0:00:06 The $1 product challenge, how my guest earned $4,000 in just 10 days without paid ads.
0:00:07 What’s up?
0:00:07 What’s up?
0:00:08 Nick Oloper here.
0:00:12 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, a light on the theory, heavy on the tactics.
0:00:14 It’s an entrepreneurship podcast.
0:00:16 You can actually apply.
0:00:19 And you’ve been around online business for any length of time.
0:00:23 I can almost guarantee you’ve heard the phrase, the money is in the list.
0:00:29 And all the experts, myself included, extol the virtues of building your email list, right?
0:00:32 It’s the platform that you own and control.
0:00:37 You’re not at the whim of algorithm updates, social media changes.
0:00:41 But the question is, are you building an email list of buyers?
0:00:45 Subscribers are great, but you’re not buying groceries on subscribers alone.
0:00:50 My guest today has a unique list building and business building strategy that throws free
0:00:57 lead magnets out the window in favor of low-priced products starting at just $1 and has seen some
0:01:01 exciting results, including that $4,000 in just 10 days.
0:01:05 From growthmodels.co, Pete Boyle, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:01:06 Thank you for having me.
0:01:07 It’s great to be here.
0:01:07 You bet.
0:01:08 I’m excited for this one.
0:01:12 I got to know, what’s the $1 product that you came up with?
0:01:12 How did this work?
0:01:16 Basically, I found myself in a position where I tried a bunch of things in business that
0:01:16 didn’t quite work out.
0:01:19 As is always the case, you know, you try some new things, it doesn’t always work.
0:01:23 And I was like, right, I need to get some good positive cash flow coming back in.
0:01:28 Went back, tried the usual lead magnet, get people in, tried to nurture them towards buying
0:01:31 from me somewhere down the line, a day or week, a month, whatever.
0:01:32 It didn’t work.
0:01:36 And so I was like, right, I need to actually get some customers coming in.
0:01:42 And so at that time, you know, ChatGPT was doing huge numbers in terms of the actual, you
0:01:43 know, daily usage.
0:01:46 And custom GPTs had just come out.
0:01:49 But most people weren’t really using custom GPTs.
0:01:50 They didn’t know how to do them.
0:01:54 So I sat down over a weekend and I thought, I’m going to figure out how I can create some
0:01:55 custom GPTs.
0:02:00 And much like the philosophy that’s now in the $1 product challenge, one of the things
0:02:05 that I wanted to do was create something that was easy for the end user to use.
0:02:08 Not like a big load of information, but a quick and easy solution.
0:02:12 And I created some custom GPTs that were around content marketing.
0:02:15 Because I spent a lot of my career doing content marketing for different brands.
0:02:21 And I said, look, these are four custom GPTs that will help you identify a great topic,
0:02:25 create great headline, do the brief that you need to send to a writer, and even help you
0:02:26 with the first draft.
0:02:29 Four of them, you can get all four for a dollar.
0:02:30 Oh, okay.
0:02:34 And then, yeah, it kind of spiraled from there because they were so easy to use and people
0:02:38 could basically go in, answer a few questions, and get the results that they needed.
0:02:42 And I kind of daisy-changed them along so you could take the output from one into the
0:02:45 next to get the next stage, and so on, and so on.
0:02:45 Okay.
0:02:50 So this is rather than starting from, like, coming up with your own series of prompts to
0:02:52 get the outcome that you want.
0:02:55 And it’s kind of like a done-for-you type of pre-setup thing.
0:02:56 Yeah, exactly.
0:03:02 So one of the issues that I see now with a lot of the AI influencers, for lack of a better
0:03:08 term, the lead magnets they’re using is like, here’s a thousand AI prompts that you can use.
0:03:12 And I look at it and I think, well, that’s great, but I only need five that are really
0:03:13 going to be useful for me.
0:03:18 So you’ve given me more work that I’m going to have to go through all 1,000 to find the
0:03:19 five that are useful for me.
0:03:20 Yeah, I’m sure these are all great, right?
0:03:22 But what’s most relevant?
0:03:22 Exactly.
0:03:25 And so I was just like, what if I do that work for you?
0:03:28 And I say, right, answer these five questions about your audience, what you want to create
0:03:32 content about, a couple of other sort of clarifying questions.
0:03:33 And this will just create the end thing.
0:03:36 Like answers that everybody would have.
0:03:36 Okay.
0:03:39 And that they would have to do anyway with a prompt, but I’ll take the prompting out of
0:03:41 the equation and you can just take it from there.
0:03:45 And this was right when custom GPTs first came in.
0:03:49 So there was a lot of buzz around them and, uh, yeah, sold all four of those for a dollar.
0:03:50 Wow.
0:03:50 Okay.
0:03:57 So maybe some upfront work for a low, a low ticket price, but then you don’t have a, you
0:03:59 have an email list, you have an audience to speak of at this point.
0:04:01 Like, how are you, how do you find buyers for this?
0:04:06 So I did have an audience at that point and I had my email list and.
0:04:11 But I didn’t use them to sell this to, I didn’t sell this to them.
0:04:11 Oh, okay.
0:04:16 Um, they weren’t really that interested in content marketing because I has an audience
0:04:18 of freelancers who wanted to know how to attract clients.
0:04:19 Okay.
0:04:19 Okay.
0:04:23 So there’s a bit of an overlap there, but they weren’t the exact ideal market.
0:04:26 What I wanted was I wanted people who were running content for larger brands.
0:04:29 So I had to go out and try and find them to get him to buy it.
0:04:30 How’d you find them?
0:04:36 So I did something that I’ve now called in spear phishing was, um, I found free communities.
0:04:40 Of, you know, content marketers who, you know, they’re all in there helping each other.
0:04:45 You can’t usually go into these places and promote because as soon as you go into a good
0:04:47 free community, the moderators are going to be like, no promotion.
0:04:48 Yeah, exactly.
0:04:52 So I went in and I, I created just value-based posts.
0:04:54 Like I said, you know, I’ve been doing this for quite a while.
0:04:57 So creating these posts wasn’t too hard.
0:05:00 Eventually I created another custom GPT that helps me create the posts.
0:05:05 So I had to take some of the work out of it, but, um, essentially I go in and I’d say,
0:05:08 look, these are the big problems that I see with content marketing.
0:05:09 This is the solution.
0:05:12 I’ve actually created some custom GPTs to help me do this.
0:05:13 No promo.
0:05:15 It was like a value-based post.
0:05:15 Here’s the problem.
0:05:16 Here’s the solution.
0:05:18 I’ve been working on this thing.
0:05:20 Just a little tease of what the offer is.
0:05:26 Then anybody who liked commented, I’d follow up with in direct messages.
0:05:28 So it wasn’t a cold DM then.
0:05:31 It wasn’t like a complete stranger saying, Hey, how’s it going?
0:05:34 I could go in and I could say, you enjoyed the post.
0:05:35 Thanks so much for engaging.
0:05:35 Yeah.
0:05:37 There was some level of, uh, interaction.
0:05:38 Exactly.
0:05:39 Exactly.
0:05:41 So it was not cold DMs, warm DMs, I guess.
0:05:44 Um, and it was, thanks so much.
0:05:45 Really enjoyed it.
0:05:45 Any questions?
0:05:50 And then if they were receptive, I would then segue that into a, you know, I put some
0:05:51 of those custom GPTs together.
0:05:53 I can give you access for a dollar.
0:05:56 And that was how I started to get the initial sales coming through.
0:06:01 It’s not a very scalable system because it still requires you to go in and talk to, you
0:06:04 know, in these groups, but, um, it can still work quite well.
0:06:11 And as long as you focus on value, the moderators so far have most of the time, like 80% of the
0:06:13 time, not had an issue with it.
0:06:13 Yeah.
0:06:15 And if you’re listening in, you may…
0:06:20 already be a part of some of these communities or it’s not you coming in completely, completely
0:06:26 cold, you kind of know the, you know, the culture of these different forums and communities
0:06:30 where, you know, what kind of content is going to fly or what kind of posts are going to fly
0:06:30 in there.
0:06:34 And if you can lead with this value first, the spear phishing is kind of interesting.
0:06:38 Like, I don’t need everybody in here, but you know, a handful of people who are interested
0:06:41 in it’s going to help me validate whether or not there’s any legs to this idea.
0:06:45 And that was the whole thing is, you know, as you say, you’re looking for those people
0:06:48 basically giving you a digital hand raise of saying, yeah, that’s cool.
0:06:51 I like this, you know, comment or likes, and then you can follow it with those.
0:06:56 And then, you know, that just made it so much easier when following up with those people and
0:06:58 just getting some kind of a result.
0:06:58 Okay.
0:07:02 So now technically, are they sending you Venmo?
0:07:03 Are they sending you PayPal?
0:07:06 Is there like a Stripe landing page?
0:07:09 Or like, how are you, if you’re figuring out like, okay, I can give you access to these for
0:07:10 a dollar.
0:07:11 Okay.
0:07:14 Next, next step to collect and deliver.
0:07:14 Yeah.
0:07:15 So it’s, it’s one of those things.
0:07:20 I think a lot of people really overanalyze what they should be doing with this.
0:07:21 And it’s like, oh, how do I deliver this?
0:07:23 So it feels like a premium package and all of this sort of stuff.
0:07:26 For years now, I’ve had a ThriveCart subscription.
0:07:30 And if you, I don’t know if you’re familiar with ThriveCart, but it’s a checkout software.
0:07:31 Yep.
0:07:34 And so, you know, you pay once for lifetime and it’s, I think it’s like $500.
0:07:37 So no monthly fees, nothing like this.
0:07:42 And then it integrates with Stripe or PayPal, but you can set up a nice looking cart checkout.
0:07:43 Quite simple.
0:07:47 And so I set it up there and basically then I said, anybody who buys this, send them to this
0:07:51 thank you page, which then has the links to the, get them here.
0:07:51 Okay.
0:07:53 Very, very simple, very low tech.
0:07:56 You could do the same with a Stripe checkout, I think, or even a PayPal page.
0:08:00 Once you have payment, you just send them the links to the, to the custom GPTs.
0:08:00 Okay.
0:08:01 Got it.
0:08:02 Thanks for, thanks for sharing that.
0:08:04 How many people bought the, uh, the $1 thing?
0:08:06 I think it was 26.
0:08:07 Okay.
0:08:10 And so the manual in these different communities groups, right?
0:08:14 So it’s got the people who might be interested in this thing leads to the direct message
0:08:17 outreach to the digital hand raisers, the people who engaged with that content.
0:08:17 Yep.
0:08:21 And then a percentage of those people click through to buy the thing.
0:08:25 So now you’ve got a grand total of $26 minus processing fees.
0:08:25 Exactly.
0:08:26 Yeah.
0:08:29 So that’s the, you’re still not going to make a much of a business out of this.
0:08:30 You know, what happens next?
0:08:35 It’s kind of the, how do you lead people up the value chain to buying more from you or
0:08:36 doing more business with you?
0:08:38 This is where Thrivecart kind of helped out.
0:08:40 And there’s plenty of other tools that you can do this with as well.
0:08:44 A lot of them are termed as like funnel building tools, but also any of the good cart checkouts.
0:08:50 If you look to see if they allow you to create a bump offer and upsell offers, one click upsells,
0:08:52 because that massively reduces the friction.
0:08:56 And basically what this allows you to do is add other products onto the checkout.
0:08:57 Yeah.
0:09:00 So that somebody then has the option to go, Oh, you know, I also want this on that.
0:09:01 You know, yeah, I’ll take that as well.
0:09:07 And I basically built a couple of extra products that I added onto the $1 products on the front.
0:09:10 The way that I always view this is the $1 product or the front ends.
0:09:15 The first thing that they buy is there to help them achieve a quick solution.
0:09:19 Don’t give them this massive big thing of information that they’re going to have to
0:09:21 sort through and figure out how to use.
0:09:24 Give them something that they can take and just put into their business or take and use
0:09:28 and get a very quick result because that’s much easier to sell.
0:09:29 Use this.
0:09:30 It takes five minutes.
0:09:31 You get this result.
0:09:34 Very easy to sell compared to some of the other things out there.
0:09:38 The bump offer, when they go to the checkout, there’ll be a little checkbox that says,
0:09:39 do you also want this?
0:09:43 And that bump offer should be there to add extra value to the initial offer.
0:09:48 And I like to think that it’s going to help people achieve the result faster, easier,
0:09:50 cheaper, or more profitably.
0:09:55 So it’s going to make getting the result from what you’re just selling them for $1 faster,
0:09:58 easier, cheaper, or it’s going to help them get a bigger result.
0:09:59 Okay.
0:10:02 The extra value of the bump offer.
0:10:06 So the, you know, would you like fries with that kind of thing accepted in a business?
0:10:07 Similar to, yeah.
0:10:10 I like to think of it as like a catalyst to help them get better results.
0:10:15 And so in that case, I then recorded a couple of videos of myself building custom GPTs.
0:10:20 And I put a basic template of how I did the description into the custom GPT.
0:10:24 Cause you give it a custom description that it follows that process.
0:10:27 And so I gave them that template and a couple of videos around it.
0:10:31 And I said, you know, for an extra, I think $47 is what I usually go for for a bump.
0:10:36 You can also get the whole system that I’ve built on how to do these so that you can create
0:10:40 not just these for content marketing, but for any repetitive task in your business,
0:10:43 you can teach an AI agent how to handle it for you.
0:10:43 And you just follow this.
0:10:44 Okay.
0:10:49 So like the how to tutorials, the instruction manual, plus if you ever want to do this on your
0:10:51 own, here’s how I set this up.
0:10:51 Exactly.
0:10:52 Yeah.
0:10:56 That is like the first page that they’ll see when they go to buy, they’ll be filling
0:10:58 out their payment details for the $1 product.
0:11:01 And then just before they can click, go through, it’ll be like, do you also want this?
0:11:03 It’ll teach you how to do this.
0:11:04 And it’s like, oh, great.
0:11:10 And then essentially when you’ve sold them that initial product, you’ve solved a problem in
0:11:14 their life and you’ve given them this solution and you’ve moved them from where they are today
0:11:19 to that transformation of where they want to be after that product, that new area, that
0:11:22 new sort of reality that they have, they now have a new problem.
0:11:29 And so I then offer them an upsell, which helps them solve the new problem.
0:11:32 So it’s a solution to that new problem that they experience.
0:11:38 And so in this case, we’re talking that they have custom GPT that will help them create content.
0:11:42 And then we’ve got something that will help them create their own custom GPTs, but they have
0:11:44 a new problem now that they’re going to have this content.
0:11:46 Is it optimized?
0:11:47 How do they promote it?
0:11:49 You know, how do they actually get sales from that?
0:11:53 So then the upsell was more information on how they can turn one piece of content into like
0:11:58 a sales machine so that people who read that piece of content will actually buy rather than
0:12:02 just producing content and seeing no tangible results from it.
0:12:08 So that’s the no shortage of content or digital clutter on the internet, but how do you actually
0:12:10 get results from that?
0:12:11 So that’s the upsell offer.
0:12:13 Do you remember what that was priced at?
0:12:17 I want to say it was 97 or 197.
0:12:21 And I only had maybe, you know, a handful of people take that.
0:12:27 It wasn’t like a huge number of people, but I was 97 or 197 because that’s usually the numbers
0:12:31 that I’ll go for is the initial product will be anything from, you know, I always start these
0:12:34 at $1 because it’s a very low barrier to entry.
0:12:40 And just beginning thinking on a transactional relationship with the person changes the rest
0:12:41 of your relationship with them.
0:12:42 It’s buyers versus freebie seekers.
0:12:43 Yeah.
0:12:49 But it’s usually $1, then 47 for the bump, then 97 to 197 for the upsell is what I tend
0:12:50 to go for.
0:12:52 And that gives you potentially 250.
0:13:00 In all digital, you know, no, no direct time required on your part to deliver this good.
0:13:03 It’s not like people are signing up for coaching or consulting yet.
0:13:04 Not yet.
0:13:04 Nope.
0:13:08 So this was all just something that I’ve created and it was loom videos.
0:13:13 So pretty low tech in terms of, you know, there was no lots of editing and like flashy
0:13:13 things.
0:13:16 It was me sat in this very chair doing a screen share.
0:13:17 It’s like, go here.
0:13:17 This is how I do it.
0:13:18 These are the templates.
0:13:19 This is why it works.
0:13:21 Very, very low tech sort of approach.
0:13:26 It took me maybe an hour to create the bump and the upsell together.
0:13:31 And then once I created them, I could sell them dozens of times.
0:13:31 Okay.
0:13:32 Interesting.
0:13:34 This is like, I’m starting to piece together.
0:13:37 You almost have to start with what you know.
0:13:37 I don’t know.
0:13:42 What would you recommend people start to like start peeling out different segments of their
0:13:47 knowledge and expertise or like, you know, how to think about these different tiers as
0:13:47 different offers.
0:13:48 Like, it’s really interesting.
0:13:53 I would always start with the, the end customer, like who is it that you’re trying to sell to
0:13:56 and figure out what are their problems that you can solve.
0:13:59 So they, they have various, but everybody has problems in their life.
0:14:01 What are the problem for your ideal customer that you can solve?
0:14:02 That’s where I’d start.
0:14:08 And usually if we’re talking about sort of business offers, whether it’s services, coaching
0:14:12 courses, there’ll be one primary offer that will take somebody from where they are today
0:14:15 to that end transformation of where they want to be.
0:14:21 And that might be earning a set amount of money, having X percent freedom or whatever
0:14:21 it might be.
0:14:27 The $1 product needs to eventually lead into that big thing because if there’s no direct
0:14:32 line between the first purchase and the big purchase, you know, you’re not going to, I
0:14:38 see what a lot of people do with their, with their low ticket offers is they sell the equivalent
0:14:40 of like, Oh, look, here’s some stuff for blue shoes.
0:14:45 And then their primary offer is yellow t-shirts and it’s like the person who wants blue shoes
0:14:46 doesn’t care about yellow t-shirts.
0:14:48 So there has to be like a direct line.
0:14:53 More with Pete in just a moment, including the small percentage of customers that make up
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0:17:30 In my case, what I could help people with was content marketing.
0:17:32 And I had a course at the time, which was the content marketing model.
0:17:35 And that’s how I did, like, built whole content marketing systems.
0:17:38 And so that was going to be the end thing for this.
0:17:39 And so I had to go back.
0:17:43 What would be the very first thing that I could do that would be very small and help somebody
0:17:48 solve the initial problem that’s stopping them getting from where they are to that big
0:17:49 transformation of where they want to be?
0:17:51 I just want to help them take that first step.
0:17:52 Got it.
0:17:54 That’s what the initial $1 product should be.
0:17:59 Then the bump offer is the catalyst to help them achieve that faster, easier, cheaper.
0:18:02 The upsell is the next problem that they have.
0:18:05 And then that all qualifies them for whatever the bigger piece is that you’re going to sell
0:18:06 them down the line.
0:18:09 What was that in your case?
0:18:09 Because it doesn’t stop.
0:18:11 It didn’t even stop with the upsell.
0:18:13 It’s like there’s still more.
0:18:17 And it harkens back to the 80-20 sales and marketing.
0:18:23 Well, for everybody who buys this thing, a percentage would buy something 10 times more
0:18:23 expensive.
0:18:26 And then a percentage of those people would buy something 10 times more expensive.
0:18:28 So what was it in your case?
0:18:28 Yeah.
0:18:30 I email my email list every single day.
0:18:33 And I’m always keeping in touch with them.
0:18:38 And this was going to be, and the way that I built things now is there’d be an automated
0:18:42 thing on the back end where it then drip feeds them information for whatever the big offer
0:18:42 was.
0:18:46 And as I said, I was going to push them towards, it was a thousand dollar course, which was
0:18:47 the content marketing model.
0:18:51 At the time, I thought that things wouldn’t take off so quickly.
0:18:52 I didn’t think that I’d see sales.
0:18:54 Initially, I was just testing things.
0:18:56 So I didn’t have everything ready for that.
0:19:00 And so I started emailing people and I was like, if you’d like some help, let me know.
0:19:04 And essentially somebody reached out and they were like, it seems like you know what you’re
0:19:04 doing.
0:19:05 Can you help us?
0:19:07 And closed.
0:19:11 I think it was like a three grand short-term consulting gig with this brand.
0:19:13 They just reached out and said, when can you start?
0:19:14 And I said, yeah, I can come in.
0:19:19 And it was very low effort for me because it was more like a coaching rather than me
0:19:20 doing the work.
0:19:21 So I would come in, help their team.
0:19:24 But that was what it became in that short-term.
0:19:29 And that’s why in those 10 days, they went from buying a $1 product to hiring me for $3,000.
0:19:30 Isn’t that crazy?
0:19:37 That’s just like such an interesting sequence of events or of sales funnel, so to speak, from
0:19:42 strangers to building up trust and authority and credibility to get somebody to pay you three
0:19:42 grand.
0:19:43 Yeah.
0:19:48 I think it’s that difference between starting off on a transactional versus a non-transactional
0:19:49 relationship.
0:19:52 The way I look at it is if somebody is willing to pay even a dollar, they have a pain that
0:19:54 they’re actively trying to solve.
0:19:59 And I always term it as in, it’s the difference between people who think information and the
0:20:00 solution is nice to have.
0:20:01 And what they do is they collect it.
0:20:05 They put it in like a Google drive folder and they’re like, I’ll come back to that in
0:20:05 a week.
0:20:08 And people who think that the information and the solution that you have is something they
0:20:09 need to have.
0:20:13 If they’re willing to pay even a dollar, they need the solution, which means they’re going
0:20:17 to be more receptive to more help to help them get that solution and the transformation
0:20:18 faster.
0:20:21 Now, we’ve heard this phrase in a few different ways.
0:20:22 People who pay, pay attention.
0:20:27 And in a lot of ways, it’s easier to take somebody when this was the example of Fiverr, you know,
0:20:33 his line was it’s easier to take somebody from $5 to $10,000 than it is to take somebody from
0:20:33 zero to five.
0:20:36 It’s like that initial transaction hurdle.
0:20:38 Like, I got to bring in my credit card.
0:20:38 I got to pay for something.
0:20:46 It’s a much bigger burden of proof to get somebody to pay you even a dollar than it is to, you know,
0:20:48 sell them more stuff once you have built that trust.
0:20:54 The way that I view it is the $1 product is little more than a filter for those who are
0:20:58 serious because everybody’s collecting these big email lists.
0:21:01 And I’ve worked with people who have got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people,
0:21:05 but they’re not making the revenue that they should from that audience because there are
0:21:09 those people, like you said, who want to go from $5 to $10,000 and spend.
0:21:14 But when you’ve got so many people who just want free stuff, it’s very hard to identify who
0:21:14 they are.
0:21:19 And, you know, that whole argument of signals versus noise, it’s very difficult to find when
0:21:20 you’ve just attracted the freebie seekers.
0:21:25 So I just view the $1 products as a filter for those who are serious, and then I can continue
0:21:28 to serve and help those people achieve their goals.
0:21:37 And in your mind, the days of the ebook or the, you know, the five day email course or challenge,
0:21:42 like that stuff is kind of, that’s just like more information versus, you know, if I’m charging
0:21:46 for a thing, it’s almost got to be like you said, this custom GPT, like something that people
0:21:48 can implement right away.
0:21:53 I’m curious, your, your structure or like what, what might make sense for that intro offer?
0:22:00 I think any format can work and it’s really depending on what, who it is that you’re working
0:22:03 or targeting to work with and how you’re trying to bring them in.
0:22:07 But I know guys who are using this with like eBooks and they’re charging for the eBooks.
0:22:09 So not the free eBooks, it still works.
0:22:14 I know people who are running little challenges and the difficulty that you have with both
0:22:19 eBooks and challenges and courses is consumption because it’s great having somebody pay a dollar,
0:22:23 but you need them to actually go and consume it and use the thing to then make the high ticket
0:22:28 stuff really viable when you’re talking about nurturing them post-purchase.
0:22:32 But I don’t think that there’s any one thing that is like, doesn’t work.
0:22:36 I think the difference is whether or not you’re giving it away for free or charging for it
0:22:40 because that payment is what filters the serious people.
0:22:46 Is there any thought to what competitors are doing or do you find that people are like
0:22:51 shopping around, so to speak, for this like a dollar thing where it’s like, well, other people
0:22:52 are offering this for free.
0:22:53 So why should I pay you?
0:23:00 So I’ve not had any sort of pushbacks with anything like this and yeah, I’ve not seen it.
0:23:04 I guess there is a thing where when you’re trying to sell something, you do probably have to put
0:23:07 a little bit more effort into the marketing to make it feel a bit more premium.
0:23:12 But one thing that I’m always very confident in is that anything that I sell, I know that
0:23:15 the quality of the information and the solution inside is good.
0:23:15 It works.
0:23:16 It’s always tested.
0:23:19 So I’m not worried about somebody not getting their money back.
0:23:25 What I always try and do is make sure that they get at least two times value of what they’ve
0:23:29 paid because then nobody can ever come back and be like, oh, that wasn’t worth the money.
0:23:29 Yeah.
0:23:34 With a $1 product, you’re looking more at like a hundred times the value because nobody wants
0:23:35 to put you.
0:23:35 Yeah.
0:23:35 Yeah.
0:23:38 It’s hard to imagine to be like, can I get a refund on this?
0:23:39 This was not worth it all.
0:23:39 Exactly.
0:23:40 Yeah.
0:23:44 One of the things that I realized when I did the custom GPTs is you needed a chat GPT
0:23:47 pro account to actually be able to use them.
0:23:49 And I put that on the sales page.
0:23:50 One person didn’t notice it.
0:23:52 They emailed me like, I can’t use these.
0:23:53 And I was like, I’m happy to give you a refund.
0:23:55 They were like, that’s fine.
0:24:01 So, but yeah, no one’s going to ask for a refund for a dollar, even if it’s terrible.
0:24:06 But last week or the week before I actually bought somebody who’s doing a similar thing
0:24:13 with $3 as a product and the quality of the information inside was really quite lackluster.
0:24:17 And as a result, when they then started to put me into their email sequences to pitch
0:24:19 me the higher ticket things, I had no trust in them.
0:24:25 So when I’m doing the $1 products, I like to offer at least like a hundred dollars worth
0:24:31 of value for the $1 because, you know, this is the first touch point of this relationship.
0:24:36 If I start off on a bad foot, if I charge them a dollar and it’s terrible, it’s
0:24:40 I’m not going to be able to charge them a hundred dollars, a thousand dollars down the
0:24:40 line.
0:24:42 It still has to be of a high quality.
0:24:43 Yeah, I’m with you.
0:24:44 It’s like the first, it’s like that free sample.
0:24:49 It’s got to be good where the $1 sample, like it’s got to be enticing enough to build that
0:24:52 trust and say, yeah, this guy is worth doing business with.
0:24:52 Exactly.
0:24:56 And my thought is if you can give me a dollar and I give you a hundred dollars worth of
0:24:56 value back.
0:25:00 When I turn around and I say, this thing’s like a hundred dollars, you’re going to say,
0:25:02 how good is this thing going to be?
0:25:02 It’s going to be amazing.
0:25:04 Right, right.
0:25:05 This is helpful.
0:25:08 If I’m pausing, it’s because I’m trying to map out like what, you know, what the sequence
0:25:09 might look like.
0:25:13 Are you still selling this sequence or are you still selling this product or are you kind
0:25:16 of migrated to something else?
0:25:20 Are you still going active in these communities or is there, at a certain point, we’ve heard
0:25:25 of people doing like a self-liquidating offer, like trying to drive ad advertising traffic
0:25:30 through Facebook or Instagram or whatever, like to the $1 thing.
0:25:32 And then, you know, at least pay for the ad costs.
0:25:33 You do anything like that?
0:25:33 A hundred percent.
0:25:34 Yeah.
0:25:39 So the, the initial offer I’m not running anymore because it’s, it’s, it’s obsolete.
0:25:45 Now AI has got a much better point than it was that you don’t really need the custom GPTs
0:25:47 for what I was doing it for.
0:25:52 And, you know, it’s gone through several iterations since I was selling this and really, I don’t
0:25:56 think there’s much value in the custom GPTs that I had built for those things.
0:26:01 I still use a lot of custom GPTs in my community with people based around templates that we know
0:26:04 that works, but yeah, not using that offer still using very low ticket offers.
0:26:11 And I still begin them all at $1 and I still go out and I start spear phishing in communities
0:26:15 where there are people who are interested in this just to try and get feel.
0:26:19 Because I think the problem that a lot of people have and the mistake that they make is they
0:26:21 think ads are a cure-all.
0:26:22 It’s like a silver bullet.
0:26:24 If you just run ads, you’ll make sales.
0:26:28 Ads, in my opinion and experience are a catalyst.
0:26:30 Again, like they’re fuel to the fire.
0:26:33 You need to be able to sell one of something, then you should be able to sell 10 of it.
0:26:38 If you can sell 10 to 100 of that thing, ads will then help you sell 100 to 1,000.
0:26:44 Most people don’t have the money to throw at ads to them to find out if something works to
0:26:45 lose thousands of dollars.
0:26:50 So I want to go out and I want to see if this will sell without having to put money behind
0:26:52 it and then I’ll put money behind it.
0:26:54 So yeah, still running $1 products.
0:26:57 And then what happens is once you start running ads, you’re going to have to play with the prices
0:27:02 a bit to try and get sure, to make sure that the average order value beats the cost per
0:27:03 acquisition on ads.
0:27:07 So I’m running my own ads now for the $1 product challenge.
0:27:07 Oh, okay.
0:27:08 It’s very meta.
0:27:09 Yeah.
0:27:10 Yeah, exactly.
0:27:14 It’s all very dependent upon making sure that when they come through that initial funnel,
0:27:17 they at least break even with the acquisition cost.
0:27:23 So yeah, you do have to play around with it, but it’s just the easiest way to scale because
0:27:27 doing the spear phishing is great, but it’s difficult to scale after a certain point.
0:27:33 Yeah, it’s manual outreach or it’s time consuming versus something that you just have sales come
0:27:33 in your way.
0:27:38 And I like this idea of validate it first, make sure somebody is going to order it, get
0:27:44 those first 10, 20 people to buy it from this manual effort before trying to automate the
0:27:47 thing and then making sure those ad costs are in line.
0:27:49 What do you see?
0:27:52 I guess it varies, the cart value.
0:27:57 The cool thing is, you know, right away, like because of the sequences, you know, it’s
0:28:02 like the order bump and the upsell, like you get a pretty good sense of, well, what’s
0:28:03 the conversion rate going to be?
0:28:05 Like what’s the average cart value going to be?
0:28:08 It’s not like this three month, you know, lead time to make a sale.
0:28:09 Yeah.
0:28:13 So you can generally find out quite quickly as long as you can drive the traffic to it
0:28:14 through spear phishing or ads or whatever.
0:28:18 You can find out quite quickly whether or not things are working.
0:28:22 And like I said, then it’s just playing around with whether the offers are right to get
0:28:27 the, you know, right conversion rates on the bump offers and the upsells and also the front
0:28:27 end products.
0:28:29 And then also playing around with the price to find this sweet spot.
0:28:35 Do you have a rule of thumb on average order value that you shoot for or conversion rate
0:28:37 or, or your cost to acquire a customer?
0:28:40 Like any of those metrics that people should keep in mind?
0:28:42 Very different depending on the industry.
0:28:47 So obviously me selling this, I’m in one of the more competitive industries for, you
0:28:49 know, biz op as it’s, you know, often called.
0:28:52 So like, you know, the sort of make money online type stuff.
0:28:56 It’s very competitive up there with finance, legal, all of these things.
0:29:02 So currently for me, my average order, sorry, my cost per acquisition is around $35 to $40.
0:29:04 It kind of fluctuates between those two.
0:29:08 So if I’m paying for ads, I’m going to be paying 35 to 40 bucks just to get a customer.
0:29:14 I worked with a guy who was a sports psychologist and we were getting customers for him at $5.
0:29:20 Like it was a much lesser fee because very, very specific to a specific industry of sports
0:29:21 psychology.
0:29:26 There’s somebody in my community and they’re running a pure $1 product funnel where it’s
0:29:30 just $1 products that they’re selling on the front end, uh, language learning.
0:29:36 And again, far cheaper, but they’re also targeting markets where it is cheaper ad spends.
0:29:40 So I’m targeting the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand.
0:29:40 Yeah.
0:29:40 Yeah.
0:29:40 Yeah.
0:29:41 They’re teaching English.
0:29:46 And so they’re targeting places that are cheaper for ad costs.
0:29:47 So their costs are low.
0:29:51 So it’s really difficult to say, this is what you should be aiming for.
0:29:54 The golden rule is just that you try and have to make the average order value better than
0:29:55 the CPA.
0:30:00 And that’s going to fluctuate so much depending on the industry, the offer, the audience,
0:30:02 all of these things.
0:30:03 Okay.
0:30:04 Got it.
0:30:10 So collect that data up front and, uh, you know, through this manual method or through
0:30:13 your own traffic channels before turning on the ads.
0:30:15 Cause it’s a good way to go backwards in a hurry.
0:30:17 If you can’t, uh, recoup those costs.
0:30:21 Now it is important to know this is kind of like upfront, like where I may need to break
0:30:24 even or make a small profit on this initial ad spend.
0:30:29 But then I’ve got this list of buyers that can hire me for consulting.
0:30:30 They can buy my higher ticket stuff.
0:30:34 Like it’s an engaged group who, who hopefully has some trust in what you’re doing and can
0:30:36 continue to do business with you down the road.
0:30:43 And we’ve found people who will spend even a dollar are up to around 12 times more likely
0:30:50 to buy other programs, offers, services from you again, than if they came through from free
0:30:51 leads.
0:30:55 So you’re going to get 12 times more sales by focusing on these people than you would on
0:30:57 people who just want information because it’s nice to have.
0:31:03 And, uh, that’s even if it’s just a single dollar rather than like a 27 or $47 front end.
0:31:03 Got it.
0:31:07 Anything that we missed on the $1 product challenge?
0:31:07 I like this stuff.
0:31:09 Yeah, I don’t, I don’t think so.
0:31:11 I think breakeven is good.
0:31:13 If you can make even a small profit, it’s better.
0:31:17 And it is, you know, figuring out it’s a lot of testing between the offers to really get
0:31:18 that right.
0:31:22 But as you mentioned, running straight into do ads is fine.
0:31:27 If you have the capital to burn, because I know guys who will just throw
0:31:31 $10,000, an ad campaign to see if they can make money back and they’ll find the messaging
0:31:32 because they’ll test heavily.
0:31:34 A lot of people don’t have that money.
0:31:37 So test manually first.
0:31:40 And then once it’s working, use ads to kind of scale that reach.
0:31:41 Right.
0:31:43 Now that makes, that makes a lot of sense.
0:31:47 So growthmodels.co slash dollar.
0:31:50 You can learn more about the $1 product challenge over there.
0:31:56 We’re going to be right back with Pete, including round two, donate a business idea right after
0:31:56 this.
0:31:58 All right.
0:32:00 We’re back with Pete Boyle from growthmodels.co.
0:32:03 Round one was the $1 product challenge.
0:32:06 Round two is donate a business idea.
0:32:08 This is something that you might start yourself.
0:32:11 If you had more time, this is something that you think listeners could run with something
0:32:12 that ought to exist in the world.
0:32:14 What have you got for us here?
0:32:16 I’m going to go through something that’s very self-serving.
0:32:21 Um, one of the things that, you know, I’m really working on with my business is how to
0:32:23 increase the reach and how to attract more buyers.
0:32:28 Obviously ads are great for this, but I do a lot of email marketing and there are lots
0:32:34 of tools out there that will allow you to do newsletter exchanges and there’s tools like,
0:32:38 you know, I could name a couple of them where it’s like, Hey, you’ve got an email newsletter.
0:32:40 There’s a similar size as I do.
0:32:42 Let’s exchange newsletters.
0:32:45 Let’s see, you know, if my subscribers want to become your subscribers.
0:32:47 There’s also ones out there that will allow you to find ones to sponsor.
0:32:54 What I’m really looking for is ways that I can find affiliate marketers who have engaged email
0:33:01 lists that could be validated in some way so that then I could approach those affiliate
0:33:02 marketers and say, look, I have this offer.
0:33:05 You know, affiliate marketing is a great way.
0:33:09 If you have the right overlap of audiences to reach a new audience, I’ll give you 50% of
0:33:10 all of the sales.
0:33:15 If you can promote this to your audience and all of this, because when I’m working with
0:33:17 affiliates in the past, you attract a lot of them.
0:33:20 5% of them will drive 95% of the sales.
0:33:25 Some of them will come through and they’ll turn out that they don’t have a good list in
0:33:28 terms of engagement or that it’s just the wrong audience.
0:33:35 So it’d be great if there was some kind of directory of good vetted affiliate marketers
0:33:39 who are promoting people’s offers and are willing to do co-promotions and all of this sort
0:33:43 of stuff and had a method that you could directly outreach to those people.
0:33:44 Okay.
0:33:50 So that’s the business idea directory of essentially affiliate marketing email lists.
0:33:51 Yeah.
0:33:54 And like there’s things where it’s similar to this, but not quite.
0:33:58 There’s, you know, places where you can find newsletters for sponsorships.
0:34:03 But of course, a sponsorship is just usually one email, a static piece of text or a static
0:34:04 image, which is fine.
0:34:05 Yeah.
0:34:08 When I’ve been an affiliate for people and when I’ve had affiliates who do the best for me,
0:34:13 what we tend to do is we build a full sequence and we run it on the same kind of process where
0:34:15 it’s, you know, same concept as spear phishing.
0:34:16 We do a digital hand raise.
0:34:17 Who’s interested in this?
0:34:21 People who say that they’re interested in this, they then get like a five or a 10 day promotion
0:34:23 of the other offer.
0:34:28 That way you don’t annoy your email list, but you tend to get much higher sales than just
0:34:30 a sponsorship in somebody’s newsletter.
0:34:32 Uh, no, that makes sense.
0:34:34 Do you know, uh, Matt McWilliams?
0:34:35 I do not.
0:34:40 Matt, I think it’s the affiliate guy.com or something like, anyways, Matt’s been on the
0:34:40 show before.
0:34:47 He’s been in the affiliate space for a decade plus and he kind of coordinates these types
0:34:54 of launches, you know, geared toward product, you know, big online business celebrity type
0:34:55 of product launches.
0:34:58 And, you know, on the affiliate recruiting side is a specialty.
0:35:03 So he may have something like this internal to his company, uh, this, this kind of database
0:35:09 where he could, uh, go work with the, on the directory side, we did an episode late last
0:35:12 year with John Rush episode six 47.
0:35:18 I want to say in, in the podcast archives, where he talks all about building these types
0:35:24 of directory websites where you’re pulling in the data and that’s the value add is the
0:35:24 data.
0:35:30 And in this case, it could be, um, number of subscribers, you know, industry that they reach,
0:35:34 um, you know, how long they’ve been in business, like different data points that you could have.
0:35:39 And I don’t know, maybe there’s some business where you take a percentage of a percentage
0:35:40 of an affiliate.
0:35:44 I don’t know how you would necessarily monetize it or maybe you charge for access to it.
0:35:47 Cause it’s like, you know, there’s obviously some money to be made on the other side, but
0:35:49 this would be, um, an interesting one to run with.
0:35:51 There’s things that are close to it.
0:35:54 And even like, you know, convert kit now, it’s my, I use convert kit from email service
0:35:57 where they have a thing where it’s like the creator network and you can go and find other
0:36:02 creators, but it doesn’t tell you the size of their list, how engaged their list are,
0:36:03 how often they email.
0:36:04 You kind of have to manually do all of that.
0:36:08 And then you have to manually go and find their email address to reach out to people.
0:36:11 And it’s like, oh, you know, it’s a lot of extra manual work.
0:36:14 And I’m like, there’s, there’s a simpler solution somewhere.
0:36:18 But it’s the manual work that leads to conversations like this.
0:36:20 Cause it was one of those, you sent me a cold email.
0:36:22 It was like, Hey, I’ve got this thing called the $1 product.
0:36:23 Do you want to promote it?
0:36:25 It was like, well, I’ll learn a little bit more about this.
0:36:27 It’s like, Hey, this is kind of interesting.
0:36:29 And now we got to do a whole episode about it.
0:36:32 So there’s, there’s pros and cons to it.
0:36:36 It sounds like you need a, um, a virtual assistant to do some of this initial research and outreach
0:36:37 for you.
0:36:38 That’s the thing.
0:36:38 Yeah.
0:36:42 And I’m, you know, there’s part of me, which is thinking if I get somebody in to help almost
0:36:46 as an affiliate partner, um, if we can just chronicle people that we find who are up for
0:36:51 it, get their approval, we could maybe create this because I know, um, certain tools as well.
0:36:56 They started off literally with this as similar thing, but for like newsletter promos, there’s
0:37:02 a guy that I know who did this started off as an air table and eventually sold the business.
0:37:08 So, and that was, it was just finding newsletters, pulling all the stats for co-promotions, uh,
0:37:10 doing intros between people.
0:37:13 And then it became a, an acquisition for somebody else.
0:37:15 Like somebody came along to acquire the business.
0:37:15 Yeah.
0:37:17 This would be, uh, no, no, no.
0:37:20 The more we talk about it, the more I think like, yeah, this is super valuable because there’s
0:37:23 going to be, there’s always going to be people with offers.
0:37:27 So there’s always going to be people with email lists who need those offers to monetize their
0:37:30 business and help their, uh, and help their audience.
0:37:31 So it makes, you know, it makes sense.
0:37:33 In fact, can we go back and come up with another idea?
0:37:35 Can we, can we just do this one ourselves?
0:37:36 Yeah.
0:37:36 Yeah.
0:37:37 Maybe so.
0:37:38 You got anything else?
0:37:40 You got another idea you want to toss out?
0:37:40 Yeah.
0:37:40 Yeah.
0:37:42 I’m going to have to come up with one quickly.
0:37:47 Um, but I think in like personally, I would find this as like quite a valuable idea.
0:37:52 If somebody would create that, it’s definitely something I would be interested in testing.
0:37:52 Yeah.
0:37:53 There’s definitely something here.
0:37:58 Cause there is, like you said, there’s the matchmakers for the email newsletter sponsorships.
0:38:01 Um, the exchange or like, do you have a, on this newsletter exchange?
0:38:03 Like promo swap type of database?
0:38:05 Do you have a resource that you like on that front?
0:38:06 That’s an interesting one.
0:38:08 Letter growth is one.
0:38:13 And I believe that, uh, I think beehive has one that’s kind of, uh, built in.
0:38:14 I’m not sure.
0:38:15 I don’t use beehive.
0:38:19 And like I said, convert kit also has one where you can recommend one another.
0:38:24 Um, and like basically when somebody subscribes your email list, it throws up a pop up and
0:38:26 it says, Hey, these are my friends.
0:38:28 You should also consider subscribing to these guys.
0:38:31 And then there’s, um, a paid version where it’s.
0:38:37 Uh, spark loop, which integrates with a lot of these tools and you can use them to basically
0:38:43 say anybody who sends me a subscriber, I’ll send them $1, $2, $5 per subscriber.
0:38:47 If you’re going to do that, it’s very important to know your payback periods and the average
0:38:51 customer lifetime value so that, you know, you’re not going to get into trouble by spending
0:38:53 $5 per subscriber.
0:38:55 And then actually they only pay you on average $3 back.
0:38:56 Yeah.
0:38:56 Yeah.
