:09:19 Yeah, you definitely want to make sure you’re setting this up.
0:09:21 In the beginning, it was trickier with Kit.
0:09:24 As they like initially launched it, it was like, what’s happening?
0:09:28 But now they’ve kind of like refined the process and you can set up a separate welcome sequence.
0:09:33 I think it’s a different tag or form that they’re subscribed to and you can send them down a different
0:09:35 path with automations and that kind of thing.
0:09:39 Again, something to set up, but once you do, it’s kind of like plug and play.
0:09:43 Yes, these are lower quality subscribers because some people don’t understand what they’re doing.
0:09:47 However, I have seen a lot of really good subscribers come from this.
0:09:48 So I think it’s worth it.
0:09:53 I know for myself, I’ve added probably 10,000 or so subscribers from recommendations.
0:09:56 So, yeah, it’s worked out really well.
0:09:58 Now, all of those haven’t stuck around, but yes.
0:09:59 That’s great.
0:10:01 I remember joking with Nathan Berry when they announced this.
0:10:03 It was like, you know, everything old is new again, right?
0:10:07 So you see like these co-registration forms, like from 20 years ago on the internet.
0:10:08 That was the first part.
0:10:12 The second part was like, how genius is this for a company that charges you based on the
0:10:13 number of subscribers you have?
0:10:15 Like, oh, if we could lift everybody up.
0:10:16 Oh, sure.
0:10:19 You know, we’re doing great by the creator, you know, the creator economy we’re supporting.
0:10:22 Oh, but meanwhile, like, oh, there’s a little ulterior motive here.
0:10:26 It’s a cool tool and it’s good for them too.
0:10:30 Yeah, that’s a fun one to crack jokes on.
0:10:32 But yeah, it’s good and bad on either side.
0:10:38 More with Chanel in just a moment, including how one creator earned $1.2 million from a
0:10:43 simple Google Doc and a genius strategy for getting paid to write content for other companies.
0:10:45 Coming up right after this.
0:10:51 For such an important channel like Found, the software powering this important channel was
0:10:53 super outdated and clunky.
0:10:57 We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for businesses to connect with their
0:11:00 customers, so do voice and text.
0:11:05 That’s Darina Kulia, co-founder of our sponsor, OpenPhone, trusted by more than 60,000 customers.
0:11:10 This is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications.
0:11:16 I like to think of it like a centralized hub to receive and respond to calls and texts in your
0:11:16 business.
0:11:20 And I asked Darina about who’s typically signing up for this kind of service.
0:11:27 We definitely have a lot of folks who come to us and their personal cell phone has become
0:11:29 their company phone number.
0:11:34 And they’ve hired a team or they’re starting to scale their business and they just find
0:11:37 themselves as a business owner, as a founder being the bottleneck.
0:11:38 So we see that all the time.
0:11:46 And then we also see folks much further along where they’re using some legacy complicated tools
0:11:50 that are just not really made for how communication happens these days.
0:11:57 We also just recently launched Sona, which is our voice AI agent that can handle any missed
0:11:57 calls.
0:12:02 If you have clients calling outside of business hours, instead of them going to voicemail,
0:12:09 it can go into Sona, which is capable to handle any replies and can also take a message.
0:12:12 So you are capturing that lead information.
0:12:17 And it’s like, and it’s a robot, like it responds like on the fly with some pre-programmed responses.
0:12:19 It does such a great job.
0:12:21 This way they can handle questions 24 seven.
0:12:23 Now here’s a, here’s a scenario for you.
0:12:29 So let’s say I’ve, I’ve committed to a certain business phone number and I’ve distributed flyers.
0:12:31 It’s printed on my business cards.
0:12:35 It is on my local business listings on directories throughout the internet.
0:12:41 Like what’s the process to now have that ring open phone system versus the current system?
0:12:41 Totally.
0:12:43 So we see this all the time.
0:12:46 This process is called phone number porting.
0:12:48 We port numbers from all kinds of carriers.
0:12:54 So basically no matter what provider you’re using, we can take that number and move it over
0:12:55 to open phone.
0:12:56 It is free.
0:12:57 We handle the whole thing.
0:13:00 And if you want to try out open phone, we have a free trial.
0:13:02 You can try it out, see how you like it.
0:13:07 And if you like it, you can then decide to port your existing number over and we handle
0:13:08 the whole process.
0:13:13 Now open phone has automatic AI call summaries, so you don’t have to worry about taking notes
0:13:13 while you’re on the call.
0:13:19 But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging, basically allowing you to quickly
0:13:25 filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a discount.
0:13:30 So you can review those and see what worked, what didn’t, and train team members on the
0:13:33 most effective tactics and language in those cases.
0:13:38 And it’s all in the name of building a better, faster, and friendlier customer experience.
0:13:41 I want all open phone customers to have five stars only.
0:13:46 Right now, open phone is offering Side Hustle show listeners 20% off your first six months at
0:13:48 openphone.com slash side hustle.
0:13:54 That’s O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash side hustle.
0:13:58 And like we talked about, if you’ve got an existing phone number with another service,
0:14:00 open phone will port it over at no extra charge.
0:14:04 Open phone, no missed calls, no missed customers.
0:14:09 With our partner Mint Mobile, you can get the coverage and speed you’re used to just for
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0:15:19 I’ve got one that I’ll add to the mix that has added probably 5,000 to 7,000 subscribers
0:15:21 over the course of the last several years.
0:15:26 And that is a Facebook group to email list integration.
0:15:28 And I’m using a tool called Group Leads for it.
0:15:35 It’s like this really low-cost browser extension that you can ask people questions when they
0:15:36 join your group.
0:15:40 I think I ask questions like, what’s your biggest side hustle struggle?
0:15:42 Or what side hustles are you working on right now?
0:15:43 Or have you started anything yet?
0:15:48 Some kind of those types of generic fact-finding questions that can help guide future content.
0:15:53 And then I’ll say, hey, if you want our best side hustle tips, enter your email here.
0:15:55 And a lot of people do that.
0:15:58 And then Group Leads sends it directly into Kit.
0:16:01 And it gets, again, a specific welcome sequence.
0:16:02 Some people are already on the email list.
0:16:04 And so it sends them a different message.
0:16:05 Hey, great to see you again.
0:16:07 Thanks for joining the Facebook group.
0:16:09 For other people, it’s like, hey, you know, welcome to Side Insultation.
0:16:11 Hey, the Facebook group is just the tip of the iceberg.
0:16:13 Here’s all the other stuff we got.
0:16:16 And so that’s been a really, really powerful kind of incremental addition.
0:16:21 Because what we found, you know, early on, the Facebook group was very much like podcast
0:16:24 listeners, like, you know, the core of the audience.
0:16:29 But over time, it started, you know, Facebook started recommending that group to people it
0:16:32 thought were interested in Side Hustles and started to grow a lot organically.
0:16:35 It’s like, oh, I need to do a better job of capturing those people.
0:16:36 I love this one.
0:16:37 It’s like, it’s so obvious.
0:16:43 And I have been the person to go, not recently, but over years ago, to go to Facebook, search
0:16:46 for a specific topic, and then join a group or find other people there.
0:16:48 So I think that’s, it’s awesome.
0:16:49 It’s such a good one.
0:16:51 This has been like top of the funnel.
0:16:54 Like we had Abby Ashley on the show with her like virtual assistant training business.
0:16:58 She runs one of the biggest virtual assistant groups on Facebook.
0:17:02 And that was like a top of the funnel entry point, you know, enter your email and we’ll
0:17:06 send you the free masterclass on how to get started, how to find your first clients and
0:17:07 really, really effective.
0:17:12 And I think we’ve seen people do it in like microgreens farming.
0:17:18 And there was another one, some guy was like doing a, like a pet waste removal, like training
0:17:18 type of thing.
0:17:21 It’s like, you know, no matter your niche, there’s a group about it.
0:17:26 And if there’s not a group, you should start one because it’s a, it’s a powerful, powerful
0:17:27 place where a lot of people are still spending some time.
0:17:29 Oh, amazing.
0:17:30 I love that one.
0:17:32 I wish I could figure out a way to make that happen for me.
0:17:33 Maybe I will.
0:17:33 Newsletters.
0:17:34 Yeah.
0:17:36 The email growth hacker newsletter email.
0:17:36 Yeah.
0:17:38 There’s gotta be something like that.
0:17:38 Gotta be.
0:17:39 I love it.
0:17:39 All right.
0:17:39 What else you got?
0:17:40 All right.
0:17:41 I think the next one.
0:17:46 So Ali Richards has been somebody I just keep being excited about because he does all these
0:17:52 cool things, but he started a business called Story Learning and he was helping people learn
0:17:54 different languages, like moving abroad.
0:17:56 You’re going to teach English as a second language, that kind of thing.
0:17:58 He turned that into a $10 million business.
0:18:03 And he now is like, I want to do something different and I want to start a personal brand.
0:18:08 So he was like, okay, how can I get people on my email list for this personal brand?
0:18:11 He couldn’t just like promote it to his language learning list.
0:18:12 It’s not the same audience.
0:18:17 So he decided he was going to put everything he learned from building that business into
0:18:18 a Google Doc.
0:18:20 And it ended up being 118 pages long.
0:18:23 And so he’s like, okay, cool.
0:18:24 Google Doc, 118 pages.
0:18:26 He’s just giving it all away.
0:18:30 So anyone looking to create like an online course business or anything like that, they would
0:18:31 be super interested in this.
0:18:36 And so he shared that and he just started promoting it in other newsletters.
0:18:38 So he would buy sponsorship placements and that kind of thing.
0:18:44 But from my end in the newsletter space, I saw every person who wrote a newsletter about
0:18:46 newsletters was sharing this thing like wildfire.
0:18:50 Like every day I’d open an email and be like, check out the Google Doc from Ollie Richards.
0:18:51 And I’m like, oh my gosh.
0:18:57 And the cool part was like, yeah, he asked for email if you went to his website to sign up and
0:18:57 get it.
0:18:59 But most people were just sharing this Google Doc around.
0:19:01 And he’s like, that’s awesome.
0:19:03 Like, I don’t need to capture every single email.
0:19:03 Yeah.
0:19:05 Like no opt-in required.
0:19:05 Totally.
0:19:06 Okay.
0:19:10 And so he ended up getting like 18,000 subscribers from this thing.
0:19:14 And they’re high quality, like super high quality.
0:19:17 Even though it wasn’t a requirement and people just consumed it.
0:19:21 And they were like, well, if he’s given this much away for free, if he’s giving me 118 pages
0:19:23 for free, what’s he sending out an email?
0:19:24 Right.
0:19:29 And so throughout the Google Doc, of course, there were like ways to opt into the email
0:19:31 list if you hadn’t been on there already.
0:19:37 But in the last two-ish years from starting this Google Doc, he’s earned $1.2 million from
0:19:41 he runs like these pretty cheap workshops, like $100 to $400.
0:19:45 And then on the back end of that, he’ll have like coaching as well.
0:19:46 I just thought this was fascinating.
0:19:52 Like 18,000 subscribers from a Google Doc, just sharing your information and your expertise.
0:19:56 Do you think it worked just because of the novelty factor?
0:19:57 Whereas like, who does that?
0:19:58 Nobody.
0:19:59 It’s like.
0:19:59 Totally.
0:20:04 He said the only money he spent on it was $10 on Fiverr to get a cover for it made.
0:20:05 Yeah.
0:20:08 And arguably, like if you look at the cover, you’d be like, you probably could have done
0:20:08 that yourself, but.
0:20:10 Okay.
0:20:14 And then getting the flywheel spinning by buying some placements or buying some swaps or
0:20:15 newsletter ads in other newsletters.
0:20:16 Yeah.
0:20:18 And so he had these workshops on the back end.
0:20:23 So if somebody bought through the workshop, he threw all that money back into buying more.
0:20:28 So he used Sparkloop, which is kind of like a paid recommendations, as well as newsletter
0:20:30 ads, just in a typical email issue.
0:20:32 So he created like this little flywheel.
0:20:36 Like if any money he made, he went back into ads and it just kept growing the email list.
0:20:37 Okay.
0:20:40 I’ve got another one that kind of piggybacks on that.
0:20:47 And I call it the permafree on Amazon strategy or permafree on Kindle strategy, where there’s
0:20:48 a, I’ve got a book.
0:20:51 It’s sidehustlenation.com slash book permafree.
0:20:56 I think might have to be a United States only, but this was last updated 2019.
0:21:02 So it’s due for a refresh, but this is three different side hustle frameworks, right?
0:21:06 You could sell a product business, start a service business, or have like a content type
0:21:07 of business, right?
0:21:09 And this gives a bunch of examples of that.
0:21:13 And it’s kind of like, if somebody’s searching on Amazon for side hustle, the goal would be,
0:21:14 Hey, you go find this book.
0:21:19 And in the book, as I have in probably all my books is some sort of lead magnet.
0:21:24 I forget what it is specifically for this one, but over the course of 10, 10 plus years
0:21:29 publishing on Amazon, you know, it’s thousands of subscribers who either buy the book and then
0:21:31 get the upgrade, which you see in almost any nonfiction book.
0:21:33 It’s like, Hey, you want the toolkit, the resources?
0:21:38 I’ll go over here and download that or get the, get the free video companion series, like
0:21:39 super, super common strategy.
0:21:43 What poured fuel on the fire was reducing the friction and just like making it permafree.
0:21:47 And what, I don’t know if this is still the case on Amazon, but you had to list it on another
0:21:50 marketplace and then email them to request a price match.
0:21:56 And so you had to upload it somewhere else for free as it’s like 0.00 was like not a, not a
0:22:00 price that was allowed in their system, but through customer support, they would allow you to do it.
0:22:03 And, um, and that’s been a powerful lead gen for me.
0:22:04 Wow.
0:22:09 So the other platforms you uploaded it for free, like everrand.com or whatever that’s called.
0:22:10 Yeah.
0:22:15 Maybe smash words or iBooks or someplace, uh, someplace else, uh, or maybe it was like
0:22:17 the Google play store.
0:22:22 There was some, and then you’d just like screenshot that or, you know, save the URL and then say, Hey,
0:22:23 could you price match this?
0:22:24 It’s free over here, you know?
0:22:26 And then as long as you don’t touch it.
0:22:31 And that’s like one of the hesitations in, in updating it, you know, I’d love to keep all of the
0:22:36 reviews for the book and just push a new version out underneath that, uh, same listing.
0:22:40 But, but then you have to go through that, you know, repricing process again, and there’s
0:22:44 no guarantee they’ll do it, but it didn’t for the, for the first few iterations.
0:22:45 Oh, wow.
0:22:46 That’s pretty cool.
0:22:46 Yeah.
0:22:47 I like that one.
0:22:51 I pulled it from the, from the fiction world where it’s like, you know, the, the first book
0:22:52 in the series is free.
0:22:53 Hopefully it’s good enough to get you hooked.
0:22:58 And then you go on and buy the rest of the series or you opt in for, you know, a special
0:23:02 bonus or get notified when the next book of the series comes out and taking a page out
0:23:03 of the fiction author playbook.
0:23:04 Oh, I love that.
0:23:06 I might have to try something like that.
0:23:06 Yeah.
0:23:12 Especially if you’ve got years and years of content that could be repackaged into 118 page
0:23:17 Google document, or it could be repackaged into a Kindle book with, with probably a similar
0:23:17 strategy.
0:23:18 I like it.
0:23:19 It’s a good one.
0:23:19 All right.
0:23:19 All right.
0:23:21 Let’s go to CJ Gustafson.
0:23:24 This is my favorite ones recently of the last like four months.
0:23:25 I can’t stop thinking about it.
0:23:28 So he writes a newsletter called Mostly Metrics.
0:23:30 He’s a CFO, like financial nerdy guy.
0:23:32 His content is awesome though.
0:23:34 He includes like gifts and just like a ton of personality.
0:23:40 But what he did was he was trying to look for sponsorships, but he started out, he would
0:23:42 go to these software companies in the financial space.
0:23:44 So like a Brex or that kind of thing.
0:23:49 And he was like, Hey, do you guys like, you don’t have any content around this one topic,
0:23:52 like would love to share a piece with your audience.
0:23:57 And so it started off free, but he got a guest post on Brex.com, which I mean, the traffic
0:23:59 from that alone is probably amazing.
0:24:05 The backlink for SEO purposes, which RIP, but anyway, so it lives there in perpetuity,
0:24:09 but it also gets, they started sharing these out to their email list.
0:24:12 So these companies are like dying for content.
0:24:17 They want someone else who’s not their content person to share some exciting news about their
0:24:19 organization or why the product’s so good.
0:24:24 And so CJ coming in as an outsider sharing about their product was just like a no brainer.
0:24:30 So now he gets paid like six to 12 K for a package of like three to four of these posts.
0:24:30 Okay.
0:24:31 She’s getting paid to write them.
0:24:32 Getting paid now.
0:24:32 Yeah.
0:24:33 Wow.
0:24:37 Most commonly is, is, uh, you see the inbound, how much is it going to cost for a link?
0:24:38 That’s great.
0:24:38 Okay.
0:24:39 Totally.
0:24:41 So he’s getting paid for these.
0:24:45 He doesn’t have to write an extra word because they’re actually just taking a piece he’s already
0:24:47 written and sent to his email list.
0:24:50 So it’s just like an aggregation play.
0:24:50 He’s getting paid.
0:24:55 He doesn’t have to write a word and he’s getting subscribers from this because at the bottom
0:25:00 of the email or the piece, it says this originally appeared on mostlymetrics.com.
0:25:02 And so people click through, they subscribe.
0:25:07 And then the best part of this whole thing is he has a paid newsletter and some of those people
0:25:09 subscribe and become paying clients.
0:25:11 So he’s like getting paid twice for some of these.
0:25:12 Okay.
0:25:18 So it is kind of like a, a customer use case scenario that you’re pitching to that company.
0:25:20 Have I, did I hear that right?
0:25:24 I think that’s how it started out, but now he’s just writing content for CFOs and he talks
0:25:28 about Brex sometimes, like he’ll link to it, like, Hey, you can use Brex for this one thing,
0:25:31 but it’s not, it’s no longer just like a review of the company.
0:25:37 Like it’s just him, a random CFO talking about this company or certain topics that their
0:25:38 readers are interested in.
0:25:40 I don’t know.
0:25:41 He’s just like killing it with this.
0:25:44 It’s almost like creating a separate blog for these organizations.
0:25:45 Okay.
0:25:51 So they have some hunger for content that wasn’t produced by their internal team, or maybe it,
0:25:52 maybe it saves them money.
0:25:53 It’s like, sure, we’ll pay you 500 bucks.
0:25:55 It’s cheaper than paying somebody in house to create this.
0:26:01 And they get the content that was already repurposed.
0:26:05 So he reaches a new audience and then a certain percentage of those people, you know, are in,
0:26:06 are in his world now.
0:26:07 And they come back to the email list.
0:26:09 They come back to the paid subscriber tier.
0:26:09 Yeah.
0:26:15 I mean, you think of even like Kit, they have creator series where a lot of their content is
0:26:19 just like pulled from these stories about different creators because I mean, people who are reading
0:26:23 their email list don’t want to hear from their, their creator person.
0:26:25 Just like, Hey, Kit’s great.
0:26:25 This is awesome.
0:26:29 It’s more like, Hey, Jay Klaus has this newsletter and here’s how he grew it on Kit.
0:26:31 And then like shares valuable information.
0:26:32 So I don’t know.
0:26:34 I’ve seen other people do something similar.
0:26:37 Caitlin Burgoyne does like webinars.
0:26:39 So she’ll do a training for companies.
0:26:42 And so that software company has an audience.
0:26:47 They’re showcasing her as like an expert on this thing and their audience is getting value
0:26:48 from her.
0:26:50 So it’s like making them look like an awesome company.
0:26:56 Yeah, that’s a whole, whole nother strategy that we could probably talk about is this virtual
0:27:02 workshops, targeting the companies that you have a good feeling like your, your avatar,
0:27:07 your target customer, your target client is already paying attention to doing business with
0:27:11 and didn’t even have to like webinars have been maybe given a bad taste in people’s mouth.
0:27:12 Like, well, I know there’s a pitch coming.
0:27:14 There doesn’t even have to be a pitch here.
0:27:16 If the goal is just to grow your audience, grow your email list.
0:27:18 We had Dustin Lean on the show.
0:27:21 And this was like one of my favorite strategies of all time.
0:27:22 He was targeting.
0:27:27 He was like, had such a niche service, like email copywriting for direct to consumer brands
0:27:28 or something like that.
0:27:33 And so he would go to Shopify, go to Klaviyo or go to companies that, you know, his target
0:27:36 customers were already doing business with.
0:27:41 And they kind of like, hey, I’d love to host this free educational workshop on how to rewrite
0:27:45 your cart abandonment sequence, like something really, really specific and niche.
0:27:49 And it’s like, I’m going to teach you the DIY version, but a lot of the attendees are busy
0:27:50 CEOs or marketing directors.
0:27:52 Like, can we just pay you to do this?
0:27:57 Like, there was no specific pitch or ask or, you know, sign up here to book a consultation
0:27:57 call.
0:28:02 Just, you know, by virtue of skipping the line, like they’ve kind of vouched for you as the
0:28:06 expert, just it was a really cool shortcut strategy to get in front of a segment, large
0:28:08 groups of your target customer in a hurry.
0:28:09 Yeah.
0:28:13 And all right, let’s give people like a normal example, because these are all business ones.
0:28:16 So I’m just thinking you were mentioning the microgreens farmer guy, right?
0:28:19 So he could go to a company like Bootstrap Farmer.
0:28:23 They sell these seed trays that you actually can grow microgreens in.
0:28:29 He can go to them and say like, hey, I want to share my 10 biggest mistakes of growing
0:28:30 microgreens or something for beginners.
0:28:34 And like at the bottom, they sign up for his email list.
0:28:37 And so it doesn’t have to be like a business oriented thing.
0:28:39 It could be, I don’t know, growing microgreens.
0:28:41 Like how much more B2C does that get?
0:28:42 Yeah, that’s great.
0:28:45 But like kind of that same question, well, who are my target customers already doing business
0:28:46 with?
0:28:48 Who would benefit from my newsletter?
0:28:52 And where can I get in front of, you know, big chunks of them all at once?
0:28:58 And it’s really interesting when both the virtual workshops and the paid guest post getting paid
0:29:01 to create content for other other companies.
0:29:06 I’m just like, my mind is spinning on, well, who else could I go and pitch this to?
0:29:12 One that is in a similar vein is this is from from years ago would be like the virtual summit
0:29:17 strategy, which full caveat, like this is a ton of work to put together, pre record a bunch
0:29:22 of videos and I’m going to drip them out over this like live three day virtual event.
0:29:25 And the goal is everybody you recorded videos with promotes it to their audience.
0:29:27 It’s the three day brand building summit.
0:29:30 It’s a three day build your freelance business summit.
0:29:32 And super, super effective.
0:29:37 If you can get this where, I mean, we talked to Chandler Bolt, like booked some obscene, like
0:29:41 probably a million dollars in sales, like from, you know, the self-publishing summit back
0:29:41 in the day.
0:29:47 But one thing that you can do is, is reach out to companies that might also want to
0:29:51 reach this audience is somebody had the example of like the freelancer summit, like grow your
0:29:52 freelancing business.
0:29:55 Hey, FreshBooks, would you mind sponsoring our event?
0:29:57 You can be the title sponsor.
0:29:59 I don’t even know if they charged for it.
0:30:03 Maybe they could have, but the price of admission was invite your email list, invite your whole
0:30:04 customer base to it.
0:30:07 And all of a sudden, boom, 20,000 registrations.
0:30:08 It was like, oh, this is great.
0:30:12 So I’m trying to sell sponsorships or even free sponsorships to the virtual summit.
0:30:17 So done right can be absolutely effective, but you’re going to be dedicating some time to
0:30:18 pulling this off.
0:30:21 This reminds me of what I just went through with the 30 days of growth.
0:30:24 It was like not a summit, but similar.
0:30:28 It’s still coordinating with 30 different people, but you didn’t have to do like a live video
0:30:29 or anything.
0:30:30 So that was interesting.
0:30:31 That was a, that was a good one.
0:30:35 I think that’s actually something that can be replicated for quite a few people and netted
0:30:39 out like 1,750 new subscribers for me in the last 30 days.
0:30:40 So I’ll take that.
0:30:40 Yeah.
0:30:43 And you called it like a, you called it like a pop-up newsletter.
0:30:44 Pop-up newsletter.
0:30:44 Yeah.
0:30:49 It’s similar to a summit in certain ways, but essentially I went out, found 30 different
0:30:50 creators, including Nick.
0:30:56 And I was like, Hey, you want to share one growth tactic you’ve used to grow your email list?
0:30:57 A lot of them I already knew ahead of time.
0:31:01 Like I had figured out like what they had done and I was like, do you want to share this one
0:31:01 tactic?
0:31:05 And then, so everybody got one of those tips every day for 30 days and now it’s over.
0:31:09 So it’s not like I have to keep writing this daily newsletter every day, but it’s a heck
0:31:13 of a lead magnet I have now of like, here’s 30, 30 tips to grow your newsletter.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:14 Yeah.
0:31:19 And everybody who is featured shares it with their audience as a little snippet, as a little
0:31:19 blurb.
0:31:21 Hey, make sure you go check out the 30 days of growth.
0:31:21 Okay.
0:31:22 Yeah.
0:31:27 And I did have some software tools giving away free licenses, but I did not do the smart
0:31:29 thing of being like, can you share this with your email list?
0:31:30 I should have done that.
0:31:32 That was the missed opportunity there.
0:31:39 It’s taking the, you know, the old vertical roundup style post and just making it horizontal.
0:31:44 We’re going to drip this out instead of say, you know, 30 creators on their number one marketing
0:31:44 tip.
0:31:45 Okay.
0:31:49 We can have that same content and that same amount of outreach and back and forth, but
0:31:53 just structured in a different way and kind of have a similar promotion engine where everybody
0:31:55 kind of bands together to share it.
0:31:55 Yeah.
0:31:56 I like that.
0:31:56 Totally.
0:32:00 That vertical thing used to work really well, but I think it’s a little tired now.
0:32:00 Yeah.
0:32:05 More with Chanel in just a moment, including the simple LinkedIn posts that generated 650
0:32:10 new subscribers in just two posts and why bundle sales might be your secret weapon for
0:32:12 growing your list right after this.
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0:34:26 These are awesome.
0:34:27 I’ve taken a ton of notes.
0:34:29 I’ve got some good ideas from this.
0:34:30 What else?
0:34:31 Anything else on the list?
0:34:32 Yeah, I like the one.
0:34:35 It’s a little more simple instead of like 30 days of content.
0:34:42 So Tom Orbach, who runs marketingideas.com, marketing ideas newsletter, but he knows his marketing
0:34:42 stuff.
0:34:44 So on LinkedIn, he just wrote, drop your website URL below.
0:34:47 I’ll reply with a specific growth hack for your company.
0:34:48 First come, first serve.
0:34:53 And then within this, so he’s giving people like custom, like ideas for growth for their
0:34:54 companies.
0:34:58 And then underneath each one that he replies to, he’ll give them the idea.
0:35:03 And then he’ll say, if you enjoyed this, I share a bunch of tips like this over at marketingideas.com.
0:35:07 He said that LinkedIn post got him 250 new subscribers.
0:35:10 And when he did it on Substack, it got him 400 subscribers.
0:35:15 So yeah, 650 just from two posts and sharing some time.
0:35:19 The brilliance of this, though, is like he can take some of these ideas and expand on them
0:35:20 in his newsletter.
0:35:23 So it’s like not even just a one-time use case.
0:35:28 Yeah, it feels like I’m giving my time, but I’m also getting future content out of this deal.
0:35:28 Yeah.
0:35:33 And he said a lot of the people who joined the newsletter actually weren’t even commenting.
