0:00:05 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits collection.
0:00:10 Do you know how much cash flows through your hometown on a monthly basis?
0:00:13 Here’s a guide to diverting some of that money your way.
0:00:19 What’s up? What’s up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because
0:00:25 opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.
0:00:31 Hat tip to Thomas Edison for that one. It’s a good quote though and an appropriate one for
0:00:35 today’s show. I’m excited to welcome Nick Huber to the program. Nick, what’s up, man?
0:00:40 Nick, thanks for having me. You bet. I’m a big fan of everything you do, so I’m glad to be here.
0:00:45 Well, thank you for tuning in. Nick is the co-founder of Storage Squad, which answers
0:00:49 the question students have of what do I do with my stuff over the summer? Well,
0:00:53 you give it to Storage Squad, they pick it up, they store it, they deliver it back to you
0:00:59 when you need it again. It’s a company that’s grown to over $3 million in sales since starting
0:01:05 as a little part-time project back in 2011. Nick is also the host of the Sweaty Startup
0:01:11 podcast at sweatystartup.com. I think that’s my favorite podcast name that I’ve come across lately,
0:01:18 and I invited him here to help us walk through his Sweaty Startup Idea Framework. That is,
0:01:25 how can you start a low-risk, low-overhead, local, service-based business? How can you set it up for
0:01:31 success? And how can you let that be the vehicle that drives you away from a lifetime of cubicle
0:01:36 slavery? Stick around in this one to hear Nick’s thoughts on generating service business ideas.
0:01:41 You can start today how to go about evaluating the market and competition and scoring your first
0:01:46 customers. That’s why I think this is pretty exciting. It doesn’t take many customers to begin
0:01:52 to make a meaningful income here. Nick, let’s get into this and generate some service business
0:01:57 ideas. This is the biggest pain point that I hear from side hustle show listeners over and over again.
0:02:03 I just need an idea. If I have that magical idea, I know I can go get started as you’re advocating for
0:02:08 a different type of idea. Something that has already been done, it’s already been proven,
0:02:12 and it just needs somebody to go out there and execute on it better. Let’s dive into this stuff.
0:02:17 Where do you suggest people start when they’re looking for that first side hustle idea, first
0:02:23 business idea? Yeah, absolutely. The reason why I’m so excited about this is I bought a house
0:02:29 about a year and a half ago, and I didn’t realize how hard it was to find people who were willing
0:02:34 to service your home, whether it’s cleaning the carpet, washing the windows, power washing the
0:02:38 driveways, the hundreds of businesses that people are outsourcing and outsourcing more and more.
0:02:43 I think about my grandfather and my dad and how they were good with their hands and they knew
0:02:47 how to do everything and they fixed their own stuff and they did their own things in their home.
0:02:51 I don’t know about you, Nick, but I am not that way. I think a lot of the next generation of
0:02:55 homeowners are not that way. What they’re doing is they’re reclaiming their time. They want to
0:02:59 spend more time with family. They want to spend less time tinkering in the garage, so they are
0:03:04 literally outsourcing everything that has to do with home ownership. Same with businesses.
0:03:07 Businesses are focusing on what they do best, outsourcing a lot of other things.
0:03:13 I think a lot of brilliant, bright entrepreneurs are missing these business ideas that are right
0:03:18 in our backyards or in our small towns or in our big cities that we can get out and
0:03:22 touch and feel and do ourselves. That’s the trend that I’m seeing out there.
0:03:27 No, absolutely. I can see that trend just as myself personally compared with
0:03:33 generations past and my father. He was able to do that is an interesting idea. You’re saying,
0:03:39 oh, plus combine that with more people getting higher level education instead of going to the
0:03:44 trades. There’s a shortage of this type of skilled worker. As a listener of the show,
0:03:49 you should come in and fill that gap or you could come in and fill that gap as a potential
0:03:54 entrepreneurial venture. A big part of this is competition. When I’m looking at e-commerce
0:03:59 or freelancing or Amazon FBA and these businesses that are amazing because they’re location
0:04:02 independent. You can work online. You can work from anywhere. There’s not a whole lot of barriers
0:04:08 to entry. I look at the amount of people flooding those markets and the people that are not
0:04:12 necessarily geographically limited. You’re competing with people from all over the world
0:04:17 in some other areas. Pakistan, places where this kind of work is taught in schools a lot.
0:04:22 People are more affordable dollar per hour to do this kind of work. I look at the competition.
0:04:25 When I look at the competition in these home service businesses, I don’t think a lot of
0:04:29 these people consider themselves entrepreneurial. I don’t think a lot of them are very innovative.
0:04:34 A lot of them are running their businesses like it’s 1985 with a fax machine, not a whole lot of
0:04:42 email even. They’re doing business like it’s 1985. I think a smart young entrepreneur with today’s
0:04:47 technology can really carve out a very interesting piece of the pie on these businesses that are
0:04:51 already in our cities. They’re already operating. They’re already profitable. More importantly,
0:04:54 as we’ll talk about here in a second, they’re easy to study and it’s easy to find out if you can carve
0:05:00 out a piece of the pie. Yeah. This was something where we were shopping for a home cleaning service
0:05:05 as an example of something that we’ve begun to outsource ourselves. It was just like you’re
0:05:12 describing. Every website, if they even had a website was from 20 years ago, it was all this
0:05:17 contact us for a quote and we’ll get back to you in five business days. The service we ended
0:05:21 up going with is called Handy. It was just like an app. I didn’t have to talk to anybody. It was
0:05:26 like $40 off your first cleaning or something. It was like this price seems reasonable. I don’t
0:05:29 know. Nobody else, I didn’t want to bother calling them for a quote. I don’t know if they’re
0:05:33 overcharging me. I’m sure they’ve got some technological overhead and development in this app,
0:05:38 so there probably is some margin in there. All they are is a matchmaker. They hook me up with
0:05:43 local cleaners who I otherwise wouldn’t have been in touch with and they just play this middleman.
0:05:48 The developers of Handy aren’t the ones coming out scrubbing the toilet. They’re just playing
0:05:53 a matchmaker in a way similar to what Chris Schwab was doing with ThinkMades on the podcast
0:05:59 maybe a year and a half ago. What kind of questions aside from maybe do I have a tech
0:06:03 advantage or do I have a customer support advantage? That was Chris’s whole thing,
0:06:07 was like, “I went on Yelp. Nobody was complaining about the cleaning. They were complaining that I
0:06:11 couldn’t get a hold of anybody. I took a while to get a quote. I didn’t know when the people were
0:06:15 coming.” What other questions can people ask if they’re evaluating different service business
0:06:20 ideas? Yeah, so number one for me is I avoid things that people are passionate about. That’s
0:06:24 the number one question. Is anybody passionate about doing this? Because if there’s a lot of
0:06:29 people who are passionate about it, then there’s probably a high level of participation and the
0:06:34 odds of success are probably a little bit lower. This would be like starting teaching yoga or
0:06:39 something. Exactly, right. The things that are fun, the things that people are hobby-oriented,
0:06:44 restaurants, brewing beer, things that are fun. Those are the things that if other people are
0:06:48 kind of having fun doing that, they’re maybe not going to make wise business decisions. They’re
0:06:51 going to undervalue their time. Those aren’t the kind of people that I want to compete with if I’m
0:06:54 starting a business. Which goes counter to most advice of like, “Well, pick something you’re
0:06:59 passionate about.” I know. I know. I’m passionate about building something. I’m passionate about
0:07:03 entrepreneurship and I’m passionate about taking steps forward every single day. I want to do what
0:07:07 I want to do in my free time right away from work. The goal here for me is have a five-year plan so
0:07:11 that I don’t have to work a whole lot. I can do what I’m passionate about and not be stressed out
0:07:16 about earning money doing those things. What else? I look at a rising demand. Like I said,
0:07:20 people are outsourcing more. The pie is getting bigger every single day. 20 years ago, 5% of
0:07:26 people paid someone to come mow their lawn. Today, 40% of people do. I’m guessing 10 years from now,
0:07:30 that number will be well over 50%. There’s more and more and more customers coming on the market
0:07:36 every single day that are using these local services. The big one is competition. We already
0:07:40 touched on it a little bit. If you’re looking at who you’re competing with and what kind of models
0:07:47 they’re using, it’s pretty easy to choose a local service business based on how they do business,
0:07:51 then try to compete with the tech entrepreneurs, the online entrepreneurs who are not necessarily
0:07:56 location dependent and really, really good at what they do. Okay. That’s interesting. So not
0:08:03 necessarily going out to conquest somebody else’s customer, not necessarily trying to steal market
0:08:08 share, but just, hey, there’s a rising tide of people outsourcing their lawn mowing, their home
0:08:14 cleaning. We talked to a woman a few weeks ago who was doing pet waste removal. And what else
0:08:19 is cool about that is the house is going to keep getting dirty, the grass is going to keep growing,
0:08:24 the dog is going to keep pooping in the backyard. You’re setting yourself up for a recurring stream
0:08:28 of revenue as long as you can keep doing this work or contracting people to do this work with you.
0:08:34 Absolutely. So in my mind, every business has either an employee problem or a customer problem.
0:08:37 Most businesses, they have customer problems. They can’t find enough customers to get the
0:08:42 revenue to build the business to be profitable. A lot of these industries and we’ll look at how
0:08:45 to actually analyze and figure out where the problem is. They don’t necessarily have customer
0:08:48 problems. There’s enough customers. They have employee problems. And I learned this when I
0:08:52 bought my house and I needed to get some things done. I would call an esteem cleaner for the house
0:08:56 when we moved in. I wanted somebody to build out my closet. I was looking for somebody to put
0:09:00 shelves in my garage. I was looking for somebody to put pest control around my house mow my lawn.
0:09:06 And I would call 10 companies and seven would answer the phone. Three were not taking new clients.
0:09:10 The other four took a really long time to come out and even look at my home.
0:09:14 It wasn’t like, okay, you know, I’m eager to get this business. I need this business.
0:09:18 They all have employee problems. They don’t have customer problems. That makes sense. So
0:09:22 they have trouble delivering the service and meeting the demand based on how many
0:09:26 employees or how their systems are designed. They don’t necessarily have a marketing
0:09:30 employee problem because the demand in some of these areas is so strong.
0:09:34 If you are mystery shopping these companies, you’re calling these companies up. I imagine
0:09:38 if they’re saying, hey, it’s going to be two to four weeks before we can get out to you,
0:09:42 that’s a good sign in your case because you’re like, okay, maybe there’s clearly
0:09:46 more demand than there is supply here. Absolutely. Lead time is number one.
0:09:51 So when I’m analyzing opportunities, I like to make a list of 10 businesses that I could
0:09:55 potentially offer with my current skill set with what I already equipment that I have. You know,
0:09:59 it’s 10 different businesses that I could start in a low risk way. And the first thing that I’m
0:10:05 looking at when I start to poke around is lead time. How long is it going to take you to come out
0:10:10 and give me a quote or build my closet or do whatever it is that I need to have done? How
0:10:12 long is that going to take? And you’ll be really surprised when you get on the phone with some
0:10:16 of these companies and they’re like, oh yeah, we’re booked out four weeks basically all the time.
0:10:20 And when we’re really busy in May, June, July, it’s more like six or seven weeks,
0:10:25 six or seven weeks for us to come out and do this. And that is not a joke. I just call around a
0:10:30 bunch of companies to put a little sidewalk down to my lower entrance to my basement because I
0:10:33 want to put it on Airbnb. And I called about 10 companies. Most of them answered the phone, most
0:10:38 of them were professional, but only two have come out and actually talked to me. And I made
0:10:43 all those calls about three weeks ago and only one has already gotten me a quote. So 10% of the
0:10:47 companies that I called have actually come out and delivered a quote and it’s been over two weeks
0:10:51 since I made those calls. More with Nick in just a moment, including more ways to come up with
0:10:57 service business ideas and how do we evaluate which ones to actually move forward with right after
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0:13:12 details. Interesting. So you’re kind of starting from the point of like what would I need done in
0:13:19 my own house? Any other kind of starting points to seed this initial list building exercise?
0:13:23 Yeah. I mean, I have a list on my website. It’s what a startup of literally about 200 different
0:13:27 services. It’s the long tail of these service businesses. You don’t necessarily have to limit
0:13:32 yourself to house painting or pest control. You can get very, very, very specific. Like if you
0:13:37 learn how to build one random example is a steam shower. I was interested in converting a steam
0:13:41 shower in one of my bathrooms because I think it’s really a healthy thing to do. I was kind of into
0:13:47 it. So I looked on Google and there is one company in the state of Georgia that does this. One company
0:13:52 that install steam showers. They wanted a $300 nonrefundable deposit to even come out and look
0:13:57 at that job. Because they can. They can’t. Yeah. They just can’t solve the employee problem to
0:14:01 service more customers. They have constraints in those regards. So you can get very creative.
0:14:05 Like think of anything that you could possibly need done. Like building out custom closets is
0:14:10 one that I love that you can order kits online and with a screwdriver and a laser level, you can
0:14:14 install really, really good closets in people’s houses. You got deck staining, window cleaning,
0:14:18 gutter cleaning, mobile bartending. You can think about just your network and what kind of lends
0:14:22 itself to what you could possibly do. I like to make a list of 10 businesses and get more
0:14:27 specialized as you go. Make a list of five businesses that are really low cost, really low
0:14:31 skilled, really low barriers to entry. And then think about, okay, if I did a little bit of investing
0:14:36 in most times just time. I love how you say, Nick, your life is what you do from five to nine
0:14:40 is the important time, right? What can you spend instead of watching TV? The average American
0:14:45 watches five hours a day of TV. What can you do to kind of get into something that has a little
0:14:48 bit more barriers to entry, maybe a little bit of equipment, maybe some skills that you need to
0:14:52 learn? I like making a list of 10 businesses and putting them on a piece of paper. That’s where I
0:14:57 start. Yeah, there’s a listener of the show who has a parking lot striping business who he’s
0:15:00 sent me some details on this. And it’s like, yeah, there’s a little bit of equipment. There’s a
0:15:05 little bit of skill and I guess probably practice in learning how to do this the right way so you
0:15:10 don’t mess up the parking lot. But it’s so niche and so specialized that like, hey, anytime there’s
0:15:14 a new parking lot going in in town, he’s the guy that gets the call. I have a friend actually who
0:15:20 does deep cleaning of restaurants. So he will go in at night with equipment. It’s a very sweaty job,
0:15:24 goes in at night in about five hours. He will deep clean and degrease a commercial kitchen
0:15:30 and restaurant floor. And he will net profit at the end of the night about $1,000 and four hours
0:15:34 time. Wow. He’s the only one in town who does it. He has all the contracts. And he was just a guy
0:15:38 with the cargo van, drove around, not necessarily that skilled. He was just willing to do this one
0:15:42 little niche thing. Now within about a three city radius, he’s the first guy on Google because
0:15:46 there’s only about two or three companies that do it, has more business that he could ever hope for.
0:15:51 He’s raised his prices every year by 30%. He just keeps having a full schedule. It’s pretty awesome.
0:15:54 Yeah. So we talked about a kind of like low skill, low barrier to entry stuff,
0:16:00 installing custom closets, installing steam showers. That stuff sounds a little bit more
0:16:04 stressful to me as like, okay, well, I’ve never done that before. I’ve definitely never gotten
0:16:08 paid to do that before. So where do you draw the line between, okay, yeah, I can figure that out
0:16:14 versus like, I might have some serious liability on my hand or I might need some special certifications
0:16:18 or licenses, something like that. Yeah. Well, a lot of times you can actually work part. I mean,
0:16:22 the thing about all these companies, Nick, is that they’re all really hurting for employees.
0:16:26 You could go get paid to learn how to install steam showers by calling that company and saying,
0:16:30 I really want to side job on the evenings and weekends. They would easily hire you for $20
0:16:35 an hour to come work for them and do that stuff. So it’s like going to school while getting paid
0:16:40 to do it. So that’s one option that I love. The second option is YouTube. I mean, it’s amazing
0:16:43 what you can learn on YouTube. I ended up installing my closet myself after I didn’t
0:16:48 want to pay the $3,500 for the basic package from California Closets or Inspired Closets.
0:16:53 It took me about 20 hours total. I built the closet of my dreams, had a ton of fun,
0:16:56 and it’s not as hard as you’d think. So that’s my advice there.
0:17:02 Okay. So you’ve got this list, five to 10 business ideas with varying degrees of complexity.
0:17:06 What happens next in your startup evaluation process?
0:17:11 Yep. Open up your computer, go on Google, and search each business. So gutter cleanings on your
0:17:14 list, you’re going to search gutter cleanings and wherever you’re from, like Bay Area, wherever,
0:17:18 Athens, Georgia. And you’re going to call the first three companies and you’re going to make
0:17:21 a little Excel spreadsheet. And you’re going to kind of play a customer. You’re going to pretend
0:17:24 to be a customer. You’re going to have an address that you need them to come quote service for,
0:17:29 or you’re just going to pick their brain. And you’re going to kind of weigh them on three things.
0:17:33 Number one is speed. Like I said, quote velocity, how fast can you come out? How fast can you provide
0:17:37 a service? Because you know that if they’re booked out four weeks, A, they’re losing a lot of business
0:17:41 and B, they are very, very, very busy. The next thing you’re going to look at is accessibility
0:17:44 and digital marketing. Do they have a website? Most of them, you’d be very surprised that you’ll
0:17:50 see one with a Google listing with no website, no real systems, no digital marketing, no advertising.
0:17:55 Last one I like to look at is pricing. For example, the landscape company that did get me the quote
0:18:00 wanted $23,000 to put a sidewalk around that I’d calculated how many yards of concrete,
0:18:05 how much wood I needed to do it. It was about $1,500 in material. That is example of where
0:18:09 they’ve just continued to raise their prices because they know they’re the only ones in town
0:18:13 that are getting out and giving people quotes and they’re getting a lot of jobs. So speed,
0:18:17 accessibility and pricing, that’s the things that you really look at. You can analyze and I do this
0:18:22 all on the phone by playing a customer. So I’ll call the top three businesses of all 10 on my
0:18:27 list. So I’m making 30 phone calls and I’m keeping a little spreadsheet of, okay, and I’m just,
0:18:30 if all three answer the phone, if all three are not that busy, if all three are very eager
0:18:34 to get your business, if all three are running Google AdWords, if all three have pretty low
0:18:40 pricing, I cross that off my list. But if they’re slow, if they’re not interested in my business,
0:18:44 if they’re not running ads, if they’re very expensive, I circle it. So after that exercise,
0:18:49 I usually have a list of about three businesses left that there’s some meat on the bone here.
0:18:51 There might be an opportunity for me to carve out a piece of the pie.
0:18:58 Do you find even in these low-skill businesses there is apparent margin out there? There is more
0:19:03 apparent demand than there is supply for window washing or gutter cleaning or something like
0:19:09 that. It’s like, okay, with a ladder and a squeegee, I could get this done. Do you find even with
0:19:14 stuff like low barrier to entry, like the pet waste removal, or is it just like, hey, it’s a race to
0:19:19 the bottom. It’s commoditized. There’s nothing left here. That’s an excellent question. And that
0:19:22 is the number one complaint that you hear from all the smart entrepreneurs who want an online
0:19:26 scalable business. They all say, why would I do that? Why would I compete against Craigslisters?
0:19:31 Why would I race to the bottom? Why would I go in these low-margin, non-scalable businesses?
0:19:37 And in my opinion, they have the wrong mindset. You don’t need to get every single customer.
0:19:41 That’s number one. You need to shift your mindset of saying, okay, I’m going to convert
0:19:47 30% of my bids, and I only want a certain type of customer. I think a lot of business owners
0:19:53 early on, they say, okay, they kind of get emotional about converting leads to jobs,
0:19:56 and they want to get every customer, and they want to win every bid, and they’ll discount,
0:19:59 and they’ll drop their prices, and they’ll do what they have to do to win every customer.
0:20:03 Whereas if you’re doing this the right way, you understand that, okay, I’m only going to convert
0:20:08 one third, 25% of all these leads that come in, but I’m going to go after the customers that need
0:20:13 two things. They want professionalism, and they want speed. They want somebody who’s super
0:20:17 professional, and they want somebody who can do this stuff quickly, and price is not as important
0:20:21 to them. There’s a lot of customers like that out there. I’m one of those customers. If I’m calling
0:20:25 around to lawn care companies, I want somebody who’s professional, who shows up in a collared shirt,
0:20:30 who I don’t have to worry about being unprofessional around my family, or driving a beat-up pickup
0:20:34 truck with holes in the side panels, you know what I mean? You want the customers that are willing to
0:20:38 pay the higher price, and I’m telling you, Nick, there are a lot of them out there. Even in these
0:20:44 low-scaled, low-barried entry businesses, you can target high-end clientele who are willing to pay
0:20:49 more for better service, and you can build a scalable company. Even in these service businesses
0:20:52 where people will say, “That’s not a scalable business. Why would I ever target that?”
0:20:56 Right. Well, everything is scalable with the right systems in place, but you bring up an
0:21:01 important point about pricing. This was my biggest mistake when I was painting houses in college,
0:21:07 was pricing too low, because I was afraid I wasn’t getting enough work to keep my crews busy,
0:21:12 so I’d discount, discount, discount, and I probably would have been better off accepting
0:21:18 fewer jobs, like hitting a lower hit rate on the bids that I did do, but just targeting a better
0:21:23 customer. I mean, the customers were fine. It was just me probably discounting unnecessarily.
0:21:28 Absolutely. It’s the only real way that you can build a stress-free, scalable business in the
0:21:32 first place, because if you don’t pack in that extra margin, if you don’t have that extra money,
0:21:35 you’re going to constantly be stressed out. You’re not going to be able to pay your employees
0:21:38 enough. We’ll get to employees in a second, because this is the biggest struggle that you
0:21:42 hear every business owner say, “I can’t find good employees,” so we’ll talk about that in just a
0:21:45 minute, but the way that you scale a business and the way that you build a business with a healthy
0:21:51 foundation is get comfortable charging a higher price and not get emotional about losing bids.
0:21:54 Losing bids sucks. It sucks to hear a customer say, “I’m going to go with a different company,
0:21:58 because they’re cheaper.” You have to have that switch in your mind that says,
0:22:01 “That’s not a customer that I wanted anyway, so that’s fine with me.”
0:22:07 Yeah. We were at our year-end retreat for this painting company, and one of the top performers
0:22:12 in the business gets up and he tells this story about how he’d been out to this woman’s house
0:22:16 three or four times, and they’ve been back and forth, and she’s got all these quotes,
0:22:21 and she comes back to him and says, “Hey, I got this quote for $1,400 or something,”
0:22:24 and he’s like, “Ma’am, I’m going to be 100% honest with you.”
0:22:30 “You don’t want a $1,400 paint job,” and he closes the bid, and it was like, “Wow, that was
0:22:34 a way to turn that around in an area,” and I actually used that when I was doing proofreading
0:22:40 on freelance book editing, and I was like, “Yeah, you could find cheaper editors out there, but
0:22:43 it’s your book. This is your baby. Do you really want to go with them? You got to put your best
0:22:48 foot forward.” Absolutely. And so many of these people are really, really bad at sales as well,
0:22:50 Nick. I’ve had some of them come out to my house. They don’t know how to shake my hand.
0:22:53 They don’t know how to talk to me. They don’t know how to present ideas,
0:22:56 and framing the sales interaction of, “Look, I don’t necessarily need your business. I’m going
0:23:00 to be extremely polite to you, extremely nice to you, but listen, this is only going to work if
0:23:05 our circle’s overlapped. I’m busy. You’re busy. I know that you want really good service. I deliver
0:23:08 that. If you want to pay a price, that’s great, but I don’t discount. These are things that I just
0:23:13 don’t do.” So if you set those guidelines as a foundation for your business, you’ll be in really,
0:23:17 really good shape when it comes time to grow. Another thing about these non-scalable businesses
0:23:21 before we move on from that, people kind of think whatever business I’m going to start right now is
0:23:26 the business that I’m going to be doing five years from now or 10 years from now. That’s just
0:23:31 not the case. Business is so much about momentum and maybe casting a wide net and offering several
0:23:36 different services and specializing, and then specializing. Then as you get skills, you specialize
0:23:40 even more. As you get skills, you specialize even more. Before you know it, five or six or seven
0:23:43 years later, you’re doing something totally different. You’re doing something higher margin.
0:23:46 You’ve kind of weeded out the opportunities as these opportunities have come to you,
0:23:50 and your business is bigger, better, and you’re doing more and more exciting things.
0:23:55 All the wealthiest people that I know, all the richest, the people who have the most free time,
0:24:00 the happiest people that I know, they all started really, really, really small businesses that weren’t
0:24:05 necessarily scalable, and then they grew them. One guy kind of built his own house and subcontracted
0:24:09 it out. Then his neighbor asked if he could build his house. You fast forward 20 years and he’s
0:24:15 building $20 million assisted livings and nursing homes for giant hospital operators,
0:24:21 and he’s worth close to a billion dollars. That’s the story of so many wealthy entrepreneurs,
0:24:25 and that is the opposite of what our media and what kind of the entrepreneur culture
0:24:30 online and on Shark Tank and in Silicon Valley kind of paints. Nobody paints those pictures.
0:24:36 Nobody shows the stories of the very, very wealthy people in our individual cities and towns
0:24:42 that don’t have a sexy story. That’s something else to keep in mind when we’re looking at the
0:24:47 nitty-gritty, non-exciting businesses that start. No, it’s 100% true. We’ve seen it from probably
0:24:52 hundreds of guests at this point that, look, choosing what’s next doesn’t mean choosing
0:24:56 what’s forever. The best opportunities aren’t visible until you’re already in motion. It’s
0:25:00 going to become a little bit of a chorus here, but I’ve definitely found that to be true.
0:25:05 Yeah, so I started my business when I was running up spiral staircases with boxes,
0:25:09 buying a $1,500 van on Craigslist, and my friends were laughing at me and my parents
0:25:13 were thought I was crazy when I was going to take my college degree and do that full time.
