579: Million Dollar Business Ideas For The Taking With Nick Loper

Summary

Episode Summary: "Million Dollar Business Ideas For The Taking With Nick Loper"

The My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast With Steve Chou Episode 579, released on February 20, 2025, features host Steve Chou alongside guest Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation. In this engaging episode, Steve and Nick brainstorm and discuss a variety of innovative business ideas that have the potential to reach million-dollar valuations. Each idea is dissected with practical insights, personal anecdotes, and actionable strategies, making the episode an invaluable resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and side hustlers alike.

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1. Pillow Subscription Service

Overview:
Nick introduces a novel concept centered around the ubiquitous pillow. Recognizing that pillows harbor multiple allergens and require frequent replacement for optimal hygiene and comfort, he proposes a subscription-based model.

Details:
Listeners are encouraged to take a personalized quiz to determine their ideal pillow type based on sleeping habits (e.g., back sleeper, side sleeper) and preferred firmness. Subscribers would receive a new pillow every three to six months, ensuring a clean and comfortable sleeping experience.

Notable Quote:
Nick Loper states at [02:33], "This is your pillow on your bed," emphasizing the everyday importance of maintaining pillow hygiene.

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2. AI Chatbot Service for E-commerce Customer Support

Overview:
Steve Chou suggests leveraging AI to create specialized chatbots tailored for e-commerce businesses. These bots can handle customer inquiries efficiently, reducing the need for extensive human customer service teams.

Details:
The service involves training AI bots with specific product information and frequently asked questions pertaining to individual stores. By doing so, businesses can provide prompt and accurate responses to customers, enhancing user experience and operational efficiency.

Notable Quote:
Steve explains at [04:23], "Train them up and then offer it as a service to just create one of these bots, customer service bot for an online store," highlighting the service-oriented nature of the idea.

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3. Second Guess Remover: Smart Home Automation

Overview:
Nick presents a solution for the common dilemma of verifying household tasks, such as ensuring the garage door is closed. This idea falls under smart home automation aimed at reducing daily uncertainties.

Details:
The proposed service could be an app or a smart device that allows homeowners to remotely check the status of various home systems. This ensures peace of mind by providing real-time updates and confirmations, thereby eliminating the need for habitual checks.

Notable Quote:
Nick shares a personal story at [07:07], recounting, "How many times have you pulled out of the house and it's not until you turn the corner that you start to think, did I close the garage door?"

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4. Live Selling Services on TikTok

Overview:
Steve introduces the concept of live selling tailored for platforms like TikTok, drawing inspiration from successful live-selling models in Asia.

Details:
This service involves acting as a virtual salesperson who live-streams product demonstrations and sales pitches. E-commerce stores can outsource their live selling needs, allowing them to reach a broader audience without maintaining an in-house team.

Notable Quote:
Steve compares it to traditional methods at [11:47], stating, "This is literally like the home shopping network," emphasizing the interactive sales potential.

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5. Home Energy Backup Consultant

Overview:
In response to recent power outages caused by severe weather events, Nick proposes a consultancy service focused on home energy backup solutions.

Details:
The service would analyze homeowners' needs and recommend suitable backup systems—whether batteries, generators, or other technologies. By partnering with local vendors and installers, consultants can provide tailored solutions that enhance home resilience against future outages.

Notable Quote:
Nick refers to a specific event at [14:14], mentioning, "The Bomb Cyclone 2024...half a million people were out of power for five days," underlining the necessity for reliable home energy backups.

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6. Solar Panel Cleaning Service

Overview:
Building on Steve's comment [15:55], Nick suggests a service dedicated to maintaining solar panel efficiency by regular cleaning.

Details:
Solar panels can lose efficiency due to dirt and debris accumulation. This service would offer scheduled cleanings, ensuring panels operate at optimal capacity and prolonging their lifespan.

Notable Quote:
Steve remarks at [15:55], "Within the first couple of years, the effectiveness of your solar panels degrades dramatically because dirt gets accumulated," highlighting the service's necessity.

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7. Organic Food Photos for Restaurants

Overview:
Steve shares an observation about restaurants incentivizing customers to take casual photos of their food, which led to the idea of providing professional, authentic food photography services.

Details:
The business would involve visiting restaurants to capture organic, candid images of their dishes, which can be used for app listings, social media, and marketing materials. This enhances the restaurant's online presence with genuine-looking photos without the costs of professional photographers.

Notable Quote:
Steve recounts at [16:24], "They were willing to pay $3 per photo," indicating a clear demand for such services.

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8. Software Migration Service

Overview:
Nick identifies a pain point experienced when software services increase their prices, prompting users to seek more affordable alternatives.

Details:
This service would specialize in migrating businesses from one software platform to another, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal downtime. By focusing on popular tools that frequently update their pricing, the service can cater to a consistent stream of customers looking to reduce costs.

Notable Quote:
Nick shares his frustration at [19:33], saying, "It makes me want to like, research alternatives, like better, faster, cheaper alternatives," underscoring the market need.

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9. Reddit Marketing Services

Overview:
Recognizing the rising importance of platforms like Reddit in SEO and traffic generation, Nick proposes a specialized marketing service.

Details:
The service would involve creating and managing Reddit accounts to organically promote brands and products. By adhering to Reddit's community guidelines and fostering genuine engagement, businesses can enhance their visibility and credibility on the platform without appearing spammy.

Notable Quote:
Nick describes at [22:01], "It's like a ghostwriting service where they're taking your content... and putting it up there," explaining the strategy behind authentic Reddit marketing.

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10. Transparent Estate Sale Service

Overview:
Steve identifies the lack of transparency in traditional estate sale services and offers an alternative model focused on honesty and openness.

Details:
This service would handle the inventory and sale of household items by listing them on platforms like eBay with full visibility to the homeowner. By providing detailed, itemized listings and real-time updates, clients can track sales and receive fair compensation without the opaque practices of conventional estate sale companies.

Notable Quote:
Steve criticizes current practices at [25:19], stating, "They can't give you prices on anything, and they just kind of give you this check and they don't even give you an itemized list."

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11. Digital Baby Service

Overview:
Nick introduces a service aimed at securing a child's digital presence from birth, ensuring their names and handles are protected online.

Details:
Parents can subscribe annually to reserve domain names, social media handles, and email accounts for their children. This proactive approach prevents others from claiming these digital identities, offering peace of mind and readiness for when the child comes of age to manage their online presence.

Notable Quote:
Nick explains at [40:33], "We're going to secure your kid's domain name, we're going to claim their social media handles," outlining the service's core offerings.