0:35:36 They just saw all of the value he was providing and were like, okay, I’m going to sign up
0:35:39 for this guy’s newsletter because he clearly knows what he’s talking about.
0:35:44 What do you think, like, if you don’t have much of a following on LinkedIn, if you don’t
0:35:48 have much of a following on Substack or X and you post the stuff, hey, you know, first
0:35:49 10 people, it’s like crickets.
0:35:53 You’re like, well, now this is awkward because now nobody even commented.
0:35:53 Yeah.
0:35:58 Well, you could always delete it if you don’t get comments within the first 30 minutes or
0:35:58 something.
0:36:00 But I mean, you could also like seed it with a friend.
0:36:03 I could be like, hey, Nick, can you go comment on this thing so I can at least
0:36:04 at least start sharing.
0:36:07 And then as people see the comments, they’ll probably share their own URL.
0:36:07 Okay.
0:36:08 So what would you call this one?
0:36:12 Kind of like almost a social proof giveaway type of thing?
0:36:14 Like, you know, office hours type of thing?
0:36:14 Yeah.
0:36:16 You could do it as an ask me anything too.
0:36:19 And this works for practically any industry.
0:36:24 So if we continue with the microgreens examples, like give me your biggest issue with microgreens
0:36:29 or what’s a recent issue you’ve encountered, like maybe they were overwatered or something.
0:36:32 It might not work on LinkedIn, but somewhere else, like a forum or something.
0:36:32 Yeah.
0:36:36 And if the first one doesn’t work, don’t get discouraged.
0:36:41 I remember this was from talking with Dickie Bush years ago when he was first getting started
0:36:41 on Twitter.
0:36:43 And he put something out.
0:36:44 It was like, I wrote a thread.
0:36:45 I forget his cadence.
0:36:47 It was either every day or every week.
0:36:52 And nine of those over the course of the year, nine of those ended up going viral and getting
0:36:58 him in his 100,000 subscribers or whatever his number was that turned into a ship 30 for
0:36:58 30.
0:37:01 Like this whole business built on the back of building that following.
0:37:04 But it was like, most of them didn’t do anything.
0:37:05 Most of them didn’t hit.
0:37:09 And his line was like, it’s the ultimate, you know, idea proving ground.
0:37:12 Because it’s like, if it doesn’t resonate in the first little bit, like the algorithm
0:37:13 is just going to bury it.
0:37:15 You’re like, well, now, you know, back to the drawing board.
0:37:17 That wasn’t the right, that wasn’t the right hook.
0:37:18 That wasn’t the right idea.
0:37:20 And you kind of refine this process.
0:37:24 I don’t know if the hit rate improved over time, but it’s almost this numbers game of,
0:37:29 you know, don’t get discouraged if your first two posts don’t deliver the results you want.
0:37:34 Like it’s kind of a game of iteration and trying to find the right thing that does hit
0:37:35 and that does take off.
0:37:35 Yeah.
0:37:38 I think he posted online like every day for nine months.
0:37:42 He got to like 2,000 followers after nine months.
0:37:43 Like most people would have quit.
0:37:43 Yeah.
0:37:44 It’s kind of discouraging.
0:37:48 But then you see his trajectory now and you’re like, whoa, it’s so cool that he didn’t quit.
0:37:49 Yeah.
0:37:53 It’s hard to stick with it in those early days, sometimes early years.
0:37:59 You’re like, one of the, it’s hard when the, you know, step one, create good content.
0:38:01 Step two, you know, hopefully go viral.
0:38:07 It’s like that wild card of it is, is a little bit challenging, but maybe you can seed it.
0:38:11 If you have a handful of connections, maybe they, you ask them to be the first commenters
0:38:16 or to, to reshare it and hopefully give the algorithm a little bit of a nudge.
0:38:21 Like even Sam Parr from The Hustle, he had the trends community on Facebook.
0:38:24 He actually said that in the beginning he was seeding posts.
0:38:28 So he would write up a whole piece for people and share it to them in their DMs.
0:38:32 And so like, even if someone like Sam Parr had to do that in the beginning, it’s okay if you
0:38:32 do that.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:33 Yeah.
0:38:38 For, for growth in reverse, anything else that you found, like in the early days to
0:38:42 try and get, you know, get those first a thousand or 10,000 subscribers?
0:38:44 It was a lot of Twitter threads.
0:38:49 And also I think the content was just so unique that people were like, I’m going to share this
0:38:50 with other people.
0:38:50 Okay.
0:38:51 That’s a huge unlock.
0:38:56 And it’s, it’s probably the underlying piece of all of these is like, if you have really good
0:39:00 stuff, it’s just going to make everything we just talked about work so much better because
0:39:01 people are going to want to recommend you.
0:39:02 They’re going to want to share your content.
0:39:04 They’re going to want to pay you to promote it.
0:39:04 Yeah.
0:39:08 What you’ve become known for, what growth in reverse has become known for is like these
0:39:16 really in-depth, deep dive case studies that say, okay, look at Sahil Bloom now and then
0:39:17 let’s, let’s rewind.
0:39:23 Let’s go back five years and see what that trajectory looked like and the specific tactics that, that
0:39:24 worked and didn’t work.
0:39:25 And you’re right.
0:39:26 It’s, it’s unique content.
0:39:27 It’s something you won’t find anywhere else.
0:39:29 And it was, it was effective.
0:39:32 So the question is, could I reverse engineer something similar for my own?
0:39:38 If you’re, if you’re listening in and, and I don’t know if there’s any shortcuts here,
0:39:43 but you’re doing that kind of analysis that, that people aren’t going to find anywhere else
0:39:44 makes it compelling.
0:39:44 Yeah.
0:39:49 Or like you just go out and find the most unique stories about side hustles and share them.
0:39:54 Like you’re not the one actually doing the side hustle necessarily, but you’re sharing all
0:39:56 of those tips and things that you’ve learned from doing your own.
0:39:58 Again, it’s just like a different way to do unique content.
0:40:00 Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good point.
0:40:03 And those are the, the episodes where you hang up and you’re like, and I got to go tell the
0:40:05 neighbors, you’re not going to believe who I talked to today.
0:40:09 You know, could you believe she makes money organizing people’s photos in the, in their
0:40:09 attic?
0:40:09 Right.
0:40:11 Oh, that’s a hundred dollar an hour job.
0:40:11 Cool.
0:40:12 I didn’t know that.
0:40:12 So good.
0:40:16 I have another one that has added probably several thousand subscribers over the course of
0:40:17 the last three or four years.
0:40:20 And that is participating in bundle sales.
0:40:27 And so this is going to be more of a, of a B to C or maybe like B to small B type of type
0:40:32 of play where a bundle sale organizer, like ultimate bundles is one BC stack is the one that I’m
0:40:33 referring to.
0:40:36 I’ve been a participant in many times, but there’s a few different companies that put these together.
0:40:43 So that may be a side hustle on its own being the host, the organizer, the aggregator, cause
0:40:48 you can, there’s some benefits to being that central hub as well, but as a contributor, how
0:40:54 it works is everybody kind of donates a product to this bundle and say, Hey, for a limited time
0:40:59 for one week, only you’re going to get access to 30, 40, 50 of these digital products on a
0:41:00 specific niche.
0:41:05 Maybe it’s how to grow your traffic and you get it for your $49, whatever it is, you know,
0:41:08 low price, a sticker price on all these resources are $5,000.
0:41:11 It’s like, okay, that might be inflated, but it’s still a good deal.
0:41:13 And you know, you never know.
0:41:17 It’s, it only takes one good idea to make back the $49 and then some, so like I’m a fan of
0:41:22 these as a, as a consumer and I’m a fan of these as a contributor because how it works
0:41:28 is all of these contributors, the 30, 40, 50 people who contributed products, plus the bundle
0:41:29 sale has recruited additional affiliates.
0:41:31 So their audience might find value in this.
0:41:33 They all promote it to their audience.
0:41:39 And when people go to go and claim those products, they go register with Teachable or
0:41:43 they go order the thing through your Thrivecart link or however it is, or they sign up on your
0:41:44 email.
0:41:47 And so they have to enter their email to go and claim the product.
0:41:49 And now they’re a part of your ecosystem.
0:41:55 So it’s a way to gather subscribers from a ton of different places all at once.
0:41:58 And it’s been a really effective one over the last few years.
0:41:59 That’s so interesting.
0:42:02 Are those like high quality email subscribers too?
0:42:03 Yeah, I was kind of surprised.
0:42:09 So the unsubscribe rate, the open rate has been pretty similar to the broader list.
0:42:14 And I guess I expected it to be a little lower, but people tend to stick around about the same
0:42:15 rate as everybody else.
0:42:16 That’s interesting.
0:42:19 So you get the entire list, even if they don’t like download your thing necessarily?
0:42:20 No, only if they claim your thing.
0:42:21 Oh, okay.
0:42:24 Yeah, so you got to come up with a compelling product.
0:42:25 Interesting.
0:42:28 Yeah, I’ve never done one of those, but I’ve seen them all over the place.
0:42:30 Yeah, it’s a very interesting one.
0:42:35 And kind of financially, how it works, like if anybody is curious, like somebody buys the
0:42:42 stack, the individual creators get $0, unless you referred them as an affiliate, then you get
0:42:45 your 40% affiliate commission or whatever it is.
0:42:50 But the play is access to this broader audience, and hopefully some people come back and claim
0:42:52 your product and become a part of your world.
0:42:57 And a lot of people will throw on order bumps and upsells and stuff, you know, to the back
0:42:59 end of their cart to try and recoup some of that.
0:43:02 But it’s more of a marketing play than a money making play.
0:43:04 Yeah, you’ve been doing that for years now, right?
0:43:05 Yeah, it’s pretty effective.
0:43:12 And it’s like, otherwise, I’d be very content to just kind of sit and do my normal thing and
0:43:14 like be in maintenance mode and record some episodes.
0:43:16 It’s like, oh, there’s this deadline coming up.
0:43:19 I got to come up with a product that would hopefully be compelling.
0:43:22 Like the podcast growth playbook came out of that.
0:43:24 The little Get Gigs mini course came out of that.
0:43:31 There was like an easy traffic makeover course that came out of that where it’s like, okay,
0:43:35 I got to come up with something that would be beneficial, that would be on brand, that would
0:43:37 be like comfortable with this price tag.
0:43:39 And here’s a good excuse to launch it.
0:43:41 I like that one.
0:43:41 Cool.
0:43:41 All right.
0:43:42 What else?
0:43:48 I think a broader category of things that I like to recommend to people are like collaborations.
0:43:50 Now, this could look like a cross promotion.
0:43:53 So like, I will shout Nick out in my newsletter.
0:43:54 He does the same on his end.
0:43:56 But that’s like the basic one.
0:43:58 There’s a guy named Alex Garcia.
0:44:01 He runs a newsletter called marketingexamined.com.
0:44:07 And he did a cross promotion with Pat Walls, who has Starter Story, which is a great one.
0:44:08 If you haven’t talked to Pat, you probably should.
0:44:10 He’s got a ton of great case studies as well.
0:44:13 But they did a cross promotion.
0:44:16 So Pat had this YouTube channel that he was starting to build.
0:44:20 I think at the time he probably had like 10 or 15,000 followers or subscribers on YouTube.
0:44:24 And Alex was like, okay, well, I have 30,000 email subscribers.
0:44:26 Like, let’s just swap things.
0:44:31 So Pat came out, filmed the video of Alex, like talking about his business and his newsletter.
0:44:35 And Alex just shouted him out as like a full page cross promotion, essentially.
0:44:35 Okay, okay.
0:44:37 Like sharing Pat’s stuff.
0:44:40 And so it looked similar on like the outside.
0:44:45 But now Pat’s channel has like, I think he has like over 500,000 subscribers on YouTube.
0:44:50 And so like that video has gotten shared all over the place.
0:44:57 About three or four months after, I believe, Alex shared that he had gotten like 5,000 to 10,000 subscribers from that video.
0:45:04 I don’t know how many Pat got, but that’s a really, that’s a lot of subscribers from one collaboration.
0:45:07 Yeah, I mean, you see this on YouTube all the time.
0:45:10 And just even in the whole channels that my kids watch.
0:45:13 Dude Perfect is collaborating with Mark Rober to build battle robots.
0:45:17 You know, but it makes sense because it kind of lifts a rising tide, lifts all boats.
0:45:18 It gets exposure to a different audience.
0:45:19 Yeah.
0:45:21 And so you don’t have to have these huge audiences.
0:45:22 That’s just like an outlier example.
0:45:25 But you can write a guest post together.
0:45:29 Like go to the writer of a newsletter and like you guys co-write a piece.
0:45:31 I’ve seen this happen all over Substack.
0:45:36 The beauty of Substack is like people can click right through and subscribe very easily.
0:45:45 Even if you don’t have Substack though, you can do something like this and just like co-write a guest post or actually write a guest post for their audience that they don’t have to write anything for.
0:45:48 Summits are kind of a version of collaborations.
0:45:50 Even that bundle is probably something similar.
0:45:50 Yeah.
0:45:52 But you can do this on social media as well.
0:45:56 So it’s not like it has to live in one channel or the other.
0:45:56 Right.
0:45:59 And it’s trying to find people of a similar size maybe when you’re starting out.
0:46:03 This was a similar strategy on podcast shout outs.
0:46:07 I mean, years ago it was, you know, Instagram takeovers, Instagram shout outs.
0:46:08 Like it’s nothing new here.
0:46:15 And could you get included in somebody else’s newsletter as a recommended resource in exchange for shouting them out?
0:46:19 It’s like similar idea here and it can work really no matter what scale.
0:46:23 If you’re starting out, it’s like, okay, maybe it’s five to 10 subscribers instead of five to 10,000.
0:46:25 But the principles are still the same.
0:46:25 Yeah.
0:46:26 There’s a woman on Substack.
0:46:28 Her name is Maya Voye.
0:46:30 She’s in the product space.
0:46:32 So she writes about like product marketing, product strategy.
0:46:37 And she went out to some of the other bigger people with Substacks and started doing this.
0:46:41 Like she would co-write pieces with them or she would write a piece for them.
0:46:43 And when I found her, she had like 3,000 subscribers.
0:46:46 And now at this point, I think she’s pushing like 20K.
0:46:48 And this was like eight months ago, maybe.
0:46:55 So like it happens pretty quick if your content’s good and you’re able to collaborate with some of these people.
0:46:57 And she didn’t have an audience at that point.
0:46:59 And she was partnering with people.
0:47:02 One guy, Akash Gupta, had like 140,000 subscribers.
0:47:07 So like because she was giving him such a valuable piece of content, he was like, yeah, I’ll share it.
0:47:07 Yeah.
0:47:13 Step one, make sure your content is good before you ask anybody to vouch for you to share it.
0:47:15 But there’s like a diverging path, right?
0:47:19 Like I can focus heads down just doing my thing and hope somebody notices.
0:47:27 It’s like you got to kind of be vocal and be proactive about promoting this stuff or going after these collaborations and promo swaps.
0:47:31 Otherwise, like the odds of somebody just finding it on their own are so low.
0:47:32 Yeah.
0:47:38 It’s very low, especially if it’s like a new venture or you’ve never been online before doing something like this.
0:47:48 You had an interesting one to move on to the next one from Cody Sanchez, where she was apparently actually buying up newsletters for contrarian thinking early on.
0:47:50 It’s like, how can I shortcut this even faster?
0:47:53 Oh, this guy already has 13,000 subscribers.
0:47:55 I’ll just go buy the newsletter.
0:47:56 It was like, you don’t want to run it anymore.
0:47:58 Like, is this how it happened?
0:48:00 Yeah, this is actually funny.
0:48:06 I was doing research and I came across this one podcast episode and I had not heard her talk about this.
0:48:09 And I think I listened to like 25 other podcast episodes.
0:48:10 Yes, I go deep.
0:48:13 And so I listened to this and she said she bought a newsletter.
0:48:19 And so typically when you buy a newsletter, you might send an email and say like, hey, we just acquired blah, blah, blah newsletter.
0:48:21 You’re now going to be on this list.
0:48:24 And you just like import all those people, delete the old list and move on.
0:48:33 But what Cody did was she actually positioned contrarian thinking as a guest post author or a sponsor for weeks, if not months.
0:48:35 She didn’t go too far into detail.
0:48:39 And I don’t know which newsletter she bought because she has never talked about this again.
0:48:39 Okay.
0:48:46 But she did do this from her words and she would build this audience on the same time.
0:48:51 So she would just send out these emails, keep writing the content like nothing ever happened.
0:48:56 And then she would turn around when she figured out like, oh, I probably got all the subscribers I’m going to get from this.
0:48:59 She would turn around and sell that back to someone else.
0:49:02 So she nowhere in this actually lost money.
0:49:06 She probably made money because she was still growing the newsletter at this point.
0:49:09 And so talk about like leverage.
0:49:10 Yeah, very savvy.
0:49:15 Yeah, I’m going to buy this asset, milk it as much as I can, but still continue its founding mission.
0:49:18 And then, you know, flip it to the next person.
0:49:20 Yeah, she’s like so on brand for her.
0:49:32 One thing that she mentioned in our earlier interview was a lot of manual outreach for the first thousand to ten thousand people where it was, would you mind shouting this out?
0:49:43 You know, to reaching out to friends who already had email lists, doing a ton of guest podcasting, podcast guesting rather, where it was sharing this idea about buying businesses versus building businesses.
0:49:53 Like, okay, that’s a unique angle and building the newsletter that way by borrowing other people’s audiences, either through email promo swaps or email shout outs or through podcast guesting.
0:49:55 Yeah, she’s a hustler for sure.
0:50:03 I created a visual actually showing all of the podcasts she was on and like her growth of her newsletter.
0:50:04 And it was like so in line.
0:50:05 It’s just amazing.
0:50:08 I’ll share that with you with you if you want to put in the show notes.
0:50:08 Okay.
0:50:09 Yeah, it was pretty insane.
0:50:10 All right.
0:50:15 Well, I could say I knew her before she was super, super famous, only medium famous early on.
0:50:18 Yeah, I remember listening to your episode with her for that research.
0:50:18 Yes.
0:50:20 You know, millions of followers ago.
0:50:20 Yeah.
0:50:22 What are we doing wrong, Nick?
0:50:23 Yeah, who knows?
0:50:23 Who knows?
0:50:25 This was depressing.
0:50:31 Like, I remember specifically showing up at FinCon 2021 in Austin.
0:50:33 And in my mind, this was like the year of TikTok.
0:50:36 So many young creators were there.
0:50:38 Oh, I started six months ago.
0:50:39 I’ve got a quarter million followers.
0:50:42 And it was just like, huh, this is a different path.
0:50:43 Like, this is unique.
0:50:44 This is interesting.
0:50:50 And one of the episodes that we recorded around that time or maybe a little bit before was with
0:50:51 Tori Dunlap.
0:50:57 And it was one video, she said, one video went super viral.
0:51:01 And her funnel was like, take your money personality quiz.
0:51:02 I don’t know if it’s changed since then.
0:51:07 And one video was like, we had 100,000 subscribers in a week.
0:51:12 So maybe you can’t control going viral, but you can control what Tori did, was having the
0:51:18 ecosystem and like the lead capture funnel and process in place for when that viral moment
0:51:18 happens.
0:51:21 And so that was kind of what impressed me from our call.
0:51:21 Yeah.
0:51:23 I think she still has that quiz.
0:51:24 It’s actually, she does.
0:51:25 I just went to it.
0:51:30 1.16 million people have taken that quiz and all of them enter their email address.
0:51:31 So that’s wild.
0:51:31 Yeah.
0:51:34 So if you’re going to play the short form game, make sure you got something to lead
0:51:35 people back to.
0:51:37 That’s my, that’s my, that’s my takeaway.
0:51:40 Tori’s got an incredible business too.
0:51:42 Well, this has been awesome.
0:51:45 I don’t know how many we can count these up, but probably 10 or 12 different ideas here.
0:51:47 Anything else before we wrap?
0:51:48 No, I think that’s, that’s it.
0:51:50 I mean, I have a million of them on my site.
0:51:54 So if you want more, if anybody really wants more than that, you can go find it.
0:51:55 Absolutely.
0:51:57 Well, yeah, there’s growthinreverse.com.
0:51:59 There’s the Growth In Reverse podcast.
0:52:01 What’s next for you?
0:52:02 Where are you taking this thing?
0:52:07 Going to put out a course slash vault of these ideas here soon with some videos and step-by-step
0:52:11 of how to do each one, because people are telling me there’s too many question marks.
0:52:12 So I’m like, okay, fine, I’ll help.
0:52:13 Yeah.
0:52:16 It’s almost like a choose your own adventure kind of thing, or you need, you need the quiz
0:52:18 funnel to be like, well, which one works for me?
0:52:18 Totally.
0:52:19 I should put a quiz on there.
0:52:20 That’s a good idea.
0:52:25 So I think that’s the next thing, but I’m still just trying to wrap my head around 30
0:52:26 days of growth.
0:52:28 Well, stay tuned for the Growth In Reverse course.
0:52:30 We’ll be happy to link that up when it is live.
0:52:32 Growthinreverse.com.
0:52:34 In the meantime, Chanel, this has been great.
0:52:35 Thank you so much for stopping by.
0:52:39 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:52:40 Just try stuff.
0:52:41 Experiment.
0:52:42 Start somewhere.
0:52:46 We have all had those failed posts, like Nick was talking about with Dickie Bush.
0:52:50 Some things will get zero views, but some things might get 10 views, and those 10 people might
0:52:52 end up becoming raving fans of your newsletter.
0:52:55 So don’t look at the small numbers and think you’re failing.
0:52:56 Just keep going.
0:52:57 Yeah.
0:53:02 So we’ll always remember this talk from Cliff Ravenscraft at Podcast Movement, I want to
0:53:03 say 2016.
0:53:06 And a question from the audience comes in, well, I’ve been doing this for,
0:53:09 five months, and I only have 200 subscribers.
0:53:11 And he’s like, time out.
0:53:14 I want you to remove the word only from your vocabulary.
0:53:15 Look around this room.
0:53:21 There’s not 200 people in this room, but you’re still thinking like you have some unique advantages
0:53:21 here.
0:53:22 You know them by name.
0:53:26 You can know their exact pains and problems, something that a Tim Ferriss can’t do.
0:53:27 You’ve got a unique advantage here.
0:53:28 Don’t say only, right?
0:53:32 You’ve got 200 people paying attention to you, investing their time and energy, putting you
0:53:33 in their earbuds.
0:53:36 You’re doing something right if you’ve got 200 people to pay attention to.
0:53:40 So yeah, don’t sweat the small numbers and experiment with some different of these growth
0:53:41 tactics along the way.
0:53:45 Now, I wouldn’t be doing my job as a host in an episode about list building if I didn’t
0:53:49 have a listener bonus, a content upgrade for you.
0:53:54 So I built a list building cheat sheet with a couple dozen different ways to grow your email
0:53:54 list.
0:53:58 So you can pick and choose the tactics that appeal most to you along with some tools and
0:54:00 additional resources to help you do it.
0:54:03 You can grab that for free in the show notes for this episode.
0:54:05 Just follow the link in the episode description.
0:54:06 I’ll get you right over there.
0:54:08 Big thanks to Chanel for sharing her insight.
0:54:12 Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:54:17 The latest offers and deals from those sponsors are at SideHustleNation.com slash deals.
0:54:20 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:54:21 That is it for me.
0:54:23 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:54:26 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share with a friend.
0:54:30 So fire off that text message for somebody who needs a little kickstart in their list building
0:54:30 efforts.
0:54:33 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:54:36 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:03 Here’s one from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection Plus.
0:00:06 Stick around at the end for the real-time check-in with Jordan
0:00:10 to see how his business is doing four and a half years after this original recording.
0:00:13 What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here.
0:00:16 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because if you mind the nickels and dimes,
0:00:18 the dollars take care of themselves.
0:00:23 Hat tip to Ben Young for that one, an early mentor of mine in my house painting days.
0:00:29 This week’s Side Hustle is about minding probably not the nickels and dimes,
0:00:32 but definitely the quarters and about how those can add up
0:00:35 to some serious cash flow in a laundromat.
0:00:39 Owning a laundromat, I think, is one of these stereotypical side hustles
0:00:44 that have been around forever and yet here we are in episode 433
0:00:46 and we haven’t talked about this yet.
0:00:48 Simple, local, cash-flowing business.
0:00:53 I want to say this was one of the examples in the Rich Dad Poor Dad cash flow board game
0:00:57 where the object of the game is to escape the rat race
0:00:59 by buying or building cash-flowing assets.
0:01:01 Isn’t that the game we’re all playing?
0:01:02 Financial independence, right?
0:01:06 In any case, laundromats, definitely an interesting way to help you get there.
0:01:11 When Side Hustle Show listener Jordan Berry reached out about his experience
0:01:14 in the laundromat business, I was excited to learn more and share it with you.
0:01:18 Stick around in this one to hear why a laundromat makes a great side hustle
0:01:22 and investment vehicle, some expensive mistakes to avoid,
0:01:27 where to look for financing help, and some creative marketing and monetization ideas
0:01:31 to really accelerate your ROI and build equity at the same time.
0:01:35 Notes and links for this episode are at sidehustlenation.com slash laundry
0:01:39 and you can find Jordan at laundromatresource.com.
0:01:43 Jordan is a former pastor, now turned multi-laundromat owner,
0:01:45 but what made him think this was a great idea?
0:01:46 Ready?
0:01:47 Let’s do it.
0:01:54 It’s like, wow, that’s such a random direction in life.
0:01:55 And it is.
0:02:00 So when I decided to step aside from pastoral ministry vocationally,
0:02:04 we had a chunk of money, but I didn’t really have a plan on what to do.
0:02:11 And I developed a, what I thought was a genius plan, which is rent out our house that we owned
0:02:17 it here in Southern California and go buy a condo in Hawaii and live in Hawaii for a couple of years
0:02:21 on the beach. And then when our kids were school age, we could come back to Southern California,
0:02:27 net gain condo in Hawaii. And my wife come back to real life. It sounds like a good plan to me.
0:02:30 I still think it’s a great plan. But my wife, on the other hand, was like,
0:02:36 we should buy a laundromat. And thus begins the saga of the laundromat.
0:02:43 And kind of the thought process behind that was, which I think also is a genius idea. But the
0:02:49 thought process behind it was, you know, we wanted to put our money into something that would be
0:02:55 making money where we didn’t have to be there. And this was before I had heard of rich dad, poor dad,
0:03:01 or investing of any sort, really. I was, I was very naive. So this was a very novel idea
0:03:05 to me. And I was very intrigued by it. And it kind of sent me down this path.
0:03:09 Did your wife’s family have a background in running these things? Or she was just like,
0:03:12 this seems like a cashflow business. Let’s go try it.
0:03:18 Yeah, no, she heard of like, I guess, like a family friend who bought a laundromat,
0:03:27 and he quit his tech job up in Northern California. And that was very inspiring and intriguing.
0:03:33 And so that’s kind of how we were introduced to the concept. And we thought, man, if he could quit
0:03:39 his tech job, you know, and just run a laundromat, and he’s there, you know, five, 10 hours a week,
0:03:42 max. That sounds like what we want to do. Let’s do that.
0:03:49 Is there a typical ROI that these things sell for? Like what’s, I mean, you can think of a rental
0:03:55 house. And, you know, the market is very efficient, at least in certain areas, or at least it’s believed
0:04:00 to be and say, well, here’s the cap rate, or here’s kind of the, you know, cash on cash return I can
0:04:03 expect with rent. How are laundromats priced?
0:04:08 Yeah, well, I mean, I think that’s one of the things that makes laundromats, I think one of the
0:04:12 best businesses out there, which is kind of a funny thing to say, because, you know, it’s just a
0:04:16 laundromat, and you probably drive by them all the time and don’t notice them. But the way that
0:04:22 they’re valued is they’re valued based on net income. And they’re valued on a multiple of that
0:04:28 net income. And so the typical multiple is three and a half to five, somewhere in that range, you know,
0:04:34 depending on the condition and of the equipment and the business and the length of the lease and
0:04:40 stuff, but somewhere three to five times net income, which means your returns can easily be
0:04:49 over 20 and even over 30%. That’s unleveraged returns without any leverage. I mean, that’s
0:04:51 without borrowing money, without borrowing money at all.