0:25:21 You fast forward seven short years, and we’re operating $10 million plus self-storage portfolios,
0:25:26 and we’re on the verge of doing some really, really cool things. Just another encouragement that
0:25:29 entrepreneurship is about kind of momentum, and it’s building on what you’ve previously done,
0:25:33 and it’s learning along the way. Anything you can do to just get started, I think,
0:25:37 is the hardest first step. All right, I’m with you there. Okay, so I’ve got my list of 10 ideas.
0:25:42 I’ve been mystery shopping, the top three competitors that I could find in each of these
0:25:48 spaces, evaluating for speed, what’s their online presence look like, how easy are they
0:25:53 to do business with, and do I have an estimate of their pricing power or what kind of margins
0:25:59 you think they’re able to hold? I imagine from there now it’s kind of a narrowing down process.
0:26:02 What does that look like for you? Yeah, when you’re down to your last three,
0:26:06 you call 10 companies, you kind of study them a little bit more, and then you don’t overthink it.
0:26:11 You jump in and you do it, and you go to domains.google.com and you find an available domain.
0:26:14 I like to have synonyms.com on the other page and kind of just really brainstorming
0:26:19 different ideas, seeing what’s available. I buy it. I send to Google my business location
0:26:24 to my house. I put a Google voice phone number on there. I operate my business with a G Suite,
0:26:27 the suite of Google tools that you can get for just a couple bucks a month,
0:26:31 where you can do everything, and you can get out of the box little customer management software.
0:26:35 I know we’re really ripping through some stuff here, but what I’m saying is it’s just time to get
0:26:40 out and serve some customers. What I always do is I put together a basic website on WordPress,
0:26:43 get an email address, get a phone number, and it’s time to go find some customers.
0:26:48 I usually print out several thousand, get some marketing materials made on Fiverr
0:26:52 or something similar, get several thousand of them printed, put them on a backpack,
0:26:55 go to a neighborhood where I think there’s houses that need what I’m offering,
0:26:59 or there’s businesses that need what I’m offering, and I get these flyers and I spread them out,
0:27:04 and I go see my customers. People laugh all the time when I talk about sidewalk chalk,
0:27:08 but Nick, that is how I built my business, because I knew where my customers walked.
0:27:12 I was servicing students. I knew that they were freshmen. I knew where they walked to
0:27:16 class. I knew where they lived, so I decided to get some boxes of sidewalk chalk, and I would go
0:27:20 on the path where they were walking to class. I knew they were walking to class at 10 a.m. every
0:27:24 day, so I’d get out there at 6 a.m., and I’d write student storage, best prices in the country,
0:27:31 storagesquad.com. I’ve written that phrase over a thousand times in my life, and I’m telling you,
0:27:38 the ROI on that time spent is – I was making probably hundreds of dollars per hour writing chalk
0:27:42 on the ground, because it was so effective. It was a billboard that probably 40% of our
0:27:48 customers in these early days said that that is how they heard about my business. I love the guerrilla
0:27:52 marketing. Wow, that’s awesome. Just getting right in front of their feet, as it were. Did you ever
0:27:57 get in trouble with the campuses or anything for blanketing the city and campus with your ad
0:28:02 messages? We ended up hiring some students to do this, and they thought it was a good idea to
0:28:07 go under the overhangs and write sidewalk chalk advertisements on the buildings,
0:28:13 which that upset the school, and I had to get a power washer and go out and clean it off.
0:28:16 But for the most part, no, they didn’t mind. I mean, the student groups were allowed to advertise
0:28:22 their a cappella groups or basketball recruiting for club ball on the sidewalk, so we did a lot of
0:28:27 the same stuff. When we were turned away, it wasn’t the end of the world. That was a big
0:28:31 part of our early marketing campaign. More marketing ideas with Nick right after this.
0:28:37 There’s no shortage of AI tools out there, but using them means switching back and forth between
0:28:42 yet another digital tool. So instead of simplifying your workflow, it just becomes more complicated.
0:28:47 That is unless you’re using our sponsor, Notion. Recommended by many aside hustle show guests,
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0:29:03 doing tasks that normally take you hours in just seconds. So I started using Notion as kind of a
0:29:08 centralized place to house all the process documentation that had been built up over
0:29:13 the last decade in the business. But one of my goals for this year is to do a better job
0:29:17 repurposing content, getting more mileage out of the stuff we’re already creating.
0:29:21 And that’s something that Notion AI is really helpful for. Side hustle show listeners can try
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0:29:43 sponsor time. Now I could read you a script about Gusto’s payroll and benefits, but instead,
0:29:48 I wanted to share some reviews and feedback from real Gusto customers. The first one says,
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0:29:58 Know anything that makes payroll a joy? You don’t hear that every day. Amy from Utah says
0:30:03 they do our medical, dental, vision, and life insurance. It’s like going to the spa. And we’ve
0:30:07 got great options and rates, even though we’re a super small team. What about customer service?
0:30:12 Here’s what Amneet says about Gusto’s support team. “Whenever something comes up, I reach out,
0:30:16 and literally 24 hours later, they tell us what to do or assure us that they’ve already
0:30:21 handled it for us.” That’s what happens when you combine smart technology and friendly humans.
0:30:24 And really, that’s just a small sample of the positive feedback that Gusto has earned over
0:30:30 the years. Right now, side hustle show listeners get three months free when you go to gusto.com/side
0:30:36 hustle. Yes, that’s three months of payroll, benefits admin, and more totally free. Again,
0:30:43 gusto.com/side hustle. And we are at a beautiful day in age where this technology is available.
0:30:46 You looked 10, 15 years ago. You had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get these
0:30:51 tools. Now you can use FreshBooks, Gusto, and some others right out of the box that just make you
0:30:54 extremely professional, efficient, and you don’t have to spend your time pushing paper around.
0:30:59 So that’s another amazing advantage that a scrappy startup entrepreneur has with these
0:31:02 service businesses. So I love it. Yeah, so true. I mean, you gave the example on the
0:31:08 Bigger Pockets Business podcast of going into the storage space as a real estate investment
0:31:13 and looking at these other companies that have a on-site manager sitting in the office all day.
0:31:16 It’s like, well, 99% of the time, they’re not doing anything.
0:31:19 That’s exactly our competitive advantage right now. We’re running our self-storage
0:31:23 facilities remotely and building a big successful portfolio doing that just because
0:31:29 a lot of the businesses, even in this big data real estate world, they’re not necessarily
0:31:35 using the latest technology. I’d say only 5 or 10% of these service businesses use things like
0:31:40 FreshBooks, Gusto, Jobber, some other out-of-the-box software that can just make your life so easy
0:31:44 so that you can spend time marketing and making money and not run and payroll and
0:31:47 sending invoices and things like that. It’s a beautiful thing.
0:31:50 It’s funny you mentioned Jobber. Jobber is a really interesting
0:31:55 software tool that I came across recently, like perfect for this type of local service business.
0:31:59 Let your customers know when you’re coming and kind of like an all-in-one system, you know,
0:32:02 when you have a crew out and about in the town.
0:32:05 Yeah, and I have a list of all these tools that I love to implement in the early days on the
0:32:10 website, sweetystartup.com/essentialtools, or there’s a dash between essential and tools,
0:32:14 but there’s just so many great little things that you can kind of bolt on to each other
0:32:17 to get so efficient so that you can get out market and find some customers. It’s a great
0:32:21 time to be alive. All right, we’re going to link that up in the show notes,
0:32:28 sidehustlenation.com/sweddy for next list of essential tools, but let’s go into one of my
0:32:34 favorite parts of the painting business was the pressure washing beforehand. It’s just like,
0:32:38 I mean, there’s entire like pressure washing porn videos just because it’s like,
0:32:42 it’s such a satisfying thing to do. So let’s say I want to start this pressure washing
0:32:49 business here locally. Would you go with the sidewalk chalk route like in a high-end neighborhood
0:32:53 and say, like, I can make this driveway look new again? Like, how would you go about it?
0:32:58 Yeah, first of all, I would go around and do some gorilla cleaning advertisements. Like,
0:33:02 I would literally use my power wand to clean some areas. There’s actually some pictures on my
0:33:07 website of some people under an overpass on the interstate. There was a really dirty triangle
0:33:12 of concrete right there that you kind of see and drive by. And they wrote on there, power washing,
0:33:15 don’t let your driveway get this dirty. And they put a phone number on there. I thought that was
0:33:21 extremely creative. But this is a business where if you’re in a neighborhood and you’re power washing
0:33:26 your friend or some early customers, give a card, have a business card and just hand them out to
0:33:29 everybody that you see and say, I’m in your neighborhood. I’m doing like, look at what I’m
0:33:34 doing here. And you’ll be extremely surprised at how far that goes. So just not being afraid
0:33:39 to walk up and shake hands and talk to somebody. Put you at an amazing advantage in the day and age
0:33:43 where most companies are just nudging their digital marketing department saying, spend more money on
0:33:47 Google AdWords. Nobody’s getting out and doing these gorilla marketing tactics.
0:33:52 I love the idea of carving it out with the pressure washer, the water equivalent of the sidewalk chalk.
0:33:56 Yeah. Another big one is Google My Business. I think so many people find service businesses
0:34:02 on the Google Maps function. And you can send a postcard to any address, pull up, get a Google
0:34:07 listing of your own. And if you have some of your early customers, even if it’s you power wash
0:34:12 your neighbor’s house for free, have them take a picture of your work and put a pretty good review
0:34:17 on Google My Business. And if you get those two things, a photo and a decently worded review
0:34:22 on your Google My Business location, it’ll just supercharge your SEO so that you start getting
0:34:26 some organic online leads fairly quickly. I mean, I’m sure you’ve done a ton of studying
0:34:30 with SEO. You’ve had some specialists on your podcast. It’s really, really competitive to do
0:34:35 these affiliate sites and things like that and target these keywords. But it’s not that competitive
0:34:40 when you’re competing against these 1985 businesses in your small town or big city even
0:34:43 to rank and get found by a lot of people who need these services.
0:34:49 No, it took like one weekend of concerted effort for my wife to get on the first page for her
0:34:53 photography business. And I don’t know if she still is. This was several years ago and they’ve
0:34:57 generated some different sources of leads. But it was like for a local service-based business,
0:35:02 your competition typically isn’t that savvy. So it doesn’t take, it doesn’t take much.
0:35:05 Now, one, you bring up Google My Business. This is a sticking point for a lot of people,
0:35:11 especially doing business as a side, is like sticking their home address on the internet
0:35:17 as their place of business. I understand there’s some workarounds with choosing a geographic area
0:35:21 that you serve. But curious what your take is on that.
0:35:24 Yeah, I mean, when I was in college, I didn’t have a whole lot to lose. So I dropped a pin right
0:35:29 on my dorm. And then my next year, my house, I dropped a pin on that one as well. So yeah,
0:35:34 you can use the service area function. You can also get a PO box. You can also rent a mailbox,
0:35:37 walk up and talk to a business owner and say, “You mind if I put my computer in this corner
0:35:41 and work here once a week and drop Google My Business location on your business?” And most
0:35:46 of the time, they’ll just say, “Of course, that’s fine.” It’s a pretty easy sell to have
0:35:50 almost no negative impact and get that kind of advantage. So I think if you’re scrapping,
0:35:53 you can get creative. There are definitely some ways to get that Google My Business listing up.
0:36:00 In the pet waste removal example, the woman, she had a banner that she hung up at the dog park,
0:36:04 which I think she said it cost her a couple hundred bucks for the year to advertise with
0:36:10 her banner there. She would bring donuts into the veterinary offices and say, “Hey, I brought
0:36:14 these donuts. Can I leave my business cards here as well?” To get in front of her target customers
0:36:18 where they were already hanging out, where they were already doing business. That’s kind of how
0:36:24 she did her marketing in addition to that, blanketed a bunch of local Facebook groups saying,
0:36:29 “Hey, pet waste removal starting at X dollars per week or something like that.” Anything else
0:36:33 on the marketing front, maybe this pressure washing example or anything else that comes to mind?
0:36:37 Just one that comes to mind right now is the lawn care companies. The lawn care companies don’t want
0:36:42 to pick up the poop, but they also don’t want to run over it. So I’m sure if you got in with a
0:36:47 couple lawn care companies, they would happily tell all their clients to also be your clients.
0:36:51 Many, many of these businesses say you’re a deck staining. You just want to be a deck staining.
0:36:55 All you need is a paintbrush and a can of stain to do this. The people who build the decks,
0:36:59 they don’t want to come back six weeks later after the wood has dried to stain the decks.
0:37:02 So you could easily talk to the carpenters who are building the decks and get them to refer
0:37:07 your business. I love finding people who refer you business because nobody else is doing that.
0:37:13 Nobody’s calling the plumbers and saying, “Hey, I put tile in showers. You plum showers. Let’s
0:37:17 work together.” People ask you all the time for referrals. I actually asked my plumber who he would
0:37:22 recommend to tile in my shower. He said, “I don’t know anybody.” I said, “I can’t believe somebody
0:37:26 who tiles showers hasn’t called you yet and introduced themselves.” So sometimes just making
0:37:30 that little extra effort to network and call the right people and offer your services to the right
0:37:35 people is just another huge advantage when it comes to gorilla marketing. Yeah, on the pressure
0:37:39 washing front, maybe that’s like the real estate agents for people who are listening to their
0:37:43 houses. Like, “Hey, look, we can make your house look 10 years younger if we cleaned out this driveway
0:37:47 or something like that.” Yep, I would go straight to the real estate agent, the top agent in town
0:37:51 and say, “I want to power wash your entire driveway for free right now, and I want to show you how good
0:37:56 of my work is and then give her or him your card after the service.” And boom, she’s going to say,
0:38:01 “Wow, every house she lists, she’s going to recommend that you come and get the driveway looking brand
0:38:06 new because it adds whatever the data is on one or 2% of the home value when your house looks
0:38:10 really, really clean when you’re trying to sell it.” So, yeah, real estate agents recommend a ton of
0:38:15 these services, and a lot of times, they don’t have anybody ever soliciting them for referrals.
0:38:20 So, that’s a really, really powerful way to drive business. Well, I love this stuff. I could geek
0:38:25 out on this for a long time. Nick, really appreciate you joining me, reaching out the Sweaty
0:38:31 Startup podcast. Definitely check it out. It’s over at sweatystartup.com. What’s next for you?
0:38:34 What’s got you excited this year? Yeah, I just think that there’s that why in the road when you
0:38:38 get some customers coming in and you can decide to either keep raising your prices and make a great
0:38:44 living or you can decide to hire employees and scale a business. But this is just such a powerful
0:38:49 way to accomplish your goals. So, I’m just so passionate about these service-based businesses.
0:38:54 We got the Sweaty Startup Reddit group that we have almost 20,000 entrepreneurs there bouncing
0:38:58 ideas off of each other. That’s reddit.com. So, the Sweaty Startup sub. You can link to that in
0:39:02 the show notes. But, yeah, I’m just really excited to get the word out more. Was that a group that
0:39:05 existed or was that one that you started? Yeah, we started it. From scratch, we basically have a
0:39:09 little community of service-based entrepreneurs that are running around doing these guerrilla
0:39:14 marketing tactics, helping each other solve employee problems and naming their businesses
0:39:19 and figure out what idea to go after. It’s a pretty cool thing. That’s awesome. What do you think
0:39:25 attributed to that growth? Oh, I don’t know. I think the podcast and getting on a couple other
0:39:28 shows like Bigger Pockets, some people started reaching out. And then I think one thing is
0:39:33 the loneliness of being an entrepreneur. I think we all kind of feel that you have your podcast
0:39:37 to kind of meet people. And I have my podcast to meet people now. But before that, I couldn’t
0:39:42 really relate to a lot of other entrepreneurs who were doing a lot of this stuff. So, a community
0:39:47 was kind of something that was really in high demand because it’s not something that you can
0:39:51 talk to a lot of your friends about who work nine to five jobs when you’re an entrepreneur and running
0:39:55 a business. So, it’s hard to relate to a lot of people. So, I think that people kind of latched
0:39:59 on to, “Oh, this is a place I can go where a lot of other entrepreneurs hang out that are just like
0:40:06 me.” So, it’s kind of refreshing. At what point did you stop hauling all the boxes yourself for the
0:40:12 storage squad and say, “Okay, now I need to hire some help to make this happen?” Because I’m thinking
0:40:18 with the dog poop pickup or the house cleaning or the window washing, it’s like I could reasonably
0:40:25 train somebody to do this as well or better than I could. I’m wondering at what point do you step
0:40:29 out or was that from the very beginning? We went through a couple really, really hard years, Nick.
0:40:33 Where we were trying to do everything ourselves. I mean, we were up all night in these warehouses.
0:40:37 You’ll hear about it on the Bigger Pockets podcast. And one day, we just said, “Listen, I mean, all we
0:40:41 do, my partner and I would sit in a room and just say we can’t find any good employees. We can’t find
0:40:44 any good employees. If we could only find good employees, we would be able to thrive.” Because
0:40:48 we didn’t have a customer problem. We had an employee problem. And one day, we were just like,
0:40:52 “Listen, we got to take ownership of this. Every single business that ever operates and hires
0:40:57 anybody has this same problem. We can’t just keep posting our Indeed ads online and hope that these
0:41:01 unicorns who care about our businesses walk in the door.” So we did two things. Number one,
0:41:06 we simplified the job so that it was simpler to teach and simpler to learn. And we put a bunch
0:41:10 of training videos and processes in place to kind of get the point across of the core
0:41:16 competencies of the job. We took everything else off the plate. And number two, we raised our prices
0:41:22 and had some money to actually hire some decent help. And those two things kind of allowed us to
0:41:27 put the money into finding the employees. I mean, we were pointing at the labor market and we were
0:41:31 operating these really expensive cities where it’s really hard to find laborers. And we finally
0:41:36 said, “Okay, let’s spend some time and money and energy recruiting employees just as we find customers.”
0:41:40 Like we’re talking about the guerrilla marketing for the power washing and the guerrilla marketing
0:41:45 for all this stuff. We got guerrilla marketing tactics in place for finding employees. We were
0:41:48 walking around with business cards in Panera and Starbucks handing them out trying to find people
0:41:52 who wanted to come work for us or earn extra money. And we were just constantly rotating and
0:41:56 having open interviews once a week. I mean, it’s really, really hard to find good employees. But
0:42:01 if you can do it, that’s when things really open up and we were able to kind of scale and grow and
0:42:07 make that shift. Okay. So there’s a couple of things. You simplified the job, the SOPs or standard
0:42:12 operating procedures, make life easier for them, set them up for success, and then raise your rates
0:42:17 so you have a little more margin to theoretically hire a better caliber person.
0:42:21 That’s right. Yeah. In the early days, we’d walk around the clipboard and they had a list of 25
0:42:25 things they needed to do on the back of that clipboard. It was customer service, packing the
0:42:30 truck, loading the truck, labeling the items, writing the invoices, doing the scheduling.
0:42:34 And we said, okay, what can we outsource off of these people’s plates so that they can do five
0:42:38 things really, really well and not worry about the customer service, not worry about the scheduling.
0:42:42 So we had one person do all the schedules for all of our branches. We had one person do all the
0:42:46 hiring for all of our branches. We had one person do all the recruiting for all the branches so that
0:42:50 everybody had a simpler job in the company. They could do it much better. Most importantly, Nick,
0:42:56 we were no longer looking for unicorns who were spectacular at everything to come in
0:43:00 and grow our business. We could hire just normal average people that could do it really, really
0:43:05 well because it was so much simpler. That’s a really powerful takeaway. Chris Duckard calls it
0:43:10 the superhero syndrome in looking for virtual help, but it goes the same whether you’re hiring
0:43:14 somebody locally or hiring somebody virtually. It’s like just because you’re doing all these
0:43:18 things yourself, doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to expect somebody else is able to do all these
0:43:24 things and operate at a high level. Nick, I really appreciate you joining me, sweatystartup.com.
0:43:28 Check them out over there. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:43:32 Thanks, Nick. My number one tip is going to be to look up from your computer screen. It’s so easy to
0:43:39 get sucked in to the online sexiness of these other e-commerce, you know, FBA, like online
0:43:43 businesses. My piece would be to just look when you’re walking around your own town, think about
0:43:47 businesses a little bit differently. Think about how that company makes money. Think about what
0:43:52 opportunities are right there in your town. Look up from your computer screen, get out,
0:43:56 shake hands, see people, and I think you’ll be a little bit better off just with that mindset.
0:44:00 Sounds good, man. Thanks so much, and we’ll catch up with you soon.
0:44:01 I really appreciate everything, Nick. Thank you.
0:44:07 That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there and make
0:44:12 something happen, and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle Long.
0:44:16 Now, if you want more Nick Huber in your life, we actually did a follow-up to this original
0:44:24 2020 recording in 2023. That was episode 578, where we pitted his sweaty startup model against
0:44:29 the so-called laptop lifestyle, the location freedom promised by certain online business
0:44:35 models. So that might be a good one to check out next. Just scroll down to 578 in your podcast
0:44:40 player app. You’ll find that one there. Otherwise, I want to invite you to create your own curated
0:44:45 Side Hustle Show playlist of the episodes that are going to be most helpful and impactful for you.
0:44:50 All you got to do is go to hustle.show, answer a few short multiple choice questions,
0:44:55 and it’ll recommend eight to 10 targeted episodes based on your answers. You can add those to your
0:45:00 device. You can learn what works, and you can go forth and make some more money this year. Again,
0:45:08 that’s at hustle.show. Thanks again for tuning in. Cheers. We’ve got a five-star review from
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0:00:04 Seven proven ways to generate new business ideas
0:00:06 with real-life examples.
0:00:07 What’s up, what’s up, Nick?
0:00:07 Oh, Loper here.
0:00:09 Welcome to The Side Hustle Show,
0:00:13 where we’ve been helping make day jobs optional since 2013.
0:00:15 Today, I want to introduce seven
0:00:18 business idea-generating frameworks you can use
0:00:21 to come up with your next side hustle idea.
0:00:22 And the first one on this list
0:00:24 is called RIP, Pivot, and Jam.
0:00:26 Now, I first heard about this method
0:00:30 from the Tropical MBA show probably 10 years ago,
0:00:32 hat tipped to Dan and Ian for this one.
0:00:34 Here’s how it works, is you rip,
0:00:36 you look at another successful business,
0:00:41 copy their model, and the key here, Pivot, is step two.
0:00:43 Pivot it to a new industry, a new vertical,
0:00:44 a new audience, right?
0:00:45 And that’s the little turn.
0:00:48 And then the jam part is the hustle
0:00:50 to go get new customers, do the work.
0:00:54 Now, we saw a couple examples of this in the last year,
0:00:58 including Sarah McCaffrey’s clothing consignment business
0:00:59 in episode 640.
0:01:01 – So I did a kids consignment event,
0:01:02 selling my kids’ youth clothes,
0:01:04 and I had no idea what I was doing.
0:01:06 I just showed up, you know, priced the thing,
0:01:07 showed up to sell them.
0:01:09 And when I went to pick up my check,
0:01:12 it was for $800, and it blew my mind.
0:01:14 – This was you, you selling your kids stuff
0:01:15 through somebody else?
0:01:16 – Yes, it was.
0:01:18 That’s how I got the idea.
0:01:20 And after I picked up that check for $800,
0:01:23 I just thought, why doesn’t this exist for adults?
0:01:26 There are a lot of kids consignment events out there,
0:01:28 and not very many at all for adults.
0:01:31 And I just thought, I know so many people with clothes
0:01:33 that’s full of clothes that are in great condition
0:01:34 that people would buy.
0:01:36 Why is nobody doing this?
0:01:38 – Yeah, why is nobody doing this?
0:01:41 Was there a reason that the people running the kids’ ones
0:01:42 didn’t do the same thing?
0:01:45 It isn’t, ’cause we’ve gone to those kid event.
0:01:46 I don’t know if we’ve ever sold anything there,
0:01:49 but we’ve definitely gone as a customer for them locally.
0:01:50 So yeah, you’re totally right, that’s the thing.
0:01:53 – Yeah, and it’s funny because a lot of people
0:01:54 think they’re similar,
0:01:56 but adult events are so different from kids.
0:01:59 We’re willing to buy whatever for our kids,
0:02:01 they’re gonna be running around outside, playing in it,
0:02:04 it’s fine, but when you’re selling adult clothes,
0:02:06 you have to find the right audience for it.
0:02:08 We’re a lot pickier, so the sell-through rate’s different
0:02:09 than kids’ consignment events,
0:02:12 so they just have to be marketed differently.
0:02:14 – Okay, okay, so as far as you could tell,
0:02:15 in the initial market research,
0:02:19 nobody was doing an adult-focused clothing event near you.
0:02:21 I think our mutual friend, Megan,
0:02:24 was maybe doing furniture consignment nearby
0:02:24 who connected us.
0:02:25 – Yes, she was.
0:02:27 – But hey, there’s an opportunity in the clothing space,
0:02:30 and what was your first step
0:02:32 in turning that from idea to reality?
0:02:35 – Yeah, well, first I tried to make the idea go away
0:02:36 because it just felt crazy.
0:02:39 I have two young kids, I’m running a photography business.
0:02:40 I was the breadwinner for my family.
0:02:43 It felt crazy to divide my attention
0:02:45 and try to start a whole other business.
0:02:47 So I really tried to ignore it for a while,
0:02:49 but I got to where I couldn’t sleep.
0:02:51 Like, the idea would not leave me alone,
0:02:53 and so a couple months later, I just decided,
0:02:55 you know what, I’m gonna go for this.
0:02:59 And that night, I found our software that we could use.
0:03:02 I had a friend who gave me the name that day,
0:03:03 who named it Statement,
0:03:06 and then I stayed up all night building a website
0:03:08 on Squarespace, and I just thought,
0:03:11 you know what, this idea will not leave me alone.
0:03:13 I have to do it, like I had no other choice.