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12. Social Media Set Rentals

Overview:
Steve discusses the trend of renting elaborate sets for creating polished social media content, particularly among influencers aiming to portray a luxurious lifestyle.

Details:
The business would involve setting up and renting out various themed environments—such as faux private jets, luxury hotel suites, or scenic backdrops—for short-term use by content creators. By providing high-quality sets, the service caters to the demand for visually appealing and authentic-looking social media posts without the influencers needing to invest in permanent setups.

Notable Quote:
Steve observes at [41:23], "People are paying money to rent venues for social media," highlighting the monetization potential of this niche.

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13. Video Scripting Service

Overview:
Nick addresses a common hurdle for content creators—scriptwriting—and proposes a service or tool to streamline the process.

Details:
This service would offer tailored scripts for podcasts and YouTube videos, either through human expertise or advanced AI solutions. By simplifying the scripting phase, creators can produce content more efficiently, overcoming the bottleneck that often delays production.

Notable Quote:
Nick articulates at [43:03], "The scripting is where it's the most time-consuming," emphasizing the need for such a solution.

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14. Family Story Capture Service

Overview:
Steve shares a heartfelt idea inspired by his experiences with his mother, aiming to preserve family histories through professional interviews and videography.

Details:
This service would involve visiting homes to interview family members, capturing their stories and memories on video. The final product could be a documentary-style film, offering families a tangible keepsake that preserves their heritage and personal narratives for future generations.

Notable Quote:
Steve reflects at [36:08], "But I was thinking of taking that one step further... you just take a film crew and you just go interview that person."

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Additional Insights and Discussions

Throughout the episode, Steve and Nick delve into various peripheral topics that enrich their primary discussions:

• Seller Summit Promotion: Steve announces the upcoming Seller Summit 2025, a conference focused on practical E-commerce strategies, emphasizing its exclusive and curriculum-based approach.

• YouTube and Content Creation Challenges: Both hosts share their struggles with content creation, particularly around scripting and aligning niche expertise with broader audience interests.

• Generational Skill Preservation: Steve and Nick discuss the importance of preserving "forgotten skills" through online courses, ensuring that valuable knowledge isn't lost to future generations.

Notable Quote:
Steve muses at [39:01], "We've covered a lot in this episode... All of these side hustles are great ideas that you can start right now with very little money," encapsulating the episode's essence.

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Conclusion

Episode 579 serves as a treasure trove of innovative business ideas, each meticulously explored by Steve Chou and Nick Loper. From leveraging AI in customer service to preserving family legacies through video documentation, the episode offers diverse opportunities for entrepreneurs to explore and capitalize on. Whether you're looking to start a side hustle or scale a business to new heights, the insights shared in this episode provide both inspiration and practical guidance to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.

For more information and resources, listeners are encouraged to visit mywifequitjob.com and stay updated on upcoming events like Seller Summit 2025 at sellerssummit.com.

Transcript

[Steve Chu]

Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to E commerce and online business. In this episode I invited my good friend Nick Loper from side Hustle Nation back on the show to give you some realistic side Hustle ideas that you can start right now with very little money. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale For Seller Summit 2025 over at sellers summit.com the Seller Summit is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high level advice, mine is a curriculum based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e commerce business entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods and not some high level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000ft. I personally hate large events, so the Seller Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast and we've sold out every single year for the past eight years. If you are an e commerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th. Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellers summit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show. Welcome to the My Wife QuotaJob podcast. In this episode I have my good buddy Nick Loper from side Hustle Nation back on the show and today we're going to give you a bunch of million dollar business ideas for you to take.

[Nick Loper]

Awesome. It's become a tradition. I think this is our third round of third time. Yeah, Business idea giveaways. If you like this form, make sure to go back and check out the other two. We'll link up those episodes in the show notes for this episode. Now, I want to pitch you an idea that came to mind recently. This is a household item that I can almost guarantee you have several of in your house that experts recommend you replace probably more often than you do. This item, experts say, can contain up to 16 different species of fungi and up to 10% of the weight of this item is now dust mites and their waste. Do you have a guess of what this is?

[Steve Chu]

Is it a water filter?

[Nick Loper]

This is neither of those. This is your pillow on Your bed.

[Steve Chu]

Oh, no way. Okay.

[Nick Loper]

So the idea that I want to pitch is pillows as a service pillow, a pillow subscription service. You would take some quiz, determine your. Are you a back sleeper? Are you a side sleeper? Okay. What dens, what thickness is going to be perfect for you? And then we're just going to ship you a new one of those every three to six months. Whatever the cadence is that turns out to be optimal for cleaning this thing and having a less gross sleeping experience.

[Steve Chu]

I kind of like that. So is it the pillow or the pillow case or both?

[Nick Loper]

I think it's the pillow itself that obviously wash your pillowcase as often as you care to, but the pillow itself collects all of this nasty stuff that just is difficult to get rid of.

[Steve Chu]

Interesting. I kind of like that idea. I'm very particular about my pillow, though.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. So I like to personalize it. But once you find one that you like, it's like, okay, I'll just keep getting that one.

[Steve Chu]

I like that idea. Actually, I never thought of that because, come to think of it, one of my buddies cannot sleep at night. And then he started, well, changing his sheets, like, three times a week. And that actually fixed it.

[Nick Loper]

Interesting.

[Steve Chu]

So this is similar, I think.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. We spend, you know, we're supposed to spend, you know, eight hours a day sleeping. And so you spend a lot of time, a third of your hours on top of this thing, and you start to think about, like, oh, this is kind of gross. Dead skin cells and everything else that's going on in there. You're like, yeah, we should probably replace this more often. More often than we do. I can't remember the last time I got a new pillow.

[Steve Chu]

You know why I like recording these episodes with you, Nick, is we have completely different ideas. So mine are kind of very E Commerce focused. Selling focused.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. Well, this is. There's an E Commerce angle to this, right?

[Steve Chu]

No, no, there is. There is, There is. So my idea was because right now I run an E Commerce store, and a lot of us don't want to be doing customer service, meaning, like, answering phones and whatnot. And you know how AI Is all the rage right now. And so a lot of stores are having these chatbots just being, like, the first line of defense.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

And there these. It's really easy to just train your chatbot to know your products. And so I was thinking a service. And again, you have to figure out how to do all this stuff, which is, not surprisingly, not that complicated. Train them up and then offer it as a service to just create one of These bots, customer service bot for an online store or any store that just knows the products and can answer simple questions.

[Nick Loper]

And so this would be a process of feeding in all the product details and exactly, kind of like the frequently asked questions, basically like the database of knowledge. And you could probably feed in chat transcripts from like the, you know, previous 10 years of human, you know, customer support representatives and say, well, what did they, how did they respond to this?