0:04:57 But depending on the price of three to five times net income, it’s probably going to be a borrowing
0:05:03 money situation, depending on, you know, how much this thing is making is I imagine that could add up
0:05:09 quickly. It could be an expensive acquisition, but 20 to 30%. So for the comparison, you know,
0:05:12 if we look at traditional rental property, especially with the market, the way it is right
0:05:18 now, like if you’re doing 10, 12, 14%, you’re doing excellent there. So you’re doing a little bit
0:05:24 better here, but there’s, I mean, there’s maintenance involved. There’s equipment and maybe some other
0:05:29 stuff to consider. So your wife says, we’re going to buy a laundromat. The numbers look interesting.
0:05:35 They pencil out. You say, okay, let’s go for it. Like, how do you begin shopping for one?
0:05:38 I mean, that’s a really great question. It was something that we didn’t really know.
0:05:42 And we just kind of fumbled our way through it started probably where everybody starts online.
0:05:49 And we just Googled laundromats for sale near me and kind of chased laundromats for sale and started
0:05:54 trying to get ahold of brokers that were listing laundromats and try to find one that was relatively
0:05:58 close to us that, that we felt like we could make work. So that’s kind of where we started.
0:06:04 When you found that first one, what was the process like of kicking the proverbial tires?
0:06:10 It was kind of exciting, actually. And we had never owned a business. And so we, we got the sneak
0:06:18 peek into this business, but the one that we ended up buying was really run down. It was typical what you
0:06:23 think of when you think of a laundromat, you know, it was half the lights were out, half the machines
0:06:28 didn’t work. It was dingy. There were homeless people there, but we were getting in there and we
0:06:34 started opening up these machines and counting quarters. And I was like, man, this is pretty
0:06:39 interesting. Quarters add up pretty quick and you can make pretty good money with just a bunch of
0:06:45 quarters. So we got in there and we just started trying to figure out, you know, the trick to buying
0:06:52 a laundromat really is figuring out how much money it’s making, how much money it’s spending. And is it
0:06:57 going to continue to do that after you take over? And what can you do to improve the business? Right?
0:07:03 So we’re kind of asking ourselves those four questions going along the process in order to try to figure
0:07:08 out if this was going to be a good fit for us or not. And when someone has their business listed with
0:07:12 a brokerage, they’ve disclosed those financials, profit and loss.
0:07:19 Yeah. So those are seller reported. So the brokers relay that information. You know, one of the big
0:07:24 tricks to buying a laundromat is that they’re all cash businesses. So it can be very difficult to verify
0:07:29 those numbers, to pinpoint exactly how much money laundromats are making. It can be a little tricky. So
0:07:35 there’s lots of little tricks and techniques to try to get as much data as possible to get, you know, as close
0:07:38 of a guesstimate as possible, but it can be tricky.
0:07:42 Is there anything you can do to protect yourself? That’s interesting. Yeah. It’s an all cash business.
0:07:47 According to the IRS, it made very little, but according to the broker, hey, we’re making money
0:07:52 hand over fist. Yeah. And I always tell people too, like, and not all laundromat owners are like
0:07:58 this. And I think this kind of model of, you know, under-reporting to the government and over-reporting
0:08:03 to buyers is, you know, I think it’s going by the wayside because it’s just not a good way to do
0:08:08 business. But in the past, it’s been like that. And I always tell people, Hey, if an owner’s willing
0:08:12 to lie to the government about how much the laundromat’s making, they’re willing to lie to
0:08:18 you about it too. So you got to be very diligent if their taxes don’t match up with what they’re saying
0:08:24 the business is doing. So a few things to protect yourself is one of the things you want to do is do
0:08:29 coin collections during due diligence. After you make an offer and it’s accepted, you want to go in and
0:08:37 collect coins with the owners every week for a few weeks, three, four, five, six weeks, and just
0:08:44 kind of get a feel for how much money is coming in. And while you do that, you also simultaneously take a
0:08:50 water meter reading. So you can see how much water is being used and you can compare that to previous
0:08:57 water bills and how much money the owner says it’s making. Is that the biggest expense? Just electric and
0:09:04 water, electric, water, and gas, gas for the dryers. So yeah, utility bills are high with laundromats.
0:09:08 But I always tell people I’m willing to pay really high bills if I’m making a lot of money.
0:09:16 Yeah. Is there a rule of thumb for what a machine should bring in over the course of a week,
0:09:17 over the course of a month?
0:09:23 I mean, that really varies based on the size of the machine and the traffic in the store.
0:09:30 So laundromat performance is measured on turns per day. And that is basically an average of
0:09:36 how many times each day a machine is used. So I think the industry average is a little over
0:09:43 three turns per day, which means on average, each machine in the store is used a little over three
0:09:49 times a day. And so I tell people, if you run your numbers at, you know, somewhere between two and a half
0:09:56 turns per day or three turns per day, and you’re okay with those returns, then you probably have a
0:10:01 pretty safe bet. But if you need more than that to get the returns you’re looking for, you might want
0:10:04 to see either to lower the price or look for a new deal.
0:10:08 Okay. What does each turn cost the customer?
0:10:15 Man, that varies really widely. So there’s, there’s a lot of different types of and sizes of washing
0:10:20 machines. And depending on where you’re at in the country, also vending prices can be significantly
0:10:26 higher or lower, you know, prices usually range from like two to, you know, some of the really big
0:10:32 machines are, are 14 bucks a load, but they’re doing 80 pounds of laundry. So basically you just take
0:10:38 everything you own and throw it in one machine and get it all done at once. Yeah. The laundromat
0:10:43 industry is really evolving right now to bigger machines, more efficient machines. But with that
0:10:44 comes expenses.
0:10:51 With that comes expenses. Those machines typically stay with the building, with the sale of the business.
0:10:56 Right. Yeah. So generally when you purchase a laundromat, you’re purchasing the assets of the
0:11:01 business, which is, you know, typically the machines and things like the boiler, the changers,
0:11:07 the fixtures, you know, the infrastructure, the plumbing, the electrical, that’s typically what
0:11:11 you’re purchasing. Okay. So you can find a connect with a broker or, you know, Google
0:11:18 laundromats for sale near you. See if you can find some listings. And then you start this due diligence
0:11:24 process of looking at the books to the extent that they’re available, doing the in-person coin collection
0:11:28 with the owners, try and, you know, see for yourself, like what it’s bringing in, comparing the utility
0:11:31 statements. What came next in your case?
0:11:36 Oh, so, I mean, we ended up pulling the trigger on that first laundromat and it was rough, man.
0:11:43 It was a, it was a bad experience. Turned out the broker, we relied solely on the broker because I,
0:11:50 I just had a hard time finding good information about laundromats online. And so I relied pretty much
0:11:55 solely on the broker who, you know, sold me on a business that was never going to do,
0:12:01 it was never going to perform the way he said it was going to perform. And it was a rough area.
0:12:09 And so, you know, we ended up losing a lot of money for a long time before we were able to
0:12:13 kind of pull ourselves out of that situation. And it was, it was hard.
0:12:19 Yeah. Here we are today. And you, despite this not great first experience, you went and bought another,
0:12:25 maybe lessons learned and you’ve become the advocate. You’re like the laundromatresource.com
0:12:25 guy.
0:12:32 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I figured I paid a lot of money and a lot of emotional
0:12:38 stress and trauma for these lessons. So I decided to put them to work. And so we did buy another one
0:12:43 and we got some land with it, which was nice. And then, you know, I just started thinking about it and
0:12:47 I was like, nobody should have to learn the lessons that I learned the way that I learned
0:12:53 them. So if I can just help anybody out to get into this business, cause there are some gotchas,
0:12:58 it is a cash business. There are ways that people can take advantage of you if you’re new.
0:13:05 And so, you know, I wanted to kind of help get good information out there to really help. Cause I
0:13:09 really believe in this business and in this business model, and it can really propel you to financial
0:13:16 freedom very quickly. If you get in it right, if you get in it wrong, it can take a really long time
0:13:22 to dig yourself out. And so I really want to help people get into it the correct way. So that’s kind
0:13:25 of why I started laundromat resource and the podcast.
0:13:30 And do you have a horror story or two from that first purchase? I’m just curious,
0:13:34 like what mistakes should people be looking for? What mistakes should people avoid?
0:13:40 So number one, I always say never rely, this seems obvious probably, but it wasn’t to me,
0:13:46 but never rely on the person whose income depends on you buying anything really, but a laundromat,
0:13:51 like a broker, he’s not making money unless you buy that laundromat. Don’t rely solely on them.
0:13:56 Even if they’re a great person, there is a conflict of interest there to a degree. And so I always say,
0:14:02 Hey, have somebody else who’s experienced in the industry, whose income doesn’t depend on you buying
0:14:08 the laundromat, who can help you navigate the waters, who can help you look for red flags,
0:14:12 help you figure out what questions you need to ask, what data you need to collect.
0:14:19 That was a huge one, huge lesson that I learned that I think is probably important in any business,
0:14:21 but especially in, in laundromat business.
0:14:27 Are you typically assuming the lease on the building or is the building part of it? I mean,
0:14:31 most of them I’m thinking of like kind of in a strip mall. So I assume that’s a lease situation.
0:14:37 Obviously you can go either way with that. I do lease one and I own the property with one,
0:14:44 but you’re typically either assuming the lease or you are negotiating a new lease during the transfer
0:14:50 process. And you know, the lease is critical. And that’s another kind of big mistake to avoid is if
0:14:59 you get a bad lease, either too short, too expensive or bad terms, it’s really difficult to move a laundromat.
0:15:05 So if your lease runs out and the landlord decides they don’t want to re-up you or they want to really
0:15:10 jack up the rents, you’re in a lot of trouble because it’s very difficult to move a laundromat.
0:15:17 So you want a good, solid, long-term lease. And so if the current owner doesn’t have that many years
0:15:20 left, you know, you probably want to negotiate a new lease.
0:15:25 So I found one, I’m on bizbuysel.com. I found this wasn’t super close to me,
0:15:33 but this is kind of out in the Central Valley in series. Asking price, 189,000. EBITDA, what’s that?
0:15:37 Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation. I don’t know what it stands for.
0:15:39 Basically the net operating income, but yeah.
0:15:46 Net operating income is estimated at 70, call it 77,000. So it’s trading at a little under two and a
0:15:53 half times that, at least the asking price. It says the lease is assumable. Doesn’t say when the
0:15:58 lease expires, oh, new lease to be negotiated by owner of real estate. Okay. So that, that may be
0:16:03 a potential red flag. It looks pretty nice. So at least like from the pictures, it looks like there’s
0:16:08 cars in the parking lot. It doesn’t look to be totally abandoned. Like some of the strip malls
0:16:11 nearby, the flooring could do some work, but like the machines and stuff look like they’re in decent
0:16:18 shape. Yeah. So on a deal like that, that new lease is really going to determine the actual NOI,
0:16:24 you know, because most likely if that lease is coming up, that’s a really old lease and the
0:16:31 lease price is probably significantly lower than market value. So that’s going to eat into that NOI,
0:16:38 which is probably why it’s valued at around two and a half times the NOI, because the real NOI is
0:16:43 probably going to be lower after the new lease is put in place. That would be my guess.
0:16:50 Okay. Is there such thing as laundromat financing or just, you know, a small business loan to try and
0:16:55 cashflow this rather than waiting the three years to break even if you’re buying it with cash?
0:17:00 Yeah, absolutely. And I, I mean, I’m a big proponent of using financing to purchase a business
0:17:09 and allowing the business to pay for itself. And so there’s, you can get SBA loans for laundromats,
0:17:15 but only under very specific situations. So what I always recommend is talk to a couple of laundromat
0:17:23 specific lenders and they not only know the business and can let you know what you need to get in place
0:17:28 to get a laundromat, but their interests are aligned with yours. They want you to succeed. They don’t want
0:17:33 you to buy a laundromat, you know, that’s not going to make money because they’re less likely to get paid.
0:17:38 So they’re on your side. So you get to leverage their experience, their knowledge and their money
0:17:41 when you work with a laundromat specific lender.
0:17:43 How do you recommend finding that person?
0:17:50 Um, I have a couple that I work with that are great. I mean, you can Google laundromat financing
0:17:56 and find laundromat lenders out there. There’s a couple of really big companies,
0:18:03 Eastern funding and Alliance funding are both some of the big ones out there, but there’s others too.
0:18:09 If you buy this thing with financing and it pencils out the way you expected it to,
0:18:16 is there a projected cash flow that you’re shooting for on a monthly basis?
0:18:22 Um, yeah, I mean, it really depends on your situation. If you’re using a lot of leverage,
0:18:28 obviously your cashflow is going to be less, but your cash on cash return might be pretty high.
0:18:36 So, you know, for example, on this deal, you know, call it a $200,000 laundromat. If you put say
0:18:44 $30,000 in and you finance the rest, you could pretty easily, if the NOI was really 75 grand and after
0:18:51 your loan, you know, you could net 25 or $30,000, which is a hundred percent, you know, ROI,
0:18:53 uh, cash on cash. Okay.
0:18:59 Yeah. So it really depends on your situation because there are laundromats that are sell for well over a
0:19:05 million bucks. And obviously your cashflow is going to be a lot higher for that laundromat than one that
0:19:06 you buy for 50 grand.
0:19:13 Okay. Yeah. It makes me want to stop by some of these ones in town and see if they would be
0:19:17 interested in selling. I don’t know. Does that conversation come up or if people have kind of
0:19:24 the systems in place? And I will say on this listing in series, it says that the existing owner reason for
0:19:29 selling retiring. And so, I mean, is that the reason people would get out of it? Like, Hey, this is going
0:19:34 to be my, it’s going to be my retirement nest egg rather than building up a portfolio of rental
0:19:39 properties. I’m just going to build an equity in, in this business and then cash out on retirement.
0:19:44 Yeah. I mean, retirement is one of the big reasons people get out, which I think is probably a good
0:19:50 sign for the industry, you know, cause once people are in, if you’re spending five, maybe 10 hours,
0:19:54 I mean, at that point you’re probably not spending 10, but you know, five or 10 hours a week,
0:19:59 you know, and you’re cash flowing enough to sustain you. That’s pretty tough to give up.
0:20:05 So retirement is one of the big reasons. There are other reasons also, but I always encourage people,
0:20:10 if you’re interested in buying a laundromat, start stopping in to laundromats and talking to owners
0:20:16 and asking them if they’re willing to sell. I’ve definitely had deals come across my desk that way,
0:20:22 just from stopping in and talking to laundromat owners, also direct mail campaign, similar to real
0:20:27 estate. You can find laundromats for sale that way too. There’s a host of reasons people might want
0:20:31 to get out. And so if you catch them at the right time, you could find yourself a good deal.
0:20:35 Okay. Right. Same thing with houses, right? Like once you go on the MLS, it becomes a little more
0:20:41 efficient, but if you can find somebody pre brokerage, maybe there’s a deal to strike there.
0:20:48 It’s interesting because it seems like, it seems like to be a very fragmented industry. And by that,
0:20:54 I mean, there’s no dominant, like regional or national player, there’s no like 1-800-got-junk
0:21:00 for the laundromat industry. It’s like, they all seem to be, you know, maybe mom and pop style
0:21:03 businesses. I don’t know. Do you find that to be true?
0:21:08 Yeah, I think that that’s true. And it’ll be interesting to see if that remains to be true.
0:21:14 I think one of the big barriers to like a big brand or even like a franchise model has been,
0:21:20 you know, just the logistics of running that many laundromats, you know, so many laundromats have
0:21:27 been coin operated and just the logistics of going to different locations and collecting coins every
0:21:33 week. And it’s just made it very difficult. But, you know, now there’s a lot of technology where there’s
0:21:39 card payment systems where, you know, you’re not really even dealing with coins at all and in some
0:21:45 of the newer laundromats. And so it’s much easier to manage. I had a guy on my podcast, he lives in
0:21:50 Italy and he owns a laundromat in Florida. And, you know, so you can kind of manage them from anywhere
0:21:57 in the world if you set them up right now. Yeah. But it is a mom and pop industry by and large now,
0:22:03 and that makes it an inefficient market, which means you can find good deals in the market right
0:22:08 now. So if you catch somebody at the right time in the right situation, you can get a good buy.
0:22:13 I’ll be right back with Jordan, including more on this remote management possibility,
0:22:19 some tax advantages to know about in the actions Jordan took to turn around his first laundromat
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0:24:38 I am interested in this remote management aspect. Talk to me about the day-to-day
0:24:44 responsibilities. You know, how much time are you spending on site at these places? A room full of
0:24:49 vending machines in a way, like, do you need somebody to be there or is it just, it would be weird to
0:24:54 unlock the doors and then just have a free-for-all? Yeah. Well, there’s a couple of different business
0:25:01 models and one is the doors unlock on their own in the morning and it’s kind of a free-for-all.
0:25:08 It’s called an unintended laundromat and basically you put a automatic door locks on and they open and
0:25:16 close on their own and you do typically need somebody to come in at least once a day to, you know,
0:25:22 clean up, you know, laundromats tend to get pretty messy pretty fast. A lot of people are coming in and
0:25:28 out. So you either have somebody come in for a couple hours to just wipe down the machines and
0:25:35 sweep and mop and clean out the lint traps, take out the trash. Or the other model is an attended
0:25:40 model where you have somebody there all day who’s keeping things clean all day and who’s helping
0:25:47 customers. And maybe they have some other responsibilities also like manning a store or if
0:25:52 there’s a service component of the business, like a drop-off laundry service or pickup and delivery
0:25:54 service. Maybe they’re doing something with that too.
0:25:58 Okay. So yeah, if you’re hiring for that role, that obviously eats into your cashflow. And so you have
0:26:04 to find out as you’re buying, is that already baked in? Like, is that manager going to stay? Like trying
0:26:09 to figure out, well, if the owner was doing that all themselves and the net was 75 grand, like that,
0:26:12 that becomes a different equation if you weren’t planning on buying yourself a job.
0:26:19 Right. And I always tell people in that situation, I would just add in the expenses for an employee and
0:26:24 base the value off of that number, not the number that they gave you where they were doing all the
0:26:25 work.
0:26:31 Gotcha. Yeah. It was in Japan, which probably isn’t surprising where it was the unattended model.
0:26:37 Yeah. It was just walk in, here’s a bank of machines and you just do it all yourself. You don’t talk to
0:26:43 anybody. And it’s just very much, uh, very technological. It felt, okay. So there’s some
0:26:47 management, especially in the coins, like you got to deal with collecting the coins, taking them to the
0:26:51 bank, making sure you have change. Sorry. I want to go back to the financing thing. Like anything else
0:26:57 you’ve seen work on the creative financing side, uh, to fund this purchase.
0:27:03 Yeah. I mean, one of the huge benefits of laundromats, I think, and I myself, I have laundromats,
0:27:09 but I also have real estate. I love real estate investing, but you know, the average cashflow for
0:27:16 laundromat is greater than real estate, but also the coveted seller financing deal that everybody seems to be
0:27:22 looking for in real estate is pretty common actually in laundromats. And the reason for that is because
0:27:29 they can be a little more difficult to fund, especially if the owner hasn’t kept great records
0:27:37 and, you know, has mismatching profit and loss sheets and taxes, um, or just can’t demonstrate
0:27:45 the income. Then they typically have to fund at least some of the purchase price. So seller financing
0:27:51 is a big financing source in laundromats. And also speaking of real estate, a lot of times
0:27:56 real estate investors ears perk up when I tell them I have laundromats and kind of talk to them about,
0:28:03 Hey, you know, a 20% return laundromat is a base hit. You know, if you want a home run, you can
0:28:10 anything over 50% is a home run in my book and their ears perk up. And so finding money partners,
0:28:16 if you can bring the knowledge and the time investment, finding the financial investment
0:28:21 is easier, I think, than even finding one for real estate purchases.
0:28:27 And what’s kind of cool is that you have the ability to evaluate the current state of the
0:28:34 business. And maybe it is this guy who’s nearing retirement and they haven’t optimized it to the
0:28:41 full extent that they could. So I think you have this physical space where people are hanging out for
0:28:46 an hour, two hours doing their laundry. Like there’s other things you can put in there. Like I’ve seen some
0:28:50 with, you know, they had the ATMs and they got vending machines and there’s all sorts of stuff.
0:28:54 Can you speak a little bit to anything that you’ve done or you’ve seen other people do to
0:28:58 increase the cashflow from an existing business?
0:29:03 This is what really drove me to reach out to you and say, Hey, you’ve got to talk about this on your
0:29:09 podcast because not only is a laundromat a great side hustle, but it’s kind of the ultimate side
0:29:11 hustle because it has side hustles within the side hustle.
0:29:19 Yeah, exactly. Side hustle inception. That’s I like that because there are a ton of different
0:29:25 revenue sources you can integrate within your laundromat. And obviously, you know, your washers
0:29:30 and dryers are going to be your main source of income. But like you mentioned, ATM machines,
0:29:39 video games, gumball machines, toy machines, claw machines, massage chairs, water stations,
0:29:44 adding services like a wash dry fold service or a pickup and delivery service.
0:29:51 There’s just a host of things. In fact, on my website, I have like a bunch of a list of a
0:29:55 bunch of different value add opportunities for a laundromat.
0:30:00 Yeah. The cool thing here is like, yeah, if you can add 500 bucks, a thousand dollars a month
0:30:06 in cashflow, you just added, I don’t even know, 40 grand in equity to the business.
0:30:12 Yeah. So every dollar of net income you add to your business is going to add three and a
0:30:18 half to five dollars of equity. And that’s how wealth is built, right? You got to have good cash
0:30:22 flow. You got to build up your equity and you got to maximize your tax advantages. If you can do those
0:30:28 three things, I call that the wealth tripod. If you can do those three things, then you can build wealth
0:30:30 very quickly that way.
0:30:33 All right. Well, talk to me about the tax front. That’s something we haven’t touched on yet.
0:30:39 Yeah. And you know, obvious caveat, I’m not a, you know, a tax advisor or a CPA or anything, but
0:30:46 you get typical business perks for having a laundromat. So you can pay your expenses before
0:30:52 you claim it as income when you own a business. Instead of when we have a job, we get paid and
0:30:58 then we pay our taxes and then we pay our expenses. And when you have a business, you get paid, you pay
0:31:04 your expenses and then you pay your taxes on what’s left over. So that’s a huge perk in and of itself.
0:31:11 But also you have all this equipment and this equipment can be depreciated. You know, the rules
0:31:18 vary depending on what’s going on with tax laws at the moment, but depreciating the equipment basically
0:31:26 means the equipment loses value in the IRS’s eyes and you get to deduct that off of your income.
0:31:30 So it’s as if you didn’t get that income, but you still get to keep that income.
0:31:37 Okay. With the idea being that eventually it’s going to have to be replaced. Well, then you can
0:31:39 write that off as a capital expense.
0:31:43 Right. Yeah. So there’s, I mean, it’s similar to real estate. Real estate works
0:31:49 in a similar way, but having a business that’s based off of physical asset like that
0:31:53 allows you to take advantage of that tax perk.
0:31:58 Okay. So if you, if you buy a machine for, I have no idea what these things cost $3,000,
0:32:03 let’s say. So, so you can either write that off all at once in the year of purchase, if you have
0:32:09 the income to do that, yes. Or you can take this depreciation over time. Is that,
0:32:10 am I understanding that right?
0:32:12 Right. Yeah, exactly.
0:32:15 Okay. Is there an advantage to doing one or the other?
0:32:20 There are advantages. And I think it depends on your financial situation. Some years, like if you
0:32:26 know, for example, down the line, you’re going to have a big windfall and, you know, this year,
0:32:30 for example, you know, your income is going to be a modest income, but next year you’re going to get a
0:32:36 lot more money. You may want to try to defer some of those write-offs to when you’re going to have
0:32:43 more income so you can depreciate it against that income. So I mean, I would recommend talking to a
0:32:49 CPA because it can get real complicated real fast, but you know, the general idea is there are tax
0:32:51 benefits also to owning laundromats.
0:32:58 Okay. So you’ve got the equipment depreciation. If you’ve got a lease, you’re not paying any mortgage
0:33:03 interest, but you are able to deduct your lease payment. Any other interesting deductions here?
0:33:08 I think those are the big ones. If you buy it with the real estate, for example, my second one that
0:33:14 I bought with the real estate, you get to take depreciation on that real estate also. And commercial
0:33:21 real estate has some really great accelerated deductions that you can take to, again, talk to
0:33:30 your CPA about it, but that’s another perk. And right now there’s actually an awesome SBA 504 loan that’s
0:33:38 allowing you to purchase real estate. I think it’s with 10% down right now. And so when you’re picking
0:33:42 up a business like a laundromat, and if you can get the real estate also, you can get that real estate with
0:33:49 very little money down. And so using your business to acquire the real estate and to pay down the real
0:33:52 estate, again, is a huge way to accelerate your wealth building.
0:33:57 Jordan, tell me about, you know, some of the actions that you took to turn around this first
0:34:02 purchase that you didn’t want. You don’t want other people to be in the same boat. Like what did it take
0:34:06 to take this from like, I think we’ve made a horrible mistake to like, okay, this is tolerable.
0:34:11 Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a great question. It took me a really long time to kind of figure it
0:34:19 out. But one of the things I realized eventually is I’m in a situation where obviously I didn’t expect to
0:34:23 be in that situation. I expected to be in a situation where I was making money and I was
0:34:29 actually losing money. And that felt like a punch in the gut. And kind of my options at that point
0:34:37 were either to just sell it and get out, cut my losses and get out, or to double down and put
0:34:43 more effort into it. Even though I was getting into it, hoping for it to be more passive. It
0:34:49 actually, I ended up having to ramp up my involvement in it. And so some of the things
0:34:55 that I did was one, I put in new equipment and that’s a big deal. You know, when people come to
0:35:00 your laundromat and it’s like playing the slot machines, when you put your quarters in, is the
0:35:06 machine going to work or is it not going to work? You lose customers really fast that way. And having new
0:35:14 machines not only helps you retain those customers, it attracts new customers, utility bills go down.
0:35:19 So your expenses go down because they’re more efficient machines. You can charge higher vend
0:35:27 prices because they’re new machines and customers will pay a premium for that. And so that was one
0:35:33 big thing. Another thing was, I think I had a little bit of the field of dreams mentality. If you build it,
0:35:39 they will come and put in new machines and everything and kind of expected people to just walk through the
0:35:46 door. And some did, but not enough. And so I ended up having to figure out creative ways to get people
0:35:53 in the door. So whether that was through, you know, digital advertising on Google and on Facebook,
0:36:00 putting up banners and stickers in the windows, running promotions, and also just getting to know
0:36:05 customers and getting to know the community a little bit, which actually is the best part of owning a
0:36:06 laundromat, by the way.
0:36:09 What else works on the marketing front? This is interesting to say, okay,
0:36:16 you’re clearly getting your laundry done somewhere else today. I want to conquest that market share and
0:36:18 have you come over to see me instead.