0:03:15 – When you get those ideas that won’t leave you alone,
0:03:16 that’s a good sign.
0:03:18 So in Sarah’s case, the inspiration
0:03:22 for the consignment event was a kids’ clothing event,
0:03:25 and Sarah’s pivot was to make it for adult clothes.
0:03:28 And then in the rest of that episode, episode 640,
0:03:30 we talked about the jam, all of the things
0:03:34 that she did to market and grow that business.
0:03:36 Another example of the RIP Pivot and Jam framework
0:03:40 came from Chris Andrews in episode 632.
0:03:43 Chris started a local food tour business in Mobile, Alabama.
0:03:46 – A friend of mine did a food tour in Savannah, Georgia.
0:03:48 I had never heard of a food tour before.
0:03:51 And when she came back home and was telling us
0:03:54 about her experience of going to different restaurants,
0:03:57 and she did a tour of the city of Savannah,
0:03:59 and they went to different landmarks in the city,
0:04:01 and the tour guide was talking about the landmarks.
0:04:03 That was all really, really interesting to me.
0:04:06 I’ve been a history buff ever since I was a kid,
0:04:07 especially local history.
0:04:10 And I thought, that’s absolutely what we need
0:04:11 in Mobile, Alabama.
0:04:14 We’ve got 300 plus years of history in Mobile.
0:04:16 It’s one of the oldest cities in the United States,
0:04:19 and fantastic food.
0:04:22 There’s a great food scene that’s in downtown Mobile.
0:04:25 And so, I think just kind of capitalizing on that.
0:04:29 And that’s kind of how the food tour got started in Mobile.
0:04:30 – Was anybody else doing it?
0:04:32 Like it’s not a new concept.
0:04:33 – No, nobody in Mobile was doing it.
0:04:36 At the time, I think mainly you would find food tours
0:04:40 in large cities around the country, in tourist places.
0:04:42 Of course, New York has probably got seven or eight of them,
0:04:45 New Orleans, which is about two hours from where I am.
0:04:49 They probably again, have five or six food tour operators.
0:04:51 But no, nobody was doing this in Mobile.
0:04:53 And so, that was another big thing for me.
0:04:54 It kept me up at night thinking about it.
0:04:58 I was like, man, somebody’s gonna do this eventually.
0:05:00 And I’m not gonna be able to live with myself
0:05:01 if that person’s not me.
0:05:02 – Isn’t that funny how Chris said the same thing?
0:05:03 It was keeping me up at night.
0:05:06 Now, not a completely new business idea.
0:05:09 Here’s one that’s already working in another market.
0:05:11 So, there’s some validation, there’s less risk.
0:05:13 And then Chris’s pivot was just applying
0:05:17 the same concept to his town, episode 632,
0:05:19 if you wanna learn more about his food tour business
0:05:20 in Mobile.
0:05:22 But, rip pivot and jam.
0:05:23 Pay attention as you go about your day
0:05:26 for interesting businesses and then put them
0:05:29 through the lens of, well, what’s the potential pivot here?
0:05:33 Could you do something similar but serve a different audience
0:05:35 or in a different industry or in a different location?
0:05:37 And one of my most successful side hustles
0:05:39 was my virtual assistant directory,
0:05:41 which used this exact framework.
0:05:46 I had come across a wine club directory and review site
0:05:48 and thought, well, this is kind of an interesting model.
0:05:51 So, I had to ask, well, what other industry could I pivot
0:05:53 that to that I was interested in,
0:05:55 that I knew a little bit about?
0:05:57 And that turned into my VA site.
0:06:00 I haven’t used the same theme that the wine site
0:06:01 was using in the first version.
0:06:03 Just swapped out the content instead of about wine.
0:06:05 It’s now about virtual assistant.
0:06:08 So, that is business idea generating framework number one,
0:06:09 rip pivot and jam.
0:06:12 Number two is what I call the sniper method.
0:06:17 And this is where you look at a broad service or market.
0:06:19 And instead of trying to be everything to everyone,
0:06:23 you focus in on a small sliver of that market,
0:06:24 a small segment of it.
0:06:26 And in doing so, you can position yourself
0:06:29 as the go-to authority on that one topic.
0:06:30 And when you do that,
0:06:34 you often reduce competition sometimes altogether
0:06:36 and potentially can improve your pricing power
0:06:37 quite a bit too.
0:06:41 Here’s how Carter Osborne explained it in episode 601.
0:06:43 – I started out tutoring standardized test prep
0:06:45 like the SAT and the ACT.
0:06:47 I tutored academics, everything from pre-calculus
0:06:49 to history to English.
0:06:51 And then I also tutored college essays.
0:06:52 And the college essays were my favorite part.
0:06:54 I always knew that that was something
0:06:55 that I wanted to invest more heavily in.
0:06:58 Frankly, I had to look myself in the mirror and go,
0:07:00 I am not a good standardized test tutor.
0:07:01 I mean, I’m just not.
0:07:04 I’m not the kind of person who has the kind of organization
0:07:07 and rigor and the sort of like dedication to repetition
0:07:08 that it takes to be a good SAT tutor
0:07:11 or a good SAT taker for that matter.
0:07:13 Even though people were referring other students to me,
0:07:15 just wasn’t the right direction for my business.
0:07:16 And the same went for academics.
0:07:19 I remember sitting down in coffee shops
0:07:22 or cafes with students and learning pre-calculus
0:07:24 as I was trying to teach it to them.
0:07:25 I was remembering how to do things
0:07:27 from my old high school pre-calc days
0:07:28 as I was trying to teach it to the students.
0:07:29 – Yeah, yeah.
0:07:30 It’s been a few years here.
0:07:30 – Yeah, exactly.
0:07:32 – I’m gonna say one chapter ahead of the kids.
0:07:33 – Exactly.
0:07:34 And I’m going, yeah,
0:07:36 I don’t think this is what their parents are paying me for.
0:07:38 So, so eventually I went, okay,
0:07:40 I think that I have enough of a foothold
0:07:41 in this whole tutoring industry
0:07:43 to specialize in one service.
0:07:45 And yes, that means sacrificing clientele
0:07:46 in the short term,
0:07:49 but hopefully it also means defining my reputation
0:07:51 as a college essay specialist in the Seattle area.
0:07:54 And with that more specific reputation,
0:07:56 tapping into a broader market of clients in the long term,
0:07:57 right?
0:07:59 So it was sort of short term loss, long term gain.
0:08:00 That was the theory.
0:08:02 And so far that’s exactly how it’s worked out.
0:08:05 – I kind of like this tactic of starting a little bit broader
0:08:09 just to get a sense of what you like doing
0:08:12 and what is delivering results for clients.
0:08:14 ‘Cause you have to kind of test the waters there.
0:08:15 And when I’m a beginning freelancer,
0:08:18 like if you’re gonna offer to pay me for whatever it is,
0:08:19 like I’m gonna take that work.
0:08:21 I’m gonna say yes, yes, I like play the improv game.
0:08:22 Yes, and by the way,
0:08:24 we could also offer this other service.
0:08:26 But as that business matures,
0:08:27 you start to recognize, okay,
0:08:30 well, this is really where I think my wheelhouse is.
0:08:31 Even if it means it’s kind of scary,
0:08:35 like I might be cutting off 75% of my revenue here,
0:08:37 but I think there’s a bigger piece of the pie
0:08:39 or an opportunity to really carve out a niche
0:08:41 for myself here on the essay prep side.
0:08:43 Carter went on to turn that singular service
0:08:45 into a six-figure side hustle
0:08:47 with far fewer competitors than he had
0:08:51 as the more generalist academic test prep tutor.
0:08:53 That’s episode 601 in your archives.
0:08:54 If you wanna go back and check it out.
0:08:57 Similarly, we caught up with Kate Johnson
0:08:58 last year on her bookkeeping business.
0:09:01 And early on, she said, look, I’ll take any client.
0:09:02 Oh, you know what?
0:09:03 I’ll take any client I can find.
0:09:06 But later on, she decided to focus solely
0:09:09 on those customers using fresh books
0:09:10 as their accounting software.
0:09:12 And not only grew the business as a result,
0:09:15 but really simplified it as well.
0:09:17 I don’t have to learn a dozen different software tools anymore.
0:09:18 I’m gonna focus just on this one.
0:09:21 And early on, this was kind of my method of madness
0:09:23 for my original side hustle,
0:09:25 my footwear comparison shopping site.
0:09:30 At that time, there were dozens of really broad market
0:09:31 comparison shopping sites out there.
0:09:34 Next tag, pricegrabbershopping.com sites like that.
0:09:36 But they all had this super broad
0:09:38 call it a shotgun approach.
0:09:40 They tried to include every product under the sun.
0:09:43 And as a result, left an opportunity
0:09:46 for a so-called sniper like me
0:09:47 to use this sniper method to come in
0:09:49 and say, look, we can build a better mousetrap
0:09:53 by focusing solely pun intended in this case on shoes.
0:09:56 And I remember John Lee Dumas’ advice to niche down
0:09:57 until you can check the box
0:10:02 of being the best/worst/only player in your niche.
0:10:04 At that time, it was the best, worst,
0:10:06 and only comparison shopping site for shoes.
0:10:08 It was, you know, or later on, you know,
0:10:10 it was the best, worst, and only
0:10:12 virtual assistant directory and review platform.
0:10:14 The best, worst, and only podcast
0:10:16 specifically for side hustlers, right?
0:10:18 What is that niche that you can really use
0:10:20 that sniper method to hone in on?
0:10:22 That is what I call the sniper method,
0:10:25 definitely one that I’ve seen work personally
0:10:27 and from side hustle show guests over the years.
0:10:30 Keep an eye out for those broad-serving businesses
0:10:33 and be thinking of how can I carve out
0:10:36 a little sliver of that market for myself?
0:10:37 I’ve got more idea-generating frameworks
0:10:39 coming up right after this.
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0:13:04 We’re talking business idea generating frameworks
0:13:05 on the Side Hustle Show this week.
0:13:08 And number three on this list is the shovels
0:13:10 in the gold rush method.
0:13:11 And you’ve probably heard the advice
0:13:13 in a gold rush sell shovels.
0:13:15 And here’s a little bit of history trivia for you.
0:13:19 That phrase is attributed to Sam Brannon.
0:13:21 He’s called the Paul Revere of the gold rush
0:13:23 because he’s famous for jumping off the boat
0:13:26 in San Francisco and excitingly spreading the word
0:13:29 about gold being discovered in the Sierra foothills.
0:13:31 This is like, you know, 1849, right?
0:13:33 The 49ers football team named
0:13:34 after this California gold rush.
0:13:37 But supposedly before he made this announcement,
0:13:39 Brannon bought up all of the mining supplies,
0:13:41 the picks and shovels and stuff like that
0:13:44 so he could resell them to hopeful prospectors
0:13:45 at marked up prices.
0:13:48 The sell shovels in the gold rush method
0:13:51 helped Sam allegedly become California’s first millionaire.
0:13:54 And even though this happened 170 years ago,
0:13:56 gold rushes still happen all the time.
0:13:58 We’re just not looking for literal gold
0:13:59 in the ground anymore.
0:14:03 We’re looking for it in the form of the latest trend
0:14:04 or the hot fad.
0:14:06 And in my 20 years of online business,
0:14:07 if you’ve been around for any length of time,
0:14:10 you’ve seen gold rushes around eBay,
0:14:12 around niche sites, self publishing,
0:14:14 print on demand t-shirts, Amazon FBA,
0:14:17 probably lots of other examples too.
0:14:19 And every time some of the best businesses
0:14:21 to come out of those gold rushes
0:14:24 are the supporting software and services.
0:14:27 For example, Liz Wilcox of Survivor fame,
0:14:30 she took the trend of online business
0:14:34 and online newsletters and built a simple $9 a month
0:14:35 membership model around that
0:14:39 where she gives you weekly newsletter template inspiration.
0:14:42 Pretty simple business that tapped into that gold rush
0:14:44 of more and more people needing to send emails.
0:14:47 – I knew I was good at email marketing.
0:14:49 And I knew that most people aren’t.
0:14:52 And I knew the missing piece for people
0:14:53 is a weekly newsletter.
0:14:56 Just following up with their subscribers every week.
0:14:59 That’s something, you’re a side hustler.
0:15:02 You’re just working a few hours a night on this project,
0:15:03 like sending an email.
0:15:06 Is that really what you need to be doing with your time?
0:15:09 So I knew if I could just write that newsletter for you,
0:15:11 maybe you’d give it a shot
0:15:13 and you would see results like mine.
0:15:15 So within the membership,
0:15:17 you just get a weekly newsletter template
0:15:19 to take and make your own.
0:15:21 That was low responsibility for me
0:15:22 because in my client work,
0:15:24 that’s what I was already doing.
0:15:26 I was writing emails for people.
0:15:28 I had owned two businesses prior,
0:15:30 writing emails to people.
0:15:33 I had an entire catalog of emails
0:15:37 that I had been writing for years and years and years.
0:15:40 I can just have this one deliverable of this thing
0:15:44 I already have a back catalog of that I can templatize
0:15:46 and I can send out once a week.
0:15:48 – In that episode, episode 600,
0:15:51 Liz described how she grew that simple low cost membership
0:15:53 to thousands of members
0:15:55 in what I thought was a really creative example
0:15:58 of what you might call selling your sawdust.
0:16:00 She already had this library of emails
0:16:02 that she’d written for herself or for clients.
0:16:04 It was just a matter of repackaging those
0:16:06 for a different audience under a different offer.
0:16:08 Do you have something similar in your business,
0:16:10 a byproduct of what you’re already creating?
0:16:13 What kind of sawdust might you be able to sell?
0:16:16 And going back to the sell shovels in the gold rush method,
0:16:19 what other gold rushes or trends come to mind?
0:16:21 So one that probably is on top of everyone’s mind
0:16:23 is like that short form video
0:16:25 is eating every other kind of content.
0:16:26 So it could be something in that space.
0:16:29 You could take a look at sites like Google Trends
0:16:34 or Exploding Topics to see what is increasing in interest.
0:16:35 You can ask your kids,
0:16:36 especially if you’ve got teenagers,
0:16:39 it could even be capitalizing on an up and coming marketplace
0:16:42 like Devin Ricks did with her video game,
0:16:46 teaching/social hour online side hustle
0:16:47 on the outskool marketplace.
0:16:51 – What outskool does is it has created this space
0:16:52 where teachers are background checked
0:16:56 and parents feel safe letting their children log in online,
0:16:58 all the sessions are recorded
0:16:59 and then they can play together
0:17:02 and it’s a good environment for them.
0:17:05 – Yeah, we would call this a buy buttons platform.
0:17:07 Go where the cash is already flowing.
0:17:10 And here’s a platform that has a built-in audience
0:17:11 where it’s relatively easy.
0:17:13 You gotta go through this background check process.
0:17:15 You gotta come up with an idea of what you’re gonna teach,
0:17:19 but relatively easy to put your thing out there for sale
0:17:23 and have people come and do business with you.
0:17:24 And actually you kind of sparked an idea here
0:17:28 ’cause like my son and his friend in California,
0:17:31 like they’ve hung out on Zoom doing like Lego builds
0:17:33 way more than they’ve ever hung out in person.
0:17:36 And it’s like, oh, I wonder if there’s like a Lego building
0:17:37 class where you can do like,
0:17:39 okay, different challenges or something.
0:17:41 So people with different pieces could still try
0:17:43 and build a, okay, today we’re gonna build a bird
0:17:44 or something like, I don’t know.
0:17:46 That would be really interesting.
0:17:48 – Oh, there’s definitely Lego classes.
0:17:50 I have a good friend who teaches Lego classes.
0:17:52 And yeah, she’ll be like, this is the inspiration.
0:17:54 You create your own version.
0:17:56 And so then everyone’s building their own Legos
0:17:59 with what they have, but yeah, that’s totally a thing.
0:18:00 – So the Gold Rush in Devin’s case,
0:18:03 we’ll call it the general rise in interest
0:18:07 in interactive online classes for kids and adults really.
0:18:08 And then coming up with a unique offer
0:18:10 to sell into that space.
0:18:11 And it’s always the example that I give like,
0:18:14 look, if she can make money teaching video games for kids,
0:18:16 you can monetize just about anything.
0:18:18 So that is idea generating framework.
0:18:21 Number three, the sell shovels into a Gold Rush.
0:18:24 What Gold Rush might you be able to sell some shovels into?
0:18:27 Number four is what I call the intersection method.
0:18:29 And this aims to find potential business ideas
0:18:31 at the intersection of your skills,
0:18:34 your interests, and your network.
0:18:37 For example, I started a freelance book editing business
0:18:40 several years ago using this exact method.
0:18:42 Number one, I thought I was a decent writer
0:18:43 and a decent proofreader.
0:18:45 Like I was an A student in English at school,
0:18:47 even though I’d never been paid to do that before.
0:18:50 I was interested in reading non-fiction,
0:18:52 self-improvement business books.
0:18:54 I’d even written a handful of myself at that time.
0:18:57 I was in Facebook groups, this is the network piece.
0:19:00 I was in Facebook groups with other self-published authors.
0:19:02 And it worked well.
0:19:04 It was a fun little side hustle experiment.
0:19:06 I read some, actually some pretty fun and interesting books
0:19:09 and some not so great ones along the way too.
0:19:10 And earned some extra cash.
0:19:13 Another cool example of this came from David Paxton
0:19:17 from Daily Golf Steals, where he was interested in golf.
0:19:20 He had some skills or learned some skills
0:19:22 in sourcing deals in a systemized way.
0:19:26 And he was an active member of a popular golf subreddit.
0:19:29 So skills, interests, and network.
0:19:32 Unlike most affiliate businesses which take months
0:19:36 or maybe even a year plus to gain any significant traction,
0:19:40 Daily Golf Steals posted two grand in your first month.
0:19:42 So talk to me about how you made that happen.
0:19:43 – Yeah, absolutely.
0:19:46 It was very nice off the bat to have quite such a good month.
0:19:49 So it was a confluence of a few different factors.
0:19:51 One, it was July.
0:19:53 So a good month full golf, it’s sunny,
0:19:55 everyone’s playing golf, people are outside,
0:19:57 and they probably even got a bit into that golf season
0:19:59 looking to purchase that next piece of equipment
0:20:01 that’s gonna get them over the hill.
0:20:02 So that was kind of one piece.
0:20:05 And then the second, and I’ll talk a bit more about it
0:20:06 and the facts of the Reddit plays.
0:20:09 – This is July, 2021, just for the sake of timeline.
0:20:11 – That is correct, yes, exactly.
0:20:13 So just about going on two years ago now,
0:20:16 the second piece here is Reddit, just as an audience.
0:20:17 It’s an amazing community.
0:20:19 And if you can get them on your side,
0:20:21 you get them engaged, you’re providing value,
0:20:23 they can be your biggest advocates.
0:20:24 And the fact that in the first month
0:20:26 was able to just get that level,
0:20:28 I can’t remember the quite number of clicks,
0:20:30 they’re just people instantly engaging,
0:20:33 instantly using your clicks to go through to these websites
0:20:34 and making purchases.
0:20:36 And it’s really just a showcase in the value
0:20:38 that a free audience can do,
0:20:39 as long as you can bring them along for the right.
0:20:41 – Was there even a website at that point
0:20:43 or is it you’re posting affiliate links
0:20:45 directly to a golf subreddit?
0:20:46 – There was a website.
0:20:48 And the website, I’ll be honest,
0:20:51 it’s not the prettiest thing, but it gets the job done.
0:20:52 And that really was the funnel.
0:20:54 I mean, Reddit back to some of its,
0:20:58 I would say it’s sometimes anti-corporation, anti-shilling.
0:20:59 They are a bit wary.
0:21:01 However, I was able to sort of,
0:21:04 I would put up about five to seven deals.
0:21:06 I would give some that were kind of freebies,
0:21:07 they would just go straight.
0:21:08 I wasn’t making any money of them
0:21:10 and trying to find that right balance.
0:21:12 And then two or three of them at the time,
0:21:14 I would actually have them go to daily golf steals
0:21:15 and then they would need to make that click
0:21:16 and then go through.
0:21:18 And those ones that would be actually monetizing.
0:21:22 – Now, I am curious to hear how you gently
0:21:23 started dropping these links.
0:21:24 ‘Cause like you said, Reddit could be
0:21:26 very anti-self promotion.
0:21:28 And if they sniff out that you’re,
0:21:30 they’re not as a member of the community,
0:21:32 but it has to be for-profit corporation.
0:21:33 And all of a sudden it’s like,
0:21:34 wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
0:21:36 I mean, I guess you’re coming in with,
0:21:37 hey, look, I’m trying to be helpful here.
0:21:38 I’m trying to save you guys some money.
0:21:40 Like here’s some cool stuff that we found,
0:21:42 but just curious how you approach that.
0:21:43 – There’s a couple of things.
0:21:47 So one, the R golf subreddit is a weird grandfathered position.
0:21:49 So for whatever reason, going back,
0:21:51 I think three or four people,
0:21:54 there’s always been someone who’s the go-to deal person
0:21:56 on the subreddit, posting those deals,
0:21:57 doing out of the goodness of their hearts.
0:21:59 So there’s kind of an established role.
0:22:01 And there’s actually someone who was already doing it,
0:22:03 but I kind of sort of tried to work alongside
0:22:05 a bit of friendly competition, I’ll say.
0:22:08 So one is an established position.
0:22:09 And then the second piece here
0:22:10 is demonstrating that value.
0:22:13 It’s really about actually spending that time
0:22:15 digging in with the deals,
0:22:16 while getting to a bit more
0:22:17 about how to automate it and source them.
0:22:19 But it was like, I think people kind of said,
0:22:21 okay, yeah, maybe it’s an extra click.
0:22:23 Maybe there’s a bit of self promotion.
0:22:24 But if he’s actually finding me good deals
0:22:25 and I’m making that purchase
0:22:27 and the number of messages I was getting from folks
0:22:29 that said, there’s real value here.
0:22:31 You started to actually see that engagement
0:22:33 and build some support.
0:22:35 And I think that’s the other piece I would say here too
0:22:37 is people would actually jump to my defense.
0:22:38 Someone would be like, hang on,
0:22:39 like this is shilling, self promotion.
0:22:41 And then someone would be like, no, hang on,
0:22:42 like he’s actually doing this.
0:22:43 He’s been doing it consistently.
0:22:44 That’s okay.
0:22:45 And I think that’s really where it goes.
0:22:48 And I mean, such a strong part of Reddit is the community.
0:22:49 And that was the other thing.
0:22:51 It’s like, I would listen to feedback.
0:22:53 Someone would say, hey, that deals normally live.
0:22:54 I’d be like, oh, okay, let me update it.
0:22:56 Or like actually chatting to people.
0:22:58 It’s not just post the link and be done.
0:23:01 It’s post the links, engage, ask questions,
0:23:02 have other people contribute,
0:23:04 really buying into that community aspect.
0:23:05 – Yeah, being a part of it.
0:23:08 In that sense, you weren’t relying on SEO
0:23:09 for discoverability.
0:23:12 It was like, I’m gonna shortcut the audience building phase
0:23:16 go directly to the hungry crowd who wants this stuff.
0:23:19 Again, that’s episode 583 with David Paxton.
0:23:20 What do you like doing?
0:23:21 What are you good at?
0:23:22 And who can you connect with
0:23:24 that might value those things?
0:23:25 That’s the intersection method.
0:23:29 And maybe you’ve seen the Ikigai Venn diagram type of picture.
0:23:33 Japanese word loosely translated to reason for being
0:23:35 or purpose where your Ikigai,
0:23:39 and apologies if I’m butchering that pronunciation,
0:23:41 but it lies at this intersection of what you love,
0:23:43 what you’re good at, what you can get paid for,
0:23:46 and what the world needs or what the market wants.
0:23:48 Maybe a little more broadly.
0:23:50 Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert in the comic strip
0:23:53 described it as finding a combination
0:23:56 of potentially common different skills or traits
0:23:59 that when combined can turn into a superpower.
0:24:02 He gave the example of being a slightly above average
0:24:05 cartoonist and a slightly above average humorist,
0:24:07 but combining the two to make a really successful
0:24:08 comic strip.
0:24:10 James Clear the same way gave himself a little more credit.
0:24:13 He called himself a 90th percentile writer,
0:24:14 not the best in the world,
0:24:16 not gonna put that kind of pressure on yourself,
0:24:18 which on its own probably not enough,
0:24:21 but then combine it with what he also described
0:24:23 as a 90th percentile marketer.
0:24:26 And all of a sudden, it’s a really powerful combination
0:24:29 and atomic habits goes on to sell millions of copies.
0:24:32 Christy De Silva was another example from the podcast
0:24:32 in the last year.
0:24:36 She gave this example in episode 627.
0:24:38 – Everyone was saying like niche down,
0:24:38 niche down, niche down.
0:24:41 And I was like, but I don’t even know what I like to do yet.
0:24:45 So I took some time and I did a little bit of everything.
0:24:47 So I was just a virtual assistant.
0:24:50 I did like admin, content creation, systems,
0:24:52 all the things.
0:24:55 And after about six months, I would say,
0:24:56 I decided, you know what?
0:25:00 I don’t want to do everything for everyone.
0:25:04 And that’s when I decided to invest in my first business
0:25:07 coach where our first session together,
0:25:10 basically she had me just like word vomit,
0:25:14 all the things that I loved about my job
0:25:16 and did not love about my job.
0:25:19 And we very quickly realized at the end of that session
0:25:21 that what I was really passionate about
0:25:23 was getting people organized.
0:25:27 And the pathway to do that was through systems.
0:25:29 So at this point for my clients,
0:25:31 I had already set up my two favorite tools,
0:25:33 ClickUp and HoneyBook.
0:25:35 I’ve also set up different CRMs
0:25:36 and project management tools for people,
0:25:39 but I felt very strongly that these were the tools
0:25:41 that I wanted to master.