[Steve Chu]

I mean, the least techy way to do this is to literally just create a spreadsheet of all the products, product descriptions and everything, and then just send them into an, an AI bot and train it just for that store as a service.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. Okay. And then targeting is there. The question is like, how do you, would you just send cold pitches to people, you know, on Shopify, do random product searches, see what stores show up?

[Steve Chu]

So I, what I would do is I would just go through the Shopify database of stores and just start reaching out to them through their contact forms. There's a lot of demand for this. I know, because I'm a member of all these forums and people are asking how to do it. And then there's like ridiculously overpriced services that offer more than this, obviously. But at the base level, it's a very simple thing that an individual can do for other companies.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. So you go sell it as a service. And the pitch being we're going to save you so many human hours of customer support time. Or like that first line of defense. Right. If we can reduce the number of inquiries. And you see this on so many tech support where it's like, you know, check out our knowledge base or check out our frequently asked questions. You know, do you still want to submit a ticket? Did this question, you know, did your question get answered like, click? You know, sometimes it's not even clear that you're going to get some of that. A human is going to read your question.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. And oftentimes, like, if you look at our most commonly asked questions is where's my order? And. Or what should I buy? Like, I'm looking for this, what should I buy? And you can answer that question really easily with an AI bot because that knows your products.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. So, okay, yeah, that's. That's interesting. I help people on their decision making. Not just, you know, tech support, troubleshooting, triage, but like actually on the front end of, well, this is my situation. Help point me in the right direction.

[Steve Chu]

Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. I've got one that I'll throw out this is probably under the umbrella of smart home automation. But I'm going to call it the second guess remover. Because how many times have you pulled out of the house and it's not until you turn the corner out of the neighborhood that you start to think, did I close the garage door? And now that you've planted that seed of doubt, your wife is like, I think we did, but I'm not really sure. Why don't we just go back and check? And so the second guess remover is maybe it's an app on your phone. Maybe it's some way to either remotely it with some smart device or it just, you know, some way to double check. Like, yes, in fact, we did close it. And you turn around and nine times out of ten, of course you closed it, because you always do. But one time, the one time that I can remember where we didn't actually close it was when we were starting our 13 hour drive from California back up to Washington and we turned around and we were like, oh, crap, we were going to be gone for a couple weeks. This thing was wide open. So it's like that. For that reason, we always do turn around and go check.

[Steve Chu]

How did you know that it was open?

[Nick Loper]

It was just that seed of doubt, like, oh, we better turn around, we better go check.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. So actually, I haven't talked about this publicly, but our house got broken into a couple weeks back and so now we've got like cameras everywhere. So I guess I would accomplish the same thing as this.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I guess if you had the camera pointed at the garage, you could check.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I like that idea. I do that all the time, actually. I second guess myself all the time.

[Nick Loper]

It's bad. It's bad. Yeah, it is. Like, of course you closed it because that's just part of like the pulling out of the driveway process. But sometimes it's like, did I hit the button? I don't know. Another one. You know, while we're on the topic of, you know, theft deterrent, in this, in this ballpark, a neighbor of ours has, you know, how people have the yard signs like this home protected by, you know, Xfinity monitoring or ADT or even like Simplisafe, you see all this stuff. This guy went a different route and his sign said something like, this home protected by, you know, a trigger happy second second amendment voter or something. I was like, hey, that, that's a bold move. I don't know if this guy is armed or not, but it's enough if I'm A prospective criminal to be like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the next house.

[Steve Chu]

I think that would work in 49 out of the 50 states in California. That would not fly.

[Nick Loper]

You don't think so?

[Steve Chu]

I don't think so, but. But you're right. I mean, yeah, they might think twice. I mean, it's all about being less appealing than the next house.

[Nick Loper]

Right, right, right.

[Steve Chu]

They're trying to make it broken into.

[Nick Loper]

Right, yeah. Make it just. Again, how can I make myself less of an easy mark, less of an easy target?

[Steve Chu]

So my next idea also has to do with shopping, but this is a trend that's been happening all over Asia and I'm not sure if you watch TikTok or any of those, but there are these people. So there's this one lady who's, who's famous for this and made it all over the News. She made $13.7 million in 7 Days Live selling on the Chinese version of TikTok. And she's just taking other people's products.

[Nick Loper]

I thought TikTok was the Chinese version of TikTok.

[Steve Chu]

There's like a douyin is a douyin is a Chinese version. The Chinese version of TikTok has educational videos and stuff. Not, not the stuff that we have in. But it was just this lady holding up stuff. Slam, you know, and then just slide. Holding up for like three seconds and then sliding it over.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

And so basically there's a lot of e commerce stores that want exposure to this audience. So you can offer live selling services. And again, you don't need an audience to do this on TikTok, which is, which is the beauty of it. But if you just go on, it's a consistency thing and you go on, you sell. There's a whole like career of people doing this now, but they're not doing it for. On a mass market trying to recruit other companies to list their goods.

[Nick Loper]

So this would be. I'm the micro influencer, selling random stuff.

[Steve Chu]

So basically you, you send me your product and you reach out and then you will just live sell on Facebook. TikTok just stream all at once and you just be like a virtual salesman, kind of like an affiliate in a different way. Like, remember we had affiliates in the web world where you click on a link.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

This is literally like the home shopping network.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. But if you don't have any following, like who's, who's.

[Steve Chu]

That's the beauty of it. You, you, you don't need a following on these platforms as long as the Your selling style is appealing. Over time you will, you know, these platforms like TikTok will find people that watch you.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, so are you sending your wedding linens to people doing this kind of thing?

[Steve Chu]

Well, so what's funny about all this? The reason why I came up with this, I was like, I was going to do this for our own products. Yeah, but like, who wants to see a middle aged Chinese guy selling wedding linens? Right. I would want to find someone probably female for our products, probably, you know, in the demographic that we're looking toward for doing this. And so what's funny is a lot of these ideas that I've come up with here today are things that I actually need for myself. And I know stores are looking for this.

[Nick Loper]

So interesting. And so.

[Steve Chu]

And TikTok affiliates have already been big. It just hasn't been organized as much.

[Nick Loper]

We've heard from some e comm sellers that they've had some pretty good success going after micro influencers in their niche and even people kind of doing product reviews and pointing towards TikTok shop.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, I think the problem is you have to go out and find these people. Whereas if there's someone, you know, who's very eloquent and, and good on camera and you go to the store more often than not, they'll be like, hey, sure, because it's all on consignment anyways. Right. You don't have to pay the person until they make a sale.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. All performance based, where you kind of set a target cost of acquisition.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, pretty much.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. All right. That's new to me. I don't spend any time on TikTok or these other ones. I don't really know. Let's see what's next on my list here. Oh, we have one. Do you have solar panels under your house?

