← The Side Hustle Show
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- [00:00]
Nick Loper
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- [01:08]
Welcome to round eight of Creative side Hustles that make real money. This is normally a Thanksgiving tradition on the show, but I've seen so many fun ideas come across my desk this year. We just couldn't wait. So. And to help out with this round is someone who's no stranger to the side hustle world. As the CEO of Flippa.com, the number one platform to buy and sell online businesses, he's had a front row seat to thousands of profitable side projects. Blake Hutchinson, welcome to the side Hustle show.
- [01:36]
Blake Hutchinson
Hey, Nick, thank you for having me on. This is going to be fun.
- [01:38]
Nick Loper
I am excited to dive right in. In fact, the first example here, the first side hustle profitable side hustle that I found that checked that creative box was a teenage entrepreneur 17 year old student selling 3D printed croc charms. This is Michael Satterley of New York. His business is called Soulfully on Track to do $300,000 in revenue. And we have a beginner's 3D printer downstairs that my wife and the kids have been playing around with. And if I know anything about the cost of filament, the margins on these little croc charms have got to be really, really strong because it costs Very little to print this stuff.
- [02:15]
Blake Hutchinson
Oh, wow. There we go. Yeah, we're literally talking about the croc shoes. And he's turned croc shoes into a charm.
- [02:22]
Nick Loper
Yeah. So he's added wheels, he's added a little V6 engine to the top of the croc in this case. Yeah. So we bring out his website. Really creative kind of stuff. A tractor was this like an excavator type of handle, a tractor tread going on underneath. So some creative designs that I'm trying to get my kids into printing stuff like this. I think there could be some demand for it. Now. I don't know if he's selling. Did it start out just selling these to classmates? Like, look at these creepy toes. Fake toe charms. 10 bucks for these. Yeah, that's pretty gnarly.
- [02:53]
Blake Hutchinson
So cool. And as you said, the margin must be high because the actual price points are relatively low. He's got one pack for $9.99 there and a two pack for $16. So the fact that he's doing them for a relatively low cost must mean that he can clearly print and fulfill for relatively low cost as well. As you said, probably quite high margin.
- [03:16]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Estimating cost of material here, probably 25 cents, you know, so he's got some good margins there. Obviously selling through this store. I wonder if he's selling on Etsy as well. I don't know if this article says anything about that. TikTok shop and Instagram have been everything. So he's the kind of product that has some natural virality built into it where people say, hey, I gotta get that impulse buy type of price point and go into town on social media.
- [03:40]
Blake Hutchinson
He's clearly a very creative guy because he's got a really large number of designs. Actually he's selling through TikTok and no doubt other social communities. He certainly has a lot of reviews, so 390 reviews, of which the vast majority are five star. So clearly doing a good job. See what the size of his Instagram following is. Yeah, he's got 109,000 followers, which is actually, well, very impressive.
- [04:06]
Nick Loper
Yeah, he's done well over there. These are relatively simple designs. A 3D printer, you know, might cost 3, $400, maybe 500 if you have a higher end one capable of doing multi colors, something like this. So somebody else could easily come up with their own designs and create something very similar here. So that was the first one that I came across for this list.
- [04:28]
Blake Hutchinson
Very cool. $20,000 a month.
- [04:30]
Nick Loper
All right. Anything that you found?
- [04:31]
Blake Hutchinson
The first one that I've got here is an Amazon Kindle publishing business. So first and foremost let's just talk about what Amazon Kindle Publishing is. So within the Amazon ecosystem you can publish digital books and those digital books can be downloaded to a Kindle. And so that's Kindle Publishing. And Kindle Publishing is like the rest of the Amazon ecosystem, it's a marketplace. So these are independent publishers. They pick a subject matter, they produce the content and then they publish to the Kindle publisher publishing store and as a result of that end up making revenues from when they sell via the Amazon marketplace. So the one I found is basically a Kindle Publishing set of books about the outdoors and RVs and national parks and anything outdoors. It's been around for just over a year and it's, it's actually making $4,000 a month in profit. So that's pretty good because the price of the, the price of the goods and this is coincidental but the price of the goods is, is just short of 10 do similar to the Crocs accessories business that you just had a look at there. But I think what's really cool about this is that Amazon Kindle Publishing is quite accessible and so if you've got a passion for something, you can publish a book and then you work the Amazon ecosystem much like you would a search engine. So you optimize your titles, you optimize your content, you choose your price points and you try to win over the customer base searching through the, the Kindle publishing ecosystem. So in this particular case it's 12 titles. So they didn't just produce one title, it's 12 titles and said outdoor adventures, nature guides, travel books.