0:39:03 I’ll go backwards on that math, but there’s, there’s something to this matchmaker model and
0:39:06 we’ve seen it in sites like podcast guests.com.
0:39:11 Like how do we, um, match people who have podcasts with people who need guests or with people who
0:39:15 want to guest on podcasts and even like help a reporter, you know, journalists who need sources
0:39:17 and sources who want to get some press.
0:39:20 So there’s, there’s definitely some precedence for it.
0:39:20 So I like this one.
0:39:26 We’ll, we’ll call this the affiliate marketing email database, uh, business idea.
0:39:26 There we go.
0:39:27 All right.
0:39:28 That is round two.
0:39:30 Round three is what we call the triple threat.
0:39:36 And the first part of this is a marketing tactic that is working right now.
0:39:37 $1 products.
0:39:40 Yeah.
0:39:45 One thing, I mean, that’s working right now that I’m really trying to do more of is YouTube.
0:39:51 I think YouTube is one of the best tools that people aren’t using as much as they should.
0:39:56 Um, and the reason that I really like YouTube is there is a great balance between both paid
0:39:58 and organic on the same platform.
0:40:00 And so you could probably get compounding gains.
0:40:06 And that’s one thing that we’re trying to really look at is how you can use paid to accelerate
0:40:09 the organic growth or vice versa.
0:40:12 Um, with like retargeting audiences and all of this sort of thing.
0:40:18 But I don’t, I see a lot of people who are jumping into still things like Facebook ads and I’m
0:40:23 running Facebook ads, but I think YouTube really is a better long-term opportunity.
0:40:25 You see a lower cost of acquisition there?
0:40:29 Not so much yet because I’m still really getting to grips with the advertising.
0:40:34 And I think that’s probably my shortcoming that I’m not seeing as good as CPA.
0:40:38 I’m seeing much cheaper click-through rates and all of this sort of stuff.
0:40:47 But I think as well, as we move towards more AI content, having real people on camera is one
0:40:53 of the things that is at the minute harder for AI to sort of recreate.
0:40:58 And so as most selling is done based on trust and based, you know, people buy from people.
0:40:58 Yeah.
0:41:03 Having a face to the brand really seems to be working quite well, even with smaller audiences.
0:41:09 I know guys with like, you know, 2000 subscribers who are pulling good money because they’re not
0:41:15 relying on YouTube’s ad revenue, but they’re using it as a way to bring them, uh, course customers,
0:41:16 coaching clients, that kind of stuff.
0:41:22 What’s a typical call to action for you on a, on a YouTube video or an example of a video
0:41:23 that’s done well?
0:41:26 Again, this is one thing that I am currently figuring out.
0:41:30 I am about 17 days into a test I’m doing.
0:41:35 I run a lot of my own little experiments where I’m trying to publish one long form YouTube
0:41:37 video per day, about 10 minutes each.
0:41:41 So I’m about 17 days maybe into doing one video per day.
0:41:42 Okay.
0:41:47 And so I’m happy to check back in and say what worked and what didn’t, uh, what I’ve tried
0:41:56 as well is a method similar to the spear phishing approach where basically I pick some of my top
0:41:59 performing videos, put money behind them to reach the audience and then retarget those
0:42:05 people with a conversion focused ad because you can get reasonable reach for quite cheap on
0:42:06 YouTube.
0:42:10 And then basically if I know somebody watches the video, they engage with it, they click
0:42:10 on the thumbnail.
0:42:15 If I then hit them with a conversion focus, I’d like, Hey, this system will help you attract
0:42:16 buyers, not freebie seekers.
0:42:17 Check it out over here.
0:42:22 That’s one thing that I’m sort of working on really just nailing down at the minute.
0:42:22 No.
0:42:22 Okay.
0:42:26 This is, this is the kind of nitty gritty stuff that I, that I totally love geeking out
0:42:27 on.
0:42:33 So organic video, long form content, see which is naturally going to rise to the top, put some
0:42:35 money to boost that, you know, promote that video.
0:42:40 Go to a, you know, a broader audience, send it out to the world and then retargeting those
0:42:41 to be, Hey, you watch this thing.
0:42:46 And then if you’re serious about this, this is the call to action related video where it’s
0:42:48 like, and now go, go buy the $1 thing.
0:42:50 And now you’re into my, into my sequence.
0:42:50 Exactly.
0:42:51 Yeah.
0:42:55 And at the same time, what I’m doing is people who buy the $1 product challenge, obviously
0:42:59 I have other offers that are the primary profit drivers.
0:43:01 Now I want to get people into them.
0:43:02 Again, people buy from people.
0:43:06 If I can get them to consume and get a result from the $1 product challenge, they’re primed
0:43:07 to buy the next stuff.
0:43:09 But you know, people buy from people.
0:43:13 So I’ve recorded YouTube videos that help coach people through those next stages as well.
0:43:19 So that’s why I think YouTube is way more sort of flexible than a lot of other channels.
0:43:22 And at the same time, I could keep going for hours on this.
0:43:24 I’m sorry, this is going to be a long one.
0:43:28 But one thing that I’ve been doing as well is trying to figure out how you can be, you
0:43:31 know, there’s the whole concept of omnipresent marketing.
0:43:34 People log into Facebook, they see you, they’re on LinkedIn, they see you.
0:43:37 It’s very difficult to do that because it’s so much content to produce.
0:43:44 If I can produce one 10 minute video, I use a tool which then separates that into seven or
0:43:47 eight different short videos for YouTube shorts, TikTok, LinkedIn.
0:43:53 I can then have AI take the transcript and turn that into a couple of different social posts.
0:43:57 And so that’s another thing that I’ve been playing around with is as I’m recording one
0:44:02 of these long form videos every day, one long form video is becoming five to 10 shorts.
0:44:06 It’s becoming five social posts, text posts.
0:44:13 Those shorts and text posts can be used across Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook,
0:44:14 Instagram.
0:44:16 Is there a specific tool that you’re using for that?
0:44:19 Because that’s the next question, a new or new to you tool that you’re loving right now.
0:44:19 Yeah.
0:44:24 So the tool that I’m really like relying on at the minute is, I don’t know whether it’s
0:44:25 Descript or Descript.
0:44:30 I don’t know how they want you to pronounce it, but Descript, D-E-S-C-R-I-P-T.
0:44:31 Yeah.
0:44:35 And it’s, um, you know, I, I picked it because I hate video editing.
0:44:35 I’m no good at it.
0:44:36 It takes up too much time.
0:44:39 And this, it transcribes the video.
0:44:43 And if there’s a piece of the video you don’t like, you just cut that, the words from the
0:44:46 transcription and it’ll edit it out of the video for you.
0:44:46 So much easier.
0:44:50 They have an AI tool built in where it’s like, Hey, create some clips.
0:44:52 You give it some prompts about what kind of clips you want.
0:44:54 You go away for three minutes.
0:44:56 You come back, your clips are ready.
0:44:57 Oh, I didn’t know they had that.
0:45:01 Cause we use, we use Descript or my, my video editor uses Descript for the video editing stuff
0:45:01 too.
0:45:05 And it’s like the first time you use it, it’s like just this amazing experience of like,
0:45:09 I could just edit the transcript versus like having to find that specific timestamp for the
0:45:11 video and drag the thing over here.
0:45:12 No, it’s really, really cool.
0:45:18 And then, yeah, it’s Underlord, you know, it’s at the top in the top right corner of
0:45:23 the, um, of the sidebar on the right hand side, Underlord, and then scroll down about two thirds
0:45:23 of the way.
0:45:27 There’s a bit which says create clips and it’ll do all of that for you.
0:45:30 You can pick a template so that it designs it well, and then it would just export them
0:45:31 all into that template.
0:45:38 You have to double check them because sometimes the clips are no good, but you know, it’s the
0:45:40 fastest way that I’ve found to do clips.
0:45:45 And then I’m using, um, socialb.com, I think basically what that allows me to do.
0:45:50 So yesterday I exported 15 shorts and I was like, this is going to take a long time for
0:45:53 me to schedule this social be allows you to set up queues.
0:45:59 So at 1 PM every day, share a short to these platforms.
0:46:04 And then I just upload 15 shorts, give them the title and it adds them to the queue.
0:46:06 And I don’t actually have to manually schedule anything out.
0:46:07 Okay.
0:46:08 Socialb.com.
0:46:10 That’s, uh, that’s a new one.
0:46:11 We’ll link both of those up.
0:46:16 Descript and Socialb, other tools that you mentioned in the call, Thrivecart, Loom, ConvertKit,
0:46:19 Beehive, lots of different tools at your disposal.
0:46:23 So we’ll link up, uh, all of those in, uh, in the show notes for this episode.
0:46:28 The last question of the triple threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months.
0:46:34 So it’s, it’s, it’s maybe not my favorite book from the last 12 months, but as I mentioned,
0:46:36 I’m really trying to get better at, uh, YouTube.
0:46:41 And what I found is headline thumbnail are really important for getting people to engage with the
0:46:41 video.
0:46:45 And the first 30 seconds are really important to get people invested.
0:46:50 And so I’ve been rereading a book called great leads, which is a direct response marketing book
0:46:53 about how to start sales messages.
0:46:57 Like I need, this is from guys who would write 10, 20,000 word sales letters.
0:47:01 Um, and this book is all about how to open them up in the different ways that you can do
0:47:06 it to hook engagement and hook like curiosity from people to get them to want to read the rest.
0:47:08 So, you know, you grab that attention early.
0:47:13 Um, so that’s one thing that I’ve been rereading in an attempt to see if I can port any of
0:47:15 that information over to video.
0:47:16 Okay.
0:47:19 Great leads, a direct response marketing book.
0:47:22 We will link that one up as well.
0:47:24 That’s, uh, that’s new to me again.
0:47:30 Uh, you can find Pete at growth models.co growth models.co slash dollar is, uh, the place
0:47:33 to start your $1 product challenge.
0:47:35 Big thanks to Pete for sharing his insight.
0:47:39 Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:47:45 As always, you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our
0:47:46 sponsors in one place.
0:47:49 Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:47:50 That is it for me.
0:47:51 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:47:55 If you’re finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
0:47:57 So fire off that text message.
0:48:02 You might benefit from adding the $1 product challenge to their business until next time.
0:48:04 Let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:48:06 and I’ll catch you in the next edition
0:48:07 of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:05 200 bucks an hour opening new bank accounts. Now, if you’ve ever been curious about the
0:00:11 side hustle of bank bonuses, Dylan is your guy, dylonsbonuses.com. Dylan, welcome to
0:00:12 the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:14 Hi, Nick. Pleasure to meet you.
0:00:18 Likewise. Now, you’ve been doing this three years on the side of your day job. This is
0:00:22 the podcast where we’ve been helping people make extra money since 2013. But if memory
0:00:28 serves, we’ve never really done a dedicated conversation about bank bonuses. So let me
0:00:32 try and summarize it. Or this is my understanding. Now, banks are hungry for new customers. So
0:00:37 they’ll actually pay you to join and set up an account, sometimes hundreds of dollars,
0:00:43 because they know it’s kind of a pain or at least perceived to be kind of a pain to switch
0:00:49 banks. Now, do you recall your first bank bonus or maybe a recent one that comes to mind? You’re
0:00:53 doing this consistently. I think it’s really interesting, not just as a one-off thing.
0:00:57 I do remember the first one. When I first moved to Connecticut three years ago,
0:01:01 I needed a new bank. Citizens Bank, when I got my new address in Connecticut,
0:01:07 they emailed me a little flyer that said, $300 for a new checking account, $300 for a new savings
0:01:12 account. And I flipped it over. What kind of scam is this? Usually junk mail is like a million. Well,
0:01:17 you know, why are they only promising me? But I read the terms of service. I looked it up. It’s like
0:01:21 Citizens is a real bank in Connecticut. I don’t think we have that in Texas. It’s like five steps.
0:01:24 You open an account. You move your direct deposit there.
0:01:25 Okay.
0:01:31 And it has to be like a minimum of $500 a month or whatever it was. And three to six months later,
0:01:37 you get $300 for the checking account in cash in the account. And then you get $300 in the savings
0:01:43 account in cash in the account. No phone calls, nothing complicated. All you got to do is move your
0:01:47 direct deposit over there and keep the account open and you get the money.
0:01:50 Okay. So that’s the one challenge. If you’re doing this consistently is keeping
0:01:57 the accounts open and juggling all of the different offers that you have going on, but not a huge
0:02:01 barrier or burden. And since in this case, it sounds like you were moving and I was going to switch
0:02:02 banks anyways, because I’m moving.
0:02:08 You can open more than one new account as long as you’re able to meet the requirements. I do one a week,
0:02:14 every week. I’ve done that consistently for almost six months. And any problem I’ve encountered has
0:02:15 been small and it’s been solvable.
0:02:22 Okay. Where do you find these deals? It sounds like, okay, the first one, they sent me a postcard
0:02:27 or they sent me a letter in the mail. Where else do you recommend people look for signup bonuses like
0:02:29 this if they want to dabble?
0:02:36 The premier resource is doctor of credit.com. Okay. That’s where you find anything, any questions
0:02:40 you have, they’re going to have a frequently asked questions about bank bonuses. They’re going to
0:02:44 any, any problem you have, there’s going to be a brief answer for you.
0:02:50 Yeah. I’ve been on the site before for something else. No, this is definitely a familiar domain. And so
0:02:58 I’m on best bank account bonuses for March, 2025. And the little scroll bar is so small. He must have
0:03:00 hundreds listed here.
0:03:02 At any given time, there’s going to be like 150 or so.
0:03:08 Do you just work your way down the list? Do you sort by most lucrative? Like how do you go about
0:03:09 what makes, what’s something worth going after?
0:03:15 This is kind of sorted straight away for you. Okay. Like section one is going to be mostly
0:03:19 nationwide or there’s going to be all nationwide bonuses. You look at the top there right now at the
0:03:25 time of this recording, it’s a $900 checking savings bonus from Chase. And then you go one,
0:03:30 two, three, four, 18 down before you get to like, you know, 150 bucks for this bank, a hundred bucks,
0:03:36 50 bucks. So you can tell at a glance that the best bonuses are at the top. Okay. Then you go to the
0:03:41 second section, savings account bonuses are slightly more complicated than checking account bonuses.
0:03:47 Nothing you can’t handle, but just so you know, business bank bonuses usually have to have an EIN,
0:03:52 but sometimes they just let you open with your social. Very rarely they make you have an LLC,
0:03:56 but again, that’s, you don’t need to worry about that because there’s going to be plenty of bonuses
0:04:00 that are not complicated at all. Okay. And many side hustle show listeners are going to have
0:04:04 a business account that they could open. So that does that double your chances or is that just
0:04:09 adding more complexity to it? Opening a business account, it might take,
0:04:13 sometimes you have to go in branch. Most of the stuff you can do online in your underwear,
0:04:19 like I said, okay. Business account bonuses, sometimes you have to go in branch. So that does
0:04:25 add to my stated goal time here of an hour a week. That’s how long it should take you or less to open
0:04:31 one account. Yeah. Okay. And I’m giving a pretty good cushion there. So a business account can be
0:04:35 a little complicated, but you actually want one business. If you don’t have one already and you can
0:04:39 get one with the bonus here, if you don’t have one already, because the reason why that has a utility
0:04:44 is that gives you a flexibility to where you don’t have to move your direct deposit from your payroll
0:04:49 or your W-2 income or however you get your checks. If you have a business account and you have cash in
0:04:57 that, usually you can pay yourself to the other account, your new bonus account from your business
0:05:04 account. And that counts to meet the direct deposit requirements because it’s an ACH pay.
0:05:10 Oh, okay. So instead of doing it through your employer, your own business, your side hustle
0:05:14 could be your employer of record to meet those direct deposit requirements. Okay.
0:05:19 And that’s how I do it too, because my employer has been myself for at least six months. And that’s
0:05:22 how I’ve gotten all my bonuses. And that’s how a lot of people do it too.
0:05:27 Okay. Interesting. Because that’s always like, well, what does the HR department think? If you’re
0:05:30 calling them up every week, be like, hey, can you change my routing number? Can you change the
0:05:33 direct deposit? I was like, what is this guy doing? Just pick a bank and stick with it. But no,
0:05:37 that makes more sense. When I did have a steady paycheck, there was, I could go in the computer
0:05:42 at work or at my old job, there was a ADP app, but maybe in other apps as well, there’s going
0:05:47 to be an option to go in and change the account without having to call. You don’t have to call
0:05:52 your boss. You don’t have to call HR. You go into the app, you change, you put the routing
0:05:57 number and the account number of your new bank and your next check is going to go there. And that’s
0:06:01 how you get your bonus. So that’s an easy way to do it without having to open a business account.
0:06:09 Got it. So I’m seeing like an example, this Chase $900 checking slash savings bonus. I’m assuming this
0:06:13 is for people who don’t already have, you can’t already have a Chase account or is like, you just
0:06:16 have to open a new one and meet these minimum requirements.
0:06:20 One of the questions that she asked me was, can you do this forever? Are you going to run out of
0:06:25 bank accounts eventually? So here’s, you know how credit cards, uh, you’re familiar with the credit
0:06:28 card game, right? And your, your, your listeners are going to be mostly familiar with that.
0:06:33 Right. Okay. So the credit card game, usually the way it works is they say in their terms of service,
0:06:38 you can’t have had a bonus in the past 12 months or 24 months or something like that.
0:06:40 Yeah. Usually like a couple of years. Sure.
0:06:45 If we look in the fine print, I don’t want to read through the whole thing, but on doctor of credit for
0:06:51 bonus and when you click on the website to actually go to chase.com or go to citizens or bankofamerica.com
0:06:57 and you see their bonus in their terms of service, it’s going to say not eligible if, and it’s usually
0:07:03 going to be one of two things. One, if you have had an account in the last six months or 12 months,
0:07:10 or two, if you’ve been the receiver of a bonus in the past six or 12 months. So basically what that
0:07:16 means is let’s say I open the account today at chase and then 90 days later, I get my bonus.
0:07:22 Okay. 90 days after that, I closed the account. We’re at six months now. Okay. You have to wait
0:07:28 another six months or a year and then you can open another chase account. Okay. Okay. So you can only
0:07:36 hit each bank once every one to two years. The thing is there’s 52 weeks in a year. There’s 150 bonuses
0:07:42 on doctor of credit.com right now. You can do one bonus a week and not run out of them. So while
0:07:48 you’re waiting on your chase bonus week two, you open up, I don’t know what’s the next best one on
0:07:54 here. Wells Fargo. I’ve gotten them twice. I’ve gotten citizens for 300 and 300 a couple of years ago.
0:07:59 And, and then three months ago, I got them again. They gave me another 300 and they know who I am.
0:08:05 There’s no fraud in this. Okay. They, they, they, they just, they just love paying you extra money
0:08:08 to open up accounts and they, you close it a little later. And then two years later, you open another
0:08:13 one. They give you another three, four or 500 bucks. Yeah. I was going to ask if it becomes like I’m
0:08:17 picturing the, uh, the back room at the casino with your, your posters up on the wall and say, Hey,
0:08:21 don’t, don’t let this guy play blackjack anymore. There are people that have been doing this for 15
0:08:26 years. And if you go to the secondary resource, I wanted to tell you about was bank bonus one zero
0:08:31 two on Facebook. And those are basically the only resources you’re going to need for months and
0:08:36 months. And you can search around if you want to, if you can find other resources, you can use my
0:08:41 website. I’m going to, you know, uh, because I know, I know how to do this. Hopefully I can accelerate
0:08:45 your learning, like implement it into your life, like a little better, just in case you have any
0:08:49 misgivings or you have a few extra questions, but mostly you’re going to want to use
0:08:55 doctrofcredit.com and bank bonus one or two on Facebook. Now the other potential hang up here
0:09:01 is the, so the direct deposit, if you can set that up, sometimes that’s going to have a minimum,
0:09:05 right? Where it’s like, it’s got to be a minimum of $500. So if I’m sprinkling that out from my
0:09:09 business account into 10 different places, like all of a sudden it’s like, well, do I have that much
0:09:15 cash to draw from? The other piece of it is the minimum balance requirements where that Chase one,
0:09:19 I think it was like $15,000 deposit. This Wells Fargo one was like,
0:09:25 a quarter million to make the highest tier bonus bonus. And so it’s like, now I’ve, if I have my
0:09:30 funds spread out and have to like maintain certain minimums that may become another
0:09:32 bottleneck in the process.
0:09:36 What if I don’t have $250,000? How am I going to get these? Well, I’ll tell you what,
0:09:41 you don’t need $250,000 to get, you only need that for this Wells Fargo bonus and maybe a couple
0:09:48 other premier brokerage bonuses, but that’s 1% or 2% of the bonuses that you have available to you.
0:09:52 Most of the bonuses you have available to you are going to be checking accounts with very basic
0:10:00 requirements that you can meet if you have either $500 in cash or a steady paycheck, any steady
0:10:05 paycheck. It doesn’t matter if you’re making 500 a week or 5,000 a week. If you have one steady
0:10:12 paycheck, you can get at least a couple of bank accounts a month. Okay. Or if you have $500 in cash.
0:10:16 Okay. Okay. And if you have more than that, that makes it a little easier, but it’s still
0:10:17 possible with very little cash.
0:10:24 Yeah. Just search or filter by the ones that have lower requirements. That makes sense. For a while,
0:10:30 like Robinhood was doing like a huge match on, you transfer your brokerage stuff over to us. It will
0:10:36 pay you like a one or 2% bonus. So if you were transferring, you know, half a billion dollars worth
0:10:41 of assets, like, oh shoot, it was a huge, huge, relatively speaking bonus for not a lot of work.
0:10:46 Yeah. I saw that. The thing that dissuaded me from that was from transferring my IRA over to them
0:10:50 was I noticed that you weren’t fully vested in it for something like 36 months.
0:10:53 So you had to keep it open for three years in that case?
0:10:58 It was almost like, don’t quote me on this, but there was something where it might’ve been where
0:11:03 you couldn’t move it for several months also. So it’s like, number one, you don’t, you don’t get
0:11:10 the one or 2% for 36 months. So it’s like, that’s first off, it’s, if it’s 2% on a significant amount
0:11:15 of money, then sure. Okay. Maybe, but I mean, do your financial planning. I don’t have a billion dollars.
0:11:22 So I, 2%, 2% of my IRA is not worth locking it up for a long time. No.
0:11:28 Yeah. And that’s kind of what has dissuaded me from really pursuing these because like, okay,
0:11:34 open a new credit card, meet the minimum spend, get this bonus relatively easy, relatively low lift.
0:11:39 But it’s like, I’ve had the same bank account for 25 years. I don’t know. It’s like been a long time
0:11:45 since switching banks. It’s like with all the direct deposit or all the auto pay, all of, you know,
0:11:51 so many different things are tied to that where it’s like, it’s a pain to switch it, switch it over.
0:11:55 And so your setup is to have like, like the business bank account as like your primary
0:11:59 inflow. And you like minimize the, the work required to do all the switching.
0:12:03 You know, that, that’s a good problem for me to remember, Nick, that if you have like a bunch of
0:12:07 auto pay, you don’t have to close your other bank account. You don’t have to close whatever your bank,
0:12:12 who’s your, who’s your primary bank right now? Chase. Chase. Okay. The only reason you would need to
0:12:15 close your account is if you want to open another one 18 months later and get a bonus.
0:12:20 That’s like, you can leave that open. I leave my Chase business account is going to stay open
0:12:24 forever. Okay. No, that’s a, no, that’s a good, that’s a good reframe, right? You don’t have to,
0:12:27 you don’t, you have to close it. And if you’re doing this, you don’t necessarily have to like
0:12:31 permanently switch in your mind. Like it’s just a game, a game that you’re playing. Okay.
0:12:34 No, no, no, no, no, no. You don’t have, no. Thank you for asking that. That’s a good,
0:12:35 that’s important point.
0:12:39 No, no, no. That’s, that’s, that’s helpful for me because I always would frame it as like,
0:12:43 oh, is it worthwhile switching? It’s like, no, the switching costs are too high, but oh,
0:12:45 if I’m just playing a bonus game, then sure.
0:12:49 No, you just open a new, you don’t have to move anything there except put some money in there.
0:12:54 And you can just, sometimes you can shoot it from your account, but usually you’re going to need to
0:12:58 make sure you’re either meeting it with a direct deposit or shooting it from a business account.
0:13:02 More with Dylan in just a moment, including the potential impact on your credit score
0:13:07 and other risks associated with going after bank bonuses right after this.
0:13:13 Some businesses are quite adept at helping you part with your money, with their crazy high bills,
0:13:18 bogus fees, and quote unquote free perks that actually cost you more in the long run.
0:13:23 I would lump traditional wireless carriers into this category. And that’s why I made the switch
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0:14:19 On the Side Hustle Show, we spend a lot of time on generating ideas and the marketing tactics that
0:14:25 drive traffic and make sales and intentionally less time on the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how those
0:14:30 sales actually happen. And the reason for that is for tons of Side Hustle Show guests like Randall
0:14:36 Pulfer, Mike Ettenberg, Becky Beach, Lou Rice, and more, the business behind the business is all the same.
0:14:41 It’s Shopify. Nobody does selling better than Shopify, and that’s why it’s the number one
0:14:47 checkout on the planet. Plus, when you use Shopify, you’ll be giving your customers access to ShopPay,
0:14:53 which boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning a lot less abandoned carts and a whole lot more sales going.
0:14:59 Shopify is the commerce platform that helps you sell wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling,
0:15:05 online, in person, in their feed, and everywhere in between. Upgrade your business and get the same
0:15:10 checkout used by dozens of successful Side Hustle Show guests. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period
0:15:18 at Shopify.com slash Side Hustle, all lowercase. Go to Shopify.com slash Side Hustle to upgrade your
0:15:28 selling today. Shopify.com slash Side Hustle. Okay. The other thing that I’ve noticed on this doctor of
0:15:37 credit list is they say opening this account is a soft credit pull. Can you speak to the impacts on
0:15:43 your credit report of doing this consistently? There’s not one. As far as I know, there’s a soft
0:15:49 pull that doesn’t lower your score. I don’t think lenders care about that. Hard pulls are what you
0:15:52 need to worry about. Okay. And when I say worry, I just mean you just need to be aware.
0:15:58 If you have too many inquiries in a short period of time, that can make an impact.
0:16:04 A hard pull. But there’s going to be maybe four on this list that are a hard pull. But doctor of credit
0:16:09 is going to tell you. They’re going to say when you click on it. And you’re going to need to give
0:16:13 them permission when you’re set. So if you don’t want a hard pull on your credit right now, it’s not worth
0:16:18 it because they’re going to give you the same $200, $300, $400 as the next account. So skip the ones
0:16:23 that are hard pulls. Yeah. And then you keep it open long enough, usually, like you said, 30, 60,
0:16:28 90 days, however long you have to do it. And then did I hear you say you kept it open another three
0:16:34 months, another period beyond that? Best practice is to leave the account open past when you get the
0:16:40 bonus. Okay. Now, the optimal way to do things, you would think theoretically, as soon as you get the
0:16:45 bonus, close the account. The thing is, the bank might notice it to reset your clock or whatever.
0:16:50 Yeah. Yes. So you might think you want to close the account straight away so that instead of keeping
0:16:55 it open the full six months, the thing is, banks might take notice of that. And maybe they won’t
0:17:00 let you open another account next time. Okay. So that’s if even if you’re selfishly concerned,
0:17:04 don’t close the account straight away, leave it open a couple months, just keep opening other
0:17:08 accounts in the meantime, and just let that one cool down after you get your bonus. If you want,
0:17:12 put a little activity on it, put a little debit card purchase here or there, don’t no need to
0:17:19 complicate things, but you don’t want to like make it obvious that they’re not making a lot of money
0:17:26 off of you because they want good customers. Right. So don’t stand out as somebody who’s just going to
0:17:28 hit them for some money and leave. Don’t make yourself a target.
0:17:30 Got it. How many accounts do you have open right now?
0:17:32 I have 20 open right now.
0:17:37 And so you’re having to spread direct deposits, so to speak, you know, across a dozen or more
0:17:41 different, different places. You just do it once or twice. You usually, usually you just have to do
0:17:44 that once for each account. You just use that. They just have to get one.
0:17:48 Okay. One direct deposit checks the box. Like, okay, he set it up.
0:17:52 And then you can forget, basically you can almost forget about it until you get the bonus three months
0:17:57 later. Okay. Got it. How do you keep track of all that? So it’s more intimidating, like working on
0:18:01 20 at a time. I mean, I guess there are more complex problems in the world to solve, but like
0:18:06 picturing like a chart of like the timeline to the bonus and like the requirements. Like,
0:18:09 how do you, um, is there an app for that? Like, how do you do it?
0:18:13 Yes. You want a spreadsheet. Here’s the fields that I have. And I’ll show you a picture of this
0:18:18 later or something. If you want to put it on whatever bank name is your field one. And that’s where you
0:18:23 put Chase, Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, Chime Bank, Bank of Everything. That’s the name of the bank.
0:18:28 My second field I have there is account type. I want to remember if it’s a checking account,
0:18:35 a savings account, a business account, or a portal. Okay. Cause that, that helps me know at a glance
0:18:42 whether I’m eligible for the next checking account or savings account. So next thing is reward amount.
0:18:46 That’s the cash money you’re going to get for each account. So at Chase reward amount, I have up
0:18:56 there $900. Wells Fargo, $2,500. One bank, $250. PSECU, $300. So that’s, that’s your third field.
0:19:01 You got bank account type bonus amount. Yeah. Then you want to have your open date when you open the
0:19:04 account. Then you want to have your close date. And obviously that’s not going to be filled out
0:19:07 straight away. You’re going to fill that out later when you close it so that, you know, next time
0:19:13 when, if, if you need to wait 12 months, yeah. When you can reopen. Next thing you want to know is fees.
0:19:18 Okay. Now that’s one thing that you’re going to, this is part of why tracking is important. And when
0:19:21 I, when I say tracking, I just mean having a spreadsheet and knowing what you need to do.
0:19:27 You sometimes half the accounts, there’s no fees. Okay. But some of the accounts, you know,
0:19:31 they might charge you a $5 maintenance fee or a $12 maintenance fee. I saw one crazy bank,
0:19:37 bank of Hawaii was like a $25, but that’s, you know, that’s crazy. You want to put in one of your
0:19:45 fields your fees and you don’t need to know what the fee is. I just put, uh, for chase $2,000 D. And
0:19:50 what that means is I need to make sure that in my bank account once a month, there needs to be at
0:19:56 least $2,000 going into that account in order to avoid the maintenance fee. And usually it’s not that
0:20:02 much. Usually it’s something like, okay. Citizens is like make one transaction. And I chatted what is
0:20:06 one. Well, you know, I have a citizens checking and a citizen saving, move a dollar over to savings
0:20:10 and then move it back. That satisfies your, yeah, that’s a transaction. Okay. I mean, yeah, yeah.
0:20:14 And then another one is going to be, make sure there’s like Santander was make sure there’s at
0:20:19 least three debit card transactions. And that’s easy too. You just, if you use Amazon, do a $5 reload
0:20:24 three times once a month. So that’s what you put in, in your fees field so that you can avoid
0:20:30 paying a $5, $15 maintenance fee, whatever it is. Okay. Next thing on your spreadsheet is, um,
0:20:36 paid by. Got it. So when you read the, the, the fine print, it’s going to say after you meet the
0:20:42 requirements, 90 days before you get the bonus. Okay. So you have to meet the requirements. Usually
0:20:47 within 30 days, you have to move your deposit over, make sure they get the 500 bucks. And then 90 days
0:20:51 later, you get the bonus. You don’t get the bonus straight away. You have to wait. You have to wait
0:20:56 like a few months, mostly. Yeah. Chase, they pay you quick. They pay in 25 days or faster. And Bank of
0:21:01 America is the same thing. So you want to put when you expect to get paid. Okay. Just so that
0:21:06 if that date has passed, then you, you know, that you either made a mistake or the bank made a mistake.
0:21:10 And it’s usually you, it’s usually you, you messed up meeting one of the eligibility things.
0:21:15 And then the last thing is notes. That’s where I put random stuff like, uh, like relay. I have a note
0:21:19 here for relay bank that they have some useful services besides just the bonus I got from them. So I’m
0:21:24 going to leave the relay bank open just because they, they have some like helpful like software
0:21:29 and stuff. That’s it. Bank name, account type, bonus amount, open date, close date fees, paid by and
0:21:37 notes. That’s it. Okay. What do you see is maybe the biggest risk of somebody starting down this path?
0:21:41 I mean, I guess you could dip your toes, do one or two and see how it works, get comfortable with it
0:21:46 and then go, go nuts with it. Like you have, like, you might think the risk is, Oh, what if I, uh,
0:21:50 what if I lose my money? Or it’s like, what if I put money? What if I need the money? Like,
0:21:53 like people ask that some, like, what if I put the money in? What if I need the money? Well,
0:21:57 it’s your money. It’s a checking account. You can use it. So that’s not a risk. Like moving,
0:22:03 moving your direct deposit over to your checking account is, is not a risk. Now it’s possible
0:22:09 theoretically, like let’s say the bank detects fraud or something like that. Now, now I don’t know why
0:22:14 they would, it’s never happened to me, but let’s say, let’s say you need to pay your bills and you
0:22:19 moved your money over to it over to your new bonus account and you get hit with a fraud alert and your
0:22:24 money’s locked up. Usually, unless it’s the weekend, even if it is the weekend, cause it’s fraud,
0:22:28 usually like they’ll handle that on the weekend too. You call them up, whatever they need your ID or
0:22:33 something, and then you get your money back. So that’s a slight risk. I guess one thing that actually
0:22:40 did happen to me was Fidelity bank. And as far as I know, they’re the only bank that’s done something
0:22:43 this egregious and a long, cause a lot of people were talking about it on bank bonus one Oh two
0:22:51 Facebook. I moved something like $5,000 there with an ACH pull. Don’t, don’t, don’t worry about the
0:22:59 difference between these, but just, I moved $5,000 there that they locked it up for like 25 days.
0:23:07 Okay. And that didn’t ruin my life or anything, but there was no way to get that $5,000 faster than
0:23:13 the 25 days they needed. Okay. But that is one bank and that, and I’m just telling you the truth.
0:23:17 That’s the only time anything like that has happened to me. Yeah. Okay. And it was just
0:23:23 Fidelity bank and everybody was talking about it. And if I paid attention to bank bonus one Oh two
0:23:30 Facebook, I would have seen don’t do an ACH pull to Fidelity bank cause they’re locking it up for 25
0:23:35 days for some reason. Okay. But most of your banks are not, not going to do that. And if they do lock
0:23:39 it up, it’s not going to be for 25 days. It’s going to be for a few days or a week while they figure out
0:23:44 who you are. But remember that’s very unlikely to happen. Yeah. Then you can just, yeah, get to get to
0:23:50 the bottom of this. Yes. No, that’s fair. Any mistakes that you’ve made or something you would
0:23:56 do differently if you were starting over? The biggest mistake I made was I learned that you
0:24:00 could do this three years ago and I didn’t take it seriously until six months ago. Cause I thought it
0:24:04 was too good to be true. They’re going to, they’re going to catch on to me. I’m not going to be able
0:24:10 to open accounts anymore. They’re going to send people to break my legs. Okay. But I could have been
0:24:16 making an extra two, 300 bucks a week for two and a half years that I didn’t just because I was busy,
0:24:22 you know, busy working full time. I didn’t, I didn’t want to take one hour, maybe, maybe two out
0:24:29 of my week to just figure out exactly how to do this and do one a week. So not starting sooner would be
0:24:33 my biggest mistake. Second mistake, which is not really a mistake, but a problem since you asked me
0:24:38 about problems. Also, the second biggest problem I encountered was because I changed addresses
0:24:43 recently. Whenever you go to open an account, you put in your personal information, your address,
0:24:48 your social, whatever. Sometimes they want like a picture of your ID. And if the, if the information
0:24:52 in the form doesn’t match your, like, let’s say you haven’t moved your ID over with the DMV,
0:24:56 that could make a problem and they’re going to fail. They can just automatically, it’s going to,
0:25:02 can’t, can’t, can’t do it. Cause if you know, their system thinks you’re still in Texas or Knoxville
0:25:08 or whatever. Okay. So you need to get your ID changed over with the public records with the DMV.
0:25:13 Yeah. I had a problem because I had changed addresses twice since coming to Connecticut.
0:25:18 Some public records were spitting out that I was still over in new Britain when I’ve moved elsewhere
0:25:25 since then. So you’ll know if you get a declination, when you go to open an account, failure to identify,
0:25:31 they’ll usually tell you that. And you’ll know that one of the, whatever record that they’re pulling,
0:25:35 it has the wrong address for you. The wrong phone number was doing it for me one time.
0:25:40 Like I, like I have two different phone numbers or if they asked me like what company I, I gave some,
0:25:45 I gave some, some smart aleck answer to some company I worked for that doesn’t exist 10 years ago.
0:25:51 And that was getting me a declination from what, you know, one bank. I don’t remember which,
0:25:53 so you got to make sure your public records are square as well.
0:25:59 Yeah. That’s something I kind of forgot to mention. Like the, you know, what would,
0:26:03 what would trigger a rejection in the credit card world? It’s, well, you already have too
0:26:08 many open accounts with us. You had too many recent inquiries or we don’t like your credit
0:26:13 utilization ratio. Like any number of things could cause a rejection on that front. And by the way,
0:26:17 you know, they just made a hard pull to tell you that they were rejecting you, but less so in this
0:26:27 case. Yeah. The other big red tape thing that you need to know about is checks systems and EWS that
0:26:32 stands for early warning systems. You need to know about checks and EWS. Okay. And Dr. Credit has a page
0:26:40 on this. It’s not complicated. Basically checks and early warning systems are what’s the word? Consumer
0:26:47 reporting agencies and they keep track of how many new accounts are opened in your name. And the purpose
0:26:53 of this is let’s say Nick Loper, let’s say checks tracks, Nick Loper and Nick Loper opened 20 checking
0:27:00 accounts today. The bank is going to pull your checks and see, Oh, somebody’s trying to scam Nick Loper by
0:27:06 opening a bunch of accounts in his name. Yeah. It’s like an identity theft thing. Yes. So checks and EWS
0:27:15 are primarily detecting identity theft. You could get a declination because the bank is checks sensitive
0:27:24 and they see you’ve opened a lot of accounts. Okay. The thing is that’s to find fraud. That’s part of why
0:27:29 you’re limiting yourself to one a week is because you don’t want to have too high of a velocity or else
0:27:33 you’re going to trigger fraud. Okay. So that’s what banks see automatically. Just what their
0:27:39 computers see is if your checks numbers are really high in a short amount of time, you might get
0:27:44 declined just because they think that somebody’s trying to steal your identity. Got it. But, but you
0:27:48 found one a week doesn’t run into that issue. No, it doesn’t. And it doesn’t for, for most people
0:27:53 either. The only biggest problems I had was just because I changed my address. Okay. Well, Dylan, this is
0:27:57 really interesting stuff, a side hustle that ever really considered, but you’re, you’re making a good case
0:28:03 for it. Dylan’s bonuses.com is a, is where you can find them. Let’s wrap this thing up with your number
0:28:10 one tip for side hustle nation. Get started and don’t give up. It’s real. Make sure to enlist help
0:28:16 from me or the community at doctor of credit or bank bonus one or two Facebook, and you’ll start seeing
0:28:21 gains sooner rather than later. Okay. So don’t, I wouldn’t put it off if I was you. I wish I wish I had
0:28:26 started sooner and it is real. I have a second number one tip. The second number one tip is be
0:28:32 nice to the bank and be nice to your fellow bonus hunters. Don’t close accounts early and don’t make
0:28:38 a scene. Don’t make a scene. What would constitute making a scene? You don’t call the bank unless you
0:28:44 need to. That’s basically it. Don’t take up their customer service reps time. Don’t make them pay a
0:28:48 whole lot more attention to you than they need to. Okay. Yeah. Don’t, yeah. Don’t be the squeaky
0:28:54 wheel. Yeah, exactly. No, it’s super interesting. I, my mentality was always like this full on switch
0:29:00 and it’s like, yeah, it’s a $300 to switch my entire financial backing. Like, I don’t know if it’s
0:29:06 worthwhile, but to open a new separate account and not looking at it necessarily as a one-off thing,
0:29:11 but something that you can do consistently, just working your way down the list. Is it going to replace
0:29:16 your day job? Probably not, but relatively simple, relatively low risk, not a lot of specialized
0:29:20 skills required. Dylan mentioned his tracking spreadsheet. If you can keep track of that,
0:29:26 you’re in good shape and you can use those extra funds to pay down debt, invest, seed money for a
0:29:31 new side hustle, lots of different ways to go about it. So Dylan, appreciate you sharing your insight.
0:29:35 Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up
0:29:41 sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:29:45 And of course we’ll link up the resources that Dylan mentioned in this episode as well.
0:29:50 That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time. Let’s go out there and make
0:29:55 something happen. And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.

0:00:05 From zero to 50 grand in monthly vending revenue in 16 months.
0:00:08 What’s up? What’s up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the side hustle show where we’ve been helping
0:00:13 people make extra money since 2013. Today we’re talking about the popular quote unquote passive
0:00:19 income business of vending machines and how my guest was able to scale up his operation to 30
0:00:26 locations in over 50 grand in monthly revenue in under a year and a half. From H&H Vending,
0:00:32 Cologia. Welcome to the side hustle show. Hey, Nick. Thanks for having me. You bet. Stick around in
0:00:36 this one. We’re going to learn how to negotiate your first vending machine placements, the right
0:00:42 locations that make the best fit there, the startup costs involved, and just how passive and profitable
0:00:47 the business really is if you’re constantly having to restock products. But Anthony, take me back to
0:00:52 the beginning, not that long ago, year and a half ago. And you’re thinking, why I ought to get into
0:00:57 this vending machine business. I’m going to turn some snacks and drinks into some monthly cash flow.
0:01:03 I’ve been in the real estate industry since like 2009. And I was like talking with my wife and I’m
0:01:07 like, my kids were three and five at the time. And I’m like, you know what? I’ve had the real estate
0:01:14 business. You know, I’ve been doing this here for, you know, 15 years. I go, I really want to do
0:01:19 something for like the kids. And I want to teach them like entrepreneurship and like work ethic. You know,
0:01:24 now that I’m making this transition from this other real estate job I was doing, I go,
0:01:28 we should look for some type of business that I could, you know, put the same blood, sweat and
0:01:33 tears that I’m putting in on the real estate side, you know, and put it into basically a business that
0:01:37 could be like a recurring income stream. Because with real estate, obviously there’s the highs and
0:01:42 lows and peaks and valleys. So, you know, once you sell a house or flip a house, it’s like, okay,
0:01:48 got to do it all over again. I came a guy across, uh, Mike Hoffman on Twitter and he had this
0:01:52 vendingpreneur community. Yes. Mr. Passive on Twitter, right? Mr. Passive. Yes, exactly.
0:01:58 And I was like, hmm, vending. Interesting. I go, and then I started like reading more about it.
0:02:02 And then I was like, you know what? I go to my wife’s name is Taylor. And I go, you know what?