[Steve Chu]

We do not.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. This is something that we've been trying to figure out and contemplate. Even though we live in the great gray, gloomy northwest, we have a south facing roof and very simple roof structure where it's like, okay, this would be good. And it kind of pains me every summer when it does get hot out. It's like almost this greenhouse where it's like we're just soaking up all this juice and just absorbing it. We're not doing anything with it. How can we harvest this in some way? But the world of solar sales is pretty opaque and sometimes a little bit shady. And people making all kinds of promises about, well, this tax rebate and then you can claim the depreciation on top of this. And other people are like, yeah, that's, that's not a thing like that. Who, who told you that? And it's just. So the idea here is like the, you know, local consultant person who can kind of play matchmaker, analyze your, your situation and your needs, and they might tell you, like, look, this is just not a fit for you. But we've got relationships with the local, local vendors, the local installers, and figure out, okay, what is a realistic and good price for this type of, type of install. And we also just had a few months ago, the, the, you know, Bomb Cyclone 2024. This was like a mass power outage event where, you know, half a million people or something out of power, and we were down five days or something in the dark and, you know, had to toss all the food out of the fridge. Thankfully, no property damage in this storm, but it was like, it got everybody thinking about, like, well, what is my, you know, home energy backup plan? Like, is this a battery system? Is this a generator system? Is it, you know, what, what makes the most sense? And this was, you know, a once in a generation event. I say, well, maybe if I just allocate what I would have spent on a battery towards, you know, a hotel room or, you know, and restocking the freezer, like, oh, I could survive the next several storms and it would still be coming out ahead. But it's something that a lot of people were thinking about in response to that. So it's kind of the home energy backup consultant. I know on a previous one of these, we talked about the. You pitched the zombie apocalypse consultant. It's in that same realm.

[Steve Chu]

Same, same thing. You know, since we're talking about solar, there was this article that I was reading where like, within like the first couple years, the effectiveness of your solar panels degrades dramatically because dirt gets accumulated on this. So how about like a service where you just go around and clean people's solar panels?

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, we can, we can boost the efficiency. Yeah, yeah, we can get you back.

[Steve Chu]

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that wasn't one of the ones I had on my list, but your, your idea made me think of that.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. So put it down.

[Steve Chu]

All right, here's one that literally I just thought of the other day as I was eating at a restaurant. So I was ordering from a Chinese restaurant for Chinese New Year, which just passed, and I noticed that the company that I was ordering from was offering to pay $3 per photo of their food so that they could populate the app with like, authentic pictures of their food. And these photos are meant to be casual, so they come across authentic. Right. Not like a stage shot.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

And so I was thinking my business idea is to just go around to these restaurants, clear there's this need, and offer to just take organic pictures of their food. And maybe in the beginning, you just do it in exchange for a free meal, just for kicks. But maybe over time, you could turn this into, you know, a real business. Because restaurants want people taking pictures and making videos of their food and posting them, whether it be on the app or are on their own accounts.

[Nick Loper]

So they're trying to incentivize, like, a crowdsourced image gallery, basically. Like, oh, of course we're going to have our, you know, fancy professional product photographer come in and take these shots. But, you know, it looks more. It looks more legit. It looks more official if it's, you know, just random customers posting pictures of their food.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. If it's a customer, like, holding up the plate or the food or eating it or whatever.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

Instead of, like, a stock photo. And so they were willing to pay $3 per photo.

[Nick Loper]

Wow.

[Steve Chu]

And of course, we did this.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. Take some pictures.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, you just take a picture of the food that you just got, like, eating it. So clearly there's a demand here. And maybe you can do this on.

[Nick Loper]

A mass scale, and it only takes, you know, one to get a toehold. And then you start going to the neighborhood or the restaurant down the street. Like, did you know, these guys must be onto something. Hey, they're paying $3 a picture, you know, to get these different things. This is just to, like, populate Yelp or where are they putting these things?

[Steve Chu]

Uh, so the one that I used, I can't remember the service. There's a whole bunch of these delivery services that they have.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

So maybe like, Door. We didn't use DoorDash, but DoorDash could be one of those. Right. It's one thing to see, like, photos of just the food. It's another to see, like, real people enjoying the food, you know?

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

And so maybe that's like, a way to. I don't know the economics behind it, but if they're willing to pay $3 a photo, clearly there's a demand for this.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. So that helps. That helps their average order value. That helps their conversion rate in these apps or something.

[Steve Chu]

Conversion rate prob. Probably. Yeah.

[Nick Loper]

Huh. Interesting.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in Starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be [e-mail] free. Just sign up right there on the front page via email and I'll send you the course right away. Once again, that's mywifequitterjob.com free. Now back to the show.

[Nick Loper]

I've got one that is related to software price increases. I think you and me both share a frugality gene and so whenever some tool that I'm using like jacks up the price, like it pains me a little bit. And it pains me that the switching cost is so high. It pains me that I feel like kind of powerless to do anything about it. And so it makes me want to like research alternatives, like better, faster, cheaper alternatives. The one that really hit me was leadpages recently where to their credit they had, they had not increased the rate in 10 years. And so it's like, I understand like this is due for a rate, but it was such a shock because it was like it almost doubled.

[Steve Chu]

I was like, oh, did it really?

[Nick Loper]

Like, hey, I've been a customer for 10 years, this is what you're going to do? To me it was like spent the whole day researching alternatives and trying to migrate over to OptimizedPress for 25% of the price. So the service that I want to pitch is like the software migration service. And it doesn't have to be leadpages. It could be anywhere you see people complaining about a price increase. It could be people looking for, you know, fill in the blank product alternative. Like zapier did this a couple years ago or they really. Oh yeah, increase their rates. And you know, anytime you see people complaining about that, like there may be an opportunity to be like, hey, you know, I'm a specialist in migrating from this thing to this thing and maybe you build some tool to help you do it. Like, I don't know, there's probably a way to do it faster. And the thing is, a lot of these are kind of proprietary, closed off software systems. Like maybe it's a little more challenging than that, but if you get good at it, I imagine you can knock these out pretty quickly.

[Steve Chu]

You know, it's funny that you mentioned Zapier because I can't remember how many years ago When Zapier doubled their prices, I moved everything over to Make.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, me too.

[Steve Chu]

Oh, you did? It wasn't called Make. Make acquired the company. I can't remember what it was called.

[Nick Loper]

It was like Integromat first.