- [06:12]
Nick Loper
Is he writing this stuff himself? Hiring ghostwriters using AI. What do you think?
- [06:16]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, let's have a look on all copyright certificates written originally. So yeah, looks like he or she has written them himself. Could be that they've got a passion for this particular subject matter or industry could be that they have edited themselves but actually got other people to write it for them. I must Admit I'm not 100% sure on that.
- [06:35]
Nick Loper
Well, to crank out 12 books in a year is like that's some heads down effort and maybe, maybe there was an existing body of content to pull from and maybe there was some AI assistance.
- [06:44]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, yeah, that's right. I mean, you know, I think the thing is probably 1 subject matter, 2 business model and then yeah, you can figure out whether you can write the content yourself or get somebody else to write it with you. And as you said, complemented by AI so long as people continue to buy it, then it doesn't really matter whether it's written with AI, so long as you probably disclose that and so long as the readership actually continues to buy it.
- [07:05]
Nick Loper
Yeah, and it's something somewhat of a timely or timeless topic. People are probably going to want the 25, 2026 travel guide travel edition. And so maybe there's some level of refreshing and republishing that has to happen here. But it's a topic, it's a subject matter that can have a long shelf life. I was listening to this interview with Robert Green. He's like, well, 48 laws of power came out 25 years ago and it still sells. It's in Atomic Habits. Another example, even though it launched four or five years ago, maybe even longer, like it still sells, it still sits on top of the chart. So there's something to self publishing or publishing in general, where a book can have a really long shelf life. One issue that you alluded to is, well, it's accessible to everyone. It's like it's good and bad. It's just like it really floods the marketplace. It crowds the marketplace with a bunch of maybe less than optimal content over long periods of time. The cream rises to the top. But it's hard to get noticed if there's a lot of other books on the same topic.
- [07:59]
Blake Hutchinson
And that's an important point about a KDP business. In fact, probably any business really. But you've got to establish credibility. Although once you do, Nick, I'm sure you and I would both agree that it's hard to get unseated. So in this particular case, it looks like he's got 66 reviews all around the sort of four and a half to five star mark. And you know, as we spoke about this is mostly evergreen content because the national parks don't change that much. So as I said, the definitive RV camping guide to all 63 US national parks is found a niche, which is a big niche and there's no doubt a large community of people that are consistently looking for this type of content.
- [08:39]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I like self publishing as a side hustle. It's, you know, one of my longest running side hustles started in 2012 and the thrill of the first Amazon royalty direct deposit of like $42 or something in my case. But it was like, I'm a professional author, somebody bought my book, like it was really cool. And then I've added to the portfolio over that time. That's almost where I see people doing the best. If you if you hit the lottery and you, you find that title, that, that sticks and continually sells. That's the dream, right? If it can generate that $4,000 a month through this portfolio of 10 or 12 titles, awesome. What I've seen more often is kind of this natural decay, this natural decline, this fall off and it's like, well, I got to keep writing another title. Or it's at the top of the funnel into my broader business and maybe they offer rv, maybe there's some affiliate play, maybe they offer some relationships with the campgrounds or I don't know if the national park has some kind of referral program or how that might even work. But like maybe it's a front end or it's a top of the funnel to a broader based business. But no, I absolutely love tapping into the power of Amazon as a discovery engine.
- [09:41]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, I think you're touching on a few things. So if you're looking to start a side hustle, tapping into an existing platform that has a large community is a really good way to fast track access to a customer base. And often that's the hardest thing. You and I could both come up with a few concepts, but actually winning over a community, much like your Crocs accessories fellow from before, it's difficult to build that community actually. He's clearly a very creative and clever guy. Being able to build a community of that size, if you don't think you can do that. Tapping into an existing ecosystem. So there's the Amazon ecosystem, there's the Etsy ecosystem. You know, if you're looking at something that is on the, in the content space like a newsletter, there's the substack ecosystem where people are actually searching for newsletters around particular subject matter. So tapping into something to win over an audience is a good way to go.