0:36:24 That’s one of the big tricks. If you’re buying a laundromat, hoping to, you know, fix it up and
0:36:29 improve businesses, you’re really in the business of changing people’s habits, right? Because people
0:36:35 have a habit of doing their laundry some other way, whether it’s in their apartment complex at a
0:36:41 different laundromat, uh, at their home, wherever they’re doing it, they have a habit of doing it
0:36:50 somewhere else. And I really have kind of developed a marketing strategy that’s working really well for
0:36:57 my consulting clients right now. And the premise of it is that it takes three visits for a customer to
0:37:02 come to your laundromat. And after they’ve come three times, they’re basically statistically speaking,
0:37:09 they’re basically your customer at that point. So I tell people when you open a new laundromat or you
0:37:14 retool your store, put a new equipment and stuff, you know, step one is do something dramatic to get
0:37:21 people in the door the first time. And so whether that’s, Hey, give free washes. There’s a guy here
0:37:27 in Southern California, when he opens a new store, he does free washes for a month, which costs them a
0:37:33 lot of money. But as you can imagine, a lot of people are coming to his laundromat that month. Um,
0:37:38 and he can easily rack up three visits in a month. And now those are his customers. He’s built a lot of
0:37:44 goodwill, but do something dramatic. Step one to get customers in. So that’s free washes. Um,
0:37:51 another popular strategy is like, if you have a card store, a card system, payment system, you can do
0:37:56 like double your money. So put 20 bucks on, we’ll add 20 bucks ourselves, whatever you do, do something
0:38:04 dramatic to get people in. Step two is once they come in that first time, your only goal is to get them
0:38:09 to come back the second time. And so whatever promotion or marketing thing you do to get them
0:38:15 back the second time, do that. And then your goal, the second time is to get them to come back the third
0:38:21 time. And after you’ve done that, then they’ve become your customer and you just have to keep your value
0:38:27 proposition high. At that point, keep your store clean, keep the machines working and keep smiles on
0:38:33 your, on your staff’s face. And you got lifelong customers. Yeah. I really liked that element of this,
0:38:37 where, yeah, people, it’s like lawn mowing. Well, the grass is going to keep growing. You know,
0:38:41 you’re going to keep needing the service over and over again. The clothes are going to keep getting
0:38:46 dirty. So I do like that aspect of it. I like that it’s self-service. Like we joke about this every time
0:38:51 we go up to Brentwood for the you pick cherries. It’s like, we’re paying for the cherries and we’re
0:38:55 doing the labor. Like this is a genius business model. And you say, you know, smiles on your staff’s
0:39:02 faces. Like, is it typically just, you know, that operator, cleaner, assistant, helper person who is
0:39:07 there during the day, like during the hours, or was there multiple people that kind of on staff at any
0:39:12 given time? Yeah. Well, I would say for probably for most laundromats, there’s usually one person
0:39:19 there at a time, if anybody, but some of the bigger stores have multiple employees working there. And
0:39:26 especially if they have a big drop-off laundry service or pickup and delivery, you know, I have
0:39:30 friends who have 40 plus employees with their laundromats and their services.
0:39:36 Well, Jordan, what’s next for you? Are you on the hunt for more of these you want to add to your
0:39:42 empire or what’s, what’s the future hold? Yeah, I have kind of two fronts I’m working on here.
0:39:49 In terms of laundromats, I am on the hunt. In fact, I just brought together, you know, one of the cool
0:39:54 things about having a podcast and maybe you’ve experienced this too, is you meet some people who are just
0:40:01 incredible at particularly people who are incredible at things that I’m not incredible at. And so I’ve
0:40:07 put together a little team and we’re actually putting together an investment group to go out and buy
0:40:12 laundromats and real estate. You know, we just believe in this business so much and we know it,
0:40:18 we’ve done the hard work and we’ve learned the expensive lessons and we’re going out and we all
0:40:25 have some of our own, but we’re all going to go get some more. So buy in more and larger laundromats and
0:40:32 some commercial real estate on that front. And then on the laundromat resource front, you know, just
0:40:40 providing more and more opportunities, not just for people to learn about the industry and to be able to
0:40:47 get into it the right way, but also, you know, more and more opportunities for people who know this business to be
0:40:54 able to share what they know and share their wealth of knowledge. And so trying to be a platform where people can do
0:40:54 that.
0:40:59 Were there other laundromat podcasts when you started or were you trailblazing there?
0:41:06 There was one other, um, a man named Ken Barrett, who’s a great advocate for the industry and has
0:41:12 had a, I think it was the laundromat how to podcast. Um, he’s since stopped that one. There’s been a couple
0:41:19 more that have popped up since I think with just the success of, of my podcast, surprising success,
0:41:20 honestly.
0:41:21 Now, why do you say that?
0:41:27 Well, I mean, it’s a laundromat podcast. Like, I don’t know, like people are interested in it and my,
0:41:33 my podcast is interesting compared to the other ones that are out there mostly because I do long
0:41:39 form interviews with owners and I ask them questions about their business and about their
0:41:44 experience and try to pull out their lessons they’ve learned and their wisdom and get advice from them
0:41:49 for the listeners. Um, and I think people are just really responding to hearing people’s stories
0:41:54 and learning from them, but you know, it is a laundromat podcast. So it’s just kind of surprising
0:41:59 how many people listen to it. That’s awesome, man. Well, there you have it. The laundromat
0:42:04 resource.com. Check Jordan out at the laundromat resource podcast. Like you said, it’s a laundromat
0:42:10 podcast. It delivers what it promises. And you’ve got me interested in this business as an investment
0:42:18 for the passive cashflow for the ROI. Definitely an interesting one as a way to, you know, put either
0:42:23 some existing assets to work, put some sweat equity to work and, uh, see what else is out
0:42:28 there for that. So Jordan, thanks again for joining me. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one
0:42:34 tip for side hustle nation. This does not have to be laundromat related, um, but can be just whatever
0:42:41 entrepreneurial wisdom you’d like to impart. Yeah. I think one of the big lessons I learned was when you
0:42:45 work with the best people and whatever it is that you’re doing, when you work with the best people,
0:42:50 you end up becoming one of the best people work with the best, become the best. And that’s on,
0:42:56 you know, both people who are, you know, maybe like for laundromat, for example, brokers or distributors
0:43:01 helping you buy equipment. When you work with the best, they’re going to help you become the best.
0:43:07 And also, you know, on the employee front, when you hire the best people, they’re going to help you
0:43:13 propel your business forward and become the best. So work with the best, become the best.
0:43:17 I like it. That’s a new one. So thank you for sharing that. Jordan, again, thanks for joining
0:43:20 us and we’ll catch up with you soon. Appreciate it, Nick.
0:43:29 Definitely an interesting option to take a look at from an investment perspective,
0:43:35 a cashflow perspective, a potential way to buy yourself an income stream that replaces your day
0:43:41 job. But like Jordan said, do your diligence, do your homework, look for inefficiencies, look for
0:43:47 opportunities to improve operations. And I think the same strategies apply to buying an online business
0:43:53 as to buying an offline one. One of the most popular episodes of the show is my chat with Stacey Caprio
0:44:00 on buying up small-ish online businesses eventually enough to replace her salary. But it’s not without
0:44:04 risk. In fact, I think her first couple purchases didn’t turn out that well, if I’m remembering
0:44:10 correctly. But I mean, you’re not going to find 20 to 30% ROI’s anywhere without risk. In any case,
0:44:16 that was episode 323. If you want to go back into the archives and check that one out. Notes and links
0:44:22 for this episode are at sidehustlenation.com slash laundry. And before we go, would you like more
0:44:28 money-making ideas? That’s what my weekly newsletter is all about. 75,000 people are already
0:44:33 getting it and I would love to send it to you as well. You can join for free at sidehustlenation.com
0:44:39 slash join or through the link in the episode description of your podcast player app. You’ll
0:44:44 also get access to hundreds of members-only goodies and bonus files that I’ve created over the years,
0:44:49 including any future ones that I end up building for upcoming episodes. Once again,
0:44:54 that’s at sidehustlenation.com slash join. We’re about to jump in the time machine to get a real-time
0:44:59 look at where Jordan’s business is today, what ended up happening with that investment pool and the
0:45:03 current state of the laundromat industry. But first, let’s take a quick break to thank our sponsors.
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0:45:50 to use platform. Ready to get started? Head over to brevo.com slash sidehustle. That’s B-R-E-V-O
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0:46:09 marketing starts. For such an important channel like phone, the software powering this important
0:46:14 channel was super outdated and clunky. We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for
0:46:20 businesses to connect with their customers, so do voice and text. That’s Darina Kulia, co-founder of
0:46:26 our sponsor, OpenPhone. Trusted by more than 60,000 customers, this is the number one business phone
0:46:30 system that streamlines and scales your customer communications. I like to think of it like a
0:46:36 centralized hub to receive and respond to calls and texts in your business. And I asked Darina
0:46:42 about who’s typically signing up for this kind of service. We definitely have a lot of folks who come
0:46:49 to us and their personal cell phone has become their company phone number, and they’ve hired a team or
0:46:54 they’re starting to scale their business, and they just find themselves as a business owner, as a founder,
0:47:01 being the bottleneck. So we see that all the time. And then we also see folks much further along where
0:47:08 they’re using some legacy complicated tools that are just not really made for how communication happens
0:47:15 these days. We also just recently launched Sona, which is our voice AI agent that can handle any missed
0:47:21 calls. If you have clients calling outside of business hours, instead of them going to voicemail,
0:47:29 it can go into Sona, which is capable to handle any replies and can also take a message. So you are
0:47:30 capturing that lead information.
0:47:36 And it’s like, and it’s a robot, like it responds like on the fly with some pre-programmed responses.
0:47:40 It does such a great job. This way they can handle questions 24-7.
0:47:46 Now here’s a scenario for you. So let’s say I’ve committed to a certain business phone number,
0:47:52 I’ve distributed flyers, it’s printed on my business cards, it is on my local business listings,
0:47:58 on directories throughout the internet. Like what’s the process to now have that ring open phone system
0:47:59 versus the current system?
0:48:06 Totally. So we see this all the time. This process is called phone number porting. We port numbers from
0:48:12 all kinds of carriers. So basically no matter what provider you’re using, we can take that number and
0:48:17 move it over to open phone. It is free. We handle the whole thing. And if you want to try out open
0:48:22 phone, we have a free trial. You can try it out, see how you like it. And if you like it, you can then
0:48:26 decide to port your existing number over and we handle the whole process.
0:48:31 Now open phone has automatic AI call summaries, so you don’t have to worry about taking notes while
0:48:37 you’re on the call. But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging, basically allowing
0:48:44 you to quickly filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a
0:48:49 discount. So you can review those and see what worked, what didn’t and train team members on the most
0:48:55 effective tactics and language in those cases. And it’s all in the name of building a better, faster and
0:49:00 friendlier customer experience. I want all open phone customers to have five stars only.
0:49:05 Right now, open phone is offering side hustle show listeners 20% off your first six months at
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0:49:32 All right, we just got out of the time machine. It is mid 2025. It is four and a half years since
0:49:38 we last caught up with Jordan. So give me the rundown. What’s the current state of your laundromat empire
0:49:39 here?
0:49:45 Oh, so between partnerships and my own kind of laundromats, I’m at five right now.
0:49:50 Okay. But more coming down the pipeline for sure. We’ve got a couple more that are probably going
0:49:56 to close here within the next few months. Yeah. So you ended up starting what you called kind of an
0:50:01 investor pool, like almost like a syndication. It sounds like where we’re going to go out and try
0:50:08 and find bigger, better laundromats and, and put an operator in place and try and do it more passively
0:50:11 than showing up and collecting quarters yourself.
0:50:19 The biggest hurdle for that was actually finding deals and finding enough capacity, enough deals
0:50:22 in order to put that money to work.
0:50:27 Because of the podcast, because of your reputation in the industry, the raising money problem wasn’t,
0:50:31 wasn’t an issue. It was like the deal flow or the inventory.
0:50:35 Yeah, the deal flow. And so, you know, we, we tried a whole bunch of different things, including,
0:50:40 you know, trying to buy larger portfolios. There just aren’t that many of them and they don’t come
0:50:46 up for sale that often, which is, is a good and a bad thing, right? It’s a bad thing because it’s
0:50:52 hard to find those portfolio deals to deploy that larger amount of capital all at once. But the good
0:50:58 news of it is it’s like a witness to how good the business can be and how you can run a larger
0:51:04 portfolio relatively passively. So ran into a lot of obstacles and ended up shifting gears on that.
0:51:11 However, since we last talked, a lot more has kind of happened in the industry that is making it more
0:51:16 possible. So actually that dream is being revived because there’s some new tools and resources available
0:51:22 now that weren’t available even just four years ago to help us be able to do that. Not only acquire
0:51:28 those laundromats, but also, or build, but also to manage those laundromats much more effectively.
0:51:33 It’s become a kind of a buzzworthy thing. Laundromats, storage facilities, car washes,
0:51:39 people trying to get in the space. Has that made it more difficult to shop for, to find deals,
0:51:44 to there’s, there’s more, there’s more competition. There’s more buyers out there than there,
0:51:49 than there were. Thanks in part to your content, to the Cody Sanchez of the world. There’s,
0:51:51 it’s become a, it’s become a thing.
0:51:56 Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And not just, not just for me or my investment group or anything like that. I
0:52:02 mean, just like a lot of my consulting clients are just, they’re having problems. Fine. There’s a lot
0:52:06 more buyer demand than there are sellers right now. Yeah. Again, which is sort of a good thing and a bad
0:52:11 thing, right? It just, it shows how strong the industry is and how strong the business is. But when
0:52:17 you’re trying to buy them, it’s tough. Is there a certain multiple where you’re like, this doesn’t make
0:52:21 sense. Like I’ve been on the other side of it. I know there’s going to be some problems and headaches
0:52:27 and challenges. And it’s like, at a certain point, I got to go find something, something else to invest
0:52:33 in. We’ve definitely seen the multiples creep up. I think we talked maybe three to five times the net
0:52:39 for the multiple in terms of valuation. Now we’re looking at four and a half to five and a half in
0:52:44 most markets and in the larger markets, you’re starting at five, even for the kind of rundown
0:52:50 laundromats. And is there a multiple, I mean, it really depends on your goals of what you’re
0:52:53 trying to do. Yeah. And you couple that with higher interest rates and all of a sudden that
0:52:59 higher operating costs, utility costs have gone up, labor’s gone up. I mean, everything’s kind of gone
0:53:04 up. Rents have gone up. Does it still pencil? Like, are you still excited about it as a potential
0:53:07 side hustle or is it like, ah, I don’t know. It’s maybe that ship has sailed.
0:53:13 It’s, it’s still pencils. There’s just so much margin in there. And, and even still at a five X
0:53:18 multiple all cash, you’re still getting a 20% return on your investment. And then obviously
0:53:23 if you throw leverage on it, that number can go up from there. So yeah, even, even at a higher
0:53:29 valuation, you’re still doing pretty well and that’s assuming no growth of the business, et cetera. So
0:53:34 it definitely still pencils. The major hurdle right now is actually persevering long enough
0:53:38 to actually find that deal. Any strategies that you’re, that you’re working or you’re comfortable
0:53:42 sharing on the shopping side or deal sourcing side. We talked about some of the
0:53:48 biz buy sell type of brokerages or types of marketplaces. We talked about knocking on doors,
0:53:54 driving for dollars. We talked about some direct mail strategies. Anything else you see in work for
0:53:56 yourself or your coaching clients?
0:54:01 All those things are still important to do. Looking for those brokers, doing direct mail,
0:54:05 doing some door knocking. You got to get a little more creative, maybe check in Facebook marketplace,
0:54:13 Craigslist type stuff. Working with distributors who sell equipment, maybe checking with maintenance
0:54:19 technicians who service laundromats. And cause they’re the ones who are going to know when the owners are
0:54:26 frustrated and ready to sell first. Okay. Okay. Right. And then work, work all the different angles. Yeah. Yeah. The main
0:54:36 strategy here is increased volume, like of as much as you, I mean, I get it. Like we, most of us have like jobs and we
0:54:44 have lives and we have families and friends and things to do, but as much volume of direct mail, of cold calling, of
0:54:51 talking to broker, like as much volume as you can do, that’s going to give you a higher success rate or chances
0:54:54 of success in a timely fashion.
0:54:59 One big shift. And it looks like, I mean, you’re joining me from Hawaii instead of SoCal where the laundromats
0:55:03 are. So that seems like a big, a big shift in remote management.
0:55:09 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you listen to the first one, like the original goal was to get a house on the
0:55:13 beach in Hawaii or a condo on the beach in Hawaii. And we ended up with a little detour, a little side
0:55:19 here we are a decade later. And finally, you know, across the street from the beach over here,
0:55:24 which is pretty sweet. I maybe have even, even talked about how like for decades, this industry
0:55:30 has not changed, has not developed technologically. We’re behind the times. However, in the last four
0:55:35 years, we’ve made some pretty big strides. I wouldn’t say that we’re, you know, on the cutting
0:55:40 edge or anything yet, but made some pretty big strides in terms of technology, payment systems,
0:55:47 operating software management opportunities to be able to manage remotely. That has been
0:55:54 a game changer. And I would say probably that in combination of an elevated presence in social
0:56:01 media has been the main thing that has brought kind of more savvy, more sophisticated entrepreneurs
0:56:07 and investors. And we’re even starting to see some private equity money trying to creep into the space
0:56:16 now. I think in large part is because the awareness has been elevated, but right at the time when the
0:56:22 ability to manage remotely, to be able to manage a larger portfolio, to be able to get the data that
0:56:28 you need to be able to make good business decisions is now it’s here. Finally, it’s in the palm of our
0:56:29 hands. So we can utilize that now.
0:56:37 Yeah. So one driver would be like a cashless payment system. So you can kind of manage or
0:56:43 you get a sense of performance remotely without having to log in. And we’ve heard about this in
0:56:47 like vending machines, for example, I have to go by the machine to see what’s out of stock because
0:56:54 it tells me on the app what’s going to be needed. And imagine you can do similar things here without
0:57:00 having to be on site all the time. It sounds like maybe the building itself can be mostly unattended.
0:57:05 You have somebody come in and clean it up, take care of it once a day, check on things, but not
0:57:08 not on site 24 seven.
0:57:13 Yeah. Well, and what’s interesting too, is over the last, I’d say four years, maybe this is,
0:57:18 this is already happening four years ago, but we’ve seen it kind of accelerate is there’s a sort
0:57:25 of bifurcation in the industry happening where you’ve got a lot more tools to remote manage and
0:57:31 automate a lot of things, like you said, and you have less of a need for somebody to be there, but also
0:57:39 you’ve got these full service laundry centers that are developing here where they’re fully staffed all
0:57:47 times. They’re open long hours. They highly focus on customer service. They offer drop-off service.
0:57:54 They do pick up and delivery out of their locations and they, they become sort of a one-stop
0:58:00 shop for all things laundry, dry cleaning, all that stuff. Right. And we’re seeing a lot more of
0:58:06 those. It’s leading to larger locations. It’s leading to higher revenues, but obviously a lot more
0:58:13 involved. Yeah. Yeah. At least initially until you can get management in place and get that machine
0:58:18 running from you, but I’ve got some buddies who are operating some of these big super centers and
0:58:25 just as passive as, you know, the person running the, the unattended stores.
0:58:30 Yeah. It’s funny. One of the most, probably the most popular book that’s been recommended on the
0:58:37 show in the last 12 to 18 months is buy back your time by Dan Martell and I’m working my way through
0:58:42 it. But common examples, like I really don’t, doing laundry doesn’t really light me up. You know,
0:58:47 don’t really check that box of where, where’s my zone of genius. And so more and more people
0:58:53 perhaps are shifting towards outsourcing this chore. And we’ve seen services, there’s a couple
0:58:58 kind of like Uber for laundry where it’s like, um, Poplin is one. I think there’s another one called
0:59:03 Hamper or maybe they emerged or something, but it’s like, and, and from the side hustle perspective,
0:59:06 it’s like, Oh, if you are the person who likes doing laundry, you can get paid to do other people’s
0:59:12 laundry. Have you seen kind of that shift where more and more, it’s not just the people who don’t
0:59:18 have a washer and dryer in their house, in their apartment. It’s the people who were like, I just
0:59:23 want to deal with this anymore. Like you hire, hire this out. Yeah. We S we’ve seen a huge explosion
0:59:29 of that. Uh, and that, that side of the industry, that service side, the drop-off laundry, where you
0:59:35 drop it off the location or the pickup and delivery is grown by leaps and bounds. Uh, and I, I genuinely
0:59:41 think that laundry is going to become the next yard work. Like where, where I live, people aren’t really
0:59:49 mowing their lawns. Uh, and I think as, as people learn that I can just drop my dirty laundry on my
0:59:54 front porch and somebody will come grab it. And the laundry fairy brings it back clean and folded,
0:59:59 uh, for me that I just think more and more people are going to opt for that. Speaking of buy back your
1:00:05 time, right? Like who wants to be doing laundry half the day on Saturday? Uh, nobody, right? Well,
1:00:10 it’s not, there are some weirdos that love laundry. Uh, I’ll just say that, uh, love doing laundry.
1:00:15 I don’t know. I’m in charge of the laundry in our house and it’s like, it’s not, it’s not something I
1:00:19 dread doing. I mean, the machine does most of the work and then you’re going to forget it. It’s an
1:00:24 excuse to, you know, listen to a podcast or watch some Netflix or something, but it’s not the end of
1:00:29 the world. But I could see if from, from the side hustle perspective, like, yeah, the acquisition
1:00:35 side has become more competitive here, but also the upside and the, and the pie has maybe gotten a
1:00:40 little bit bigger as well on the, on the demand of who’s using this type of service. Yeah. And we’re
1:00:46 actually seeing a lot more people come in solely on the service side, or at least initially on the
1:00:51 service side, right? So a lot of people are starting pickup and delivery businesses in their
1:00:57 communities before owning or without owning a laundromat, right? And they’ll just process the
1:01:02 laundry at a laundromat or they’ll build some, something out in their garage or in a shed out
1:01:09 back or lots of different ways people are doing it. But I’m seeing a lot more people, uh, doing that
1:01:14 and doing it as a side hustle kind of before and after work. The beauty of the service side of the
1:01:20 business is really the sky’s the limit on, on what you can do on a physical location. You’re
1:01:25 limited by your capacity of how much business you can do, but on the pickup and delivery side,
1:01:29 Scott, I mean, you can process overnight, you can go to multiple locations, you can go to other
1:01:33 people’s locations and process it. There’s lots of options there. Yeah. Yeah. That’s an, I mean,
1:01:38 that’s what these kind of startup peer-to-peer laundry type of services are essentially doing.
1:01:44 If we can build a distributed army of contractors, laundry contractors, and we can go out and serve
1:01:51 tons and tons of clients. Yeah. Anything else, uh, trend wise or in the personal portfolio that
1:01:57 is interesting of note, uh, over the last few years? I’m seeing a consolidation right now starting
1:02:04 to happen. There’s fewer owners owning larger portfolios. This has been traditionally a mom
1:02:09 and pop industry, right? Like it’s not rocket science. It’s just laundry. And yeah, that’s something
1:02:14 we talked about. It was super, super fragmented. Yeah. And it still is. I mean, it’s still by and
1:02:20 large is, however, there are more people getting more aggressive about building or buying laundromats
1:02:24 and building private equity rollups. They’re coming, coming for you. They’re coming. And I think with
1:02:32 that comes multiples that start to go up, uh, even more. Um, it wouldn’t surprise me if down the line,
1:02:37 we start seeing 10 X multipliers in the business. Yeah. All right. Well, now, now’s the time to get
1:02:43 in. If you find one for sale in your hometown, you can find Jordan again at laundromat resource.com
1:02:50 hosting the laundromat resource podcast. Any other advice before we wrap? If you can persevere enough
1:02:57 and actually find those deals, the rewards are still there for you. And, uh, in some ways that barrier is,
1:03:04 is a, is a good thing. Uh, cause it does weed out a lot of competition. Um, so persevere there and then
1:03:08 don’t go it alone. Uh, you know, lots of free resources out there. Lots of people out there
1:03:13 help you like with any side hustle or any investment that you’re doing. Um, just save yourself the
1:03:20 headache and, and, uh, borrow somebody else’s 10,000 hours. Uh, absolutely start off on the right foot.
1:03:24 Very good. Jordan, thanks so much for sharing your insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping
1:03:29 make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit upside hustle nation.com slash deals for
1:03:34 all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for
1:03:38 tuning in until next time. Let’s go out there and make something happen. And I’ll catch you in
1:03:41 the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on.

0:00:04 A listener reached out and said, you got to get this woman on the show. She’s got a really
0:00:08 creative resale business, actually getting inventory donated for free, and then applying
0:00:14 some really savvy branding and marketing to build what she calls a sustainable soft toy
0:00:21 adoption agency. She’s saving the planet one teddy at a time from lovedbefore.london,
0:00:23 Charlotte Liebling. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:27 Thank you very much, Nick. It’s lovely, lovely to be here.
0:00:31 I’m excited for this one. This is a big deal. Your kid outgrows their stuffies. There’s probably
0:00:36 50 or more in the next room over there. They’re still in okay condition, most of them,
0:00:41 and a lot of donation places won’t accept them. Parents, at a certain point, want them out of the
0:00:46 house, so they end up in the landfill. I got to get rid of them some way. I can’t donate them.
0:00:53 So you come in with loved before and say, there’s got to be a better way. With over 10,000 sales now,
0:00:58 adoptions now, beautiful branding, retail partnerships. We’ll get into all of that.
0:01:03 But it started as a side hustle. You’re working full-time. You say, there’s got to be another
0:01:04 alternative path here.
0:01:12 Yeah, that’s exactly it. I was actually volunteering in a charity shop at the time, and I started to
0:01:19 notice just how many donations people were bringing in of stuffed animals and often what a really big and
0:01:23 sentimental and emotional moment it was for them. But as you say, the process, as it was,
0:01:29 is these charity shops are really overwhelmed. Thrift stores, charity shops, op shops, same thing.
0:01:34 And they were going straight out the back and into the bin, unfortunately, or they were just
0:01:41 sold as dog toys. And the memories that they came with and the love and stories were just thrown away
0:01:45 in that moment. And that really struck me. I kind of went from there, really.
0:01:49 Yeah. So you say, well, what if we could re-home these? What if we could turn this,
0:01:55 what is now, unfortunately, going to be garbage into, give it a new life? And so what are some
0:01:56 of the first steps here?
0:02:01 Well, the actual first step in that moment was for me to go home and understand that that was a
0:02:07 wider problem than just one that I was seeing in this specific shop. So I jumped straight onto Google
0:02:13 that night and was kind of frantically searching, is this a widespread problem? And what does this look
0:02:18 like on a global level? And I remember the walls were kind of covered in scribbles and crazy post-it
0:02:24 notes and like mad scientist vibes. I kind of had this brainwave of, all right, well, if we can change
0:02:29 the perceptions of them becoming rubbish and losing their value once loved, then maybe we can make a
0:02:36 real difference in the industry. And that’s kind of where I went from there, really. And I think I
0:02:44 started with the most nothing, nothing you can have, apart from maybe a very supportive mum and dad and
0:02:50 boyfriend who were kind of cheering me on. But, you know, I had sort of the five pounds in my bank
0:02:56 account that I had at the time. And I was thinking, okay, well, how do I turn that into 10? And how do I
0:03:02 turn that 10 into 100? And, you know, piece by piece, build up something here. But I would say what we
0:03:10 actually started with was a community. And so before I sold anything, before I presented any kind of
0:03:17 product or service, I put something out into the world via social media to validate that other people
0:03:22 would connect with this and this would resonate with them. So yeah, I started with the community side.
0:03:26 Was there any social following? This is just on your personal accounts at this point?
0:03:31 I set up a whole new account for this. And fundamentally, what it was, was me and my little
0:03:39 one bedroom flat with a few teddy bears, just starting to talk about some of the things that
0:03:44 were going through my brain and sharing some of their adventures and that kind of thing. So it was
0:03:50 separate from my personal account because I wanted to. I think there’s a lot of value in building
0:03:57 something almost secretly from the people around you. You want to know that this is validated beyond
0:04:04 your circle of friends who will, you know, support everything you do. And it has to have legs and
0:04:06 those legs must be built in the real world.
0:04:10 Okay. So do you have an example of what those first few posts said or looked like?