0:25:45 And at the time, I’ll be honest with you, Nick,
0:25:50 I actually didn’t see many people in the online space
0:25:54 like just niching down into specific tools
0:25:57 and being like pros.
0:25:59 They had ClickUp Consulting at the time
0:26:01 was a very small group of people.
0:26:03 HoneyBook Pros wasn’t even a thing.
0:26:06 I was one of the first like 12 HoneyBook Pros.
0:26:10 And so it felt like again, this like leap of faith,
0:26:13 like starting as leap of faith, continuing,
0:26:15 you’re constantly having to believe in yourself,
0:26:19 but then niching and taking such a drastic turn
0:26:22 was definitely like a mindset thing of like,
0:26:24 I feel like this is the right thing,
0:26:26 but I hope that it pays off.
0:26:27 – And pay off it did.
0:26:30 Christy went from generalist to specialist
0:26:33 and ended up 10xing her hourly rate as a result.
0:26:37 She was interested in and excited about building systems.
0:26:40 She had some skills in a couple of specific software tools
0:26:42 and she could potentially get certified
0:26:45 through those platforms as a fast track way
0:26:47 to connect with potential clients.
0:26:49 That is episode 627 in your archives
0:26:50 if you wanna go check it out,
0:26:52 but this is the intersection method.
0:26:53 What do you know?
0:26:55 What do you like and who do you know?
0:26:58 What’s the network and maybe your network’s network?
0:26:59 Who, what kind of people do you know
0:27:01 to go a little bit broader?
0:27:04 And at the intersection of those is a potential side hustle.
0:27:07 Number five is the scratch your own itch method.
0:27:09 This is solve your own problem.
0:27:10 The saying goes because other people
0:27:13 are probably facing the same issue.
0:27:15 For Lou Rice in episode 589,
0:27:18 inspiration for her Kindle e-reader strap
0:27:20 struck in the middle of the night.
0:27:22 So you drop the sig on your newborn’s head,
0:27:24 obviously probably upsetting for him.
0:27:27 And then you’re like, shoot, what happens next?
0:27:29 – Yeah, I mean, very upsetting for me too, right?
0:27:32 And I think it’s that new mom’s middle of the night,
0:27:33 hour long breast feeds,
0:27:35 and you don’t wanna be on your phone all the time.
0:27:37 So reading a Kindle is a great option.
0:27:42 That happened about 2 a.m., Ben ran in, we were all crying.
0:27:46 But the next day, Ben’s a bit of a creative type.
0:27:48 He had a piece of silicon, a silicon mat,
0:27:52 and he fashioned a really crude strap with staples.
0:27:54 And he gave that to me to try out.
0:27:57 And after a month of that, I was pretty hooked.
0:27:59 I didn’t want the Kindle without it.
0:28:01 I was able to obviously do a lot of things one handed
0:28:04 as you need to when you have a baby.
0:28:06 So we kind of thought, oh, this could be something.
0:28:08 – And this is like 2021.
0:28:10 Had nobody thought of this before?
0:28:13 They had to be a competitive product on the market.
0:28:15 – We had a little look around, obviously on Amazon,
0:28:18 there are similar products, but they were pretty ugly.
0:28:20 They had like little metal claws,
0:28:22 or they’re very industrial looking.
0:28:26 And nothing kind of sleek and stylish like our straps are.
0:28:29 So the silicon means it’s the perfect fit,
0:28:31 like it molds to your hand.
0:28:33 – When we spoke, she was selling like 50 grand a month,
0:28:37 worth of these simple, lightweight Kindle straps.
0:28:39 And I know she’s gotten some great press since then
0:28:41 from pain and frustration to opportunity.
0:28:44 Here’s how Gar Russell described the origin story
0:28:47 of his RV rental business in episode 625.
0:28:49 You have this idea, like it’s gonna be a fantastic
0:28:52 birthday present for your lovely bride,
0:28:54 or an anniversary present rather.
0:28:55 And hey, howdy, we got this RV.
0:28:58 Let’s go, we’re gonna have all these fun times in the woods,
0:29:02 imagining the years of outdoor fun and adventure ahead of you.
0:29:05 And her reaction is not quite what you’re hoping it will be.
0:29:08 – Yeah, we got to the campground and we got set up.
0:29:10 I thought all was going well.
0:29:14 The first morning when she’s chasing our toddler around
0:29:17 and seven months pregnant with number four,
0:29:20 and she said, “I’m going home, baby.”
0:29:22 And I thought, “Oh, what did I forget?”
0:29:24 And I didn’t forget anything.
0:29:25 She was just miserable.
0:29:27 And she was done camping.
0:29:29 And we were supposed to be there six more days.
0:29:34 – Yeah, so that’s not how anybody wanted it to go down.
0:29:36 – No, no, not at all.
0:29:38 And I went right into panic mode of,
0:29:42 “Oh my gosh, I just bought this RV for a lot of money
0:29:44 and my wife doesn’t want to be here
0:29:47 and jumped onto Craigslist and threw it up for rent.”
0:29:51 – Okay, so you’ve got this big expensive asset/liability
0:29:53 at the moment, but hopefully it turns into an asset.
0:29:54 Sitting in the driveway, it’s like,
0:29:56 “Well, shoot, what am I gonna do with this thing?”
0:30:00 So you turn around and put up for rent on Craigslist.
0:30:02 What kind of reaction, does that get?
0:30:03 Any takers?
0:30:05 – Yeah, it blew my mind.
0:30:07 I literally had inquiries coming in
0:30:09 within a couple of hours.
0:30:11 So the light bulb immediately went off.
0:30:14 People are, “Hey, I need it for this weekend.”
0:30:17 ‘Cause that was in July when I purchased it for her.
0:30:19 So it’s like in the middle of summer.
0:30:20 And people are like, “Oh, hey, we’re going camping
0:30:22 this weekend or that weekend.”
0:30:23 – Sure.
0:30:24 – So it was wild.
0:30:25 – That is idea-generating framework.
0:30:28 Number five, scratch your own itch.
0:30:29 Figure out, well, what annoys you?
0:30:31 You can keep a mental note of all the things
0:30:34 that frustrate you, that you spend money to solve.
0:30:35 You look at your credit card statement.
0:30:38 What is a disproportionate portion
0:30:39 of your spending going towards?
0:30:41 What do you wish you didn’t have to deal with?
0:30:43 What are the things that your friends, neighbors,
0:30:45 coworkers complain to you about?
0:30:47 Because on the other side of all of those
0:30:49 is potential business idea, potential side hustle.
0:30:52 We’ve got a couple more idea-generating frameworks
0:30:54 coming up for you right after this.
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0:31:09 you can do it all without complexity.
0:31:12 Shopify’s Point of Sale system is a unified command center
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0:31:18 One thing that’s really cool about Shopify POS
0:31:19 is you can keep customers coming back
0:31:21 with personalized experiences
0:31:24 and collect that all-important first-party data
0:31:27 to give your marketing teams a competitive edge.
0:31:29 Even if that marketing team is just you.
0:31:31 Now how about some data to back that up?
0:31:34 Businesses on Shopify POS see real results,
0:31:37 including a 22% better total cost of ownership
0:31:42 and benefits equivalent to an 8.9% uplift in sales.
0:31:43 Want more?
0:31:46 Check out shopify.com/sidehustle.
0:31:48 That’s all lowercase and learn how to create
0:31:51 the best retail experiences without complexity.
0:31:55 Again, that’s at shopify.com/sidehustle.
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0:33:13 Idea generation framework number six
0:33:15 is called Expert Enough.
0:33:19 The idea here is you probably have an area of your life
0:33:20 or maybe several areas of your life
0:33:23 where you know more about than the average person.
0:33:25 And this one can be a little tricky
0:33:26 because once you know something,
0:33:28 it’s hard to imagine not knowing it.
0:33:30 It’s called the Curse of Knowledge
0:33:32 and you almost assume everyone else
0:33:33 must also know this thing.
0:33:36 It’s not that special, but you’d be surprised
0:33:38 that other people might pay to access the stuff
0:33:41 that’s in your head that is second nature to you,
0:33:42 the stuff that you don’t think twice about.
0:33:45 Here’s how Hugo or Tega described it
0:33:47 in episode 602 last year.
0:33:49 – So basically, working as Yacht Crew,
0:33:50 it’s really, really common for people
0:33:51 to have envy towards your job,
0:33:53 ask you how did you get into this?
0:33:55 What do I need to do to do the same thing?
0:33:57 It’s kind of something that we blow off
0:34:00 because you wouldn’t be surprised how many people ask me.
0:34:01 I give them the breakdown, I explain it,
0:34:04 and then everyone goes, “Well, okay, cool,
0:34:06 “I’ll do that sometime.”
0:34:08 And it just kind of got used to doing the same pitch,
0:34:11 copy and pasting the same notes over and over,
0:34:14 but I saw that more and more people were making money online
0:34:15 and it was becoming more and more common
0:34:17 for people to be able to work from their laptop.
0:34:19 So I was based on a boat at the time in the Netherlands.
0:34:21 It was really cold, it was winter, it was bleak,
0:34:23 it was snowing all the time,
0:34:24 and it was this huge contrast
0:34:26 between what I’d been previously doing,
0:34:27 whether it was in the Caribbean
0:34:29 or in the nice Mediterranean waters,
0:34:31 and I just thought maybe there’s something I can do
0:34:34 on the side so I can transition less to doing this
0:34:37 and maybe kind of work a little bit on the boats
0:34:38 but also have something online
0:34:40 because ultimately I knew that I didn’t want
0:34:42 to be permanently on the boats.
0:34:43 – And it wasn’t the first side hustle
0:34:46 that you thought about or that you started, was it?
0:34:48 – No, no, actually I was trying a few different things.
0:34:49 I was looking at drop shipping,
0:34:51 I was in the middle of building a website
0:34:54 trying to sell different Chinese trinkets
0:34:54 and different things.
0:34:56 I was thinking about a lot of different things.
0:34:58 Ultimately I kept coming across more and more people
0:35:01 that were doing information products or courses
0:35:03 based on stuff that they already knew.
0:35:06 And it seemed like people were really successful
0:35:08 when they actually either had the knowledge
0:35:09 or they had the passion for the topic
0:35:10 that they were thinking about.
0:35:13 So that got me to thinking about the niche
0:35:14 that I currently work in and I was thinking,
0:35:17 well there’s not that many people that actually work on yachts.
0:35:18 There’s a famous TV show
0:35:20 that a lot of people think they know about yachting
0:35:23 but it’s kind of a caricature of my industry.
0:35:25 But anyway, I thought maybe this is something that I have
0:35:27 that other people would like to do.
0:35:28 I mean, I knew that people had been asking me
0:35:30 about it all the time.
0:35:32 So I just thought maybe I can package that together
0:35:35 and show people how to do it and that could work.
0:35:36 – Yeah, it’s interesting.
0:35:39 It’s a very niche type of career
0:35:41 but still something where you’ve been able to find
0:35:43 a large enough audience that’s interested in it
0:35:46 to say, okay, we can turn this into a business.
0:35:47 Yeah, it’s definitely helpful
0:35:49 if you’ve got the actual knowledge and experience
0:35:51 to go out and do that thing.
0:35:53 Definitely helpful than just the current trend
0:35:56 inside us is, well, let’s just regurgitate a bunch of AI
0:35:58 and spin up a website and see if it ranks.
0:36:00 It’s like, I don’t know how sustainable
0:36:02 that’s gonna be long-term.
0:36:04 And in your case, it was kind of like
0:36:07 this aspiring yachty career advice seeker.
0:36:10 People trying to kind of land their first job in the space.
0:36:11 Like that was kind of the thesis of who I’m gonna target.
0:36:14 – Right, that was probably my original target as well
0:36:16 but then I also wanted to target people
0:36:18 that maybe just wanted to travel.
0:36:20 They wanted to work abroad or make money
0:36:22 just in an unconventional way
0:36:23 ’cause that was pretty much what I was doing.
0:36:25 When I first discovered yachting,
0:36:26 I had never been on the water much.
0:36:28 I didn’t even know how to swim at the time
0:36:30 and while it was backpacking in Southeast Asia,
0:36:32 I met someone who was doing this job
0:36:34 and just the more and more they told me about it,
0:36:35 it sounded more and more appealing.
0:36:37 And again, my love for travel was really
0:36:38 what drove me into the industry.
0:36:40 It wasn’t so much a love for boating
0:36:42 or a previous sailing experience.
0:36:44 So I figured that it’d be nice to try to find people
0:36:46 that were in the same situation as me
0:36:48 ’cause I felt like if I could do it
0:36:49 and I could have a successful career
0:36:51 getting even up to the position of captain
0:36:53 that I thought a lot of other people
0:36:55 might be able to do the same thing.
0:36:56 – So here’s a quick exercise.
0:36:58 Make a mental note or even a physical note
0:37:01 of the stuff that people ask you questions about.
0:37:04 That’s a sign that you’ve got some perceived expertise
0:37:05 in that area.
0:37:07 It might not be the world’s foremost thought leader
0:37:09 on the topic but you don’t have to be
0:37:12 if you were just a step ahead of your target customer.
0:37:15 Like Hugo found, it just might be expert enough.
0:37:18 You can also take stock of the problems or challenges
0:37:21 that you’ve overcome, the things that you found frustrating
0:37:22 but figured out a solution for,
0:37:25 or the things that come easy to you
0:37:26 that other people struggle with.
0:37:29 And that’s a sign that you might be expert enough.
0:37:31 Again, that’s episode 602 with Hugo
0:37:34 building an online expert-based business
0:37:37 based on his experience or working on yachts,
0:37:39 working on big boats.
0:37:40 That’s framework number six.
0:37:43 And before we move on to our final framework,
0:37:45 I think it’s worthwhile to share a counterpoint
0:37:47 for expert enough, a counterpoint for this one
0:37:50 where you can actually build expertise over time
0:37:52 by following your curiosity.
0:37:55 And the side hustle show is probably a good example
0:37:57 of that where I had a little bit of side hustle experience
0:37:59 when I started, I’d already quit my job
0:38:01 to run the side business full-time,
0:38:03 which I figured at least gave me some authority
0:38:05 to start talking about this stuff
0:38:07 but I’ve definitely gained a whole lot more experience
0:38:09 by embedding myself in the space
0:38:12 for the last 11 and a half years.
0:38:13 But the counterpoint that I had in mind
0:38:17 is Harry Duran from the Vertical Farming Podcast.
0:38:21 Get this, Harry was running a podcast production company
0:38:24 but he didn’t have any agriculture experience.
0:38:26 He didn’t have even any connections in that industry.
0:38:29 It was just something he was curious about.
0:38:31 So we started recording conversations
0:38:33 with leaders in the vertical farming space
0:38:36 and built a really inspiring side hustle
0:38:37 on the back of that.
0:38:39 Here’s Harry on how he landed his first guests.
0:38:42 – And then I started early with influencers in the space,
0:38:45 people who were writing news sites about vertical farming.
0:38:47 I got those early people on
0:38:48 and then I started going for the CEOs
0:38:50 and thankfully a couple of them said yes.
0:38:51 – Isn’t that funny?
0:38:53 I want to pause there ’cause like if you’re just a dude,
0:38:55 you say like, hey, can I pick your brain,
0:38:58 call it up some random CEO or cold emailing them.
0:39:00 You’d be like, who are you again?
0:39:01 Like, no, I’m not taking your call.
0:39:04 But if you say, I have the Vertical Farming Podcast
0:39:06 and you are clearly a leader in this space,
0:39:08 would you give me an hour of your time?
0:39:10 All of a sudden it’s like, it kind of flips that conversation.
0:39:13 They’re flattered by that invite in a lot of cases
0:39:15 and it’s a chance to talk about what they’re doing
0:39:17 and hammer hone their agenda.
0:39:18 I think it’s really cool.
0:39:20 – I think what a lot of people overthink sometimes
0:39:22 is this idea of reaching out to people and saying,
0:39:24 oh, this person is never going to say hi,
0:39:26 I’m a little embarrassed to ask, they don’t know who I am.
0:39:28 And the first thing I did is I whipped up Airtable,
0:39:29 one of my favorite apps.
0:39:31 I just started dropping in all these companies,
0:39:33 vertical farming companies, just doing my research,
0:39:36 who’s the CEO, who’s the founder and building my list.
0:39:37 Some people call it a dream 100,
0:39:39 but people I wanted to have a conversation with.
0:39:42 And when I started early, those early conversations,
0:39:45 I would say, hey, I’m reaching out to name one,
0:39:48 name two, name three, these CEOs and people would see that.
0:39:51 And even though I hadn’t actually had the conversation
0:39:52 with them, by virtue of them seeing that name there,
0:39:54 they’re like, oh, he’s going for like the big names
0:39:55 in the space.
0:39:57 Once those people started confirming,
0:39:58 I would change the language.
0:40:02 I would say, I’ve now confirmed a interview with so and so.
0:40:03 And then obviously once I started–
0:40:04 – Okay, okay.
0:40:05 – Yeah, and stair stepping.
0:40:06 I’m kind of banking on the name recognition
0:40:10 that people are going to know who those other names were.
0:40:11 Okay.
0:40:12 – And then once those started getting confirmed
0:40:14 and scheduled, I said, I’ve now scheduled an interview.
0:40:15 So I just kept changing language.
0:40:16 Obviously, once I’ve recorded,
0:40:19 I’ve recorded three interviews with A, B, C, and D.
0:40:20 – Harry went on to explain how he booked
0:40:25 a $9,000 sponsorship deal before releasing a single episode.
0:40:29 And it was something like $80,000 in total sponsorships
0:40:32 over the course of the show for a very part-time project.
0:40:34 In a niche, he had no expertise in.
0:40:37 So maybe we should call this framework number 6.5.
0:40:40 Curious enough in contrast to expert enough,
0:40:41 but a super inspiring story.
0:40:44 Again, 586 in your archives if you wanna go back
0:40:46 and check that one out.
0:40:48 Number seven is the probing for pain method.
0:40:51 And this can be incredibly profitable
0:40:53 if you know how to ask the right questions.
0:40:56 How this generally works is calling up a business owner.
0:40:58 It could be someone you have a previous relationship with.
0:40:59 It could be somebody you never met
0:41:01 and asking questions like,
0:41:02 hey, tell me a little bit about your business.
0:41:05 What’s the biggest challenge facing your industry
0:41:06 over the next five years?
0:41:08 What does a typical day look like for you?
0:41:10 What’s the most frustrating or time-consuming
0:41:11 part of your business?
0:41:13 Jonathan Stark is a pro at this.
0:41:16 He explained how it works in episode 505.
0:41:18 – Okay, so let’s assume that you’re good.
0:41:19 You’re really good at something.
0:41:20 You know you’re good at it.
0:41:22 You don’t have to be the best in the world at it.
0:41:24 You just need to be a lot better at it
0:41:25 than the people you’re gonna serve.
0:41:29 So, for example, if you wanna sell web development services
0:41:31 to web developers, you need to be great.
0:41:33 But that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about here.
0:41:36 Let’s say you totally understand how Facebook ads works
0:41:39 and you wanna help, we’ll use dentists again.
0:41:41 So you say– – Dentists are getting picked on.
0:41:45 – Yeah, dentists are like my favorite vertical.
0:41:46 They’re a great one, actually,
0:41:48 because virtually everyone knows one.
0:41:49 So if you do something for dentists,
0:41:50 you can basically go to a party
0:41:53 and literally everyone at that party can recommend,
0:41:54 can introduce you to a dentist.
0:41:55 – Fair enough, okay.
0:42:00 – But anyway, so let’s say you do Facebook ads for dentists.
0:42:01 You already know Facebook ads.
0:42:02 You taught yourself that.
0:42:05 Maybe you did it for fun on a side project or whatever,
0:42:07 but you just consider that you know a lot about it,
0:42:09 probably more than the average dentist.
0:42:11 And then what you do is you go to that party
0:42:13 or you just email your friends
0:42:16 or you, in some private forum, you say,
0:42:19 “Hey, I am thinking about putting together
0:42:20 “a new service for dentists.
0:42:21 “Does anybody know anybody
0:42:23 “that you’d be comfortable introducing me to
0:42:25 “so I could talk to them about this business idea?”
0:42:27 And you’re gonna get virtually every,
0:42:29 assuming you have some friends and family,
0:42:31 you’re going to get a bunch of names.
0:42:32 – Okay.
0:42:34 – Then either you have them intro you
0:42:36 or you reach out to the dentist directly
0:42:38 and you say something along the lines of,
0:42:40 “Hey, I got your name from Bob
0:42:43 “and I’m thinking about starting a new business,
0:42:44 “but before I do that,
0:42:46 “I want to talk to a few people like you
0:42:48 “or experts in your field and find out
0:42:49 “if I’m barking up the wrong tree
0:42:51 “or if this is valuable to anybody.
0:42:53 “This isn’t the sales call in any way.
0:42:56 “I just wanna pick your brain for 15 minutes.”
0:42:57 And in exchange for that,
0:43:00 I would love to answer any questions you might have
0:43:02 about Facebook ads or other things
0:43:05 that other sorts of social media advertising.
0:43:06 – Okay.
0:43:07 – I’ve had some people go nuts with this
0:43:10 and send out maybe a hundred emails like that.
0:43:14 Had other people just send out maybe 20 emails like that.
0:43:18 And in both cases, you get about a 10% response rate.
0:43:20 People are generally pretty happy
0:43:23 to help you out with stuff like this.
0:43:25 As long as, one, they believe
0:43:27 that it’s not a sales call,
0:43:32 and, two, that you’re not some kind of direct competitor
0:43:34 who’s trying to find out trade secrets about you.
0:43:35 – Oh, okay, okay.
0:43:37 – So you have to be really sensitive
0:43:38 about those things and the kinds of questions
0:43:40 you ask them when you get them on the phone.
0:43:42 But assuming that you’re sensitive to that sort of thing
0:43:44 and it makes perfect sense
0:43:46 why you’re asking given questions,
0:43:49 then it’s really not that much of a problem.
0:43:50 So when you get them on the phone,
0:43:53 you say, “Hey, in your mind,
0:43:55 you’re thinking I have this hypothesis,
0:43:58 I have this problem that would be valuable to be,
0:44:00 Dennis would find valuable to be solved.”
0:44:03 And you validate that without leading the witness too much.
0:44:05 So you don’t want to put words in the mouth like,
0:44:09 “Hey, if I offered a service where I advise you
0:44:11 about your Facebook ads
0:44:15 or I manage your Facebook ads for you at night or whatever,
0:44:17 then would you pay for that?
0:44:18 How much would you pay for that?
0:44:21 ‘Cause that’s too much.
0:44:23 People are either gonna be nice and just say yes
0:44:28 or it’s gonna feel weird and awkward and salesy.
0:44:31 I prefer to ask questions that are more like,
0:44:34 the last time you did some advertising, how did you do it?
0:44:37 And they’ll explain some situation, something,
0:44:40 or, and that’ll lead you to the next,
0:44:41 have you ever thought about this
0:44:43 or have you ever thought about that?
0:44:44 You’re not putting words in their mouth,
0:44:46 but you are directing them somewhat,
0:44:47 at least on the topic area.
0:44:50 So you don’t want to get on the phone calling
0:44:51 and just come straight out with like,
0:44:52 “If you could wave a magic wand
0:44:55 and make your dental practice better, what would it be?”
0:44:56 ‘Cause they might go off and say like,
0:44:58 “Oh, if this teeth-wetting stuff was cheaper
0:45:00 then that would be fantastic because it costs so much.”
0:45:02 And I can’t, and they’ll go off for 15 minutes
0:45:03 talking about something
0:45:05 that there’s no way you can help them.
0:45:05 – Okay, okay.
0:45:09 So they, you know, specific to your service area
0:45:11 or your hypothetical service area.
0:45:13 Like, what kind of advertising have you done so far?
0:45:15 What’s your social media presence like?
0:45:19 – Right, and literally everybody on every one of these calls,
0:45:21 I’d call them market research calls,
0:45:26 everybody is, their hypothesis usually blown out of the water
0:45:28 or at least blown sideways by these.
0:45:29 And that’s why they’re so important
0:45:32 because if you just went out and did all the work
0:45:35 to set up a sales page for this service
0:45:38 or started putting together, you know,
0:45:39 a bunch of content marketing
0:45:41 that you were gonna put on an email list,
0:45:43 like a trip campaign, it would be a giant waste of time
0:45:46 because it would turn out that the specifics
0:45:48 of what people actually find valuable
0:45:53 in your expertise space is different than what you think.
0:45:55 And there’s another important piece
0:45:56 is that they’re gonna use a bunch of words
0:45:58 that a non-expert would use
0:46:00 to describe the stuff that you’re an expert at.
0:46:01 And you need to get those words
0:46:03 and put them in your marketing materials
0:46:06 so that your perfect ideal clients
0:46:09 will recognize the message.
0:46:10 – Oh, okay.
0:46:13 So if they’re not talking about, you know, CPMs
0:46:16 and you know how these different jargony words,
0:46:17 they’re like, I could really use more,
0:46:19 I could really use more patience
0:46:20 to get in my dental practice.
0:46:21 – Right, yeah, they’re gonna talk about,
0:46:23 they’re gonna talk about their business
0:46:25 in their business terms and you need to get,
0:46:28 this is the benefit of targeting a specific market
0:46:30 is that you pull that language that’s specific
0:46:33 to that tribe to use the Seth Godin term
0:46:35 and you can put that straight into your materials.
0:46:36 So at the top of the page, when you say,
0:46:38 I helped Dennis with Facebook ads,
0:46:39 they’re gonna read down that page
0:46:41 and it’s gonna be like they’re talking to a dentist,
0:46:43 like you obviously get them.
0:46:46 It’s gonna be, it’s a really good trust builder,
0:46:48 you know, from just a static page
0:46:49 or if you’re doing it over email,
0:46:51 which, you know, in this case probably better,
0:46:54 you know, it’s amazing the difference.
0:46:56 You get their heads nodding immediately.