- [10:30]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What the Crocs guy did a good job of was kind of creating that demand, which I think is a lot harder than filling demand on particular platforms and search engines. People are already searching for this thing. I can optimize my product to get in front of those people instead of did anybody wake up in the morning saying like I really need a tank themed croc charm excavator thing that hooks off my toes? Probably not, but once they see it, they're in for it. The next one I have, this is an older example, this is from probably 2023 and it's called the userisdrunk.com and I'm not sure if this service is still active, but it is Thousand dollar drunk website audits the idea here is your website should be so simple a drunk person should be able to use it. And I think he has a sister site called like the user is your mom or something where he gets his mom. I don't think he gets his mom drunk, but he gets his mom to like try and audit the website and figure out what am I supposed to do on this page? Like the user navigation flow. So I want to say it was a thousand dollars, but this kind of had a viral moment 10, 12 years ago. And so I'm not sure if he's still active on it. And there's like a disclaimer about like, yeah, how healthy is this for you? How many of these can you legitimately do in an evening before it gets to be too much? But kind of a creative positioning because I was, I was actually selling these, you know, five minute website audits on Fiverr back in the day, probably around the time that this, that this came out. And you know, here I was charging, you know, at a, at a minimum $5. And he's got much higher pricing power because of this kind of unique positioning and kind of this viral marketing moment. And so maybe that's the takeaway is like, what is a service that already exists that I could put a unique spin on? And not saying you should resort to alcohol to put for that unique sp. It was a creative example of doing that.
- [12:18]
Blake Hutchinson
Plus, you know, it's a legitimately valuable service. Other than the fact that he claims to be getting very drunk before he looks at your website. Getting someone to actually review your site from a usability standpoint is something that more site and business owners should actually be doing.
- [12:34]
Nick Loper
Yeah, totally. So valuable service. Oh yeah, here it is. Userismymom.com so a couple, couple of different ones on there. What we've done in the past is like, if you're looking for different services, you could just go onto Fiverr, you can go onto Upwork and just like scroll through. There's like hundreds and hundreds of categories. So if I hit like talent marketplace. Oh, see, all specializations. Yeah. And you can pop open each one of these and it's like there's dozens under each one. So it's a brainstorming tool to be like, well, shoot, I could do that. And then maybe you pair that well. What's a unique spin or what's a unique target demographic that I could offer that service to?
- [13:14]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, I think this is an important point because side hustle is side income. So if you're listening in, you're a bookkeeper and you're working for someone as a bookkeeper, you could, in theory, as Nick just said, list yourself as a bookkeeping specialist on upwork or fiverr, and no doubt earn some side income. Similarly, if you're a copywriter at a digital agency, you can list yourself on a marketplace like this and actually earn side income. So it's important to tap into the skill set you already have.
- [13:42]
Nick Loper
Yeah, drunk bookkeeping. Probably not the one that people want to sign up for, but maybe pivot that one to do a different. You know, I do bookkeeping for Amazon sellers, for KDP author, you know, for something, you know, some specific user. All right, that was number three for me. What's next for you?
- [13:58]
More creative side hustles with Blake in just a moment, including faceless YouTube channels.
- [14:03]
The profitable Claw Machine player, and more right after this.
- [14:07]
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- [16:18]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, so YouTube channels I think important piece again to think about this from a platform standpoint. So YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world. And so as a result of that, you've got a very large user base searching for content across absolutely everything from news and politics to sport and travel. And as a result of that, it has spawned a massive creator ecosystem. And if you are able to produce content, obviously either shooting content and or yourself, much like Nick and I are doing here, talking about subject matter, you can find that in short order you can amass a community of followers followers and then start to earn income from the YouTube ad engine. So the one that I wanted to show here today is called Latest Hoops and I'm sure you can probably all guess what that's going to be about. But Latest hoops is a YouTube channel here which is all about basketball. Claims to be the best basketball channel on YouTube. You can see here the ultimate hub for all things NBA and wnba. Stay ahead with the latest possible news, exclusive possibilities, et cetera. And basically what they are then doing is producing and pulling together content about either. In this particular case they've pulled together some content from NBA Legends. In this particular case they've got Michael Jordan versus Larry Bird. They've talked about NBA players, careers that have been destroyed by girlfriends. NBA players react to their NBA 2K22 ratings. So it's all sorts of content that he's curated. It's not original content. He's cut it to fit within a particular topic. And so you can do that, do that as well for something that you're particularly passionate about. Now the critical thing in here is what he's trying to do is drive video views. So you can see here the NBA legends one 8.6 million views. So you're talking about serious scale here, published three years ago. And as a result of that, he'll be earning ad income. So it's a really, really Fast growing asset class, for want of a better description. We actually see a lot of these now exiting on Flippa Nick. So it's, it's something which not only is lucrative to build, but then lucrative to exit as well.