[Steve Chu]

Integromat. That's what it was.

[Nick Loper]

But yeah, because. And the challenge is there's a learning curve. It's like, well, I already know how Zapier works. Do I really want to do this? Is it worth the time? But it's like, well, if I'm going to have this for another five or ten years, then yeah, it adds up every month. But totally, yeah.

[Steve Chu]

I like that you would have to specialize in something. But yeah, that'd be really easy to do because people tend to complain on Reddit.

[Nick Loper]

Right, right.

[Steve Chu]

And you could say, hey, I just use this to migrate and it's like your own service.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, right.

[Steve Chu]

I love it. I like that one. I like that one.

[Nick Loper]

Can I go again while we're on the topic of Reddit? So as you know, like, the world of SEO has kind of been turned upside down the last year, year and a half or so with Google really prioritizing both AI search results, but also sites like Reddit and like Quora, kind of these, you know, user generated content type of sites. And so, and I've actually met somebody doing this, but they're providing Reddit marketing services where we'll create these different accounts and we'll kind of build up their Reddit credibility. So it's not like they're just coming in and spamming links, but they're kind of like strategically and intentionally highlighting your brand in kind of an organic Reddit approved way in a lot of cases where you could start, well, if Reddit is, you know, all of a sudden siphoning off a bunch of my traffic, like, how can I get in front of that traffic in a way that at least from the outside looking in appears to be authentic and playing by those rules.

[Steve Chu]

You know, those gamification services started happening almost immediately after. Have you been approached by the Reddit services?

[Nick Loper]

Not, not by anybody serious, that I can tell.

[Steve Chu]

I mean, I've been approached and I always thought it was spammy, but like the people who approached me, but yeah, there are companies paying lots of money for this service, so.

[Nick Loper]

Absolutely, because basically it's a, I mean it's basically a ghostwriting service where they're taking your content, your ideas and putting it up there and like, you're probably not going to get the same traffic, the same traffic value, but it's a way to kind of get your message.

[Steve Chu]

Funny, our. Our mutual friend Spencer Hawes, I think, tried one of these services.

[Nick Loper]

Oh, okay.

[Steve Chu]

And he had some good results. I know you probably had him on this podcast at some point.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I'll have to catch up with Spencer for sure.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. Okay. So my next idea has to do with the fact that we recently moved my mom into our neighborhood, and she was moving from a gigantic house to a little, teeny, tiny house because, you know, housing is so expensive over here.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

Anyway, she had to get rid a lot of stuff. And, you know, if you go to these estate sale people, it's all like a super sketchy industry. Like you have. They can't give you prices on anything, and they just kind of give you this check and they don't even give you, like an itemized list of what was sold and for how much. They just kind of hand you this check at the very end, which I found really sketchy. And we interviewed a whole bunch of these services. But so I was thinking there's a lot of people moving, right. And they need to get rid of their stuff. So why not just put like an above board sort of selling service where you'll offer to just ebay all of their stuff. And it's completely transparent. You show them the auctions, you just go and you take photos. For some reason, I could not find a service that was willing to come to my mom's house, take a full inventory, and just list everything on ebay.

[Nick Loper]

Oh, okay. No, I like this. Lots of. I mean, it taps into the trend of, you know, empty nester baby, booner baby boomers, downsizing and a typical. I mean, what's an estate sale fee is they take 40, 50% of everything they sell.

[Steve Chu]

They. Yeah, they pretty much take half. But it's the lack of transparency that bugged me. Like, they can't make any promises and they don't even give you the itemized list.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

Of everything. At least the ones that I interviewed in Maryland. And I could not find a place that was just willing to ebay everything and come to the house. Like, you can bring all your stuff to them and they'll ebay. I found those services.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. I met a guy a couple of years ago who was doing something similar. It wasn't. Maybe some of it was ebay, but another segment of his business was like a dedicated auction site, like almost a dedicated estate sale type of site. It's like, I'll manage the whole thing for you. Partnered with local real estate agents who kind of knew the customers as they were selling their house and knew they were going to need to get rid of some of this stuff. And it was all on consignment, it was all on performance. Whatever sells, we'll take a cut and we'll pass on the rest.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, I mean, the key for me was transparency.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, right.

[Steve Chu]

I like to see the auctions and whatnot. And sure, you can take your cut, but at least in Maryland, the estate sale people that I went through, it just felt like kind of dirty to me. So. No, I think there's a need.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I really like this one. And then, you know, do that realtor partner angle or start with friends and family who are going through this process. Get a few reps under your belt and figure out how to streamline that process and then provide that. Because it's kind of the. The anti positioning is that you position it as, you know, we're transparent. We're the homeowner advocate. There's different ways. It's like, you know, when you see like cruelty free on like a shampoo or any type of product or something, you're like, yeah, well, now I automatically assume that every. Every other thing is like, filled with cruelty. And you're like, that's an interesting anti positioning.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. Just the fact that you can see the auctions that they're conducting and what the actual selling price is. Yeah, that'd be good enough for me.

[Nick Loper]

Okay, cool, cool, cool. What else do I have? Do you have a aura ring?

[Steve Chu]

No, I do not.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, me neither. And. And the reason I don't is I believe the sleep score is largely irrelevant. Where it's like, I'm gonna wake up today and I gotta be the best version of myself. You know, whether I slept well or whether I slept poorly. I still gotta show up. I gotta be a dad. I gotta do all the things. I gotta go crush the day. And so it's like, you know, maybe there's an opportunity for the oura ring that just shoots back, you know, 98s, 99s, like all the time. It's like, you nailed it last night. You know, you might feel tired, but no, the data says you did great. You might as well, you know, go out and crush your day. Something that's kind of been. Been on my mind. It's like, you know, sleep is getting a lot of attention lately with, well, you know, we're recognizing like, how important it is for brain recovery. Like, you know, all sorts of different health consequences. And it's like, yes, do all the things to make sure you try and get the best night's sleep possible. But it's kind of silly, like, oh, I'm not going to do what I plan to do because I only got a 73. Like, well, really, like, you still have to go do your day.

[Steve Chu]

So this is like a positive reinforcement type of ordering.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I like that. It doesn't even.

[Steve Chu]

That cheers you on.

[Nick Loper]

You don't have to be connected to any data. Like, it just has like fake looking Bluetooth or something. I don't know. Gag.

[Steve Chu]

Gag gift. I. I'd considered getting the Oura ring because I know, like, what you eat has a lot to do with how well you sleep. So by just eating certain things and then taking, you know, the. The score you can narrow. Because I know, like, for example, if I eat something super greasy, like Chinese food, for example, like the night before, I don't sleep that well.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

And it's. It's taken me years to figure that out. Whereas maybe something like that ring could have. Could have told me. So maybe more like an application specific type of ring.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

Where you enter in what you ate and then you get the data, you know, to see if there's any correlations.