0:46:58 – Oldie, but a goodie, that original call
0:47:01 with Jonathan Stark, if you scroll down to number 505
0:47:03 in your podcast feed, you should be able to find it.
0:47:05 My hope is that this episode has shown you,
0:47:08 there’s no one right way to come up with your side hustle
0:47:09 idea, your next business idea,
0:47:12 but there are lots of different methods and exercises
0:47:14 to try if you’re struggling to find something
0:47:16 that resonates with you.
0:47:17 To recap, what we covered, number one,
0:47:19 was rip, pivot, and jam.
0:47:21 This is take somebody else’s business model,
0:47:24 pivot it to a new market, a new geography,
0:47:26 and jam, go out and do the work.
0:47:27 Number two was the sniper method,
0:47:31 look at a broad serving product or market or service
0:47:34 and figure out how can I carve out a tiny little sliver
0:47:35 where if everybody else has a shotgun,
0:47:37 how can I be a sniper rifle
0:47:39 and just carve out a tiny little niche?
0:47:42 Number three is the shovels in the gold rush method,
0:47:45 looking for trends and opportunities and figure out,
0:47:48 okay, how can I support the miners in that space?
0:47:50 How can I tap into those trends with something
0:47:52 that would be beneficial to them?
0:47:54 Number four is the intersection method.
0:47:57 This is what you know, what you like and who do you know?
0:48:00 How can you get connected with people that might value
0:48:01 those other two things?
0:48:03 Number five is the scratch your own itch method.
0:48:05 This is looking at your own pains and problems
0:48:07 and saying, well, if I’ve got this struggle,
0:48:09 it’s probably a struggle for somebody else as well.
0:48:12 Lots of examples of that in the archives.
0:48:14 Number six was expert enough.
0:48:16 This is looking at the areas
0:48:18 that other people ask you questions about.
0:48:20 You have some perceived expertise and authority
0:48:21 in that space.
0:48:22 Even you might not even think of yourself
0:48:24 as being an expert there, but other people do.
0:48:27 And that’s a good sign and there might be a market there.
0:48:30 Six and a half, we took a pause to talk about curious enough,
0:48:32 the counter example to expert enough
0:48:36 where if you can bring some unique curiosity into a space,
0:48:38 you can build credibility and authority over time
0:48:41 with the example of Harry and his vertical farming podcast
0:48:45 and number seven was what we called probing for pain.
0:48:47 This is a little bit of the market research,
0:48:51 the one-on-one conversations, what do people really want
0:48:54 and how can you use their own words to build a service
0:48:55 that would be beneficial to them.
0:48:57 And then of course, the other method, number eight,
0:48:59 is to just go binge on the side hustle show
0:49:00 until you find something that sounds good.
0:49:02 We’ve got hundreds of ideas to choose from.
0:49:05 So lots of different episodes mentioned in this one.
0:49:08 I’ll do my best to link up those specific references
0:49:09 in the show notes.
0:49:10 Easiest way to get there
0:49:13 is follow the show notes link in the episode description.
0:49:16 You find the full writeup on all of these different frameworks.
0:49:18 Big thanks to our sponsors
0:49:20 for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:49:23 As always, you can hit up side hustle nation.com/deals
0:49:26 for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:49:28 Thank you for supporting the advertisers
0:49:29 that support the show.
0:49:30 That is it for me.
0:49:32 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:49:34 If you’re finding value in the show,
0:49:36 the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:49:38 So fire off that text message to somebody
0:49:40 who’s looking for their next side hustle.
0:49:41 Until next time, let’s go out there
0:49:42 and make something happen.
0:49:44 And I’ll catch you in the next edition
0:49:46 of the side hustle show.

0:00:04 – From side hustle to a million dollars in sales.
0:00:06 What’s up, what’s up, Nick Loper here.
0:00:07 Welcome to The Side Hustle Show
0:00:09 because your nine to five may make you a living,
0:00:11 but your five to nine makes you alive.
0:00:13 How does somebody with no business experience
0:00:15 launch a successful side hustle?
0:00:17 We’ll stick around in this episode to find out.
0:00:20 Today’s guest was working as a firefighter,
0:00:22 but it’s tough work and the,
0:00:24 and his sunglasses kept breaking and getting scratched up.
0:00:26 And he said, like, hey, like a lot of entrepreneurs,
0:00:27 there’s gotta be a better way, right?
0:00:30 And that’s what started him down this path,
0:00:32 starting as a side hustle a few years ago
0:00:35 to recently eclipsing a million dollars in lifetime sales
0:00:40 and still growing like crazy from frontline-optics.com
0:00:41 like Ettenberg.
0:00:42 Welcome to The Side Hustle Show.
0:00:43 – Hey, hey, how’s it going?
0:00:44 Thanks for having me.
0:00:46 – You bet, I’m excited for this one.
0:00:49 I want to kind of get the origin story here
0:00:51 of like why this product needed to exist in the world.
0:00:53 There was nothing else.
0:00:56 I’m picturing like, you know, scientist lab safety glasses.
0:00:57 Like maybe that was the alternative,
0:00:59 but like, hey, there’s gotta be a better way
0:01:01 than trashing these $200 Oakleys.
0:01:02 – Exactly.
0:01:04 So yeah, I was a big sunglasses guy.
0:01:06 Anybody who’s worked in an industry
0:01:09 in which your uniform is picked out for you knows
0:01:12 that like style and uniform don’t really go hand-in-hand
0:01:13 together.
0:01:14 So one of the few things that we do have
0:01:16 is like a wristwatch and our sunglasses.
0:01:18 So for me, I took the sunglasses,
0:01:21 started collecting them, but they’re expensive, right?
0:01:23 And then going to work,
0:01:25 generally on your day-to-day adventures,
0:01:28 you can take good care of your stuff.
0:01:32 But when a 911 call comes in, you know, things happen fast.
0:01:35 There’s no time to like securely put your sunglasses away
0:01:36 so that they don’t get scratched.
0:01:38 You just, you just go to work.
0:01:40 And when the job is done, you come back,
0:01:43 you pick up the pieces and I was consistently finding
0:01:45 my sunglasses had been scratched or broken
0:01:48 or engineers bag fell on them one time.
0:01:50 And so I was just going through them 200 bucks,
0:01:52 200 bucks, 200 bucks every single time,
0:01:54 figured there had to be a better way to make them.
0:01:57 I knew they couldn’t be too terribly difficult
0:01:58 to manufacture.
0:02:00 So started looking and making them myself.
0:02:03 And, you know, that was about a little over three years ago
0:02:05 now, and now this is what I do.
0:02:09 – Okay, so I love this method of coming up with ideas
0:02:11 from saying that like kind of the personal pain point,
0:02:13 you know, scratch your own itch kind of thing.
0:02:16 Like, look at your own, Tim Ferriss would say,
0:02:17 look at your own credit card statements.
0:02:18 Where are you spending a bunch of money?
0:02:20 And like, ah, there’s gotta be a better way, right?
0:02:22 But then it gets a little fuzzy.
0:02:25 It’s like, well, do I find manufacturers?
0:02:27 It’s kind of hard to imagine that a durable,
0:02:30 scratch resistant product doesn’t already exist.
0:02:31 But is that what you found?
0:02:34 – So it’s not that they didn’t necessarily exist,
0:02:36 but there wasn’t anything that was really marketed
0:02:38 directly towards first responders.
0:02:40 There was a lot of military stuff.
0:02:42 There was a lot, you know, in those other areas,
0:02:44 but a lot of them were still very expensive.
0:02:47 And ultimately, you know, there wasn’t anything
0:02:50 that was really focused on like a first responder.
0:02:52 And so that was what I found as I kind of went through
0:02:55 is there was no one speaking directly to my market.
0:02:57 No one that was building glasses
0:02:59 focused directly on my market.
0:03:02 And so I figured I was gonna, you know, fill that void
0:03:03 and I was gonna make sunglasses
0:03:06 that were directly marketed towards first responders.
0:03:08 Now, for all of you who are not first responders,
0:03:10 it’s not like you are not allowed to wear them.
0:03:11 But if you go on our website
0:03:13 or see any of our marketing materials,
0:03:15 you’ll see that it’s always law enforcement,
0:03:16 firefighters, paramedics, you know,
0:03:18 that’s what you’re gonna see wearing them.
0:03:19 ‘Cause that’s where I came from
0:03:21 and, you know, that’s the market that we focus on.
0:03:23 – Yeah, it’s a niche within a niche.
0:03:26 Like we’re gonna do durable scratch resistant product
0:03:31 and we’re gonna hone in on this specific use case
0:03:33 or the specific user base.
0:03:34 – Exactly, exactly.
0:03:36 And we know what the day in the life
0:03:37 of a first responder is.
0:03:39 So we can kind of tailor to that.
0:03:41 We also back all of our sunglasses
0:03:43 with this no questions asked replacement program.
0:03:46 So if you lose them, you break them, anything happens.
0:03:48 We’ll replace it one time, no questions asked.
0:03:51 Again, with the idea that no matter what you do,
0:03:53 eventually these things are gonna break
0:03:54 ’cause the job’s gonna catch up to them.
0:03:55 So we’re gonna, you know,
0:03:57 kind of help cover that cost when it happens.
0:03:59 – Okay, so we come up with the idea.
0:04:00 What happens next?
0:04:02 Is it trying to find a manufacturer
0:04:05 that is making similar sunglasses?
0:04:07 Just, hey, can we make these a little tougher?
0:04:09 Like, where do you even go?
0:04:11 – Pretty much, I went to Google, right?
0:04:13 And I started Googling and finding things
0:04:16 and what you’ll find, especially when you’re starting out,
0:04:18 is a lot of these big manufacturers,
0:04:20 they don’t wanna work with you, you know,
0:04:22 ’cause your volumes are just too small.
0:04:24 I started this thing with $5,000.
0:04:26 Again, this was a side hustle.
0:04:28 At the time that I started it, too,
0:04:30 I was actually listening to this show,
0:04:33 which is kind of fun, full circle to be here now with you.
0:04:34 – Love it.
0:04:36 – But yeah, I just started looking into everything,
0:04:38 contacting manufacturers, and I just had to go
0:04:42 kind of further and further and further down the Google list,
0:04:44 you could say, until I finally found a smaller factory
0:04:47 that understood what I was trying to do,
0:04:50 wanted to kind of grow with me and then, you know,
0:04:52 helped educate me and hold my hand through, you know,
0:04:55 the education of what is, you know, the optical industry.
0:04:57 – Is this through, not through Alibaba,
0:04:59 this is just like, I’m going through pages,
0:05:02 finding somebody who will accept a smaller minimum order.
0:05:04 – Correct, yeah, I stayed away from Alibaba.
0:05:08 Alibaba’s, you know, you can find gems on there,
0:05:09 but for the most part, like a lot of those
0:05:11 are third-party sourcing.
0:05:14 At the beginning, I did pick a few samples from there
0:05:16 and the stuff that came back was just so bad
0:05:18 that I, you know, I kind of threw my hands up
0:05:19 and said, I got to go a different route
0:05:22 and kind of Google just the traditional search
0:05:24 is how I found my manufacturer.
0:05:27 – Okay, that’s a great tip to like go to page 234,
0:05:30 like see if you can find somebody who is, you know,
0:05:32 smaller, hungrier for business, willing to work with you.
0:05:35 So $5,000, this is initial inventory.
0:05:36 How many glasses does that get you?
0:05:38 I don’t even know a concept.
0:05:41 – So I bought 300 pairs of sunglasses to start
0:05:43 and then with that, I also, you know,
0:05:46 got my Shopify store filed for a trademark
0:05:49 and had a very small budget leftover for marketing.
0:05:50 But yeah, that was my initial investment.
0:05:53 It was $5,000, 300 pairs of sunglasses,
0:05:55 and then the foundation that everyone needs
0:05:56 to kind of get the ball rolling.
0:05:57 – Got it.
0:05:59 Have you ever messed around with Shopify before?
0:06:01 He said, I don’t have any business experience.
0:06:02 It’s like, what’s the learning curve,
0:06:03 like trying to set this stuff up?
0:06:05 – It’s pretty plug and play,
0:06:09 but there’s obviously aspects of it that are challenging.
0:06:12 I relied a lot on Fiverr to get started,
0:06:13 just inexpensive tasks,
0:06:16 but you have to know what you’re trying to do.
0:06:18 Thankfully, I did, I had kind of a vision
0:06:19 of what I wanted things to look like,
0:06:20 and I had examples.
0:06:23 So by going on there, I was able to kind of say,
0:06:25 hey, I want this to look like this
0:06:28 and really map out exactly what I was trying to accomplish.
0:06:30 It wasn’t that difficult overall,
0:06:32 as you really dive into it.
0:06:35 That’s when, you know, the details start to focus.
0:06:36 – And clearly there’s some validation
0:06:41 from what Warby Parker has done in prescription glasses,
0:06:42 what obviously Gooder has done
0:06:45 in kind of direct-to-consumer sunglasses.
0:06:46 So there’s some validation.
0:06:48 People are willing to order this stuff online.
0:06:50 It’s just a matter of getting in front of them.
0:06:50 – Absolutely.
0:06:53 – So build it and they will come, maybe not.
0:06:56 So build it and then try and spread the word.
0:06:57 What happens on the marketing side?
0:07:00 – Build it and they will not come, right?
0:07:02 My first year took us a really long time
0:07:04 to kind of get any traction.
0:07:07 Obviously, family, they’ll buy the first batch
0:07:09 just to support you and friends will support you.
0:07:11 But it doesn’t really feel all that great, you know,
0:07:13 ’cause you kind of expect it.
0:07:16 – You recognize every name on the order report?
0:07:17 – Yeah, exactly.
0:07:19 But that first order that comes in from a name
0:07:21 that you have no idea who this is, you know,
0:07:23 like you truly acquired your first customer
0:07:26 is a pretty special moment that I’m sure everybody
0:07:29 who’s gone into business is familiar with.
0:07:29 – Yeah, it’s really exciting.
0:07:31 It’s really vulnerable too.
0:07:33 I remember like even in the example of the podcast,
0:07:35 like the first like 50 download day
0:07:38 and it was, I think I have exuded my own circle
0:07:39 of influence at this point.
0:07:41 And that’s like, that means strangers are listening in.
0:07:42 Well, you know, what if they hate it?
0:07:43 What if they think it sucks?
0:07:44 What if they leave a bad review?
0:07:47 Like all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, I wanted this to happen,
0:07:50 but it’s also super kind of nerve-wracking too.
0:07:53 – Yeah, you get vulnerable at that moment.
0:07:54 – Do you know how they found you?
0:07:56 Was this, you know, word of mouth referral?
0:07:58 Was this a Facebook ad?
0:08:00 – It was all organic at that point.
0:08:02 We were just doing a lot of like organic posting.
0:08:04 So that would have been how they found us.
0:08:07 I hadn’t even been running ads yet.
0:08:10 So it was still very, you know, like I’m gonna take a picture.
0:08:11 I’m gonna put it up.
0:08:12 I’m gonna use hashtags, you know,
0:08:16 the old school method that maybe still works to an extent,
0:08:19 but not quite how it did back in the early days.
0:08:23 But I was able to kind of ride the coattails of that path,
0:08:25 you could say, towards my first customer.
0:08:28 – Okay, and targeting hashtags specific to this niche.
0:08:30 I don’t know what those would be, you know,
0:08:33 #firstresponder, #firefighter, stuff like that.
0:08:34 – Exactly.
0:08:35 So yeah, that was pretty much what I did.
0:08:38 I didn’t have any kind of like post-purchase surveys set up
0:08:41 at that point to figure out how people, you know,
0:08:43 found me, which I learned later, the value of.
0:08:45 But yeah, you know, you get one,
0:08:48 you keep, you know, rinse and repeat, do the same thing,
0:08:50 figure out what’s working, what doesn’t, change it.
0:08:52 And the next thing you know, there’s two,
0:08:55 and then there’s three, and then there’s, you know, 10,
0:08:56 and it just keeps going.
0:08:59 – Are you handling fulfillment out of your garage,
0:09:01 out of your spare bedroom, in this kind of like,
0:09:03 one advantage of sunglasses is that they’re super small,
0:09:05 lightweight, easy to ship, stuff like that.
0:09:07 – I am not thankfully handling
0:09:08 any of the fulfillment anymore.
0:09:10 – But for those first orders?
0:09:12 – The first orders, absolutely, absolutely.
0:09:15 Yeah, I had a corner, we have a pretty funny video.
0:09:17 My wife, my son, and myself are all in here,
0:09:18 packaging orders.
0:09:20 I worked initially as a firefighter,
0:09:23 and at that time I was still working as a firefighter.
0:09:25 So especially as the business started to pick up,
0:09:27 you know, orders would pile up, and so I would come home,
0:09:29 and then it was like, cool, we’ve got, you know,
0:09:31 these 10 or 15 orders that we need to ship out,
0:09:34 because it’s been three days since they’ve ordered it.
0:09:35 All right, so it’s got to happen now,
0:09:37 and we turned it in this family thing,
0:09:39 where we’d all set up a little assembly line,
0:09:40 and build out these orders,
0:09:43 and my son would take them to the post office with me,
0:09:45 you know, he loved going and handing the person
0:09:47 at the counter all of the glasses to get scanned,
0:09:49 and it was fun time.
0:09:51 – Yeah, that’s exciting, that’s really cool.
0:09:53 How did you figure out pricing, or is this like,
0:09:56 based on what other sunglasses are charging,
0:09:58 you know, how to figure out how much to charge for these?
0:10:01 – You know, you look at your competitors in this space,
0:10:03 and kind of mimic those price points,
0:10:05 and then you figure it out from there.
0:10:07 When we first started, we were, you know,
0:10:10 very inexpensive, but the quality of the components
0:10:12 at that time also were not as high quality,
0:10:15 just due to the fact that we didn’t have the capital
0:10:18 to be able to put like a premium quality product together
0:10:20 when we were testing, to see if this was validated,
0:10:23 and then as we continued to grow, you know,
0:10:25 we put money into upgrading components,
0:10:27 and making them more durable, and stronger,
0:10:29 and better lenses, and all those things,
0:10:30 and with it, you know, it’s now, you know,
0:10:32 obviously a much more premium product
0:10:34 than it was when we first started.
0:10:35 – Looks like you’re around 80 bucks a pair now.
0:10:36 – Yeah, exactly.
0:10:37 – What did it start at?
0:10:40 – They started at 42, so when I first started,
0:10:41 they were never like $20 throwaways,
0:10:44 and I didn’t want to be playing in that space.
0:10:47 I was trying to build something that, you know,
0:10:49 people would understand was a little bit better
0:10:51 than what you’re gonna get at the gas station, or 7-Eleven,
0:10:54 but we weren’t quite at that premium level at that time,
0:10:56 and now we’ve definitely grown
0:10:58 in the quality of the components to be at that level.
0:11:02 – Okay, yeah, so still not as much as like a designer pair,
0:11:04 or, you know, those $200 Oakleys,
0:11:06 but it’s no longer just like a straight commodity,
0:11:07 like you said, gas station pair.
0:11:09 – Exactly, they’re nice enough
0:11:10 that you’ll try and take care of them,
0:11:13 but not so excessively priced that you’re gonna be scared
0:11:16 to let something happen to them if, you know,
0:11:18 if the job asks that of you.
0:11:19 – More with Mike in just a moment,
0:11:22 including his micro-influencer strategy
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0:11:27 right after this.
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0:12:38 Creating really great retail experiences is tough,
0:12:41 especially if you’ve got multiple stores, teams of staff,
0:12:43 fulfillment centers, separate workflows.
0:12:44 It’s a lot to deal with.
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0:13:31 the best retail experiences without complexity.
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0:13:38 All right, so you start to ship out a few pairs.
0:13:40 I love getting the family involved.
0:13:42 And this is all still through kind of organic, social,
0:13:45 trying to build up a presence and a following.
0:13:46 But at a certain point, you’re like,
0:13:49 “Well, how do we find more buyers?
0:13:51 “Find what we call lead fountains?
0:13:52 “How do I get in front of lots of customers?
0:13:54 “What’s that evergreen source?
0:13:56 “Is it gonna be social?
0:13:57 “Is it gonna be through partnerships?
0:13:58 “What was it?
0:13:59 “Where did you find worked early on?”
0:14:02 So early on, when we didn’t have a lot of budget,
0:14:04 it was a lot of micro influencer marketing.
0:14:06 We would reach out to them.
0:14:08 There was no monetary component at all.
0:14:12 It was just simply, “Hey, I’m Mike, this is my company.
0:14:16 “I’m a first responder and I would love to get you
0:14:17 “this product in your hands.
0:14:19 “If you like it, share it with your audience.
0:14:20 “If you don’t like it,
0:14:21 “you got yourself a free pair of sunglasses.
0:14:22 “Do we have a deal?”
0:14:26 And a lot of people took it ’cause why not, right?
0:14:27 It’s a free pair of sunglasses.
0:14:29 And once they got them, they liked them,
0:14:31 they saw the quality, they saw the uniqueness of it.
0:14:33 They liked the story.
0:14:35 Additionally, we have a charitable component.
0:14:37 So a portion of every sale goes back
0:14:39 to our first responders children’s foundation.
0:14:41 And that’s an organization that supports
0:14:42 kind of the families left behind
0:14:44 by someone who’s critically injured
0:14:45 or killed in line of duty.
0:14:48 So we’re taking care of our own
0:14:49 and all of that kind of resonated.
0:14:52 And so that message started to be shared
0:14:54 amongst their networks.
0:14:55 And that would get a few more people in the door
0:14:57 and a few more people in the door.
0:14:59 And then the word-of-mouth advertising started
0:15:01 to kind of grow from there
0:15:04 and gave us enough budget to go into traditional marketing.
0:15:06 – Is there a sweet spot of like follower count
0:15:08 or accounts after I think like,
0:15:10 what qualifies as a micro influencer here?
0:15:14 – We try and stay at somebody below like the 20,000 mark.
0:15:16 And we find a lot of success
0:15:18 in like the three to 5,000 follower range.
0:15:20 – ‘Cause at that point, they’re like excited
0:15:22 that a brand is reaching out to them.
0:15:22 – Exactly.
0:15:24 So they’re just getting to that point
0:15:27 where a brand would want them to have this stuff.
0:15:28 So they’re excited.
0:15:29 Whereas the further on they go,
0:15:31 they start to get more comfortable
0:15:34 with the fact that they get people reaching out to them.
0:15:36 You’ll get a lot of people who will get your glasses
0:15:38 and then just not reply.
0:15:40 And or they’ll come back to you with a,
0:15:43 I charge this amount of money for a shout out.
0:15:45 And we’re not really in the name of doing that
0:15:48 unless you’re, you know, got millions of followers.
0:15:49 – Got it, yeah.
0:15:53 And did you find there were 50 of these people,
0:15:56 a hundred of these people, like, I’m not in that space.
0:15:59 That’s like, are there firefighter influencers on TikTok?
0:16:00 – Yeah, there’s thousands.
0:16:01 – Really?
0:16:02 – And then as you find one,
0:16:05 the algorithm will, you know, recommend you to another.
0:16:06 And so you just kind of keep on,
0:16:09 keep on going, follow hashtags, you’ll find them.
0:16:12 But there’s a lot and a lot of our content
0:16:14 that we’ve gotten if you go, you know, on our social media
0:16:16 and look like a lot of the stuff in the early days
0:16:19 is just, those are all influencers who we traded
0:16:21 a pair of sunglasses for a shout out and a photo.
0:16:24 And then we got multiple people’s faces on our site
0:16:27 which showed it in different, you know, law enforcement,
0:16:31 EMS, fire environments and just kind of continue
0:16:34 to grow the user base, I guess you could say.
0:16:35 – And do you have an estimate of how many free pairs
0:16:38 you sent out to kind of build a good will
0:16:40 amongst this crowd of micro influencers?
0:16:43 – At this point, I would say over a thousand that we’ve sent.
0:16:44 – Wow.
0:16:45 – And then there’s some that, you know,
0:16:48 they provided with a professional photographer,
0:16:51 quality photo and we’ll circle back with them again
0:16:54 to work with them again, since they’re putting out
0:16:56 like quality content that we can repurpose
0:16:58 and use on our site and in, you know,
0:17:01 in marketing, if they give permission, there’s a lot.
0:17:04 We generally try and find about 10 to 20 a month
0:17:06 to send a pair to, to kind of keep that dream moving.
0:17:07 – Yeah, I guess that’s true.
0:17:09 It’s not a static thing.
0:17:11 Like, you know, there’s always new accounts being created,
0:17:13 new people getting into the space.
0:17:13 – Exactly.
0:17:15 – Love this, over a thousand free pairs,
0:17:18 like really showing some dedication to this strategy.
0:17:20 And then is there any way to track, you know,
0:17:22 oh, this guy performed, but this one didn’t?
0:17:24 Like, you know, we’re just going to cast
0:17:26 as wide a net as possible.
0:17:28 – You always got to track the data, right?
0:17:31 Generally, our approach with people is we start out
0:17:34 reaching out to them as an influencer for, you know,
0:17:37 a photo and a shout out to their audience.
0:17:39 And then after about a week or two,
0:17:40 we generally follow up a second time
0:17:42 and we ask them how they like the glasses.
0:17:43 And if they really like them,
0:17:45 we introduce them to an ambassador program
0:17:48 where they can earn a commission based off of their sales.
0:17:50 And that gets them a discount code.
0:17:55 And with that, we usually see one to two months of sales,
0:17:57 like a high volume of sales generated.
0:18:00 And by a high volume, I mean like five to 10 per,
0:18:01 again, they’re smaller influencers,
0:18:04 but five to 10 a month from that person.
0:18:05 And they have, you know, they have a discount code
0:18:07 so we can track all of that as well.
0:18:09 But yeah, we will put them on a spreadsheet
0:18:11 after they get sent to it, we’ll follow up
0:18:14 and then we’ll notate, did they give us a story?
0:18:15 Did they give us a post?