0:04:17 Yeah, it was stuff like, because I guess there’s a few elements of the concept or the proposition that
0:04:24 needed testing. It was around, do people so feel as emotionally attached to stuffed animals and
0:04:30 would people or are people looking for other ways to give them up or donate them that don’t involve
0:04:36 them going in the bin? And so I guess I was introducing some toys as having character and
0:04:42 talking about their name and what they love and personifying them and bringing them to life in a way
0:04:48 to understand whether that was the kind of thing that, you know, would at all resonate and whether
0:04:55 I was just this crazy teddy bear lady on one corner of the planet. And that’s all it was.
0:04:57 But it turns out I wasn’t.
0:05:02 Yeah, other people did resonate with this story and have it a big way since then. This is at
0:05:07 lovebefore underscore London, almost 150,000 followers on Instagram at this point. But starting
0:05:12 out with a brand new account from scratch, anything that you did to boost the post or get more eyeballs
0:05:12 on it?
0:05:19 To be honest, we don’t put any spend into marketing. It’s about storytelling, finding different and
0:05:26 creative ways to emotionally not just tell people what you’re selling and what they can buy from you,
0:05:33 telling them stories, whether that’s the stories of the brand or the founding of the business and all
0:05:38 the background. When someone comes across your profile, they should feel like they have just
0:05:46 met their new best friend. You know, you have to go beyond selling into the kind of depths of
0:05:51 human connection. And I think that for us has been the key.
0:05:57 For your initial inventory, do you go back to that charity shop where you’re volunteering at? Or do
0:06:02 you kind of put the call out on these social channels to say, if you have a used teddy bear,
0:06:08 somebody that is ready for their next adventure, we’ll take it off your hands?
0:06:15 At the very, very start, I piloted this in a small way with the charity shop that I had been working in.
0:06:21 And they, you know, gave us some of the inventory and I found they’ve accompanied them to a couple of
0:06:26 market stalls and that kind of thing. And then I said to you, okay, well, this is, this has got legs and this
0:06:33 is something I really want to develop as a sole entity. And so kind of parted from them and then was left in this
0:06:40 strange position where I’ve had just nothing. I remember that very clearly as a time where I would spend my
0:06:47 evenings, putting leaflets through doors of my local neighbourhood, you know, telling people that they
0:06:54 could come and drop stuff off. I spent my days, you know, with friends walking around charity shops,
0:07:01 pitching to them and saying that if you’ve got anything you’re throwing in the bin, then redirect it to me,
0:07:07 I’ll come and connect on a Saturday, as well as the social media side too. But yes, it was very much a
0:07:14 case of knocking on doors. But there was a turning point with that, I’ll be honest. It was probably
0:07:21 during COVID, people were looking for feel good and connection and warm and fuzzy. And that led a lot
0:07:28 of people naturally to our doorstep. And I think that was also a time where we really started to see,
0:07:37 I’m going to use the word avalanche of donations. And instead of me knocking on doors, you know,
0:07:40 the post for knocking on my door several times a day.
0:07:47 Right. So word starts to spread through this local marketing, handing out leaflets and just knocking on
0:07:50 doors at the existing charities. Look, look, if you’re going to toss it, give it to me, it said,
0:07:55 or I’ll come by and pick it up. As you start to collect some initial inventory, what happens after that?
0:08:00 A big moment of validation was sometimes you could see the amount that people were paying
0:08:06 in terms of postage to send, you know, sometimes, or before we could accept donations internally,
0:08:14 for example, within the US, someone would readily send a box containing one or two stuffed animals
0:08:20 that cost them $150, $200 to send to us just because they cared so much about what happened
0:08:26 to it next. So I guess it really gave me a kind of strength of validation in that period. Quite quickly,
0:08:34 we started to work our way up Google. So if you type in, you know, donate soft toys or donate teddy
0:08:40 bears, for example, we are the first result on the first page, you know, of most of those search terms.
0:08:47 And we have been for a long time. And I think we worked hard on that. And it was our kind of first
0:08:53 introduction to SEO and starting to understand that. But yeah, you know, there was a particular
0:08:59 day where I remember opening the door and physically not being able to walk out of my front door because
0:09:05 of this wall of boxes. And that was really particularly difficult because we shared a hallway with our
0:09:12 neighbor, who I hope isn’t listening to this because I’m sure he absolutely hates me. But yeah,
0:09:17 he could also not get out of his door and it became a bit of a regular thing. And it was kind of funny,
0:09:20 but also not so funny.
0:09:25 So now you’ve got a wall of stuffed animals that have showed up on your doorstep. How do you even
0:09:31 begin the process of cleaning these up and crafting a story around each one of these? Like it seems,
0:09:35 I solved the first problem. I got some inventory for free. Great. Now I got to go and sell it.
0:09:40 Yes. The reality of this business is from day one, it’s been a big old journey of
0:09:46 trial and error. This isn’t a business where you order something from China and then you see if it
0:09:51 works and you order it a thousand more times. Each product needs to be very individually processed
0:09:57 and loved back to life in a lot of scenarios. And it’s been a case of working out how you do that to one
0:10:02 and then how you do that to 10 and then how sure that, you know, over the same duration,
0:10:07 you do it to a hundred and then a thousand. It was quite literally opening boxes,
0:10:13 understanding all the sizes and shapes and, you know, conditions that those toys came in
0:10:20 and practicing. Yeah. Loving them back to life and, you know, failing at that a hundred times
0:10:23 before making any success for that.
0:10:27 Is it as simple as throwing it in the laundry machine?
0:10:28 I wish.
0:10:33 I love the branding on love before where you call it like the spa day where you show the
0:10:37 little teddy bear getting like scrubbed and like a lovingly, you know, it’s got a little
0:10:40 bathrobe on, I think in one of the pictures. And it’s just like, that’s great.
0:10:47 Yeah. This is something that is a bit of a weird tension with a business like this where,
0:10:54 you know, they do go through the spa and we do like live a lot of that branding and value,
0:10:57 but you know, there is that business side of like, if you’re trying to scale,
0:11:01 you can’t give each of them a bubble bath with cucumber over their eyes.
0:11:10 So we’ve had to very much work out what that balance is and how it’s so far from just being
0:11:15 able to throw them in a machine. But at the same time, you have to find cleaning methods
0:11:19 that are robust enough that you don’t know where these toys have come from. And you have to assume
0:11:24 the worst with every single one that you pick up. This is one of the areas where I think I’m often
0:11:28 most guarded because it is a bit of a secret sauce and we’ve worked so hard on it.
0:11:32 You’ve got me curious on like, well, what other categories? Like if I roll up to the local
0:11:37 thrift shops and donation shops, like, well, is there a different category of goods where they’re
0:11:42 like, yeah, we just can’t take this or it’s more trouble than it’s worth for us. But if you want it,
0:11:45 sure, you know, take it off our hands. I’m wondering if there’s any other categories because
0:11:50 it’s so creative. I was going to ask, is there a first sale moment where you’re like, okay,
0:11:54 I managed to flip one of these or I managed to sell one of these. Was it through social?
0:11:59 Was it through the website? Like take me back to the, the first revenue here.
0:12:06 Yeah. I actually don’t remember the first online sale, but I do remember there was one particular
0:12:15 sale and I think it was just so powerful in, in how much it went for. It was a, an event. There’s
0:12:24 like a, this kind of festival and I set up a stool there and it was cash only. And a few of the toys I
0:12:28 had there were just normal ones. You had, you know, builder bears and stuff like that.
0:12:34 It were going for, you know, 10 to 20 pounds, that kind of thing. And there was a couple of really,
0:12:39 really special bears I’d had there. And this was at a point, I feel like now I have a built-in
0:12:43 valuation tool in my brain, but this is at a point where I certainly didn’t. And so I’d had some help
0:12:49 in valuing these toys. And there was one there that was valued for somewhere between 350 and 400
0:12:54 pounds. And I thought it was beautiful and really, really special, but I certainly didn’t,
0:13:00 you know, expect that anyone else would, especially for that price tag. And it was the first one to go.
0:13:05 Yeah. And just in context, to translate it to dollars, we’re talking like 450 to $500 for a
0:13:06 stuffed bear.
0:13:13 Yeah. So it would be over 500. And yeah, someone whipped out their purse or there was their wallet,
0:13:22 actually, and took out all of that cash and handed it over. And I think I was in such disbelief. You
0:13:26 know, this wasn’t a collector’s fair. This wasn’t that kind of audience, but this person had been so
0:13:33 deeply struck by the concept and was so in love with this object and the item and the story it came with,
0:13:40 that they were more than happy to part with that cash. And so, yeah, that was a really special moment
0:13:46 in just, again, making me realize, okay, this has legs and other people get it and other people believe
0:13:46 in it.
0:13:49 Yeah. There’s something to it where something, this was going to get tossed. This was going to get
0:13:54 thrown away. And now all of a sudden with the right branding and positioning and story behind it,
0:14:00 it’s worth 400 pounds. More with Charlotte in just a moment, including how she landed partnerships
0:14:06 with brick and mortar luxury retailers and the surprising operational challenges of scaling this
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0:16:31 Did you continue doing like those types of almost like a pop-up event where you show up, you know,
0:16:35 at a festival at a something else where there’s going to be a crowd of people and kind of set up shop? Is
0:16:43 that the early days of the sales side? I would say so. I think putting together a website and working out how to
0:16:49 do that was one thing that I was trying to do from the start but involved a lot of kind of
0:16:53 complexity. Obviously, each product needs to be individually photographed and things like that.
0:17:00 So going to the odd event felt like an easy touch way to start making sales and start circulating the
0:17:06 brand. I have distinct memories, you know, of totally alone, carting around a little trolley containing,
0:17:13 you know, 20 bears in this packaging. Actually, I used to hand make, this sounds so strange,
0:17:20 I couldn’t afford to buy cardboard boxes to put them in or packaging to put them in. So I used to buy
0:17:27 pieces of card and I’d hand cut out the frame of a box and make the box myself. So I used to cart
0:17:37 that all around to little, yeah, little fairs, summer fairs or school fairs even and just stand and I think
0:17:48 that as an entrepreneur, when you’re starting out, you have to dig so deep, you know, when no one else believes in
0:17:53 you or what you’re doing, you see a box among both selfless people. But, you know, people are
0:17:58 walking past and you have to dig so deep in those moments to put yourself out there and start to
0:18:03 convince other people. There’s a reason to believe in what you’re standing out with, you know.
0:18:07 Yeah, and it’s super valuable. Get the one-on-one customer interactions, what they like, what they
0:18:10 don’t like, what resonates. What are the factors that make somebody pull out their wallet and say,
0:18:11 yeah, I’ll take one?
0:18:18 It’s funny because people connect with love before and with the products, you know, and the concept on
0:18:25 such different levels. Sometimes it will be that they walk past a toy and that the name or the story
0:18:31 is something that resonates with some aspect of their life. And that will pull someone in. It could be
0:18:38 that the storytelling itself is what’s bringing someone or the, the kind of initial tag that it’s
0:18:43 something sustainable. It’s something circular. And when they dig further, they really kind of
0:18:49 fall in love with that element. I learned very early on that the packaging was such a huge part of
0:18:55 that storytelling and in that like value signaling as well. The fact that these toys were sitting there
0:19:00 with a little handwritten bio and they had their own little box with a cushion in and, you know,
0:19:07 just bringing them to life in that way again really is, is what sets it apart from a toy that’s in a
0:19:09 a box at a charity shop.
0:19:13 Yeah. They’re super cute. And you’ve given them all individual names and written a quick
0:19:16 background bio on them.
0:19:19 Yeah. And often that’s supplied by the previous owner as well.
0:19:24 Oh, okay. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. I was going to say, if you just plug it into AI
0:19:28 and have them come up with all these, like, you know, heartwarming stories, it’s like, no,
0:19:31 it’s got to be authentic, but it needs it because otherwise it’s like, okay, you’re selling a used teddy
0:19:36 bear. Like, okay, gross. You know, that’s probably the reaction. It’s like it needs to be
0:19:38 like elevated in, uh, in the way that you’re doing it.
0:19:45 Yeah. That’s exactly it. Like these toys that have been loved, there’s this big, you know,
0:19:50 misconception that they’re losing their value. Whereas actually, if you can physically signal,
0:19:55 you know, through the packaging and through the storytelling that, that they’re so much more
0:20:00 valuable through the stories they come with. And that totally changes the perceptions. Um, but yeah,
0:20:05 often they come, you know, with their story fully written with little anecdotes about them or memory
0:20:09 shared with them, et cetera, which is always lovely. Yeah. I’m going to give an example.
0:20:14 This is a little teddy bear called Tumbles. It says Tumbles isn’t sure how her feet got so big,
0:20:19 but she’s decided to make the most of them great for dancing, stopping in puddles, or simply being
0:20:25 noticed. She’s looking for a home where clumsy is just another word for adorable, right? 25 pounds.
0:20:31 And so I want to ask about like, how you think about pricing in margins here, where it’s like most
0:20:36 on the website, I’m seeing mostly like kind of in the 15 to 25, 30 pound range, uh, you know,
0:20:42 call it 20 to $40. Is that a typical, uh, typical price per, per item?
0:20:48 Our kind of most popular price points are between like 16 to 25 pounds. You know,
0:20:53 obviously that differs, for example, if they’re in Selfridges or, um, so, you know,
0:20:58 different retailers that we’re with now, it can be different, but I’d say online on our own
0:21:03 DTC platform. Yeah. 15 to 25 ish is, is, is kind of standard.
0:21:09 Okay. How about in the retail shops? I want to talk about how those retail partnerships came to be
0:21:14 to set up a, it looks like a semi-permanent display at Selfridges, at Bloomingdale’s,
0:21:16 get some of these, you know, higher end stores.
0:21:22 It’s funny really, because it’s still quite surreal that we’re actually in those places. Um,
0:21:28 when I started this business, I said, you know, the ultimate goal, I can’t remember what the
0:21:32 question was asked that made me say this, but you know, or something along the lines of how will you
0:21:41 know when you’ve made it? And I said, if we can get these toys from rubbish, like literal rubbish to
0:21:45 being sold in the world’s most luxury stores, then I’ve made it.
0:21:50 Yeah. It’s a big gap. And it’s, it’s like, well, it happened. That’s crazy.
0:21:59 It happened. So with Selfridges, what happened is, is I wrote them an email. I found an email on their
0:22:06 website and I followed that email, you know, being very insistent that they wanted to hear from me.
0:22:12 And I followed that and followed that until I found a contact and then they put me in touch with the
0:22:18 right place. And then I said, you know, I didn’t waste much time kind of going back and forth in terms
0:22:25 of like an email chain. I said, look, let’s have a call and let me tell you about me and love before
0:22:32 and why I think you’re going to want to hear this. And so they said, yeah, okay. And we jumped on a call
0:22:39 and I kind of pitched love before and I told the story and I’d done a lot of researching and understanding
0:22:45 their own goals, especially around sustainability and where they were going as a business. And I aligned
0:22:50 it quite specifically with all of that. We started with a pop-up and we did a pop-up in their London
0:22:58 store over Christmas to kind of prove ourselves, I guess. And when we did that, they offered us a
0:23:03 permanent space in their Trafford and their Birmingham stores. And then not long after that,
0:23:08 they offered us London. So Selfridges only have four stores in the UK and we’re permanent spots in
0:23:09 three of them now.
0:23:13 Yeah. So, so cold outreach, you’re like, if you don’t ask, the answer is always no,
0:23:18 but trying to find a decision maker on the, on the buyer side or the merchandising side,
0:23:23 especially with, with brick and mortar retails, like we only have a finite amount of floor space
0:23:28 and we got to think about how it’s going to turn and how it’s going to position our brand. It’s like,
0:23:32 well, we’re not known for selling used teddy bears. So how are we going to, how are we going to make
0:23:36 sure this is in alignment with what we want to do? But the research, Hey, we, you know,
0:23:40 we know you have these sustainability goals. We feel like this is in alignment and here,
0:23:44 we’re not asking for a permanent placement right out of the gate, but let us test it out with a
0:23:47 little pop-up over the holidays. We’ll see, we’ll see how the, the shoppers react.
0:23:52 Totally. Let us prove what we can do. And I think another big selling point was
0:23:58 the fact that we, I’ve done all the design from day one of anything of all the packaging,
0:24:03 the space design, anything kind of creative. We weren’t asking anything of them. We were saying,
0:24:08 we’ll do the storytelling. We’ll design the space. We know how to do this. We,
0:24:12 we know what your variables and how we can fit in with that. So I think coming with that full
0:24:19 package made a little difference. But from that point, I’ll be really honest as we do some outreach
0:24:26 and, you know, we track leads and stuff outside, but actually people were on our doors. You know,
0:24:31 bloomingdales came to us. Oh, that’s interesting. I was going to ask if it was similar,
0:24:34 like a cold outreach to bloomingdales, but they found you.
0:24:42 Yes. And I would be silly not to think that selfridges are an incredible sales opportunity
0:24:46 for us and the traffic and the footfall that they have is incredible. And the sales
0:24:54 are absolutely great. But more than anything else, they are marketing and, you know, many of the buyers
0:25:00 or the people that have the other stores we’re now stocked in found us because they walked through
0:25:06 selfridges just on a shopping trip or with their child and they were pulled into our space and they
0:25:12 started reading about it and they went from there. So I think we owe a lot to that kind of first win.
0:25:14 Yeah. It’s like leveraging some, uh, some social proof.
0:25:20 Very much. So we’ve had a friend of mine, Harry was running the vertical farming podcast. He’s
0:25:25 trying to get guests like CEOs of vertical farming companies. And it’s like in my first email, it’s
0:25:29 like, Hey, I’m reaching out to, you know, well-known name, number one, well-known name, number two,
0:25:32 and so on. And then as soon as he booked them, he’d replaced that language with, Hey,
0:25:36 I’ve already booked calls with well-known name, number one. It’s like, okay, how do we keep this
0:25:38 virtuous circle spinning?
0:25:43 That’s exactly it. You need one foot in somewhere and the rest will follow.
0:25:48 So very good. As a percentage of the pie chart, like these retail placements versus online sales,
0:25:53 versus social versus pop-ups, like how does the revenue part break down now?
0:25:58 It can vary massively. And I think we’re in a moment of real growth on the retail side where
0:26:05 we’re bringing in lots and lots of new retailers, but it generally tends to be quite 50, 50. And so from
0:26:13 our own kind of D to C side versus the through retailer. And I think that it, it kind of always
0:26:20 has been because as we’ve grown our capabilities to fulfill larger orders for retailers, so have we
0:26:26 scaled our capability to put more on our online drops. And therefore they’ve kind of grown quite
0:26:28 nicely in parallel together.
0:26:33 Is that how you structure where we’re going to batch, spa treatment, a bunch of new donations,
0:26:37 and then do a drop versus like, we’ll put them up Wednesday, Tuesday, as we photograph them,
0:26:39 as we get them available?
0:26:45 Yeah. So we have always done drops. It’s kind of always been the mechanism against which we’ve
0:26:53 worked at the start. Those drops were of, you know, 10 to 15 bears, and now it’s 150 plus weekly. In
0:27:01 terms of our processes, it makes sense, but also actually driving the, the exclusivity and the
0:27:05 limited availability is a really powerful tool. I think on e-commerce particularly.
0:27:09 Well, plus there’s built in scarcity. It was like, there’s only one tumbles. And it’s like,
0:27:11 if you want it, he’s going to be gone.
0:27:18 And it’s very competitive. Like we, we have some real, you know, like genuinely very upset people
0:27:23 sometimes at drop time, you know, people will sit on the website as it leads up to 8pm and they’ll be
0:27:27 waiting. And if they miss out on someone they’ve had their eye on, you know, through our previews or
0:27:33 whatever, that causes genuine upset. It sounds like I’m laughing. I’m not, I find it really upsetting,
0:27:37 but that’s a really powerful thing. And it’s to, to drive that traffic that,
0:27:42 you know, is going to be there each week and to be able to track that data and watch it grow and
0:27:46 change and fluctuate, you know, throughout the year and the seasons is also really powerful.
0:27:52 And then those, the, the anticipation is primarily built through the social channels or through email
0:27:55 or like, how are you getting people pumped up for the next drop?
0:28:01 Yeah. So it’s largely socials. And we do in the kind of 24 hours ish leading up to the drop,
0:28:07 we’ll start to preview them. We put things on our stories. We do posts, we introduce a couple of the
0:28:15 stories. We use the kind of Instagram little forecasting families to give teasers. We certainly
0:28:25 do have, I think, about 40,000 subscribers to our email. And we certainly remind them of the drop and
0:28:30 give them a bit of a teaser in that too. So I would say it’s predominantly socials.
0:28:34 Was there a specific revenue target or milestone and maybe it’s getting into these, you know,
0:28:39 retail shops where you felt comfortable saying this could be a full-time thing. Like I’m going
0:28:44 all in on love before. Well, people are actually quite shocked to find out, but I actually do still
0:28:46 have another job as well. Oh, I didn’t realize that.
0:28:55 Yeah. So in true side hustle form, I started love before on the Sunday and I started an internship
0:29:00 internship at what is now my other job on the Monday. And so they have grown in parallel
0:29:06 together and fed into each other from day one. Wow. So yeah. If you ever find yourself saying,
0:29:09 well, there’s not enough hours in the day. Well, look at what Charlotte’s doing over here.
0:29:14 Yeah. It’s, it’s been a wild ride when one job has ended, the other has started. I think people
0:29:21 find it quite strange, including my own team, which is of about 15 people now that I work somewhere
0:29:26 else. But when you’re starting from absolutely nothing, you have no freedom. You have to grow
0:29:32 that freedom and we’ve never taken on investment. So I kind of consider myself my own investor,
0:29:36 you know, my, my fiance, he works full-time for the business. He manages the team and
0:29:45 people find it quite strange for sure. But yeah, I think you have to make sacrifices of all kinds as
0:29:51 an entrepreneur and investments beyond financial. And for me, it’s just been one of them so far.
0:29:55 More with Charlotte in just a moment, including growing the team, how she actually has people
0:30:01 volunteering to come work for her and some of the tools and tech she uses to manage it all coming up
0:30:07 right after this. One strategy I didn’t fully embrace or maybe wasn’t fully aware of when I was
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0:33:50 Who was the first team member or the first couple roles that you brought on help for?
0:33:56 One was my now fiancé. So my partner’s name is Alex. We’ve been together for coming up 14 years.
0:33:58 So since I was 15 and he was 16.
0:34:00 Similar story over here. No, that’s great.
0:34:01 Oh, really?
0:34:02 High school sweethearts.
0:34:07 Oh, I love that. Well, I mean, there was a point in our lives where, you know, he’d come home from
0:34:11 work, I’d come home from work, and then I’d spend the whole night sitting on the living room floor,
0:34:16 packing orders for this strange little business that was just like in my own head at the time. And I
0:34:22 think he kind of had the thought of, okay, well, if I ever want to spend any more time with her again,
0:34:24 I think I’m going to have to jump on this ship.
0:34:25 Yeah, I’m going to have to help out, yeah.
0:34:31 Yeah. And so he did so, and he did so wholeheartedly. And I can honestly say the business
0:34:36 would not be where it is without him. He’s the kind of the other half to my brain. And so we were kind
0:34:43 of CEO, COO, and he was the first, you know, additional person. It was a no-brainer to bring him
0:34:48 along and to introduce him in. And then I’d say we kind of went through a period of having
0:34:55 a couple of different friends jump in that we would pay for bits and bobs of time just to help us fulfill
0:34:57 online orders. So packing.
0:34:59 Okay, like the logistic side.
0:35:08 Yeah, pick and pack, operational, logistic kind of side. And I suppose that’s kind of the core of our
0:35:16 team now. We do really do everything in-house. Particularly myself and Alex have kind of
0:35:22 worked out how to do all of the things in all of the roles across time. So the bulk of our team
0:35:30 are people that do the sussillment of the orders. And so like, for example, I can focus on growing
0:35:36 the business and extending it into the different directions. Yeah, we call them now officially,
0:35:38 they are junior cuddle coordinators.
0:35:43 Well, one thing that’s interesting is there’s a little volunteer tab on the website.
0:35:43 Yeah.
0:35:48 And do you get people offering their help? They just love the brand. They love the story so
0:35:49 much. They want to work for you for free.
0:35:55 It’s wild. We get so many. So I had to build this section of the website because each and
0:36:00 every day we would get people saying, you know, I want to quit my whole life and move across the
0:36:02 world to join this business.
0:36:03 Wow. That’s incredible.
0:36:09 I could show you thousands of entries across this from around the world of people who want to
0:36:14 either join the team or help bring this to their corner of the world. Or, you know,
0:36:19 as you say, volunteer for us. We do have a few members of the team now who are
0:36:23 volunteering, particularly on the like customer services side. We’re fortunate enough to have
0:36:30 made it onto a platform called We Make Change. You have to prove that you’re a business that’s
0:36:35 genuinely doing something positive and, you know, making change to get on there.
0:36:39 Wow. Okay. Is it technically, I know there’s a charitable component with, you know,
0:36:42 donating profits, but it’s not technically a nonprofit business, is it?
0:36:50 Absolutely not. And that was a really strong strategic decision from my side. For me,
0:36:57 if we’re truly to change the way the industry is going, you have to take it away from this just
0:37:03 being like teddy bears in charity shops. This is a business. This is a business that, you know,
0:37:07 off its own back chooses to do good. And like you say, supports charity in a number of ways.
0:37:14 But this is a business that I want to be, and is competing with the world’s biggest stuffed animal
0:37:21 brands, like a household name. This isn’t just a charity. This is a business that’s doing good.
0:37:23 And yeah, a proper business.
0:37:30 Got it. Yeah. In coordinating the team and coordinating the retail effort and the accepting donations,
0:37:35 the cleanup process and the online sales effort, I was going to ask if there’s any tools or software
0:37:42 or tech that you swear by that you rely on to help keep tabs on this growing empire while
0:37:44 still working the other job too.
0:37:53 For me, as a kind of, I guess, creative, as well as a business owner, I work best in platforms like
0:37:59 Figma. And so Figma is like a cloud-based kind of design platform, which is a collaborative tool
0:38:06 that I use as a bit of a whiteboard and workshop space, but also somewhere where I create deliverables
0:38:07 and design proper things.
0:38:14 The reality is a lot of this business is built in spreadsheets. This is Alex’s specialist area,
0:38:23 but he has built some incredible, incredible spreadsheets that underlie that secret source space.
0:38:31 But the fact that we have each product individually photographed and has to be checked and all their
0:38:36 safety information inputted and all of that, and in one button that uploads to our website.
0:38:41 Yeah, that’s such a logistical, you don’t think about it, the managing inventory, hundreds of sales
0:38:46 a week. And it’s not like, well, there’s 25 of this one item. It’s like everything is individualized.
0:38:49 So now I got to go delete that row or market is sold. And it’s like, absolutely have to build
0:38:52 a process around that. Otherwise it’s just going to break immediately.
0:38:59 I hope that the magic of this business is that it comes across as this simple, beautiful concept.
0:39:08 The reality is that we’ve had to break and build every part of it. You know, we exist in a weird
0:39:15 gray space. We’re not a traditional toy brand, nor are we a traditional reseller. We fall in between
0:39:22 spaces. And so we’ve had to break and remake all the systems. And it is sometimes people will say,
0:39:29 well, I’m going to poppy you and do this myself. And honestly, I’m like, good luck, good luck for you.
0:39:36 The complexity that sits behind it. And I think that particularly sits behind going from selling
0:39:45 10 to, you know, sending us a thousand in a week is infrastructure, but we’d need like now scientists
0:39:45 in the background.
0:39:49 Well, you might call it a gray space. Others might call it a blue ocean where it’s like,
0:39:53 there’s nobody else competing in this specific sub niche. So I think that works. It looks like the
0:39:58 website itself is powered by Wix. Anything else on the tools and tech side?