- [18:34]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it looks like this is a faceless channel where it's just pulling in existing clips, existing content, repackaging them in, in a unique way and trying to hit that viral wave.
- [18:43]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, totally. And you know, he, it's important that people understand you have from something small, even the stuff that this, this individual, he or she is posting. It's not like he's getting amassing, amazing view counts on his new stuff. So it's not like it, it instantly goes viral. He has to work on the content and figure out the algorithms over time and then resurface it and advertise it through his other videos too. So his first, his most recent video here three weeks ago, it's only got 327 views. Some of his more popular, popular videos have got 2 and 3 million views. So you've got to work at that algorithm.
- [19:17]
Nick Loper
Totally. One strategy that we've seen is looking at what videos have done well for other similar creators and trying to create something tighter, better, funnier, you know, fill in the blank. But trying to look, instead of coming up with something completely on my own, like the algorithm's already spoken, this was a hit. Like let's, let's try and tap into that and maybe even draft or ride the coattails off of that existing content. So I pulled up Social Blade as an estimator for latest hoops and says it could be earning up to $40,000 a year in ad revenue from that type of content. We've done a couple episodes on faceless YouTube channels and what's kind of interesting now is we did one and then we did an update like a year later, peak AI wave. And it's like script writing is AI pulling in video editing is click idea generation. You've got to seed it. But that's AI it was like thumbnail design AI. It was kind of really interesting to see like pretty low overhead type of business. Now of course, like the Kindle Publishing example, low overhead equals lots of competition. So you think, well, what's the secret sauce that I'm bringing to the table? Particular passion about basketball, particular insider secret. Like, you know, can I do this game better than everybody else who's trying to do this game? And I think that's how you're going to win.
- [20:34]
Blake Hutchinson
And it's a really important point because side hustle doesn't mean no work or passive income. You've got to continually produce this content. Now, as you said, it's faceless. He's just taking clips and editing and cutting them. But you've got to know how to edit and cut.
- [20:50]
Nick Loper
Absolutely. All right, next one up for me is a headline that I found. It was called, I made $40,000 selling plush dolls that I get out of claw machines, which the skill tester first. Yes. So this guy apparently became very adept at winning claw machines and how. Here's how I turned this into a profitable hobby. Now, the first thing that comes to mind is, like, if you're going to resell these things anyway, like, you could probably get them on Alibaba, or you could probably get them somewhere else from some wholesaler, like, for about what you're paying in claw machine. So without. Without having to go spend hours at the arcade thing, he's like, okay, I sell average $20 in sales per day, and it costs me three to seven dollars per win. So if I sell that for 25 is significant. I'm not debating the ROI. I'm saying there might be a simpler inventory acquisition method.
- [21:44]
Blake Hutchinson
I think this is hilarious. My average arcade session costs between $150 to $200. So you'd have to know that you're very good at the game. And clearly he does. He's probably spent a lot.
- [21:54]
Nick Loper
Yeah.
- [21:55]
Blake Hutchinson
To get to this point. But as you say, Nick, there's probably easier ways to get access to their plush toys. However, it could be that the reason he's selling them and having the success selling them is the story behind how he gets.
- [22:07]
Nick Loper
Sure. Yeah, maybe so. Or, yeah. If it's like a unique collector's item type of thing, you could only win it in a claw machine. And I happen to be very good at that. Yes. I spend 150 to $200 in a session, and it takes sometimes hours. I don't know. It sounds like it's time consuming, but I can walk away with $300 to $500 in resale value. So, yes, this pencils out to be a profitable gig. And maybe this was your hobby. Maybe you learned this skill and you really enjoy the thrill of doing it and beating the system here.
- [22:40]
Blake Hutchinson
So good. So good. These people are so creative in their ability to make money.
- [22:45]
Nick Loper
Yeah. I love a bringing down the house, beating the casino type of story. I feel like these claw machines are rigged against you. So I do like how he's getting one up on the arcades. All right, what else have you got.