0:18:16 Did they send us something?
0:18:17 Did they want to become an ambassador
0:18:19 so we can kind of see the progression?
0:18:20 – Got it, okay.
0:18:22 And that goes directly to your Shopify store.
0:18:24 Is an ambassador program something you got to manage
0:18:27 in-house or is there like a Shopify app
0:18:30 that helps and figures out like the commission payout
0:18:31 and all this stuff?
0:18:33 – Yeah, we have an app called Up Promote
0:18:34 and Up Promote is free.
0:18:36 I always like free, right?
0:18:38 So I don’t want to have to pay if I don’t have to.
0:18:41 The downside is you have to manually pay out
0:18:42 your ambassadors every month,
0:18:44 but it’ll collect it all for you.
0:18:46 It’ll tell you how much and then you basically
0:18:50 just go into PayPal and we send them their payment
0:18:51 and then we click it off
0:18:53 that the payment’s been paid outside the platform.
0:18:55 They have a paid portion
0:18:56 where they do that automatically for you
0:18:58 and take your hands off entirely.
0:19:00 But for us, you know, it’s something
0:19:03 that we have a virtual assistant that’s handling.
0:19:05 It just makes sense to kind of keep it in her workload.
0:19:08 – All right, so the ambassador program is cranking now.
0:19:11 What else is going on on the marketing front?
0:19:12 I love this.
0:19:13 Just we’re going to get in front of all these people
0:19:15 who talk to our target audience already.
0:19:17 I think it’s a really smart way to do it.
0:19:19 But anything else that has been firing
0:19:20 on the marketing side?
0:19:23 – Now Metta is really where we’re at,
0:19:25 but I’ll take it a few steps back
0:19:27 since we’re kind of going through that normal progression.
0:19:30 So I started to advertise on Metta.
0:19:32 I had no idea how to run it.
0:19:34 I didn’t know what a hook was.
0:19:36 You know, I was just like putting pictures out there
0:19:37 and I was running traffic ads.
0:19:40 And for anyone who’s been doing this,
0:19:42 we all know that traffic ads get you exactly
0:19:44 that they get you traffic to your site.
0:19:46 They do not get you any sales.
0:19:48 In addition, I was not yet smart enough
0:19:50 to be capturing people’s emails.
0:19:52 I was firefighter by trade,
0:19:54 but I didn’t know all of these little tricks
0:19:56 to make sure that I can remarket and grow a list.
0:19:59 You know, these were all foreign concepts to me.
0:20:00 – So, you know, this is helpful.
0:20:03 So Facebook or Metta has lots of different
0:20:06 targeting options or like goal option,
0:20:07 how are we gonna optimize your campaign?
0:20:10 And if you’re saying, if you optimize for traffic,
0:20:12 they kind of inherently know
0:20:15 who are the click hacky people on our platform.
0:20:16 It’s like we get you traffic,
0:20:17 but we don’t know what happens after that.
0:20:19 They may not click on anything on your site.
0:20:21 They may not buy anything,
0:20:23 but we can get you affordable clicks.
0:20:25 – Exactly, exactly.
0:20:26 So they know, right?
0:20:28 Like they’ve got so much data on their users
0:20:30 that they know exactly what they’re sending.
0:20:33 So if you’re trying to get traffic, you’ll get traffic.
0:20:34 If you’re trying to get sales, you’ll get sales.
0:20:36 But they cost, you know, a different amount.
0:20:39 To be put in front of the person who’s ready to purchase
0:20:42 is significantly more expensive to be put in front
0:20:44 of the person who will click the link
0:20:46 and never do anything from there.
0:20:48 But it was still fun to see the traffic numbers going up
0:20:50 and Shopify gives you these little metrics
0:20:54 that tell you like, oh, you’re in the 10% of all stores
0:20:56 that start at the same time as you, you know,
0:20:58 and it gives you this little pat on the back,
0:20:59 feeling if you’re doing something right.
0:21:01 – Yeah, that’s kind of fun.
0:21:04 It’s like, come on, Shopify, I appreciate you giving me
0:21:06 a pat on the back about the traffic stats,
0:21:08 but how about the sales?
0:21:10 – Right, so yeah, again, I didn’t necessarily know
0:21:13 what I was doing, was running those traffic ads,
0:21:16 started to run some purchase ads, but, you know,
0:21:18 I didn’t have great quality stuff.
0:21:21 I was taking photos, I was throwing them on Canva
0:21:23 and creating a quick template
0:21:25 and trying to put an ad together.
0:21:26 I was still learning.
0:21:29 And then, you know, I found TikTok.
0:21:32 So it was kind of funny, I was going
0:21:35 for one of my morning runs at work.
0:21:38 And as I was running, we were in Coronado,
0:21:40 and there was this house that was overlooking
0:21:42 like a boat dock area.
0:21:45 And there were these young kids, I’ll call them,
0:21:47 that were constantly there on their laptops
0:21:49 on the back patio, and I would run by them
0:21:50 and I always wondered, you know, what,
0:21:52 what do these guys do, right?
0:21:54 And so finally, one day I had to ask.
0:21:56 – Yeah, to afford this waterfront house, yeah.
0:21:58 – Yeah, I had to ask, and so I stopped
0:22:00 and I was like, what, you know, what are you guys into?
0:22:01 And they’re like, oh, like, we have a marketing agency,
0:22:03 like we do online ads.
0:22:06 So of course, I started telling them what I was doing,
0:22:09 and they told me like, you got to go all in on TikTok.
0:22:11 And I’m like, I’m still not on that platform yet.
0:22:13 I don’t know, you know, how I feel about it,
0:22:16 but okay, and then the next time I went on a run
0:22:18 and I saw them out there like, are you on TikTok yet?
0:22:20 All right, you need to double down on TikTok.
0:22:22 I’m like, yeah, yeah, and I go and run,
0:22:24 come back another day, and they’re like, you know,
0:22:26 triple down on TikTok.
0:22:27 So I’m finally like, all right, like,
0:22:30 I’m gonna go back, I’m gonna make a TikTok ad.
0:22:32 And I did, it wasn’t great, but again,
0:22:34 I hadn’t figured out this concept of a hook.
0:22:37 I just like, all of a sudden there was just sunglasses
0:22:38 and music in the background.
0:22:40 It wasn’t, you know, there’s nothing to capture
0:22:40 and it was attention.
0:22:43 And so I decided to make a video
0:22:45 and the start of the video is a picture
0:22:47 of the sunglasses falling out of the fire engine
0:22:50 in slow motion, and I voiced over it,
0:22:52 stop beating up your expensive sunglasses on the job.
0:22:55 And then it went to the different sunglasses stuff
0:22:58 and that thing just took off.
0:23:01 And like that was in May of 2022
0:23:03 and the company basically exploded
0:23:04 from that point forward.
0:23:05 – Wow, that’s great.
0:23:07 You know, that’s the power of one viral video
0:23:10 or one thing, and that’s really funny
0:23:12 that these kids were like convincing you to do it.
0:23:14 – I understood the power of a hook at that point.
0:23:17 And then I started to, you know, I took that same ad
0:23:19 and I moved it over to the Meta platform
0:23:21 and it performed just as well, if not better,
0:23:24 more consistently, I guess you could say, on Meta
0:23:27 and gave me the budget to test other things
0:23:29 and to develop, you know, professional looking ads.
0:23:32 And that was the beginning of this business
0:23:34 turning into, you know, a real thing
0:23:37 and not just this side project I was doing on my off time.
0:23:39 – Yeah, I’m looking at the TikTok account now,
0:23:44 over 3,000 followers, not huge by TikTok standards,
0:23:45 but, you know, a healthy following
0:23:48 and some of these videos do have hundreds of thousands of views.
0:23:49 – We’ve done pretty well on there.
0:23:50 It was interesting.
0:23:52 So in 2022, what you could do
0:23:55 is you could run an ad and it was like,
0:23:57 it was almost like a shotgun effect that TikTok would do
0:24:00 where they would blast it out to this huge group of people
0:24:03 at a very small cost per click.
0:24:05 So conversion rate was low,
0:24:08 but the amount you were spending was like nothing.
0:24:10 So you were able to make a lot of money off of this thing.
0:24:12 And then as time would go on,
0:24:15 its algorithm would try and niche down
0:24:17 as to who your audience was
0:24:19 and the ad would stop performing once it did that.
0:24:22 But you could literally turn the ad off and duplicate it
0:24:25 and it would just start again at that shotgun approach
0:24:26 and it would like narrow itself down.
0:24:28 So it was like once every one to two weeks,
0:24:29 you would turn the ad off
0:24:32 and just refire the exact same ad again
0:24:34 and you’d get another, you know, one to two weeks
0:24:36 of use out of this same thing.
0:24:39 And so I gained that system for a pretty long time
0:24:43 until they kind of caught on and changed their algorithm.
0:24:45 And then that approach didn’t work anymore.
0:24:46 And once that happened,
0:24:49 we pretty much left the TikTok platform
0:24:50 ’cause we found success on Meta
0:24:51 that was more consistent
0:24:54 and kind of been all in on medicines.
0:24:56 – Okay, yeah, well the getting’s good
0:24:58 and figure out how it all works.
0:25:00 You played around with TikTok shop
0:25:02 or is it still like we’re driving all the traffic
0:25:03 back to our own Shopify store?
0:25:05 – We’re driving back to our own Shopify store.
0:25:07 We’ve dabbled and tried.
0:25:10 I haven’t been able to find much success on TikTok shop
0:25:13 but I do have friends that are making hundreds of thousands
0:25:16 of dollars a year through a TikTok shop only.
0:25:18 So there’s definitely opportunity there
0:25:19 for the right products.
0:25:21 And I think the right price point,
0:25:24 I think if you’re in like the 30 or so dollar range
0:25:26 and you get those impulsive buyers.
0:25:29 – Yeah, more impulse buy price point, that makes sense.
0:25:31 – Exactly, but once we kind of got into that,
0:25:32 you know, that $80 range,
0:25:34 people have to think a little harder
0:25:35 about making that purchase.
0:25:37 And so the impulse is kind of removed,
0:25:39 which I think is what TikTok shop’s all about.
0:25:42 – All right, well, if you know anybody, send them my way
0:25:44 ’cause that’s something we haven’t covered yet on the show.
0:25:45 It might be interesting
0:25:47 to always these up and coming up and came platforms.
0:25:50 I’ve got some people for you, I’ll send your way.
0:25:51 – Okay, beautiful.
0:25:54 So now the focus is on meta.
0:25:56 This is gonna be more consistent.
0:25:58 This is Facebook and Instagram.
0:26:01 Just a huge, huge audience and all the data points in the world
0:26:03 on how to best target these people
0:26:05 and running the same kind of ad
0:26:07 and appreciate you painting the visual of like the fight,
0:26:10 you know, the slow mo, no, they’re falling.
0:26:13 So that makes sense.
0:26:15 – So yeah, we moved everything over to meta.
0:26:17 We started to use that ad.
0:26:19 We kind of created some new versions of it.
0:26:23 And then we started to test just still image ads.
0:26:28 And the still image ads have had much more stability
0:26:29 than the videos.
0:26:33 Videos are kind of fun, but they seem to fade out quicker.
0:26:34 You know, if you see the video once
0:26:35 and then you see it a second time,
0:26:37 you’re much more likely to just click past it
0:26:39 ’cause you already know what’s gonna happen.
0:26:41 Whereas an image kind of burns a picture
0:26:43 in someone’s mind, I guess you could say.
0:26:46 And if they see it again, it’s again top of mind,
0:26:48 all the information that you wanted presented to them
0:26:51 is instantly back at the front of their mind.
0:26:53 And that’s another one of those touch points
0:26:57 that you statistically need about seven to get your sale.
0:27:01 So still ads have been our new bread and butter
0:27:04 and what we’ve done to take us up to that seven figure point.
0:27:06 – Yeah, you have the initial awareness
0:27:10 and then onto interest, attraction, desire.
0:27:11 I don’t know what the acronym was,
0:27:13 but it’s something like that where,
0:27:14 okay, at first I gotta know you exist.
0:27:17 And then I gotta be, why should I care?
0:27:18 Why do I need this in my life?
0:27:20 Like, okay, and now I’m ready to trust you enough
0:27:22 to do business with you and go buy the thing.
0:27:26 Is there a metric for like a cost per sale
0:27:27 or like cost of acquisition?
0:27:28 How do you think about that
0:27:31 in terms of return on ad spend through Meta?
0:27:34 – Yeah, so it varies for us depending on the time of year.
0:27:37 And again, we’re only a little over three years in,
0:27:40 so we’re still learning some of these curves.
0:27:41 For the most part, you’re looking at,
0:27:44 during the good season, it costs about $15
0:27:45 to acquire a customer.
0:27:48 – Is the good season, like Q4, like holiday season,
0:27:49 or is that like–
0:27:52 – No way, Q4 is terrible for us, which is interesting.
0:27:53 – Well, it’s winter time.
0:27:55 Who’s buying sunglasses in the middle of winter?
0:27:57 – Exactly, but so for us,
0:27:59 we really see the uptick starts to happen around April
0:28:01 and it goes through around September.
0:28:03 So from like April to September
0:28:05 and spring and summer months,
0:28:07 everyone’s getting ready for their,
0:28:08 starting to get sunny out,
0:28:10 they wanna get their sun outfits together,
0:28:12 start thinking about sunglasses,
0:28:13 getting ready to go on vacation,
0:28:15 you gotta get a new set of sunglasses
0:28:16 for your new vacation, right?
0:28:19 So we see like a huge spike in demand
0:28:21 when it’s like nice, sunny weather outside,
0:28:23 whereas when it’s like gloomy,
0:28:25 sales obviously still come in,
0:28:27 but it costs almost double to acquire those customers.
0:28:28 – Okay, that makes sense.
0:28:32 Yeah, there’s some seasonality to the business, for sure.
0:28:34 More on Mike’s meta strategy in just a moment,
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0:30:58 On the targeting side,
0:31:01 just kind of letting Meta’s algorithm do its thing.
0:31:04 You mentioned maybe retargeting or maybe email marketing,
0:31:06 but what else is happening there?
0:31:07 Our current approach right now
0:31:10 is we have top-of-the-funnel ads,
0:31:11 and our top-of-the-funnel ads,
0:31:15 it’s still a conversion campaign when you go into Meta,
0:31:16 but the conversion event we’re looking for
0:31:18 is website visitors.
0:31:19 So it’s not traffic.
0:31:22 They’re trying to send you better quality traffic
0:31:22 through this point.
0:31:25 And what we see is we track through Google,
0:31:27 and we can see if somebody’s actually spending
0:31:30 a good amount of time and clicking around on our website
0:31:32 versus like arriving and bouncing.
0:31:34 And so we do that with interest targeting.
0:31:36 The three that are working for us right now
0:31:39 are a stack of law enforcement interests,
0:31:40 a stack of firefighter interests,
0:31:43 and then a 2% lookalike audience.
0:31:46 And we have different style top-of-the-funnel ads
0:31:46 for each of those.
0:31:49 But the point of them is to get them to the site,
0:31:50 and then they get hit with a pop-up
0:31:53 for 15% off their first order,
0:31:55 and to sign up for our email newsletter.
0:31:57 – Okay, is there a pretty good take rate
0:31:58 on that 15% offer?
0:32:00 – We got about 4% conversion rate
0:32:03 on those that are signing up for our email.
0:32:04 So still playing with it,
0:32:07 trying to get a little bit better, but they do convert.
0:32:10 – Yeah, can you explain what a 2% lookalike is?
0:32:13 – So a 2% lookalike, so we stack everything together.
0:32:17 So we run a lookalike audience on Instagram Engagers.
0:32:21 We run a lookalike audience on Facebook Engagers.
0:32:23 We run a lookalike audience on Purchases.
0:32:27 And then we’ve also taken our email list
0:32:30 and loaded that in to Meta and used that as well.
0:32:34 So we basically stack 2% lookalike on all of those things.
0:32:38 And the type of creative that works with–
0:32:39 – What’s the 2% refer to?
0:32:42 – It’s basically like how broad you can do anywhere
0:32:46 from like a 1% to a 10% audience lookalike.
0:32:50 And the smaller it is, the more like niche it is,
0:32:52 but the audience level is smaller.
0:32:55 So you can kind of play in a range there.
0:32:57 And we’ve just found that the 2%
0:33:00 seems to be the sweet spot for our brand.
0:33:04 This would be like more targeted rather than less.
0:33:07 – It’s looking at the things that are similar
0:33:09 about all the people in that profile
0:33:10 and finding a cold audience
0:33:13 that has those same key variables.
0:33:15 – Which is a incredible capability.
0:33:17 Like I love the ability to do this.
0:33:19 – Yeah, this is full blown Meta.
0:33:21 The magic of Meta is there.
0:33:24 They just know so much about our customers.
0:33:25 Probably know more about me than I know about me.
0:33:27 – Yeah, upload your customer list
0:33:30 and say find me more people like these people.
0:33:31 And they can do it.
0:33:34 – Exactly, and the ad copy or the style
0:33:36 that seems to work well with them is like founder,
0:33:38 founder videos, founder images.
0:33:41 So through that resonates with that group.
0:33:45 Whereas the firefighter interest has firefighter style
0:33:48 images, videos and law enforcement, same thing.
0:33:50 – Okay, is this you on camera modeling?
0:33:52 – On the founder stuff, yeah.
0:33:54 There’s, I’ve been on some different interviews
0:33:55 and things like that.
0:33:58 So yeah, it’s me. (laughs)
0:34:01 Which I was not comfortable with for a very long time.
0:34:03 But when you put your face to a brand,
0:34:07 it really does help to kind of build that trust
0:34:08 that people are looking for.
0:34:09 So it works.
0:34:10 – Okay, yeah, for sure.
0:34:12 And yeah, people connect with that
0:34:14 and say, yeah, I wanna support this guy.
0:34:15 – So we have that running.
0:34:18 Then we have a retargeting purchase one.
0:34:20 So anybody over the last 90 days
0:34:22 who’s been to our website gets targeted again.
0:34:25 But that one is a purchase campaign.
0:34:27 So it’s more expensive to get them to the site,
0:34:28 but they’ve already been vetted.
0:34:29 ‘Cause anybody in that list
0:34:32 has already shown an interest in our products.
0:34:34 And then we retarget via Google.
0:34:35 – And are you still running these yourself?
0:34:38 Or did you hire the kids from the patio in Coronado?
0:34:41 – No, no, I do everything on Meta myself.
0:34:43 And then I hired someone for Google
0:34:45 ’cause Google’s an interesting animal
0:34:48 that someday I would love to really learn.
0:34:52 But it’s a lot more complex on the surface.
0:34:55 And so it was worth it to get a specialist.
0:34:57 – For Google ads or for SEO?
0:34:58 – For ads, yeah.
0:35:00 – Did you expect to become a,
0:35:02 have to become a Meta ads expert
0:35:03 when you’re in the fire service?
0:35:06 And just like, oh, now I know all about this retargeting
0:35:09 and different types of layered campaigns.
0:35:11 Like, oh, we’re gonna start off with the traffic campaign
0:35:12 and then we’re gonna retarget those people
0:35:13 who were most engaged.
0:35:15 So now it’s a conversion campaign
0:35:17 and that brings down our cost of acquisition.
0:35:20 It’s like, you’re speaking a completely different language
0:35:21 than I imagined you were three years ago.
0:35:23 – It’s pretty funny, but what I’ve realized
0:35:24 is that I love it.
0:35:27 So if I had found myself in this career
0:35:30 to start with, I think marketing would have been something
0:35:32 that really would have fired me up.
0:35:36 I just, I never knew, I didn’t try, right?
0:35:38 But I miss the fire service for sure,
0:35:41 but this is definitely, I could talk about marketing
0:35:45 and for hours, it just puts a smile on my face.
0:35:47 And to be around other people who are doing it
0:35:49 and hearing what’s working for them
0:35:51 and trying it out in your own ad account.
0:35:53 And it’s just, it’s so fun.
0:35:55 – Well, you must be doing something right.
0:35:58 So I Googled, I imagine what would be a valuable keyword
0:36:00 for you sunglasses for firefighters.
0:36:02 I see frontline optics in the sponsored listings
0:36:05 and then it looks like we’re ranked third organically.
0:36:07 So something is working.
0:36:09 Lots of happy five star reviews on here.
0:36:10 – Yeah, we’re doing well.
0:36:12 It’s been a process, it’s been a fun road.
0:36:14 You know, we’re just getting started really
0:36:17 if you think about how big the sunglasses industry is
0:36:20 altogether, but we’re definitely carving out our space
0:36:24 as you know, the go-to brand for first responders.
0:36:25 – Yeah, outranking Oakley at this point.
0:36:27 So let’s keep it up.
0:36:27 – Keep it going.
0:36:31 – Anything specific that you did on the SEO side?
0:36:35 – Yeah, I mean, I’ve got the basics of SEO down,
0:36:37 but it’s an area that I lack in.
0:36:39 You know, I don’t speak the SEO language
0:36:42 and that’s, you know, it’s an area that in 2025,
0:36:45 I’m gonna be looking to learn more about
0:36:48 so I can better implement and better position the company
0:36:50 for some more organic growth.
0:36:51 – Are you selling on Amazon at all?
0:36:55 – I think that we may look into it now in 2025
0:36:57 with a couple of our model lines,
0:36:59 but I enjoy the fact that I have complete control
0:37:02 over like my customer experience, customer journey.
0:37:04 You know, when you reach out to us,
0:37:06 you get a human that is gonna contact you.
0:37:08 We put a lot of value in making sure,
0:37:10 you know, the people come first.
0:37:12 I really like what Zappos did
0:37:16 in being such a like customer service focused company.
0:37:17 That that’s kind of the foundation
0:37:20 for what I wanted to have happen here.
0:37:22 It’s my fellow brothers and sisters
0:37:24 and that are first responders.
0:37:25 I wanna make sure that I take care of them.
0:37:29 And so having like above and beyond customer service
0:37:29 was important.
0:37:32 And if I go to these marketplaces,
0:37:33 I don’t have as much control of that.
0:37:36 – Yeah, one advantage that you have
0:37:39 is that you have the traction in the email list
0:37:42 and the audience where if you want it to launch on Amazon,
0:37:45 you could absolutely provide that algorithm
0:37:48 with its own little boost and drive your own sales
0:37:50 and traffic and get rewarded for that.
0:37:52 Versus so many people, historically,
0:37:54 the play is I’m gonna start on Amazon
0:37:55 and I’m gonna take advantage of Amazon’s traffic
0:37:57 and customer base.
0:37:58 And then I’m gonna try to wean myself off it.
0:38:00 I think it’s so much harder to go that direction.
0:38:02 Amazon customers are Amazon customers
0:38:03 and they’re happy to stay in there.
0:38:05 – Yeah, I haven’t yet looked.
0:38:07 I know there’s tools that you can get to see
0:38:09 if people are like looking up your keywords.
0:38:11 So I’d probably get one of those tools and see
0:38:13 but I’m pretty sure just based off of how much
0:38:16 like direct traffic and Google traffic we get
0:38:19 that people see our ads and they go to other places
0:38:20 to come to our website.
0:38:21 So I wouldn’t be surprised at all
0:38:23 if people are jumping on Amazon
0:38:25 and typing in front line optics.
0:38:26 And if they don’t see it,
0:38:28 it’s, you know, that’s where the question mark comes in.
0:38:30 Do they then go find us somewhere else
0:38:33 or do they then click on somebody else’s product
0:38:34 and I’ve, you know, I’ve lost them.
0:38:36 So I think having some exposure
0:38:38 with maybe a limited product line on Amazon
0:38:40 is probably smart for us.
0:38:43 But the idea would be obviously to keep the majority
0:38:44 of the traffic coming to the website.
0:38:45 – Yeah, that’s funny.
0:38:46 I’ve done the same thing.
0:38:49 It’s like, you know, some probably saw some ad
0:38:51 or, you know, been targeted for something.
0:38:53 Let me go see if it’s available on Amazon.
0:38:55 And if it’s not, of course, they’re gonna serve you up
0:38:58 your competitors, they’re gonna serve up alternatives
0:38:59 ’cause they wanna make the conversion.
0:39:02 But if the branding is strong enough,
0:39:04 it’s like, I know, no, no, I guess I’ll go order
0:39:05 directly through their site
0:39:07 because that was the thing that I wanted.
0:39:10 So I imagine if the marketing and branding
0:39:11 and positioning has been strong enough, like, no, no, no,
0:39:13 I’m gonna go do business directly with front line.
0:39:17 That’s our hope, you know, it’s hard to see it, right?
0:39:20 That’s one of those things you can’t necessarily track.
0:39:22 You know, based off of how much growth we’ve had
0:39:24 and our conversion rates and all of that,
0:39:25 I feel like we’re doing a pretty good job
0:39:27 of speaking to our audience and keeping them.
0:39:29 – All right, so sales are cranking now.
0:39:32 You’ve got the 3PL, the third party logistics,
0:39:34 handling the fulfillment, the shippings.
0:39:37 You’re not running to the poster or running back home
0:39:39 and having the family, ’cause I imagine the order volume
0:39:42 is a little bit higher today than it was the early days.
0:39:45 At what point do you feel comfortable
0:39:47 leaving the fire service and all that entails?
0:39:49 ‘Cause it’s like, well, if I stick it out
0:39:51 for a few more years, I got this pension,
0:39:53 it can be a hard gig to walk away from.
0:39:55 – It kind of happened out of necessity.
0:39:58 So, you know, we had found that success on TikTok.
0:40:00 The company started to grow and it went from being
0:40:03 kind of like a nothing to a six figure company overnight.
0:40:07 And with that, you know, we started to go to trade shows
0:40:10 and, you know, opportunities for presenting themselves.
0:40:12 And I had taken vacation because this,
0:40:15 it’s called Vision Expo West, it’s in Las Vegas.
0:40:17 It came and my goal was to go there
0:40:21 and I wanted to find a, like a high end lens provider
0:40:24 and I wanted to find somebody who could do prescriptions.