0:40:06 I think recently, and this comes with increased cash flow is, is using tools like it sounds so
0:40:12 silly, but zero and accounting tools. There are so many spaces as an entrepreneur where you can
0:40:21 pour in your energy and so much energy. But if you can afford to, that energy can be so much better spent
0:40:27 in other directions if you can just plug something simple in. And I think that particularly, you know,
0:40:31 I know it sounds boring to just be like, get accounting software, but it’s, it’s not. And it’s,
0:40:37 you know, once you reach that point, it’s like a massive, massive weight lifted off your shoulders
0:40:44 on the actual operational side. So obviously each toy comes with a bio. And at the very start,
0:40:50 I would handwrite them all. I’ve actually got a lump on my finger, which is from writing,
0:40:54 you know, hundreds and hundreds per day. And it’s really painful and I can’t do it anymore.
0:41:01 But at that point, you know, we had to work out, okay, well, how do we mass write cards? And we
0:41:06 couldn’t afford the printer that would take the cardstock that would allow that. So we managed
0:41:12 to get our hands on a, on a robot and Alex programmed this robot to hold a pen.
0:41:13 What?
0:41:20 I’ve got footage of this. It’s quite incredible. And the robot would communicate with the computer
0:41:26 who would, you know, send the story to it. And we, in the end, we even programmed another robot.
0:41:28 So we had Isaac was our first handwriting robot.
0:41:30 A handwriting robot.
0:41:37 Yeah. Incredible. And then we had Margot Roby, who would pick up the card to give it to Isaac,
0:41:42 because obviously you’ve got, you know, it’s all well at writing the cards, but it’s not helpful if
0:41:44 you have to sit there all night handing it a card to write.
0:41:46 Babysitting the robot, sure.
0:41:52 Yeah. So Margot would use a suction arm to hand the card to Isaac, who would communicate with the
0:41:58 computer and write the story using an actual biro. And, you know, we went from there. And we did that
0:42:03 until we reached the point where we could afford the ridiculous printer. But then, even then, we didn’t
0:42:08 want to lose that handwritten touch. So it’s like built around my handwriting and all of this, you know,
0:42:15 that’s the side to the tech that I think you just have to go through the works of and the processes of
0:42:17 and the trial and error of.
0:42:21 Yeah. That’s kind of crazy. We go through this, you know, elimination, automation,
0:42:22 delegation type of framework.
0:42:23 Absolutely.
0:42:27 What gives you energy? Where’s your time best spent? Like, okay, is there a way to automate it?
0:42:32 It turns out we could automate handwriting pretty well with a robot. I never knew that that was a thing.
0:42:33 Yes.
0:42:38 Very cool. I was going to ask, going back to that point about where you’re spending your energy,
0:42:43 what’s a day in the life look like for you if there is such thing as a typical, you know,
0:42:45 typical Tuesday and in the day of Charlotte?
0:42:51 I would say that there definitely is no typical day in my life. A day in my life really has very
0:43:00 little pattern or routine. I spend, I’d say, a lot of my time on calls kind of growing the business,
0:43:06 whether that’s with new retailers or, you know, partnerships and talking to new people. I do a lot
0:43:12 of interviews, you know, a year or two ago. I was the one that was up through the night packing orders,
0:43:17 but I’ve moved since further away from that operational side into the kind of growing the
0:43:18 business. Yeah.
0:43:24 Yeah. So a lot of my day is, is telling our story in various different directions. It’s
0:43:29 working with different people to work out how to tell the story alongside them.
0:43:33 Yeah. Well, the press loves you. I don’t know how my listener came across you, but I mean,
0:43:39 we’ve got features in BBC and The Guardian and dozens of other outlets here. What’s surprised
0:43:42 you the most over the last four or five years of building this thing?
0:43:49 I could probably do a whole podcast episode on mistakes and surprises. No, I feel like there’s a
0:43:57 moment, a turning point where you realize that you actually appreciate the surprises and the failures
0:44:03 and the mistakes more than the successes, because they teach you so much more than anything else ever
0:44:08 could. So I feel like that’s the point where I’m at. And I can look back a lot of the moments that we have
0:44:17 had in a very different light. You grow in maturity as a business owner quite rapidly. And if I look at
0:44:24 some of the decisions I made earlier on, and frankly, some of the ways in which I was taken advantage of
0:44:31 by other businesses, for example, were quite shocking. And I think we’ve grown a lot since then. We’ve had
0:44:37 packaging that’s arrived totally wrong. And we’ve spent huge amounts of money on, you know,
0:44:45 moments where we’ve lost every penny that we had, even stuff like almost burning down our whole office
0:44:49 and workshop by accident. The learnings around that kind of thing.
0:44:55 Love Before has facilitated over 10,000 adoptions. What’s next? Where are you taking this thing? More
0:44:59 retail partnerships? What does the future hold? Fluffy world domination, for sure.
0:45:00 Nice.
0:45:06 I think that looks like many different things. The goal is absolute household name. You know,
0:45:12 when someone thinks about a stuffed animal, whether that’s buying, donating or getting rid of,
0:45:18 learning how to care for, I want them to think of us and for us to be the authority in that. We will be
0:45:26 soon expanding our services into, for example, the spa side more so people can send in their toys and
0:45:30 have them pampered and sparred and sent back to them. You know, so building out more services based
0:45:37 on the capabilities that we’ve built in-house. I think having our own stores one day, as well as
0:45:44 expanding into retailers across the world. Currently, and this is, well, I don’t know if I should say this,
0:45:46 writing a book in the background.
0:45:48 In your spare time, geez.
0:45:55 In my spare zero time. But yeah, you know, when I say world domination, I really mean it. I want to be
0:46:01 everywhere in every touch point that exists that a stuffed animal does. It’s not just about, you know,
0:46:06 selling them in the beautiful boxes. But when you go to a theme park, for example, and you see them all
0:46:12 stuffed in a machine with a grabbing, you know, a grab machine, you know, why do they have to be produced
0:46:18 new and shipped over from China? Why aren’t we using the ones we already have for those kind of
0:46:23 things? So I think developing the proposition from what it is now into, like I said, every touch point
0:46:25 that interacts with a stuffed animal.
0:46:30 Yeah, you got to work both sides, the supply side, we got to keep up the volume of donations to keep
0:46:36 up with the demand on the sales side. I love the idea of spinning off, starting a side hustle on the
0:46:39 side hustle, we can have a spa service, send them to us, we’ll send you back. I think that’s really cool
0:46:46 and excited to see where it all goes. And today, you’re supporting Make-A-Wish UK with half of all
0:46:53 profits donated to charitable causes. Loved before that London is where you can check out the sustainable
0:46:59 stuffed animal adoption agency. Charlotte is at the fluffy CEO, if you want to follow her personal
0:47:04 account. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation, particularly as a
0:47:10 founder, who is really trying to change the world. The top tip is about building something that makes
0:47:19 people feel something. I think connection is the most underrated currency in business. And it’s
0:47:26 something that’s massively under-recognized. Anyone can sell stuff, but you have to, behind that,
0:47:32 build a brand that people come back to, that they believe in, that they tell others about.
0:47:36 Yeah, that people threaten to quit their jobs and move across the world and try and volunteer for you.
0:47:40 Exactly that. People do, and some of my team have. They’ve given up their whole lives to come across
0:47:47 them because they believe in it so deeply. You have to stir something in people. Because I think
0:47:53 something I always say is that feeling leads to following. That following is where you build trust,
0:47:59 and that trust is where you see magic. I like that. Feeling leads to following.
0:48:06 Yeah. Feeling leads to following. And this is that community-first approach. Brand before business,
0:48:09 before product, before anything else. Make people feel.
0:48:14 Yeah, that’s great. That was one of the things that I wrote down was your line. When somebody comes
0:48:19 across your profile or your site, they should feel like they just met their new best friend. It’s like
0:48:24 that kind of gut, first response, reaction, almost love at first sight type of thing. “Hey, these people get
0:48:29 me. This person gets me, right?” And like, “Yes, I want to follow that.” Feeling leads to following.
0:48:33 That’s great. The other takeaway that I put down was find that gray space. You know,
0:48:39 find that blue ocean. John Lee Dumas calls it, “Be the best, be the worst, be the only.” And it’s like,
0:48:43 if you can niche down to the point where you could say, “We’re the best stuff toy adoption agency. We’re
0:48:47 the worst because we’re the only. We’re the only game in town.” If you want this type of thing,
0:48:53 find that gray space. Loved this conversation. Again, loved before that London. If you’re listening
0:48:57 to this, you want to make extra money, you’re not sure which path to take, I want to invite
0:49:01 you to take our free two minute quiz at hustle.show. You can do it right from your phone. And then based
0:49:07 on your answers, it’s going to point you hopefully in the right direction with a custom curated list of
0:49:13 eight to 10 side hustle show episodes from the greatest hits archives, what to listen to next. Again,
0:49:17 that’s hustle.show. A few short questions about your side hustle interests, your goals,
0:49:21 and then you can add that personalized playlist to your device. You can learn what works from
0:49:26 some of our top guests and then go out and make some more money. Again, big thanks to Charlotte for
0:49:31 sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:49:37 Sidehustlenation.com/deals is the spot to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one
0:49:41 place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you’re finding value in the show,
0:49:45 the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message. Hey,
0:49:50 you got to check this out. I know you’re going to love it until next time. Oh, let’s go out there
0:49:55 and make something happen. And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.

0:00:05 Hey, this guy sells 300 grand a year on the side of a product he didn’t even invent.
0:00:06 What’s up?
0:00:06 What’s up?
0:00:07 Nick Loper here.
0:00:11 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, where we’ve been helping people make extra money since
0:00:12 2013.
0:00:17 Today’s guest took a creative approach to his side hustle, starting with a product that
0:00:21 was already selling and then applying his own branding, marketing, positioning to it
0:00:25 and driving around $300,000 a year in sales.
0:00:29 From baldbuck.com, Chris Gray, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:31 Nick, I’m happy to be here.
0:00:34 Your voice is so soothing.
0:00:38 Like it could be like on a calm radio station or something.
0:00:40 You have a really nice voice, dude.
0:00:43 This is my podcast voice, honed over decades of doing this.
0:00:43 Okay.
0:00:45 Well, you as well.
0:00:46 Very deep.
0:00:47 Let’s stick around in this one.
0:00:51 We’re going to learn how Chris came up with the idea for Bald Buck Barbecue Seasoning.
0:00:52 It’s a barbecue rub brand.
0:00:57 The sales tactics you can borrow for your own business and how he’s grown and scaled all
0:00:59 as a part-time project.
0:01:01 And barbecue season is upon us.
0:01:02 So good timing on this one.
0:01:05 And my understanding is that’s where this story starts.
0:01:08 A few years ago, eating some delicious chicken.
0:01:09 Yeah, man.
0:01:14 I was hanging out with my brother-in-law and I’m, you know, I’m in Texas, Texas boy.
0:01:16 And I love smoking food.
0:01:21 One day I go over there and I eat this chicken and I’m like, man, this is delicious.
0:01:22 What did you put on it?
0:01:24 And he showed me the, uh, the seasoning.
0:01:26 I said, oh, okay.
0:01:30 So I went and found out how to get some, um, or actually he gave me some, like a big bag of
0:01:30 it.
0:01:35 I used it on chicken, Mick, and my friends loved it.
0:01:36 My family loved it.
0:01:40 I started getting requests to like cater within the family, right?
0:01:42 This is not like paid catering, but people were just loving it.
0:01:43 Okay.
0:01:48 And so I was like, I’m sitting on something here and I could either go open a restaurant
0:01:50 or I can just sell the rub.
0:01:53 So I decided to sell the rub.
0:01:53 Pause right there.
0:01:57 Cause those are two very different options that I think other people might’ve come up with.
0:01:59 Other people might’ve been like, well, here’s where you can go get it.
0:02:00 Or here’s where I got it, right?
0:02:01 Like there’s the easy solution.
0:02:06 And then there’s the one step, you know, inserting yourself into potential profit stream step.
0:02:07 Yeah.
0:02:07 I don’t know.
0:02:08 I think that’s the way I think.
0:02:10 I just saw an opportunity, right?
0:02:14 I, I, I like most entrepreneurs, I probably suffer from chasing too many things.
0:02:19 Um, but I saw here was an opportunity for something that I’m passionate about, which is
0:02:23 smoking food, barbecue, and then I’m also passionate about marketing.
0:02:30 And so I chose to go sell the seasoning itself as opposed to open a restaurant because the overhead
0:02:35 was going to be lower and I could work more digitally than having to commit a bunch of money
0:02:40 to buying a space and getting staff and having rent and all the overhead that would come.
0:02:41 Yeah.
0:02:42 With having a barbecue joint.
0:02:42 Okay.
0:02:44 So step one, delicious chicken, maybe step zero.
0:02:50 Step two is, I assume going to your brother and say, well, where did you get this stuff?
0:02:54 How can I, um, build a, build a distribution channel here?
0:02:55 Like what’s going on there?
0:02:56 So this is what I love.
0:03:00 I tell people, I sell this barbecue seasoning and they’re like, oh man, did you come up with
0:03:01 your own special blend?
0:03:03 And how long did it take?
0:03:04 And did you have a lab?
0:03:05 And none of that, man.
0:03:07 I just found out who made it.
0:03:10 And then I called them up and I’m like, Hey, I like your seasoning.
0:03:12 Do you white label it?
0:03:15 Meaning do they give you the rub and allow you to put your own brand on it?
0:03:16 Yeah.
0:03:17 And the white labeling happens all the time.
0:03:21 If you go to like Costco has Kirkland’s, which is a white label of something else.
0:03:24 Walmart has great value, a white label of something else.
0:03:25 And so Amazon does it.
0:03:26 Everybody does it.
0:03:27 Yeah.
0:03:29 And so I called them up and said, Hey, can I just white label your season?
0:03:31 They’re like, yeah, we have a program for that.
0:03:32 And I was like, great.
0:03:38 So then I had to go and create my own brand, my own coloring, my own, all that stuff, which
0:03:39 was easy to do.
0:03:43 I was lucky because my business partner, we have a business partner in several businesses.
0:03:45 He’s a graphic design guy.
0:03:50 And we were going over all these different names on, you know, what we wanted the seasoning
0:03:50 to be.
0:03:52 I had a list of 20 different names.
0:03:53 One was bald buck.
0:03:55 We chose bald buck because it was funny.
0:03:56 Plus I’m bald.
0:03:58 My nickname with my friends is buck.
0:03:59 They would call me bald buck.
0:04:03 So I found, I thought this would be a way of like getting back at them.
0:04:04 Like, Hey, you made fun of me.
0:04:05 Now I have a brand.
0:04:08 Um, and so we did that.
0:04:10 We came up, he drew the, he made the logo.
0:04:11 We came up with the name.
0:04:12 We gave it to the company.
0:04:15 They label it, they can it, and they just ship it to us.
0:04:19 So all I got to do now is push it, which is kind of scary, Nick, because when you get
0:04:24 sold or when you get shipped 5,000 units of seasoning, you better, you better figure out how
0:04:26 to move it or you better cook a lot of chicken.
0:04:27 Okay.
0:04:32 So the seasoning company had this system already in place and they say, Hey, you can totally
0:04:32 do that.
0:04:34 Just send us your graphics.
0:04:35 Send us your seasoning.
0:04:38 Send us your branding package and we’ll, we’ll put it on the bottles for you.
0:04:39 You don’t even have to do that yourself.
0:04:41 Yeah, they, they can it.
0:04:42 They put it on enough.
0:04:42 I want to save money.
0:04:45 I got to do that myself eventually, but they do it all.
0:04:47 And a lot of places do this, Nick.
0:04:48 And a lot of different things.
0:04:49 Um, it could be microphones.
0:04:50 It could be art.
0:04:51 It could be shirts.
0:04:54 Like a lot of people do most of the work for you.
0:04:56 All you have to do is go push it.
0:04:58 And that’s something I wish I would have understood a long time ago.
0:05:00 I don’t have to create everything.
0:05:02 A lot of the work can be done.
0:05:05 I just need to find something that works and then find a way to sell it.
0:05:08 So in this case, we had this seasoning worked.
0:05:09 My family loved it.
0:05:10 Friends loved it.
0:05:13 It was already popular in a different state.
0:05:16 I just had to take it, bring it and wrap a different story around it.
0:05:17 And that’s what I did.
0:05:17 Yeah.
0:05:24 And there’s some, uh, parallels or similarities to like the Amazon FBA private labeling world
0:05:26 that was big, you know, eight or 10 years ago.
0:05:29 Whereas, you know, look at the two, three, four-star reviews for a given product.
0:05:32 You know, what are people it’s, you know, you know, it’s already selling, you know,
0:05:35 there’s some proven demand, but how can you make some tweak
0:05:39 or improvement or iteration and go oftentimes find that same factory?
0:05:42 Like, I want you to make me this, but with these adjustments,
0:05:45 with these small changes, then I bring that to market.
0:05:49 And like, that was a very popular side hustle for, for a long time.
0:05:50 And I imagine people are still doing it.
0:05:53 And in this case, it sounds like, well, I didn’t tweak the recipe at all.
0:05:56 I just, I’m going to put my own marketing to it.
0:05:57 Once I, once I’ve got it landed.
0:06:00 Yeah, man, I think things get, uh, what’s the word?
0:06:05 Commoditized easily nowadays say there’s a widget out there and everybody’s selling it.
0:06:08 And I say, well, my widget just kind of has this little special thing to it.
0:06:09 The special feature.
0:06:11 Well, then nobody cares about a feature, right?
0:06:13 Like I have a Apple watch right here.
0:06:18 If you see any kind of Apple commercial, they don’t, they don’t sell you on the features of the phone
0:06:20 or the watch or whatever it is.
0:06:21 It’s always some kind of benefit.
0:06:25 And usually one key benefit they talk about with seasoning, right?
0:06:31 There’s no like, well, there is a benefit, but what I think sells this thing is the stories
0:06:32 that are behind it.
0:06:35 These are things that are happening in my life or things I’ve experienced or things I heard
0:06:36 from other people.
0:06:39 But I don’t know if you ever heard, Nick, somebody can look this up.
0:06:41 I forget the name of it, but it was a study done over 10 years ago.
0:06:47 And these guys bought several items from eBay, several like really, really cheap items.
0:06:51 They probably bought them for, I don’t know, sub two bucks, sub a dollar, whatever they buy
0:06:52 them.
0:06:59 And then what they did was they paid some copywriters to put a story behind each item
0:07:01 and then they relisted it, right?
0:07:07 So say they bought something for a buck on eBay, take that same item, relist it this time
0:07:08 with a story.
0:07:09 Okay.
0:07:09 Okay.
0:07:12 There was a story about a horse head and a story about this, that they did that.
0:07:17 They sold this thing for like, if they bought it for two bucks, they could sell it for like
0:07:18 32 bucks.
0:07:18 Okay.
0:07:18 Right.
0:07:19 Whatever that multiple is.
0:07:25 And that was item after item after item with the only difference being the story.
0:07:27 That’s an example of what happened with bald buck.
0:07:31 Cause you take this seasoning and I’m not just, we’re not just selling seasoning here.
0:07:32 There’s a story behind that.
0:07:33 This there’s love behind it.
0:07:34 There’s entertainment behind it.
0:07:35 There’s some drama behind it.
0:07:39 We wrap these stories around the recipes and that’s how we sell it.
0:07:39 Yeah.
0:07:40 I like that.
0:07:43 I tried to do something similar selling an old car of mine, a crappy car.
0:07:46 It was going to sell for like 2000 bucks, but I was like, here’s the journey that we’ve
0:07:47 been on together.
0:07:50 They’re like, it’s ready for its next adventure, you know?
0:07:51 Yes.
0:07:52 So this is, this is great.
0:07:58 I love that example of, you know, taking a commoditized thing and adding words to it, adding
0:08:00 a little more emotion and story to it.
0:08:00 Absolutely.
0:08:02 You get 5,000 units.
0:08:05 First of all, we got to pause and say, well, how much does that cost?
0:08:07 And it was at the minimum or could you have gone lower?
0:08:10 Or like how much does the minimum order, what’s the startup cost here?
0:08:16 Well, the MOQ was like 300 actually, but it was like the price is super high.
0:08:18 So I just like, let me, I just jumped in.
0:08:20 It’s kind of like to burn the ships, right?
0:08:23 Like if I buy 300, I’m kind of like, yeah, well, I got 300 here.
0:08:24 It might work.
0:08:28 I buy 5,000, which ended up being over $5,000 or something.
0:08:33 And it’s like, okay, you know, I’m, I better move this seasoning or my wife is going to
0:08:35 be upset.
0:08:39 So that gave me the added motivation to really move this seasoning.
0:08:43 And so one of the things that helped get it, get it off the wall, I’m talking a lot that
0:08:45 did I answer your question before I go?
0:08:45 No, no, no, that’s good.
0:08:45 Okay.
0:08:47 So just to get a ballpark, okay.
0:08:54 5,000 units, roughly 5,000, maybe a little more, but like a bucket to per jar per thing.
0:08:55 Is that accurate?
0:08:56 Yes, sir.
0:08:56 Okay.
0:08:57 All right, go ahead.
0:08:59 So these things get landed and now you’re like, well, now I got to figure out how to
0:08:59 move them.
0:09:02 Like, what are some of your, what are some of your first marketing moves here?
0:09:02 All right.
0:09:06 So the first one, I didn’t know I was sitting down, I was sitting down and I was like, man,
0:09:07 I gotta, I gotta move this.
0:09:09 And so I just started thinking, I’m like, well, you know what?
0:09:10 Let me just reach out.
0:09:16 I use something to tell me the most popular barbecue influencers on YouTube.
0:09:21 I Googled it, got the most popular ones, and I went to the list and then I found, I was
0:09:25 watching these different guys’ videos and there was some I resonated with, some I didn’t.
0:09:27 There was one in particular named T-Roy.
0:09:28 I just liked him.
0:09:29 I just liked his vibe.
0:09:30 I liked his shows, digging him.
0:09:33 So I started doing my research on him.
0:09:35 If you’re reaching out to somebody, and this is something that I’ve learned.
0:09:38 So this is like, if I’m, if I was watching this show, this is me talking to me.
0:09:44 If I’m looking to reach out to Nick or somebody on YouTube, learn a little bit about them and,
0:09:46 and be able to speak to them a little bit.
0:09:51 Because if you just kind of come out and you’re just like, hey, sell my seasoning and I don’t
0:09:51 know who you are.
0:09:53 Well, then they’re not going to, they’re not going to really care about you.
0:09:58 But if you can reach out and speak their language or resonate with them in some form or fashion
0:10:02 or show that you’ve been watching it or you’re, you’re familiar with them, then that helps.
0:10:09 So I do my research on T-Roy and come to find out, Nick, that T-Roy used to live in the
0:10:10 same city I lived in.
0:10:13 It’s a, it’s a, it’s a bigger city now in Texas, but it’s not huge.
0:10:14 It’s called Pflugerville.
0:10:15 It’s North of Austin.
0:10:16 It’s like not a big city.
0:10:17 He lived in Pflugerville.
0:10:19 I lived in Pflugerville.
0:10:21 Then I found out that he lived his own, and I forgot how I did this.
0:10:22 I was doing research.
0:10:25 He lived in an old neighborhood that my best friend lived in.
0:10:31 So when I reach out to T-Roy, I reach out to him with a, I don’t just say a simple email
0:10:33 like, Hey, check out my seasoning.
0:10:38 I get, I put, I gave him an email that he would, would break his pattern, his reading pattern.
0:10:42 The title of the email was like, ball, black, Jamaican from Pflugerville, Texas.
0:10:46 That’s going to be a lot different from everything else he sees in his email stuff.
0:10:46 Right?
0:10:48 So ball, black, Jamaican from Pflugerville, Texas.
0:10:49 He opens it.
0:10:50 Then he opens it.
0:10:52 And I first go into, I’m from Pflugerville.
0:10:55 I had a, my, one of my best friends grew up in Black Hawk, blah, blah, blah.
0:10:58 So I was, so I, he knows that I’ve done my research then.
0:11:02 Try to find like some common connection and may not, you know, luck may not strike that
0:11:06 you have, you know, a hometown in common with, with the big influencer in your niche, but like
0:11:10 use that as a framework to try and find some sort of common connection.
0:11:11 Yes.
0:11:12 And there’s, there’s all, there’s going to be something.
0:11:15 I got lucky with that, but there could have been a number of things.
0:11:18 I could have talked about seasoning or an episode, whatever it is.
0:11:20 There’s a number of ways I could have gone about it.
0:11:22 But to, to your point, Nick is yeah, find something in common.
0:11:23 I did that.
0:11:28 And then the next thing I did that was important was I didn’t say, Hey, will you just put my
0:11:29 seasoning on your show?
0:11:30 Who’s going to do that?
0:11:30 That’s all.
0:11:31 That’s like, what’s in it for me.
0:11:34 My thing was what’s in it for him through that.
0:11:35 It was like, you know what?
0:11:37 I’m going to, I love to give you this seasoning.
0:11:38 I like to mail it to you.
0:11:40 I want you to try it.
0:11:44 And if you, I said it, it works best on chicken, smoked chicken.
0:11:51 If you like it, I will then give it to the first 50 fans who request it for free.
0:11:53 So one, I’m saying, Hey, try it first.
0:11:55 Cause I’m not sure if he’s going to like it or not.
0:11:56 And I want him to like it.
0:12:01 Otherwise he’s not going to really be like as authentic when he talks about it on the show.
0:12:04 And then two, it was like, it was something that he could give to his fans.
0:12:06 It’s not me giving to him.
0:12:08 It’s him giving something to his fans.
0:12:14 I, I, I lose what a hundred something, 200 something bucks when it comes to the shipping
0:12:14 and all that other stuff.
0:12:15 Yeah.
0:12:21 But I just paid that money for massive advertisement and backing.
0:12:22 Yeah, no, this is really cool.
0:12:25 So it sounds like he does try it.
0:12:26 He, he, he responds.
0:12:28 First of all, you get a yes.
0:12:28 Yeah, sure.
0:12:28 Send me it.
0:12:29 I’ll give it a try.
0:12:32 He likes it, makes a video about it.
0:12:34 And there’s a cool angle of like, Hey, this stuff is super good.
0:12:39 Plus if you’re watching this and you’re the first to like comments,
0:12:42 subscribe, you know, whatever his call to action is, uh, you fear in the first 50,
0:12:45 I’ll send you, Chris, I’ll send you a jar of this.
0:12:46 Absolutely.
0:12:48 And that was done in like 2021, I think.
0:12:50 And I’m still getting emails today.
0:12:51 Hey, I saw your video.
0:12:54 Can I, that was done in like four years ago at this point.
0:12:54 Yeah.
0:12:59 The first 50 have long since been claimed, but well, that’s, and that’s kind of cool.
0:13:03 It’s like an evergreen type of, uh, type of medium where people could be discovering
0:13:06 the stuff years after it’s originally published.
0:13:07 Absolutely.
0:13:10 And then now what was beautiful about this is okay.
0:13:15 We, um, you know, I put it out there, the video, you get this massive spike in traffic
0:13:19 when, when the video drops, you know, first 50 people get it for free.
0:13:20 Other people who realize, Hey, I can’t get it for free.
0:13:21 I’ll buy it.
0:13:22 They, they go buy.
0:13:23 So a couple of things happen from there.
0:13:28 One, other YouTubers will reach out to me about, Hey, I saw it on T-Roy station.
0:13:30 Can we do it on ours?
0:13:33 I’m like, yeah, I’ll give it to your fans for, I’ll give it to 20 of your fans, depending
0:13:35 on the size of their, their channel.
0:13:38 So I just started giving it away to people who asked me to do reviews.
0:13:38 Okay.
0:13:44 And because T-Roy was a, a giant in the barbecue influencer space, other people were watching
0:13:48 is that, Hey, you know, could we do, could we do set up a similar arrangement, uh, for
0:13:50 my own channel for the other barbecue channels?
0:13:54 I’m looking, it looks like 350,000 subs for T-Roy.
0:13:58 So I’m not a, not a small influencer to say yes, right out of the gate.
0:13:59 Not a small one, dude.