- [22:57]
Blake Hutchinson
So the next one I've got is just the newsletter ecosystem is alive and well. So this one's called Remote Work Opportunities and it's a beehive newsletter. So Beehive is a platform that enables you to publish. It's like Substack. And both Substack and Beehive make publishing newsletters very, very simple. So you don't need to know how to use a CRM or anything like that. You basically create a post and then you'll, it'll allow you to set up a subscription form, ie, what is your email address. And then people subscribe and you can either charge them and they have an inbuilt merchant layer, or you can make it free and then earn added income so long as you get a massive following. And this is a classic case of do something that you, you know and do something that you are passionate about. In this particular example, I found a newsletter which is just about remote work opportunities. Now clearly remote work right now is very much flavor du jour. It's a big industry. People want to work from different parts of the world, different parts of the country, depending on where you. And this particular newsletter is all about remote jobs and tips to help you hustle remotely and grow your career.
- [24:11]
Nick Loper
Okay.
- [24:12]
Blake Hutchinson
And so it's set up on beat. He's publishing well, maybe two or three times a month. And so, you know, find work, use microtransitions to save you from burnout. This one is fine. Works at the MUM Project. Knowing the value of friction mapping. Discover remote friendly jobs on the MUM Project. And also there are lots of services now that you can curate together to publish this content and actually appeal to a large audience that's looking for one distinct place where they can go and find out about this stuff. So I found this quite interesting. Now he's making money from ad revenue and so it's a combination of ad revenue plus affiliate revenue. So when he, when people click off to one of these job sites to get the job, he'll be making money from those affiliate clicks when they convert into leads and or enter actual job applications. So clever and right within the sphere of the remote work industry, which is very big right now.
- [25:06]
Nick Loper
Are you seeing any newsletters like this one sell through the Flippa platform?
- [25:11]
Blake Hutchinson
Yes, I think publishing generally speaking is still very attractive. You and I are very familiar with the blog and the blogger environment and blogs are a little bit on the nose just as a function of, of not quite knowing how the Google search, the SEO realm is going to work. Not necessarily Trusting the ad revenue streams that have historically been so promising and evergreen. So between YouTube channels, KDP and newsletters, they are three fast growing categories generally in the world, but also for Flippa. So short answer is yes, we probably trade maybe 15 to 20 newsletters a month, selling for between 10,000 and maybe up to half a million dollars. And it all comes down to the size of the community and the engagement level of the readership.
- [26:00]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that makes sense. And it's something that here is branded as remote work opportunity and not, you know, Blake's remote work Newsletter or something. It's like, it's not personally branded, so there's opportunity. The challenge is the writing team, you know, whoever's putting this together. Like, how hands off. Is it really for the owner or did I just buy myself a job? Especially if it's like a daily or weekly recurring newsletter. I gotta recreate the product every time I wanna hit send.
- [26:28]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, that's right. And I think in this particular case, he will be using a network of writers that he's probably amassing. My guess is from Fiverr or Upwork, just as you were browsing around before. So he's got a concept, he's probably got a standard operating process or procedure. And he then farms that SOP out to various writers and has them produce the content. In his particular case, I mean, this is the perfect side Hustler. He basically introduces himself and says, I love launching online projects and building passive income streams. I'm stretched a bit thin at the moment with all of the projects I'm doing, so I'm selling a few of my different newsletters. So he's got a business newsletter, he's got a local media newsletter. He's got this remote jobs newsletter. And that's his thing. That's what he knows.
- [27:11]
Nick Loper
Yeah. If you can figure out how to acquire a subscriber base and do it profitably. We did an episode on a local newsletter where it ended up when we recorded almost half the town, population wise, was subscribed to this guy's newsletter. It's like, on the one hand, like, that's pretty cool penetration. On the other hand, it's like, well, there's a natural ceiling of how big this thing could be. But he was like, I have five spots per send. I can send five a week. And it's like, like, you know, he kind of had hit that magic, you know, $1 per subscriber per month metric. And it was, you know, really, you know, pretty profitable business. It's like, yeah, there's. There's something to this and there as a reader, super valuable to land in my inbox if you're going to do the work of curating everything for me and summarizing just what I need to know. Like, good for you. I think that's really, really cool.
- [27:59]
Blake Hutchinson
I mean, the whole daily newsletter thing for a local city, a Geo has been well trodden. Back in 2000, there was a business started called Daily Candy was a daily newsletter that provided readers with information about hip and trendy events in their city. Now, it started in New York City and it was a loan. It was New York City only for a very, very long time and obviously good city to builder what's new and what's upcoming content around because there's so much happening and you're New York City. But it eventually expanded to over 12 US cities and then sold to Comcast for 125 million. And they ultimately ended up shutting. That was 2008, though. Ultimately ended up shutting down in 2014. But the point about local following is, the great thing about it is when you hit that ceiling, you can expand to another geo. And so this person can do that. And that's the thing I tend to like about local content. It's kind of infinitely scalable in that regard.