0:02:07 I go, I think this could be a really good business that we could do. Not a lot of upfront capital
0:02:13 initially. We could grow it into something passively, you know, and do it with the kids. I can teach them
0:02:19 entrepreneurship and work ethic. And I think that would be a really good idea for us to kind of go
0:02:24 full blown. So it was like a two, three weeks. I was going back and forth with Mike and his team
0:02:31 and I ended up joining this community like end of September. And I just went full blown, like all in
0:02:37 at the time. Fast forward, you know, 15 months later, you know, we did, uh, with it just being the end of
0:02:42 February a couple of days ago, you know, we were over $65,000 in revenue, you know, and I’m looking
0:02:48 to be at over 75,000 by the end of April. Cause I have other machines that have just got installed
0:02:53 this past week. And I got three more that are going in, uh, three locations going in like next week.
0:02:59 And so that’s the name of the game is stacking locations and machines. And now what, what’s your
0:03:04 take on this? Like, is there a place for one machine, two, two machines, like, you know,
0:03:09 the toe dip, Hey, I want to get my kids, you know, some exposure to supply and demand and cashflow
0:03:14 and product inventory turnover. Or it’s like, do you need to go big? Like, do you need dozens of
0:03:18 machines to make it into like full-time thing? I mean, a full-time thing. Yes. But just to,
0:03:24 to be able to operate. Yeah, that’s a great question, Nick. And you know, my story is different from like
0:03:29 everybody else’s story. Like, so, like I said, I ended up joining Mike’s vendingpreneur community.
0:03:36 And when I was in there, I talked to a lot of other different people that had different routes.
0:03:41 I was kind of like treating them as like my board of directors, but there was a guy down in Texas.
0:03:48 He’s a high school football coach and a teacher, and he has only four locations and he’s doing 20 K a
0:03:55 month. Wow. You know, so you could be very selective with your locations of like how, like, depending on
0:03:59 your goals or what your time is like, Hey, I’m a fireman or I’m retired. I just want some supplemental
0:04:08 income, you know, or I’m a teacher and I want to teach my kids to do this. They’re 18 and 19 and
0:04:12 you’ve got some built-in stockers already and stuff. So it all depends on like what your goals are.
0:04:18 So for me, when I first got into the business, like I was like so antsy. I was like, Oh my God,
0:04:22 I got to get a location. Let’s do this. Let’s go. Let’s go. But the biggest thing I tell people now,
0:04:28 when they, when they’re going to start out something, I go, be poised, wait for the right location.
0:04:34 If it takes four or five months to wait for the right location, wait for it. Don’t just do your,
0:04:39 let me use a sports analogy here. Don’t use your spring training or training camp and like, um,
0:04:45 football on a, on a location that is not going to be the best. That’s what happened with me.
0:04:48 When I did it, I ended up getting a location that was five minutes from my house.
0:04:53 And unfortunately it’s only been doing like $700 a month because there were certain questions
0:04:59 questions that I didn’t maybe ask in the beginning of when I was basically looking when I was basically
0:05:04 qualifying that property. When I first initially went, I don’t know, 700 bucks a month is not
0:05:10 nothing. Well, 700 bucks a month of revenue. So once you deduct your cost of goods and your fees and all
0:05:14 this stuff, you know, usually your cost of goods, you want to shoot from like anywhere from like around
0:05:20 35%, you want to be like 35%. If you’re growing exponentially, like kind of how I am, you’re
0:05:26 buying so much inventory because you’re constantly refilling up new machines. I’ve been averaging a cost
0:05:31 of goods of maybe like anywhere between like 40 and 43%, you know, but like once I plateau,
0:05:38 my goal is to be 35 to 33 ish percent cost of goods, you know, at that point.
0:05:42 Okay. So interesting. Raw number is like sell something for a dollar. That means you bought
0:05:48 it for 30 cents. That’s correct. Okay. Yep. So I try to shoot for margins for drinks and chips. I try
0:05:55 to shoot for 65% plus candy can’t get there. Cocoa has gone up in price, you know, and just like with
0:05:58 everything with inflation, you know, candy is going to probably be like one of your worst margins,
0:06:05 you know, like it’s, you’re probably going to be like 50 to 57% on your candy. And then what I’ve
0:06:09 been doing is since I’ve been going into a lot of class A luxury apartments, a lot of the seven
0:06:17 11s and Walgreens and, you know, just have been closing, you know? And so what I’ve been doing
0:06:20 is I’ve been going in there with my pitch and saying to these property managers and say, Hey, you know
0:06:25 what? I’m like, I’m also going to, it’s not old school machines. I’m using these AI powered smart
0:06:31 markets now. And I’m saying, Hey, I could put incidental items in there, you know, Tylenol,
0:06:37 toilet paper, paper towels, Vizine, Mucinex, NyQuil, Tide Pods, Bounce Sheets, whatever.
0:06:40 Okay. Yeah. Yeah. More than just snacks and drinks. Sure.
0:06:45 Yeah. You know, you, those are a little bit like around a smaller margin, maybe like 45 to 50%,
0:06:50 but I put it in there because when I go in there to pitch a location, it’s a value add that may be
0:06:54 a certain person, a certain operator that has machines in there right now, they can’t offer.
0:06:54 Okay.
0:06:56 You know, so they see the value in me.
0:07:00 Let’s go back to this first location. The one that you said is doing 700 bucks a month.
0:07:01 Yes.
0:07:05 Sits super close to home. It sounds like, you know, business with training wheels,
0:07:10 like a, you know, low risk kind of a, kind of a thing. I could stock it myself as, as need be.
0:07:10 Yep.
0:07:15 You don’t have the machine yet. I imagine you get a yes from the property manager. What’s the
0:07:20 conversation like? Hey, have you, have you thought about Mike was, so Mike was on the show episode
0:07:25 599 last year. You go back, listen to that one, but he was like, don’t say the V word. He’s like,
0:07:30 lead with like modern amenities. Don’t say vending, but what’s your, what’s your conversation like
0:07:31 with this building or with this operator?
0:07:37 Yeah. Uh, vending it’s out of my vocabulary. Um, I, I, I say it’s, it’s, uh, there are smart
0:07:43 markets is basically what they are. The AR, the AI, their AI smart markets. And that’s what I lead
0:07:49 with. And then this is going to be amenity for your workforce. Uh, this is going to be an amenity
0:07:54 for your building, you know, cause if you don’t want it, I’m going to go down the street anyway.
0:07:58 And I’m going to talk to, you know, the other competitor. And if they say yes, that’s an amenity
0:08:03 that they’re going to have and that your building won’t have, you know? So it’s, it’s a competition
0:08:08 type business, especially, you know, like in luxury real estate, but like in manufacturing or
0:08:13 that’s the one warehouse that I’m in at right now, you know, they want their people to be satisfied
0:08:18 and work hard and it’s a nice amenity for them. You know, was that, was it an apartment
0:08:21 building that first location? No, the first location. So this is where I made the mistake.
0:08:26 So whoever’s listening and wants to start your own vending route, make sure you’ve qualified
0:08:31 the location thoroughly. So when I went there, they told me they had two shifts and it was 75
0:08:39 employees. So I assumed that it was 75 employees for both shifts. Well, it turned out to be that
0:08:44 there were 70 employees for the first shift. And then for the night shift, there were four.
0:08:51 So I was thinking that this thing was going to be 150 employee place. And it was just a mistake
0:08:55 on my part. You live and you learn, but you know, make sure you’re thorough and you ask those questions
0:08:59 and make sure you understand what the, you know, how many people are working there. I mean, especially
0:09:04 if you come across like one of these commercial buildings or office buildings, you know, what’s
0:09:08 the vacancy? Okay. Well, that’s great. But how many people, how many of these suites and
0:09:13 these people are working from home, how many of these companies inside this office building
0:09:18 are supplying goods for free, you know, cause it might be like a wealth management, you know,
0:09:22 team or office in there that has maybe a hundred employees that go in there, but then, but they’re
0:09:26 supplying everything for their employees for free protein bars, water, all that stuff. That’s,
0:09:32 that’s going to deter you to them from going there. So just make sure you’re very thorough with,
0:09:36 with like asking your questions once you go there, just so you’re qualifying the property
0:09:40 correctly. Because they might say, Hey, we’re 80% occupied, but if there’s, they’re only reporting
0:09:47 into work two days a week, it’s not a lot of foot traffic. Yeah. 80% times 40% of the week is a
0:09:54 little bit, a little bit lower. Is there a sweet spot that you found in terms of, you know, building
0:10:01 size, number of residents, number of workers, or, you know, before anything lower and just like,
0:10:06 it doesn’t really make sense. If I’m evaluating a property site, it’s got to have for residential
0:10:12 real estate, it’s got to have a minimum of 200 units. Okay. And I don’t like garden apartments.
0:10:17 So I don’t want like the, the machines being in a clubhouse. And then there’s a 800 units that are
0:10:22 like a four block radius. And then people have to walk to the clubhouse. I don’t like those.
0:10:26 I need a building that is a, it’s all one building. So the elevator takes you down to the
0:10:31 vending machine. You know, it takes you up. You can’t walk outside because again, convenience.
0:10:37 Yeah. Manufacturing facilities. I would want to be in there with at least 150 employees.
0:10:42 If it’s an office building, I mean, I’ll tell you, I’ve been looking at some of the most beautiful
0:10:47 skyscrapers in downtown Chicago for the past eight months. And I’ve had a ton of meetings with a lot
0:10:51 of them down there because I’ve just been getting referred to them, but I would go through the same
0:10:55 questions now of when I’m asking them, okay, what’s the vacancy? Oh, 60%. How many people are working
0:11:00 from home? Oh, well, you know, it’s Mondays and Thursdays are there’s about maybe a thousand
0:11:05 people through the turn dial, you know, and then maybe Fridays there’s maybe 300. I’m like, okay,
0:11:09 so we’re working with like around 2,300 people a week. So times that by four, you know, we’re like
0:11:15 around 9,200, you know, for the month. It’s like, I’m like, all right. I’m like, but I don’t know
0:11:18 like how good it’s going to do. And a lot of these commercial buildings, they have these empty
0:11:23 seven 11s or the bookstores that they used to have where they were cooking before COVID, you know,
0:11:28 they got all these empty spaces, but I just don’t want to be the Guinea pig. So what I’ve been doing
0:11:31 is, and I haven’t got anyone to take one yet. Mike has been a lot better than me. He’s actually had
0:11:36 some people that have subsidized. So what I do is, is with those commercial buildings, just so I’m not
0:11:41 losing in the beginning is that I will go in there and then I will offer them. And I’ll say here, I
0:11:45 don’t know what your location is going to go ahead and do. I go, but I need a, and I’ll work my numbers
0:11:49 backwards with like what I need to be profitable on that location. And I’ll just say, for an example,
0:11:53 I need to make $2,000 in revenue. That way it could cover my cost of goods, my stock or any
0:11:59 spoilage. This monthly or weekly? Monthly. Okay. Yeah. So if the machine without me knowing it,
0:12:04 if it goes in there to does $1,300 a month, you know, okay, I’m going to invoice you for the
0:12:09 difference of $700 where you’re building or your owner is going to have to pay. I know you guys want
0:12:15 these amenities and stuff like that, but I can’t take that risk of being a Guinea pig here and having
0:12:19 this thing, having me lose money. And then I have to move the machine for relocation and all that.
0:12:23 And then like, I’m, I don’t win, you know, it’s not, it doesn’t set me up for success. I haven’t
0:12:28 had anybody take me up on that yet. Mike has maybe done two or three of those out for him out in the
0:12:32 West, out in Oregon by you guys. Like he has done, like he’s been like a master at it.
0:12:38 Got it. So that is, so that’s the pitch is like, look, we could offer these, um, amenities,
0:12:43 snack, drink, you know, food service ourselves as the business owners, or we could hire
0:12:47 Anthony to do it. And we understand he’s got to make some money and this is his minimum.
0:12:50 And if it doesn’t hit that minimum, then we’re going to have to subsidize it,
0:12:55 but it’s still worthwhile because it keeps our employees, you know, keeps the tenants happier.
0:12:58 That’s the pitch anyways. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no, absolutely.
0:13:02 More with Anthony in just a moment, including what happens when your prospect building
0:13:07 already has a vending machine and how much you might have to pay to place a new machine right after
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0:15:27 Shopify.com slash side hustle. I asked Mike the same question, like if this building has been around for
0:15:33 10, 15, 20 years, like have they literally never thought about this before? It’s hard to imagine
0:15:38 an office building or even a residential building that didn’t already have this vending machine in the
0:15:44 lobby or in the elevator bay. What I have found out in this business is extremely archaic.
0:15:50 All these property managers, majority of them had operators in there, but they just couldn’t get a
0:15:56 hold of them or they weren’t stocking it. So what I do is when I go into an appointment, I tell them,
0:16:00 hey, I’m local. You could call me. You’re going to call this cell phone number. You’re going to get me.
0:16:04 Okay. And I’m going to get back to you right away. When you’re dealing with these property managers,
0:16:08 these people that have decisions they have to make, they don’t want another headache of chasing you
0:16:12 down as a vendor, you know, and that, cause already doing that and dealing it with all these other
0:16:14 fires that they’re dealing with through the building. They’re dealing with the painter,
0:16:18 the scaffolder, the window company, the, you know, all these other different trades that they’re
0:16:22 dealing with. If you just call and you give them a nice experience of customer service back,
0:16:27 it’s refreshing to them. So when I go look at a property, I put a proposal together. I send it,
0:16:33 I take pictures and video. I send it over to my mock-up guy. He gets it over to me within 24 hours
0:16:36 and I send them a proposal within 24 hours. And every single time when I do that,
0:16:41 they are floored away of how quickly they got that proposal. So get back to people quickly,
0:16:45 you know, set expectations from the beginning. A lot of these, like I said, a lot of these property
0:16:50 managers, they are, they’re, they’re worried about when is it going to be stocked because it hasn’t
0:16:54 been regularly stocked. So I, I go on that first meeting and I set up the expectation. I tell them,
0:17:00 I go here, when I’m, when we sign up, I’m going to let you know what day your property is going to be
0:17:05 stocked on. So then that way, if you’re getting down to like four Cokes or three Snickers, I don’t,
0:17:10 I don’t need to have 30 property managers texting me. Hey, it’s getting low. I’ve already set the
0:17:14 expectation of knowing that, Hey, your machine is going to be filled up on Tuesdays. So if it’s
0:17:18 Monday or Sunday and it’s low, I mean, we’re going to be refilling it shortly. So they know I’m coming,
0:17:23 setting that expectation. And I let them know after the first month, if I feel like your machine needs
0:17:27 to be stocked twice a week or three times a week, we’ll make the adjustments in our route schedule.
0:17:31 we’ll make sure that it’s going to be filled. Okay. So you find a lot of time you’re conquesting
0:17:39 market share from some legacy providers that have gotten, um, you gotten complacent or, you know,
0:17:44 they’re not answering the phone. They’re not performing the way that you would like for somebody
0:17:48 who’s new to the business, who’s young and hungry, who wants to go out and get it with a, with a more
0:17:52 modern experience or more modern machine. A hundred percent. Okay. Because a lot of the locations that I go
0:17:56 into, some of them had the same machines that I had in, but the other half, you know, they had
0:18:00 maybe the old school coil machines that maybe when me and you were growing up that we would see.
0:18:07 Yeah. I remember, you know, banging on, come on. Exactly. You know, it was like, so now I go in,
0:18:12 I show exactly now this new machine, these new machines that I have. And, um, you know, they’re
0:18:16 blown away, you know, they’re blown away. Okay. So that’s what’s in the proposal. The proposal says,
0:18:20 this is the machine that we’re going to use. You need to check out the specs, the model number,
0:18:24 you know, how, what it’s, what it could potentially hold in terms of inventory. This is when we’re
0:18:29 going to come by your stocking, restocking day is Tuesdays. And, you know, here it is sign on the
0:18:36 bottom line. Are they looking for concessions from you in terms of, well, you’re going to take up,
0:18:41 you know, 12 square feet of our floor space. We’re going to charge you rent for that on a monthly
0:18:47 basis, or we’re going to charge you a percentage of sales. Like what’s, what’s typical in terms of
0:18:52 that arrangement? So usually there’ll be a rev share agreement that I’ll give them when I go
0:18:56 into there. You know, when I first initially thought when I got in this business, I’m like,
0:19:00 ah, do I give rev shares? Why not? But I don’t need Anthony 2.0 coming down the line and offering
0:19:04 rev share to all my buildings and trying to boot me out, you know, uh, you know, a year down the line.
0:19:06 It’s always another person coming down the line.
0:19:11 Exactly. After I just spent $400,000 on equipment, you know, this past year. But like,
0:19:16 what I’m saying is I go in there and I say, here, I offer it from them to the beginning of
0:19:21 a rev share. And because I want to view it as a partnership, if I’m doing the job of what I’m
0:19:26 doing and I’m constantly evolving, uh, and I’m making certain changes and I’m doing different
0:19:32 things there, like with the machines and trying out new products. And I’m just very, I tell everybody,
0:19:36 I’m a very collaborative person. I don’t care what it is to put into these machines. I don’t care.
0:19:41 Like I will put whatever I have my variety that I put in there initially because I tell the,
0:19:45 I tell everyone it’s like dating, you know, it’s like a month or so. And so you kind of learn that
0:19:49 building. What do they like? Do they like Pepsi? Do they like Coke? Do they like Doritos? Do they
0:19:54 like Cheetos? Like, do they have more protein? Do they like kind bars? If somebody has a suggestion,
0:19:59 that person, that resident could scan that QR code and they could go ahead and send that back to me.
0:20:03 And my staff gets it. And we review those weekly. And then we make those changes, you know,
0:20:08 on certain those machines. If somebody has got a request for, um, a La Columbe black coffee,
0:20:12 I’ll go in there and I’ll take out one of the drinks that are maybe not selling. Maybe the Pepsi
0:20:15 isn’t selling and I’ll just replace it the following week and put it in there.
0:20:19 Okay. That’s, yeah, that’s kind of cool to crowdsource that wisdom a little bit. Yeah.
0:20:23 You can take a stab at the beginning. This is what we’re going to put in.
0:20:23 Yeah.
0:20:28 And then you get some data pretty quickly. If you got 200 residential units to say, well,
0:20:32 what’s, what’s actually moving here? And then take out the bottom 10%, bottom 20%,
0:20:33 try something new.
0:20:37 Exactly. No, absolutely. You know? And then basically that’s kind of like what I do. So
0:20:41 if I get those suggestions, I’ll review those weekly. And then I basically do a review of all
0:20:43 the machines, like, you know, basically monthly.
0:20:46 Okay. On the rev share side, what’s typical?
0:20:52 Three to 5%. Yeah. So when I go in there and it’s of gross sales, you know, because, um,
0:20:56 if you do it off profit, like, you know, profit could get like a little, it’s, it’s a little
0:20:56 tough.
0:21:00 Not, not a ton, but it’s, it’s just something to throw the property management company or
0:21:02 throw the building owner.
0:21:06 Throw the owner. Yeah, absolutely. You know, it’s more about them getting a little bit of
0:21:10 something back. You know, they feel validated that they’re getting something for return for
0:21:10 this amenity.
0:21:15 Because the alternative is they could just do it themselves. And I’ve been reviewing some like
0:21:20 performa, like real estate syndication type of documents. And there’s a line item on there
0:21:25 for like laundry and vending. Like they count on this as the investment group as part of their
0:21:31 revenue. And so there’s some segment of the building owner populations like, no, we’ll just
0:21:36 keep that in house. We’ll keep, you know, all that margin. But there’s another segment, like the kind
0:21:40 that you’re catering to is like, we don’t want to deal with the logistics of product and restocking
0:21:44 and machine maintenance or anything like that. We’ll just, Hey, you want to give us 5%? Cool.
0:21:46 You, you deal with it.
0:21:50 Yeah, they don’t. Because a lot of the people that I’ve experienced with is that they just have
0:21:54 so many fires that they’re putting out, fix this punch list on this unit here, this move in there,
0:22:00 like all this stuff. So like I am, you know, there’s just, there’s just a lot of, you know,
0:22:05 fires that they’re putting out and to have them focus on restocking. That is just something that
0:22:09 it’s like the ROI is not there for them. That’s not the best use of those, uh, those property
0:22:09 managers time.
0:22:15 Got it. So you mentioned, you kind of alluded to this equipment cost here. What does a vending machine
0:22:23 cost? What is, what’s your take on financing versus buying versus new versus use? Like lots
0:22:24 of different routes that you can go here.
0:22:30 I have like five different machines, which is kind of hectic because now I’m dealing with five
0:22:34 different operating systems, uh, in their backend and trying to have them all communicate to each
0:22:39 other with me, just pulling reports and all that stuff as well too. So, um, it’s a little bit of a pain
0:22:43 in the butt, but, uh, I’m working through it. It’s not like, like, it’s not like hard and it’s
0:22:48 like so much like extra work, but it is, you know, it is a nuisance in contrast to like the Southwest
0:22:53 model where we’re going to fly one type of airplane. So every, you know, any mechanic can work on any
0:22:57 plane, like that kind of thing versus, okay. It adds just a little bit of complexity.
0:23:02 Yep. Absolutely. So like the, I have a futuro combo machine, which it might be like one of those
0:23:07 ones with like the coil and that one takes cash. You know, those, I have a, I have four of those
0:23:13 machines at a shelter and those cost me like around 5,000 and I bought those refurbished.
0:23:18 Okay. Brand new. They would probably go for 6,500. I think is the new pricing as of 2025.
0:23:24 The micro markets. I have three of those. When I, when I say micro market, those are like those open
0:23:32 markets, people, you know, honest policy people could check out at a kiosk, you know, and those roughly,
0:23:37 and then I’d have to build and put those together and those run anywhere from like eight to like,
0:23:42 nine grand of what those are. But in those items, you got to look because you have some theft,
0:23:48 you know? So it adds a little bit to my guy when he goes to stock it. Cause one of our policies are,
0:23:54 one of our processes are when he goes to restock that micro market, he counts, he, he stocks the
0:23:59 whole unit. And then he has to go and verify all the inventory that is there, every single item.
0:24:04 And then if there’s 10 Cheetos that says on the system, but there’s only physically eight,
0:24:07 he has to change it to eight. Cause what happened to those other 10? Well,
0:24:12 somebody probably stole it. Yeah. You know? So those are the micro markets. I have Stockwell’s,
0:24:20 which are an AI smart machine. Those run like around like eight grand, like 80, like nine grand,
0:24:26 probably once, once it’s delivered with freight. And then the newest and latest machine that I’ve been
0:24:31 installing, I’ve installed 33 of them within the past four months has been these micro marts.
0:24:36 so they are a refrigerator. They’re AI power machines work like a Stockwell, but they hold
0:24:43 more inventory, but they actually have a video digital board that runs on the machine. So,
0:24:48 which is very powerful for me because like I can run ads on there is what I’m feeling like what I can
0:24:52 do down the line. Once I have the data and that could be additional revenue that I could get in without
0:24:57 even like, I haven’t even tapped into yet. Sounds fancy. Dude. When I was installing one of these last
0:25:02 weeks in the Fulton market area, which is like an emerging area, like in the West loop in Chicago,
0:25:07 like it’s like where Google has their space and there’s new buildings being built all the time
0:25:14 over there. The property manager was doing a tour, a owner’s tour and I was installing them. And when he
0:25:17 was, when he was walking, when one of the people were walking by, they like looked at it, they took a
0:25:21 picture and you know, because they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. It’s not like anything that
0:25:25 they have seen. It’s a really good looking machine. So property manager comes around the corner and
0:25:31 gives me a fist bump, you know, cause I made them look good on his tour. Nice. What are those things
0:25:37 run you? So those with freight, they are like around like 12 K on there, you know, so they’re a little
0:25:45 bit more expensive, but I’m, I’m, I’m counting on the ad space that I could potentially be selling down
0:25:49 the line. Once I have the data in front of me, Hey, I’m at a 500 unit building. I’ve had,
0:25:55 you know, there’s a monthly, I have over, you know, 800 transactions. There’s been this amount
0:25:59 of dollars, you know, and then, Hey, Coke, Pepsi, Chicago Cubs, you guys are playing the Cardinals
0:26:03 this week. Okay. But you want to put, you know, something in ad space on here for a hundred bucks
0:26:07 a month or 50 bucks a month, you know, and run it. Okay. Yeah. Now you’re in the media business.
0:26:11 Exactly. Right. Got a little mini billboard here for you. That’s what I’m hoping. I mean,
0:26:15 that’s, that’s my goal there to kind of really increase the revenues on those machines. So like
0:26:19 that, that is my goal. So next year, I’ll hopefully have a better idea about how that went.
0:26:24 This is helpful at the risk of doing public math, which I’ve sworn off doing, but it’s kind of this
0:26:31 upfront capital in equipment and inventory. And then, you know, a payback period of a number of
0:26:37 months or potentially years, if it’s a slow location, but like, how do you think about a winning
0:26:42 location or what’s kind of a target ROI, if you think about it that way, in terms of,
0:26:44 you know, the payback period on one of these machines?
0:26:50 So with me being initially started, I wanted to increase my cash flows right away on these,
0:26:56 on these routes that I had. Cashflow was very important to me. So I actually ended up paying
0:27:03 some of my first locations cash just so I didn’t have a finance payment. And that way I was able to
0:27:08 increase like my cashflow net. I wouldn’t have to factor that, you know? So one of those machines
0:27:16 that I bought was like nine grand with, it was doing like 23, 22 to $2,500 a month. So my net payment
0:27:23 of like what would come to me off of all that would be like around like 750 or 800 bucks. So I was like,
0:27:28 okay, my net payment is 750, 800. I’m going to break even on this and like less than a year. And then like,
0:27:34 if I look at my return on that, like every year over going over, like I’m going to be making that
0:27:38 it’s like a hundred percent return. So I’m like, right after it’s paid off. I mean, there’s depreciation,
0:27:43 there’s maintenance involved, I imagine, but you’ve covered your expenses and then it’s all gravy.
0:27:46 Yeah. Then it’s all gravy. And then like, I’m running the numbers. I’m like, okay, here, it’s
0:27:49 like a, each year it just goes up a hundred percent return, return, return, return. And then obviously
0:27:54 there might be maintenance and it might not be go up as high each year’s as that. But so when I was
0:27:58 looking at the numbers, I was like, oh my gosh, I’m like, I have to like, I’m making like 8% over
0:28:02 here. I’m like, I’m just going to take my money out and then just invest it into my machines. You
0:28:06 know, it’s like a better return. Right. Cause if you’re looking at a a hundred percent return
0:28:11 potentially. Yeah, exactly. So that’s the way I looked at it, you know, initially now what I did
0:28:16 was is that since I was growing, I leveraged like financing capabilities, you know? So some of these
0:28:21 places had, um, financing options. Basically what that meant was it would be like 0% down and then
0:28:25 they would finance it over 60 months and then maybe be like a 12%, you know, interest note.
0:28:31 And then maybe that machine would cost me like 160 or 175 bucks a month, you know? But if I’m making
0:28:37 1500, $1,600, you know, the one 60, one 75, it really wasn’t, you know, the end of the world,
0:28:41 like for me to go ahead and pay that, make that payment. Cause now I got extra cash where I could
0:28:47 go reinvest back into the business by just, you know, buying inventory, you know, building out the
0:28:51 warehouse and all that stuff as well too, which I’ll kind of talk about like how my transition went from
0:28:57 like me actually like growing. And then when I actually hired my first person and like when I
0:29:04 actually did that. Yeah. But yeah, so that’s kind of like where I was at within regards to like
0:29:08 evaluating these things, if I should pay cash or if I should go ahead and finance it, I will say
0:29:13 besides those first couple of machines that I paid cash, I financed every single one since.
0:29:19 More with Anthony in just a moment, including how he turns one location lead into three and hiring some
0:29:23 help. So we didn’t have to keep stocking the machines all by himself right after this.
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0:31:49 Okay, this is really helpful because yeah, I think we hear all $400,000 in equipment costs. Like, you know, the
0:31:56 jaw kind of hits the floor. But there are different creative options. Think about your return on monthly
0:32:04 cash flow, right? If you said, Oh, my financing payment on this machine is $175, $200 a month. And I’m clearing, call it
0:32:12 $300 even in monthly profit on maybe $1,000 in sales. Like if we’ve got those, that’s even like really low
0:32:18 margins. You’re paying for the machine, you’re paying for your inventory. And even if you’re breaking even
0:32:22 for the duration of that payment period, like you’re adding equity to the business, which is another
0:32:26 really interesting thing. It’s just like, yes, there’s this monthly, you know, semi-passive cash flow
0:32:31 play. But there’s also like, okay, now if I’ve got this route that’s doing 50, 60 grand a month,
0:32:38 like there’s a multiple that a new another vending operator would come in and buy that from you. Did you consider
0:32:45 buying existing routes like to grow through acquisition, if you know, from that old tired operator that you just wanted
0:32:50 out? Or has it all been kind of new, new conquest or new, new placements?
0:32:56 No, but I actually we I actually bought one in downtown Chicago, there was a kid through the community, Mike’s community
0:33:02 that was moving back home. And we, I basically bought it from him and we transitioned him out as
0:33:07 he moved back home. And I basically took over his route. Okay. When I joined his community in like
0:33:12 October of like 2023, he has like a lead generation service and stuff like that. So I like paid for him
0:33:16 to handle all that stuff. So as I was doing that, I was doing pop-up, pop-ins, hitting the ground and
0:33:21 everything. Like it was very like light for me, like in the beginning, like I, like I got some leads, but
0:33:26 like they weren’t really like good locations to do. And then like February of 2024, it just like all
0:33:30 happened like a waterfall. Like every property manager was answering the email campaigns that
0:33:35 his team set up. And it was like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I was like, what the, yeah, it was,
0:33:41 it took me off guard. So I went to every one of those meetings and I closed them. Now I live an hour and a
0:33:46 half away from the city of Chicago. So I didn’t want to build a business model where I had to go down to
0:33:51 the city. I wanted to build it out by my house and I wanted to do it within like 25 minutes of
0:33:56 driving. Didn’t work out like that. So I pivoted in my business and I ended up getting a storage unit
0:34:03 downtown, started off in an 80 square foot unit, went to 150 square foot unit. And then we just like in
0:34:08 September of last year, you know, we went to a 700 square foot unit spot. You know, when I went into
0:34:14 those meetings with those property managers, I went in there and I closed every single one of them.
0:34:18 And then what I did was the reason why I was able to grow so quickly was I was able to turn one of
0:34:24 those leads into three other locations by saying, Hey, you have another property manager. You have a
0:34:28 regional manager that oversees other properties that would like to see our, get value from our
0:34:32 amenity and see those other buildings. And then it was just like, introduce me here to there. I would
0:34:36 go look at those things, put the proposal together for that one and then close it and go.
0:34:41 So turning one customer into two, turning one lead into three. Say again, how are you incentivizing
0:34:44 those people to introduce you to other property managers?
0:34:47 So like going back to the rev share, like people will talk about it and say, Hey,
0:34:51 will you offer rev share? Yeah, I do. Well, and then what I would say is like, okay,
0:34:56 it doesn’t start until six months after. Cause I have a huge front upfront costs of like buying the
0:35:00 machines and everything like that. I’m like, so what I’ll do is I’ll start rev share after six
0:35:04 months, but I will expedite, I will cancel that out and expedite the rev share for you.
0:35:08 You know, if you refer me to over three other sister properties that you have within your network
0:35:11 and they’re like, Oh, well, we’ll take it. Some of them, some of them jump on it. Some of them
0:35:16 don’t majority of them did. And then I was able to get into these other, you know, locations relatively
0:35:22 quickly and kind of grow the route pretty quick. Do you find that? Is that just a virtue of like
0:35:26 podcasters, no other podcasters, property managers, no other property managers. So it’s just like,
0:35:29 well, this, you know, ownership group just has other buildings around the city.
0:35:34 It’s more of that property manager, the company that they work for, how many buildings do they manage?
0:35:39 Yeah. Okay. Okay. And there’s some of them out there that manage 700,000 properties throughout
0:35:43 the United States. There’s other ones that manage 500,000. Yeah. But there’s also other ones that
0:35:47 are like smaller, which are good, you know, that you can go in and they might have 20 properties and
0:35:51 you could gain access to all 20 of those. So it all depends.
0:35:56 Yeah. So then you have a warm lead versus a completely cold, cold call or cold email to some
0:36:00 random property manager. It’s like your coworker or your peer, you know, around the corner,
0:36:05 you said we ought to get in touch and we can start that conversation. At what point do you bring on
0:36:09 somebody to help stock these things? It sounds like you’re spending a lot of time on the business
0:36:15 development time. Yeah. Meetings with property managers, dealing with the higher level type of
0:36:19 stuff, but at the same time, like, oh shoot, we’re sold out of Snickers on third street. So now I got to
0:36:23 go over here. It’s like, talk to me about the logistics maybe early on and then what that kind
0:36:28 of has transitioned to today. Absolutely. So my first machine was installed of December of 2023.
0:36:33 I then had a bunch of other, these ones, I had another one installed in January 23 or 24 and then
0:36:37 another one in March of 24. So I had three that were up and running like out in the Western suburbs,
0:36:42 like by me that I was handling and I was using a, I was basically using the third car garage out of my
0:36:48 house for this, which my wife, you know, God bless her. She’s been unbelievably supportive and amazing,
0:36:52 you know, throughout this whole process. But you know, she was like, okay, I don’t know if I want
0:36:58 to make this into our warehouses, our garage, you know? So you had to battle that stuff for a little
0:37:03 bit. So then once I started growing into the city and then when I bought that route in May of 2024,
0:37:09 I had them still stock the route in May for me. So it was good. Cause it gave me like time to get my
0:37:13 stuff settled down there in the city, find a storage unit, you know, which was a pain in the butt,
0:37:18 you know, because a lot of these life smart and life cubes and life storage facilities,
0:37:22 they don’t allow you to have delivered food there cause they don’t want infestation. So I was
0:37:28 actually able to find a place that was basically like a shared office space that, that hosted weddings
0:37:31 and stuff like that. So they didn’t care about food and they had a loading dock and everything.
0:37:36 So I was thinking down the line with me growing this, I need to find something with a loading dock.
0:37:40 So if there’s a pallet that’s going to be dropped off once my route gets big enough,
0:37:45 like I need those tools and that accessibility eventually down the line. So that way I’m not
0:37:50 jumping to another location. Okay. I didn’t even think about that. Like, yeah, you got to have an
0:37:56 animal proof type of space. Are you at that point now ordering like from, I don’t know, from
0:37:59 corporate or like a distributor? What happened? Like, how do you get the stuff?
0:38:05 Yeah. So what I did was originally I was buying all the stuff from the big box stores, Mike,
0:38:10 but what he did was he actually went with like the mothership since that community has grown so much.
0:38:15 And he basically negotiated distributor ships with all these different companies. And he went there
0:38:20 with the volume basis of the community. So it was great. So what happened was we went to this one
0:38:27 distributor and then now I could have pallets being dropped off at my warehouse now, because now where
0:38:33 my route is at, like I order a lot of inventory weekly last month’s cost of goods for me when I
0:38:41 did 65,000 was like $27,000, you know, and cost of goods again, a higher number because I’m buying,
0:38:47 I installed so many machines. So I had to install and stock so many machines that were bare right now.
0:38:53 That number will come down once, once it’s stabilized. Yeah, exactly. So what happened was I started
0:38:58 interviewing people last year in June. I was stocking all the stuff myself in June. Mike really
0:39:02 pushed me because Mr. Passive is like, you can’t be stocking these machines. You know, you’re not
0:39:07 saying that you’re not saying I’m not good enough for a 25 hour job, but like my skill set, I should
0:39:11 be using it and focusing on stuff that’s 800 or 900 or a thousand dollars per hour. I had to focus on
0:39:17 business development and growing the route. Yeah. So he’s like, but I’m like, Mike, I can’t like afford it,
0:39:21 you know, because I’m, I won’t be in the red for a little bit, you know, with bringing on a guy and all
0:39:27 this stuff. He’s like, just do it. Just like, all right. So I did it. I went out there, I posted an
0:39:33 ad and I was interviewing people and I was interviewing people based off of their car and
0:39:37 their van. And do you have a van? Do you have a truck? Cause I needed somebody to put all these
0:39:42 tow containers like in there. So I’m telling Mike and he goes, Anthony, he goes, just buy a van. I go,
0:39:46 Mike, I go, I’ve talked to you in two days. Every time I talked to you, you’re costing me money.
0:39:50 You’re costing me 30 grand here, you know, with a van I got to buy now and all this stuff. But
0:39:54 you know what I bought in and he goes, you know what, Anthony, you have to,
0:39:58 because how are you going to grow the route? If you’re going to be stocking and doing these machines
0:40:02 six hours a day, you know, when are you going to do it? You’re never going to see your family.
0:40:06 It’s going to be like another job for you. Yeah. The driver that you hired because he had a van
0:40:11 leaves for whatever reason. And then you’re back to ground zero. Yeah. Back to ground zero. So I bought
0:40:16 the van. I bought one of those four transit connect vans. They’re like 103,000 miles on it. I bought
0:40:21 it, put zero down. It was like a $300 a month, monthly payment. Car insurance is maybe like a
0:40:26 buck 75 or something like that. So I bought it. Then I was, I went back to interviewing people and I was
0:40:31 able to interview people based on the best quality candidate that I could get instead of worrying
0:40:36 about their, if they had a van or a car or a truck. Yeah. Yeah. So I was able to do that. I ended up
0:40:41 hiring somebody, brought them on. It’s nice that the facility that I have my warehouse at,
0:40:45 they allow me to park in their parking lot. Now it costs me a hundred bucks a month, but
0:40:51 that way I have the car parked there, you know, on site for my, for my guy to use.
0:40:55 Yeah. And at that time I had like 2000 units I had at the time.
0:40:58 Sorry, like rows of product in a machine?
0:41:02 No. So what I mean, 2000 units, I meant like 2000, like luxury apartment units over five buildings at
0:41:06 the time. Okay. Got it. Got it. Like one building was 200 units. The other one was 250,
0:41:12 one was 600, you know, so I had 2000 units. So I needed to hit the pavement, start going around and,
0:41:18 you know, start building that up, you know? So just this past month, I’ve eclipsed 10,000 units total
0:41:27 across my whole locations. And I have like 36 locations actually now. I’m counting the three that
0:41:32 are going to be delivered and it would be installed here this week. But, you know, I would have not been
0:41:39 able to add 8,000 units to my route if I was picking and stocking. So like, sure. Thank goodness. I took
0:41:44 his advice and I leaped and it sucked. I mean, I was nervous about it initially, but you know,
0:41:50 I jumped and I went after it, you know, I don’t want to say like a cliche saying, but like, you got to
0:41:55 start being like comfortable with being uncomfortable. And I know that’s a cliche that a lot of people say.
0:42:01 And literally that’s what I did. And I leveraged myself and I went after it.
0:42:07 Yeah. It’s that kind of hold your breath for this short-term period. And it’s like that in a lot
0:42:11 of side hustles where it’s like, I can kind of see the light at the end of the tunnel and I know it’s
0:42:16 going to be uncomfortable to get there, but hopefully it’s a short-term thing. And I believe in the
0:42:21 business. I believe we can get there, but it’s, it’s not going to be fun for a minute.
0:42:26 Yeah. You know, and it’s going back to that cliche. Like I talked to somebody the other day and he’s
0:42:29 like, Hey, Anthony, I really want to get on. And he told me this and he was like, you know,
0:42:33 I’m an IT guy and I’m an introvert. And you know, do you have to be really good at sales? Like when
0:42:37 you go out and all this stuff. And I’m like, I’m like, here man, you are, you’re going to not saying
0:42:41 you have to be the best at sales. I’m like, my pitch now is totally different from when I started 15
0:42:45 months ago. I go, but I asked him, I go, are you married? You have a partner? He goes, yeah,
0:42:48 I’m married. I got two kids. I go, well, dude, I’m like, you had to sell your wife on marrying you.
0:42:54 You know, I’m like, you had some type of sales quality to convince her to know that she wanted
0:42:59 to spend the rest of your life with you. I go. So I go dig down. You have the ability
0:43:04 and just know that it’s a numbers game and you’re going to hear a lot and a lot of no’s before you
0:43:08 hit a, hear a lot more yeses. And you’re just gonna have to be, you have to get through it. And
0:43:11 it’s just a numbers game, brother. And you just have to work through it.
0:43:14 What kind of common objections do you hear from property managers when you
0:43:17 are making the initial outreach or even after you sent your proposal?
0:43:23 With them, it’s always like follow-ups because vending is not like their first priority.
0:43:29 They’re dealing with so much other stuff that’s going on there throughout the building. So there’ll
0:43:35 be times where I send a proposal and, you know, I won’t get assigned one back for a month and a half
0:43:40 or two. You know, there’s one right now that I’ve sent over last July and I’m still popping in and
0:43:45 just touching base and doing all these different things monthly because that’s the name of the
0:43:49 game in sales and pipeline. You just got to build your pipeline up. And then once one says yes,
0:43:53 one will say another yes. I mean, I got an email last week from somebody. Hey, Anthony, I talked to
0:43:58 you back in October. When can I get the machines in? I’m like, okay, sounds good. Nice to hear from
0:44:03 you, you know, but like, uh, so it does take some follow-up. It does take some sales strategy of like
0:44:08 how you want to go ahead and follow up. You know, you don’t want to be following up with people saying,
0:44:13 Hey, did you get my proposal? Where are you at now? You know, like I always follow up and I always
0:44:18 want to add like some type of value. Hey, I, I just talked to the CEO and I’m going to be ordering
0:44:23 machines this week. You know, can I get that signed proposal back where I can kind of add you to that
0:44:27 order, you know, creating some type of urgency, doing some type of different type of sales follow-ups
0:44:32 to kind of always add value. I’m not a big person of like, Hey, when are you going to get it back?
0:44:36 Cause like if somebody reads that, like I know when I read it, when I’m so busy, like, it’s just like,
0:44:39 I’m like, all right, uh, I’ll respond back to you later. Like there was no value, but it’s like,
0:44:44 Hey, I made a new vendor. I’m going to be installing crumble cookies in our machines. Now what this
0:44:47 guy’s gonna be installing crumble cookies. Oh my God. That’s so great. This is what, you know,
0:44:51 and then they respond. Okay. Have you been able to get the kids involved at all? Oh yeah, no,
0:44:57 absolutely. So on the weekends we do our Costco runs and do the picking in the garage. I’ll actually
0:45:02 brought them to some locations with me where I actually stocked them myself because the stocker at the
0:45:06 time couldn’t stock it for me. So I go, come on kids, let’s go, let’s get in the car and let’s go.
0:45:12 And I got photos of them doing it. And I’ll tell you that, that was the main mission for me was to
0:45:17 teach them entrepreneurship and work ethic when we first started. And then they were three and five at
0:45:22 the time. And they’re now going to be five and seven here, you know, come in May, but just their
0:45:28 transformation of their minds of like how they think about things like within regards of value.