[Nick Loper]

Some of those simple things. And maybe it's just like a reminder in the morning, like carpe diem. You know, it could be something simple, like a simple push notification, like, hey, today's the day. Go get it. You're not getting any younger. We had some guys on the show years ago, that was their app. I think it was called We Croak. And it was just like a daily death reminder. And you know, kind of like the, like the Memento Mori thing. It was like, hey, yeah, just, just a, you know, I don't know. 1:27pm hey, just, just a heads up, you're going to die someday. And like, well, shoot, I better go get after it.

[Steve Chu]

Nice. Nice. So this next idea is. I hope Tony doesn't get mad at me. But what was funny about this next idea is I got it from her during Seller Summit. So Seller Summit's the annual e commerce conference that I run. And hilariously, at the last event, she was actually helping some attendees optimize their dating profiles because there's these guys that they come to Seller Summit every year and they're still single. And they. It. We just struck up this conversation like, yeah, you know, how do I improve my dating efficiency? So Tony looked at their profile and they're like, oh, okay, you need to change this, this, this, this. Right?

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

So now with. With A whole bunch of these AI image tools and whatnot. And AI just in general, to help with the copy. You can easily put together a profile that at least gets your foot in the door, and then it's up to you to screw up the data or whatnot. But. So Tony was. Was doing these, helping people with their dating profiles for at least two or three people at the event. And I was like, tony business, her next side hustle. Exactly, exactly. And there's all these AI tools that can touch up your existing photos to make you look better from an existing photo that you upload, too.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. So, yeah, no, I had a friend who recently did an AI LinkedIn headshot kind of thing. He fed in a bunch of existing pictures, like, hey, this was a lot faster and cheaper than hiring a photographer.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, once people all start doing this, you're not going to be able to believe anyone's profile, but, you know, at least it gets you in the door, you know?

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. I mean, how many of these dating profiles are, you know, completely honest and truthful to begin with?

[Steve Chu]

That's true, that's true. But it's very easy to screw up one of these too, because certain people are looking for certain things. Right?

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. My brother's rule was, you know, anybody who had, you know, anything Seahawks related was like an automatic out. He's like, I do not care about football. Anybody who's like, you know, holding a beer was like, automatic out. He's like, is he sober? It's just, you know, it's kind of interesting. Like, everybody has their own different filters and criteria, where for somebody else it would have been like, hey, you know, you're drinking beer and watching football. It sounds like my kind of guy. My kind of person.

[Steve Chu]

Exactly, exactly. But the conference shows that a lot of people need help in this department, so there's clearly a demand for it.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I think that. I mean, that taps into some other trends, too, of people postponing a lot of major life decisions, getting married later in life, having kids later in life, the loneliness epidemic. This is a real thing. Help people find their partner. That taps into a big, big market.

[Steve Chu]

That is, until AI becomes that partner. But that's a topic for a different episode.

[Nick Loper]

That's another episode. Well, just aired recently was like, I interviewed my AI self. Like, Robo Nick just prompted ChatGPT to respond as me. And. And it did surprisingly well. It was like, hey, that's kind of the answer I would have given. And, you know, it only made up a few facts. Which were a little weird, but it did surprisingly well.

[Steve Chu]

I was like, are you publishing on your podcast? No, I haven't tried that yet. That sounds like a very interesting episode.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. I mean, because you've got, you know, this 10 year body of work out on the Internet too, where, you know, Ed absolutely could respond to.

[Steve Chu]

Steve, link that episode up. I want to listen to that one.

[Nick Loper]

All right, I'll send that one to.

[Steve Chu]

That sounds like a great idea, by the way. Yeah, love it.

[Nick Loper]

All right, what's. What's next? Is it my turn?

[Steve Chu]

It's your turn, but I got a couple more too.

[Nick Loper]

Okay. Next one for me is in the world of content creation. And I'm calling this, you know, I'm feeling lucky for podcast editing. And so what we've learned over 10, almost 12 years of podcast editing, it is at least as much about what you don't say as what you say. Like what you don't err. And so my job as the host is to cut the fluff, cut the stuff that doesn't add to the conversation. Or like, we went off this tangent. Didn't really, didn't really go anywhere. Or that question kind of landed with a dud, like, okay, fine. And so my job after recording has been to go through the transcript and find those little sections just to try and tighten that up. And maybe we'll record for an hour and try and find the best 50 minutes. And maybe there's a sliding scale on this. You know, I'm feeling lucky editor. I think this is going to rely on AI. You feed in the transcript, you feed in examples of past episodes that you really like. And my thought is this is going to make suggestions on where to trim the fat. What could you cut out of this? And not lose the overall message and takeaways, but just make it a tighter listening experience.

[Steve Chu]

I've been waiting for a tool like that as long as I've been podcasting. I think the closest thing that I've used for that is a tool called Opus Clip. Have you tried that tool?

[Nick Loper]

No, this is like the. We'll make AI shorts for you.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, it'll make shorts for you, but it actually does a reasonably good job of picking out, like something that you can just cut to the front, you know, to get that hook and the attention. Okay, but something like that. More along the lines of what you just described. I would definitely pay for a tool like that, no questions asked.

[Nick Loper]

Because it's like the time, that's the time consuming. This is where I love being a podcast guest. Where I just show up, and as soon as the recording is done, my work is over. But as the host, it's like, well, now I gotta review this whole transcript and figure this out and thankfully have an editing service to help perform those actual cuts. But if there was a. Even just a starting point, you know, maybe that's what it is. It's like, okay, we want to end. The sliding scale is like, you know, I want to. You know, how strict did you want it to be? Like, okay, it's only going to keep the best 15 minutes. I think that would be really, really hard. But if you're just, I want to trim 10%, you know, give me the bottom 10% of this episode, and maybe it will make suggestions on that.

[Steve Chu]

So all these ideas that I've given you are just ones that I've come up with as a result of things that have happened in my life. So as I mentioned before, my mom just moved in our neighborhood, and, you know, as you get older, you want to spend more time with your parents. Right. And what I've discovered just hanging out with my mom a lot more is that she has all these stories to tell that you don't know about that you probably wouldn't have asked when you were younger. Right.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

And so there was this service that we used a while back where the company basically just emails your mom or your parent a list of questions, and then they compile their answers in a book.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

For you. Right. But I was thinking of taking that one step further. So this is a book that sits on my shelf that I treasure now because it's all stories.