- [28:59]
Nick Loper
For yeah, there's the next town over, the next city over. There's a big opportunity to kind of fill the void left by local news reporting, local newspapers on the decline. Like, it's. You could be the thing. And what was interesting, and this might appeal to a certain personality type is like, he would roll in and people would be like, you're the Instagram guy to you show up to these local networking parties and stuff. Oh, because he had a decent Instagram following and he's like, that's the social proof side. The Instagram account makes no money, right? But people see it and they're hey, 30,000 followers. This guy must be legit. It's like, no, no, no. The newsletter is where it's at. The newsletter is what makes all the money. But if you want to be that person, become kind of the voice for your local community, a really powerful place to play. Now, what I was thinking about and what I would like to build is I think there's going to be a way to build kind of an AI listening agent and give it 150, 200 different sources to pay attention to, to come up with lists like this one. What are the coolest side hustles out there that people are talking about this week? You can. Could you know, I gotta believe that I could build a tool to do that. And maybe that fuels podcast content, maybe that fuels newsletter content, but that's where I would like to go with this one.
- [30:11]
Blake Hutchinson
Well, maybe it's a learning tool. Actually, Nick, that's a really cool idea. People could subscribe to that and it's just this ongoing feed of the best side hustle ideas and how those people make money. That's a very cool concept. I actually think people would like that.
- [30:24]
Nick Loper
All right, well, yeah, you heard it here first. Don't steal it before I get to it. It might be a minute.
- [30:29]
More creative side hustles with Blake in just a moment, including a few unique e commerce ideas, a $50,000 a month.
- [30:36]
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- [32:49]
All right, next one on my list is skin colored socks. This is another E commerce example on track to hit seven figures next year. Although that's, that's a lot of projecting out into the future. Who knows what the future holds. But this is a business that's been going for quite a while. But a younger entrepreneur who wanted some skin toned colored socks called nudesocks.com socks with an X. So really creative e commerce business example of solving a personal pain point.
- [33:19]
Blake Hutchinson
I absolutely love it. The thing about E commerce is so long as you've got something creative and a story behind how you came up with it. Looks like they were on Shark Tank. Is that correct?
- [33:30]
Nick Loper
I think she was inspired by watching Shark Tank.
- [33:33]
Blake Hutchinson
Got it started the brand with $10,000. You know, key point there, you can start these things with relatively small amounts of money.
- [33:41]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I started at 18 years old, no outside funding and just kind of slowly leveling up. It sounds like year after year. And this is typical of a lot of E commerce brands where it's once I have product market fit and I sell through that initial order, that initial inventory, I gotta plow it all back in to more. I gotta hit. I know I gotta replenish, I gotta restock, I gotta add more SKUs. And it could be a while before you really draw a salary or take any money off the table, but you can kind of plow that forward and build the equity value of the business too.
- [34:13]
Blake Hutchinson
Also unlikely to get disrupted fast though, too. Right. It's not like AI is going to suddenly take market share away from the nude socks niche.
- [34:23]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Oh, we launched a partnership with QVC this year. Sold 500 socks. 500 pairs of socks per minute. Okay. So I imagine and QVC gets pitched by a lot of product creators, but you know, she cut through the clutter and sold some talks on tv.
- [34:39]
Blake Hutchinson
That's awesome. Love it. And of course, you know, E commerce, once you've got an established base of customers, once you've figured out the logistics and the inventory side of it, you can expand into new ranges and start to tap into the existing community. And then of course, you know, I should say, sorry, the blatant plug. But there's a lot of buyers who are looking to acquire E commerce businesses that have found some sense of scale.
- [35:04]
Nick Loper
Yeah, well I feel like the Amazon roll up business has kind of come and gone but you still see some demand on the buy side for more diversified ecom shops.
- [35:13]
Blake Hutchinson
Absolutely. It's still the number one most searched for asset type on Flippa is E Commerce and specifically direct to consumer Shopify.
- [35:22]
Nick Loper
What do you think is driving that? That's interesting.