0:45:31 You know, we used to walk into target all the time. We used to always be like, okay,
0:45:35 we got to get one, get something, get something. You know, now I taught them about like coupons and
0:45:40 discounts. And then they would look at like, Hey, maybe this could be good, something value for the
0:45:45 vending machine. And then, you know, something that I did not realize that they just got so obsessed
0:45:50 with vending machines. Like, so like we’re watching Despicable Me 4 and there’s a vending machine in the
0:45:55 back. Dad, there’s a vending machine in the background. Or if it’s a Taylor, like the Taylor Swift song,
0:46:00 we’re listening to it in the car last summer and it’s her song, Cruel Summer. And like 48 seconds
0:46:05 into that song, there’s a verse that where she says with the light of the glow of the vending machine
0:46:10 hits your face or something like that. And then they went crazy, like in the backseat of the car, dad,
0:46:16 vending machine. So like, um, that’s the stuff that really moves me, man. And that’s what motivates me
0:46:23 every single day. Yeah. It’s just, that’s been so great for me to experience, you know, this past
0:46:29 year is the impact of what it had on the kids. Because even when I was talking to other successful
0:46:34 type people and just anybody actually, and they would always reminisce about, Hey, I used to go with my dad
0:46:38 when he used to be a painter here, when my dad used to buy this, you know, and they’re, they get those
0:46:45 little doses of real life experience, you know, uh, at such a young age. And that’s what I really
0:46:49 want to instill in them. Yeah. It’s really cool. Cause it’s an example of a business that is super
0:46:55 easy to understand. Okay. Buy something for a dollar, sell it for two. Yeah. And Oh wait, I didn’t have to
0:47:00 be there to make that say, you know, that’s like that little flip that can switch from like, Oh, you’re
0:47:04 grow up, go to school, get a good job. And, you know, trade time for money. It’s like, here’s this
0:47:08 little fork in the road. It was, I think it’s really interesting that, and it’s cool that you’re exposing
0:47:14 to them, that to them at a young age. Thank you. I was so addicted when I first got into this business.
0:47:18 I would be checking my, I would be refreshing my sales reports weekly. I mean, I mean, I weekly, I mean
0:47:23 like every like hour, like it was, it was so obsessive because I was so new to it. I would wake up in the
0:47:27 morning. Oh my God, how much did we make overnight? You know? And it’s awesome because like in the city,
0:47:32 you know, some of these kids, they’re going out for Halloween night or St. Patrick’s day. Like I know
0:47:37 Saturday night between one and 4am, that thing’s going to be cleared out at these luxury apartments
0:47:42 because these kids are just going to go back and just wipe it out. Yeah. Refresh on the reports or
0:47:46 pulled. Yeah. That’s great. Any big surprises, whoops, surprises or mistakes. We’ll tee it up like that.
0:47:50 Yeah. Like I said in the beginning, just make sure you, when you’re qualifying that location,
0:47:55 make sure you’re asking all the questions, you know, make sure you’re figuring out how many people are
0:47:59 working there. What’s the times that they’re working there. You know, just quantify that. Don’t assume a
0:48:03 second shift is the same as the first shift like me. And then don’t overthink it. Like I come from
0:48:07 a real estate world. That’s always says like location, location, location, same thing here
0:48:11 with vending, but it’s foot traffic, foot traffic, foot traffic. So if there’s going to be foot traffic
0:48:14 and there’s going to be people that are going to be walking by it, there are going to be sales.
0:48:21 So just make sure that you are very conscious of the foot traffic that is there.
0:48:25 Very good. What’s next for you? What are you excited about this year? Where do you want to take it?
0:48:28 If you asked me 15 months ago, if this is where I was going to be at,
0:48:33 I would be like, you’re nuts. There’s no way that would be here. So my goal is to be at a hundred
0:48:37 thousand dollars per month. I’m going to reassess the business and see if I want to go ahead and
0:48:42 double down or triple down and then grow it to a 200 or 300,000 or for even a $400,000 a month
0:48:48 business. Wow. And then some serious, serious equity involved at that point. Now you’re talking
0:48:53 about a multimillion dollar valuation. Yeah, no, absolutely. So like, these are some of the
0:48:57 things that I’m like tossing around and going around about. So I’m trying to think, you know,
0:49:01 where do I want it to go? Because I just don’t want it to get it too big where it pulls me away
0:49:08 and my stocker, a guy that I hired, he only taken off four days in six months. So great hire that I
0:49:14 had, but he was sick in January and he had the flu or whatever. So I had to wake my butt up and go out
0:49:19 there and pick and stock and do it. And it sucked. It just did. It sucked. Uh, but my kid, he had a
0:49:24 basketball practice. His first basketball practice started at 4 PM and I wasn’t missing it. So I told my
0:49:29 wife, I go, you know, I’m going to wake up at 2 AM, go do the route, pick all the stuff to make
0:49:32 sure that I’m back in time. You’re going to have to take care of the kids in the morning. She still
0:49:36 works. She’s a public school teacher out here in the Western suburbs for 22 years. And she’s like,
0:49:40 yep. She goes, I’ll do it. I’ll take care of the kids that morning. You go out and do it.
0:49:46 And, um, so it’s been good. Like, cause to have a supportive partner like that has been like,
0:49:50 I wouldn’t be here without her and with her support and just having the sacrifice and some of those
0:49:53 days where I had to get out there and do it and hustle and not come home till late. Cause maybe
0:49:57 the machine was delivered and the machine was acting up and it wasn’t working the right way.
0:50:01 And I’m on the phone with customer support till nine o’clock at night and she’s handing the kids
0:50:04 and putting them to bed. So there’s Murphy’s law for sure. No matter what.
0:50:10 Absolutely. Yeah. Whenever you’re moving bulky technology, giant machines around physical
0:50:14 inventory, there’s people involved. Yeah. Things are going to happen, but that’s part of being a
0:50:18 business owner and you figure it out as you go. Absolutely. So this has been awesome. Anthony,
0:50:23 I really appreciate you spending some, some time with us and schooling us on the rapid
0:50:27 growth vending model here at Chicago. H and H vending.com. You can find them over there.
0:50:32 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation. This does not have to be
0:50:37 vending specifically related. This could be whatever entrepreneurial wisdom you’d like to impart.
0:50:41 Yeah. So you are going to experience some adversity, but you’re going to have to push through it.
0:50:48 And if you push through it and persevere, you will be successful. If you are, weren’t,
0:50:52 if you’re thinking about a certain job that you’re at and you want to, Hey, I need a change or I need to
0:50:58 do this. I tell somebody jump and make the jump and go ahead and do it and push forward and, you know,
0:51:02 try to make it happen. So that way down the line, you don’t have any regrets, you know, and say, Hey,
0:51:07 I should have tried this. I should have did this. Just go out there and try it. And then you’ll leverage
0:51:11 yourself to make sure that you’re successful and it’ll happen. You’ll just have to push through it.
0:51:15 That’s right. Keep your risks low, keep your upsides high and go to town. Um, again,
0:51:21 H and H vending.com. Awesome episode. A couple of takeaways for me. You just alluded to this. Hey,
0:51:26 real estate is, uh, the rule is location, location, location in this business, foot traffic, really
0:51:32 similar to this location. How many people are going to be, uh, having exposure to this machine? How many
0:51:35 people, you know, certain percentage of those people are going to buy something if you stock it right
0:51:40 and figure out the right product mix there. And the other side of it is, yeah, on the surface,
0:51:46 Hey, you know, buy the thing for a dollar, sell it for two simple, but on the backside of that is
0:51:51 this, it’s a sales machine, right? How do we get in front of the decision makers? How do we do that
0:51:55 consistently? How do we turn one lead into three? Really like that. Hey, well, the typical, you know,
0:51:59 uh, moratorium on the, uh, rev share is six months just cause we got to pay back the machine. Like,
0:52:04 I love this line. Hey, but we could shortcut that. We can cut that out. If you throw me to two other
0:52:09 buildings, three other buildings really like that building and nurturing that sales pipeline and
0:52:14 recognizing that this is not their top priority, right? Do the follow-ups and make sure that you’re,
0:52:18 uh, top of mind. Cause there might be another Anthony knocking at their door, sending them an email,
0:52:24 a cold calling them to, uh, to try and get his machine in, her machine in. So try and be top of
0:52:29 mind, uh, on that front. We referenced episode 599 with Mike Hoffman, the, uh, the vendingpreneur,
0:52:34 Mr. Passive on Twitter. Um, I think he’s got a discount for side hustle show listeners on the
0:52:38 vendingpreneur community, not positive on that, but if you mentioned side hustle nation or side hustle
0:52:43 show, I know he’ll take good, uh, good care of you on that and go back and listen to his original
0:52:47 episode. If you’re interested in learning a little bit more, big thanks to Anthony for sharing his
0:52:52 insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always,
0:52:58 you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one
0:53:03 place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you’re finding value in the show,
0:53:08 that is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message for me to that person in your
0:53:14 life who is looking for creative ways to make extra money, uh, outside of their job until next time,
0:53:18 let’s go out there and make something happen. And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the
0:53:20 side hustle show. Hustle on.

0:00:13 This listeners sold $100,000 worth of golf gloves on the side from his day job, and he’s here to break down the highs and lows of starting a direct-to-consumer e-commerce brand, willing something new into existence.
0:00:21 I think it’s a pretty cool story from chipgolfco.com, Chip with two Ps, Randall Pulfer. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:26 Thank you so much for having me, Nick. I’ve been a longtime listener of the show, so very, very excited to be here.
0:00:41 Love it. Always love to showcase listener success stories. Stick around in this one. We’re going to cover how Randall came up with this idea, how he found the right manufacturing partner to make it reality, plus the marketing efforts that have worked to start to generate some profitable sales.
0:00:55 Now, I want to start with your idea-generating process for this. Again, you go to chipgolfco.com to check these out, but it looks like the main value prop is to take a quality golf glove,
0:01:12 where historically the choices, well, you want it in white, white, or white, but make it fun, right? To give it a little bit of a design that showcases the player’s personality. Talk to me about the inspiration, the idea to, well, maybe we can innovate on the design side here.
0:01:26 Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. So, I myself am a golfer, as is my co-founder, Tyler. And, you know, Tyler and I met in college. And one of the things that we, you know, knew early on was that we both had entrepreneurial aspirations.
0:01:40 And, you know, we wanted to find a product that we could sell. And we wanted to do it in an industry that we were passionate about. The golf industry was kind of booming. And we saw, you know, all these new companies coming out with these funky shirts and different styled hats and belts and everything.
0:01:53 And yet, for some reason, golf gloves was like the one product that just, like you said, literally remained black and white. And we said, that just shouldn’t be. We looked online. We found a couple companies doing it, but the designs were pretty lackluster.
0:02:02 And, you know, doing our competitive intel, we ordered a few of them, and they were extremely low quality. Patterns would peel off. They just wouldn’t really last that long. They didn’t really feel that good.
0:02:09 I, myself, love a good leather golf glove. High quality. They last a long time. Makes for really great grip of the club.
0:02:09 Yeah.
0:02:17 And we said, why can’t we combine these two? A high quality glove, some good designs we’re seeing in all other aspects of golf. And so that’s kind of where the idea started.
0:02:33 It’s an interesting example of trying to find some blue ocean in a big market, you know, and a big market with kind of a rising tide of interest. Hey, here’s an outdoor activity that anybody can go and do. And it reminds me a little bit of StrideLine.
0:02:46 This is like the athletic licensed socks where, you know, hey, you can already buy shirts and hats and jackets and everything else with your team’s logo on it. But have you thought about socks? You know, here’s a little bit of a new space.
0:03:07 Similarly, we just did the sunglasses episode with Mike Ettenberg. It’s like, well, you know, my uniform is dictated by work. But here’s like one little element where I could add my own style and personality to do these sunglasses for first responders. And so it sounds like kind of a similar play where nobody else is doing this or nobody else is doing this well. So here’s an opportunity to play.
0:03:17 Yeah, no, it’s definitely like a niche in a very big market. I think a reason a lot of the bigger players haven’t done it is gloves have historically just not been like a super high margin item.
0:03:43 I think a lot of these companies, it’s not their biggest seller. They’re much better off focusing on shirts and clubs and balls and everything. And so we said, well, we can focus on it. I mean, it’s perfect for us, you know, wanting to just have some side hustle income, see if we can’t grow this product. And, you know, we’ve found ways to continue to improve that margin. But, you know, it’s been a challenge in that sense. But it’s also opened up a huge opportunity for us. And like you said, kind of a big market with a lot of big time players as well.
0:04:12 I want to pause and ask, you know, why physical product? Because a lot of times you’ll say, okay, I’m interested in golf. I have a passion for this. I see the growth chart going up and to the right. And so we’ve seen people do like content sites like Sean Ogle’s Breaking 80 comes to mind on like the content side. We’ve seen people do, okay, I’m going to, you know, sell into the golf space. I’m going to, you know, do drop shipping for these, you know, big garage size golf simulators or something.
0:04:42 I think people could set up or we had David Paxton was doing like daily golf steals on an affiliate model where I’ll, you know, source the best deals on gear and send those out every day. And on the e-com side, okay, naturally, I’m going to have higher startup costs, because I got to order a bunch of these, I’m going to have potentially lower margins, I got to go pay for ads, like there’s a more, there’s more moving parts, like what attracted you to this model versus, you know, any of these others that could have, you know, scratched that same itch in the in the golf niche.
0:05:12 Yeah, no, I mean, I’ve always kind of had an entrepreneurial mindset. And one of the dreams that I had when I was a young kid was I wanted to create a product and I wanted to see it in a store or I wanted to run into somebody in public and they’d be wearing it. Okay, something like that. So I’ve always been geared towards products. I also have an engineering undergrad. So a lot of what we do is physical product related, you know, we’re not necessarily all in on computer science or things that are very tech. It’s very product heavy. And so that’s kind of where my initial interest was.
0:05:23 Interest came in. And then to your point about like choosing, you know, what product at the time I was living in an apartment. So I didn’t want to have a product that was going to take up my full apartment. I wanted something that was going to be a little bit smaller.
0:05:35 And that’s kind of where gloves just kind of fit the perfect that fit the bill for lack of a better term. I mean, it allowed me to store it. It’s a natural repeat purchase as well, which I thought was really interesting where gloves are designed to not last forever.
0:05:49 Sure. They wear out after a while. Yeah, they wear out after a while. And that’s sort of the intended, you know, that’s how they’re supposed to function. I mean, so it provides this unique business model where, you know, shirts, for example, people buy them and they usually keep them. They can wear them for a really long time.
0:06:06 Gloves do kind of have to be replaced every once in a while. So yeah, I mean, the physical product stuff is just something I’ve always been interested in wanting a physical product. I can certainly tell you it probably would have been easier if I chose not to do something with inventory, let alone the number of SKUs that we have. But it’s been it’s been fun.
0:06:33 Yeah, I mean, it does check some of these boxes of being really small, lightweight to ship, you know, decent price point where it’s not completely, completely commoditized. So there’s, there’s definitely some advantages to that. And it’s something where if I can, you know, I can design it once I can have it made, and I can sell the same thing, you know, not the same, not as elegant as software to multiple different customers. But like, you know, there’s, there’s some advantages of scale there, too.
0:06:53 So I don’t mean to take a total, like, dump on on this idea. But just curious to get your thoughts on that. So what happens? What happens next? So you’re saying, like, we want to do the gloves. And now we got to find somebody to manufacture this or like, what if we just what if we just sold little stickers or decals to put on top of your existing golf gloves? Like, where do you go next?
0:07:03 Yeah, I mean, I have never brought a product to market. And so kind of my first thing is most people is just Google start Googling around. We tried Alibaba tried to source some samples from there.
0:07:27 And they all came back from various different countries that when we did a lot of our product market research, most of the big players were producing their gloves in Indonesia. So we kept Googling, you know, Indonesian glove manufacturer, and eventually came across a couple, sent some cold emails, as most people do, and got some responses back, did some sampling. And, and that’s how we found our current manufacturer that we work with. So it was just the old Google machine.
0:07:44 All right, what you do in design yourself. And again, you go to chipgolfcode.co chip with two P’s, you can finally you take a look at some of the designs. They’re not overly complex, kind of like a repeated pattern, like almost emoji style. But like we do this design yourself. Did you have to bring on a designer? What was that process like?
0:08:13 Yeah. So the designs we’ve done completely in house, which for someone, like I said, engineering background, I’m not the most creative, most artistic person. The first rendering of this was just in PowerPoint, just to get the, you know, the initial samples done. And we’re actually starting to get a little bit more creative with some of our designs and taking them outside of just the thumb and the Velcro latch, which if you see, that’s most of our, where our designs sit. Because, you know, we actually did a little bit of product market research and found that people do like having the simplified white glove.
0:08:42 And that’s why we wanted to keep the majority of it white. That being said, we are moving into some different designs where we’re starting to design other aspects of the glove, like the, you know, the actually entire thing. So yeah, most of these were just done in house and they were rough at first. We’ve gotten better as we’ve gone. But yeah, the sampling process took a while to finally get the scale and everything right. And every time we did it, it was two to three months, you know, by the time the manufacturer actually can do the screen print and get it to you, ship it to you, go back and forth, it can take a little bit of time.
0:09:01 Yeah, it’s painfully slow. And those early, it’s like, okay, come on, because we can’t really iterate and provide feedback until we get the thing in our hands and do all this stuff. But I love this idea of, hey, we noticed, you know, on the Wilson package or, you know, whoever else is making these, you know, big name brand golf clubs.
0:09:27 It was made in Indonesia. So there’s a big hint. We can go try and find the same manufacturers. I remember talking with Chad Rubin years ago, and he was just talking about this direct-to-consumer play where you could almost find the same factory where Lululemon is getting their leggings made and just say, can I white label these? You know, can I, you know, make this design enhance? It was like really, really interesting how you could go out and find those actual facilities.
0:09:35 And, well, I don’t have the same level of branding and marketing budget that they do, but maybe I can undercut that. It was like, oh, here’s an interesting way, or here’s my unique spin on it.
0:09:47 So you go get the samples, you get a design or, you know, a fit that you like. And here, you kind of alluded to this as the challenging piece of all, you know, hands are not one size fits all.
0:09:55 So now I got to, you know, order four or five different sizes of these. I got left-handed, I got right-handed, but trying to put together a minimum order.
0:10:01 What was that minimum order? Do you mind sharing what the startup costs look like here?
0:10:15 We did like an initial survey. We had pulled some Facebook groups, just like golf enthusiasts and said, hey, we’re thinking about making this product. What do you think? Can you input your size, your email? Try and get sort of an initial, almost like pre-order list.
0:10:24 But also, we wanted to gather information on, like, what is the distribution of sizes out there? How many people are medium-large versus extra-large? Things like that.
0:10:31 Because when we’re talking about an initial order, we wanted to make sure that we, you know, ordered it to a rough proportion that we actually think we’d be able to sell through.
0:10:38 Is it, like, evenly distributed, or is there, like, a bell curve where, you know, two-thirds of the people are medium or whatever?
0:10:44 Yeah, it’s pretty normally distributed. Usually, most people are going to be medium, medium-large, or large. Those are kind of the three most popular sizes.
0:10:53 The majority of golfers out there are righty golfers, meaning that they wear their glove on their left hand, which we’ve had some confusion on people ordering.
0:10:57 I’ve tried to make that very clear, that it’s on your left hand for right-handed golfers.
0:11:04 But, yeah, so the initial order quantity from our manufacturer was a minimum order quantity per design of 1,000.
0:11:09 And so, you know, we were trying to say, okay, well, can we mix sizes in there?
0:11:12 They’re like, yep. Can we mix designs in that quantity?
0:11:17 No, it’s got to be unique per design because they got to print the custom leather, and so that’s sort of their startup cost.
0:11:18 Okay.
0:11:21 And so, we ended up deciding that we were going to just go with two designs, right?
0:11:23 We weren’t going to roll out a website with just one design.
0:11:28 We wanted to give some elements of choice, even though two designs really isn’t that much better.
0:11:32 So, our first two designs were our Texas Hold’em and our Feeling Lucky.
0:11:35 We figured, you know, golf, gambling, sort of go hand-in-hand.
0:11:36 It’s a pretty popular thing.
0:11:40 I also love the name Texas Hold’em, kind of playing off the Texas Hold’em theme.
0:11:41 So, I love that.
0:11:43 That was the first design we did.
0:11:52 And the Feeling Lucky is just kind of your green clover, the idea of being lucky, hole-in-one, golf initiated, you know, in Ireland and Scotland and that sort of area.
0:11:53 Okay.
0:11:54 So, those were the two designs we rolled out with.
0:12:07 We did 1,000 of each of them, and between the actual raw materials, the shipping, and everything, it ended up being a little bit over $10,000, which, you know, for two people a couple years out of school was a pretty big investment.
0:12:09 Thankful for my co-founder, Tyler.
0:12:15 We were able to split the upfront cost so it wasn’t like I was completely going out on a limb on my own.
0:12:16 Yeah.
0:12:21 But, yeah, it was a pretty sizable investment, a little bit more than I think I would have initially anticipated when we got into it.
0:12:36 Yeah, but you’re doing these manufacturing runs and hopefully find a partner that is like, okay, this is probably lower than they would like to do, too, but, you know, maybe this company grows over time and we can scale up as that happens.
0:12:46 Now, how did you figure out, okay, so I’m a little over $10,000 to get 2,000 gloves landed, and then you figure out how much to charge on the other side for these things.
0:12:54 I’m trying to think of, like, when the last time I bought a pair of golf gloves, it was probably $15, $20, like, from the pro shop.
0:12:56 Like, I don’t know, what kind of price did you land at?
0:13:01 Yeah, so we went into PGA Superstore and just walked around and we were like, what are these competitors pricing these at?
0:13:08 And for the premium ones, they were upwards of $18, $20, sometimes $22, $24 for just a good leather golf glove.
0:13:13 So we said, okay, you know, I’m not sure that we’ll be able to fully compete on price, but we did try.
0:13:14 We said, okay, we’re going to price this at $18.
0:13:17 We really didn’t do a ton of math.
0:13:19 We just walked in and said, hey, they’re selling for $18 to $20.
0:13:21 We’re going to sell for $18 to $20.
0:13:24 We also love the idea that there’s 18 holes of golf.
0:13:25 Make it $18.
0:13:25 Kind of fit.
0:13:26 Let’s roll with it.
0:13:27 Sure, sure.
0:13:27 Okay.
0:13:34 So we did that and, you know, we’re thinking, all right, you know, our cost per unit is like, you know, eight, nine bucks or whatever.
0:13:36 And, you know, that leaves us plenty of margin.
0:13:43 And then, you know, as we started to get into it, and again, this is sort of my engineer’s fallacy, I just didn’t factor in marketing at all, right?
0:13:46 I’m thinking, we’re going to make a great product.
0:13:48 People are going to be lining up to buy it.
0:13:49 It’s going to sell itself.
0:13:50 We’re going to be great.
0:13:56 And then all of a sudden you realize that, nope, you actually are going to need to market this product and there’s a cost per acquisition.
0:14:00 And so very quickly we realized, you know, $18 probably wasn’t going to cut it.
0:14:04 At the time, we were also charging for shipping on top of that.
0:14:07 So, you know, total cart value would be maybe $23, $24.
0:14:17 And, you know, we got some advice early on just to include shipping, makes, you know, the conversion rate a lot higher, just build it into the price.
0:14:19 People hate being charged for shipping at the end.
0:14:22 So we ended up bumping our price up to $24.
0:14:30 And once we started to expand to other channels, Amazon, Etsy, Walmart, there’s all these additional fees.
0:14:35 And one of the ways that we could make it make sense was to increase the price on those platforms.
0:14:40 Well, we didn’t want to have the product mispriced on various different platforms.
0:14:42 And so we ended up just bringing it up to $28.
0:14:45 It takes care of kind of the fees on a lot of the third-party platforms.
0:14:48 And we haven’t had a ton of resistance to that pricing.
0:14:50 It is definitely on the more premium side.
0:14:54 But again, our product is very differentiated, not only in the quality, but in the design.
0:14:58 So we feel like, you know, it’s okay on the upper end of that price point right now.
0:15:07 And we do offer bundling savings and, again, try and increase that average order value to get the price per unit for the customer down and still make it make sense for us.
0:15:08 Got it, got it.
0:15:12 No, that’s helpful to hear that it doesn’t have to be set in stone, right?
0:15:20 You know, you could test something out and soon you realize, well, now we got to go out and acquire customers or there’s these different fees involved.
0:15:20 Yeah.
0:15:24 And so you’re open to testing different things.
0:15:32 It sounds like more with Randall in just a moment, including that initial market validation survey and how they made their first sales right after this.
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0:18:06 I didn’t want to go back to this initial survey that you talked about of, well, what’s the size distribution, right?
0:18:11 We don’t want to be stuck with a bunch of extra smalls at the end of the season and not know what to do with them.
0:18:15 Were this just friends and family fellow golfers?
0:18:24 Like, how did you come up with a critical mass of people to respond to this initial questionnaire, like this market research phase?
0:18:25 Yeah, it was friends and family.
0:18:28 We went on Facebook groups and just looked for golf enthusiasts.
0:18:37 Yes, I know, like I listened to a couple golf podcasts, so I looked for golf podcast groups and then we would just go in there and say, okay, here’s a lot of people that listen to similar podcasts as us.
0:18:39 They probably have similar interests.
0:18:40 It’s golf related.
0:18:42 Let’s post it in there, see if they’ll help.
0:18:49 And I think I was unbelievably amazed at how many people, you know, again, it’s, I’m asking for maybe a minute or two of their time.
0:18:54 But still, it’s like a stranger to stranger, people kind of willing to help us out, give us positive feedback.
0:19:04 So we ended up gathering, I want to say a couple hundred responses, which not huge, but it was enough for us to make a semi-informed decision on kind of the size distribution, if you will.
0:19:08 And not to mention, we also got feedback on like designs that people would like.
0:19:09 Would they buy this?
0:19:10 What would they pay?
0:19:15 Things like that, which, again, helped us kind of set the initial price and even some of our marketing strategies.
0:19:16 All right.
0:19:28 So now you get your gloves landed and you’re at this, you know, build it and they’ll come type of moment of like, you know, the line, envisioning the line out the door of the website.
0:19:31 But then, you know, how do you drive that initial traffic?
0:19:39 Do you go back to this, you know, list of 200 semi-hand raisers where it’s like, oh, it’s not super apparent there’s going to be a pitch down the road.
0:19:43 But, you know, how do you figure out how to move some of these first units?
0:19:43 Yeah.
0:19:50 Well, I will tell you, there’s no scarier thing than sending off 10,000 to, you know, someone you never know across overseas.
0:19:52 Somebody in Indonesia.
0:19:52 Yeah.
0:19:55 So I will say when the product finally showed up, I was very relieved.
0:20:00 One thing that, you know, I just didn’t even really think about was packaging, right?
0:20:06 The gloves came in like these plastic sleeves and like they were just the gloves.
0:20:08 And I was like, oh, my God, we need packaging, obviously.
0:20:13 So we ended up finding a company in China to make our packaging for us.
0:20:16 And we ended up starting with like, we actually got one here.
0:20:20 It’s like a zipper type of thing to store it.
0:20:23 So it’s like super lightweight, can ship really well.
0:20:24 Oh, yeah.
0:20:26 So we started with that, but I had to order those.
0:20:28 And then additionally, we needed to label them.
0:20:30 So shout out to my wife.
0:20:37 I ended up printing a bunch of labels for both the design and the sizing just on like our printer at home.
0:20:39 And we spent, I mean, days.
0:20:41 We had to label 2,000 of these things.
0:20:42 We were putting the size label.
0:20:49 Like we were just like, you know, manufacturer, assembly line, just passing them down, putting them in, stuffing them, labeling them, all of that.
0:20:52 So it took us a long time to get that all set up.
0:20:54 And then we were doing this out of my garage.
0:20:57 So we had to go buy some organizers and try and organize them all.
0:20:59 So we got the inventory all set up.
0:21:03 And then to get the initial customers, we started with friends and family.
0:21:07 We revisited kind of that initial email list that we got.
0:21:11 We started posting a little bit on social media, just trying to get some organic volume.
0:21:15 And again, naive as I was, just kind of assumed that, oh, my God, people are going to see this.
0:21:16 There’s nothing like it.
0:21:18 And they’re going to be lining up to buy it.
0:21:20 And I could not have been more wrong.
0:21:26 It is something that you do consistently have to demonstrate the value of the product and the differentiation
0:21:29 and why it’s worth someone spending their hard-earned money on it.
0:21:32 And that process took a long time for us to learn.
0:21:34 You know, we had never touched Facebook ads.
0:21:37 You know, we had tried organic and it was slow.
0:21:40 And we were like, well, we got 2,000 gloves in the garage.
0:21:41 We got to start moving these.
0:21:46 So we started experimenting with some paid social, started on Meta.
0:21:50 And it was a very iterative, you know, low-budget process.
0:21:54 But eventually we, you know, put out an ad campaign, saw what worked, saw what didn’t, made some tweaks,
0:21:58 reinvested some more money, kind of continued to grow it that way.
0:22:03 But it was largely via paid social traffic that helped us move the first couple thousand units.
0:22:11 What kind of ad did you find worked well for that in terms, if you can give an example of the imagery, the headline, anything?
0:22:12 Yeah.
0:22:15 So we ended up finding on Upwork a photographer.
0:22:18 And we were saying, hey, we need some good product photos of these.
0:22:19 We don’t have anything on the website.
0:22:20 We need them for ads.
0:22:24 So they had made some really high-quality photos that are actually still on our website today.
0:22:26 Those are the main photos that we use.
0:22:30 And honestly, our, again, naive ads, it was just, here’s a picture of the product.
0:22:31 Here’s the name.
0:22:32 Here’s why it’s awesome.
0:22:34 Please buy it.
0:22:36 Like, that’s basically the extent of the ad.
0:22:37 And it worked.
0:22:42 And like, that was honestly the nice thing about our product is the pictures themselves jump off the page.
0:22:46 It’s not like someone trying to sell, you know, something that everybody else has.
0:22:48 It’s just, why should you buy it from me?
0:22:50 This product is naturally differentiated.
0:22:54 So if you’re targeting it to the right people, they see it and they’re like, wait a minute, what is that?
0:22:56 Like, I’ve never seen anything like that.
0:22:57 Click into it.
0:23:00 And then you sort of trust the website to kind of convert them.
0:23:01 But it was a challenge, right?
0:23:04 Because we weren’t converting at a super high rate.
0:23:06 And it was, you know, are our ads inefficient?
0:23:10 Is it because we’ve only got two designs to choose from on our website?
0:23:11 Like, what is it?
0:23:12 It ended up being both.
0:23:15 So we ended up adding more designs and getting better at advertising.
0:23:16 But yeah, it was definitely tricky.
0:23:18 And it was a slow, slow burn at first.
0:23:23 Yeah, there’s so many factors that run into, they go into running a profitable ad campaign.
0:23:24 Well, was it the image?
0:23:25 Was it the headline?
0:23:26 Was it the landing page?
0:23:31 Like, was there, you know, lots of different places where people can fall out of that funnel
0:23:36 or lots of potential leaks in the bucket there trying to address all of those, plug all those
0:23:37 different holes.
0:23:38 But that’s interesting.
0:23:44 Was there a cost of acquisition on meta?
0:23:47 And the beauty here is like, well, you could target people who are into golf.
0:23:51 That kind of like psychographic type of targeting can be really powerful.
0:23:54 But was there a target cost of acquisition you were going for?
0:23:57 Ideally, I mean, we wanted it to be between like six and eight dollars.
0:23:59 Like, that’s something that we could be.
0:24:01 And at the time, we were really only selling one glove at a time.
0:24:04 Maybe every once in a while, we got a two glove order, but it was usually one at a time.
0:24:09 And so that was the number that we felt like we could make a little bit of money on enough
0:24:12 to sort of roll into more inventory and target that.
0:24:18 The nice thing is our target demographic of, you know, men, 20 to 50 ish, especially during
0:24:20 peak golf season, which is over the summer.
0:24:23 That CPM demographic is often very cheap.
0:24:28 So we didn’t realize that at the time, but it allowed us to not be super efficient and still
0:24:31 have relatively low cost per acquisition.
0:24:36 You know, as we’ve advertised to wider audiences in different times of the year, especially during
0:24:40 like Black Friday when CPMs are crazy, we are having to be a little bit more creative in terms
0:24:43 of increasing average order value, right?
0:24:48 To make the higher acquisition cost of, you know, sometimes it’s 15, even upwards of 20,
0:24:51 depending on the target audience there to acquire that customer.
0:24:54 So, I mean, ideally, we’re single digits.
0:24:57 I think more often than not in practice, it’s slightly higher than that.
0:25:00 And, you know, that’s where we’re trying to get better with some of our more organic
0:25:05 advertising strategies, plus email lists where we can reduce, you know, the aggregate
0:25:06 cost per order.
0:25:09 It’s something that we definitely need to get better at.
0:25:12 I mean, the cost to acquire our customers via social media is only going to get more expensive
0:25:13 with time.
0:25:17 And, you know, in order to build a sustainable business, I think finding ways to do it without
0:25:22 going all in on paid is a very important thing that we’re still very much, very much learning.
0:25:27 Anything you found effective to increase that average order value?
0:25:32 I want to say I saw something that was like, maybe it was a split test, but I thought I
0:25:36 saw something like buy three, get one free, either type of promo or something like that.
0:25:39 We consistently run a buy three, get one free promo.
0:25:42 But one of the things that has really helped is we have a new plugin on our website through
0:25:43 Rebuy.
0:25:43 Okay.
0:25:48 It’s basically like you add a glove to your cart and it says, okay, you’re only X amount
0:25:49 away from free shipping.
0:25:49 You add another one.
0:25:54 It’s like, oh, you know, you’re, you can get this free glove dryer thing.
0:25:56 This like new accessory that we have.
0:25:59 If you add another glove and then all of a sudden you’re at three and you get one free.
0:26:03 So it’s, it’s sort of moving the customer along the journey.
0:26:04 So that’s been really helpful.
0:26:09 You know, I think as we’ve gotten more designs, I think it’s natural for people to want to
0:26:09 buy two.
0:26:13 So just trying to find ways to get people to, you know, get one as a gift or get returning
0:26:15 customers, things like that.
0:26:19 As far as like getting more people to the site organically too, the thing that has stood
0:26:23 out to me is being as open, transparent, and honest as possible.
0:26:29 Like, I think one of the, you know, best videos that we had was actually talking about one of
0:26:35 the defective glove orders that we had and showing like how it happened, why it happened, being
0:26:36 transparent about it.
0:26:40 And we actually got more sales from that video, the one that was talking about how our
0:26:44 product had been low quality than any of the other videos.
0:26:49 And so we’ve tried to be more just open and honest and bring people along the journey because
0:26:54 people really want to support, you know, businesses like ours that are small, growing, learning.
0:26:58 And so that’s something that we’ve really leaned into both on the website and our ads and a lot
0:26:59 of our content.
0:27:01 And that’s worked out pretty well for us too.
0:27:02 So what, so what happened?
0:27:07 There was a screw up with the order and tell me about that.
0:27:08 Yeah.
0:27:10 So we were doing our biggest order to date.
0:27:12 I think we were ordering a couple thousand gloves.
0:27:14 It was our most popular design, the stars and stripes.
0:27:16 That one we sell out of consistently.
0:27:18 She said, all right, we’re going to order a big quantity.
0:27:22 We had already done one or two orders with our manufacturer on this glove before.
0:27:28 And we get the gloves in and they look the same as every other order we’ve done.
0:27:30 We got them in right before, you know, May.
0:27:33 So it was peak selling time, May, June, July.
0:27:35 You got Memorial Day, 4th of July.
0:27:37 People are going to be buying these up like you wouldn’t believe it.
0:27:37 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:27:39 So we start selling them.
0:27:40 We’re moving them quickly.
0:27:40 We’re feeling really good.
0:27:43 And then all of a sudden we start to get some negative reviews.
0:27:45 Hey, this design is peeling.
0:27:47 This, this glove stinks.
0:27:47 All this stuff.
0:27:48 And we’re like, what’s going on?
0:27:50 Like this has not happened before.
0:27:53 And so people were complaining that the design was peeling off.
0:27:57 So I went into my garage, I pulled one out and I just started rubbing my finger on it.
0:28:00 And lo and behold, the design starts to peel off.
0:28:01 So we talked to our manufacturer.
0:28:03 I said, what’s going on with this?
0:28:04 They looked into it.
0:28:08 Turns out they had accidentally printed the design on waterproof leather.
0:28:14 So when obviously people get wet, they’re sweating, whatever the case is, that design is going to come peeling right off.
0:28:16 And you couldn’t tell just by looking at it.
0:28:19 It wasn’t until we had had like several hundred out there.
0:28:25 And so now we’re in scramble mode and it’s, oh no, you know, we’ll refund anyone who bought it.
0:28:26 We either refund or exchange.
0:28:33 We took, you know, all the Sergeant Stripes gloves off the website, which at the time was a bulk of our inventory.
0:28:41 So that really slowed us down and it was sort of this, oh crap moment of like, you know, can we survive this from like a cash flow perspective?
0:28:45 Is this going to hurt our brand image to a point where we’re not going to be able to recover?
0:28:46 You know, what was the case?
0:28:50 And so we ended up getting out in front of it, made a video, said, hey, this is what happened.
0:28:52 This is why it happened.
0:28:53 Honest mistake.
0:28:55 If you bought, please let us know.
0:28:57 We will do whatever we can to make it right.
0:29:02 And luckily our manufacturer was able to make a new order and they were willing to refund us because they knew it was their mistake.
0:29:04 So we just had to wait in time.
0:29:04 Yeah.
0:29:10 So it didn’t completely screw us, but it was sort of that like, oh my God, how did we not do better quality checks?
0:29:22 And, you know, the light at the end of the tunnel of this whole thing is that this has actually led to a lot better process between us and our manufacturer where hopefully we can minimize these issues going forward.
0:29:31 And again, sort of a cheap lesson, like when you think about where we were versus where we are now, this happened actually last year, but our scale is much larger now.
0:29:31 Yeah.
0:29:35 It easily could have been a much more significant impact.
0:29:38 And so luckily we got ahead of it and hopefully made the fix for a long time.
0:29:46 But it just goes to show you, like, you can always do more product quality checks on all your products, especially when they’re coming from all over the place.
0:29:51 That’s great that the manufacturer stood behind it and didn’t charge you for that reorder.
0:30:00 And you got the customer list, you could say, hey, well, let’s once, but it’s going to be a couple months, you know, lead time shipping across the oceans before we get these to you.
0:30:05 But hey, bear with us where this video end up getting posted.
0:30:12 Is this just kind of a social channel marketing thing for you to be like, hey, crazy, crazy thing happened.
0:30:17 We shipped out a bunch of waterproof peeling gloves on accident.
0:30:21 We post most of our videos across both Instagram and TikTok.
0:30:24 TikTok is something that we really leaned into more and more over the last year.
0:30:27 And that is really where it went more viral.
0:30:33 I mean, it didn’t get, you know, millions of views or anything, but it got, you know, considerably more views than most of our videos get.
0:30:41 And I think, you know, what was really encouraging was a lot of people in the comments saying, you know, this is so cool that brands are willing to stand behind their quality.
0:30:44 They’re even willing to talk about mistakes.
0:30:45 Like this is what people want to see.
0:30:52 And that was sort of a light bulb moment for me, too, is because, you know, every time I went on social media, it was very salesy, right?
0:30:54 It was like, hey, this is the glove.
0:30:55 These are the benefits.
0:30:56 Please buy.
0:30:59 But especially on TikTok, people go there for really one of two things.
0:31:01 They either want to be entertained or they want to learn.
0:31:03 Those are the two primary things.
0:31:05 And if you can do that while also selling a product, great.
0:31:10 But more often than not, people see something that’s salesy and they sort of move past it.
0:31:13 And this video was very different from what we had done in the past.
0:31:15 And that’s where the engagement sort of picked up.
0:31:26 And it was just great to see, you know, the community of people that came to support us and told us, you know, to just keep going and mistakes happen and that they would be rebuying and all of this stuff.
0:31:31 But we did have to do a little bit of damage control on some of the people that are not on social media.
0:31:33 And didn’t maybe see that video.
0:31:37 So we actually sent it out in like an email and we’re just like, hey, this is what happened.
0:31:39 You know, feel free to get in contact with us.
0:31:40 Very good.
0:31:43 You bring up an important point.
0:31:46 This is, you know, echoed from a friend of mine years and years ago.
0:31:55 He gave me what he called the rule of the internet that people are only ever online for one of two reasons, like you mentioned, to be entertained or to solve a problem.
0:32:01 So if your content can play in one of those spaces, I think you’re going to be in good shape.
0:32:07 The interesting place here is like you almost, you know, okay, you could say, yeah, I guess it solves a problem.
0:32:10 Like I need to get a better grip on my club, right?
0:32:12 And I want to do it in a way that expresses my personalities here.
0:32:21 But in general, it’s like harder to play, in my opinion, in the entertainment space, because then you’re competing with ESPN and Netflix and everything else.
0:32:29 But if you can solve a problem, especially like Q&A type of stuff, like generally an easier place to play, in my opinion.
0:32:38 But so we’re going to, in what’s interesting about the golf gloves is it’s like kind of at this impulse buy price point.
0:32:43 Typically golfers, like I’m going to stereotype, like a more affluent demographic anyway.
0:32:45 So they say, well, okay, 28 bucks.
0:32:45 Sure.
0:32:48 You know, now I can impress my friends at the next round.
0:32:49 Like, hey, where’d you get that cool glove?
0:32:54 So there’s some maybe bragging rights or uniqueness to it that could lend itself to that.
0:32:59 But it’s kind of at that impulse buy price point where it’s like, well, I’m not going to think too much about this.
0:33:04 Or you’re not going to do a ton of competitive research going out like, well, who really is, you know, the best golf club?
0:33:06 I’m going to trust that it’s a standard golf club.
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0:35:52 So doing the social strategy, I did want to ask, because you mentioned, okay, we expanded to Amazon, we expanded to Etsy.
0:35:59 I want to talk about, you know, going after these other marketplaces and maybe the pie chart breakdown of where those sales are happening.
0:36:00 Yeah.
0:36:06 So the reason we really wanted to prioritize getting on some of these other platforms was they’re really just natural search platforms, right?
0:36:07 People are going on there.
0:36:09 They’re searching for golf products.
0:36:18 One of our biggest challenges was bridging the gap between people who buy, like you said, the impulse buy, usually in-store, versus getting people to buy online.
0:36:21 I, myself, as a golfer, I’ve never once bought a golf glove online.
0:36:23 I’m usually buying it in a store when I need it.
0:36:32 So we had to sort of change the way people view this and said, no, like this is a product, an article of clothing, apparel, like similar to other things that you would buy.
0:36:33 Yeah.
0:36:42 And really get people to be almost more proactive in buying them as opposed to, oh, I show up to the course, I got a hole in mine, let me run into the pro shop and just grab one off the rack.
0:36:44 So that was sort of an interesting thing we had to bridge.
0:36:48 And that’s where we said, well, we got to be where people are searching these things, right?
0:36:52 You can try and create the demand on your social media, your ad platforms.
0:37:02 But we knew that Amazon, Etsy, even TikTok, people were going in there and they were searching for golf or golf products because people were buying things online more and more.
0:37:04 And so we just needed to be on there.
0:37:07 We’ve tried advertising on all those platforms too.
0:37:09 But yeah, it’s really just the natural search.
0:37:11 There’s really no reason not to be on them.
0:37:13 You know, the only good things can really happen.
0:37:15 So that was sort of our initial thought process.
0:37:26 Now, all else being equal, is it more beneficial for you, for somebody to go to the website and buy or for somebody to go to Amazon and like start to send, you know, positive conversion signals?
0:37:29 So maybe you start to rise in the search results if somebody looks for a golf club.
0:37:30 Yeah.
0:37:38 I mean, Amazon as a whole, their fees are very, very high, but they still can tend to be cheaper than like an acquisition from paid social to our website.