0:14:02 He, it, he had, you’re right.
0:14:03 You hit the nail on the head.
0:14:06 He had a, he has a massive influence and other people who want to be like him are watching.
0:14:07 So then they want to be like him.
0:14:07 So what do they do?
0:14:10 They go copy him and they reached out to me.
0:14:12 So I got other videos done just through that.
0:14:14 And then number two, I have the video.
0:14:17 I have a video of T-Roy that to your points evergreen.
0:14:23 Now I can use that in several different ways as social proof.
0:14:31 So now if we do an ad or we do a story or something, it’s not us talking about how great
0:14:32 ball buck is.
0:14:34 We’ll do the story or whatever, and we’ll put ball buck in there.
0:14:39 We’re also going to drop that video there so that the person who’s reading this story, reading
0:14:44 this thing, this recipe can click the video, go to YouTube, or they can watch the video right
0:14:45 on the page.
0:14:49 Or if they YouTube ball buck, he’s probably going to come up with some other people.
0:14:51 So they watch a C ad or whatever.
0:14:53 And we talk about how good it is.
0:14:57 They leave the landing page and now they search us and we’re there.
0:15:03 We’re on YouTube and we have other people talking about how good the seasoning is, which gives
0:15:05 us some social proof and helps sell it.
0:15:05 Yeah.
0:15:05 Yeah.
0:15:07 It’s not just the brand talking about it.
0:15:08 Like, hey, trust us.
0:15:08 We’re great.
0:15:09 It’s like, I don’t know.
0:15:11 We have other people vouching for it too.
0:15:12 Yes, absolutely.
0:15:17 More with Chris in just a moment, including the marketing tactics that drive consistent
0:15:17 sales.
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0:17:42 Aside from the giveaway, I take it, you said that the people who don’t get the, they don’t make it in time for the giveaway.
0:17:44 Like, do they come by and buy the stuff?
0:17:47 Like, are you starting to see your first paid sales at this point, too?
0:17:48 Yeah.
0:17:51 The people who didn’t make the giveaway, they start, some of them start buying it.
0:17:53 Then eventually that slows down.
0:17:57 And so I hit this point where I was like, okay, I did the T-Roy video.
0:17:57 That was cool.
0:18:01 It’s cool to show my family and friends and stuff like that and make a few sales.
0:18:03 But then how do I keep selling?
0:18:03 Right.
0:18:05 I got 5,000 of these to move here.
0:18:05 Yeah.
0:18:08 So then that’s what I came up with.
0:18:09 I was like, well, that’s when it hit me.
0:18:10 And I was like, well, I have this video.
0:18:12 This video is excellent social proof.
0:18:14 So at that point, we’re like, you know what?
0:18:18 Let’s write some blogs, some stories about this.
0:18:21 And what we did, Nick, was we would, I was like, you know what?
0:18:25 Let me write an article about how to smoke chicken.
0:18:29 Or get with, we would get like, this is interesting.
0:18:31 My brother-in-law, right?
0:18:35 He has his dad, his dad’s a salty older guy or whatever.
0:18:36 So I would just talk to this guy.
0:18:38 This guy’s been in a lot of different barbecue competitions.
0:18:40 I would talk to him about stories.
0:18:43 And he would teach me a little bit about how to smoke chicken.
0:18:46 But I’d also ask him about stories, about competition stories.
0:18:47 I jotted down.
0:18:52 So now I take those same tips he gave me about how to smoke chicken because they’re really
0:18:53 good tips.
0:18:57 And I could write an article about how to smoke the best chicken and blah, blah, blah.
0:18:58 And you’re going to get some feedback.
0:19:00 I’m going to educate you on how to smoke the chicken.
0:19:02 But more important, there’s going to be a story in there.
0:19:07 And that story would probably resonate with the demographic that’s going to read that article.
0:19:09 And so that’s what we did.
0:19:09 All right.
0:19:14 And you’re relying on Google Organic at this point for people to find it?
0:19:15 We pushed a lot of that through Facebook.
0:19:17 Again, I’m a marketer.
0:19:24 So if we could rely on Organic and if I didn’t have 5,000 units of it, I probably would just
0:19:28 slow roll it, but didn’t have the time for that.
0:19:33 And so what I did was we just went to Facebook ads, put an ad out there, and then let it roll.
0:19:38 And the great thing for you guys who don’t know, Facebook ads or most platforms nowadays,
0:19:41 they do what I call the heavy lifting.
0:19:44 Like back in the day when me and Nick were doing a bunch of marketing, you’d have to be
0:19:48 real specific about your targeting and kind of get all technical with your targeting.
0:19:52 Nowadays, these platforms, these social media platforms are so good.
0:19:56 They kind of know who to put these things in front of without you saying it.
0:19:59 You just need to put the ad out there and it’ll figure it out for you.
0:20:01 And so was the ad like a direct call to action?
0:20:02 Hey, come by the seasoning.
0:20:05 Or was it more of like a content?
0:20:08 We’re going to show them the article on how to smoke.
0:20:10 Here’s a great smoked chicken recipe.
0:20:12 Try to get a sense of what you found effective there.
0:20:17 If I come out and say, ball buck season and buy it, watch this video, not going to sell.
0:20:21 But if I come out and say, hey, hey, here’s how to smoke chicken.
0:20:24 Or here’s some three smoked chicken tips that most people don’t know.
0:20:27 And I give them really good tips that they did not know.
0:20:28 That’s really helpful.
0:20:33 And then I subtly mention the rub and how it helps.
0:20:36 Now it has a better chance of selling.
0:20:38 It’s an indirect sell.
0:20:42 So the purpose here is to educate, then sell, not sell.
0:20:43 Got it.
0:20:43 Got it.
0:20:50 And I’m looking at pricing on the site and it seems to be kind of in the $30-ish, $35 maybe.
0:20:53 Oh no, it’s $18 for the single container.
0:20:58 So if the acquisition cost is a buck or two, there’s some margin to play with there.
0:21:01 Have you done any testing on pricing or how do you arrive at this?
0:21:03 No, I mean, I started at the top.
0:21:09 So I just went and looked at the best rubs in the market, found how much they could, what was the max they were selling for.
0:21:11 And then I matched that.
0:21:14 And I had to because, you know, this is not a high ticket product.
0:21:22 So you want, you know, if there was any, again, if I’m watching this and I’m giving myself advice, like charge more, right?
0:21:25 It’s easier to come down in a price than it is to go up.
0:21:34 So I figured I needed to charge more so I could have room for hiring people and shipping and buying products and the things that come with selling a seasoning.
0:21:36 So we charged, I charged as much as I possibly could.
0:21:41 And I’ve gone up since then because tariffs and things are more expensive to get shipped in and stuff like that.
0:21:44 And so, but yeah, I found the most expensive thing on the market and matched it.
0:21:45 Okay.
0:21:45 Got it.
0:21:45 Yeah.
0:21:48 You’re going to have to pay for shipping or pay for ads.
0:21:51 There’s acquisition costs involved.
0:21:53 Did you pay for these giveaways, all sorts of things?
0:21:54 Yeah, exactly.
0:21:55 We have to pay for these giveaways.
0:21:59 I mean, I had, I need as much room to work with as possible.
0:22:01 And so I need as much margin as possible.
0:22:01 Yeah.
0:22:08 I was going to say when it’s a direct to consumer play, it’s not like somebody is standing at the grocery store and they’re, you know, comparing one, two and three.
0:22:12 And well, this one is $5 and this one is 10 and this one is 15.
0:22:15 And they’re like really looking at the label and sniffing it and smell.
0:22:23 It’s like, it’s almost in this impulse buy category of like, well, this YouTuber recommended it or this recipe looks good.
0:22:24 Like it recommended it.
0:22:25 It’s like, I’ll give it a try.
0:22:25 Right.
0:22:29 And so it seems, even though it’s somewhat commoditized, right?
0:22:36 You can get this stuff at any grocery store, but it’s like, that’s that story and that branding and the positioning and like the interrupt factor.
0:22:37 Oh, I saw this on Facebook.
0:22:41 I saw this on YouTube where it’s maybe less price sensitive than you might think.
0:22:42 Yeah.
0:22:47 I mean, they’re at the grocery store and they’re comparing, okay, this one’s five, this one’s 10, this one’s 20.
0:22:49 Oh, I’m going to get the five one and try it.
0:22:50 And that’s just a commoditized type thing.
0:22:58 Whereas our seasoning, you know, not saying that there’s nothing special about the seasoning at the grocery store, but there is a lot of love behind what we do.
0:23:03 And the stories that, I mean, I’m, I’m talking to, by the way, my rub goes out to an older demographic.
0:23:06 And it’s funny because where I get my stories comes from an older demographic.
0:23:10 I got, I got, uh, you know, the, the pit match guy I was talking to.
0:23:12 He’s, he’s an older gentleman.
0:23:14 There’s a female I talked to and she’s older as well.
0:23:16 And I go and I grabbed their stories.
0:23:18 I grabbed that people who love to cook.
0:23:19 And then I use that.
0:23:22 If I was just trying to push seasoning, I wouldn’t do that.
0:23:28 Like I care about this and these people, and they talk to me and there’s a love there that I then transfer to the landing page.
0:23:32 That’s much different than me just putting an ad out about a seasoning.
0:23:34 I think there’s more behind what we do.
0:23:40 And when the reader feels, reads that, it’s like when you, when people go to the movies, they’re going to the movies to check out.
0:23:42 Like there, there’s nothing going on.
0:23:45 That’s a lot of people’s way of being present and checking out.
0:23:45 Right.
0:23:53 So now if I give you a story and it happens to be by seasoning, but I’ve allowed you to check out and get immersed into something.
0:23:58 And then you see this thing, you’re much more receptive to paying whatever the price is.
0:24:00 Cause now it’s not a five, 10 or $20 thing.
0:24:04 It’s a, this really cool story about this really cool product changes the game.
0:24:06 Here’s one thing that kind of surprised me.
0:24:09 Cause I’ve seen so many direct to consumer brands go this way.
0:24:12 The default is the subscription.
0:24:14 I’ll send you another thing every month, click here to sign up.
0:24:16 And it’s like, timeout.
0:24:17 I don’t know if I want it.
0:24:21 Like I haven’t even tried it yet, but it’s like, everybody seems to go be going that way.
0:24:26 And it’s kind of surprised, especially since it’s like a replenishable type of thing.
0:24:28 You’re going to, if you use it, if you like it, you’re going to run out.
0:24:29 You’re going to need to order more.
0:24:36 I was a little bit surprised not to see that like checkbox for the recurring, you know, subscribe and save type of thing here.
0:24:37 I thought about that, Nick.
0:24:39 And I was like, man, really, this is, it’s a lot of seasoning.
0:24:42 I mean, if you’re a heavy user, you’re probably using two cans.
0:24:46 I mean, if you’re a, if you’re a barbecue pit master guy, whatever.
0:24:46 Okay.
0:24:47 Different.
0:24:51 But your everyday person who’s buying this, maybe one a year.
0:24:52 I’m lucky if they get two.
0:24:56 It’s just, so what I’m going to send you seasoning every, every three months.
0:24:57 You’re just going to stack up.
0:24:59 No, I’m going to sell it to you.
0:25:02 And I’m also going to send you weekly emails to let you know that I’m still here.
0:25:05 So when you decide to buy, you can do it.
0:25:10 But again, this thing is, there is a very human component behind what we do.
0:25:11 I, at least I believe.
0:25:16 And I think that the way we approach it, avoiding the subscription thing is just more of a, is an example of that human approach.
0:25:16 Right.
0:25:17 That’s fair.
0:25:23 We’re going to do the follow-up, but we’re not going to, we’re not going to force you to commit to doing this subscription thing.
0:25:24 I wouldn’t want to buy all that.
0:25:25 See, like, what am I going to do with all that seasoning?
0:25:26 It doesn’t make any sense.
0:25:27 And so, yeah.
0:25:28 Okay.
0:25:33 Going back to the Facebook ads, was there a target cost of acquisition that, that you like to be in?
0:25:35 And like, how often do you have to rotate the copy?
0:25:38 Or is it just like, we’re running this on Evergreen?
0:25:41 Some of the campaigns run three, four, five months at a time, depending.
0:25:44 It is hard to get a target CPA.
0:25:46 A target CPA, for those who don’t know, is target cost per acquisition.
0:25:49 So you want to say, hey, I want to sell this thing.
0:25:54 I want this to cost me no more than $5 in advertisement for everything I sell.
0:25:56 That’s harder to do nowadays.
0:26:05 Back in the day, before cookies and this, and when consumer behavior was a little more simple, you could get a pretty decent target CPA.
0:26:08 You could be like, yeah, it’s costing me about five bucks to sell this thing.
0:26:11 Nowadays, the consumer is smart.
0:26:13 We’re all smart.
0:26:14 Like, I’ll give you a quick story.
0:26:21 We have, we had Windows installed in my house a year or two ago, which are way more expensive than I thought Windows should be.
0:26:22 We got them installed in our house.
0:26:23 But this is the thing.
0:26:26 I saw a ad on Facebook.
0:26:29 I then forwarded to my wife.
0:26:33 My wife goes to their website, comes back and talks to me.
0:26:37 And then she calls them again, I think, through their PPC, their pay-per-click, their Google Ads.
0:26:42 So, what happens is their Google Ads gets credit for that sell.
0:26:43 But where did it start?
0:26:45 It started back with me, with Facebook.
0:26:54 So, what I mean by that is, like, I can’t trust the CPA, and Facebook might be super high.
0:26:59 But if I’m selling a lot of products on the back end, well, they might have saw the ad on Facebook, but they watched YouTube.
0:27:01 Yeah, they had to come from somewhere.
0:27:06 Yeah, they saw it on Facebook, then it went to my site, or they went to Amazon, or something like that.
0:27:11 And so, I have to kind of get a feel for it as much as – it’s not as much as the science, like it used to be.
0:27:12 Okay.
0:27:22 Yeah, there is – as much as we’d like to be able to track down to the dollar with all these attribution models, it sounds like there may be a little bit of a gray area.
0:27:27 And you have to kind of trust the bottom line of, well, what sold?
0:27:28 What was their ad spend?
0:27:29 They had to come from somewhere.
0:27:34 They had to find that initial awareness somewhere, and it must be working, even if it’s not –
0:27:38 they didn’t follow the funnel in the same session.
0:27:38 Yeah.
0:27:43 I mean, and they’re so – they do have these other attribution tools, like I think Hyros and Triple Well.
0:27:46 They’re supposed to – to me, they’re not that great.
0:27:48 To me, at the end of the day, this is just for me.
0:27:53 I’m not saying that for everybody, but just for me, it’s what Nick just said, where I’m just – it has to come from somewhere.
0:27:54 Let me see what’s happening at the bottom line.
0:27:55 What am I spending on marketing?
0:27:55 Total.
0:27:57 What are my top line sales?
0:27:57 Total.
0:28:06 Let me do my best to try to figure out what’s really working as best as I can, but it comes down to having a feel, which you get by doing this over time.
0:28:06 Okay.
0:28:12 Now, are you shipping these initial orders out of your spare bedroom, out of the garage?
0:28:15 Like, is there a logistics partner?
0:28:24 Like, all of a sudden, if we’re talking about 5,000 units, licking and sticking and going to the post office, and it’s like, this is starting to get to be another – a whole other job.
0:28:29 Yeah, my living room was real fragrant there for a while, really fragrant.
0:28:40 And when I first started doing this, it was just me and my office, and I would have two days a week, which I didn’t have those two days to be doing this, but it was two days – I started off really heavy.
0:28:43 So, it’d be like two full days of me just doing it all.
0:28:44 Like, I was like – because I got hit.
0:28:48 It kind of – it was like an oh-my-gosh moment where it just – a lot came at once.
0:28:53 My very first article worked way better than I thought it would, and then all of a sudden, I have all these orders.
0:28:58 And so, now, I’m like, oh, crap, I have to do all these orders, and two days a week of just doing orders.
0:29:02 And as time went on, I ended up – my grandma lives down the road.
0:29:04 Thank goodness she has a big shed.
0:29:08 I could put an AC unit in, so now I put all the product and everything and all my materials in that shed.
0:29:11 The AC and all that’s good to go.
0:29:18 And then I have a pool house slash workout room in my backyard, and I have – there’s two employees, actually three employees.
0:29:22 But one of the employees comes once to twice a week, depending on the workload.
0:29:29 And she’ll go in the pool house, and she has everything she needs out there, and she’s just – we do all that in the pool house.
0:29:32 USPS comes and picks it up, and I’m done.
0:29:33 All right.
0:29:34 We’re not promising overnight shipping.
0:29:36 We’re going to process these a couple days a week.
0:29:38 You get it when you get it.
0:29:51 You mentioned Amazon, so I do want to talk about that as a distribution channel, as a place to potentially find people who – yeah, they discovered you through YouTube, and they’re – well, they’re used to shopping on Amazon, so they may find you over there.
0:29:52 Yeah.
0:30:00 Or through potentially Amazon directly if they’re looking for unique gifts or barbecue seasoning or something directly on Amazon.
0:30:03 Can you talk to me about that as a sales channel?
0:30:04 Yeah, absolutely.
0:30:05 I was against it at first.
0:30:08 For those who don’t know, when you ship on Amazon, you don’t keep your data.
0:30:09 What do I mean by that?
0:30:11 That means that you don’t know the person’s email.
0:30:13 You don’t know their phone number.
0:30:15 I don’t know if you even get their address.
0:30:16 I don’t remember.
0:30:31 But my point being is if you buy from my store, if Nick comes to my store and he buys, I get all Nick’s information, not just like random information, good information, like his real name, real phone number, a real email because he just bought something, so he wants to track it.
0:30:34 So I get a real email address, and I get his physical address.
0:30:38 This is quality data, which is a whole other game, whole other conversation.
0:30:39 So I get that.
0:30:41 When you go to Amazon, you get none of that.
0:30:42 Amazon keeps that.
0:30:44 Yeah, it’s Amazon’s customer, not your customer.
0:30:45 Exactly.
0:30:49 I’m helping Amazon get data, and nowadays data’s gold.
0:30:52 So I’m helping Amazon get all the data, keep all of it, and I just sell.
0:30:56 So I was against it, but I had to, I was like, you know what?
0:30:57 People trust Amazon.
0:30:59 They may not trust me, even though I have all the social proof.
0:31:00 Let me put this on Amazon.
0:31:04 So I put it on Amazon, and man, it’s sold.
0:31:05 Like, people just trust Amazon.
0:31:07 So I was like, oh gosh, the people are really buying it.
0:31:08 Yeah, yeah.
0:31:10 Like, I see, like, hundreds of reviews on the listing.
0:31:10 Yeah.
0:31:12 People, it’s Amazon.
0:31:13 They trust it.
0:31:17 So I had to go there at the expense of data.
0:31:20 It helps with the top line, so I just had to go there.
0:31:21 And here’s the thing.
0:31:25 With Amazon, I don’t play the whole, let me compete with other barbecue seasonings and
0:31:27 barbecue brands and play the organic and the SEO.
0:31:29 I had my site optimized on Amazon.
0:31:34 Like, I, you know, the first time I threw it up there, it was a really weak looking, like,
0:31:34 listing.
0:31:37 And then eventually, I was like, oh, let me look like a professional.
0:31:41 And so we did it, and it looks like a professional listing now, at least as professionals I can
0:31:42 pay for.
0:31:45 But we did that.
0:31:48 And like I said, man, it did really, really well.
0:31:49 What’s your take on this?
0:31:53 Because we’ve seen more people go your direction versus starting on Amazon.
0:31:57 We’ve seen more and more people try and build up their own traffic sources through their own
0:31:58 Shopify-powered store.
0:32:02 And then you know that a certain percentage of people are going to be looking for it on
0:32:02 it.
0:32:03 Can I just get it on Amazon?
0:32:05 Like, they already have my checkout information.
0:32:07 Can I just click the one-click thing?
0:32:12 Do you find there’s some value in the algorithm when you’re, like, driving your own traffic to
0:32:13 a certain extent?
0:32:13 Absolutely.
0:32:17 I think that I’m playing the whole, like, Amazon SEO.
0:32:19 When I say SEO, guys, it’s search engine optimization.
0:32:23 So I’m trying to rank organically on, like, if somebody typed in Barbecue Rub, there’s a
0:32:24 game you play to get you at the very top.
0:32:27 I don’t want, I don’t feel like playing all that, playing the game.
0:32:28 I don’t feel like advertising on Amazon.
0:32:31 I don’t even do the whole fulfillment by Amazon because they take a lot of your money.
0:32:35 If I do the advertising and fulfillment by Amazon, my margins shrink.
0:32:36 So I was like, forget it.
0:32:40 What I’ll do is do all my advertising off that platform.
0:32:44 And I only use Amazon when somebody wants to buy.
0:32:46 If somebody finds me on Amazon, they’ve probably made their decision already.
0:32:47 Okay.
0:32:48 And that’s what I wanted.
0:32:52 So the conversion rate on those, you know, listing clicks are super high because they
0:32:54 already know what they are looking for.
0:32:56 And so you’re doing fulfillment by merchant.
0:32:58 Like somebody will collect the order and then you’ll ship it out.
0:32:58 Absolutely.
0:32:59 Yeah.
0:33:00 Otherwise, yeah.
0:33:03 If they’re warehousing it, if they’re, if you’re doing their ad platform, like all this
0:33:03 stuff.
0:33:06 And all of a sudden those margins get real, real narrow.
0:33:08 Amazon’s making money no matter what your margins are.
0:33:10 Amazon’s so dirty, Nick.
0:33:14 And what they’ll do too is like, if you have a commodity or something, like say I had this
0:33:14 comb.
0:33:17 If you’re wondering why I have a comb, it’s for my beard, not for my head, obviously.
0:33:21 But if you have a comb there and Amazon sees that you’re selling a ton of this comb, what
0:33:22 does Amazon do?
0:33:22 Yeah.
0:33:23 The Amazon basics version.
0:33:24 Yeah.
0:33:25 They have all your data.
0:33:28 They know exactly what you’re doing and they have more money than you.
0:33:31 So they’ll go and just take your product and undercut you.
0:33:32 The beautiful thing about this.
0:33:34 And so you have to be cognizant, man.
0:33:39 Amazon can play that game where you can have your Amazon barbecue rub, but it’s not going
0:33:43 to sell unless you, because you’re not doing what I’m doing, which is putting something else
0:33:43 behind it.
0:33:48 More with Chris in just a moment, including the creative way he increases his average order
0:33:54 size and the side side hustle he expects to eventually overtake the barbecue rub e-commerce
0:33:55 part of the business.
0:33:56 Coming up right after this.
0:34:02 One strategy I didn’t fully embrace or maybe wasn’t fully aware of when I was starting out
0:34:06 was this idea of the piggyback principle in the startup phase.
0:34:09 That means you don’t have to start completely from scratch, but instead you can take advantage
0:34:15 of existing tools, templates, playbooks, best practices from the people who’ve gone before
0:34:15 you.
0:34:18 A perfect example of this is our partner Shopify.
0:34:24 Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses from household names to side hustlers
0:34:28 on their way to becoming household names with hundreds of ready to use templates.
0:34:31 Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store and start selling.
0:34:35 Plus, Shopify is packed with helpful AI tools to accelerate your workflow.
0:34:40 We’re talking product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhancing your product photography.
0:34:44 You can even easily create email and social media campaigns to reach your target customers
0:34:46 wherever they’re scrolling or strolling.
0:34:49 If you’re ready to sell, you’re ready for Shopify.
0:34:53 Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side.
0:34:59 Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:35:02 Go to shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:35:05 Shopify.com slash side hustle.
0:35:13 For such an important channel like phone, the software powering this important channel was super outdated and clunky.
0:35:20 We wanted to make it delightful and make it very easy for businesses to connect with their customers through voice and text.
0:35:24 That’s Darina Kulia, co-founder of our sponsor, OpenPhone.
0:35:31 Trusted by more than 60,000 customers, this is the number one business phone system that streamlines and scales your customer communications.
0:35:39 We bring your calls, your messages, your contacts in one simple place, and we allow you to bring in your team.
0:35:46 So you as a business owner don’t end up being the bottleneck, and we really make it easy for you to deliver that incredible experience.
0:35:52 It’s all about speed, streamlined communication, team access into one centralized place.
0:35:53 I think that makes a lot of sense.
0:36:00 Something that all of our customers love is ability to have a shared phone number, which really is great for calling and texting.
0:36:08 So when someone calls you or texts you, there’s multiple people that can team up on responding, and everyone is in the loop about that conversation.
0:36:12 This visibility is so critical, especially as you scale.
0:36:18 And the ability to text a business is like a new and novel thing that, as a customer, I really appreciate.
0:36:25 One thing that we’ve launched at OpenPhone, which is, I think, a game changer, is Sona, which is our voice AI agent.
0:36:29 It basically helps you never have a single missed call.
0:36:39 It can handle responses to any common questions, basically any questions that you train it on, and then it can capture that information so you can quickly follow up.
0:36:43 We are helping businesses never lose a customer because a missed call is a lost opportunity.
0:36:49 Now, OpenPhone has automatic AI call summaries, so you don’t have to worry about taking notes while you’re on the call.
0:37:01 But another cool feature is what Darina called AI call tagging, basically allowing you to quickly filter for the calls that were sales objections or customer complaints or requests for a discount.
0:37:09 So you can review those and see what worked, what didn’t, and train team members on the most effective tactics and language in those cases.
0:37:13 And it’s all in the name of building a better, faster, and friendlier customer experience.
0:37:24 Right now, OpenPhone is offering SideHustle show listeners 20% off your first six months at OpenPhone.com slash SideHustle.
0:37:29 That’s O-P-E-N-P-H-O-N-E dot com slash SideHustle.
0:37:35 And if you have existing numbers with another service, OpenPhone will port them over at no extra charge.
0:37:38 OpenPhone, no missed calls, no missed customers.
0:37:40 Yeah.
0:37:45 You have control over the pricing, too, so you can kind of match, make sure it’s the same pricing.
0:37:46 Absolutely.
0:37:48 Can I hit on one thing about pricing, if you don’t mind?
0:37:49 Yeah, go ahead.
0:37:53 If you go on my site, you’ll see that there’s, I’m not just giving people seasoning.
0:37:55 Seasoning is expensive.
0:37:57 There are some items where it’s, what is it, a premium.
0:38:03 So the premium being, like, you buy this seasoning, you get this thing for free.
0:38:05 My seasoning is expensive.
0:38:05 I get it.
0:38:13 And so what I did was I would work with, talking about MOQs, I would work with, like, an Alibaba or somebody like that who sells wholesale.
0:38:17 This is prior to all the tariff stuff, by the way, so I’m not sure what the prices are now.
0:38:28 But back in the day, I could, like, get a bunch of barbecue slicers or, yeah, I can get a bunch of slicers or barbecue meat, like, thawing trays or 50-cal bottle openers.
0:38:38 It’s just cool things, depending on if it’s a female or male who’s buying my stuff, that if they went and bought that item alone, it would cost them north of 20 bucks, sometimes over 50, depending on the item.
0:38:50 So I go and I buy those and I say, hey, if you buy five things of seasoning, which lasts you two, three years, if you buy five things of seasoning, you’ll get this thing for free, this meat thawing tray.
0:38:53 Or you buy two things of seasoning, you get this slicer for free.
0:38:59 And then you see that, and you’re like, oh, the price of this is 30 bucks, but if I just bought the slicer alone, it’s 20 bucks.
0:39:00 So really, this is, it makes sense.
0:39:05 I did the premium thing, and you can help me kind of, like, make this point a little better here, Nick.
0:39:11 But adding a gift to it, like a free gift, a premium or something, helps justify the purchase.
0:39:16 If Nick buys something today and it was super expensive, and he goes to his wife and is like, babe, I bought this and it was really expensive.
0:39:17 She’s like, what the heck?
0:39:22 But if Nick’s like, hey, babe, I bought this, it was expensive, but we got a free car, she’s gonna be like, oh, that was great.