- [35:24]
Blake Hutchinson
So we've met a lot of SaaS founders recently who are moving into E Com. We've met a lot of online publishers moving into E Comm. I think that the interesting thing about SaaS right now is people are a little bit worried about how easy it is to spin up SaaS tooling using AI and so differentiation is going to be harder and a lot of the existing SaaS businesses are getting disrupted. Content's difficult because clearly the content itself can get disrupted by AI. The Google landscape is shifting fast. E Com feels like it's untouched by AI right now. You can use AI to optimize your workflows but as it relates to what you sell and people's demand for it, that's not shifting and that's not declining at the same pace as we're seeing other business models get hit and or decline. So I think it's weirdly the most defensible small business business model right now.
- [36:20]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Physical goods changing hands, unlikely to be. Yeah, until you can 3D print those nude socks at home, you gotta, you gotta buy them from somebody, you gotta.
- [36:29]
Blake Hutchinson
Buy them from somewhere and we still all need to wear socks.
- [36:32]
Nick Loper
There you go. So it's interesting to hear that of all the ones. Yeah, like a little bit gun shy around software right now. It's like people could recreate some of these tools on their own but if you have an E commerce store with you know, proven consistent sales, I imagine if it's a subscription E Comm like even better is it's like okay, what is the, you know, what's the sales cycle here? How are people discovering this? You know, what's the ad spend, you know, what's, you know, all of these different, different metrics that people are going to look into. But let somebody else take that risk of the initial inventory, the product market fit like the, you know, let them do all the hard part and you're like, okay, it's already selling now or it's already, it's already proven out and I can come in as an investor and maybe you have some next Level, you know, marketing and operations chops that you can apply to it.
- [37:19]
Blake Hutchinson
Speaking of next level marketing, I've got one more example of a really cool side hustle if you'll. If I've got time.
- [37:25]
Nick Loper
Okay, do it.
- [37:26]
Blake Hutchinson
So this one is called Geometry Spot. And the thing about Geometry Spot is the clever world from which this has been built around. So hopefully you can see my screen here. But this says the in inside the chaotic world of kids trying to play video games on their school laptops. And basically it goes on to talk about Geometry Spot. Now Geometry Spot is a simple looking website. It says here, as you would expect, that it's all about geometry. Exploring the geometry of circles, tangents, introduction to trigonometry. Now of course what is interesting about this Nick is see this little button on the right hand side, it says activities. When I click it this becomes a games portal. And so kids in school and or at home are pretending to do homework and or work on their geometry and clicking the activities button and ultimately playing Roblox or any of the other games that are here. Now what is phenomenal about this is just the, the scale at which this business is operating. So this particular business has just short of 5 million page views a month. It is making $50,000 monthly clear on ad revenue. And he has most of the kids across most of the high schools in the US using his site at some point in time in any given year or month. So 110 million page views across his websites, quite a big social following and huge explosive revenue growth. 261% revenue growth in the past six months as more and more kids across high schools in the US have flocked to his sites, which of which one of them is Geometry Spot.
- [39:20]
Nick Loper
So it's like a fake site that looks like I'm learning geometry and I guess I can hit a quick button real quick if the teacher's looking over my shoulder and it would go back to that screen.
- [39:30]
Blake Hutchinson
That's exactly right.
- [39:32]
Nick Loper
There was something, it was called like emergency button or boss button or something. And it was, it was just like it would bring up a spreadsheet, like a complicated looking spreadsheet, like for somebody walk by. I guess this is the high school equivalent of that back in the day.
- [39:44]
Blake Hutchinson
I can't remember what it was. I think I'm going to say 2005 or 6. So a long time ago, 20 years ago. And Expedia had this kind of Excel button on the top right hand side. So you'd be planning your travel at work. And if you need press this Excel spreadsheet formula thing and you'd press it and would suddenly bring up like an Excel template with a complex set of formulas and a bunch of data inputs. Anyway, very cool concept. He's a 16 year old kid, he's a new just outside New York City, somewhere in New York. And I met him once, he came along to a dinner with his father. Really creative guy, makes a ton of money and is pretty happy earning a side income. Albeit he's not the teacher's pet, that's for sure.
- [40:27]
Nick Loper
Did he mention how he got the initial traction to generate that kind of traffic?
- [40:32]
Blake Hutchinson
I think that this is virality at its best because when I look at his Google Analytics here, which I can see on Flippa, it's all organic search. So if I Look at this, he's 73% of his traffic is organic search, 25% of it is direct and most of it 95% of it is usually.