0:37:46 The big advantage to having people go through your website is that you get to collect that personal information, like the email and stuff like that.
0:37:50 Whereas on Amazon, Etsy, TikTok, they don’t really let you have that information.
0:37:56 And so you do kind of limit the long-term value of your customer if you don’t get them to go through your website.
0:38:01 That being said, we will definitely take a sale on any of those platforms versus not.
0:38:07 So, you know, the natural search and higher ranking of those products and volume there is certainly important.
0:38:09 I’d say a majority of our sales still come through our website.
0:38:14 Amazon is very seasonal with golf search, as you might expect.
0:38:20 So, you know, it peaks and valleys, but definitely the majority of our sales are coming through our website.
0:38:27 Now, I hadn’t really considered Etsy as a channel for kind of a mass-produced product like this.
0:38:31 What’s the reaction like, or is there a different strategy over there?
0:38:32 Yeah.
0:38:33 So it’s actually very interesting.
0:38:38 I didn’t really think much of Etsy either, and actually when we first tried to set up our Etsy shop,
0:38:43 we said it was a product that we manufacture, and they, like, didn’t let us make an account.
0:38:45 They were like, oh, this is for handmade products only.
0:38:46 So we couldn’t get on there.
0:38:47 And I was like, okay, great.
0:38:51 So I had to create a new account and basically just say, it’s handmade.
0:38:53 And we’ve been on Etsy ever since, and it’s been fine.
0:38:58 Made by somebody’s hands, in addition to sewing machines and robots, sure.
0:38:59 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:38:59 Right.
0:39:03 But no, Etsy is actually a very profitable channel for us.
0:39:11 Not in terms of total volume, but I think because of the nature of our product being very different and sort of artsy in a way, it is very unique.
0:39:14 And Etsy is great for products that stand out amongst the crowd like that.
0:39:18 And Etsy ads, too, have been very efficient for us.
0:39:26 We don’t put a ton of money in there because it’s not super scalable, but it is an efficient channel and pretty consistent revenue stream for us, which I’ve actually been pleasantly surprised by.
0:39:30 Yeah, I can see it as a Mother’s Day gift, a Father’s Day gift.
0:39:37 You know, I think it plays well in that space that people might be looking for golf gifts on a site like Etsy and say, oh, that’s a unique idea.
0:39:38 Yep.
0:39:39 No, exactly right.
0:39:45 And that’s one of the search terms that we have in our products is like golf gifts, Father’s Day, all that sorts of stuff.
0:39:46 And it does pretty well.
0:39:54 Okay, and so you mentioned the biggest slice of the pie chart was your own site, followed by Amazon, followed by Etsy.
0:39:55 What’s the breakdown look like?
0:39:57 Yeah, it’s becoming more and more TikTok.
0:40:01 I think we’re posting content in there and TikTok Shop has been a growing platform.
0:40:04 I’d say TikTok and Amazon are pretty similar.
0:40:08 And then our website, our website’s got to be 60, 70% maybe.
0:40:11 And then TikTok and Amazon probably make up the majority of the rest.
0:40:12 Interesting.
0:40:17 So are you able to drive your own traffic to TikTok Shop or is that paid ads?
0:40:22 Is that, you know, going after golf influencers to try and promote this thing?
0:40:23 What’s that site look like?
0:40:28 So we tried TikTok ads and just didn’t have a ton of success with it.
0:40:32 Again, it goes back to the point of like, I know when I’m on TikTok, I don’t want to watch ads.
0:40:34 I want to watch fun, engaging content.
0:40:37 And so we didn’t have a ton of success with it.
0:40:47 That being said, there are more robust ways to advertise TikTok products on like the TikTok shop and like where it shows up in search, which we should do a little bit more experimentation with.
0:40:49 But most of the sales on TikTok have been organic.
0:40:55 It’s a lot of just trying to post videos and get people, again, virality and just getting people to buy it.
0:41:01 One of the first times we actually did this was we released a glove that had a hot dog design on it.
0:41:06 And I basically just went on TikTok and I was like, and we had not sold like very many gloves on a TikTok video ever before.
0:41:08 And I said, okay, hot dog glove.
0:41:09 I was eating a hot dog.
0:41:13 I said, for every glove that you buy, I will eat a hot dog on a TikTok video.
0:41:20 And we ended up like selling out our hot dog gloves, which I was telling myself, I was like, if that is the end outcome of this, I’ll be fine with it.
0:41:25 But there is a video out there of me trying to eat like 20 hot dogs in one sitting and it did not go very well.
0:41:26 Okay.
0:41:28 But yeah, so the TikTok stuff is all organic.
0:41:31 I think there’s ways that we can do it a little bit better.
0:41:32 Like you said, leveraging influencers.
0:41:34 We want to definitely do more of that.
0:41:38 I’ve listened to quite a few of your podcasts where people mentioned the success of influencers.
0:41:41 And we’ve tried it here and there, haven’t had a ton of success.
0:41:49 But to the point about the sunglasses episode, it sounds like the benefit is in the masses where it’s just like the more you do, you might get one or two that hit.
0:41:51 And those often pay for the ones that don’t.
0:41:54 So I think it’s just something that we have to do a little bit more of.
0:41:58 Yeah, it sounded like probably all marketing, right?
0:42:03 There’s an 80-20 to it where, you know, 20% of the accounts that you reach out to are going to drive 80% of the sales.
0:42:05 But just casting a wide net.
0:42:11 I was shocked when Mike said he had shipped out probably over a thousand pairs of sunglasses.
0:42:11 Yeah.
0:42:13 It was like, oh, this is like a really concerted effort.
0:42:19 I was like, are there a thousand, you know, first responder micro-influencer accounts out there?
0:42:20 He’s like, oh, we’re just scratching the surface.
0:42:23 I’m like, okay, you know, this is an Imagine Golf.
0:42:24 There’s probably even more.
0:42:25 Oh, there’s a lot.
0:42:26 Yeah, there’s a lot.
0:42:29 So yeah, we are definitely, that’s a concerted effort for us in 2025.
0:42:34 So if you see some organic videos with our gloves in it, that’s hopefully a good thing.
0:42:35 Sweet.
0:42:35 All right.
0:42:38 So that’s what’s coming up next.
0:42:45 I did want to touch on the tools and tech side of things where you mentioned this rebuy.
0:42:47 This is like a Shopify plugin.
0:42:52 Anything else you’re using in addition to that, either for email or video?
0:42:55 You know, anything else that is making life easier on the tech side?
0:43:05 So one of the Shopify apps that we use is Shopify Marketplace Connect, I think they call it, but allows for, you know, your inventory and orders to sync from all your other platforms into Shopify, which has been really helpful.
0:43:16 Additionally, we use this website called Built With, where we basically would go to different competitor websites, throw in their URL, and it would basically tell us all the plugins that they have on their Shopify.
0:43:21 So that’s where we learned about like Klaviyo and all these different things, and we have used those as well.
0:43:24 So Klaviyo is probably one of our bigger ones.
0:43:38 Rebuy, as you mentioned, we also use this other, it’s sort of an app, but it’s called Kero, but it actually allows other companies to sell our products on their site, and they get a commission if they get a sale.
0:43:45 So like one of the companies that we work with, they’re sort of like you mentioned at the top of the episode, they are sort of like the middleman between all these other companies.
0:43:47 And they’re sort of just a marketplace for golf products.
0:43:50 And so they don’t have to do any of the sourcing or anything.
0:43:59 We do all the shipping, but they’re sort of driving traffic to their site, and we don’t really care about paying the commission because it’s usually in line with our customer acquisition costs at that point.
0:44:02 So those are just some of the tools that we use.
0:44:04 And we do use Shopify now.
0:44:05 We didn’t always.
0:44:10 We started on Squarespace, and it was a challenge for a lot of reasons.
0:44:15 It seems like a lot of the third-party platforms and stuff just integrate a lot better with Shopify.
0:44:22 And although Shopify is more expensive, it has made a huge difference in our ability to be more flexible on our site.
0:44:23 Okay.
0:44:24 No, these are great.
0:44:25 These are really interesting.
0:44:30 Klaviyo is the email service specifically for e-commerce brands.
0:44:32 Karo is a new one to me.
0:44:44 This is really interesting where it’s almost kind of an affiliate program of sorts where, you know, if somebody else has a, you know, a golf merchandise type of website, hey, would you mind adding our products to your catalog?
0:44:46 Sure, we could do that.
0:44:52 We could do seamless checkout integrated with your stuff, and then you handle the shipping and fulfillment, almost like a dropshipping relationship with these other stores.
0:44:53 Yep.
0:44:54 No, it’s super smooth.
0:45:01 I mean, we basically, there’s, we get requests, too, sometimes on Karo, where people will be like, hey, I saw these products are available on here.
0:45:02 I’d love to put it on my site.
0:45:07 And we do a little bit of diligence to make sure it’s like a site that’s in line with our brand.
0:45:07 Yeah.
0:45:09 But more often than not, we’re like, yeah, sure.
0:45:14 Like, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really impact us to have it in more places, more backlinks, more exposure.
0:45:16 And we fulfill all the orders ourselves anyway.
0:45:18 So, yeah, it’s a pretty seamless thing.
0:45:22 And like I said, the commission is at, if not cheaper than our customer acquisition.
0:45:24 So, we’re totally fine paying it.
0:45:25 Okay.
0:45:29 Now, at this point, you’re selling thousands of pairs a year.
0:45:36 So, I imagine, you know, the, you know, the Amazon siren or the bell that goes off when an order comes through, like, in the early days.
0:45:40 Like, okay, we got to turn that off and probably no longer shipping out of the garage.
0:45:46 Like, we’ve, you know, outsourced the fulfillment to, well, I imagine you send some into the Amazon warehouse so it can be Prime eligible.
0:45:51 But like, for those Shopify orders, you know, where does, where does that go?
0:45:53 How does that look like logistics-wise?
0:46:04 For the first couple years of this, we were doing it all out of my garage and very quickly realized, not only from a space perspective, but just from time perspective, you know, as we were scaling, it was an hour and then it was two hours.
0:46:07 And then it was sometimes more of that of every night going in there and packing orders.
0:46:08 We got to find a solution.
0:46:11 So, we recently partnered with a third-party logistics company.
0:46:13 They have all of our inventory.
0:46:14 They process all of our shipments.
0:46:16 So far, that’s been going really well.
0:46:18 It’s taken a huge load off of me.
0:46:22 And my wife is also very happy to have all the products out of the garage.
0:46:24 So, that’s been great.
0:46:32 And it’s allowed us to be more scalable because that was truly a bottleneck in our general process of just having to go and actually pack all these orders.
0:46:41 And then, you know, if I’m out of town for more than a couple days, I got to turn Amazon dark because if you don’t ship in a couple days, then, you know, they get you with fees and complaints.
0:46:43 And so, that was always a little bit of a pain.
0:46:49 We actually don’t do anything Fulfillment by Amazon yet, although it’s definitely something that we want to do.
0:46:56 We actually worked with a consultant for Amazon ads early on just to get an idea, lay the land of it.
0:47:12 And he felt pretty confident based on what he was seeing that some of our products could be, you know, like multi-million dollar SKUs in Amazon if we consolidated the most popular sizes, ordered in bulk, and sent them into Amazon and let them do it eligible for Prime, like you said.
0:47:15 So, that’s definitely something that we want to explore down the line.
0:47:19 Is there a scenario where you start to go brick and mortar?
0:47:21 Like you said, that’s where I bought my last glove.
0:47:23 I was like, well, shoot, this one’s got a hole.
0:47:28 Let me run into the pro shop real quick before tea time and just grab, you know, whatever they have in my size.
0:47:32 Is there a pro shop distribution angle down the road?
0:47:35 So, that was actually the initial thought.
0:47:38 Like, I thought the pro shops would be the larger portion of our sales.
0:47:42 We are in a couple pro shops in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
0:47:43 That’s where I’m based.
0:47:48 I’m really just going in, introducing them to the product, and, you know, they were interested enough to take a flyer on us.
0:47:52 I will say it’s very challenging for them for a couple reasons.
0:47:56 One, for each design, you can have upwards of 20 SKUs.
0:48:02 And so, if they wanted to have multiple designs, multiple SKUs, all of a sudden, from an inventory management perspective, it’s a little bit tough.
0:48:06 Additionally, it’s just not a huge moneymaker for them.
0:48:12 You know, they’re making, you know, five, six, seven, eight bucks a glove after wholesale and all that stuff.
0:48:19 And for them, it’s like, even if they moved a couple hundred a year, it’s just not really making a huge dent in their bottom line.
0:48:27 So, they, you know, while they’re very interested, they want to support, they like it, it is hard from an inventory management and ultimately, like, an effort standpoint.
0:48:34 That being said, I think our gloves have to be in retail, whether that’s in PGA Superstore or Golf Galaxy or whatever it is.
0:48:36 Our products are super visually appealing.
0:48:47 And I think it’s one of those things that people, when they see it, they feel it because there is a part of the design right now that it does look a little gimmicky, could be cheap because that’s how they’ve historically been made.
0:48:54 And so, to demonstrate that ours are actually true premium, you know, grade A, Cabretta leather, a lot of times people might have to feel it.
0:49:02 And that is definitely a potential disconnect right now that we’re trying to, you know, ease over with videos and content and all of that stuff.
0:49:06 But I do think long-term plan would be to eventually get this into retail.
0:49:11 And I think we’re set up from a logistics standpoint and a pricing standpoint to be able to do it eventually.
0:49:16 Do you see where, you know, everything these days is, like, everything is a subscription.
0:49:23 It’s like, do you see, like, golf gloves as a subscription where it’s like, well, every quarter we’ll ship you a new design.
0:49:28 Like, you just punch in your size and, you know, we’ll, almost like a subscription box type of thing.
0:49:31 Yeah, we’ve definitely thought about it and talked about it.
0:49:34 I think we have to have a lot of designs to do it.
0:49:39 And so we’ve been bootstrapping and kind of growing the inventory and the selection slowly.
0:49:47 But, yeah, I do think it’s the kind of thing where you could say, hey, if you buy, you know, five gloves now, we’ll ship one to you every month and you’ll get this amount of savings.
0:49:53 And then, like you said, the recurring revenue model is something that’s always enticed me, not just in a physical goods space, but just in general.
0:49:58 And I do think there is a potential for it, although, you know, wouldn’t want to force it.
0:50:04 I think there are other kind of priorities for us, but it’s definitely an interesting thought that we’ve considered.
0:50:11 Like half of the Shopify stores I get to, that’s like the only option is sign up for this recurring thing.
0:50:12 It’s like, oh, what if I just want to try it?
0:50:15 You know, it just, you know, there didn’t even seem to be an option.
0:50:17 Like, how do I just make a one-time purchase?
0:50:18 And I got to remember how to cancel this thing.
0:50:22 Like, it’s, you know, people have gotten very aggressive with the subscription model.
0:50:25 Maybe that’ll be our new tagline, not a subscription.
0:50:27 Yeah, because it does wear out.
0:50:29 And it’s, you know, kind of a unique thing.
0:50:31 I was just, just spitballing here.
0:50:33 But, Randall, you’re working the day job.
0:50:36 You’re selling thousands of things, thankfully, outsourced fulfillment at this point.
0:50:43 Where does your time go if there is such thing as a day in the life or in a typical week these days?
0:50:45 I’m usually waking up 5.30 or 6.
0:50:52 I usually try and do emails and stuff like that for Chip prior to starting my day job, which I get to work from home.
0:50:54 Luckily, which has made that a lot easier.
0:50:57 I do have more time in the day and can be a little bit more flexible.
0:50:59 And then I’ll work, you know, till 4 or 5.
0:51:02 And then we have two adopted dogs.
0:51:04 And so they require a lot of attention as well.
0:51:04 I’ll take them to the park.
0:51:07 My wife comes home, like to spend time with her.
0:51:11 And then usually maybe an hour or two at night, I’ll go in and do some of the other stuff that we have.
0:51:20 Whether it’s setting up ads or looking at profitability or looking at different reports from our logistics partner or, you know, dealing with customer service or whatever the case is.
0:51:21 So it’s definitely a mix.
0:51:28 But prior to offloading the shipment to our third party logistics company, you know, my whole night was basically pack and order.
0:51:32 So anything outside of that feels like I have a ton of free time now.
0:51:36 But, you know, I love to play golf, like to spend time with my family, my wife and two dogs.
0:51:38 And that usually takes up any free time I’ve got left.
0:51:39 Yeah, love it.
0:51:44 It feels like a burden off of the shoulders to let somebody else handle that stuff.
0:51:46 Well, this is really cool.
0:51:53 I know we’re coming into our fourth golf season with some big goals to try and double or triple revenue from last year.
0:51:54 But what’s next for you?
0:51:56 What’s on the horizon for Chip Golf?
0:51:58 Yeah, it’s continuing to roll out new designs.
0:52:01 We have some really exciting designs that we’re going to be rolling out this year.
0:52:03 So definitely stay tuned.
0:52:07 We’ve got one that’s going to be looking like it’s going to be all green, similar to the master’s jacket.
0:52:09 We’ve got one that’s like all red.
0:52:14 It’s supposed to mimic sort of like a boxing glove, really just trying to be as artistic and different as possible.
0:52:16 And then we’ve got a few other designs.
0:52:19 We’re also thinking about rolling out just like a generic white one.
0:52:23 Granted, it kind of goes against everything that I’ve just talked about, but there is a demand for it.
0:52:29 And so I think you talk about average order value and potentially getting more customers offering something like that is certainly a value.
0:52:32 So from the product standpoint, there’s that.
0:52:34 We also want to continue to improve our scalability.
0:52:42 So that comes with like the 3PL, continuing to perfect our ads and ultimately make this a business that hopefully one day can replace my day job.
0:52:49 I mean, I’ve been very transparent about that where, you know, I would love to be able to run this as a full-time thing.
0:52:50 As soon as I can pay the bills with it, I will.
0:52:54 But it is, you know, still definitely a labor of love right now.
0:52:57 And, you know, we’ll continue to try and strive towards that end goal.
0:53:04 And that’s fairly common in any physical product business where once you do find some product market fit
0:53:10 and you’re making some sales, like, okay, well, now we need more inventory and we need to make a bigger order and a bigger order.
0:53:18 This is kind of that natural progression sometimes for years before you really start to draw a salary from it or take any money off the table.
0:53:20 It always goes back into growth.
0:53:21 I think that’s really common.
0:53:21 Yeah.
0:53:26 And we’ve done, too, another thing that I neglected to mention was we do a lot of custom glove orders.
0:53:28 So different companies will reach out.
0:53:29 Brands will reach out.
0:53:29 Oh, okay.
0:53:31 And we do like collabs.
0:53:40 Yeah, it’s a whole new revenue stream for us that’s actually really nice because it’s sort of bulk up front and it’s only a one-order deal and it usually is great.
0:53:43 So we’ve worked with, you know, private equity companies that take their clients out golfing.
0:53:47 They want to have, like, a fun giveaway that’s completely customized to them.
0:54:03 We’ve worked with other golf apparel brands that, you know, they just want, like, if you were to go to any website for, like, a glove manufacturer and you wanted a custom glove, the only thing they’re really willing to customize are, like, the logos on, like, the Velcro latch and that’s about it.
0:54:09 You know, we will do custom pattern, custom packaging, colored wrist stripes, whatever you want.
0:54:10 We’ll pretty much do it.
0:54:14 And so we’ve had some brands that are wanting to sell their gloves on their site.
0:54:22 And so we’ve been making, you know, gloves for them almost as, like, a manufacturer for them, which has been fun because we do love the creativity of it.
0:54:28 That’s sort of the fun part of this whole thing is getting to see a design come to life and be completely different than anything that’s out there.
0:54:33 And a lot of these brands bring some really cool ideas to the table and it’s fun to execute on those for them.
0:54:34 I think that is really cool.
0:54:37 And that’s to your point about increasing average order value.
0:54:48 Well, how can you figure out how to make this a B2B business where people are going to order 100 of these for, you know, their company team building event or something?
0:54:50 Like, I think that makes a lot of sense.
0:54:51 I think that’s really kind of a cool angle.
0:54:52 I hadn’t thought about that.
0:54:55 ChipGolfCo.com.
0:54:56 Chip with two Ps.
0:54:58 Use promo code HUSTLE for 15% off your order.
0:54:59 Randall, this has been awesome.
0:55:06 I’m inspired by this and, you know, we’ll definitely grab a pair for my next round.
0:55:11 It’s kind of, you know, frozen tundra out there at this point, but we’re going to be thawing out soon.
0:55:12 We’ll be hitting the links.
0:55:16 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for Side Hustle Nation.
0:55:17 Find joy in the struggle.
0:55:20 When you are starting out, there’s going to be a lot of them.
0:55:23 And I think it can be very discouraging to a lot of people.
0:55:33 If you don’t find joy in the long hours and the mistakes and you lean into it as sort of just part of the process, building a brand, a product is going to be stressful.
0:55:41 I read a quote one time that entrepreneurs are the only people crazy enough to work more than 40 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.
0:55:42 And that is very true.
0:55:49 You need to be willing to put in the hours, but, you know, the labor of love and hopefully you’re working in an industry or a product that you’re passionate about.
0:55:52 And that passion will carry you through the hard times.
0:55:54 And it’s very easy to get discouraged.
0:56:00 It’s one of the main reasons why I love having a co-founder where it feels like, you know, every time that I may be like, hey, this isn’t going to work.
0:56:02 He’s like, no, this is definitely going to work.
0:56:03 And then vice versa.
0:56:05 And it sort of keeps the boat afloat.
0:56:09 But, yeah, maintain positivity and find joy in the struggle would be my main piece of advice.
0:56:10 Find joy in the struggle.
0:56:11 That’s great.
0:56:11 Yeah.
0:56:17 The entrepreneur is somebody who, you know, is willing to work 80 hours a week to avoid working 40 hours a week.
0:56:24 The line that came up, this was probably last year on the show, I was like, I don’t make any money while I’m working, so I can make money while I’m not working.
0:56:28 It was like this, you know, chasing this, you know, passive or time leveraged income.
0:56:30 It’s like, oh, there’s something, there’s something to that.
0:56:33 We’ll, you know, figure out a more concise way to say that.
0:56:34 But it’s been awesome.
0:56:35 Again, chipgolfco.com.
0:56:37 We’ll link that up in the show notes.
0:56:40 A couple of takeaways for me before we wrap.
0:56:44 Number one is this idea of finding that white space.
0:56:55 You know, every market on the surface is going to feel saturated, but when you’re in it, you might notice these like little, little areas where you can kind of carve a toehold for yourself.
0:57:00 You kind of wedge yourself in there with something that is unique and differentiated in some way.
0:57:03 I think that these gloves have done a good job of that.
0:57:08 And then what we talked about was, on the one hand, you know, creating demand.
0:57:13 That’s the social content, the viral content, the social media ads, the impulse buy type of stuff where it’s like,
0:57:15 Oh, that’s a unique gift idea.
0:57:16 I’ll go ahead and buy one.
0:57:27 And then also pairing that with the filling demand on these different search platforms, the Amazon, the Etsy’s, the TikTok shops, to a certain extent, where it’s like, okay, I’m in the market for a new golf club.
0:57:28 Anyways, I’m looking for it.
0:57:31 And if I happen upon this, oh, that’s a unique design.
0:57:32 Let me go ahead and buy that.
0:57:36 So trying to balance both of those on the marketing front, I think is really interesting.
0:57:46 Your listener bonus for this episode, if you are excited about e-com, is my list of 25 e-commerce niche ideas to get your creative juices flowing.
0:57:49 You can download that for free at the show notes for this episode.
0:57:52 Just follow the show notes link in the episode description.
0:57:59 And if you like this one and you’re wondering what to listen to next, I might recommend number 649.
0:58:04 That was the sunglasses episode with Mike Ettenberg from Frontline Optics.
0:58:09 Kind of a similar direct-to-consumer sunglasses brand in his case, targeting first responders.
0:58:12 But big thanks to Randall for sharing his insight.
0:58:15 Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone.
0:58:21 As always, you can hit up SideHustleNation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
0:58:24 And thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.
0:58:25 That’s it for me.
0:58:26 Thank you so much for tuning in.
0:58:29 Until next time, let’s go out there and make something happen.
0:58:31 And I’ll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show.

0:00:23 One of the fastest ways to make extra money, just stop spending as much. It goes straight to your bottom line. Hey, and you didn’t even have to come up with a new business idea. Today we’re talking tactical and creative money saving hacks with a long time listener, a serial side hustler. She’s the co-host of the Frugal Friends podcast and co-author of the new book, Buy What You Love, without going broke. Jen Smith, welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
0:00:28 Nick, thanks so much for having me. This is a for sure a full circle moment for me.
0:00:59 Well, it’s been a long time coming. Appreciate you joining me today. We I think we both uh are in agreement that it’s important to take a a holistic view of personal finance, thinking of yourself as the C_E_O_ or the C_F_O_ of your own life and really taking charge of your personal profitability, which of course includes the revenue side, which we’ve got hundreds and hundreds of episodes about, increasing your income. But it also includes the expense side, which we typically don’t talk a lot about. And with that, I wanna tee it up to you for suggestion
0:01:07 one on how to spend less monies or start saving more, or maybe a foundation that uh you need to lay on this mission to get the spending in check.
0:01:37 Yeah, I love side hustling, but you’re right. When you focus on the expense side, that’s the lowest barrier to entry, and you can start seeing more margin between your income and expenses faster when you stop spending money than if you’re just focus on side hustles. So what we tell everyone to do is yes, first track every expense, but not just your current expenses and your future expenses. First,
0:02:07 wanna start with your past expenses too. So first, look back at your last ninety days of spending and figure out what are the patterns, what are the habits, what am I already spending on. So that way you’re better prepared as you go through life and you’re spending money, you have a little bit more knowledge and a little bit more preparation on the things you’re more prone to spend on, the situations where you’re more prone to impulse spend or to overspend.
0:02:18 So we look back before we look forward, but that first tip is the same, is that you have to know what you’re doing, you have to track your expenses. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:28 For this, are you just uh pulling up the past three months of credit card statements and trying to figure out well where where to really go, trying to categorise this uh spending into different buckets? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:02:58 Yeah, you can really easily do it with whatever you’re using for your credit card or your debit card, wherever your transactions are. Or if you’re using a budgeting app like YNAB, Monar, Copilot, any of those, they do it automatically for you. And it’s really easy to sort by the dates that you made, so maybe you went on vacation, you wanna see maybe what you’re more prone to overspending on on vacation. You can sort by category, so maybe you’re not going to the same place over and over.
0:03:25 But you’re doing take-out over and over just at different places. Or maybe you do sort alphabetically so that you can see your expenses at each place. Like maybe I’m grocery shopping on Sunday, but I’m always heading back to the grocery store Wednesday or Thursday because I just didn’t make enough of a list or I didn’t stick to the list enough. So I’m always heading back for that one thing and getting more while in there. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:35 We used Monarch, which uh there’s some level of irony in it being a paid tool to help you spend less. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:03:38 I use Monarch too. Yeah, I pay for it as well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:08 you know, they probably have some like new customer discount. I’ll look I’ll look that up. I’ll link it up in the show notes for you. But w what we did ’cause we we kind of had this sense of well here’s our, you know, bare bones budget or like kind of the big ticket mortgage and utilities and f f food. You know, we kind of had a general sense of what it it cost to sustain our lifestyle. But then like every month when the credit card statement would come be like oh that seems a little bit high. What did what did we buy? It was like oh well we had uh plane tickets or we had
0:04:29 uh car repair or we had s you know something else broke, it it’s like every month it’s like well wasn’t a one-off thing, it’s like a very consistent thing. So we used Monarch to look at the last twelve months and be like well what do we what do we actually spend? And it was the kind of our hunches became true and the outflow was quite a bit higher than we had kind of mentally be envisioned in our in our heads. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:04:53 Yeah, it’s it’s always more nerve-wracking before you actually look. That’s why so many people just don’t wanna look back. We just wanna start freshly, go forward looking at expenses. But you will be more effective faster if you’re trying to lower your spending by knowing where you’re starting from. And it’s always scarier not knowing than when you actually look into it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:12 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:05:42 So once you look back, then you can start looking forward. So then you would start to make a budget. But I would say everybody’s budgeting style is different and everybody thrives with a different level of either being very strict or being very loose. Like for me I hated the strict budget, but I thought that’s what I had to do to be in control of my spending. And what I found was when I gave myself more
0:06:06 flexibility in the categories, like created fewer categories, it actually gave me more freedom to not spend on things and to spend without guilt and it made it more sustainable for me. So but the next point is to make a spending plan for the future. You can call it spending plan, budget, whatever makes you feel good. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:08 Spending plan sounds better than budget, for sure. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:21 Right. So like the f beautiful thing about language is that there’s so many synonyms for the same thing, right. So if one word gives you like g the grow that gross feeling like budget sometimes can, you can call it something else. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:23 Yeah, so it feels so like very restrictive, yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:06:53 right, right. So making some kind of spending plan for what I wanna do. And we recommend a zero based budget, but not just to have every dollar tied up into whatever’s most efficient, but so that you know that you have enough to put towards your financial goals and whatever you’re planning to do. So if you need a little extra capital to start a side hustle or you’re trying to pay off a debt before you can so you can work less, you have more
0:07:23 for your side hustle, you wanna make sure those things are covered first and on the timeline you wanna cover them and then with the rest that’s where we figure out our discretionary uh purchases. Obviously paying bills you know first and foremost but that’s kinda what you wanna do and you can make a budget or spending plan that you will stick to better because you already know what you’re spending on other things. You’re not just taking a shot in the dark on what you’re spending on
0:07:43 take-out or coffee or whatever, you actually know how much you’ve been spending over the past three months. So maybe you spend the same or maybe you shave it a little bit, but you’re not going to cut it by ninety percent because it’s an arbitrary thing that you think, quote unquote, you’re supposed to be spending that much. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:07:53 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:08:45 Yeah, that can be it. And I think it’s it’s not so much where the money
0:09:15 that zero based budgeting is, but it’s having a job for every dollar. So that dollar’s job could just be a miscellaneous fund, and you have a larger miscellaneous fund because you don’t wanna have a coffee budget, a take-out budget, a grocery budget, a non-food grocery budget, which I have seen like people have two check-outs at the grocery store because they wanna categorize food and non-food differently. Like if that’s you and you love that,
0:09:25 do you That’s. not me. So I would rather have bigger categories and more flexibility within them. And it can still be zero based. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:09:55 Yeah okay, I like that call to you know make sure every every dollar has a job put puttin it to work. When I’ve you know first started working and get the direct deposit I was like okay whatever they say allocate ten percent to four oh one K_ or up to whatever the company match was and then everything else just went into checking and what didn’t necessarily nee like I could probably could have accelerated my saving or investment journey and you know kind of was a natural saver to begin with but didn’t do a great job of investing that in compounding assets just kind of sat there in a lot of cases. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:10:25 Yeah, it when you are intentional about what you do with your money when you get it, it just it works better. And when you take care of the bigger things, you don’t have to stress so much about the smaller things. And so that’s like the eighty twenty rule in saving money. So when we look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics on what Americans spend on most, the biggest things are housing, transportation, and food. Those make
0:10:55 up about sixty percent, those three things, sixty percent of our monthly budget. So if we can focus on those three things first, mainly housing and transportation, where we make decisions about that maybe every five, ten, fifteen years, but if we focus on those really intentionally, then the six dollar latte or the twenty dollar take-out makes a lot less of an impact. So for me, that was when I got my last
0:11:25 I didn’t pay cash for it, I got a loan for it and that’s okay with me, like I’m not against like car loan debt, but what saved me four thousand dollars in one sitting was that after hours of negotiating for one car, which was virtually identical to another one, on the website they were the same price, but I was sitting there waiting to get this one car that after all the fees and
0:11:55 I have no idea how it inflated to four thousand dollars more than the other car. And I had this feeling like this sunk cost feeling. I’d already spent so much time negotiated, I’ve negotiated down a lot, I’ve invested a lot into the salesperson that I’ve never met before and will never see again in my life. So I was sitting there and I was about to buy the car, to just bite the bullet until I realised is this worth four thousand dollars, like what I’m sitting here for?
0:12:23 and worrying more about myself versus the time and the other people around me. And I was like no. So I got up, left and went and got the other car and in that one moment, which was very uncomfortable and I did not like it, it saved me four thousand dollars. So it’s making decisions like that that are what’s going to help us like really, really cut our spending. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:12:53 Yeah, that makes sense. It’s not so much the coffee’s here or there. I mean maybe it adds up to a lot and there’s oh, but if you if you save that four dollar latte and you compound it over it, you know, it’s like well, but if it brings you joy in life, you know, come on. But no, totally. Like on the housing, on the transportation, uh if you find some creative ways to uh stretch your uh food budget a little farther, like these are the big big levers that you can pull to make a bigger impact. More money saving hacks with Jen in just a
0:13:00 including my favourite non-confrontational negotiation tactic and four questions to ask before you make a purchase right after this.
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0:15:58 I will share on the car buying experience, I will share my most uh underrated negotiation tactic and it’s just called silence. It’s just sitting there awkwardly for what feels uh like an uncomfortable amount of time and I’ve seen this over and over again. We were kind of taught this uh when I was painting houses like once you name your price and you present the estimate, just sit there wait for wait for a reaction like don’t talk yourself out of a deal, you know. I remember uh going in take my car in for like an admissions test and there was a place nearby in California where y they had some you know
0:16:28 deal on the window. So I’d, you know, take it in and they say well because yours is an S_U_V_ it’s gonna cost more. And I was like well first of all, you know, calling my two-wheel-drive uh four-cylinder uh Ford Escape an S_U_V_ is being very generous, but but putting that aside the, remembered it’s sitting there for w what was probably just ten or fifteen seconds, but like in the moment it felt super awkward. And the guy was like okay fine, we’ll just honor that price. And I was like oh, I didn’t have to do anything for that. The other one was we were legitimately off the grid up in the mountains. Turns out like on Friday our landlord
0:16:58 that sent a note hey we’re we’re gonna have to raise your rate to to this you know maybe it was a three hundred dollar increase or something didn’t get the email ’cause we were not checking email come back on Monday night and we see like three future messages hey just making sure you saw this and then last one was like well how about if we meet in the middle and it was like hey I just saved a thousand bucks by not responding to this it works online too if you’re not in a hurry like if you have something in your shopping cart on some site just leave it leave it for a day leave it for a couple days there’s a lot of e-commerce stores have like the abandoned cart
0:17:10 sequence. So you might see a follow-up e-mail where it’s like hey, did you did you forget something? How about ten percent off if you if you check out now. And so and that’s my underrated new negotiation tactic of just waiting. Silence. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:31 Yeah. Oh my gosh definitely. Any time I wanna buy clothes on Poshmark, I just like it. I don’t put it in the cart, I just like it. And then like ni nine times out of ten, I get a special offer on the piece. Yeah, it’s always you just show a little bit of interest, but don’t give ’em anything else. Like you can walk away. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:17:40 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:06 setting that mindset well, not everything that you buy has to be brand new. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:18:36 Yeah, I try to buy as much as possible second-hand, not just because it saves money, but also because we have so much stuff on our planet that we have I think the estimate is we have enough clothing already made to clothe the next six generations of people. And so if we can stop that flow, we not only are saving money, we are and and these things are more negotiable than
0:19:06 something that you would buy in Target or Wal-Mart, right? But we’re also cutting down on like landfill waste clutter uh in our earth. So it’s just like there’s no reason to just not think second-hand first. It doesn’t mean everything you buy has to be second-hand, but if we would just shift the mindset to being like before I buy anything, I use these four questions. How can I get it for free? So like a buy nothing
0:19:36 or free on Facebook Marketplace, or from a friend either trading or borrowing. If I can’t get it for free, how can I get it for low cost? And so that’s where second-hand comes in. How can I get it on Poshmark, eBay, ThredUP, can I buy it from Facebook Marketplace, thrift store. If I can’t get that, and I don’t spend a ton of time searching for these, I’m you know, depending on how fast I need something, I’m not searching for years, right? I’m just I’m
0:20:06 looking, I’m trying to get creative before I just first go out and buy it new. If I can’t get it low cost, I ask how can I get a deal on it? Like how soon is the next sales cycle coming up ’cause they always come back around. And then if I really need it and I can’t wait for a sale, how can I buy full price and not feel guilty about it? So is there a way I can buy locally or sustainably? Something like that. So those are the four questions that I asked before
0:20:09 Or I’d buy something in order to save money. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:20:40 Yeah, I know that’s that’s a good filter to put a new purchase decision through, and I will add another layer of filtering which I just call the waiting period. Maybe it’s twenty four hours, maybe it’s thirty days, and this is something that I d uh used to do quite a bit more. So I can just put a thirty day waiting period on it and you’ll find in a lot of cases that y you know obviously can’t do this with food and other essentials, but it’s like for you know something something else where it’s like oh that’s a nice to have. You
0:20:55 find that you lived a perfectly happy existence for the thirty days in between, and you’re like uh you just set a calendar reminder, hey, buy the thing. And you might find like yeah, I don’t really need it anymore. Or I don’t really want it anymore. And if you find that you still do want it, then by all means like okay, go for it knock, yourself out. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:26 Yeah, there’s so much money to be made in FinTech with like frictionless payment and getting us to impulse buy. Like all an advertiser needs to do is show up in your social media feed. You have a pattern, right? You’re just scrolling. They just need to interrupt that pattern. It’s literally called a pattern interrupt. They just need to interrupt it for thirty seconds to get your attention within if you they can get you to make a purchase in thirty seconds, then they’ve got you. You know, any more than thirty
0:21:40 then we check back in with ourselves and we’re asking ourselves that question. Right right, do I really need this in my life? And it’s not necessarily out to scam anybody, it’s just like hey this was a b a novelty product. Most the time our episodes are on that pattern interrupt side where it’s like how do how do I get people to buy my stuff. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:21:49 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:16 I find that the longer I run a business the better I get at resisting marketing, at least for things that I don’t need. Like I truly love marketing for introducing me to things that really do improve my life, but I also know when it’s something that they’re trying to create a problem or create a solution that I didn’t need or have before. Like it’s they are creating it so I buy something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:27 Yeah, I’ve had enough sales training that you start to recognise it when other people are using that stuff on you and not it’s not necessarily a turn-off, but you’re just like okay I, see I see what you’re doing here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:22:42 It’s makes sense for us because we’re in it, but there’s so many people who don’t know what’s going on, and it’s really not their fault, that’s why we love talking about it on Frugal Friends, is so that everybody can know what we already know as business owners. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:23:12 The next uh money saving hack that I wanna introduce is what I call the substitution game. This is where you’re finding better, faster, cheaper, all lower cost alternatives to the stuff you’re already spending money on. This is kind of borrowed from Rose-Marie Groener from Busy Budgeter years ago. I was like well you’re targeting people who don’t have any money. Are you targeting like people who are like trying to be really frugal with their spending? Like that didn’t seem like a great audience. And she was like well it’s a great audience because if you can show them hey you’re already spending money on
0:23:42 have you considered this better, cheaper alternative? It’s, you know, a natural affiliate recommendation to make that switch. It’s like oh, okay, you know s so one example would be like MIT Mobile in our house, like oh say money on your cell phone bill. But they’re looking at the things that you’re already spending money, like if it’s been a while since you’ve shopped for car insurance, like you’re you keep paying the same rate, but your cars have depreciated since you last, you know, renegotiated that. So like different things that you could kind of look at um and try and get the same service for lower cost.
0:24:12 Yeah, I did that recently with insurance. It wha and actually our insurance is coming up again. So it is time to do it again. But it’s things that you’re already buying and need. I think it’s go always good to like re-think if you actually need it, and I do this a lot with our streaming services to say like okay, is this actually something I need? Because sometimes when you take a break and you come back in, then you get like a new subscriber discount. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:12 Mm-hmm.
0:24:20 So sometimes just like canceling for six months can save you even money more money again if you can’t negotiate it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:24:44 Mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:14 Mm-hmm mm-hmm mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
0:25:44 it’s it’s too small to even make it down. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:26:12 Yeah, I think and we also th we believe that any change we have to m make is permanent, and truly nothing is permanent. So my co-host Jill, when the before they owned a home, they lived in an R_V_ for a couple years. And they never intended for that to be a permanent lifestyle, like they were not R_V_ YouTubers who, you know, built a brand around being digital nomads, right.
0:26:42 literally did it to save money on their living expenses for two years. And that’s how we ended up meeting them ’cause they just took advantage of living in an R_V_ to take a road trip down to Florida. So so many of the things we think of or maybe it’s not having a car, a second car uh or a car at all as maybe you skip out for six months or nine months and just take an e-bike or you’re a one family car, nothing that you do to save money
0:26:51 to be permanent, but if it’s worth the money you will save for however long you do it, that could make a big dent in your future goals.
0:27:21 Yeah, we have strongly considered becoming a one-car household in this interim period where the kids are, you know, pre-driver’s license age ’cause it’s like the insurance carrying cost sits at the driveway most of the time not getting used and sometimes oh well now we gotta jump-start the battery and stuff, but uh you kind of have to do that math well how much would you spend on Uber or Lyft like on those very few occasions where you really did need two cars, like and does that outweigh the cost. So
0:27:26 there’s the kind of questioning to your point some of the the bigger ticket items in your life. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:27:56 Yeah, definitely. So I think my next recommendation, and it’s one that I’ve been talking about for years and have been delighted to be talking more about in twenty twenty five, because it is a hot topic, is no spend challenges. So I know like ha stopping spending money is extreme, right. So I don’t I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it is it’s a gateway drug to saving sustainably. So if you’re interested in it
0:28:26 it’s not bad. But I love talking about no spend challenges, which is you know extreme, but it’s extreme for a short amount of time and it’s not extreme just for the sake of being extreme. But so like when we were talking at the top of the episode about looking at what you spent in the past and making a plan for what you will spend in a future or spending plan or budget, there is this real time period between that and that’s where
0:28:56 a no spend challenge can really help you get a handle on your expenses. It goes beyond like the subscriptions and the automations and all that and gives you a really big insight into what are my spending habits, what am I spending on without thinking, what am I taking for granted that I have to spend on to meet a need when I could really get creative and meet that need for free or lower cost. So I
0:29:26 like to recommend doing at least one not thirty day no spend challenge. Maybe you’re starting out getting ahold of your expenses. Maybe you’re kind of recommitting yourself. Doing thirty days is enough. Like yes, there are books written about people doing no spend challenges for a year, like no buy, low buy years. That’s that’s fine if you wanna write a book about your experience. But if you want to just get a handle on your spending, [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:29:56 and start to retrain some of your dopamine receptors to go towards other dopamine producing habits versus automatically going to scrolling the Amazon app or going to Target or any of these shopping-induced dopamine receptor things Thirty. days really is enough. So I read uh while we were writing Buy What You Love Without Going Broke, I was reading Dopamine Nation by Anne Lemke and she was she worked with people with all kinds of
0:30:26 addictions. And the first thing she would do is put them on a quote unquote dopamine fast. And they’re not really fasting dopamine, you need dopamine. But the thing is is that you can if you abstain from what is creating these dopamine inducing actions, these quote unquote addictions, if you abstain for four weeks, one month, thirty days, whatever, the first two weeks are very hard. The the
0:30:56 week actually is the easiest, the second week is the hardest. But after two weeks, you start to see a difference in where you’re getting your dopamine hits and how you’re getting them. And after four weeks, you can truly see a ch a change to where if I’m stressed, I can go towards something that will actually treat the root cause of the stress instead of stress shopping, which is just a habit. So that’s what I
0:31:08 love about the no spend challenge is for that right there to start paying attention to spending habits and starting to change them versus just how much money you’ll save of not spending for four weeks. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:31:38 Yeah, we had some friends recently uh go through this, we th we did not participate for photo disclosure. They were allowed to buy, you know, produce and stuff, but otherwise it was like trying to eat out of the pantry, eat out of the freezer, and it’s interesting that you mentioned week two is the hardest ’cause this really aligns with uh the New Year’s resolution data that like w what is it, January twelfth is quit day. It’s like that’s, you know, the first week like, motivation is really strong, okay, I got this and then week two, uh it starts
0:32:08 wait a little bit and then by the end of week two it’s like yeah forget it I’ll just go back to my old habits and it’s like that’s uh that’s really interesting here and y my guess is because I’ve done like twenty four thirty six hour fasts but not much l longer than that and it makes you you kind of notice what it makes you notice what you’re missing makes you really grateful that you’re not doing that most of the time but it’s kind of i trying to f figure out those little emotional points where oh I normally would have bought
0:32:18 this or normally would have eaten this or normally would have spent that, and I think that’s a that’s really interesting. A little bit extreme, but maybe it kick-starts or build some awareness around where your money’s going. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:32:49 Yeah, w so we talk about finding the radical middle ’cause everybody loves to live in extremes ’cause they’re really easy to market and talk about they go viral, but where s true sustainability lies is in the radical middle. And we can find our radical middle by visiting extremes and learning about them, but we don’t wanna live in them. And that’s kinda what a no spend challenge is, right? Like it’s extreme, it helps you realise okay, what’s the thing that I can’t stop
0:33:19 thinking about wanting to spend on ’cause you’re right, I’ve done twenty four hour fasts too, and I think about food m way more than than I would if I was not s like on a fast. And so people, when they think about cutting out costs, they think about the most important things to them and be and like oh, but I don’t wanna give up this. And usually that’s the last thing you should give up. And a no spend challenge can help you figure out okay, what are the things that I am constantly thinking about that I really
0:33:37 miss and then you check back with that transaction inventory and you’re like oh, I didn’t even think about this, yet I’m always spending on it w w so I don’t I can just draw a line in the sand now and say I’m not gonna spend on this anymore. Uh so I really love it for that aspect. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:33:49 More money saving hacks with Jen in just a moment, including cash versus credit cards, some helpful browser extensions and how to take control and stop playing defense with willpower all day long right after this.