[Nick Loper]

But what service did you use for that?

[Steve Chu]

I forgot what it was called, but I can find out for your listeners if they want.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

The problem with that service, though, was, like, the parent or whatever has to do a lot of writing.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

It's actually quite burdensome for them, especially if English isn't their first language. So what I was doing, thinking about doing, was taking that one step further. All you have to do is come with the questions ahead of time, and then you just take a film crew and you just go interview that person. That way you have it on video. I think that would be much more valuable than the book. I love the book, don't get me wrong. But it was just kind of hard to. To. To make sure it got written in. Whereas with video, if you send a film crew there, you know, there's. There's no, you know, it's just off the cuff, and it's actually your parents Speaking. Which is a valuable keepsake for anyone to have.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah. And then they. They can turn it into like a documentary style.

[Steve Chu]

Yes.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

And maybe that could be an extra service. You turn into. You do the editing and you turn into a documentary.

[Nick Loper]

I think this would be really cool because you're exactly right. I looked into some of these, you know, parent story capture services, and you're exactly right. It's like, it really. It's not. I mean, it's a gift. That's what we were looking at for Christmas gifts. But it's like, this is just a lot of work. Like, all of a sudden everybody.

[Steve Chu]

It was a lot of work.

[Nick Loper]

All these questions and, you know, for what real benefit? Like, you already know these stories. It's just. This is more of a gift for us. But it was kind of really challenging and it kind of first came to mind with my grandpa on my dad's side. So listen to the hardcore history, like, 18 hour saga of World War II in the Pacific. And I know we served there, like, you know, Navy quartermaster or something in Northern Australia. That's like all I know. But it's like, what else, you know, what was your level of involvement here? Like, did you see combat? What was it like being shipped off at 20 years old across the world? Like, all that kind of stuff is gone now. And I think it's a really powerful one to potentially capture some of that for future generations.

[Steve Chu]

And this is instantly why I interviewed my mom for the podcast. It wasn't for my listeners, you know, it was. It was more so I could have her on the episode. So you could do the same thing just audio wise, too. Just over zoom. It'd be, you know, kind of informal. And if you're good at asking questions and getting extra information out, like me and you are, for example, we could turn this into a service.

[Nick Loper]

Right. This was on snl, like, where the son is interviewing the dad, and then they, you know, get super vulnerable. You know, just have these conversations because all of a sudden you put mics in front of their faces and then they turn to the camera and do like a squarespace ad read. And it's.

[Steve Chu]

I haven't seen that episode. I'll have to check it out.

[Nick Loper]

I think it was. It was a fun one. Okay, so that's kind of the end. End of life or approaching end of life. How do we capture some of these stories? You know, it's like the movie Coco, you know, and Ector is fading away, like, oh, he's being forgotten. Right. How do we. How do we remember the people who came before us. I think that's a really cool idea. And like that, you know, professional filmmaking. So, like, to rent out even freelance professionals to do this for a day, it's. It's not going to be cheap, but it's not going to be like, over the moon expensive. Yeah. The one I have is the opposite of that. Not end of life, but beginning of life. I'm going to call this the digital baby service. This is. We're going to secure your kid's domain name, we're going to claim their social media handles, we're going to register their Gmail account, and for this we're going to charge you, I don't know, 100 bucks a year. Like, you know, there's going to be a decent margin because basically the domain, all this stuff is free except for the domain, which maybe cost 10, 12 bucks a year to renew. But we're just going to secure this for you so you don't have to worry about it. And so when your kid becomes old enough that they care about this, you know, all of a sudden we have that lockdown for you. This is something that I did when the kids were born. We better go, you know, register their domain names just in case, you know, we wouldn't want anybody else to have that. So something that would probably be. There might be a market for that as a service.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah, actually, there's a lot of things that you could do, but, yeah, it would be a service where you just lock down the names for any relevant service that you might not be able to think about. Right. That you might not have necessarily thought of, besides the obvious ones. Yeah, so, yeah, I like that idea. I like that idea. Kind of along those same lines. My next idea is a little bit more. Well, it more caters to, like, the personalities of the younger folks these days. So I kind of got this idea after reading an article about how people are paying money to rent venues for social media. So, for example, a lot of these. These make money online. Guys literally rent a jet set. So it looks like you're on a private jet when you're really not.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

And I think that's just like a reflection of where society has been going. But you could profit from it by just creating a bunch of these sets, whether it be a private jet or a luxury hotel suite or a botanical garden or just something cool where it's literally just the set for. For Instagramming or doing lives from.

[Nick Loper]

Wow.

[Steve Chu]

And then just rent that time out to people. I might have a problem with this one. But I, I thought of it because people are paying for these services.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, I think there's, there's probably something to that. And yeah, you have a warehouse space where you have like four or five of these set up. And yeah, you have people come in. Oh, you, you're two hour block. You know, they come in, knock out a bunch of reels or not a bunch of videos, and you're set.

[Steve Chu]

And this is very pervasive in China, actually. So if you see like a TikTok video of a factory of someone like, you know, making stuff, chances are it's fake. Like, literally it's just like a table and just like the backdrop of it with this machine, like rotating the same products over and over again.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

So I've been just seeing a lot more of those, you know, debunked because, you know, people want to look like they're successful or doing these things. And it's maybe it's just like a sad reflection of where we're going. But, you know, there's a market there for renting out these services.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, this was speculation for, for years. Or certain influencers, like, oh, you know, they're standing in front of the rented Lamborghini. They don't really own that. Like, that's not really their life. It's like, I don't know, I guess maybe a certain demographic that appeals to. It's like, who cares?

[Steve Chu]

It's the younger folks because we're old and crotchety nowadays.

[Nick Loper]

Get off my law. No, but this is cool. And I do love me a rental business. We've talked about the photo booth business. We talked about renting mobility scooters. We had a guy renting out reusable moving boxes or plastic storage bins, basically. And so here's another example of something. Hey, build it once or build that set once and get paid for it over and over again.

[Steve Chu]

Yep.

[Nick Loper]

Cool.

[Steve Chu]

What do you got? You got a couple more?

[Nick Loper]

I've got, I think one more. And this is around a personal pain point of mine. And I'm, you know, curious to get, you know, your, your take on this. As a prolific YouTuber these days, what I struggle with is the scripting. Right. That's kind of the bottleneck for me. And we've got this huge body of content we've seen, you know, in my mind, like, people stating very obvious things like, hey, have you ever thought about this as a side hustle? Like, really, like, that is getting, you know, 100,000 views. Like, that's like the most basic idea ever but it's like, it's all in this scripting. And so some sort of video scripting service, or, you know, maybe it's an AI, or maybe it's a human, where it's like, just, just tell me what to record. Like do it in my voice, you know, load it up. I could fire up the teleprompter, or I could just do the voiceover and we'll, you know, lay over some other imagery. But just. That's like the big bottleneck in producing more video content for me.