0:40:27 – This is a trade show for the glasses industry.
0:40:28 – Correct. – Okay, love it.
0:40:30 – In addition, it was like, cool,
0:40:32 like I’m gonna take my wife to Las Vegas, right?
0:40:34 We haven’t had time together.
0:40:35 We’ve been with our kids.
0:40:38 We’re gonna get people to watch our kids for us.
0:40:39 And the two of us are gonna have this time.
0:40:43 It’ll be a work slash play like event for the two of us.
0:40:47 And so we went there, all work on that first two days.
0:40:49 And then the last day that we were there,
0:40:51 we went to go see the show, oh,
0:40:53 and we were hanging out together
0:40:55 and I feel my phone start buzzing in my pocket.
0:40:58 And I look and it’s fire department that’s calling
0:40:59 and they’re calling to notify me
0:41:01 that I’m being forced to work the next day.
0:41:03 And then I need to basically get there.
0:41:05 And it’s like 10 o’clock at night right now.
0:41:08 I’m in Las Vegas, we flew there, right?
0:41:10 There’s no way I’m gonna make it back in time.
0:41:12 And I kind of notified them,
0:41:15 but it was that moment where I just kind of looked
0:41:17 at my wife and I was like, we have this thing
0:41:20 that is growing and it’s not gonna be able to grow
0:41:22 to the point where I see it going.
0:41:25 If I keep having to answer this phone call
0:41:27 and go back to work, especially for one
0:41:29 that’s not providing us with any kind of balance.
0:41:32 So at that point, we kind of hit that moment
0:41:35 where it was like, maybe the fire service
0:41:37 isn’t for us anymore.
0:41:40 And we start to go down this new venture
0:41:42 and we did, we jumped off the cliff.
0:41:43 – Well, really good that you had,
0:41:45 you had lowered the height of the cliff,
0:41:47 which I think is maybe the most important thing
0:41:49 is a lot of people would get that call or that text.
0:41:51 Hey, I need you, I need you in the office.
0:41:53 I need you here by eight o’clock tomorrow.
0:41:54 And you have no control over your schedule,
0:41:55 no control over your calendar.
0:41:59 And it feels diminishing or almost maybe humiliating
0:42:00 is too strong, but it’s like, it’s just frustrating.
0:42:02 Like, ah, you know, that’s not what I was planning to do.
0:42:05 And now I am not in control of my own time.
0:42:06 – And a lot of people, well,
0:42:08 I don’t have anything to fall back on,
0:42:10 but you built this thing up to the point where you’re like,
0:42:12 hey, I think there’s an opportunity.
0:42:15 Here’s the writing on the wall that we can go
0:42:16 and we can go and do this.
0:42:17 We can pay ourselves.
0:42:19 We can cut our own paycheck with sunglasses sales.
0:42:21 – Yeah, that was the start of it.
0:42:22 We started to kind of think about it.
0:42:25 And within about 30 days, we had decided
0:42:27 that was what we were gonna do and put in my notice.
0:42:29 Yeah, left the fire department
0:42:31 and became a full-time sunglasses mogul,
0:42:32 I guess you could say.
0:42:35 – There you go, full-time sunglasses salesman.
0:42:36 Where’s your time going today
0:42:38 if there is such thing as a day in the life?
0:42:40 – I still split my time a little bit.
0:42:43 So the fire service and particularly being a paramedic
0:42:45 is something that’s very, very important to me.
0:42:48 So I still teach and I teach at the local community college.
0:42:50 I teach EMT and paramedic down there.
0:42:52 That’s my new side hustle, I guess you could say.
0:42:54 – Nice, nice, by choice, yes.
0:42:56 – Yeah, sunglasses are the main one.
0:42:59 So generally I dedicate one day a week to teaching
0:43:02 and on the rest of them, I start off my day.
0:43:04 I send a video message to all my customers.
0:43:07 So I use this app called Bonjuro
0:43:09 and you can literally record yourself.
0:43:11 And so I personally thank everybody
0:43:13 who buys a pair of sunglasses from us
0:43:15 with a video from me.
0:43:17 – Oh my gosh, how many of these are you doing a day?
0:43:18 There’s gotta be dozens.
0:43:21 – It’s like about 50 to 60 a day.
0:43:22 – Oh my gosh, okay.
0:43:25 – You know, but they’re 15 seconds or so.
0:43:27 It’s a lot, but at the same time,
0:43:30 I’m trying very hard to take an impersonal transaction
0:43:31 and make it personal.
0:43:34 – Yeah, this is the old example of do things
0:43:35 that don’t scale, right?
0:43:38 – And some would argue that they do scale
0:43:41 because it’ll increase your LTV on a customer, right?
0:43:43 – Yeah, how do we turn a one-time order
0:43:44 into hopefully a customer for life?
0:43:47 – Exactly, and what’s to say it doesn’t scale
0:43:49 ’cause I can always hire somebody
0:43:52 once it gets to the point where it’s taking up hours
0:43:54 of the day or it’s right now, it’s not, you know,
0:43:56 they’re quick.
0:43:57 – Do people write you back?
0:43:59 Like what’s the reaction that you get on those?
0:44:00 – People are pretty ecstatic.
0:44:01 So the ones who write back
0:44:04 or they’re all kind of blown away by the customer service.
0:44:06 – Yeah, like wait, with the founder of the company
0:44:08 to send me a personal video message?
0:44:09 Like that’s really cool.
0:44:11 – Exactly, that doesn’t happen, right?
0:44:12 And that’s what we do, right?
0:44:14 We’re trying to shake things up
0:44:15 and do things a little differently
0:44:17 and make people feel important ’cause they are, right?
0:44:19 Like my business wouldn’t survive
0:44:21 if there weren’t people who were purchasing it.
0:44:23 So I’m thankful for each and every one of those people
0:44:26 who decides to, you know, take that gamble
0:44:27 and buy from a company that they’ve never heard of before.
0:44:29 You know, that’s how I kind of start my day.
0:44:31 I have a content day, so like on Fridays,
0:44:34 I generally try and do all of my content,
0:44:36 whether I’m taking pictures of the glasses,
0:44:38 doing little videos of the glasses,
0:44:40 preparing things for our graphics people
0:44:41 to put sales together.
0:44:43 That’s kind of one of the days.
0:44:45 And I guess what I should say
0:44:48 is I try and chunk my days out with a particular task.
0:44:50 So I’m not jumping from one thing to the next,
0:44:51 to the next over that day.
0:44:55 I kind of put my mindset to a particular task
0:44:57 and I just bang that out for the duration of the day.
0:44:59 But it always starts with my thank yous.
0:45:02 – How do you keep coming up with new content ideas
0:45:03 after three years of doing this?
0:45:06 How many different pictures of sunglasses can you take?
0:45:08 That’s what I worry about,
0:45:11 but you’ve managed to be a pretty prolific content creator.
0:45:13 – You just get different pictures of different people
0:45:14 and different environments.
0:45:16 You start looking into different markets,
0:45:19 like what does a first responder do on their day off
0:45:21 and start kind of looking into those spaces.
0:45:23 You know, a lot of it is a rinse and repeat,
0:45:25 but just a refresh, right?
0:45:28 So this worked, this angle worked, this headline worked,
0:45:30 but we just need to freshen up the image or freshen up.
0:45:32 It’s a different time of year.
0:45:34 Like right now, the gifting angle works really well.
0:45:37 So a lot of those same graphics that worked in earlier,
0:45:38 you change up the headline
0:45:40 and it’s like a gifting style headline
0:45:42 and it’ll start to deliver.
0:45:43 Yeah, just playing around with it.
0:45:45 You gotta be testing always.
0:45:47 You never know what’s gonna work
0:45:48 or what the algorithm’s gonna like.
0:45:51 – Yeah, tweaking different headlines and images and angles
0:45:54 and playing around with different split testing
0:45:57 of the ads and ad copy and everything that goes into it.
0:45:58 Trying to keep growing this thing
0:46:00 and it sounds like it’s growing really well.
0:46:01 – Yeah, it’s scary.
0:46:06 – You mentioned the initial traffic campaign
0:46:09 was kind of just a donation to the Zuckerberg fund
0:46:12 of like, well, great, thanks for getting me some visitors
0:46:13 but no customers.
0:46:16 Anything else that stands out to you as a mistake
0:46:18 or even a surprise good or bad along the way?
0:46:21 – Yeah, you know, the most recent one would be like
0:46:23 this recent Black Friday, right?
0:46:26 So everyone gets caught up in this concept that, you know,
0:46:30 Black Friday, Cyber Monday is the super bowl season
0:46:32 of sales and you hear these stories
0:46:35 that there’s companies that do, you know, 90% of their sales
0:46:38 in those four days, you know, or just a month in November.
0:46:42 Even though looking at our sales history,
0:46:45 we always have this dip in like October, November.
0:46:48 I decided that this year I was gonna go all in on ads
0:46:50 for Black Friday, Cyber Monday
0:46:53 and it was a big skinning the knees moment
0:46:55 ’cause it did not work.
0:46:56 Now we brought in a lot of new customers.
0:46:58 We brought in a lot of people into the brand
0:47:01 but it was not profitable and we spent a lot of money
0:47:02 to kind of get there.
0:47:06 So that was just essentially acting off of emotion
0:47:09 instead of acting off of the math and the data
0:47:11 and the data and the math all told me not to do it
0:47:13 but I had to try it anyway.
0:47:15 You know, that’s a big one but they’re always gonna happen
0:47:18 and it’s okay ’cause think about a little kid, right?
0:47:21 A little kid touches a hot stove or falls and skins
0:47:25 their knee from doing something and they learn a lesson
0:47:27 and they don’t do that particular thing again.
0:47:28 We’re doing the same thing, right?
0:47:30 I’m a toddler when it comes to business.
0:47:34 So the only way I’m gonna learn what to do or not to do
0:47:37 is to experience it, feel the pain
0:47:39 and know that that wasn’t something to do again
0:47:41 and learn from it and that’s how we grow
0:47:42 and we get better.
0:47:44 – Yeah, you never know until you try
0:47:46 but it can be painful and hopefully, you know,
0:47:49 the company is young, hopefully people like the glasses,
0:47:50 they tell five friends, right?
0:47:54 Like there’s ways where maybe over the lifetime value
0:47:56 that customer may hopefully break even
0:47:58 and become profitable on those ad costs
0:48:00 even if it wasn’t in month one.
0:48:02 – Exactly, it’s all about that lifetime value, right?
0:48:03 – Yeah, what’s next?
0:48:05 What’s next for you in front line?
0:48:06 What are you excited about these days?
0:48:07 – Just continuing to grow.
0:48:09 You know, I wanna grow, I wanna expand the team.
0:48:11 One of the things we’re trying to do
0:48:15 is get these things what’s called ANZZ 87 plus certified
0:48:18 and so once they are certified from that level,
0:48:22 they become true eye protection and not just sunglasses
0:48:25 and with that comes the ability to bid on like contracts.
0:48:27 So you can bid on contracts with the military,
0:48:30 you can bid on contracts for, you know,
0:48:35 having these sunglasses issued as a piece of PPE, essentially.
0:48:37 So new firefighter comes on board,
0:48:39 they get their set of turnouts, they get their helmet
0:48:41 and they get an issued pair of protective eyewear
0:48:44 that is from a, you know, first responder brand,
0:48:45 supports first responder brands
0:48:48 and it just would make for a good fit.
0:48:49 – How hard is it to get this certification?
0:48:51 That sounds like a great path forward.
0:48:53 – I’m not gonna say that it’s simple
0:48:56 but it’s not incredibly difficult.
0:48:59 The hardest part about it is you make a mold
0:49:01 that you think is gonna work on paper, right?
0:49:03 And then you put it through the test
0:49:06 and it has a fail point and then you have to go back
0:49:08 to the drawing boards and do another mold
0:49:10 and each one of those molds can cost you anywhere
0:49:12 from like three to $5,000.
0:49:15 So the process to get there can be expensive
0:49:17 but the upside is dramatic, so.
0:49:18 – Okay, well, we’ve got an episode
0:49:20 on landing government contracts.
0:49:22 I’ll have to send that one to you after the fact
0:49:24 ’cause it’s like, hey, this is the largest customer
0:49:27 in the world, you know, they print the money.
0:49:28 Let’s go after this guys.
0:49:30 – Absolutely, please send it.
0:49:32 – Well, very cool, frontline-optics.com.
0:49:33 That’s where you can find Mike
0:49:35 and grab a pair of those glasses yourself
0:49:38 if you are a first responder
0:49:40 or just you don’t want a pair of durable sunglasses.
0:49:41 Go check them out over there.
0:49:42 Let’s wrap this thing up
0:49:44 with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:49:47 – Mindset is key to everything.
0:49:49 You always hear people talk about, you know,
0:49:51 a glass being half empty, you know, or half full.
0:49:53 If you look at the downside of things
0:49:55 and kind of have this poor me mentality,
0:49:57 you’re never gonna see like the silver lining
0:49:59 of a learning opportunity.
0:50:02 So having that mindset, knowing that you need to try,
0:50:04 that you’re going to fail,
0:50:07 but with each failure comes a teachable lesson
0:50:09 that will make you successful in the future
0:50:11 is what’s most important.
0:50:14 So have that mindset, be ready for these things to happen,
0:50:17 learn from them as they happen, take the wins as wins,
0:50:20 but then also don’t get so excited about the wins.
0:50:21 Look at them the same way and figure out
0:50:24 why did you win so that you can continue to win.
0:50:26 So it’s, you know, it’s all in your mind.
0:50:28 That would be the biggest thing you could do
0:50:31 is make sure you have a good, solid mindset.
0:50:33 – Yeah, this is something that comes up
0:50:35 more often than you’d like to think.
0:50:37 You know, it’s something we work on with the kids
0:50:38 all the time.
0:50:40 My son had a, they were riding high
0:50:41 after their first basketball game.
0:50:42 He’s in third grade.
0:50:44 So it’s like pretty sloppy looking basketball
0:50:46 to begin with, but they crushed in their first game.
0:50:47 Quadrupled the other team’s points.
0:50:49 Game two, different story.
0:50:51 They’re on the receiving end of this shellacking.
0:50:54 And it was this wake up call, like, well, yeah, you know,
0:50:55 you can’t dribble the ball to your shoulder.
0:50:56 It’s going to get stolen, you know.
0:50:58 So this mindset, you don’t lose, you learn,
0:50:59 and hopefully you learn.
0:51:02 And otherwise you did, you did lose some,
0:51:05 but with every, with every setback comes this opportunity
0:51:08 and mindset really is the key to appreciating that
0:51:09 and not being down in the dumps.
0:51:10 Whoa, is me.
0:51:11 I’m an abject failure.
0:51:12 It’s never going to get better.
0:51:13 Mike, this has been awesome.
0:51:15 Really appreciate you joining me.
0:51:16 Couple takeaways before we wrap.
0:51:21 I really like this kind of example of product plus niche.
0:51:23 Like, I think it’d be really tough to start
0:51:26 just a broad sunglasses brand to use your example.
0:51:29 But if we sell sunglasses, durable sunglasses
0:51:30 for first responders, like, okay, now we got a niche.
0:51:32 Now we can speak to this audience.
0:51:34 I like the idea of targeting uniform jobs.
0:51:38 Like, look, this is the one area of personalization of style
0:51:38 that I can get.
0:51:40 Like, what other jobs are out there wearing uniforms
0:51:42 that you might be able to pivot and target to?
0:51:43 I like that.
0:51:45 I love the influencer outreach strategy,
0:51:46 the micro influencers.
0:51:48 We’re going to send out a thousand free pairs
0:51:50 and try and build up some goodwill within this community.
0:51:53 We’re going to recruit ambassadors for the brand.
0:51:54 That was really cool.
0:51:57 And then as with e-commerce and really probably any brand,
0:51:59 it’s this game of lifetime value
0:52:02 minus cost of acquisition equals profitability, right?
0:52:04 And so what’s our customer going to be worth?
0:52:06 We don’t know, starting out,
0:52:07 hopefully it’s more than a one-time order.
0:52:08 And then how much does it cost
0:52:11 to acquire that customer through either our own
0:52:13 Blood, Sweat and Tears organically
0:52:14 or through paid acquisition channels.
0:52:18 And it’s a game that you found has been really exciting
0:52:19 to learn and play.
0:52:21 Your listener bonus for this episode
0:52:24 is my list of 25 e-commerce niche ideas
0:52:25 to get your creative juices flowing.
0:52:28 Download that for free at the show notes for this episode.
0:52:31 Just follow the show notes link in the episode description.
0:52:32 It’ll get you right over there.
0:52:33 And if you like this one,
0:52:35 you’re wondering what to listen to next.
0:52:37 I’ve got a recommendation for you,
0:52:39 couple e-commerce recommendations for you.
0:52:43 I think we’ll get a kick out of number 589 with Lou Rice.
0:52:48 This is the story of a really novel idea,
0:52:49 like a little silicone strap
0:52:51 that goes on the back of your Kindle device.
0:52:54 And when we spoke, Lou was selling the crap
0:52:56 out of these things and a similar strategy,
0:52:59 targeting book influencers on TikTok.
0:53:00 It was kind of how the initial traction game,
0:53:02 and then she went on Amazon after the fact,
0:53:04 but really simple product,
0:53:06 great marketing behind it and some great results.
0:53:07 And then we’ve got another one,
0:53:08 I’ll dig up the episode for you,
0:53:10 so it was on a skincare brand.
0:53:12 And it was similar, like paid acquisition.
0:53:14 And then what was cool about that was like,
0:53:15 it was a recurring subscription survey.
0:53:18 Every month, you’re gonna need to renew your skincare tube
0:53:19 or bottle or whatever it was.
0:53:22 And so that was like a pretty boy was the brand.
0:53:23 So it was all like, hey, pretty boy kind of stuff.
0:53:26 So really a couple other e-com examples
0:53:28 to get those juices flowing for you.
0:53:30 But big thanks to Mike for sharing his insight.
0:53:31 Big thanks to our sponsors
0:53:33 for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:53:36 As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com/deals
0:53:39 for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:53:41 Thank you for supporting the advertisers
0:53:42 and support the show.
0:53:43 That is it for me.
0:53:44 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:53:45 If you’re finding value in the show,
0:53:47 the greatest compliment is to share with a friend,
0:53:49 to fire off that text message.
0:53:50 Hey, maybe we should start our own sunglasses brand.
0:53:52 Hey, check this out until next time.
0:53:54 Let’s go out there and make something happen,
0:53:55 and I’ll catch you in the next edition
0:53:57 of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:03 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives
0:00:06 from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection.
0:00:07 What’s up, what’s up, Nick?
0:00:09 A Loper here, welcome to the Side Hustle Show
0:00:12 because when your non-job income
0:00:15 exceeds your monthly expenses, you’re free.
0:00:17 And it’s exactly that freedom
0:00:18 that I wanna talk about today,
0:00:21 except we’re gonna tackle it a little bit differently.
0:00:24 Often the case on the show is exploring
0:00:27 one specific business model and then reverse engineering
0:00:30 the path it took to earn five, 10, 20 grand a month.
0:00:33 Today, I actually wanna start a little bit smaller
0:00:37 and use Side Hustles, broadly defined here,
0:00:38 since not everything I’ll talk about
0:00:40 is super entrepreneurial in the traditional sense,
0:00:44 but using Side Hustles to erase your expenses.
0:00:46 How do we zero out your personal expenses
0:00:48 with extra income streams?
0:00:51 Of course, that’s the end game for a lot of Side Hustlers.
0:00:53 Like how do I build something up to the point
0:00:56 where I can leave this soul-sucking job?
0:00:58 And I think that’s a worthy goal,
0:01:00 especially if your job really is
0:01:02 of the soul-sucking variety.
0:01:04 But that can also kind of be
0:01:06 an intimidating place to start from.
0:01:09 So what I wanna propose instead as an alternative path
0:01:12 is what I call the Side Hustle Snowball.
0:01:15 How this works, and this might sound familiar to Dave Ramsey
0:01:18 fans, is listing out your monthly expenses
0:01:21 from smallest to largest.
0:01:24 For example, you might have things like Netflix
0:01:27 or your cell phone bill toward the top of the list,
0:01:29 and you might have things like your rent, your mortgage,
0:01:33 or childcare, or property taxes down at the bottom.
0:01:37 In this episode, I wanna walk through some real-life examples
0:01:40 of how you can start erasing expenses.
0:01:43 First, to allow yourself to celebrate those many wins
0:01:45 along the way, like instead of,
0:01:47 well, shoot, I only made 50 bucks this month,
0:01:49 it can be reframed as awesome.
0:01:52 I made my car insurance free this month.
0:01:55 And second, to build some positive momentum.
0:01:58 Hopefully we get this little snowball rolling for you,
0:02:01 and it turns into this income avalanche.
0:02:03 I think of those fundraising bar charts
0:02:06 where they get filled in as more and more people donate,
0:02:09 and you can watch the progress until it’s overflowing
0:02:11 out of the goal number at the top.
0:02:14 I think you can do the same thing with your income,
0:02:17 your expenses in this Side Hustle Snowball framework.
0:02:20 This one little reframe is definitely helpful in our house.
0:02:22 It’s something we talk about all the time,
0:02:24 and I hope it is for you too.
0:02:26 Notes and links to all the resources mentioned
0:02:30 are at sidehustlenation.com/snowball.
0:02:31 Ready?
0:02:32 Let’s do it.
0:02:35 (upbeat music)
0:02:38 So we’re gonna go from smallest to largest in this episode
0:02:40 with some personal examples.
0:02:41 And in making this list,
0:02:43 I was reviewing our credit card statements
0:02:44 and bank statements.
0:02:46 I’m looking for, okay, what are the recurring costs
0:02:47 that we have?
0:02:49 And one of the smallest ones that I could find
0:02:52 is my Dollar Shave Club membership.
0:02:54 I gotta keep this head looking smooth here,
0:02:58 but it’s like $7.65, but it only ships every three
0:02:59 or four months, so I’m gonna round it up
0:03:02 and call it a $2 monthly expense.
0:03:04 And yeah, I said, we’re gonna start small.
0:03:05 So how can we erase this?
0:03:08 $2, starting with very low dollar amounts.
0:03:11 One easy way is with cashback apps.
0:03:13 I’ve got several of these on my phone,
0:03:16 including Fetch, Ibotta, Dosh,
0:03:18 they all have funny names, and it’s super easy
0:03:20 to accumulate a couple bucks worth of points every month
0:03:23 to erase that Dollar Shave Club, in my case.
0:03:26 Next on my list of expenses is Netflix.
0:03:28 This is $13.99 for us.
0:03:30 This is crept up a little bit over the years.
0:03:31 And don’t tell Netflix this,
0:03:34 but I know they can see our data and the kids watching,
0:03:36 you know, their octanots every afternoon.
0:03:38 They could realistically charge way more
0:03:41 before we’d even start to shop around or blink.
0:03:43 But one way that I like to mentally cover small expenses
0:03:47 like this is to buy shares of dividend-paying stocks.
0:03:51 Now, of course, none of this is investment advice,
0:03:54 do your own due diligence, all of that legal stuff.
0:03:56 But I’ve been building what I call my cash flow portfolio
0:03:58 over the last five or six years,
0:04:00 and it started with this snowball idea.
0:04:03 Jeremy from gocurrycracker.com,
0:04:05 he’s on the podcast years and years ago
0:04:07 about, you know, his early retirement stuff.
0:04:09 He had this article called Free Coffee for Life,
0:04:11 Free Starbucks for Life or something like that.
0:04:15 And the punchline was to go buy enough stock in the company
0:04:16 to cover your habit.
0:04:18 I thought that was a really cool framework.
0:04:20 We’ve done the same thing for Target, actually.
0:04:23 So how you do the math on Netflix,
0:04:24 and I don’t think Netflix pays the dividend,
0:04:27 but you can just substitute some other company that does.
0:04:29 So you could say, okay, 14 bucks a month,
0:04:32 168 bucks a year, then go look for some dividend-paying stocks.
0:04:35 And I’ve got a personal bias toward those companies
0:04:38 with a long history of not only paying,
0:04:40 but growing their dividends over time.
0:04:43 And then if you divide the expense you’re trying to erase,
0:04:45 168 bucks for Netflix in this case,
0:04:47 by the forward dividend, I think it’s called.
0:04:50 Basically, what does this pay per share on an annual basis?
0:04:53 It will tell you how many shares you need to buy.
0:04:56 And of course, dividends are always subject to change.
0:04:57 There’s a lot more to this
0:05:00 than I have the expertise or qualifications to explain.
0:05:03 But I will say this has become a growing source
0:05:05 of household revenue,
0:05:06 which, again, started with the goal
0:05:09 of just making some of these small,
0:05:10 little expenses disappear.
0:05:14 It’s been really motivating to watch that grow over time.
0:05:16 And if you’re looking for a better yield,
0:05:18 like oftentimes dividend yields
0:05:20 are in the one to 4% range,
0:05:22 if you’re looking for a better yield,
0:05:24 I’ve got a whole list of other interesting
0:05:28 alternative investment options for you on Side Hustle Nation
0:05:31 with varying degrees of liquidity on those.
0:05:34 I’ll link up that for you in the show notes for this episode
0:05:37 at sidehustlenation.com/snowball.
0:05:40 Our next recurring monthly expense is life insurance.
0:05:44 And even though I fully trust Brynn is gonna be just fine,
0:05:47 financially, without me, I did set up this policy
0:05:50 before our first little hustler was born.
0:05:51 It’s a super small policy.
0:05:52 It’s like 14 bucks a month.
0:05:55 There’s this old Jeff Foxworthy bit about life insurance.
0:05:58 So he says, okay, you wanna make sure that you have enough
0:06:00 that your loved ones are taken care of,
0:06:03 but not so much that you’ve got a bounty on your head.
0:06:05 I’m probably airing on the low side here.