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0:36:42 Wh what do you think about this one? ‘Cause I have been very pro credit card rewards. We have banked thousands of dollars’ worth of cash back and free flights around the world. Like it has been, you know, almost a p a part of our identity to, you know, b take advantage of these credit card bonuses. But there’s some pretty compelling data that says people spend more and consistently more and significantly more when they’re using credit cards instead of cash.
0:37:13 you have a spending plan, you can use credit cards really responsibly and take advantage of all the benefits that they have to offer. I love credit cards for the safety they afford you when you’re making transactions, for all of the flight and hotel benefits, I love them. But you have to be working on a plan because sometimes we’ve been I’ve done this before when you’re consumed about getting to those like like minimum spends to get the bonus or whatever. You can just throw
0:37:43 else on the credit card because you’re like oh I’ll make it up with the points I get. Which really isn’t and then your points just sit there like in perpetuity because you have so many and you can’t have you know can’t take off time for work to travel for six months with all your points. So being very intentional with a spending plan can help you really get the most out of credit card usage and put into perspective okay
0:37:54 what is enough? Like what vacations am I trying to take? How many points do I need to get there? And do I have to hoard points just because I can? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:22 No. Yeah, you can’t t you can’t take ’em with you. And and they get get ’em devalued year after year. So use ’em use ’em up. And we do think cash is important for the kids, especially a younger one, to like see that physical transaction, the money leave in his hands. For me it’s almost the opposite, where it’s like it feels like it feels like it’s free ’cause I know it’s not gonna hit the account, it’s not gonna I’m not gonna see it on my statement, it’s just like oh here’s twenty bucks, sure. But it’s you know, it’s there’s some interesting psychology around cash versus cards. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:42 Yeah, I definitely think it’s wise ma like when you’re starting out and if you believe you do have a pro like a real problem with overspending, just lock the credit cards for a few months and just use cash. It does it it’s not a long-term solution, but it is a good short-term exercise. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:38:57 On the shopping side, going back to getting the best deal, I like the site Cashback Monitor, um I like Rakuten. Do you have any other tools, tips, uh you know, for deal finding or or Cashback here? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:39:28 Yeah, I’ve been into CNET shopping lately. It’s one of those like price trackers so you can see if something is on is less expensive on another site. I use um B_E_N_I_. So that is a site that helps well it’s uh it’s a browser extension, and so like if I’m on if I see somebody wearing a cute Lululemon uh sweatshirt, I can look it up on the Lululemon
0:39:58 And then the Benny browser extension, I click that and I can find the sweatshirt on second-hand sites like Poshmark, ThredUP, E_Bay, RealReal, all of those resale sites. It will look at that particular new item and find it all over the internet second-hand. And so I actually love that. It saves me m way more than like any rebate app ’cause I’m saving [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:02 fifty percent on things that are even new with tags. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:07 Okay Cool. Benny, that’s a new one to me. Well we can link that up in the show notes. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:25 Gem it does a similar thing with if you’re more into like vintage and higher end stuff, it’s similar to Benny, but for more like vintage clothing, that’s G_E_M_. Gem search I think I’m, not 100% sure. I am not super fashion forward, so I just use Benny. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:40:38 Got it, cool. And and nor am I, so just buy clothes from and then just well that that fit well, so buy another pair of clothes or buy another one of those in a different colour or something. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:24 It’s hard to find hard to find if something that fits. I will say I have a transition to spending more up-front for hopefully better quality stuff than rather wearing out the you know pair of old navy shorts in six months or something. So you know what’s like the buy buy it for life or you know these brands that hopefully a little more durable or longer lasting. So it’s sometimes it’s wh what do they call it? It’s like a you know penny-wise pound, foolish or something like you know single ply you end up using more. So like a
0:41:29 there’s some certain ones where you’re just yeah it looks cheaper on the surface because it’s not gonna last. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:41:59 Yeah, that’s one of the problems with having a frugal living podcast is that people will come up to Jill and I and brag about how cheap they got their clothing or how cheap they got something. And then I’m like yeah, but did you need it? And is it gonna last? Like I think those things I obviously do not say them out loud. But it that is always what I think. It’s always people bragging about what they got, what they could
0:42:16 instead of like bragging about I d I didn’t consume this, or I didn’t buy anything on Amazon for, you know, six months or stuff like that. That is what I would love to hear our listeners brag about. And anybody I, would love to hear that from anybody. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:42:29 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:15 Yeah, it is a balance. Frugality for us isn’t just about stewarding your m your money well, but it’s being a good steward of all of your resources, and that includes time, your physical space, so not like cluttering up your space with a bunch of free stuff or cheap stuff from Craig’s list. Uh it’s about your mental energy and natural resources too, so it’s about stewarding all these limited resources well. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:43:32 That makes sense. One limited resource is attention. You like that transition. The um hack that I wanna share is to m either not sign up for marketing emails from different stores or brands in the first place, or you can unsubscribe from them if it is becoming a problem.
0:44:03 what I tend to do from the stores that I’d actually shop from like R_E_I_ and some of these other ones, even like pizza like Papa Murphy’s and stuff like goes into this special folder that I don’t really see, but when it’s time to order or when I’m in the market for something, I can go through and see if they sent me any deals recently. It’s like out of sight, out of mind, but I’m I’m still in control rather than like oh there’s a sale going on or oh it’s it’s like well I I don’t need to see that ’cause I wasn’t gonna buy it i th like
0:44:15 the game that they want to play. It’s like how to create more purchase activity. But it’s like I wanna do that on my own terms. And so I just have a bunch of filters set up in G_ mail to throw those into like a marketing deals or something folder. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:44:27 Mm-hmm.
0:44:48 Mm-hmm. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:12 Yeah, absolutely I. look at my wife’s inbox and it’s like thousands and thousands of messages. It’s like could I help clean this up for you? But she generally does okay with the impulse buys. But it’s like it’s it’s it’s somewhat exhausting to be playing defense with willpower all day long and have seen this with food or with you know m the bombardment of different marketing messages. And so you kind of have to build these little uh guardrails around uh around yourself. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:45:42 Yeah, you definitely have to remove the temptation you ha it’s so much easier to not have it in front of you than it is to decide to make a good decision. Like we always say work with your brain, not against it. Your brain wants to take the path of least resistance. So let it. But you have to put up the guard rails so that path does it like derail you from your financial goals. So we
0:46:12 uh atomic habits, uh James Clear’s like habit triggers, the cues, and so like i is it the person I’m with or is it the place that I’m heading to or coming from, is it the time of day, so we look at these cues and we’re like okay, can I change anything about these to remove the temptation, and that works so much better than trying to rely on yourself to make the good decision every
0:46:37 ‘Cause by by three P_M_ it’s you’re you’re sober. You’re just done. That’s and and you know a amount like you don’t need to be stronger. Like I think we can feel guilty for our lack of you know quote unquote self-discipline or discernment or whatever. But our body’s literally designed to d to do this for our brain. So work with your brain, not against it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:05 Yeah remove, the temptation and s some of the things it might be ordering delivery, like a grocery delivery. It saves you from making impulse buys in the store. Like we’ve started doing a lot of target pick-up, which for me it’s like it’s gonna it’s only a few things. Like let me just go in. It’s gonna be faster than sitting here waiting on somebody to bring out this stuff. Like it feels silly. Like I’ll just go pick it up. But the mentality is like we’ll probably save money by not going into the store and seeing oh what else is in here that we need. That jumps into the cart. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:47:37 I do this? And I think part of it is like if I’m going to target for one thing, I’m already there. So it would be an inefficient use of my time to not walk around to see if there’s anything else I need. Because then I would have to go back. And I don’t wanna go back. So then I look around and then that’s where I end up impulse buying something instead of if I had just walked in to get the one thing and and walked out. So part of it I think was is an
0:47:49 is an efficiency thing for me and, so yeah, I’ve been doing Walmart grocery pick-up for years since I had my first son and he was just impossible to go grocery shopping with. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:48:19 Alright. The next one on uh my list is to get an accountability partner. I think if you’re trying to cut back spending and all your friends don’t know about this, or they’re gonna think you’re all of a sudden this wet blanket who doesn’t wanna do anything anymore, I I think it’s helpful to have somebody else in your corner who’s on the same journey who’s rooting for you. I remember years ago, Tiffany um the budget nista, she said this was like day one of her thirty day live richer challenge, day one get yourself an accountability partner.
0:48:49 from the business and growth and marketing standpoint I was like well this is fantastic you just doubled the size of your audience you know on day one, this is great. But from um the personal like uh stick-with-itness factor you gotta have somebody else who um who can support you and say no no no we’re in this together. I remember even on the the health and fitness side like we would come home uh from from work early in our careers and be like well we said we were gonna go uh go for a run but you know it would be easier if you don’t if one person’s thinking ah I don’t
0:48:52 really wanna go like, no no no, we’re gonna back each other up, we’re gonna go do this. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:49:22 Yeah, you you have to it takes a village, and we’ve gotten so far away from from that ideology, it’s hard to find a village now. If you want to succeed in anything financially, business, health, you do have to surround yourself with people who have the same goals. So they don’t necessarily have to be on the same path, but they at least have to be genuinely supportive of the path that you’re
0:49:53 And I had to stop hanging out or talking to some people when I was paying off debt, and I hang out with them now. It’s not like I cut them off totally from my life ’cause they were toxic or something. They just weren’t good for me in that period of time. And so it being really honouring your season and whatever you’re trying to accomplish and and really making a point to create community around you to support
0:50:07 that is truly gonna make or break. I don’t think I know I would not have paid off my student loans if I hadn’t had my husband there, like when we were working together on it. Like I just I was not interested in it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:20 Do you have any recommendations for maybe one partner in a relationship is the spender and the other is the saver? Like how do you kind of bridge that gap and get buy-in from a a spouse or partner? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:50:50 first I think the spender and saver like personality types are a myth. I think everybody spends and everybody would save if they had enough incentive. Like if you were gonna die tomorrow unless you made five thousand dollars, like you’d find a way to make that money, right? So everybody can do it uh theoretically. But not everybody has the same values and
0:51:20 wants the same things. So it might look like and and people don’t think that they are sometimes capable or deserve the things that they truly want in life. Like we think we deserve small things and so we’ll go after small things and those are the things that are typically marketed to us, but big things like retiring in your fifties or even in your sixties or starting like going full time in a business
0:51:50 or stuff like that. Sometimes we don’t think that we can get that because that would take so much of our time and so much effort. So we we sacrifice these bigger things that we actually want to just take the smaller things. And when we recognise what our partner actually wants in life and we start to have those big higher level conversations, that’s when we can start to honour what this person would actually say
0:52:19 what would give my partner incentive to save. What is the thing that they really do want in life and would save for. That ’cause that was what happened with me. I didn’t wanna pay off her debt, but I did want to eventually foster. And that involves a lot of time. Um a lot of time investment. And it’s easier to invest that time if work is optional for me. And if I have a seven hundred dollar debt payment every month, work is not optional for me. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:52:19 Yeah.
0:52:44 So that became the catalyst for why I wanted to pay off the debt. Him just it being a good idea or something I’m quote unquote supposed to do or something that my spouse wanted me to do was not enough for me. I had to connect it to what I really wanted. And so you have to find the thing that your partner really wants enough to stop spending on the small things to focus on the big things. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:14 Yeah, getting on the same page in alignment with that big picture goal. What do you you know, what do you wh what do we envision for our life? Like what uh you know, having that i i and the goal posts may move, but having some sort of destination in mind rather than just saving for the sake of saving, I think that can be that can be really important or maybe that’s something that we found uh helpful uh early on in in our journey and recognising it to team sport. Like we gotta have some some buy-in here. But having that big picture
0:53:41 it’s important on the saving side, it’s important on the side hustle side too ’cause it’s like the going is gonna get tough, you’re gonna wanna quit, it’s just like what’s that driving motivation behind it and it’s a kind of it’s it’s the different side of the same coin. Well it’s like well yeah everybody says they wanna side hustle to make extra money, but why? Like what does that afford you? Like going three or four layers deep uh i and if you have a spouse or partner in the picture like then that can that can be really impo be important too. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:42 Yeah. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:53:45 Anyth anything else on your list? I think we’ve done uh pretty good here. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:54:15 Yeah, I I would say the last thing for me is to celebrate small wins. I think that we uh at least for me, and I think that this might be for a lot of personal finance nerds, we are so we are so quick to move the goal post. Uh we hit one goal and then we just, you know, move it back and we’re already onto the next without recognising what we’ve done and celebrating that. So really taking time
0:54:45 we achieve a goal, like what did I struggle through so that I don’t forget that. Uh and then what was really easy for me that I thought wasn’t gonna be easy. Um and and so all of these things reflecting on the journey so that the next time you’re trying to accomplish something and you’re not sure if you can do it, you can actually look back at what you did the last time and be encouraged. It can and these successes
0:54:52 pushing through setbacks, they all compound on themselves. So the goals that you reach can be bigger and bigger. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:23 That’s right. Keep leveling up. That’s the name of the game. And I do wanna add a point here that like as your income increases, as your side hustle starts to grow, as you level up in your career, like some level of lifestyle creep lifestyle, inflation is uh is recommended. That’s kind of the point, right? Like you reward yourself. You know, make things easier on on yourself. Uh enjoy the fruits of your labour. Tim Ferriss has this line um about well how can I waste money to improve
0:55:42 quality of life. And I think that waste line is really important because it allows you to acknowledge that it’s not necessary. Like yes, it’s an upgrade. Yes, it seems frivolous based on my, you know, you know, years of frugal habits. I so I’m gonna acknowledge that it’s a waste, but it’s worth it because it’s gonna make life better or easier in some way. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:55:53 Yeah. Lifestyle inflation is not bad as long as it’s proportionate to your income inflation and it aligns with what you truly value and what your goals are. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:13 Very good. Jen, this has been awesome. Congrats on the book launch. Again, buy what you love without going broke. Buy what you love book dot com Make. sure to grab a copy. Make sure to check out the Frugal Friends podcast. Now you’ve got other side hustles, other projects, self-publishing print, on demand. What what are you working on this year? [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:56:43 Oh, this year is all about YouTube. We are definitely diving more into video. It’s that one thing that I think will make other things easier or unnecessary in the future. So yeah, we are starting a c a couple different uh YouTube segments for the podcast and I’m even starting to post more on my personal YouTube channel. Well, it’s called modern frugality. So it’s not like personal personal, but there are just some things where
0:56:54 like I’m just I’m gonna post more on YouTube. I’m gonna get over my fear of not being not feeling camera-ready, not feeling camera-worthy and just just try it. [SPEAKER_TURN]
0:57:24 Very good. Modern frugality we’ll link that up as well along with frugal friends and the book Buy What You Love Without Growing Broke. What’s that one thing that will make things easier or unnecessary? I love that line. Now we’ve been talking about saving money in this episode, but as you know there’s only so much you can cut. But your earning power on the other side is limitless, which is why we’ve got over six hundred fifty episodes dedicated to that topic. If you’re not sure where to start, I wanna invite you to grab your personalized side hustle
0:57:54 play list, all you gotta do is go to hustle dot show, answer a few short multiple choice questions, and it’ll recommend uh eight to ten episodes to start with based on your answers. Again, that’s at hustle dot show. Big thanks to Jen for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up side hustle nation dot com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let’s go out there
0:57:59 make something happen and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.

0:00:05 Here’s an oldie but a goodie from the archives from the Side Hustle Show Greatest Hits Collection.
0:00:09 What’s up, what’s up Nick Loper here.
0:00:15 Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because your 9 to 5 may make you a living, but your 5 to 9 makes you alive.
0:00:21 This week you’ll meet a high school dean who’s built his Side Hustle to the point where it now makes more than the day job.
0:00:23 And he’s done it teaching chess.
0:00:29 Stick around to hear how Jeff DeOrio from EliteChess.net built his minimum viable audience.
0:00:35 How he set up the business for recurring revenue and how you can borrow some of these same tactics in your own business.
0:00:42 As a listener bonus, this week I put together a free list of 20 more hobby niches where you could apply the same general business model to.
0:00:48 You’ll find that along with the full show notes for this episode at sidehustlenation.com/chess
0:00:51 or through the link in the episode description of your podcast app.
0:00:56 The story starts with Jeff teaching chess at a neighboring school’s summer camp.
0:00:58 Ready? Let’s do it.
0:01:02 [Music]
0:01:12 I was making $17 an hour and started thinking, “Wow, maybe I could do this for myself and give myself a little bit of a raise.”
0:01:23 Plus, I was making all these kids really strong in chess in the neighboring cities and then not really focusing on my own community that I was working with.
0:01:26 You’re helping out the competition for your own chess team.
0:01:34 Yeah, and while I believe strongly in just kind of helping anyone, I thought I should at least serve the people nearest to me too.
0:01:35 Okay.
0:01:42 So that was the idea, but I didn’t really move on it. I sometimes have a little trouble getting started.
0:01:46 I have these ideas and then I kind of think about them quite too long.
0:02:01 And it wasn’t until I was about to begin my fourth year of summer camp where I said, “I’ve got to give this a try,” but I was scared to do it.
0:02:09 And so I decided that, you know what’s going to get me off of, get me moving would be to just host a charity event.
0:02:23 I thought that if I made it about someone else, then it would make it a little bit easier for me to handle if, you know, it didn’t go well or if my idea wasn’t as strong as I thought.
0:02:36 And so then I reached out to some local charities and asked them if they would be willing to let me run a charity chess tournament in their name and give them all the money basically.
0:02:46 So they were very supportive. Sometimes when you knock on doors and ask people, “Can I give you money?” They very rarely turn you down, I found.
0:02:51 They’re not like, “Well, skeptical. What’s the catch? What’s this guy’s angle?”
0:02:54 Yeah. I mean, I didn’t get a lot of that angle.
0:03:05 Maybe just inherently being an education people kind of, for whatever reason, I think they approached you with a little bit of a sense that you are giving yourself to the community in general.
0:03:12 So I think that helped. The charities were all on board and they said, “Well, what can we do to help?”
0:03:20 I really didn’t need much, but I said, “If you want it to go better, you could always send it out to your audience.” And so that’s what they did.
0:03:26 Okay. You know, you’re piggybacking on the audience that they already have or the list that they already have.
0:03:36 Yeah. And we’re just saying that we’re going to serve their audience. And we did that and it went well. And so then we did it at some local schools.
0:03:45 And that really went well. And so we started to get sort of this little following that joined from it.
0:03:55 From there, I basically then just started, I said, “You know what? I’m just going to donate my skills and chess knowledge and teaching abilities to anybody in the area.”
0:04:03 And so from there, I reached out to local tournaments and I would show up at their tournament and I would go over games with kids.
0:04:13 So when a kid plays a chess game, they take record of the moves. And after their game, they come out and I would go through the games and kind of guide the kids.
0:04:20 And if anyone here has children, you know that when you play board games with kids and when they lose, it can be pretty traumatic.
0:04:23 Yes. We’re in that stage for sure.
0:04:33 Yeah. We had to put Monopoly on hold in our house for about a year. And so that definitely happens with chess because it’s a one-on-one thing and kids would lose and be really upset.
0:04:42 And I would show up at these local tournaments and I would just scan the room for crying kids and I would just show up and I’d say, “Hey, bud.”
0:04:47 Or, you know, to a little boy or girl and say, you know, parents and say, “Hey, can I go over that game with you?”
0:04:56 And then my goal was just to really just try to make those kids feel really big and 10 feet tall when they left and show them, you know, all the great things they did.
0:05:05 This would be the equivalent of a basketball or football player like watching game film after the fact, trying to figure out what went well, what didn’t go so well.
0:05:14 100%, 100%. In chess, you often find that you make, you know, in a 30-move game, you might have made 28 really good moves and two bad ones.
0:05:19 And unfortunately, that causes you to lose. But the essence of what you did is still really positive.
0:05:25 And so I can tell you, if you get a bunch of crying kids to stop crying, parents are very, very thankful.
0:05:31 They think you’re a magician. And we started to get little crowds at these tournaments and started to build the following.
0:05:38 Okay. Does Elite Chess exist at this point? Or is it just kind of like you’re building your own reputation in the community?
0:05:47 It does not really exist. It doesn’t even have a website or anything. The name exists, but I don’t really have a platform.
0:05:54 I’m just building my name in the community. And I had literal sign-in lists of people’s emails.
0:06:00 You know, I said, “Hey, do you do this on the side or where can we get more of what you’re doing?”
0:06:03 And I would say, “Well, this summer we’re going to try some summer camps.”
0:06:09 So if you’re interested, just write your email down on this sheet of paper. And we started to build a list.
0:06:18 Okay. From the charity organizations inviting their existing audience of people, their existing email list,
0:06:22 for the local schools, like, “Hey, we’re going to host a charity tournament at your school.”
0:06:26 Or, “We’re going to host a free tournament at your school.” And they’re inviting their students, their parents.
0:06:32 And so you’re kind of like very grassroots trying to build up this initial audience of people.
0:06:36 And I like the paper signed up. She said, “Oh, I don’t have to have any fancy tech involved.”
0:06:39 Put your name and email down here and we’ll be in touch.
0:06:47 Yeah, that’s exactly what we did. And we did that for a few months. And I think we had around maybe 50 emails on there.
0:06:55 But as with most of the stuff we’ve done, you know, they’re usually really strong leads, really strong emails and contacts.
0:07:03 And so we then held our first summer camp and we ended up having 12 kids show up our first week.
0:07:16 And I remember just in that first camp, you know, making five times the amount of money that I made teaching summer camps for somebody else just with 12 kids.
0:07:24 Wow, that’s really cool. Kind of just grassroots validation. Hey, I didn’t have a huge database to advertise this too,
0:07:32 but the people who were on this list were interested. We had 12 people show up and you’re kind of off to the races from there.
0:07:39 Were you able to, like, secure a church basement or a community center?
0:07:44 I’m just trying to think of, like, logistics of having 12 kids show up. Where do they go? And how does this work?
0:07:53 Yeah, that’s exactly what we did. We went out and rented space from local churches and local schools.
0:07:58 A lot of schools will rent their spaces as well. Some people don’t really know that.
0:08:03 Schools often will rent, especially if you’re community-based organizations.
0:08:10 And in my case, I did have some relationships in education. Not that they don’t do it to anyone, but…
0:08:13 Yeah, especially in the summer, they’re not using the place, you know, it makes sense.
0:08:20 Exactly. They’ve got these buildings sitting empty. And so we did that with churches and schools all summer.
0:08:24 And then, you know, that’s where we kind of grew elite chess.
0:08:29 And then once the summer was over, our families were like, “Well, you can’t stop now.
0:08:35 Can you keep teaching our kids?” And so I basically just asked them what they would want.
0:08:41 And they said they wanted once a week chess instruction during the weekdays, you know, at night.
0:08:46 And so that was the start of our first weekly chess academy.
0:08:55 And did you find that from those first 12 kids, was there some stickiness factor where they would come back the following week?
0:09:00 Or they would come back later in the summer? You get this a lot with, you know, online marketing.
0:09:05 Well, I had, you know, I built up this audience and I launched my thing and I made all the sales.
0:09:09 And then the next week, the next month, it’s kind of like back to the drawing board.
0:09:12 Well, now I got to go find more people. How does this work?
0:09:18 Yeah, we, I’m very blessed. We built some really amazing relationships.
0:09:24 And sometimes, you know, when I think back to those times, you know, they’re just really great times.
0:09:30 Because when you have a small audience, you know, so much of the time we have this small audience sitting in front of us.
0:09:35 And we think like, “Wow, I wish it was bigger.” Or, “Where’s the next person? Where’s the next person?”
0:09:47 But, you know, even if you just have 15 people in front of you basically showing up saying that they like you and support you and want to, you know, be around you and what you’re doing,
0:09:53 you can leverage it into just amazing situations and impact. And that’s kind of what we did.
0:09:58 You know, we built such strong relationships with those first 12 to 30 kids.
0:10:07 And I remember, you know, us going to tournaments together, sitting, you know, in hallways and stairwells, going over games.
0:10:12 And, you know, they ended up being huge champions for us and really spreading the word.
0:10:21 And we went to their birthday parties and graduation parties. And when you get bigger, you know, you lose a lot of that.
0:10:27 And so, you know, there’s obviously a balance. But those original people that are with you on your journey are really special.
0:10:31 And if you treat them well, it can really start you off on the right page.
0:10:39 Yeah, there’s some advantages of being small and scrappy that the big players can’t necessarily afford to do.
0:10:47 And it’s like, well, you can know everybody by name and you can spend time with them versus somebody with a huge audience.
0:10:50 It just isn’t feasible.
0:10:59 More with Jeff in just a moment, including how he initially priced his group classes and how he pivoted to online instruction to keep the business afloat.
0:11:08 Years ago, I was sitting in a conference in Santa Barbara and the presenter asked this question, are you working on your business or are you working in your business?
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0:13:33 Give an example of how things started to spider out from those first dozen or two dozen customers?
0:13:41 Honestly, everything we’ve ever done to continue to grow has been just asking these people
0:13:45 that show up for us what they need and what they want and how can we serve them.
0:13:55 We did that, and we started to run our classes in seven-week blocks, kind of like selling a class.
0:14:02 Every time our seven-week blocks were over, we’d have to go out and try to do another launch and get more kids.
0:14:06 We would grow, but then they started to say, “Hey, we want to do this more regularly.
0:14:11 Can you offer tournaments? Can you offer seminars?”
0:14:19 We just started to continue to do that all the while charity and giving to local organizations was a big part of our mission.
0:14:37 Just through word-of-mouth charity and listening to our people, we just slowly grew and then it just picked up momentum to the point where we are today.
0:14:46 I like that call too. “What is the audience asking for help with?” This is straight out of John Lee Dumas’ book and all his advice over the years.
0:14:50 “Well, I’ve got a little bit of people paying attention to me. What do they want help with?”
0:14:54 “Okay, they want help with podcasting or webinars or whatever.”
0:14:58 “Okay, I can do that and then on to the next thing.”
0:15:02 “Well, what else are they asking for help with? How can we structure that in a way that makes sense for them?”
0:15:09 Once a week, chess classes, they want tournaments, they want this other stuff and then continuing to build that out and go from there.
0:15:16 Was there anybody else doing this in the community or just from a sense of competitive pricing?
0:15:22 How do I know what to charge for this? Just throw a number out and see what kind of reaction it gets?
0:15:31 Yeah, there was not anybody that I knew of that was doing these night classes.
0:15:37 There was definitely organizations out there doing tournaments because that’s kind of where I started gathering some of my people.
0:15:51 But really, the model that was out there was more of an after-school model where organizations would partner with a school and they’d have a chess coach show up to the school and run an after-school program.
0:15:55 And that’s a great model and we do a little bit of that today too.
0:16:09 The only difference is that sometimes parents put kids into there and their goal isn’t always because their kid loves chess and they want to grow them in chess or challenge them or inspire their intellectual abilities.
0:16:22 A lot of times we would find that parents would put kids into there because it would work out for their work schedules and those kind of things, which is fine, but nobody was really focusing on chess for chess sake.
0:16:37 And then basically, once we started doing it, the pricing, as you mentioned, was a challenge and me, just some of my own limiting beliefs and just being scared to charge.
0:16:41 I remember the thought of, well, what are we going to charge per hour?
0:16:47 My thought was, well, babysitters are getting paid $8 an hour.
0:16:55 So at the very least, we can charge $8 an hour and people would be like, oh, it’s babysitting, but our kids are learning chess.
0:17:14 And so our first program, we charged $8 an hour and that was, like I said, lots of things that I’ve kind of grown as an entrepreneur and charging and kind of diving into this part of the world when I was in education
0:17:20 prior has been a great transition and hopping over those hurdles has been part of my journey too.
0:17:30 Well, if it’s a group program, I’m trying to do the math on this, well, if I got 10 kids showing up and I can teach them at $8 an hour, all of a sudden I’m at $80 an hour.
0:17:34 That’s not bad at all, but is that how this was structured?
0:17:36 Yeah, that’s exactly it.
0:17:48 That first group that had, I think, 12 kids show up at $8 an hour was $96 an hour and to me, and that was five times what I was making as a summer camp counselor.
0:17:55 And you start to realize the power of these small groups and community around chess.
0:18:00 Yeah, going from one to one to one to many.
0:18:02 Oh, what’s the pricing look like today?
0:18:06 So now our pricing has come a long way, I would say.
0:18:16 Our pricing for in-person classes is about $25 an hour and online is about $17 an hour.
0:18:25 And for me to get there was a journey, and so I’ve always just kind of went back to this idea of giving.
0:18:30 And so anytime I would raise prices, I would always say, okay, I have to give them something more.
0:18:32 And so I would give a little bit.
0:18:44 And so we started doing things like giving tournaments as part of our program or giving seminars as part of our programs or providing individual assessments as part of our program.
0:18:52 So the more we gave, it made it easier for me to kind of increase and justify pricing to a point where we are today.
0:19:00 And frankly, I don’t know where our pricing could go because we’ve never raised prices and lost people, which is kind of interesting, you know.
0:19:06 Okay, so you’re saying, well, we’re going to make it this price, we’re going to charge $25 an hour.
0:19:17 But when you join this cohort or when you join this weekly class session, you also get this personal evaluation and you get access to our tournament calendar.
0:19:22 So there’s other reasons than just show up at this time at this place.
0:19:38 Yeah, and for me, that’s always just been a way that I could, you know, with integrity, look at my people and say, hey, we’re going to raise the prices, but you know, here’s why and here’s what’s additional coming down for you.
0:19:51 You talked to me about the pandemic impact of doing in-person classes here and I don’t know if there’s a transition. It sounds like you’re doing online stuff today, you’re doing both today.
0:19:56 And was that always the case or was that born out of necessity?
0:20:12 Yeah, born out of necessity. One day we got an email from our school and churches that we were currently renting from and they said, you no longer can host in-person chess classes because of the pandemic.
0:20:29 That was a huge wake up call for me, just kind of realizing that no matter what you do, you know, if you can kind of insulate yourself from having outside forces kind of impact your business.
0:20:40 But I think just as a rule for me, that was something I said from this point forward, we’re really going to try to make sure that we’re in charge of our people and kind of what we do.
0:20:51 And so we switched over to online and I basically cut, you know, all everyone’s prices in half and said, OK, stick with us.
0:20:59 We’re going to try to do this online thing. And they really all did. And everyone stuck with us.
0:21:13 And then what a very interesting thing happened, we don’t really do much marketing, which is kind of crazy, but the word of mouth that hit through online was incredible.
0:21:27 And so our people started going out and telling their friends and cousins who they’d been talking to about chess and us for so long, but they weren’t able to physically get there and suddenly all those people now had access to us.
0:21:31 Right. Because prior to this point, it’s all, it’s all been local.
0:21:40 All local and we’d have parents driving from really far to come to us and all of a sudden now we had this bigger market open up.
0:21:49 And so we I think at the start of the pandemic, we had about 90 kids coming every week to class.
0:21:55 And then within, you know, by the end of the pandemic, we were all the way to like 200.
0:21:59 Wow. That and then on top of that, you know, the Queen’s Gambit.
0:22:01 Right. I was just going to say.
0:22:13 Yeah, and it did. It did positively impact our business, not massively, but just, you know, we found that we started getting more inquiries from like little girls to play chess, which was really cool.
0:22:28 And so we were able to kind of then maximize the online learning environment. It helped that my background is education and we were able to kind of create a product that was that could really help kids and families, you know, even when they were locked in in their houses.
0:22:40 Yeah, that’s really cool. So yeah, you know, being in the right place at the right time to capitalize on an interest and increase in interest in chess through some pop culture stuff and just broader trends.
0:22:53 But also just, you know, being able to serve a broader community of, well, it’s not just local anymore. We can do this for anybody at, you know, as long as it’s a reasonable time zone for you, come, come hang out and we’ll do this.
0:23:03 Is there a cap to the size of the classes that you can reasonably host and allow for proper instruction and Q&A and everything?
0:23:19 We try to keep our class sizes to around eight kids if we can. With that amount, we feel like we can give pretty good individual attention and still keep those relationships with our students.
0:23:36 I have, you know, other coaches that are working with me now and as I say, you know, now with a little bit of a broader audience, you know, my personal relationships with each of our students is definitely different than it was, but they still have really strong relationships with their direct coaches.
0:23:52 Okay, and right now it’s show up at this time and we’ll do live instruction. Is there or are there any plans to create the chess for kids, you know, beginner, intermediate, online course or like the chess for parents online course?
0:23:57 I have to imagine there’s some sort of product out there or there’s some YouTube content around there.
0:24:13 Yeah, that what I would say is one of our, you know, next steps. We are looking to get into the online space a little bit more. It’s been positive for us, but we don’t haven’t had any presence on YouTube or Twitch.
0:24:28 There’s a lot of streaming that goes on with chess. And so that is the next step for us is trying to serve people, you know, without it being time sensitive and live. But then also we are continuing to expand in person as well.
0:24:36 We just opened a physical retail chess center in our community. So we are starting to grow in that direction too.
0:24:50 Okay. Side note, do you know if this is true or not? I read somewhere that a chess grandmaster can burn like thousands of calories during a match just due to the brain processing power that they’re using, or is it just like a total myth?
0:25:09 That is true. I don’t know the science of it, but I will tell you that I personally have, you know, found I’ve played in three day chess tournaments where you’re playing sometimes up to 12 hours a day, and you will actually lose weight.
0:25:27 I’ve lost like four or five pounds in a weekend. And all I did was sit at a chess board and play chess. It is kind of crazy to think about. And so when we compete with, when I was competing with our high school team and coaching them, I mean, our food intake and how we manage that.
0:25:37 We were pretty extreme, I would say, just because we were at a higher level trying to win state titles. But that would be a big part of our process.
0:25:44 That’s awesome. Now there’s a new product for you is chess as a weight loss tool. That’s crazy.
0:25:59 I’m curious about the tools and tech that you’re using to manage the database of customers and process payments and host these online classes and separate that from the in-person stuff.
0:26:04 Can you give me a sense of what’s helping you stay organized and run this whole thing?
0:26:16 We use JotForm to kind of take people’s information, and then we use Stripe, integrate Stripe into that, and that manages our monthly memberships.
0:26:27 As I said, we used to do seven-week blocks, but now it’s just recurring month-over-month charges automatically through Stripe. That’s really helped our churn rates.
0:26:39 It’s for a monthly membership, and it’s $80 or $100. You get one class a week, and it’s at this time slot, and it’s just recurring until you cancel.
0:26:58 Yep, that’s exactly right. Most of the tech that we use, and then we deliver our classes through Zoom webinars because it allows kids and families to register for their classes.
0:27:07 We post our class schedules, and then families can register for those classes, and we can set class size limits based off those registrations.
0:27:21 That allows us to kind of manage how many kids are in each class, and then it allows our coaches to access us too, because it’s just been kind of a really fun part of our growth.
0:27:36 We have coaches right now. We have fantastic coaches in India. We have a coach in Bosnia. We have coaches all over the country, and because of this system, we’re able to kind of allow all these people from across the country and world
0:27:38 to connect through chess.
0:27:46 Yeah, do they rotate through the weeks, or if I sign up as a student, I’m going to get the same coach week after week?
0:28:00 You get the same coach week after week. We did do some switching in the past, but we just once again, we’re very relationship based, and we think that coaches building relationships with their kids allows them to give individualized instruction,
0:28:07 allows them to guide those kids, and so if you sign up, you will have the same coach week after week.
0:28:17 More with Jeff in just a moment, including his rule for when it’s time to systemize, and how he’s grown his team, so it’s not just him selling his chess expertise anymore right after this.
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0:30:51 This might be a silly question, but I’m curious about coming up with curriculum that is changing or different sub-games or drills to do.
0:31:01 The body of content that you have to come up with to teach these classes on a weekly basis has got to be at least from an outsider looking in, kind of a daunting thing.
0:31:15 Oh yes, incredibly daunting. Most of our business has grown. Just me being a full-time dean and having this on the side, I would, as soon as something got unmanageable to where I’m staying up all night doing something, I generally think,
0:31:24 “Okay, I need to get a system.” And so for this, I was creating all the curriculum on my own, but now I license it.
0:31:35 So I bought a package curriculum, which basically gives what we have is we have five different levels of class. There are 30 topics in each level.
0:31:41 And so as the kids progress through those 30 topics, once they master them all, then they can just move up to the next level.
0:31:59 So there’s a very nice path for them, and we don’t have to create any more curriculum. And our magic, I think, is really not necessarily in the X’s and O’s. It’s more of how we deliver it and so how we structure our classes and work with kids.
0:32:05 And so we use that curriculum with our style and community to kind of make our product.
0:32:15 Okay, no, that’s helpful to say, “Well, somebody else has already solved this problem.” And I like this message that whenever I’m staying up too late working on this, there’s got to be a better way.
0:32:25 There’s got to be a system for this. And then going out and finding that. And then I didn’t even think about that too. But yeah, everybody’s coming in at different levels, kind of like swim lessons.
0:32:35 I go from minnows to sharks, I forget what it was, I was a kid. But yeah, not everybody’s going to be jumping off the deep end right at the beginning.
0:32:44 Yeah, so that point now allows me, for anybody who comes into our system, they sit down and they play me and chess for 10 minutes.
0:32:54 And I give them like a little mini lesson, and it allows me to kind of set the stage for what kids and families will expect.
0:33:04 And so after they play me and I give them some guidance, just like I did back in the day, then we’ll place them in a class level and then they’re off and running.
0:33:14 Okay, on the instructor side, how do you end up connecting with these instructors really all over the world to come and work for each class for you?
0:33:28 That mostly started with just the local chess community. We had people who were volunteering for our chess team that I was coaching at the high school for years.
0:33:37 And so those were just the easiest ones because they donated so much time to our programs in the past that they kind of knew my style and what I wanted.
0:33:47 And I was able to hire them on and try to pay them back for all they’ve done. And then from there, really just people started reaching out to us.
0:33:57 And we would just vet them and train them. And now actually we’ve been doing it for so long, not crazy long, but 10 years.
0:34:03 Now kids who took our classes are now coaches for us, which is really…
0:34:04 Oh, that’s awesome.
0:34:12 Yeah. I mean, we have, in fact, one of the kids in our first, out of that first 12, is basically one of our strongest coaches.
0:34:21 And he’s a junior in college, but he’s perfect for our online coaching and hopefully he’ll have a future with us after he graduates too.
0:34:23 Okay. Yeah, that’s really cool.
0:34:35 A way to employ people, hire from within in a way. We went and looked at a preschool the other day where it had been around long enough for some of the student TAs that would come and help.
0:34:40 It started there when they were four or five years old. It was like, “Oh, okay. You know, it comes full circle.”
0:34:51 Yeah. And that’s a really fabulous endorsement, I would say, of that preschool, right, where people feel the connection to kind of return much like we see in some of our private schools in our area.
0:34:58 There’s just this strong connection and returning to kind of give back what you were given.
0:35:10 Did you ever get the pushback that, “Well, I wanted Jeff. You’re the guy with the credentials and you’re the face of this thing. I don’t want some other random instructor. I want my kid to have you.”
0:35:18 Yeah. Still to this day, I would say when I do the assessments with people that they say that they would want me.
0:35:28 I think this is not uncommon in anyone who runs a business, whether it’s a bakery or an online consulting or you name it.
0:35:34 Originally, there’s this feeling that it’s like a personal brand and it’s all tied to you.
0:35:35 Yeah.
0:35:47 And while that makes you feel good, you know that if you truly want to impact more people, you’re going to have to find ways to kind of step away at least enough to kind of expand impact.
0:36:07 And so we still do get that, but I’ve trained and worked with our coaches so much that they’re just incredible people and incredible coaches that I’ve never, without a second head, any doubts that once we put a kid with one of our coaches that they don’t get top notch service.
0:36:21 Yeah, you’re right. This is the challenge amongst freelancers and tutors, experts of any kind where it’s like, “Do you get stuck selling your own expertise and trading time for money?”
0:36:24 Even if it’s great money, there’s still a limit to that.
0:36:26 Well, here’s a way to scale it.
0:36:38 I connected with a guy in the Bay Area who was doing coding tutoring or computer science tutoring, and it was the same thing, kind of like starting out doing it himself.
0:36:48 But we pretty quickly had branched out to hiring computer science majors from the local area colleges to go out and do this, kind of act on him as his proxy.
0:36:54 They know what they’re doing, they’re trained on this stuff, they can help you just as well or better than I can.
0:37:01 That was his way of kind of removing himself from that time for money, driving to kids’ houses and doing all that stuff.
0:37:05 So that’s pretty cool. I’m just able to get that set up.
0:37:16 With any recurring revenue side, it becomes this kind of math equation of managing the churn versus managing the growth.
0:37:23 Hopefully, if I net positive like one extra person a day, I just gave myself a raise to borrow from Shane Sams.
0:37:30 Give me a sense of how you’re thinking of that in terms of a monthly recurring revenue number or the metrics that matter most to you.
0:37:34 It is definitely something that I think about now.