[Steve Chu]

If you find such a service, I would sign up in a heartbeat. You're absolutely right. The scripting is where it's the most time consuming. I've got it down now where I can script something with the help of AI in about 90 minutes for a 10 minute video.

[Nick Loper]

Right, that's still, that's still 90 minutes though, like. Okay, but that's helpful here, that it's not. That it's not instant for you.

[Steve Chu]

Well, if you think about it this way, I used to spend a lot more time on a blog post. Yeah, I used to spend like three or four hours on a blog post. And what I like about YouTube scripting is it doesn't have to be grammatically correct, nor does it have to be, have to have the proper punctuation either. So that's why it's faster for me. But yes. I've tried so many things, Nick, training AI to talk like me. And we have enough body of work between the two of us now that it's pretty easy to do that. But I don't think it's, it's just hard to find that replacement. From what I've seen.

[Nick Loper]

What's a typical process for you going from something that you maybe have written about, it could be years ago, but it's still relevant to turn that into a video version because it's like there's different, there's a different formula. Right. You couldn't just read off the blog posts and have that be compelling.

[Steve Chu]

You know what's funny is that's how I started my YouTube channel. Yeah, I just read the posts and you're right, that doesn't work. Well, I can corroborate that. So which you can just feed it into ChatGPT or Claude. Yeah, and I have a prompt for this because I do less of this now, but I had a process for this where you give it a prompt and since we have enough work out that you can say in the voice of Nick Loper or Steve Chu and it comes out with Something that you can modify into a script, and then you also have to make changes to it. So it's not. It still takes time, but it makes things much faster. Because there's a whole big difference between SEO written blog than there is, you know, a compelling YouTube video.

[Nick Loper]

Well, speaking of YouTube, you're closing in on half a million subscribers over on the My wife quit her job channel. What kind of videos do you find? Do? Well, like, help me out on the YouTube. I'm gonna.

[Steve Chu]

I can. Yeah. Struggle. It's been a struggle, Nick. So I teach E commerce, and what I found is that if I just go and teach E commerce on that channel, it gets like, no views. Right. Because that's not what people want. Like the. The common folk does not want e commerce strategies, which is unfortunately my specialty. I mean, that's what I like creating content about. So the struggle is mixing that content, my teaching content with. With something that the mainstream viewer actually wants to see. So it's basically dumbing down the content. Maybe that's not the right word. Making it more appealing to the masses. That's the secret.

[Nick Loper]

Any videos that have done particularly well for you?

[Steve Chu]

I mean, I have a whole bunch of videos that have gotten over a million views that. That when I published them at the time, were topics that were in the news too. So recency helps too. What people are searching for and wanting to look about, you know, read about. And right now, if you think about it, I feel like the world is in chaos right now. At least the US Is in chaos. There's tons of topics that people are searching for right now.

[Nick Loper]

Any criteria you use, like a tubebuddy or Vidiq to.

[Steve Chu]

I use Vidiq.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah.

[Nick Loper]

To come up with, you know, what's the metric you're looking for? Like minimum search volume or minimum score there?

[Steve Chu]

I don't actually even look at search volume anymore. I mean, I do. I do. As a last step, I should say. I shouldn't say. I don't look at it all.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

But I'm just trying to create topics that I know I can do a good job writing a good hook for. And then keyword research is actually secondary. It didn't start out that way, but now that's how I do it.

[Nick Loper]

Okay.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah.

[Nick Loper]

Hook first.

[Steve Chu]

Okay, I got one more. That I got one more idea.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah, yeah, go ahead.

[Steve Chu]

For the audience. Before we go, this is something that, once again, I got from talking with my mom, because we hang out a lot more now. She lives right down the street. This is what I call, like, A forgotten skills online course series. So my mom, you know, back in the old days, she was telling about all these skills that she had to do from first principles. Like, there's a lot of things we take for granted now, right. That everything's machine made and whatnot. But back in the day, they did stuff by hand. And so we're talking about skills like Asian calligraphy, Morse code, how to read a map. Like, I don't know if I don't think my kids know how to read a map. Right. Because it's a skill that you don't need anymore because you have GPS and what now? Metal working. Old school photography, where you're developing photos with the chemicals and everything. Just, just a way to document and teach all those old school things and put them in one place.

[Nick Loper]

I mean, like, what's. What's the point of learning Morse code at this point? Like, you try to signal a. Said to send somebody a telegram.

[Steve Chu]

Well, so the idea is there's a bunch of people out there that, like, for me, as an example, who would want to just learn these things from first principles. Like, my personality is such that I don't like depending on services handling everything for you, because once something goes down, you're in trouble.

[Nick Loper]

Yeah.

[Steve Chu]

So I actually would like to learn these things from first principles. And I can't be the only one out there.

[Nick Loper]

Fair enough.

[Steve Chu]

Yeah.

[Nick Loper]

How to read a map. I'm on board with metalworking. Has, has not, you know, been relevant to my life ever since. Like metalworking merit.

[Steve Chu]

Well, these are just examples for me, right. Like Asian calligraphy. You know, artistic things that, you know, are, are not as big of a deal now, but they're still beautiful. And, you know, I think the art should be carried on to future generations.

[Nick Loper]

That sort of thing that's fair and even would be more relevant is just like fixing stuff around the house and not being like, powerless to just throw your hands up in the air. Well, I don't know what to do. And we had a light go out this weekend, and I do what I know how to do. Well, I'll replace the bulb. And then that didn't do it. And so then I'm like, hey, dad, what does it mean if you replace the bulb and the light still doesn't work? He's like, well, maybe your switch went bad. Okay, how do I test that? Well, we got to take it apart. You got to use this little multimeter thing, which he had, which we don't have. So he brought it over.

[Steve Chu]

And, you know, it's funny you say that? Look what I got right on my desk.

[Nick Loper]

Fancy. All right, that's all. Those are all the ideas that I've got. You got anything else?

[Steve Chu]

I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. We've covered a lot in this episode actually. Hope you enjoyed this episode. All of these side hustles are great ideas that you can start right now with very little money. For more information and resources go to my wife quitherjob.com Episode 579 Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellers summit.com if you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com and if you're interested in starting your own e commerce store, head on over to my wife quittherjob.com and sign up for my free 6 day mini course. Just type in your email and I'll send the course right away via email.