0:06:08 But I can almost guarantee you’ve got something lying around
0:06:11 in the garage, in the attic, in the closet
0:06:14 that is probably worth $14 or whatever your premium is
0:06:18 to somebody on eBay or a Greg’s List or Facebook Marketplace.
0:06:22 Over the years, we’ve sold books and cooking supplies
0:06:25 and clothes we don’t wear anymore and furniture
0:06:28 and toys and other baby stuff that they outcrew,
0:06:29 a standing desk recently.
0:06:32 I think that was on Facebook Marketplace.
0:06:34 Now, one rule that I have that I’m admittedly
0:06:36 not always great about enforcing
0:06:39 is that every time Amazon shows up at the front door,
0:06:41 there needs to be an equal and opposite sale
0:06:43 or donation out the back door.
0:06:45 And of course, you can scale this up all you want.
0:06:48 I mean, check out my interview with Stacy Gallego
0:06:49 from last fall.
0:06:52 She shared all about flea market, flipping business,
0:06:53 where she sources inventory,
0:06:57 how she finds inexpensive ways to ship really bulky stuff.
0:07:00 She had earned, I think, 7,000 bucks in profit
0:07:04 the month before we recorded as episode 406
0:07:09 of The Side Hustle Show or sidehustlenation.com/flipit,
0:07:12 but taking advantage of this declutter in profit thing
0:07:16 to cover some small expense on your budget.
0:07:18 The next expense on my list is our cell phones,
0:07:23 which are at 20 bucks per line per month with Mint Mobile.
0:07:26 So first of all, there’s this substitution game
0:07:28 you can play with some of these expenses.
0:07:29 When you go through your list, you might find,
0:07:31 oh, do we really need that?
0:07:34 Or do we really need to be spending so much on that?
0:07:36 Like we have switched mobile providers
0:07:39 from Verizon several years ago to Ting,
0:07:43 and then in the last year or year and a half to Mint,
0:07:45 and each time saw significant cost savings.
0:07:47 Actually, I don’t know, our costs on Ting
0:07:51 kind of kept creeping up mostly based on data usage.
0:07:52 So that’s where Mint has definitely been
0:07:56 a cost saver, sidehustlenation.com/mintmobile
0:07:58 is my referral link for that.
0:08:01 I think I get four gigs a month or something for 20 bucks.
0:08:03 I don’t know, I use just a small fraction of that.
0:08:04 But how do we pay for it?
0:08:06 Well, one of the longest running
0:08:11 snowball income streams for me is Fiverr, F-I-V-E-R-R.
0:08:15 And lately have been averaging 20 to 50 bucks a month
0:08:17 over there, mostly from digital product sales,
0:08:20 gigs I created years ago, and it’s 100% organic.
0:08:22 I don’t do anything to promote these gigs.
0:08:27 We’ve got several excellent Fiverr episodes in the archives.
0:08:28 But what’s cool about the platform
0:08:31 is how you can rapidly test different offers,
0:08:35 which is something that Mike Zima talked about in episode
0:08:38 375, I think we called it rapid gig prototyping,
0:08:40 rapid side hustle prototyping.
0:08:42 Fiverr forces you to think in terms
0:08:45 of many productized services.
0:08:48 Like what’s one deliverable that you might be able
0:08:50 to help someone out with?
0:08:53 If you have this broad menu of different offerings,
0:08:56 like, okay, how do I peel off just one little item from that?
0:08:58 So it’s probably not about coming up
0:09:01 with some grand marketing strategy,
0:09:03 this long-term consulting thing,
0:09:06 but maybe it’s about setting up Google Analytics for somebody,
0:09:08 which I think was maybe one of Mike’s first gigs.
0:09:10 And because there’s always new software,
0:09:13 new trends, new demands, the search volume on Fiverr
0:09:15 is constantly shifting.
0:09:16 So it’s easy to put up different gigs,
0:09:19 test where the demand is, see what kind of reaction you get.
0:09:22 You can take a look at the navigation categories.
0:09:24 They’ve got a bunch of different kind of freelance
0:09:27 categories for some inspiration there.
0:09:28 I think Fiverr’s still worth a look.
0:09:30 It’s definitely come a long way
0:09:32 from being the $5 marketplace,
0:09:34 that it maybe was eight or 10 years ago,
0:09:37 lots of room to command premium prices on there,
0:09:42 and still tap into this big established audience of buyers.
0:09:44 We don’t have any car payments, thankfully,
0:09:46 but we do have some vehicle-related expenses,
0:09:49 including gas and insurance.
0:09:51 Gas is around 50 bucks a month for me,
0:09:54 maybe double that if I include Bryn’s car.
0:09:56 One cool way to make this disappear,
0:09:59 well, one cool way would be to buy an electric car.
0:10:02 And there’s actually probably some math to do on that front.
0:10:07 As a side note, I’m over 1,150 miles on my e-bike now,
0:10:09 and that’s in just under three years,
0:10:11 mostly transportation miles to and from school,
0:10:15 to and from downtown, as opposed to recreation miles.
0:10:17 That’s been a great purchase.
0:10:21 I know I’m not at the break-even point on gas savings yet,
0:10:23 but I’m getting closer with every trip,
0:10:24 and it’s a lot of fun too.
0:10:26 But with the car, how do we make up
0:10:29 this $5,200 monthly gas expense?
0:10:31 How do we make that go away?
0:10:34 One interesting way that’s accessible to almost everybody
0:10:37 is market research studies.
0:10:38 I’ve got a full list of companies
0:10:42 that facilitate in-person and online focus groups,
0:10:44 paid research studies.
0:10:47 And these are often in the $50 to $200 an hour range,
0:10:51 so pretty decent hourly rate for just giving your opinion.
0:10:54 And a lot of that depends on the level of industry expertise
0:10:56 that the researchers are looking for,
0:10:59 because naturally a study targeting
0:11:01 some super specific job role,
0:11:03 it’s gonna be hard to find those people,
0:11:04 so they’re gonna pay more
0:11:07 than general population consumer study.
0:11:09 I’ll link up that list in the show notes for you
0:11:12 at this episode at sidehustle nation.com/snowball.
0:11:13 A couple of my favorites off the top of my head
0:11:18 are userinterviews.com and respondent, respondent.io.
0:11:21 Just this month, I did a user interviews study
0:11:23 about my video editing process,
0:11:27 entering 50 bucks in the form of an Amazon gift card,
0:11:28 which like, okay, we know we’re gonna spend it,
0:11:30 so it’s about as good as cash.
0:11:32 I’ve done a few studies like this.
0:11:35 I don’t know, they’re always interesting conversations.
0:11:36 I think it’s a fun way to help shape new products
0:11:38 and get paid in the process.
0:11:41 Now, a lot of these expenses have definitely changed
0:11:44 since this original 2021 recording,
0:11:48 but the broad strategies and the tactics to erase them,
0:11:49 I think they held up pretty well.
0:11:52 And we’re gonna keep that side hustle snowball rolling
0:11:53 right after this.
0:11:57 And the next vehicle related expenses,
0:11:58 the car insurance expense,
0:12:01 which for us is around 90 bucks a month for two cars.
0:12:04 And yes, 15 minutes did save us 15% or more.
0:12:06 But again, on the substitution game,
0:12:09 check out Gabby GABI as a quick and easy way
0:12:14 to compare rates, sidehustle nation.com/gabbygabi
0:12:17 is my affiliate link for that.
0:12:21 Users report saving an average of 960 bucks a year
0:12:22 or something crazy like that,
0:12:25 and they don’t sell your information to third parties.
0:12:28 This is like the dirty secret of the car insurance industry.
0:12:29 Your cars are worth less every year
0:12:31 because they keep depreciating,
0:12:33 but the insurance company keeps charging you
0:12:35 the same amount as if nothing ever happened.
0:12:39 The side hustle that you erase this in our house
0:12:40 is print on demand.
0:12:43 Two platforms that we’re playing on right now
0:12:45 are Merch by Amazon and Redbubble.
0:12:48 There are full episodes dedicated to this topic,
0:12:49 but on a high level,
0:12:51 how it works is you upload a design,
0:12:53 in our case, mostly T-shirts,
0:12:56 and I say R because Bryn’s really taken the lead on this,
0:12:59 but you upload your design, you create this listing,
0:13:01 and after that, everything else is hands off.
0:13:03 When somebody else orders Amazon
0:13:06 or whichever other company you’re listed with,
0:13:08 they handle the printing, the shipping, the fulfillment,
0:13:10 the customer support, everything.
0:13:12 And then you earn a little royalty
0:13:14 that you get to set up front on that sale.
0:13:19 Merch has paid us between $50 and $400 every month this year,
0:13:23 and what’s kind of fun is now Bryn has a reputation
0:13:25 for doing this among our friends and family,
0:13:27 so she’ll get like custom design requests.
0:13:29 Definitely a fun little side hustle
0:13:31 that helps erase some expenses.
0:13:33 The challenge that I see with Merch
0:13:36 is how quickly copycats can come in.
0:13:39 Even if you have an original idea,
0:13:41 if it sells, it’s not gonna take long
0:13:43 before some software sniffs that out
0:13:46 and creates an almost identical looking product.
0:13:49 So the people that I see having the most success here
0:13:51 and really taking it beyond a hobby level
0:13:54 are the ones like Michael Essek from episode 402,
0:13:57 who, you know, they’ve got thousands of designs,
0:13:59 and he was even working on some offline licensing deals
0:14:02 to expand his distribution.
0:14:04 TV and internet is next for us, Comcast, oh man.
0:14:06 People like to hate on Comcast.
0:14:08 I don’t know, man, I think it’s a pretty reliable ISP.
0:14:09 I couldn’t run my business without them,
0:14:11 so I’m not gonna badmouth them here.
0:14:12 For us, that’s 75 bucks a month.
0:14:16 I think you could erase that with one freelance gig,
0:14:17 one small freelance gig.
0:14:19 I didn’t do a ton of this,
0:14:21 but I did some freelance writing a few years ago.
0:14:26 I made $75 for articles that were in the 752,000 word range.
0:14:29 Could you do something similar?
0:14:32 Could you set it up as a recurring monthly assignment?
0:14:33 Could you do an article a week
0:14:36 and blow past this expense number?
0:14:37 Could you do something local?
0:14:39 I mean, we’ve had awesome episodes
0:14:42 about mobile detailing, knife sharpening,
0:14:44 cleaning services, pet waste removal.
0:14:46 Members of the PsiDoscelNation community
0:14:49 are doing pressure washing, lawn mowing, gutter cleaning.
0:14:52 Shoot Dustin Rieckman, who was on episode 391.
0:14:55 He sent me this video about how his kids made $850
0:14:56 in a few weeks,
0:14:59 cleaning out garbage cans in their neighborhood.
0:15:00 Pet sitting, dog walking,
0:15:02 there’s no shortage of opportunity out there.
0:15:03 Maybe even learn a new skill.
0:15:05 We have heard from lots of community members
0:15:08 who listened to episode 286, took action,
0:15:12 got their notary license, loan signing agents.
0:15:16 Can make this $75 Comcast bill go away in one signing.
0:15:17 And then you’ve got this skill
0:15:19 you can choose to put to work the rest of the month
0:15:21 or not, it’s up to you.
0:15:24 The next expense I’m trying to erase are our utilities.
0:15:28 This is gas and electric, water, garbage.
0:15:32 And for us, this is in the range of $150 to $200 a month,
0:15:35 all combined in the way that I have covered this
0:15:36 historically, or at least this year,
0:15:38 is with self-publishing.
0:15:40 The combination of Kindle, paperback,
0:15:44 and audio book royalties is usually around this level
0:15:46 or higher during promotion periods.
0:15:48 And speaking of promotion periods,
0:15:51 you can grab my latest book, “1K 100 Ways”
0:15:53 at 1k100ways.com.
0:15:54 This features 100 members
0:15:56 of the Side Hustle Nation community
0:15:58 on how they’re making extra money,
0:16:00 how they came up with their ideas,
0:16:02 how they found their initial traction,
0:16:03 and how long it took them
0:16:06 to reach that $1,000 profit milestone.
0:16:09 Again, 1k100ways.com.
0:16:12 Now, self-publishing comes in a lot of different flavors.
0:16:15 I have been focused on the non-fiction space
0:16:18 where outside of a few blockbusters,
0:16:20 it’s kind of an authority building play.
0:16:22 It’s an audience discovery play.
0:16:25 It’s a portfolio play rather than,
0:16:27 oh, I’m gonna make a fortune off book royalties.
0:16:28 And we’ve heard from others
0:16:29 in the children’s publishing space.
0:16:32 Matt Ralph was a guest recently,
0:16:35 and even the so-called low content publishing space,
0:16:38 which could be journals, notebooks, log books,
0:16:40 workbooks, all designed for a niche audience,
0:16:42 and all print on demand.
0:16:44 But again, it’s a business model I like
0:16:46 because I can create the asset once,
0:16:47 and it serves people,
0:16:50 and it works for you for years down the road.
0:16:53 I ran this report recently in KDP,
0:16:55 my Kindle Direct Publishing Dashboard,
0:16:57 and it now lets you run a lifetime report,
0:17:01 and it showed $66,000 in lifetime estimated
0:17:03 author royalties since 2011.
0:17:07 So on an annual basis, it’s not huge,
0:17:09 but I’m not gonna turn it down.
0:17:11 And top of that, it’s a lot of fun,
0:17:14 and it adds up to some significant cash over time.
0:17:15 Now, if writing isn’t your thing,
0:17:17 maybe you make an online course,
0:17:19 even though it’s been almost seven years
0:17:23 since I created my primary Udemy course,
0:17:25 which actually is on the topic of self-publishing,
0:17:28 it still brings in 50 to 130 bucks a month,
0:17:31 U-D-E-M-Y.com.
0:17:33 It’s this peer-to-peer education marketplace,
0:17:35 millions and millions of students on there.
0:17:37 You can think of these like mini search engines,
0:17:38 Udemy being one of them,
0:17:40 Fiverr being another one of them.
0:17:41 Where can I put my buy buttons?
0:17:44 Where can I make it easy for people to do business with me?
0:17:47 Where can I go where the cash is already flowing?
0:17:49 All right, the expenses are getting a little bit bigger here.
0:17:51 We’re going up to groceries now,
0:17:55 which are in the range of $600 to $800 a month for us,
0:17:56 for a family of four.
0:18:00 For me, I would love to snowball this expense away
0:18:01 with YouTube ads.
0:18:04 I’m currently around 500 bucks a month,
0:18:07 but it’s been as high as $1,200 a month.
0:18:11 And I haven’t done a great job of prioritizing YouTube,
0:18:13 building dedicated systems
0:18:15 around producing consistent content,
0:18:17 but that’s almost what’s crazier here.
0:18:20 Even with my current half-hearted lackluster,
0:18:23 admittedly not super cinematic YouTube effort,
0:18:25 it still brings in hundreds of dollars a month.
0:18:26 And it feels like free money
0:18:28 because I would probably do it anyway.
0:18:29 Don’t tell YouTube that.
0:18:31 I like doing the quick interviews.
0:18:35 I like trying to make videos to compliment existing articles.
0:18:37 I like throwing podcast episodes up there.
0:18:40 And when revenue comes back, that’s like an awesome bonus.
0:18:43 So trying to erase the grocery expense
0:18:45 with the YouTube ad money.
0:18:49 The next expense on my list here is preschool/daycare for us.
0:18:50 That’s been, for most of this year,
0:18:53 we’ve been paying around 1200 bucks a month
0:18:55 for two kids to go a couple of days a week.
0:18:58 We found that to be a good combination of focus time.
0:19:02 For me to do work, because again, I like doing this stuff
0:19:06 and they get some pure socialization time as well.
0:19:11 When I first drafted the “Side Also Snowball” post in 2016
0:19:13 that this episode is based on,
0:19:17 I mentioned podcast sponsorships were my daycare eraser.
0:19:19 And at that time, I noted that the show
0:19:22 was earning around 300 bucks a week after production costs.
0:19:26 And it’s really rewarding to revisit that now five years later
0:19:30 because even though production costs have remained similar,
0:19:32 the revenue has grown by quite a bit over that time.
0:19:35 More than enough to cover the cost of preschool.
0:19:37 Of course, if you need to make money quickly,
0:19:39 starting a podcast would be pretty low
0:19:41 on my list of recommended actions.
0:19:44 But if you have a little bit of a longer time horizon,
0:19:47 I still think there’s a tremendous opportunity
0:19:50 in the world of podcasting to reach a target market,
0:19:53 to build a business from these helpful conversations.
0:19:55 So overlining on the preschool expenses,
0:19:57 that should be a line item that’s going down.
0:19:59 You know, when our oldest starts kindergarten this fall,
0:20:02 which is just not steady starting kindergarten already time,
0:20:04 seriously does fly.
0:20:07 Now alternatively, we could look at Brinn’s photography business
0:20:10 here and say that every wedding that she and Brooke shoots,
0:20:12 you know, that covers a month and a half of preschool
0:20:14 or something like that, maybe two months.
0:20:17 And that’s a common reframe in the personal finance space
0:20:20 instead of looking at the price of an item in dollars,
0:20:23 instead consider the price of the item in time.
0:20:25 So if you make $25 an hour
0:20:27 and you’re contemplating this $100 purchase,
0:20:29 yeah, you can afford it, but is it really worth
0:20:31 trading four hours of your life for?
0:20:34 Or even more, when you take taxes into consideration,
0:20:36 the sticklers will notice I’ve been ignoring taxes
0:20:38 this whole time, so if you want to get really technical
0:20:40 about it, yes, you’re going to need to factor in
0:20:42 your marginal tax rates and all that jazz.
0:20:44 But put another way, this was actually
0:20:46 in Tanya Hester’s book, Work Optional,
0:20:50 every extra dollar that you add to your monthly budget
0:20:54 in expenses is another $300 that you need to save for
0:20:57 in retirement to cover that expense in perpetuity.
0:20:59 Definitely makes you think twice
0:21:03 about these seemingly innocent little lifestyle inflation
0:21:05 decisions that we make every month.
0:21:08 And the last expense on this list, this is the big one,
0:21:11 this is a rent, maybe it’s surprising that we’re renting
0:21:13 right now, it’s actually been, I think,
0:21:15 a very profitable move for us on a lot of fronts
0:21:17 for the last seven, eight years.
0:21:19 We talked a little bit about some reasons
0:21:23 why that might make sense in 10 unconventional money rules,
0:21:25 which was my episode with Rich Jones
0:21:28 from Paychecks and Balances last fall.
0:21:31 Now, for personal and emotional reasons,
0:21:34 much more than financial ones, we’re buying a house.
0:21:37 It’s actually supposed to close at the end of the month.
0:21:38 This is going to be a big move for us.
0:21:41 Excited about it, I’m nervous about it,
0:21:43 but we’re looking forward to starting a new chapter.
0:21:45 It’s going to be tough to say goodbye to this place.
0:21:47 I mean, this is where we brought our babies home.
0:21:49 This is where we started our businesses.
0:21:50 That little corner of the living room
0:21:53 is where the side hustle show started, you know?
0:21:54 But for almost everyone,
0:21:57 this is going to be the biggest line item on your budget.
0:21:58 So let’s say you’re trying to, again,
0:22:00 side hustle snowball your way up
0:22:03 to eliminate this rent or mortgage expense.
0:22:05 And one distinct advantage of buying over renting
0:22:08 is that eventually that mortgage does go away.
0:22:11 Property taxes, another story, and how much in cash
0:22:14 it costs to make that mortgage go away, another story.
0:22:16 But there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.
0:22:19 Now, on the side hustle show in Hunt Side Hustle Nation,
0:22:23 we’ve heard dozens of ways to earn $2,300 a month or more,
0:22:25 whatever your mortgage or rent is.
0:22:28 It could be selling printables, driving for Instacart,
0:22:31 teaching online classes, real estate investing,
0:22:34 renting out portable hot tubs, you name it, we’ve covered it.
0:22:37 But if you break down all of those different business models,
0:22:40 the most common denominator I think you’re going to find
0:22:44 is that they help other people in some meaningful way.
0:22:45 You can get everything you want in life
0:22:48 if you help enough other people get what they want.
0:22:53 It’s exactly right at the rent/mortgage level of income
0:22:55 or rather level of expense.
0:22:58 We’re solidly in the entrepreneurship territory
0:23:01 here versus downloading a cashback app
0:23:02 where we started this episode.
0:23:05 And that means thinking about who you can help
0:23:06 and how you can help them.
0:23:08 Fall in love with the problem, right?
0:23:10 Not necessarily the solution, because the solutions
0:23:11 might change.
0:23:15 So if I’m trying to get to the $2,000 plus level of income
0:23:18 today, and I need to do it quickly,
0:23:21 I’m thinking about freelancing, consulting.
0:23:23 I’m thinking about the software with a service model
0:23:27 we talked about with Brad Rice in episode 441.
0:23:29 If I’m OK with a longer time horizon,
0:23:32 I’m thinking about the drop servicing model
0:23:36 we talked about with Anthony and Janilka Hartzog in episode 438.
0:23:38 Their residential cleaning service
0:23:42 was bringing in $25,000 a month in revenue
0:23:43 without them doing the cleaning.
0:23:46 Built to grow, built to scale from the beginning.
0:23:48 I think the same model could be applied across a ton
0:23:52 of other local fragmented home services niches.
0:23:54 I’m thinking about starting a newsletter.
0:23:56 I’m thinking starting a YouTube channel.
0:23:57 I’m working in public.
0:24:00 I’m thinking about starting a new website,
0:24:04 probably from an aged or already established domain.
0:24:06 But if I’ve got a longer time horizon,
0:24:08 I’ve got a few more options.
0:24:10 And in my case, I’m really grateful to cover the rent
0:24:12 with affiliate marketing.
0:24:15 This has been my bread and butter of side hustle income
0:24:18 going back to even before I quit my job.
0:24:20 Affiliate marketing is a fancy way
0:24:23 of saying helping other companies sell their products
0:24:26 or services online and helping customers find the best product
0:24:28 or service for their needs.
0:24:28 You’re in the middle.
0:24:30 You’re playing matchmaker there.
0:24:33 Check out our episodes with Tammy Smith, with Debbie Gartner,
0:24:36 with Alex and Healey from Finn vs Finn,
0:24:38 all getting paid to essentially answer
0:24:40 people’s questions online.
0:24:41 There’s a lot of technical stuff.
0:24:43 There’s this SEO learning curve.
0:24:44 There’s this strategy to learn.
0:24:47 But that’s what a lot of it comes down to,
0:24:50 helping people make informed decisions.
0:24:52 As an example, an affiliate example,
0:24:54 I wrote a post originally years ago,
0:24:57 promoting Udemy’s New Year’s Sale.
0:24:59 So every year, they’ve got this big discount
0:25:00 at the start of the year.
0:25:01 Start the year off right.
0:25:02 Get your learning on.
0:25:03 Get a big discount.
0:25:07 And anticipating that, I compiled a list of the courses
0:25:10 that I thought would be most helpful and most relevant
0:25:11 for my audience.
0:25:13 Some of these were guests on the show.
0:25:15 Some of these were things they had already bought
0:25:17 through the magic of affiliate link tracking.
0:25:19 And on the surface, this post was
0:25:21 a pretty blatant affiliate play.
0:25:24 Probably had 100, 200 affiliate links in there.
0:25:27 Some of them were doubled up, which I openly admitted,
0:25:30 yet I had people thanking me in the comments.
0:25:31 And why is that?
0:25:33 Because it was helpful to them.
0:25:36 And I didn’t call it Udemy’s New Year’s Sale.
0:25:39 I called it the much more clickable and content-heavy,
0:25:43 the 101 best Udemy courses for entrepreneurs, freelancers,
0:25:44 and side hustlers.
0:25:48 And over the course of five-plus years of that post’s life,
0:25:51 it’s earned $30,000, $40,000.
0:25:54 The reports inside of Rakuten Linkshare,
0:25:56 whatever it’s called now, don’t even let you go back that far.
0:26:00 But it has been a significant asset for the business.
0:26:02 And it’s been helpful for the people who visited that page
0:26:06 as well, helping people make informed decisions.
0:26:08 As you’re contemplating the extra income stream
0:26:12 that’s eventually gonna erase your rent or your mortgage,
0:26:15 you gotta ask yourself, what does success look like?
0:26:18 If I pursue the thing that I’m thinking of pursuing
0:26:21 and it goes well, what does life realistically look like?
0:26:23 Three to five years down the road.
0:26:26 And I think the best lens into that future
0:26:29 is to find somebody who’s already done that thing
0:26:31 who has been reasonably successful at it
0:26:33 and see what their day-to-day looks like.
0:26:35 What are they stressed out about?
0:26:36 What interviews have they done?
0:26:38 I love to soak up the information from people
0:26:40 who are just a little bit ahead of me
0:26:42 because they know what’s coming.
0:26:43 They know what’s coming down the road.
0:26:46 I hope this episode gets your side hustle snowball rolling,
0:26:49 picking up some steam and turning into that income avalanche
0:26:51 because covering your expenses
0:26:52 is of course just the beginning.
0:26:56 I want you to have some financial margin in your life,
0:26:57 some financial breathing room
0:26:59 for the unexpected bumps in the road.
0:27:02 And we’ve certainly seen our share of those lately
0:27:04 but you’re awesome, you’ve got this.
0:27:06 There’s this whole community of other side hustlers
0:27:08 and entrepreneurs who’ve got your backs.
0:27:09 You don’t have to go out alone
0:27:12 if you have found this helpful, tell a friend.
0:27:15 That’s the best way to spread the word
0:27:17 and if you can convince someone else to take action,
0:27:19 now you’ve got a direct accountability partner
0:27:20 for your journey.
0:27:23 Once again, you’ll find links to all the resources
0:27:24 and mentioned in this episode
0:27:27 at sidehustlenation.com/snowball.
0:27:28 That’s it for me.
0:27:30 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:27:33 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen
0:27:34 and I’ll catch you in the next edition
0:27:36 of the Side Hustle Show.