0:39:28 So you want to give people an excuse, a reason to not look stupid when they’re making a purchase.
0:39:40 I think that’s a really creative way to increase the average order size where you’re like, I could just get the, you know, the one pack, but for a little bit more, I could get two plus this free gift, or I could get five.
0:39:43 Yeah, I think this is a really interesting way to do it.
0:39:48 I don’t know if I’ve seen anybody doing exactly that on other e-commerce sites like this before.
0:39:49 Yeah, thanks, man.
0:39:51 That was exactly what it was.
0:39:53 It was like, I need to increase this average order value for this thing to make sense.
0:39:55 And it’s a good deal.
0:39:58 These slicers and these other things that we give away, those things are expensive, man.
0:40:03 Like, so we just give it to you for free with the seasoning, and now it makes more sense to buy the seasoning.
0:40:04 Okay.
0:40:07 Now, is there all these sitting in the pool house slash warehouse now too?
0:40:10 Yeah, yeah, they’re in the warehouse slash pool house.
0:40:16 So you have most of it in the warehouse, and then we just went, as we move things or things are selling, we just put what we need to in the pool house.
0:40:20 And again, the pool house is my workout room, and it is quite fragrant.
0:40:23 Come out of there, smell it like barbecue.
0:40:25 Yeah, exactly.
0:40:33 The other thing that you touched on was email marketing and sending out kind of a weekly, sometimes story-based, you know, newsletter, so to speak.
0:40:36 Is this content on how to smoke better chicken?
0:40:43 Like, give me an idea of what kind of stuff that you’re sending out that can’t always be, hey, did you run out yet?
0:40:44 Buy more.
0:40:50 Yeah, and that’s exactly what I was avoiding was, you know, you don’t want to send out something like, hey, buy more, buy more, because nobody cares about it.
0:40:54 Again, I’m thinking about the consumer more than I’m thinking about me when it comes to this.
0:41:01 And with the newsletter, this is a way of building a community around a seasoning, which sounds odd, right?
0:41:02 How do you build a community around a seasoning?
0:41:04 Well, we do it through our newsletter.
0:41:08 And for those who don’t know, if you’re looking at a side hustle, you know, don’t sleep on newsletters.
0:41:11 There’s platforms out there like Beehive, and newsletters are big business.
0:41:13 There was one, The Morning Brew.
0:41:15 They sold for like $75 million.
0:41:19 And then there’s smaller ones that sell for a million, and smaller ones that sell for $500,000, $600,000.
0:41:23 So newsletters are a side hustle if you could build it.
0:41:25 And so what I decided was, hey, you know what?
0:41:26 We’re going to do a newsletter out of this.
0:41:31 It’s going to have a weekly recipe, but it’s not just going to be, hey, here’s a cheesecake recipe.
0:41:34 It has nothing to do with the seasoning, but I give them recipes.
0:41:39 But if I just sent out recipes about chicken alfredo or something like that and pointed back to my site, nobody cares.
0:41:43 But it’s more of the same where it’s like, okay, who are these people?
0:41:46 These people I know that I can get stories from or whatever.
0:41:49 And then I go and I take those stories.
0:41:51 I give those to the people.
0:41:55 Like, here’s a story about something that happened last week or whatever it is.
0:42:01 And then I give them the actual recipe of what I’m saying or what I’m talking about that week.
0:42:03 And then let them go to the site if they want to or not.
0:42:10 It’s a cooking newsletter, but really it’s an entertainment newsletter where it’s a story about something that happened with our guy Buck that week.
0:42:12 And then there’s three interesting articles.
0:42:17 It’s typically articles that we find interesting, something that will entertain people.
0:42:18 And then there’s a recipe.
0:42:21 And it’s that format week after week.
0:42:23 And what we found, Nick, is that the audience loves it.
0:42:27 They email us back saying, hey, this is something that they look forward to weekly.
0:42:30 They really look forward to it, something that entertains them.
0:42:33 So now, again, it is not just a seasoning.
0:42:34 It’s a community.
0:42:35 It’s a thing of entertainment.
0:42:36 It changes.
0:42:39 I’m out of that whole commoditized, is it 5, 10, or 20?
0:42:41 I’m in a whole new ballgame.
0:42:42 Mm-hmm.
0:42:42 Yeah.
0:42:47 I mean, is the newsletter, do you see that becoming a side hustle on a side hustle?
0:42:53 Like, is it become its own like barbecue influencer thing that people follow along with, whether or not they ever buy the stuff?
0:42:54 That’s exactly what it’s going to be.
0:42:55 It’s a side hustle on a side hustle.
0:42:59 At this point, I did my first advertising two weeks ago.
0:43:01 My very first one, $7.20, right?
0:43:04 We got to start somewhere, though, right?
0:43:07 But I’m consistently like Beehive.
0:43:13 I like Beehive, the platform, because Beehive will make it easy for your newsletter to get sponsored.
0:43:16 All you have to do is make sure people want to actually read your newsletter.
0:43:18 And so we get high engagement.
0:43:22 And so now we’re getting flooded with sponsorships.
0:43:23 My first one was $7.20.
0:43:30 And then now I’m starting to figure out, OK, I can start testing how to put sponsorships in here.
0:43:32 And there’s other ways to monetize the newsletter.
0:43:36 So to your point, Nick, it’s a side hustle on a side hustle.
0:43:44 And to me, I think that I will eventually be more profitable in the newsletter business than I am with the seasoning business.
0:43:45 Interesting.
0:43:46 Yeah, you can see where it’s going.
0:43:48 How many subscribers do you have to at this point?
0:43:50 Right now we’re at 7,000.
0:43:51 We were as high as 9,000.
0:43:55 I had 42,000 emails at one point.
0:44:00 And then I went down to like 15,000 that were like somewhat active.
0:44:07 And then now on Beehive, since it’s so they really care about people engaging, I keep the list real tight.
0:44:10 Like if you don’t open my email within 30 days, I’m kicking you off and I’ll tell you.
0:44:10 Yeah, yeah.
0:44:18 And so I keep it real tight because I’d rather have a tighter list with higher engagement than a big list with low engagement.
0:44:18 Okay.
0:44:22 So Beehive, I assume Shopify is what’s running the site.
0:44:22 Absolutely.
0:44:25 Any other tools or tech that you swear by here?
0:44:28 We run the site on Shopify, use Beehive as a newsletter.
0:44:34 I use a lot of, I do a lot of talking with ChatGPT and Claude.
0:44:35 These are AI platforms.
0:44:38 A lot of idea stuff happening with that.
0:44:41 For those who I’m sure at this point, everybody knows about ChatGPT.
0:44:49 Some of y’all might know about Claude, but I don’t just go in there and like just come out to ChatGPT and ask it, hey, solve this problem.
0:44:55 I really take time to make sure ChatGPT knows exactly how I wanted to act.
0:45:02 And not just that, if you’re in ChatGPT, you go to the top of it, there’s certain models that ChatGPT has.
0:45:05 And each model does something different.
0:45:06 You’ll have a basic model.
0:45:09 You’ll have a model that’s good for ideas and research and writing.
0:45:11 You’ll have a model that’s good for coding.
0:45:17 I am very, very intentional about the way I’m training it to act.
0:45:19 Think about like training a person.
0:45:23 I tell it exactly how to act and I give it examples of what I’m looking for.
0:45:23 Okay.
0:45:24 Right.
0:45:26 And then I pick the correct model.
0:45:29 I’m looking, so if I’m doing research, ideal stuff, I’ll pick the research one.
0:45:30 At this point, it’s 4.5.
0:45:32 So I know how I want it to act.
0:45:34 I have it in the correct model.
0:45:37 And now I start working with it and coming up with ideas.
0:45:39 And here’s the thing I’ve learned about AI.
0:45:45 If you are terrible at, let’s say, writing copy, which is mean writing words to sell yourself,
0:45:51 if you’re terrible at that and you use AI, it’s just going to multiply how terrible you are.
0:45:52 Right.
0:45:52 That’s all it does.
0:45:58 But if you have a skill, like something you’re good at and you use AI correctly, it’ll multiply
0:46:00 your efficacy by 100 times.
0:46:06 And so I use it to magnify my strengths and in some cases compensate for my weaknesses.
0:46:11 But I find much more help when I use it to magnify my strengths.
0:46:12 Yeah, but you’re right.
0:46:14 It’s kind of garbage in, garbage out.
0:46:19 But if you can kind of prompt and prime it to act a certain way, it does a really good
0:46:20 job of doing that.
0:46:24 And again, between, and I’ll use, I’ll go, I’ll have chat GBT open and I’ll have Claude
0:46:24 open.
0:46:25 Claude’s another one.
0:46:32 And I’ll do the, I’ll like do the exact same thing to both and get different ideas and different
0:46:32 feedback.
0:46:35 And I’ll kind of compare and contrast that feedback.
0:46:40 It’s just like helping me expanding the mind, man.
0:46:40 It’s really, it’s really good.
0:46:45 Any other tools or resources that you like?
0:46:49 If you are trying to sell something, like you don’t have stories, you don’t know what’s going
0:46:57 on or whatever, Reddit is a goldmine, just a goldmine, depending on what you’re trying to
0:46:57 do.
0:47:02 If you’re trying to like crowdsource things or figure out what people think, if you’re trying
0:47:05 to find the story or something for something, I like to go to Reddit.
0:47:09 I’ll find the subreddit that makes the most sense for what I’m trying to figure out.
0:47:12 Then I’ll sort it by top comments.
0:47:16 Then once you do that, or top posts, you can sort it by top posts.
0:47:20 And then after you sort it by top posts, you can say for the year, for all time, for the
0:47:20 last week.
0:47:24 So I usually go top posts all time or top posts for the year.
0:47:27 And I start at the top and I look at the posts.
0:47:30 And not only do I look at the posts, I’ll open the post up and I’ll look at the comments.
0:47:31 These are real people.
0:47:36 So depending on your niche, let’s say you’re in the weight loss niche and you sell to females
0:47:40 and you find a subreddit that has a bunch of females who are looking to lose weight and
0:47:42 you sort it the way I’m looking at, I’m telling you to sort it.
0:47:46 And you go there and you read the posts and more important, read the comments and the comments
0:47:48 that really got a bunch of likes and stuff.
0:47:49 You learn a lot.
0:47:51 It’s crowdsourcing for free.
0:47:55 I would pay money for Reddit with the type of stuff that I learned from it.
0:47:56 It is amazing.
0:47:58 Do you have an example in the barbecue space?
0:48:01 Like I’m trying to think of what that might look like.
0:48:04 And now that I think about it, at the very beginning, when I was telling you, I was trying
0:48:06 to find an influencer, I use Google and I’m going to Reddit.
0:48:08 And that’s how I found T-Roy.
0:48:13 Now that I remember it, but in the specifically selling the product, there was a, it was tips
0:48:16 on how to smoke something called tri-tip, I believe.
0:48:20 And I went to, went to Reddit, went to the barbecue thing.
0:48:23 I looked up tri-tip, went in there, started looking through what people were saying.
0:48:25 Amazing tips, amazing tips.
0:48:26 I take it.
0:48:27 I go test it.
0:48:28 It worked great.
0:48:29 Boom.
0:48:30 Good to go.
0:48:34 And then putting that into an email or putting that into an article, which then drives a
0:48:35 Facebook ad, which then drives sales.
0:48:37 Absolutely.
0:48:39 That’s just one small example.
0:48:41 I’ve got different businesses done different things.
0:48:43 I’ve used Reddit heavy.
0:48:44 Got it.
0:48:44 Yeah.
0:48:49 This is almost a page out of the Buzzfeed playbook where, you know, there’s curating different
0:48:50 tweets or different faces.
0:48:52 And it’s just, you know, now that’s a piece of content for them.
0:48:53 Exactly.
0:48:57 And then for me, I’ll go to like, cause I’m not just doing, I don’t just sell barbecue
0:48:58 recipes.
0:49:01 I might, I had like, let’s say a creamy lemon chicken or something like that.
0:49:06 I’ll go to things like all recipes or just any like popular food thing.
0:49:08 And I do the same thing.
0:49:10 You go and you just look at the recipe.
0:49:10 Okay.
0:49:11 Is that good or whatever?
0:49:13 But then I start reading the comments.
0:49:16 There’s so much free crowdsourcing information out there.
0:49:23 If you get creative, if you want to pay for stuff, there’s another tool I use called SEM
0:49:23 Rush.
0:49:27 And this talks about traffic that’s at different websites.
0:49:30 And it’ll show you, Hey, this website’s getting so much X traffic or whatever.
0:49:36 But if you pay a little bit more, you figure out what the top pages are in that website.
0:49:38 So now let’s take a cooking website, like all recipes.
0:49:40 I go there, put it in SEM Rush.
0:49:41 It will show me all the traffic.
0:49:46 Then I’ll select something called top pages and I’ll sort it for top pages by the last two
0:49:46 years.
0:49:51 And then you’ll start to see which one of their recipes got the most traffic.
0:49:55 If that recipe got the most traffic, well, that tells you that people are interested
0:49:56 in it.
0:50:00 Maybe I should write an article about that recipe because people are already interested
0:50:00 in it.
0:50:01 Oh, okay.
0:50:01 Okay.
0:50:07 And even if it’s not going to rank organically, it may resonate with people on social because
0:50:09 you’ve got some data to back it up.
0:50:11 People are already finding it through all recipes.
0:50:12 Absolutely.
0:50:16 And so now instead of somebody having to search for it, like anything else, I’m bringing it
0:50:16 to them.
0:50:21 And they’re like, Oh yeah, I want to know how to make, you know, great homemade brownies
0:50:22 or something or whatever.
0:50:23 I keep using desserts.
0:50:25 I don’t really sell the product with desserts.
0:50:30 It’s like, well, it’s gotta be a Thai cheesecake and then chicken on the side.
0:50:33 But yeah, it’s usually a more savory recipe than I’m advertising.
0:50:37 But when I’m trying to put on my rest on my website and my newsletters, I’ll just, again,
0:50:38 I’m just giving out good information.
0:50:42 So I’ll give them a solid brownie recipe that I got from some website.
0:50:45 Plus use AI to like polish it up and give me tips.
0:50:47 I’ll give them some like really good information on how to cook stuff.
0:50:51 I mean, it’s such an interesting angle because I imagine the cost per clicks or cost, you
0:50:56 know, that you’re paying to Facebook are so much lower sending people to a piece of content
0:51:01 on a, you know, a recipe type of page than it would be to a product sales page.
0:51:04 And if I’m at the conversion rate, it’s obviously going to be a lot lower too.
0:51:07 It’s like, there’s a balance there and then, but there’s, you know, retargeting.
0:51:10 There’s all sorts of fun stuff you can do after that.
0:51:11 You got those people to initially click.
0:51:11 Yeah.
0:51:12 Yeah.
0:51:17 I’m not pushing finance or weight loss stuff or these things that have high CPCs cost per
0:51:18 clicks or high CPM.
0:51:20 CPM is basically how much it costs for people to see your stuff.
0:51:22 This is just food stuff.
0:51:26 And I want to find a recipe that’s engaging because here’s one more quick tip.
0:51:29 If you’re advertising on social media, you’re working with social media.
0:51:34 You have two different people who are your, your readers or your clients on there.
0:51:36 You have the people that you’re trying to sell to whoever that is.
0:51:39 And then you have the actual platform itself.
0:51:39 So let’s take Facebook.
0:51:44 You’re trying to reach the user, but also you need to be like taking care of Facebook.
0:51:45 Well, how do you take care of Facebook?
0:51:49 What’s Facebook in here for Facebook want Facebook or Tik TOK or whatever it is, pick your social
0:51:50 media platform.
0:51:50 What do they want?
0:51:54 They want people on their platform for as long as possible.
0:51:59 So if you’re putting something out there that has people on the platform, whether it’s like
0:52:05 watching a video for a while or engaging with the video or writing or sharing it or reading
0:52:10 something, if you play Facebook’s game or any social media platforms game, which is keep them
0:52:15 on that platform for as long as you can, then that social media platform will reward you
0:52:18 by putting your stuff out there for even cheaper.
0:52:20 So that’s the game.
0:52:20 Okay.
0:52:24 So it’s not even driving, it’s not even driving traffic back to baldbuck.com.
0:52:28 It’s like, I’m going to, I’m going to copy paste the whole recipe into the body of this Facebook
0:52:28 post.
0:52:41 And then also what Facebook likes is you get the biggest, I guess, bump, if you want
0:52:43 to call it for sharing and comments.
0:52:47 So if you’re getting people to share your stuff or comment on your stuff, if Facebook sees it,
0:52:50 man, this post, everybody’s talking about it, they’re sharing it.
0:52:51 What’s Facebook going to do?
0:52:52 Boom, boom, boom, boom.
0:52:55 They want to keep people happy, keep people engaged, keep them on the platform.
0:52:58 If you could do that, then you could do well.
0:52:58 Yeah.
0:53:02 And then all of a sudden, yeah, your cost per engagement or cost per reach goes, goes way
0:53:03 down because they’re pushing it out.
0:53:04 Way down.
0:53:05 Absolutely.
0:53:05 All right.
0:53:06 What would you do differently?
0:53:09 I mean, it sounds like we were three, four years into this business.
0:53:12 If you had to start over, anything you’d do to accelerate the journey?
0:53:19 I would have gotten more aggressive with reaching out to YouTubers or user-generated content influencer,
0:53:19 whoever it was.
0:53:22 I still could do that to this day, but this is a side hustle.
0:53:27 I got other stuff going on, but it’s not what you have to say.
0:53:29 It’s what other people have to say about the product.
0:53:32 And there’s a few ways of doing that.
0:53:33 You can’t just copy and paste a review.
0:53:40 If you could really get other people to speak about the product for you, that gives leverage,
0:53:40 man.
0:53:42 Would you approach it similarly today?
0:53:44 It was like, hey, we could do a giveaway for your audience.
0:53:49 Would you say, hey, I’d love for you to be an affiliate partner for this thing.
0:53:51 You know, here’s a unique referral code.
0:53:52 Like, how would you, how would you pitch it?
0:53:56 Everything you just said, the essence of what you just said is what’s, what’s in it for that
0:53:56 person.
0:54:02 Um, not caring about like, you know, obviously I have goals here, but for me to get those
0:54:04 goals, it’s the whole Zig Zig Ziglar thing, right?
0:54:05 You can get everything you want.
0:54:06 If you help enough people get what they want.
0:54:09 So it’s what’s in it for this other person.
0:54:13 How can I make them look good or help them make money or whatever it is?
0:54:15 Let me key in on that.
0:54:17 And then I’ll get what I need from, from this.
0:54:18 Fair enough.
0:54:20 Any, uh, any big surprises?
0:54:23 The surprise was, oh no, all of a sudden it’s an actual business.
0:54:27 Oh no, I have to actually like work with people and now I have to manage people.
0:54:28 And that was a surprise.
0:54:31 And so I didn’t think about that prior to getting into this.
0:54:32 I didn’t see that coming.
0:54:32 Yeah.
0:54:33 That’s interesting.
0:54:36 Is that the, the question most people ask is what if this fails?
0:54:37 What if it doesn’t work?
0:54:40 What if I just have to liquidate these 5,000 units of seasoning?
0:54:44 The other side of it is, well, what if it does work?
0:54:48 You know, what’s that, what’s that going to look like two, three, four years down the road?
0:54:53 And if it actually is selling, is that going to be, is that, it could be a win for me?
0:54:57 And I mean, it sounds like, yes, but just like, you know, there’s, there’s other things that
0:55:00 happened along the way or that necessitated along the way.
0:55:03 It’s like, yo, if I don’t want to be doing all the work, yeah, I’m going to have to bring
0:55:03 on some help.
0:55:06 This is something that’s going to sound a little bit of woo woo, but I’m going to go there anyways.
0:55:10 Like I told you at the very beginning, I bought a bunch of units and it was, I might, I might
0:55:10 recommend it.
0:55:15 I’m not saying go spend a bunch of money and like put yourself into a corner.
0:55:16 I don’t, that wasn’t a wise move.
0:55:17 It was just something that I did.
0:55:25 But I will say that I feel like the mindset behind stuff is, is underestimated.
0:55:30 So if I bought these units feeling like, man, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know if I’m
0:55:33 going to be able to do this, then I probably want, if I buy these units and I’m like, I
0:55:37 have to do this, then it just puts me in a different mode.
0:55:39 You’re working from a totally different place.
0:55:40 That’s one.
0:55:44 And then the second thing, when I’ve noticed this with anything that I’ve started, any
0:55:48 business or whatever, I would get caught up in what’s the logo going to be?
0:55:50 What’s the product?
0:55:51 Let me optimize the product.
0:55:52 What’s my website going to look like?
0:55:52 What?
0:55:53 Oh, let me change this color.
0:55:58 And I would do all these things, do all these different things, everything, but the most important
0:56:00 thing, which is sell it.
0:56:01 It was a pattern of mine.
0:56:03 Well, it’s easy to procrastinate on.
0:56:03 Yeah, that’s the hard part.
0:56:05 But you feel like you’re doing something.
0:56:09 It’s like a, like a, like a running back going from sideline to sideline instead of up to
0:56:09 field.
0:56:12 Like you look busy, but you’re not doing anything.
0:56:12 Yeah.
0:56:15 And that’s how I was like all these little things that made me feel good.
0:56:16 Let me get it up.
0:56:18 Maybe I should go back to school.
0:56:21 Like all these things making me feel good about it.
0:56:24 But what I’m doing is really just procrastinating, doing the thing that’s most important, which is
0:56:25 selling the product.
0:56:29 And if I could go back and tell myself that with anything I’ve done is figure out how to
0:56:31 sell it, then figure everything else out.
0:56:32 Yeah.
0:56:33 We’ll figure out.
0:56:33 Yeah.
0:56:35 We’ll, we’ll figure out the logistics once we got some orders.
0:56:35 Yeah.
0:56:38 Well, we could always change the logo down the road if we don’t like it.
0:56:38 Yeah.
0:56:39 There’s all sorts of, yeah.
0:56:43 But no, it’s, it’s easy to get caught up on that, you know, because you want to, you
0:56:47 want to put your best foot forward, but at the same time, yeah, I’m, I’m with you
0:56:48 on, on all of that.
0:56:52 But baldbuck.com, that’s where you can find this order ups, the barbecue seasoning for
0:56:53 yourself.
0:56:55 Yo, Chris Gray is where you can find Chris on social.
0:56:57 What’s next for you?
0:56:58 What’s got you excited this year?
0:57:00 I love our newsletter and what we’re doing there.
0:57:02 That’s, that’s really fun.
0:57:05 And then I’m really excited about where AI is right now.
0:57:10 Kind of think that we are in the wild west of it where in my, in my little inner bubble
0:57:13 circle, whatever you want to call it, everybody’s talking about it, but the general population
0:57:15 isn’t really on it.
0:57:19 And I think that this is like, you know, back in the day, you know, I don’t know how old
0:57:21 you are, Nick, I’m, I’m 44, man.
0:57:25 And, and I was around when the internet started coming to, to be a thing.
0:57:26 I’m, I’m close to that.
0:57:27 I’m almost there.
0:57:27 Yeah, man.
0:57:32 Well, you remember people were like email or you could buy things online.
0:57:34 That’s how it was back then.
0:57:35 Now look at it today.
0:57:39 I believe we’re there with AI and we’re on the precipice of it.
0:57:40 And a lot of people don’t know about it.
0:57:43 And there’s a lot of different ways to make a lot of money.
0:57:48 Maybe using AI and using AI and robotics and automation and, or use you just using AI to
0:57:49 get ideas and help with stuff.
0:57:54 But I think we’re kind of, we’re here where there’s an opportunity to use it to make money
0:57:58 or use it to help you make money or directly use it to make money.
0:57:59 I’m excited about that.
0:57:59 Yeah.
0:58:01 It’s a, it’s a brave new world.
0:58:02 We’ll see where it goes.
0:58:06 I’m trying to get better about using it on a daily, weekly basis.
0:58:09 I know I’m just scratching the surface and try, try and crowdsource some, some wisdom
0:58:12 from guests and from side hustle show listeners as well.
0:58:14 And what, what’s your use case here?
0:58:15 What am I, what am I missing out on?
0:58:16 But, uh, very cool.
0:58:20 Uh, so we’ll link up all this stuff, baldbuck.com and Chris Gray’s socials.
0:58:24 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:58:29 My number one tip is if you are starting to sell something or you have an idea of a product
0:58:34 that you want to do or a service you want to do, and you’re just starting, find something
0:58:36 that already works.
0:58:41 Don’t get crafty and try to create something unique and have this, oh, this idea, my blah,
0:58:41 blah, blah.
0:58:48 Like to get the thing off the ground to, you really want to get a ball rolling, find something
0:58:49 that is already working.
0:58:50 Then put your spin on it.
0:58:53 In the case of baldbuck, the seasoning was already selling.
0:58:56 I just need to, it was already good.
0:58:57 It already tasted good.
0:58:58 I didn’t need to come up with my own blend or something.
0:58:59 It was already working.
0:59:00 Yeah.
0:59:00 Yeah.
0:59:02 I just put, I put my label on it and figured out how to sell it.
0:59:06 But I think that concept is something else that’s helped me tremendously as I leverage
0:59:07 what’s already working.
0:59:07 Yeah.
0:59:09 Remove part of the equation, right?
0:59:13 Like it’s a way to kind of leapfrog or piggyback what’s already been done.
0:59:15 You don’t have to start completely from scratch.
0:59:19 It’s, you know, just, there’s still a lot of moving parts that you got to figure out,
0:59:21 but it’s like, well, here’s one, one less thing to worry about.
0:59:22 One less thing.
0:59:22 Up to the move.
0:59:24 So appreciate you sharing that.
0:59:25 That was one of my takeaways here.
0:59:32 You may not have to be a creator, an inventor completely from scratch.
0:59:36 And maybe you iterate on something that’s already out there, but go where there’s some proven
0:59:38 demand versus trying to create demand from scratch.
0:59:44 I loved Chris to talk about the brand positioning and then going after the partnerships.
0:59:46 We’re like, well, how am I going to sell this stuff?
0:59:48 Who’s already got some traffic and eyeballs?
0:59:50 Well, all these barbecue influencers do.
0:59:55 How can I make it a win for them instead of, and trying to find some sort of common ground
0:59:57 and then initial outreach, lots of good tips there.
1:00:02 And then going back to the storytelling and the emotion and his eBay example of like, it’s
1:00:03 the same stuff.
1:00:07 It’s the same commodity that it was 10 minutes ago, but now it has this story attached to it.
1:00:09 People willing to pay a premium for that.
1:00:12 Plus some creative ways to increase the average order size.
1:00:15 You’re going to do the shipping and logistics side of it anyways.
1:00:19 You know, what’s another couple of jars of stuff to throw into the box?
1:00:22 How do you incentivize people to increase that average order value?
1:00:23 What do you think?
1:00:26 Is there an opportunity to white label a product that you already love?
1:00:32 Your free listener bonus for this episode is my list of 20 hobby-related niches to get
1:00:35 your creative juices flowing, like barbecue might be a hobby for you as well.
1:00:37 Other stuff you might be able to sell for a profit.
1:00:40 Just follow the show notes link in the episode description.
1:00:41 It’ll get you right over there.
1:00:43 You’ll be able to download that for free.
1:00:46 Again, my list of 20 other hobby-related niches.
1:00:49 Big thanks to Chris for sharing his insight.
1:00:52 Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
1:00:57 As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our
1:00:59 sponsors in one place.
1:01:00 That is it for me.
1:01:01 Thank you so much for tuning in.
1:01:05 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
1:01:07 So fire off that text message.
1:01:09 Maybe it’s to that barbecue lover in your life.
1:01:12 Maybe it’s to somebody who’s just on the cusp of that next side hustle idea.
1:01:14 Would love your help in spreading the word.
1:01:17 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
1:01:20 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.
1:01:21 Hustle on.