0:37:45 It’s not something I thought about before, only because, well, I guess I thought about it a little bit when we had this kind of class model where we were selling these groups of seven weeks of class,
0:37:50 then I was always relaunching and trying to figure out why so-and-so didn’t return.
0:37:58 But once we got to the monthly recurring model, then churn became more of something that I focused on.
0:38:05 I would say that there’s a few ways that we really believe to kind of decrease churn.
0:38:15 Number one is habits. I think we are such creatures of habits, and habits probably lead to more of the large growth in our life than anything else.
0:38:34 If you can build habits for these people to keep showing up at the same time, every week, and you serve them well, that’s a big deal because they will just start to say, “Wednesday is chess day, so we can’t have soccer that day,” or whatever else.
0:38:40 So we build habits, and then, of course, providing value is always a great way to reduce churn.
0:38:49 But I think more than anything, what we’ve started to notice is finding ways to show progress to kids is really powerful, and to anyone.
0:38:59 We’re addicted psychologically to progress, and so no matter what kind of business you offer or service you offer, if you can show people,
0:39:10 “Hey, this is where you were when you came to us, and here’s where you are now,” and you can regularly show that to people, you have a really strong chance of making them stay.
0:39:23 And so what we do is we have these progress charts where kids are working through those 30 topics in their level, and they kind of put stickers on every time they master a topic.
0:39:38 And every five topics they master, we give them a different chess piece key chain, and then those kind of things just keep them looking forward, and then they, of course, over time, can graduate to the next level.
0:39:44 Okay, this would be like in martial arts, okay, you got your yellow belt, your brown belt, you’re working your way up.
0:39:45 Exactly right.
0:39:52 And they’re sharing this with the parents, or you’re sharing this with the parents, like, “Hey, look at where your kid was, and look where they are today.”
0:39:58 And they have access to the charts, and the kids always love to show their parents their charts every day at class.
0:40:03 So our in-person churn rates are really, really low, like they’re under 3%.
0:40:06 And so that’s, you know, really good.
0:40:10 Online, though, now is our next kind of challenge.
0:40:16 And in our last coaches meeting, this is one thing that we’ve been talking about is, you know, how do we decrease our churn online?
0:40:23 Because it’s much higher, our churn rate online is, you know, like 9% to 10%.
0:40:27 Meaning every month, 10% of the people will drop off?
0:40:29 Yeah, I don’t really like that.
0:40:38 I don’t like feeling like I’m on a hamster wheel, but I also just don’t, I don’t want kids to kind of stop getting, you know, the benefits of chess,
0:40:41 if it’s something on our end that we can kind of fix.
0:40:45 Of course, kids try many different things, so that’s normal.
0:40:50 But online, we are having trouble with showing them that same progress.
0:40:52 We, you know, we can’t give them the key chain.
0:40:58 We can’t really, like, have the chart is kind of a difficult thing for them to show their parents.
0:41:02 And we don’t get to touch base with the parents always at the end of class.
0:41:14 So right now, we are working through that and kind of showing, creating electronic charts and how we can go about showing that regular progress so that maybe kids will stick around longer.
0:41:18 Okay, yeah, that’s, you know, that’s the life of the entrepreneur.
0:41:21 It’s like, there’s always another challenge, like a game of whack-a-mole in a way.
0:41:25 It’s like, okay, well, what’s the next thing to try and work on improving?
0:41:27 But I appreciate that you got things going on.
0:41:30 I like this, you know, figuring out ways to show progress.
0:41:42 I think that’s probably something that anybody who’s in an instructional role or even a client-facing role can be helpful with to say, like, well, here’s the impact that we’re having and cultivating positive habits there.
0:41:47 Jeff, you mentioned you don’t do a lot of marketing, but new people are finding you somehow.
0:41:50 Are you incentivizing word-of-mouth?
0:41:54 Are you still going out into the community doing these pro bono events?
0:41:59 There’s got to be something else that keeps, you know, replacing that 10% a week.
0:42:07 It is a little weird to say, but we’ve really never done any marketing just in about the last four months.
0:42:18 Once we’ve started running, like, Facebook ads, but at a very low rate, like, under $10 a day, like, nothing, you know, really small.
0:42:23 So it continues to be word-of-mouth and definitely, I would say, charity events.
0:42:31 So that is our marketing, you know, it’s just the way that our company, we just view, like, we want to change the world with chess.
0:42:35 So we always are doing charity events of some sort.
0:42:41 Just this week, for instance, I, you know, I donated to two, like, fundraisers.
0:42:51 So lots of people reach out to us and say, hey, we’re going to have a fundraiser for our school or our program or whatever it might be, community event.
0:42:54 And so we always donate to those, no matter what.
0:42:59 We always, if any school reaches out to us and says, hey, we want to start a chess club,
0:43:02 we always donate all the boards to their chess clubs.
0:43:06 So we donate, we’ve donated probably thousands of boards.
0:43:14 We know that if we serve those people, generally speaking, you know, someone asks or they want to know about chess, they send them to us.
0:43:20 And then even in the pandemic, you know, one of the first things we did is once we got the online piece figured out,
0:43:28 we just reached out to libraries in the area and all over, really, and just said, hey, we know all your people are stuck at home.
0:43:32 Can we offer free chess classes for them?
0:43:34 And they said yes.
0:43:42 And so the library would reach out to all their people and we would show up once a month and teach a chess class for the kids.
0:43:48 And those kind of things just always seem to bring people back to us.
0:43:53 Yeah. Well, the library thing, it didn’t have to be just the local library system anymore.
0:43:56 I mean, you could lather rinse repeat across the country.
0:43:58 Yeah, without a doubt.
0:44:03 And it’s become such a part of kind of what we do that I don’t even think about it anymore.
0:44:10 Like in a transactional way, I just sort of know that I just know that it’s going to happen and that people will come back to us.
0:44:13 And often people ask like, what can we do for you that question?
0:44:16 We get a lot and I often say nothing.
0:44:24 And I think that does maybe impact people even more because I just really we’re not we’re not interested in that kind of transactional giving.
0:44:28 But we know that in the end, it seems to have served us.
0:44:40 So yeah. And at this point, I basically get a new student a day is where we’re at right now, you know, joining our programs or at least taking an assessment with me.
0:44:44 So I’ve got all the people I can handle right now.
0:44:46 Yeah. Super cool.
0:44:52 What’s next for you? Do you foresee this becoming a full-time thing? Where do you want to take it?
0:45:00 Yeah, you know, our business never was that it was always, you know, it started being something where we make a few extra bucks.
0:45:05 And then, oh, maybe my wife can stay home and raise our kids.
0:45:09 And then it’s like, oh, maybe we can actually save for someone’s college.
0:45:11 And so it’s kind of progressed.
0:45:16 But now, you know, my wife’s been amazing kind of raising the kids, but our kids are getting older.
0:45:21 And so now my time is certainly something I’m even more conscious of.
0:45:30 And the fact that my side hustle now makes more money than my main hustle, we are starting to think about maybe moving full time into chess.
0:45:32 And so, yeah, we’ll see.
0:45:36 We just opened a physical location in our community last month.
0:45:39 So that’s been an incredible dream realized.
0:45:47 And so we’re going to work with that and then hopefully do a little bit more online chess, basically building a YouTube.
0:45:51 Physical locations is a home base for the local in-person classes.
0:45:55 So you don’t have to keep shuffling around to different schools and church basements.
0:45:56 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
0:45:58 And we’re able to kind of have a home.
0:46:08 And, you know, we’ve been running local events here for high school and middle school kids where they’re showing up, you know, on Friday nights at a very like safe, positive place for kids.
0:46:14 So we’re trying to be a pillar of the community and then online and see what we can do online too.
0:46:15 Well, I’m excited for you.
0:46:22 I mean, anytime you get a side hustle to outpace the day job salary is incredible.
0:46:27 So really inspired by what you’ve built at EliteChess.net.
0:46:29 You can check Jeff out over there.
0:46:30 Really appreciate you joining me.
0:46:34 Let’s wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation.
0:46:42 My number one tip is to give whenever your business stagnates, I would say give.
0:46:48 If you’re scared of, you know, starting your business, don’t make it about you give.
0:46:54 And I think, you know, businesses were really designed to solve problems and make the world a better place.
0:47:02 And if we just go back to that when you’re kind of banging your head against the wall or, you know, afraid or suffering from a living belief.
0:47:11 If you just reach out to a local charity or find, you know, the community that you live in and find a way to give to them or give to the online community.
0:47:18 I just think that in the end there’s going to be some magic that’ll happen both in you and the people you serve.
0:47:19 Absolutely.
0:47:25 I can hear it throughout the story, this spirit of giving and being a good steward of the community.
0:47:28 It reminds me in one of Gary Vaynerchuk’s books.
0:47:31 It’s like this one word chapter on how to win at marketing.
0:47:35 Like the chapter title is longer than the entire chapter and it was just care.
0:47:37 And I was like, that’s it next chapter.
0:47:44 I was like, okay, if you can care, if you can give, you know, and be in a good position to have people start paying attention to you.
0:47:47 So Jeff, really appreciate you joining me and sharing all this stuff.
0:47:49 We will catch up with you soon.
0:47:53 You go find them at EliteJess.net and appreciate you joining me.
0:47:54 Thank you so much, Nick.
0:47:55 This was really fun.
0:48:00 All right, I hope you enjoyed that chat with Jeff.
0:48:01 Definitely a really cool story.
0:48:07 A couple takeaways I wanted to highlight were first the power of partner marketing.
0:48:15 If you don’t have an audience, go find someone or some organization that does and figure out how to be of service to them in some way.
0:48:28 In Jeff’s case, it was these charities and schools and libraries, teaching free classes, hosting these charity benefit tournaments, all while establishing himself and tapping into those preexisting audiences.
0:48:39 Dustin Lean on the podcast took the same approach for his online marketing agency, reaching out to e-commerce software brands to host these free educational workshops or webinars for their customer base.
0:48:44 This is definitely a fast track power move to build an audience quickly.
0:48:48 And important note here, it doesn’t have to be a big audience to get the ball rolling.
0:48:54 If you’re selling a higher ticket service, maybe just three or four clients is enough for a pretty serious side hustle.
0:48:56 In Jeff’s case, 50 emails.
0:49:02 You can find 50 people and you can know them by name and you can find out their problems and you can build their solution.
0:49:09 That’s something that a company with 50,000 prospects can’t really do beyond just generic surveys and heat map software.
0:49:17 Personal example, for the first two and a half years of side hustle nation, I would send a personal welcome message to everyone who joined the email list.
0:49:29 I probably sent 10,000 of these things from 2013 to 2015, trying to get a response, trying to start a conversation, trying to figure out what people were struggling with so I could either point them in the right direction or map out future content.
0:49:30 That would help.
0:49:36 The second takeaway that I want to highlight is figuring out a way to show progress for your customers, your readers, your listeners.
0:49:43 I think we all strive for a sense of progress to be better, smarter, faster, richer than we were yesterday.
0:49:48 And I want to challenge you to think of ways to highlight that progress for your own audience.
0:49:55 Maybe it’s tracking their website traffic or their social media following or how much weight they’ve lost or their practice test scores.
0:50:03 I’m thinking about this in terms of my own email efforts and I’m not sure the best way to measure it outside of trying to collect benchmark survey data.
0:50:16 In my case, if I could capture someone’s side hustle income on day one when they joined the list and then recapture that every three to six months, I think it would be a cool way to illustrate over time how that number is hopefully growing and keep people sticking around.
0:50:27 If you have any sort of membership or recurring revenue business, I think Jeff’s call to show positive progress can really help address the, you know, why are we paying for this again question.
0:50:42 You will find the full text summary of this episode links to all the resources mentioned in that free listener bonus of 20 more hobby related niches that you could probably apply the same general business model to at side hustle nation dot com slash chess.
0:50:48 Once again, that’s side hustle nation dot com slash chess to download that free bonus and get your creative juices flowing.
0:50:51 That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time.
0:50:58 Let’s go out there and make something happen and I’ll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. I’ll see you then hustle on.

0:00:01 (upbeat music)
0:00:04 $100,000 with AI-coded apps.
0:00:06 Hey, create something once, monetize it over and over again.
0:00:08 That’s a business model that I really like
0:00:12 and historically software and apps,
0:00:13 definitely check that box.
0:00:17 But it used to be, you had to be pretty technical
0:00:18 or pay someone technical
0:00:21 if you wanted to build really any kind of software.
0:00:23 Today, not as much.
0:00:25 I guess has been using AI tools to help build
0:00:28 a series of smallish web apps,
0:00:31 usually to solve a very specific problem
0:00:33 for a very specific customer.
0:00:35 But he’s making thousands of bucks about doing it
0:00:36 and having a lot of fun along the way.
0:00:40 From doyevenblog.com, Pete McPherson,
0:00:42 welcome back to The Side Hustle Show.
0:00:43 – Yes, thank you so much for having me, Nick.
0:00:46 It’s a pleasure to be here, talk about techie things.
0:00:49 Hopefully we can get some good takeaways for people,
0:00:50 some good actionable items,
0:00:54 even if we do go a tiny bit into what sounds technical.
0:00:56 So yeah, let’s give it a shot.
0:01:00 – Yeah, the promise of having AI do the work for you
0:01:01 is an interesting one.
0:01:03 ‘Cause software companies
0:01:05 are some of the most profitable businesses in the world.
0:01:08 It’s like, we could sell this same code
0:01:11 to thousands, billions of different customers.
0:01:15 And it has often seemed out of reach for individual creators.
0:01:17 So what’s changed in the past few years?
0:01:19 And what do you see as the opportunity
0:01:20 for side hustlers here?
0:01:22 – The biggest thing that changed
0:01:25 was obviously using chatGPT or Claude
0:01:29 or any of these newer LLMs, AI models,
0:01:32 to do the parts I didn’t know how to do.
0:01:33 I knew how to do a few parts.
0:01:35 I’ve been interested in this, I’ve been coding,
0:01:37 I’ve been fairly techie forever.
0:01:40 And then maybe about a year and a half ago, two years ago,
0:01:43 I was finally able to cross the threshold
0:01:46 and have AI do the heavy lifting.
0:01:49 And the last part of your question there,
0:01:51 more specifically in the past like three months
0:01:55 and six months, we’ve crossed another bridge.
0:01:56 We’re now at a place where you could basically
0:01:58 just type in stuff you want.
0:02:02 And believe it or not, like maybe seven times out of 10,
0:02:05 eight times out of 10, these AI tools are getting better,
0:02:09 they’re getting faster, they’re getting more aware
0:02:10 of its outputs.
0:02:14 And so the opportunity right now is,
0:02:16 well, you said it already, this is, we know this,
0:02:20 creating software products, creating stuff you can use,
0:02:22 you can sell to your existing audience.
0:02:27 Even, I would argue entering in new markets with SAS,
0:02:30 software as a service, has never been easier and faster
0:02:33 for everybody, for all of us, non-developers,
0:02:35 even if you never touched a line of code.
0:02:36 – Yeah, so you’ve built a few of these.
0:02:41 One is an affiliate link tracking tool called Aftracker.
0:02:42 You’ve built one called Topical Map,
0:02:46 which helps come up with, what am I gonna talk about
0:02:47 on my content creation business?
0:02:52 fab.ai is the fully autonomous blog builder,
0:02:54 what does it stand for?
0:02:56 – You’re actually the only person besides myself
0:02:59 who’s ever gotten that correct, so where to go?
0:03:00 Yeah, I sold that company a couple of months ago.
0:03:05 – Okay, well, I’ve been watching as each one of these
0:03:09 has been built and presented and kind of like,
0:03:12 you do a good job of sharing the journey along the way,
0:03:14 which I think is interesting.
0:03:17 So maybe we start there with this idea generation.
0:03:21 If I’m listening and saying like, well, this sounds cool.
0:03:23 I’d like to start playing around with this,
0:03:26 and I probably would recommend that’s where people start
0:03:29 is like, you’re not gonna build anything super beautiful
0:03:31 right out of the gate, but you gotta start tinkering
0:03:33 with something, but you gotta have an idea
0:03:35 before you could start tinkering, like how,
0:03:37 where did these ideas come from?
0:03:39 Or how do you recommend people kind of go through this?
0:03:40 What should I even start to build?
0:03:45 – Sure, I would say it’s a twist on an age old strategy
0:03:47 called scratch your own itch.
0:03:49 I think people who have listened to your show
0:03:50 have probably heard those words before.
0:03:51 Am I right, Chair?
0:03:52 – Yeah.
0:03:56 – So I think approaching how you work on your computer
0:03:57 and a scratch your own itch.
0:03:59 There’s a scratch your own itch off your computer
0:04:00 and there’s a scratch your own itch
0:04:03 when you’re using scheduling software,
0:04:04 when you’re sending emails,
0:04:06 when you are creating a YouTube video,
0:04:08 when you’re editing a YouTube video,
0:04:11 when you’re interacting with the web in general,
0:04:14 cultivating this mindset of scratch your own itch.
0:04:16 And Nick, I think you absolutely nailed it.
0:04:18 I think what I would recommend to anybody who’s like,
0:04:20 oh, this kind of sounds interesting.
0:04:24 I might try that would be to pick one teeny tiny thing.
0:04:26 Like you said, you’re not gonna build
0:04:31 the next huge amazing 10 bajillion ARR software
0:04:35 company probably, but you can build a little Chrome extension.
0:04:37 For example, I play a game.
0:04:37 I won’t mention what it is.
0:04:38 It’s totally stupid.
0:04:42 But I play a game that doesn’t have any tracking whatsoever.
0:04:46 And so basic like multiplication and division things
0:04:49 that I’ve been doing on my phone, on a calculator.
0:04:50 I was like, wait, I could,
0:04:52 I could totally just build a Chrome extension.
0:04:53 I’d never built a Chrome extension before.
0:04:55 I have no idea how that works.
0:04:57 But I went into my code editor.
0:04:59 We could talk about tools later, of course.
0:05:03 And just prompted AI, I told a little bit what I want
0:05:04 and so on and so forth.
0:05:06 And then boom, it’s done.
0:05:06 It’s there.
0:05:08 I’m not gonna make any money off of it.
0:05:13 But it was a tiny challenge, pain point frustration I had.
0:05:15 And again, I’ve cultivated this mindset
0:05:17 of noticing when this happens.
0:05:19 I had this small little problem
0:05:21 and I built a teeny tiny little tool.
0:05:23 It’s like, I don’t know how many lines of code it is
0:05:25 ’cause I actually haven’t looked that much at the code.
0:05:27 But it’s really small and it works.
0:05:30 And I use it every day when I’m playing my silly little game.
0:05:31 – Interesting.
0:05:34 Okay, so some, just as you go through your day to day
0:05:37 and I’m just gonna rattle off a couple, you know,
0:05:39 pain points just from like this week.
0:05:42 One is when you’re pasting anything
0:05:45 from Google Docs into WordPress.
0:05:49 It brings in all of this junk HTML
0:05:53 and you really inflates the size of the page unnecessarily.
0:05:56 And like the formatting maybe looks a little bit janky
0:05:59 with some of the font selections by default.
0:06:01 Same thing with Microsoft Word
0:06:03 or importing images from Google Docs.
0:06:04 You know, getting those into your website
0:06:07 as a blog article, personal pain point
0:06:08 may not resonate with anybody else.
0:06:11 But it’s like, you know, so I built this little,
0:06:13 I can’t even figure out the image piece of it
0:06:15 but just like a little macro in Word
0:06:18 where like we’ll strip all of this stuff out.
0:06:19 So maybe there’s something there.
0:06:21 I don’t know if that would be a WordPress plugin,
0:06:23 if that would be a Chrome extension,
0:06:25 but something like that.
0:06:26 So that’s one idea.
0:06:29 Personal pain point number two is, you know how
0:06:33 pretty much every airline now will let you rebook
0:06:36 if they don’t have any change fees anymore.
0:06:39 And so you can rebook if the price goes down.
0:06:42 And it’s like, but it’s kind of a pain
0:06:44 to go and check and see.
0:06:46 And I’ve set up some Google flight alerts.
0:06:49 There’s gotta be a way to either automate this
0:06:50 or at least get a notification like,
0:06:52 “Hey, your flight went down.
0:06:54 You might as well go and get your $50 in credit.”
0:06:56 And sometimes, you know, sometimes I get
0:06:58 like the sale notifications, but it’s like,
0:07:00 there’s gotta be a smarter way to do this.
0:07:01 – Yes.
0:07:03 Would you like me to tackle those two just really quick?
0:07:04 – Yeah, let’s do it.
0:07:06 – We’ll start with the second one.
0:07:09 There is a tool which I can’t remember the name of.
0:07:12 It is basically Zapier, which I’m sure
0:07:13 most people are probably familiar with.
0:07:16 You can set up automations and end points
0:07:18 between various apps or whatnot.
0:07:20 This is the exact same thing except
0:07:23 with the ability to just insert AI
0:07:27 in between each of your automation steps, so to speak.
0:07:29 And it would be perfect for solving
0:07:31 the second problem you mentioned there.
0:07:34 You could use plain language to kind of say,
0:07:37 “Hey, I usually go to Google flights
0:07:39 or I usually check American Airlines
0:07:40 or I usually do this.
0:07:43 Here’s some of the URLs, here’s my login information.
0:07:45 Like I need you to extract this
0:07:48 and then automatically email me when this happens.”
0:07:50 And it takes a little while to set up,
0:07:52 but you don’t even have to touch code for this.
0:07:54 This is a tool, it is paid,
0:07:56 but I can show that with you later.
0:07:56 – Yeah.
0:07:57 – But that’d be the perfect thing.
0:07:59 – Okay, that’s an interesting one.
0:08:01 – In terms of like building your own thing,
0:08:02 what was your first one again?
0:08:03 I just forgot.
0:08:05 – The first one was just like the tedious formatting
0:08:08 that you junk HTML that gets, you know,
0:08:10 automatically inserted when you paste stuff in?
0:08:11 – Yes, absolutely.
0:08:14 This gets into maybe a strategy
0:08:15 I really wanted to talk about later.
0:08:16 So I’m gonna segue.
0:08:18 This will be valuable I think.
0:08:22 For anybody who’s looking to pick up coding,
0:08:23 even if it’s AI coding,
0:08:25 not saying you’re gonna become a developer,
0:08:30 but I would say pick one specific focus,
0:08:33 text stack, focus, and then just stay with it.
0:08:36 For example, Nick, maybe you’re on a Mac OS device
0:08:41 or Windows, you could learn how to build Mac apps.
0:08:43 On the contrary, it’s actually pretty similar
0:08:45 to build iPhone apps.
0:08:48 You could learn to build web apps.
0:08:50 That’s a lot different.
0:08:50 It’s a lot different.
0:08:53 You’re gonna have to probably choose a new code language.
0:08:56 And again, you don’t have to learn development,
0:08:59 but it’s still going to be so much easier
0:09:00 for anybody listening to this
0:09:02 to just build five different Chrome extensions.
0:09:04 Maybe that’s your thing.
0:09:06 Maybe it’s WordPress plugins
0:09:08 is what you really wanna dive into.
0:09:09 – Okay.
0:09:12 Well, somebody, no, this is actually really golden
0:09:14 because there is an opportunity
0:09:16 in the Chrome extension space,
0:09:17 in the Shopify extension space.
0:09:20 We had, I heard of somebody doing like 10 grand a month
0:09:22 with like a Wix extension or something,
0:09:25 like these kind of micro niche marketplaces
0:09:27 that do something really, really specific.
0:09:30 And because there’s a built-in ecosystem around that,
0:09:33 like it can be, I don’t know, it goes into them,
0:09:36 search, you know, marketing on these different platforms
0:09:38 and, you know, is it a freemium model?
0:09:39 Like, what’s your strategy there?
0:09:44 But no, I love this call to focus on one tiny little thing
0:09:47 first versus trying to, you know, build something
0:09:49 completely standalone and go out and try and sell it.
0:09:50 – Sure.
0:09:51 There’s a reason I bring this up.
0:09:53 By the way, mine’s web apps.
0:09:54 That’s what I do.
0:09:55 I have JavaScript.
0:09:57 I use SvelteKit, but you don’t even have to know
0:09:58 what that is.
0:09:59 It doesn’t matter.
0:10:01 What I mean is it builds web apps.
0:10:03 Apps you access in your browser.
0:10:07 You type in the URL to topical map AI or whatever,
0:10:08 and it just pulls it up.
0:10:09 Or Calendly or whatever.
0:10:10 I just do web apps.
0:10:11 That’s all I do.
0:10:14 Except for my little silly game Chrome extension.
0:10:16 But part of the reason I bring that up
0:10:19 is there are lots of different ways
0:10:20 you could solve your pain point.
0:10:22 You mentioned the formatting.
0:10:24 Removing the formatting and getting things ready
0:10:25 for WordPress.
0:10:27 You could build a Mac app for that.
0:10:28 I know people that have, that’s all they do.
0:10:30 They just build Mac apps.
0:10:32 And if I were doing that, I would probably just do it
0:10:34 where you copy a Google doc.
0:10:37 You can build in a shortcut on your computer
0:10:40 and it just automatically formats it, removes everything,
0:10:41 blah, blah.
0:10:43 And then copies it to your clipboard again
0:10:45 after you hit the hot key.
0:10:47 And then just copy and paste into WordPress.
0:10:50 Or if you want to be the WordPress person,
0:10:52 you build a WordPress plugin, like you mentioned.
0:10:55 Or if you’re Pete, I would do it via web app
0:10:57 because that’s what I know now.
0:11:00 Having built a dozen of these different web apps,
0:11:01 it would be super small.
0:11:04 It would literally just be like maybe a text area
0:11:06 where you just paste in everything.
0:11:10 You click one button and maybe it automatically removes
0:11:12 the formatting and then again,
0:11:14 automatically copies it to your clipboard.
0:11:15 But then you can go into WordPress.
0:11:17 That’s what I would do.
0:11:18 I hope that’s helpful for people.
0:11:20 I really wanted to hint at there’s a ton of different ways
0:11:23 you can approach these sorts of things.
0:11:25 But maybe it’d be helpful if you think about
0:11:27 some of the things you’re interested in,
0:11:29 like WordPress, like Chrome extensions,
0:11:32 like web apps, like iPhone apps, that sort of stuff
0:11:34 before you really go off the deep end here.
0:11:34 – All right, well that’s good.
0:11:37 So this is idea generation method number one,
0:11:40 scratch your own itch, anything else on this,
0:11:41 coming up with ideas phase?
0:11:43 – I have two that I like.
0:11:44 And these are legal.
0:11:46 I think they’re ethical enough,
0:11:47 but it’s somewhat stealing.
0:11:49 I have two examples.
0:11:54 Number one would be to find one tiny feature
0:11:57 in some tool, maybe you’re already using
0:12:00 that has like a bunch of different features.
0:12:03 One tiny feature, steal one feature from one of your tools.
0:12:04 And I’ll give you a good example of this.
0:12:07 So back when I did more SEO blogging,
0:12:12 I used Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S, Ahrefs, there’s an SEO tool.
0:12:15 And they have a ton of different features.
0:12:16 You can do keyword research,
0:12:18 you can do this and that and this and that.
0:12:21 All I really wanted, I canceled my subscription,
0:12:26 but all I really missed was the site explorer tool.
0:12:28 So that’s an idea for a business right there.
0:12:32 You don’t have the $99 to pay a month for Ahrefs,
0:12:33 or however much it costs now.
0:12:37 You can pay $9 for my app, it’s just the site explorer.
0:12:38 I wouldn’t market it as that
0:12:41 ’cause that would be straight up stealing Ahrefs stuff.
0:12:45 But you could just build one tiny feature of some other app.
0:12:47 Maybe it’s an expensive app that you pay for.
0:12:50 That’s idea number one.
0:12:53 – Okay, this unbundling of things
0:12:58 that maybe you’re a user of, or you know are popular,
0:13:01 but people don’t need all of the things under the hood.
0:13:03 You know, just trying to carve out a segment
0:13:06 for people who really are only interested in this one feature.
0:13:08 – This is why Nick makes the big bucks.
0:13:10 ‘Cause that was a far better explanation than I gave.
0:13:12 Unbundling, that’s perfect.
0:13:13 I love it.
0:13:18 Last one is, oh, here’s the example that came to my head.
0:13:22 Calendly is a tool to use, you send a scheduling link
0:13:24 and somebody clicks it and they can see your calendar
0:13:27 and they pick out a time and so on and so forth.
0:13:29 There for a while, there weren’t many alternatives
0:13:31 to Calendly that are now,
0:13:36 but AppSumo, No Kagan’s company, created TidyCal.
0:13:40 TidyCal.com, this was like a year or two ago.
0:13:42 They didn’t use AI, this is completely different.
0:13:46 But it basically was taking an expensive tool
0:13:48 that really doesn’t need to be all that expensive
0:13:50 and then just building a cheap version.
0:13:54 There’s was like $30 lifetime or something.
0:13:56 And I could think of this all the time.
0:13:58 There’s a ton of tools.
0:13:59 I was gonna throw this company into the bus.
0:14:01 I won’t, I won’t mention this company,
0:14:03 but it’s a podcasting tool.
0:14:06 I have my own podcast, Nick has podcasts
0:14:08 that produces podcast transcripts
0:14:10 and you can do some other marketing things
0:14:13 like generate some titles and generate some show notes
0:14:15 using AI and stuff like this.
0:14:18 I did not wanna pay however much it cost.
0:14:19 I don’t remember what it was.
0:14:20 So I just built my own.
0:14:24 It took like a week with like an hour to a day.
0:14:25 It’s technically live.
0:14:26 You can’t go buy it.
0:14:28 So I’m not gonna point people to it.
0:14:31 But I just built my own where I just upload my audio.
0:14:34 It gets the transcript using the same backend tools
0:14:36 probably as this other company.
0:14:39 And then I can click a button and generate some title ideas
0:14:41 and then some timestamps
0:14:43 and some different stuff like that.
0:14:45 So there are very few of those tools
0:14:49 that are really, really cheap, really affordable.
0:14:51 And that was the sort of thing where I was like,
0:14:54 pretty sure I could build my own version of this
0:14:56 for like, not a whole lot of money,
0:14:58 not a whole lot of time and energy.
0:15:00 And I did and it worked and it was good.
0:15:01 – Interesting.
0:15:05 So you could look at even at your own software or tech stack
0:15:08 and what are the ones that you think the price point
0:15:10 kind of grates on you a little bit?
0:15:13 There’s gotta be a better way to say,
0:15:15 how could I build a cheaper version
0:15:19 or even a simpler version that doesn’t do all of the,
0:15:21 it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles,
0:15:22 but maybe there’s something there.
0:15:24 So number one was scratch your own itch,
0:15:26 figure out your own personal pain points
0:15:27 and try and build something around that.
0:15:30 Number two was unbundling of different software tools.
0:15:32 Like I just wanna pull out this one feature.
0:15:34 That’s the most important thing to me
0:15:37 or that’s the one that I think maybe is most valuable
0:15:39 or for whatever reason.
0:15:42 And number three is to rebuild a cheaper version
0:15:45 or compete on, this is kind of the app sumo playbook.
0:15:48 You see companies on there doing this all the time.
0:15:51 Like, hey, we’re an alternative to fill in the blank software.
0:15:52 – Right, exactly.
0:15:53 One huge thing I wanna mention.
0:15:56 This is like the thing that makes me the happiest
0:15:59 in all of this, building my own apps,
0:16:02 learning how to code via AI.
0:16:06 The thing I like the most about this is you have control.
0:16:10 We don’t have to put up with how this other software did this.
0:16:11 We could build our own.
0:16:12 More with Pete in just a moment,
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0:17:23 – And I mentioned scratching your own niche.
0:17:25 Well, there’s more to it than that.
0:17:29 Not only is that a good way to find ideas that sure,
0:17:31 you could market to other people,
0:17:33 but first and foremost, you solve your own problems.
0:17:36 And if you know how to leverage AI,
0:17:38 if you know how to code for this stuff,
0:17:40 you can make it how you want,
0:17:42 which is, it sounds pretty obvious,
0:17:44 but I think that’s underrated.
0:17:46 I think people don’t think about that enough.
0:17:47 I built my own podcasting tool,
0:17:50 trained on my own podcasting data,
0:17:51 the prompts I send to AI,
0:17:54 I wrote like there was so much control
0:17:57 and it gives me exactly what I want,
0:17:58 exactly how I want it,
0:18:02 and my exact formatting that I want it like every time.
0:18:03 I think that’s really underrated.
0:18:06 – Yeah. Now, if you’re following these methods,
0:18:07 especially the second and third one,
0:18:10 there’s some level of market validation.
0:18:12 Hey, we know these companies have been around for a long time,
0:18:15 people are used to paying for this functionality.
0:18:20 Does anything else go into your market validation
0:18:22 or competitive analysis phase
0:18:26 before you start prompting the code generators?
0:18:28 – Yes and no, no, in one sense,
0:18:32 because a lot of my own projects,
0:18:34 again, just me personally,
0:18:37 they are based on that scratch your own itch.
0:18:39 So part of me doesn’t care so much.
0:18:41 – Okay, yeah, I’m gonna build this for myself
0:18:44 and if anybody buys it, that’s gravy, okay.
0:18:47 – I use my podcasting, I call it a pod promo.
0:18:47 Don’t go sign up for it,
0:18:49 but I just call it a pod promo.
0:18:51 I’m probably never gonna sell it
0:18:52 just ’cause I don’t really wanna focus on that.
0:18:54 I still use it every week,
0:18:56 but yes, on the other hand,
0:18:58 I do think if you are going to approach this
0:19:02 first and foremost as a money-making venture,
0:19:03 which I think most people should,
0:19:06 yeah, I do think you should validate these ideas
0:19:08 and this might be skipping ahead a little bit,
0:19:12 but my strategy for this is really obvious.
0:19:14 It’s really annoying to listen to on a podcast,
0:19:17 but that is have an existing audience,
0:19:21 build an audience that follows you
0:19:25 from platform to platform, from project to project,
0:19:28 from this idea to that idea, that sort of thing.
0:19:31 This is, in my opinion, the one,
0:19:35 the only marketing strategy that is pretty foolproof, right?
0:19:39 Not based on anything happening with Twitter or X
0:19:42 or Blue Sky or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram
0:19:47 or email open rates or Apple or you get my picture, right?
0:19:49 So for me personally, that’s the validation.
0:19:51 I do have an existing email list
0:19:53 that I’ve been cultivating for years
0:19:57 and I generally send it to them within,
0:19:58 within a couple of weeks of having the idea.
0:20:00 Like, oh, I built this MVP.
0:20:01 – But it’s not huge.
0:20:03 It’s not like hundreds of thousands of followers.
0:20:04 – No, no, no.
0:20:05 I think I have, I don’t mind sharing.
0:20:09 I think I have like 5,500 people on my email list.
0:20:12 – Yeah, which is not nothing, but it’s, you know,
0:20:14 I guess, you know, a micro influencer status.
0:20:16 I’ve heard some people call like this range
0:20:18 between 1,000 and 20,000 or so people,
0:20:21 paying people, paying attention to your work.
0:20:22 Yeah.
0:20:23 – That’s been that way since 2019.
0:20:24 That’s true, yes.
0:20:25 – When you come up with these ideas,
0:20:27 did you do like a pre-sale thing?
0:20:30 Well, how serious is anybody about this?
0:20:32 Would they actually, you know, enter their PayPal?
0:20:34 Would they actually swipe their credit card for this?
0:20:36 Before I go through the trouble of building it,
0:20:37 or now it’s, I’m gonna build it
0:20:38 ’cause I don’t take that much time
0:20:40 and then we’ll see what the reaction is.
0:20:44 – So I do like to build something
0:20:46 that people can access first.
0:20:49 I think if people are going into online courses
0:20:52 or membership sites or any of these more
0:20:55 traditional digital product ideas,
0:20:57 I do think validating the idea,
0:20:59 getting people to, a pre-sale,
0:21:01 getting people to pay you before you build it,
0:21:02 totally valid.
0:21:05 Because I think these are much bigger projects.
0:21:09 I think for these software products,
0:21:12 especially since we’re staying small to begin with,
0:21:13 and that’s what I do,
0:21:15 I try and stay really small, really tight,
0:21:20 one tiny feature, one tiny solution to a problem,
0:21:21 I built them first.
0:21:26 And usually that can take anywhere from two or three hours
0:21:30 to maybe 20, 30 hours over a couple of weeks.
0:21:32 It’s like my longest one.
0:21:33 But generally I can whip something up now
0:21:35 in a couple of hours.
0:21:36 It’s not gonna look very pretty,
0:21:38 but I’ll put it in front of my audience
0:21:40 for a very small offer.
0:21:43 And sometimes not even my entire email list.
0:21:46 I have a group of about 100 to 200 people
0:21:50 that used to be paying members of my membership community,
0:21:52 people I know that I could literally text on the phone,
0:21:54 like people that are close to me.
0:21:56 And I’ll generally offer it to them first
0:22:00 for a very small lifetime deal, topical map AI.
0:22:04 I think I sold for like $39 lifetime, period.
0:22:07 Does anyone going to pay for this at all?
0:22:09 That’s what I was going for.
0:22:12 – Right, and if there is some positive feedback
0:22:13 and reaction in purchasers,
0:22:17 then I can invest the time to polishing it up,
0:22:19 making it look pretty, all this other stuff.
0:22:22 – Totally, I sold one product called EasyCourse,
0:22:24 which was terrible, by the way, in retrospect.
0:22:26 And part of the reason I know it was terrible
0:22:29 is because it got exactly two sales,
0:22:32 and it was a really cheap price point.
0:22:33 It got exactly two sales.
0:22:36 And those two people both had major issues
0:22:37 and they couldn’t figure it out.
0:22:40 And I was like, this was not it.
0:22:41 It was really clear.
0:22:43 – This was gonna be like a learning management system?
0:22:44 – It was basically like never ever paid
0:22:47 for online course software again, and it works.
0:22:49 – Like a think-effect, teachable, that kind of, okay.
0:22:52 – Really dumbed down, simplified version.
0:22:54 Yes, but yes, that’s exactly that.
0:22:59 And I was going to teach people how to build that themselves.
0:23:00 They had actually, they had my template.
0:23:02 They could just duplicate the template
0:23:04 and they changed the content and they have an online course
0:23:07 that people could buy or that they could sign up for.
0:23:09 It did not go over well at all.
0:23:10 No one was interested in the two people
0:23:12 that bought, didn’t have a good time.
0:23:13 So that was a big fail.
0:23:15 And there’ve been one or two other projects
0:23:17 where it’s, again, dirt cheap price point,
0:23:21 but it’ll be like 25 sales, 50 sales, 100 sales, 200 sales.
0:23:25 And that is when I like, okay, now I can double down,
0:23:28 fill out this product, do a little bit more marketing,
0:23:30 maybe, and that sort of stuff.
0:23:31 – Okay, now I like that.
0:23:33 I want to dive deeper into different marketing strategies,
0:23:38 but tell me about this two to 20 hour creation phase
0:23:42 of, you know, from idea to having something
0:23:45 that is viable and something somebody might even have
0:23:46 the opportunity to pay for.
0:23:47 What goes into that time?
0:23:50 – The very first app I built that went public
0:23:52 and that people could actually sign up for
0:23:57 took about six weeks and like 40 hours a week.
0:23:59 It took a really long time.
0:24:01 This was two years ago at this point.
0:24:04 And I wasn’t really using AI a whole lot.
0:24:08 I was going through a YouTube course that I found
0:24:10 and like doing what this person did.
0:24:12 It’s a change it for my app and doing with,
0:24:15 doing with this next lesson and change it for my app.
0:24:18 And I got lost so many times, couldn’t figure out or whatnot.
0:24:22 The next app, which was maybe six months later,
0:24:24 it’s about a year and a half ago-ish,
0:24:26 is a little bit more AI friendly.
0:24:29 Like I kind of had that experience under my belt
0:24:32 and I swear Nick, it took like less than a week,
0:24:34 maybe 15 hours total.
0:24:36 This was me sitting down at my computer
0:24:39 and like whipping up some code
0:24:42 and then going back and forth with chat GPT
0:24:44 and back and forth and back and forth, back and forth.
0:24:45 And then we get an app.
0:24:47 – What would be like a starting prompt?
0:24:51 And this is in chat GPT versus some other software
0:24:52 specific tool?
0:24:57 – The past three to six months have shown us
0:25:01 an explosion in AI code editors.
0:25:03 They call these IDEs.
0:25:05 I don’t even know what that stands for, to be honest with you.
0:25:08 But VS Code has been around for decades
0:25:11 and it’s a software on your computer.
0:25:13 Windows or Mac, Ted Matter, you open it up
0:25:15 and this is where you actually write your code.
0:25:17 But now it has AI in there.
0:25:19 And there are two or three other tools
0:25:21 I can throw out later if you’d like me to.
0:25:23 I use one called cursor.
0:25:27 And cursor, I would literally fired up
0:25:30 and let’s say you wanted to make a WordPress plugin
0:25:32 for your Google Doc formatting issue.
0:25:35 You could literally just fired up, no folders open,
0:25:38 no files open, just like a blank screen
0:25:39 that you’re basically staring at.
0:25:40 And you could tell it,
0:25:43 “Please create me a WordPress plugin
0:25:48 where I can copy and paste in text from a Google Doc
0:25:51 and so on and so on and so on and so on.”
0:25:53 You just tell it that and it’s gonna whip something up.
0:25:55 It’ll do it on its own now.
0:25:56 You’ll sit there and watch it.
0:25:59 It’ll create this file, it’ll implement it.
0:26:00 It’ll create another file.
0:26:01 It’ll analyze this other file.
0:26:04 It’ll create this, it’ll analyze that.
0:26:07 And I would say like 90 seconds later,
0:26:08 you’re probably gonna have something
0:26:10 pretty close to functional.
0:26:13 There’s always gonna be troubleshooting and errors for sure.
0:26:17 But at this day and age, you can try one of these tools.
0:26:19 You can prompt it like you were telling,
0:26:21 like you were talking to another developer.
0:26:22 If you had no idea how to code,
0:26:25 you would just say, “I want an app that does this
0:26:27 and ties into my Google Calendar
0:26:29 and then emails me this and then does this
0:26:30 and then does this.”
0:26:32 And it’s gonna do it.
0:26:33 That sounds overly simple,
0:26:35 but that’s what we’re at these days.
0:26:36 – That’s pretty crazy, okay.
0:26:40 And then you go into the testing phase after that
0:26:42 or it really can’t be that easy.
0:26:46 It’s like just telling it in plain English,
0:26:47 this is what I wanna build.
0:26:49 There’s gotta be, I need login information,
0:26:52 I need API access,
0:26:57 there’s gotta be other things or is there not?
0:26:58 – Yes and no.
0:26:59 You might actually be surprised
0:27:03 how much is not needed these days.
0:27:08 But that said, it can save you a lot of headache down the road
0:27:14 if you kind of prompt an AI for the big picture first.
0:27:16 So I have my notes open here.
0:27:19 I have like a seven step kind of process
0:27:21 to this entire thing.
0:27:22 We’ve already gone over a couple of these.
0:27:25 Number one, have an idea in some way.
0:27:28 I think the second big step is asking AI,
0:27:32 chat, TPT, Claude, Google, doesn’t matter.
0:27:33 Asking for the big picture.
0:27:35 Say I wanna create a WordPress plugin
0:27:38 that does this and does this and does this.
0:27:41 What are the big steps to implementation
0:27:43 and what tools should I use?
0:27:44 And AI is gonna give you a lot of things
0:27:46 you can kind of choose from.
0:27:49 And it’ll be like, oh, Firebase, that’s free.
0:27:50 It’s made by Google.
0:27:54 I can use Firebase for my backend, my database.
0:27:55 I’m not a backend developer at all.
0:27:59 But I know I need to store information somewhere
0:28:01 in a spreadsheet or database or something.
0:28:04 So I use Firebase and I found it from AI
0:28:06 that was like, oh, you could use Firebase for this
0:28:08 ’cause it’s free.
0:28:10 It has a database, it has authentication
0:28:12 where people can log in to your app
0:28:15 and creates a cookie and this sort of stuff.
0:28:16 Again, I don’t even know how all of these things work.
0:28:19 But start with the big picture.
0:28:22 Start by kind of choosing some tools.
0:28:24 Even if you don’t know what tools you need yet,
0:28:25 no one does, right?
0:28:27 Ask AI, ask the big picture.
0:28:28 – Okay.
0:28:31 – And then the next two steps we kind of mentioned already.
0:28:34 The next one will be to actually go into one of your code
0:28:37 editors or whatever and then start.
0:28:38 Prompt it to build something.
0:28:42 Create this page, create this app, create this plugin,
0:28:43 whatever.
0:28:46 And then there’s only really two more steps here.
0:28:49 Number one, try it, fire it up.
0:28:50 Figure out how to do that.
0:28:52 It’s generally not that hard
0:28:55 because of how advanced AI is these days.
0:28:56 And if you can’t figure something out,
0:28:57 why don’t you just ask it again?
0:29:00 Like, how do I open this in my browser?
0:29:01 That was one of the first things I Googled.
0:29:03 Like, oh, I have code on my computer.
0:29:04 How do I test this?
0:29:06 How do I see it in my browser?
0:29:08 And AI is like, oh, yeah, click this link.
0:29:12 It’s localhost colon five, seven, three,
0:29:13 I don’t know what it was.
0:29:14 – Yeah, okay, okay.
0:29:15 – Right?
0:29:18 And then test it out and then fix errors.
0:29:19 And that’s it.
0:29:21 It’s that over and over and over again.
0:29:24 Test it out, something’s not gonna work.
0:29:27 And they’re gonna be like, AI, this did not work.
0:29:28 Why?
0:29:31 And then hopefully it’s gonna give you some ideas.
0:29:32 It’s gonna change things for you at this point.
0:29:35 It didn’t used to be that way a year ago.
0:29:38 But implement something, test it, ask AI to fix it.
0:29:41 That sounds overly simple,
0:29:43 but that’s like my entire workflow these days.
0:29:45 Get AI to build something, test it out.
0:29:47 – Yeah, that’s interesting.
0:29:48 ‘Cause my first thought was,
0:29:51 and then you gotta go to Upwork to find somebody,
0:29:54 but it’s like, no, just ask, hey, how come this didn’t work?
0:29:57 It’s, I mean, what are the implications of like,
0:30:00 you know, at least $300,000 a year,
0:30:03 software developers, salaries, and–
0:30:03 – I don’t know.
0:30:04 – It’s cool.
0:30:05 Like from a side hustle, you know,
0:30:07 builder creator perspective,
0:30:11 but it’s terrifying from a job security
0:30:13 if that’s your role in the world.
0:30:14 – Sure, I don’t know.
0:30:18 And nobody knows for the most part.
0:30:22 But I think maybe a more relevant question
0:30:23 for me personally,
0:30:25 not to hijack your question there, Nick.
0:30:28 But if this is such a golden opportunity now,
0:30:31 and everybody can do it, can’t everybody do it?
0:30:35 Can’t Nick go home and spit out like five apps tonight
0:30:36 over the course of like an hour,
0:30:41 just because of these AI technology advances?
0:30:43 Yes, absolutely.
0:30:46 And I think we have a very limited window.
0:30:46 – Yeah.
0:30:47 – I’m not selling anything.
0:30:49 So, you know, I’m telling the truth here.
0:30:52 There’s a very limited window to do this,
0:30:56 to use AI to build apps for money
0:30:59 before, this is just not a thing anymore.
0:31:01 Before, now you just tell Siri on,
0:31:03 I’m talking about now, a year from now,
0:31:04 you might just tell Siri,
0:31:06 hey, could you build me an app
0:31:08 and go ahead and install it to my WordPress site
0:31:13 at doobnblog.com and go ahead and test it three or four times
0:31:14 to make sure it’s functional.
0:31:16 Oh, and by the way, can you whip up a sales email
0:31:18 to my list and go ahead and schedule that for tomorrow?
0:31:20 Like, that’s where we’re going.
0:31:24 And so I think the next 12 months, 18 months,
0:31:29 is where we as humans can build these software products
0:31:31 and hopefully capitalize on it,
0:31:33 at least a little bit before that happens.
0:31:35 – And yeah, the developer jobs, I don’t know,
0:31:36 but it’s looking grim.
0:31:39 – Okay, that’s interesting.
0:31:40 I mean, that’s like, you know,
0:31:43 this whole neighborhood is a lot of Microsoft,
0:31:46 a lot of Amazon, a lot of tech jobs
0:31:48 in the Seattle suburbs where I’m at.
0:31:51 So it’s interesting for sure.
0:31:56 Okay, so we’ve kind of described what we want in AI.
0:31:58 Now it’s kind of this back and forth,
0:32:01 the troubleshooting process and testing process.
0:32:03 You know, like any project, this QA phase,
0:32:05 and this was my biggest pain point
0:32:07 working with any software development project.
0:32:10 You know, I’d send them over my spec
0:32:13 and they would, and even if it was just updates
0:32:14 to an existing project,
0:32:16 there’s like for the shoe business I used to have.
0:32:19 And it’d be like, hey, we did all the things that you asked for.
0:32:21 And you’d send it, like the very first thing would be like,
0:32:23 broke and be like, did you test this at all?
0:32:25 It was like the most frustrating thing.
0:32:27 They’re so eager to like ship it, get it off their desk.
0:32:31 It’s like, where was the QA phase in any of this?
0:32:32 I don’t know.
0:32:33 Okay, but that’s the next thing.
0:32:36 And then we go into the marketing part.
0:32:38 I don’t know, it was your list.
0:32:42 What was toward the end of this seven steps?
0:32:43 That’s basically it.
0:32:45 I’ll tell you one more very quick lesson
0:32:48 ’cause I think this is incredibly important
0:32:52 for anybody who touches code or apps or anything.
0:32:56 Things will go wrong and you don’t need to know the answer.
0:32:57 So about two years ago,
0:33:01 I hired some person on Reddit in the Svelte community.
0:33:02 I didn’t know a thing.
0:33:03 I didn’t know what I was doing.
0:33:05 I was like, can I just like hire you
0:33:06 for a 30 minute zoom call
0:33:10 to look at some of my code here and like figure this out?
0:33:13 And this person was a complete professional.
0:33:15 He’s one of these like $300,000 a year,
0:33:17 like tech bros, he’s super kind.
0:33:19 And we got on the call.
0:33:21 I hired this guy, he came in here
0:33:23 and he took a look at the problem
0:33:25 and he’s like, yeah, I have no idea.
0:33:29 And my first thought was like, okay, awesome, sweet.
0:33:30 Thanks.
0:33:32 So what am I paying you for, yeah.
0:33:36 – Yeah, but two and a half seconds later, he said,
0:33:37 all right, let’s figure it out.
0:33:40 And he said it in this, this jolly tone like,
0:33:42 oh, I have no idea what the problem is.
0:33:44 I have no idea how to fix this.
0:33:45 Oh, let’s figure it out.
0:33:48 And so he literally, I sat there and watched his screen
0:33:52 as he opened Google and like copied and pasted my code
0:33:55 and then like went to some result and read something
0:33:56 and like two and a half minutes, he’s like,
0:33:58 oh, let’s just copy and paste this
0:34:00 and put it in your code and see if it works.
0:34:00 And it did.
0:34:03 And I was like, oh, okay.
0:34:06 This is what that job looks like, problem solving.
0:34:07 And it’s the same thing.
0:34:09 – And that’s entrepreneurship in a nutshell.
0:34:12 You may remember Brian Harris had this video
0:34:13 years and years ago.
0:34:14 – Just figure it out.
0:34:15 – Just figure it out, right?
0:34:17 You know, you’re always going to hit that next ceiling
0:34:20 and that next problem, that next hurdle obstacle.
0:34:21 What are we going to do?
0:34:22 Let’s figure it out.
0:34:23 Like that’s your job.
0:34:26 So no, I’ll highlight that point for sure.
0:34:27 – Totally.
0:34:29 And I still get stuck in this every now and then.
0:34:32 I will reach something that is not working
0:34:34 and I’m frustrated and I’m frustrated.
0:34:36 And maybe I do one or two Google searches
0:34:39 when I’m frustrated and eventually my mind comes back
0:34:42 around to, oh my gosh, I just need to ask somebody
0:34:45 and by somebody, I mean AI these days.
0:34:48 And so I do and without fail,
0:34:51 I’m generally like five minutes away from the solution.
0:34:54 So again, just to reiterate here,
0:34:57 I like to have an idea, check.
0:35:02 I like to prompt AI for the big picture implementation.
0:35:03 That’s my exact words.
0:35:07 What’s the big picture implementation to building this?
0:35:10 Or what are some different tools I should use for this?
0:35:12 – Okay.
0:35:13 – And if we have time, Nick,
0:35:16 I want to talk about back end as a service,
0:35:17 which is brilliant.
0:35:18 It’s the brilliant, we’ll talk about that later
0:35:22 if we have time, but big picture.
0:35:25 And then ask AI, okay, what’s the first step
0:35:28 if you’re using chat GPT, you might ask it.
0:35:29 What’s the very first step?
0:35:31 What do I need to code first?
0:35:33 What do I do with this?
0:35:34 Where do I put this on my computer?
0:35:36 Do I create a folder or do I, what do I do with this?
0:35:40 Or if you’re using a code editor like cursor,
0:35:43 like VS code, like windsurf, replete,
0:35:46 all these other ones, then you can pretty much just start.
0:35:50 You could say create me a plugin that does X, Y and Z.
0:35:53 Fire it up, test it.
0:35:55 However you test it depends on what you’re building.
0:35:58 If you don’t know how to test it, ask AI.
0:36:00 How do I see if this is working or not?
0:36:02 Try it, try to use it that for me,
0:36:04 that was uploading a podcast episode
0:36:06 and trying to get a transcription.
0:36:08 Didn’t work for a long time.
0:36:11 And then ask AI to fix it.
0:36:14 Ask AI to troubleshoot, find what’s happening here.
0:36:16 And if AI doesn’t work, you can go to Google.
0:36:18 That takes a little bit longer these days.
0:36:20 And then do it again, and then do it again.
0:36:22 And that’s it, that’s the whole process.
0:36:24 – More with Pete in just a moment,
0:36:26 including the marketing and monetization
0:36:29 of these AI coded apps and how we sold one of his creations
0:36:32 for $45,000 right after this.
0:36:36 – Let’s talk about the marketing and monetization piece
0:36:39 and then circle back to this backend as a service.
0:36:42 So obviously it is helpful
0:36:46 if you have your own existing legion of followers,
0:36:48 your 5,500 email subscribers, great.
0:36:50 If you don’t have that, hey, start building in public,
0:36:52 you know, start doing the social media,
0:36:54 start building that up, obviously a good practice.
0:36:58 What happens once you’ve tapped out that audience?
0:37:00 It doesn’t get you necessarily super far,
0:37:02 it doesn’t necessarily get your recurring revenue
0:37:05 if you’re doing it as a one-time, beta,
0:37:07 lifetime deal, super discounted.
0:37:10 Well, what else have you seen work on the marketing side?
0:37:13 – There are two big categories,
0:37:16 one of which I hate and I’ve had no success with,
0:37:18 but I’m gonna tell it to you anyways.
0:37:20 And the other which I’ve had a lot of success with,
0:37:22 and I love it and it’s what I wanna do going forward.
0:37:27 So the first category would be all the traditional advice
0:37:29 that you could literally Google right now
0:37:31 and I’ll just list off some.
0:37:35 Product time, launch your product on product time.
0:37:37 You could do that, it’s actually not hard.
0:37:41 – Yeah, this is huge in like the indie maker community.
0:37:43 – It is, but it’s super hard
0:37:45 because every single day of the week,
0:37:47 dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of companies
0:37:48 are doing this.
0:37:51 Some of which already have an existing audience
0:37:53 of a million people that are gonna go and upvote
0:37:55 their thing or whatever.
0:37:56 – Right, yeah.
0:37:58 – There’s a lot of these types of ideas.
0:38:00 Oh, launch to this.
0:38:02 Oh, go on, it used to be like hacker news.
0:38:04 Hacker news, hacker news, what was that?
0:38:05 Doesn’t matter.
0:38:08 Oh, go to this forum and post it here
0:38:12 and then, oh, post it here and launch it here.
0:38:15 I tried that for a couple of different projects now,
0:38:17 three projects, I’ve tried to go that route
0:38:20 and it has not worked at all for me personally.
0:38:22 Some people swear by it, you can Google
0:38:23 these sort of things, how to launch an app,
0:38:26 how to market your app or whatever
0:38:27 and those things are gonna pop up.
0:38:28 – Yeah.
0:38:31 – I’m gonna, the second category, the second category,
0:38:34 partnerships, I’ve done various partnerships
0:38:37 over the decades of entrepreneurship
0:38:41 and I think this idea of building your own apps
0:38:42 is by far the easiest.
0:38:45 It’s the easiest pitch in the world
0:38:46 and I’ll tell you how I got into this.
0:38:51 So I tried to sell one of my apps almost a year ago,
0:38:53 like nine months ago and I was just trying
0:38:55 to offload it very cheap.
0:38:58 I told somebody like $15,000, that’s it, period.
0:38:59 I was already making a little bit of money,
0:39:01 15 grand, it’s yours.
0:39:05 And I found a buyer, I met with this person on Zoom
0:39:08 and they were like, I’m happy to pay $15,000
0:39:13 or we can come in as 50/50 partners,
0:39:14 we will now be partners in this business,
0:39:16 we’ll split all the profits or whatever.
0:39:19 I know this guy over here who has an audience
0:39:23 of like a bajillion people and he wants to market the app.
0:39:26 And I was like, doing the math in my head,
0:39:28 like even if this barely pans out,
0:39:30 this is like a win-win for me
0:39:33 or this is a zero lose for me, there’s no downside.
0:39:36 And so I told the guy, yeah, sure.
0:39:39 I brought him on at 50/50 partners, he did promote it,
0:39:41 it did grow, it made great money
0:39:43 and my mind was just blown.
0:39:45 I was like, I’ve already done the work,
0:39:47 I’ve already built this app for the most part.
0:39:48 I actually did a little bit more work on it,
0:39:50 but I didn’t have to do any marketing.
0:39:52 They were like sending it to their email list
0:39:54 and they produced a couple of YouTube videos.
0:39:56 They created a social channels and I was like,
0:39:58 oh my gosh, this is amazing.
0:40:01 And I am, so I’m building a new project
0:40:05 as of last week with a new partner
0:40:07 who’s been on your show, a mutual friend of ours.
0:40:09 I won’t name them because the app’s not live yet.
0:40:11 And it was the same sort of pitch.
0:40:13 And in fact, I reached out before I even built it.
0:40:14 I knew this person already, by the way.
0:40:17 So this wasn’t like a completely cold email.
0:40:19 I reached out to this person and I said,
0:40:24 hey, I can build apps now because I’m fancy and I use AI.
0:40:26 I have this idea right here,
0:40:29 which would be perfect for your audience.
0:40:32 So here’s the deal, we’ll split this 50/50.
0:40:35 I’ll do all the work, I’ll build the app,
0:40:38 I’ll handle customer support, I’ll create the documentation.
0:40:40 It’s the things I was gonna do anyways.
0:40:43 All you gotta do is promote the app however you want.
0:40:44 – Okay. – Mention it to your email list.
0:40:47 It’s in the email marketing space, so it’s email related.
0:40:49 And she was like, yeah, okay.
0:40:50 This is the easiest pitch in the world.
0:40:53 So partnerships, finding people
0:40:55 who have the audience that you need.
0:40:57 If you don’t have your 5,000 people already
0:41:00 who are following Nick from project to project,
0:41:02 I think going and finding these people,
0:41:05 which is easier said than done, I realize this,
0:41:08 especially if you don’t have a very strong network yet.
0:41:09 I get that.
0:41:13 But I still think there’s, it’s such a good pitch.
0:41:16 – And your preference is to do it as like almost like a,
0:41:19 like you said, a 50/50 equity split partnership
0:41:21 rather than, you know, trying to go out
0:41:23 and find a hundred different affiliate partners.
0:41:26 I’ll give you 30% to try and promote this thing.
0:41:27 – Oh gosh, yeah.
0:41:29 Affiliates, affiliates are the worst.
0:41:31 Yeah, no, I like this.
0:41:33 It’s just incentives, right?
0:41:38 People have that much more incentive to grow,
0:41:40 to mention it, to promote it, to market it,
0:41:42 to do all that stuff when they are literally invested.
0:41:44 It’s not just like a one-off commission.
0:41:46 It’s not even a recurring commission.
0:41:49 Part of my pitch, by the way, is we’re gonna run this
0:41:50 for a year and then we’re gonna sell it.
0:41:53 Like a sell in apps is like really hot right now.
0:41:54 That’s part of the, and you get half of that.
0:41:56 You get 50% of that.
0:41:59 So yeah, I think it’s a lot easier than affiliates for sure.
0:41:59 – Okay.
0:42:02 On the pricing side, do you find like this one-off,
0:42:05 like, you know, lifetime access for this one price
0:42:07 or do you do a more traditional SaaS model
0:42:10 or do the partners, you know, want, you know,
0:42:12 one pricing model versus the other?
0:42:14 Like, what do you, what do you see?
0:42:15 It’s like, well, you know, give me some examples
0:42:16 of price points on these different tools
0:42:17 that you’re building.
0:42:20 – If you plan on selling your app period,
0:42:23 even if it’s a very small chance of selling your app,
0:42:25 I think you should go a very traditional route,
0:42:29 monthly payment, annual payment, subscription-based business.
0:42:33 For sure, 100% because I don’t think many people
0:42:34 are interested in buying it otherwise.
0:42:36 That’s just the truth.
0:42:40 That said, this is part of the glory of entrepreneurship.
0:42:42 You do however you want.
0:42:47 I think there is a space, especially in the Mac app world.
0:42:49 I have this tool on my computer right now called Clop,
0:42:51 C-L-O-P.
0:42:55 It’s just like a, whenever an image hits my downloads folder,
0:42:57 it just automatically compresses it and like resizes it
0:42:59 for me and then just drag it.
0:43:00 That’s great.
0:43:02 Anyways, no affiliation with these people
0:43:04 and it was like $30.
0:43:06 – Lifetime, just a one-time thing.
0:43:07 – One time, okay, yeah.
0:43:08 – Right.
0:43:09 I don’t think they’re ever planning on selling
0:43:10 any of their apps.
0:43:13 This is like a developer duo.
0:43:14 They have like, I don’t know,
0:43:17 five, 10, 20 different Mac apps.
0:43:17 They’re never gonna sell.
0:43:19 This is like their passion thing.
0:43:21 They don’t even need customer support for the most part.
0:43:24 Like it’s not an ongoing thing
0:43:27 that they’re constantly really releasing features for.
0:43:30 It’s kind of a different thing, a different vibe.
0:43:31 I don’t know how else to say it, Nick.
0:43:33 But I do think if you are gonna sell, yeah.
0:43:35 I think it needs to be traditional subscription,
0:43:37 monthly payments, that sort of thing.
0:43:40 – Okay, so that’s what I’m hearing is the app sumo model
0:43:42 of like the low lifetime access.
0:43:44 I think great for validation,
0:43:46 great for proving a concept.
0:43:48 But not so good.
0:43:49 Well, now I gotta support this thing
0:43:51 for the lifetime that I promised.
0:43:55 And it’s gonna be much harder to sell.
0:43:57 Like, well, it made $10,000 to sales.
0:44:00 Well, yeah, but what has it done for me lately?
0:44:01 How do you gotta keep going back to that well
0:44:04 versus the recurring model here?
0:44:07 Obviously much more attractive to a buyer coming in.
0:44:10 Now, did you have a non-partner exit?
0:44:13 Any marketplaces that you like to put this stuff up for sale?
0:44:15 Is there a rule of thumb on multiples?
0:44:16 What’s going on there?
0:44:18 – I will give credit where credit is due
0:44:21 and give a shout out to acquire.com.
0:44:26 This is the company I use to sell my most recent app.
0:44:29 And I was, again, I’m not affiliated
0:44:31 with these people in any way.
0:44:32 But I was blown away.
0:44:33 – Is this like a brokerage?
0:44:35 – They are a brokerage, correct, yes.
0:44:35 – Okay.
0:44:38 – I was blown away by how easy it was.
0:44:39 They met on a Zoom call.
0:44:41 They walked me through everything.
0:44:43 In fact, we had like two or three calls
0:44:45 just to like stay in close contact
0:44:47 as like buyers were contacted.
0:44:51 And they actually emailed the listing out to their list.
0:44:52 And it was great.
0:44:53 It was absolutely fantastic.
0:44:56 And there’s a couple of these brokerages.
0:44:59 I guess Empire Flippers is another one.
0:45:03 I actually have a listing that’s about to go live there.
0:45:05 Acquire.com, and there’s one or two other ones.
0:45:08 Flippa, they do software products as well.
0:45:09 There’s a couple of these.
0:45:11 I recommend going that route.
0:45:16 Yes, you will pay the 8%, 10%, maybe even 15%, I think.
0:45:18 – Okay.
0:45:21 – In closing fees, the brokerage fee, totally worth it.
0:45:23 Totally worth it.
0:45:26 They make sure all the legal stuff is happening,
0:45:29 dotting the I’s, crossing the T’s, that sort of thing.
0:45:31 Yeah, use the brokerage.
0:45:32 – Which one did you sell?
0:45:33 Like if you’re comfortable sharing the price point
0:45:36 or the multiples of the math behind that?
0:45:37 – Oh, I don’t mind.
0:45:38 I’m super happy with this.
0:45:43 So fabfabb.ai, fully autonomous blog bot as you nailed
0:45:46 early in the upset.
0:45:50 I did not work on this app for nine months straight.
0:45:51 I had touched it.
0:45:54 And I had it on my to-do list to work on it.
0:45:57 And I got to that day on my to-do list.
0:45:59 And I’m like, today is fab.ai day.
0:46:00 I got to work on this thing.
0:46:02 I opened it up on my computer
0:46:04 and I had this sinking feeling in my gut.
0:46:07 Like, I don’t want to do this.
0:46:08 You know what?
0:46:10 Maybe I could just sell it.
0:46:12 And no joke, like 24 hours later,
0:46:15 I was on a Zoom call with the acquire.com people.
0:46:18 I had to get like financials and order.
0:46:19 It was literally just Google Sheets.
0:46:23 I just Google Sheets financials with income and expenses.
0:46:26 And I use Stripe for billing and payments.
0:46:29 So I just kind of connected my Stripe account.
0:46:31 And I kind of wrote like a little blurb.
0:46:35 I wrote how I grew the app, which wasn’t very much at all.
0:46:37 – You didn’t have recurring revenue at that time?
0:46:40 – Very little, less than $1,000 a month at that point.
0:46:44 And so yeah, I use their built-in valuation tool.
0:46:45 You know, they give you like a huge range.
0:46:50 Oh, your app could be worth $10,000 or like $130,000.
0:46:54 Well, mine, I literally just slid the little slider,
0:46:58 the valuation price point slider on my screen
0:46:58 all the way down.
0:47:00 I slid it all the way down.
0:47:01 I was like, I just want to get rid of this.
0:47:05 And it was like $45,000 or something.
0:47:07 And I was like, done, fine.
0:47:08 That’s great.
0:47:10 If I, $45,000, I’ll take.
0:47:11 – Wow, yeah.
0:47:13 – Again, I launched the app
0:47:16 and I had like a hundred subscribers, paying subscribers.
0:47:18 But then I didn’t work on it for like nine months
0:47:21 and people dropped off and it was, it was crazy, right?
0:47:23 I have no idea what the multiple was.
0:47:28 I know that between 30X, 30X monthly net revenue,
0:47:33 – Monthly. – You can literally Google this.
0:47:36 Like SaaS, multiple sales or whatever.
0:47:40 30 to 35 is generally like a pretty normal range,
0:47:43 I think, 30X to 35X.
0:47:44 Mine was a little bit more than that
0:47:47 just ’cause I think it was fairly cheap.
0:47:49 It was, I’m not selling it for like one and a half million
0:47:50 dollars, right?
0:47:51 It was $45,000.
0:47:53 And that’s it, listed it.
0:47:56 I think a week and a half later, it was live.
0:47:59 I had an onslaught of like the initial people
0:48:02 showing interest and then maybe like three or four people
0:48:04 a couple of days later that were having a conversation.
0:48:08 And then one person who was like literally sent over the,
0:48:11 oh, I forgot what it’s called, the purchase agreement,
0:48:15 like intent or whatever to buy it, cash closing.
0:48:17 And I was like, sole, that was easy.
0:48:18 This was great.
0:48:20 – A couple of important things to note here.
0:48:22 One is like, when’s it time to pull the plug
0:48:25 on your side hustle when it’s, you know,
0:48:27 when you have post-poned working on it for nine months
0:48:29 and when you do finally get to it,
0:48:31 you like within 10 minutes, you’re like,
0:48:32 this is awful, why am I doing this?
0:48:34 Like when you come to dread the work,
0:48:36 that’s a good sign that I don’t need this in my life,
0:48:38 but it’s an asset, right?
0:48:39 It’s sort of just shutting it down
0:48:41 and sunsetting it into the, you know,
0:48:43 abyss of the internet.
0:48:45 Hey, this might be worth something to somebody else.
0:48:47 It might be worth $45,000 to somebody else.
0:48:49 I think that’s a really interesting one
0:48:53 where in the case of building tools like this,
0:48:56 okay, I can build near-term cash flow
0:48:58 if I sell it either as a one-time thing
0:49:00 or I sell it as a subscription,
0:49:03 but I’m also building equity in every incremental,
0:49:07 you know, $500 that I’m adding to the bottom line
0:49:08 every month, every $1,000 that I’m adding
0:49:09 in recurring revenue.
0:49:13 That’s worth 30 to 35X as an exit valuation.
0:49:15 It’s like really, really interesting,
0:49:18 this cash flow plus equity component there.
0:49:20 – You know, one of the benefit to this,
0:49:22 this whole building app thing,
0:49:27 the expenses are essentially zero, essentially zero.
0:49:32 A few of my apps do use AI themselves.
0:49:35 Fab2AI was using AI to create blog posts.
0:49:39 So yeah, there were API costs from OpenAI,
0:49:44 from Anthropic, who makes the Claude AI models.
0:49:47 But other than that, like actually hosting the app
0:49:49 and having it live on the internet is,
0:49:53 in most cases, free for all my other projects.
0:49:55 – Yeah, if you already have hosting or something,
0:49:56 yeah, it makes sense.
0:49:57 – No, no, no, not even have hosting.
0:49:59 I mean, you can host it for free.
0:50:01 You can go to Vercel right now
0:50:04 and you can deploy, host your app
0:50:08 with SSL certificates and everything for zero dollars.
0:50:11 Every single month, like this is there.
0:50:14 And the back end I use is zero dollars from Google.
0:50:18 It’s made by Google and Stripe.
0:50:19 You pay Stripe fees when somebody buys your app,
0:50:21 but again, it’s free to sign up.
0:50:23 My expenses for these things are nothing.
0:50:26 So even if they only make, like you said,
0:50:29 a hundred bucks a month, 200, 500 bucks a month, like–
0:50:31 – Yeah, it’s incremental, yeah.
0:50:32 – The expenses are just nothing, yeah.
0:50:34 – Yeah, the margins are out of control, yeah.
0:50:38 Okay, so finding this, we’ll call them like
0:50:40 the audience partner or the marketing partner.
0:50:42 And this is one of the side hustle trends
0:50:43 that have been going on for a long time.
0:50:46 Like you have the founder and then you have,
0:50:47 like, well, how are we gonna market this thing?
0:50:49 Like we need that influencer component,
0:50:52 like somebody who already talks to the people
0:50:53 that we want to talk to.
0:50:55 That would be a good fit for the tool.
0:50:57 So that’s one component.
0:50:59 You tease this back end as a service thing.
0:51:01 So I’ll tee that up for you.
0:51:06 – Sure, I had the most trouble when I first started out
0:51:08 figuring out the back end.
0:51:11 A database hosted on a server somewhere,
0:51:12 what even is a server?
0:51:14 A server’s just a computer.
0:51:15 Took me a while to figure that out,
0:51:18 but literally just a computer that has a database
0:51:22 where I store my user data, their email address,
0:51:25 their name, anything related to my app,
0:51:28 like the transcription for a podcast or whatever it is.
0:51:33 That was so hard for me when I first did this.
0:51:34 It took forever.
0:51:36 I just could not wrap my head around this.
0:51:39 How does my app talk to a database
0:51:42 and back and forth like my mind was just blown?
0:51:46 So back end as a service is relatively new
0:51:50 and it’s basically software products itself
0:51:54 that you can go use for no money, by the way.
0:51:58 That kind of does most of that heavy lifting for you
0:52:00 and you kind of plug it into your app
0:52:01 with a few lines of code
0:52:04 that you can just kind of copy and paste in.
0:52:09 But once you do, you can run a back end database authentication
0:52:13 like for my apps.
0:52:15 People can use the sign in with Google button.
0:52:16 Like they click the button
0:52:18 and then the Google thing pops up
0:52:20 and they sign in with Google.
0:52:20 – Oh, okay.
0:52:22 – I didn’t code any of that.
0:52:23 – Yeah, yeah.
0:52:24 I don’t want to create a new password or anything.
0:52:25 Okay, yeah.
0:52:29 So this is like the off the shelf tools or templates.
0:52:30 Like you kind of plug it.
0:52:32 I don’t have to start completely from scratch.
0:52:34 Some of this functionality already exists
0:52:35 and apparently it’s open source
0:52:40 or it’s available for people to borrow.
0:52:42 – Again, this is why Nick makes the big bucks
0:52:44 because off the shelf is the perfect way
0:52:45 to think about this.
0:52:46 It is.
0:52:48 No one cares about messing with databases.
0:52:50 I do not, I don’t get that.
0:52:51 My brain doesn’t get that.
0:52:55 This is off the shelf solutions for databases,
0:52:58 authentication and other stuff like that.
0:53:00 But those are the two big things.
0:53:03 So I’ll just point out, I use Google’s Firebase.
0:53:06 It’s literally the name of the app, you can Google it.
0:53:08 And it’s completely free.
0:53:11 It’s silly, easy to like set up.
0:53:14 In fact, you can really just ask AI to do it these days.
0:53:15 And it’ll tell you like,
0:53:17 oh, first you need to go create a Google account
0:53:20 and then do this, so on and so forth.
0:53:21 But once you do that,
0:53:23 ChatGP knows how to use Firebase.
0:53:24 They know how to use SuperBase.
0:53:26 They know how to use these back end as a service things.
0:53:30 And if you ever have to manage it yourself,
0:53:33 it’s as simple as going to their website,
0:53:35 Firebase or SuperBase,
0:53:38 and kind of like point and click, searching for things.
0:53:40 It’s the off the shelf things.
0:53:42 You don’t want to touch SQL.
0:53:44 You don’t want to be doing queries for databases
0:53:47 ’cause that’s just, oh, that’s way beyond the scope
0:53:48 of anything I know how to do.
0:53:50 So yes, back end as a service,
0:53:52 you’re gonna have to pick one, that’s what I’m saying.
0:53:53 So Google what that is,
0:53:55 ask ChatGPT, get signed up.
0:53:59 They’re completely free to start with and go from there.
0:54:02 – All right, it sounds like a project for,
0:54:03 after putting the kids to bed,
0:54:06 let me dig around on the internet,
0:54:10 which has always been and found my coding knowledge
0:54:11 is super, super limited.
0:54:13 Like I can read some HTML and, you know,
0:54:16 insert hyperlinks and stuff like that.
0:54:20 But otherwise it’s super, super basic enough to figure out,
0:54:22 you know, every time I hit refresh on,
0:54:24 after I had an updating code and it doesn’t break.
0:54:26 Like, yes, okay, I’m a programming genius.
0:54:27 This is amazing.
0:54:29 But this is really cool.
0:54:31 I mean, we’re going back to like hypercard,
0:54:32 to do hypercard.
0:54:35 It’s this like middle school era of programming,
0:54:38 you know, shout out to like the two people in the audience
0:54:41 who will get that reference if they’re old enough to,
0:54:42 but it was this, you know,
0:54:44 going back to this practice of figuring it out
0:54:48 where the teacher would kind of, you know,
0:54:51 write a very simple instruction or prompt
0:54:53 at end of the beginning of the class,
0:54:56 the beginning of the quarter, super frustrating.
0:54:58 Like, dude, you didn’t tell us how to do any of that.
0:55:00 How are we supposed to do the thing?
0:55:02 And it’s just, you kind of like,
0:55:03 it was super frustrating.
0:55:05 It’s like, give me the instructions.
0:55:06 I will find that was like the kind of student,
0:55:08 like I will knock this out of the park for you.
0:55:12 But it was so open-ended and it took a few weeks
0:55:14 into the class to be like,
0:55:16 there’s a method to your madness here.
0:55:18 I ended up being one of the most fun
0:55:20 and rewarding classes here.
0:55:22 And I can kind of see this being similar,
0:55:25 like creating something just to solve a problem of your own
0:55:28 to like, you know, put something out into the world.
0:55:31 I think it’s really, it’s really unique.
0:55:34 But anything surprised you over the last couple of years
0:55:36 in building these things and trying to market and sell them?
0:55:40 – The most surprising thing is that I actually did it.
0:55:43 I didn’t go to school for this.
0:55:45 I’ve never went to a coding boot camp.
0:55:46 So on and so forth, right?
0:55:49 I’m not a trained developer.
0:55:52 But at some point, like I literally coded something
0:55:53 and built it and got paying customers
0:55:55 and then sold the company.
0:55:57 And not for a million bajillion dollars.
0:55:58 – Yeah, isn’t that crazy?
0:56:00 – But yes, it is crazy.
0:56:04 And I’ve just blown away by not just me,
0:56:08 but the fact that we can all do stuff like this now.
0:56:11 Again, we have AI to thank for the large part.
0:56:13 But for anybody listening to this,
0:56:16 we can all build apps now, software.
0:56:17 It’s just wild.
0:56:20 And every single week that goes by, it gets easier,
0:56:22 which is continuing to be surprising.
0:56:26 – So if you got a checklist of future projects
0:56:29 that you wanna build, what’s next?
0:56:30 Where are you going with this?
0:56:31 – Yeah, you want the ideas?
0:56:32 I will literally just throw them to the ether
0:56:34 and then somebody can steal them.
0:56:36 Number one, an app that will text me
0:56:40 when half time is over for my college football games.
0:56:43 I wanna be able to input Nick’s team,
0:56:46 the Washington Huskies, GoDocs,
0:56:48 but also the George Bulldogs, GoDocs.
0:56:49 I wanna input my team
0:56:51 and I wanna get a text message when half time is over
0:56:52 and the game is starting back.
0:56:54 So I can walk back in the other room
0:56:55 and get in front of my TV.
0:56:56 There’s an app right there
0:56:58 that I would pay $10 a year for.
0:56:59 – Love it.
0:57:00 I mean, it’s like Red Zone, right?
0:57:01 So it’s similar.
0:57:02 – Oh, I don’t know.
0:57:03 I don’t know what Red Zone is.
0:57:04 Maybe you could share this with me.
0:57:05 – Well, this is like NFL Red Zone.
0:57:08 Or like we’ll send you an alert
0:57:09 when your team is inside the 20 year.
0:57:11 Like, didn’t something like that exist?
0:57:12 – I don’t know.
0:57:13 It’s a great question.
0:57:15 Either way, I’d pay for it.
0:57:17 Here’s another one that I think I might actually do
0:57:18 as my Necklace project,
0:57:20 unless somebody else does it better.
0:57:23 And that is an AI mastermind group.
0:57:25 I wanna be able to log in
0:57:27 to something that looks like a chat window
0:57:29 or heck, I might even do voices
0:57:33 since the AIs have voices now, audio.
0:57:35 And I literally just wanna interact with it
0:57:37 as my mastermind group.
0:57:38 In fact, I wanna go more specific.
0:57:43 I wanna be able to define the exact people
0:57:46 that are in my mastermind group, give them names,
0:57:50 give them character traits and life experiences
0:57:53 and pros and cons and strengths and weaknesses,
0:57:57 each person except for their AI.
0:57:58 And I wanna chat with them.
0:57:59 So almost like an AI therapist,
0:58:01 but an AI mastermind group.
0:58:02 That’s another idea.
0:58:02 – Yeah.
0:58:04 And this is something I’ve been exploring.
0:58:07 Like you can easily prompt it to be like,
0:58:09 respond as if you’re Tony Robbins,
0:58:12 respond as if you’re Pat Flynn or Warren Buffett
0:58:14 or Aristotle or, you know.
0:58:16 And it’s, I mean, this is kind of taking it
0:58:17 to the next level.
0:58:19 We, I’m picturing there like talking heads,
0:58:22 you know, Hagen generated on a screen here.
0:58:23 – Totally.
0:58:26 I’ll give you another one that’s somebody else to do
0:58:27 that I don’t want to do.
0:58:32 And that is affiliate tracking software,
0:58:33 but dirt cheap.
0:58:35 So there are a lot of tools out there
0:58:39 like rewardful and what’s the other one?
0:58:41 Link mink, there’s another one.
0:58:43 These are affiliate referral softwares
0:58:46 where you sign up, you pay $49 a month
0:58:47 and they give you this code,
0:58:51 a line of JavaScript or something
0:58:53 that you install into your site.
0:58:56 Maybe it’s WordPress, maybe it’s a software product
0:58:59 like ConvertKit or something like that.
0:59:00 I don’t know.
0:59:03 And then they handle your affiliate marketing, right?
0:59:04 They give you affiliate links.
0:59:06 They give you a page where your affiliates can sign up
0:59:08 so on and so forth.
0:59:11 All of these are way overpriced
0:59:14 and the market is itching for people like me
0:59:18 who are indie developers to pay $9 a month
0:59:21 and just have a dirt simple affiliate tracking thing.
0:59:23 I don’t know why these are so expensive
0:59:24 and somebody needs to create this.
0:59:27 This is like the AppSumo tidy cow versus Calendly.
0:59:29 Somebody should build this right now
0:59:31 and sell it to me and I’ll pay for it.
0:59:32 There you go.
0:59:33 And it can’t be that hard.
0:59:35 I have a Doven yet, but it can’t be that hard.
0:59:36 – All right.
0:59:37 These are great.
0:59:38 Well, you can email Pete, Pete, do you even blog.
0:59:41 Once you got this developed, doyevenblog.com
0:59:43 is where you can check them out.
0:59:46 Thanks so much for schooling me on this stuff.
0:59:49 I think I’m inspired to start playing around with it
0:59:51 or allocate a portion of the week
0:59:53 to just learn new things, start digging around with stuff
0:59:56 and see what comes of it.
0:59:58 I think it’s really exciting what you built
1:00:02 and looking forward to seeing the future projects
1:00:04 in the pipeline what comes down the road.
1:00:06 But let’s wrap this thing up
1:00:09 with your number one tip for side isolation.
1:00:10 – Quit quicker.
1:00:12 I think maybe I’ve heard this on your podcast before.
1:00:14 So this is gonna be a little bit of a cop out.
1:00:19 But my one tip is to drop your projects faster.
1:00:25 Drop your ideas faster and move on to the next thing.
1:00:29 I do think there is a possibility
1:00:33 that you will quote unquote lack a certain focus here.
1:00:35 I do think there’s a possibility
1:00:38 that you might miss out on some opportunity
1:00:42 if you had tripled down on a project instead of quitting.
1:00:46 But on the long run, I actually think it’s better advice
1:00:49 to quit faster and move on to the next thing.
1:00:53 That’s my side hustle and entrepreneurship mantra right now.
1:00:55 – Well, I gave my criteria for when it was time
1:00:58 to throw in the towel when you come to dread the work.
1:01:00 What’s your quick criteria?
1:01:01 – That’s a huge one right there.
1:01:04 I mean, that looks like a lot of different things
1:01:07 for me personally, but I do feel that now.
1:01:10 I don’t want to work on this project anymore.
1:01:12 That’s the number one sign.
1:01:15 Figure out a way to probably not shut it down completely.
1:01:16 I’m with you.
1:01:18 All of these things can be assets.
1:01:20 I mean, I didn’t touch my app for nine months
1:01:21 and then I sold it.
1:01:24 Either just give yourself grace for not working on it
1:01:25 and just put it down.
1:01:27 If it’s not costing you any money,
1:01:30 list it for sale, figure out something else to do with it
1:01:32 when that work becomes tedious.
1:01:33 I’m with you.
1:01:34 – All right, well, this is fair.
1:01:36 And this is the reason why we ask this question
1:01:40 because half the time, or oftentimes,
1:01:41 well, the answer is persistence.
1:01:44 If you just stick with it through the hard times,
1:01:48 eventually you get to the pot of gold at the other side.
1:01:50 Like, well, how long do you really keep digging
1:01:52 before you just throw it in?
1:01:54 It just never comes.
1:01:57 So there’s no shame in quitting.
1:01:57 Same thing.
1:02:00 Like if you’re gonna leave your job to start a business,
1:02:01 I would love to see you start the business
1:02:02 before quitting your job.
1:02:04 Like you have lower the height of that cliff
1:02:05 that you’re jumping off.
1:02:07 If you’re quitting to something rather than from something,
1:02:09 you know, a whole lot of psychology around that.
1:02:12 But you don’t need to hang on to something
1:02:13 that’s making your life worse.
1:02:16 So quit quicker is the number one tip from Pete
1:02:16 in this one.
1:02:17 It’s been awesome.
1:02:20 I love the calls to action of like,
1:02:22 well, if you don’t know how to do it,
1:02:24 ask the AI to troubleshoot it.
1:02:26 I love the call to start small.
1:02:28 I love the call to find a marketing partner
1:02:30 and share the upside with them.
1:02:32 Really, really interesting episode.
1:02:33 Again, one that’s inspired me,
1:02:36 hopefully to go stride and try and build something on my own.
1:02:38 But big thanks to Pete for sharing his insight.
1:02:39 Big thanks to our sponsors
1:02:41 for helping make this content free for everyone.
1:02:44 You can hit upsidehustlenation.com/deals
1:02:47 for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.
1:02:48 Thank you for supporting the advertisers
1:02:50 that support the show.
1:02:51 That’s it for me.
1:02:52 Thank you so much for tuning in.
1:02:53 If you find a value in the show,
1:02:55 the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.
1:02:58 So fire off that text message to, you know,
1:03:00 somebody who’s always coming up with different business ideas.
1:03:02 Hey, have you ever thought doing a software project?
1:03:04 This episode is for you.
1:03:05 Until next time, let’s go out there
1:03:06 and make something happen.
1:03:08 And I’ll catch you in the next edition
1:03:09 of the Side Hustle Show.