- [40:52]
Nick Loper
Do you think people are looking at how to learn geometry or people are looking for like games portal or something?
- [40:56]
Blake Hutchinson
I think games portal and so I think what's happening here, in fact I've got his keywords, I'll tell you what his keywords are. Top organic keywords is his brand keyword geometry spot. The other keywords that he's ranking for are yeah, games and games shop and things like that. So he's winning the search game. But I think if I go back to the Vice article it's talks. So he's 16 year old, Jerry is his name and it was a function of building a YouTube channel. And one of the comments said why don't you add games to it that we can all play while we're in school. And from there he's added the games link and it's gone viral. It started to get spread throughout the high schools of the US Interesting. He says here I was in class and some kid was on my website, I'm like, oh my God, you're on geometry spot. And my geometry teacher looked up and he says I made that one. And my geometry teacher said so you write stuff about geometry? And he said no, it's a gaming website. And she started laughing.
- [41:58]
Nick Loper
And that's so funny. Our kids play this game called Geometry Dash. And I was like, hey, it sounds like a math game, knock yourself out. And it's like, has nothing to do with geometry. So maybe there's some overlap there. I mean it's hard to bank on virality but, but you build something useful, you tell a good story around it. And I like this part about listening to the audience, hey, I pivoted. I started with something else and then it turned into this other thing that turned out to have a much bigger audience than I initially thought.
- [42:26]
Blake Hutchinson
Yep, very cool. You know what, all these ideas that we've spoken about, Nick, you could actually, if you're listening out there, take this recording and throw all the ideas into GPT or Claude. And so what are the other ideas that are similar to these ideas? And you'll get this big long list of. Of potential side hustles.
- [42:43]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I love using that as a brainstorming tool right now. A couple more for me before we wrap. This one is a subscription box for members of the ministry. It's called Consecrate. Consecrate box. And it is doing. She says she's got around 500 subscribers and if we look at the website pricing, I think it was around $48 a month. Okay. Oh gosh. Three month subscription for $68. So some experimentation around the PR. She's curating different items that would appeal to members of the clergy, members of the ministry, and using that as their subscription box niche. So if it's around, what's that, 20, $30 a month somewhere in there, it's probably a $200,000 a year business based on that. Now there's cost of goods, there's shipping, there's other stuff involved, but top line revenue sounds like a little side project for.
- [43:37]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, very cool. And this subscription commerce industry gained some momentum, particularly during COVID And there's an entire platform dedicated to all of these called cratejoy.com and cratejoy.com is basically a platform, but then ultimately a curation of all of the different subscription boxes similar to this one. So it's a very cool industry. And if you find a passion then to curate the stuff that people like you like opens up a real opportunity.
- [44:05]
Nick Loper
I think she mentions Chris Gillebeau's side Hustle school and there was a subscription box for military wives. And she says, shoot, I could do something similar. I could pivot that to the industry that I know or the community that I know so we can shout out side hustle school Chris there and inspiring people to take action. All right, and then the last one that I've got is a mobile sauna kind of rental service. So this is Bywater Sauna. This is something that my brother told me about out at the beach north of Seattle where it's this really cool, trendy, looking, kind of like log shaped box. Let's see if I can find their Instagram, but we're gonna sell 60 minute sauna sessions. And the idea is like you don't sit in there for the whole time, but the idea is, you know, you go between the Puget Sound and the cold salt water and then you run back in to the sauna. You kind of like do this hot, cold cycling. And they charge 35 to $40 for this hour long session. And as you can kind of see, it's big enough to accommodate several different users at once and seems to be doing pretty well actually. This one started with a, with a Kickstarter campaign. So they ra 25 grand through Kickstarter to get the initial funding for this, for this mobile sauna.
- [45:17]
Blake Hutchinson
That's cool. So just explain it to me. So basically these are fixed locations or goes around different parts.
- [45:25]
Nick Loper
It sounds like this one is parked but could be, you know, towed behind a trailer. It sounds like. Now when I was doing a little bit of research, it looks like you can find mobile saunas, you know, designed smaller versions for around 15, $20,000. And maybe you could partner with the yoga studio, with the gym, with the wellness center, with other, you know, parks at the local lake or river, you know, you know, hangout spots or Airbnb hosts or you know, people who have ski cabins or something. And like, hey, we could set this up as a value add to the people who are coming by anyways and maybe you do it as a pop up event or maybe you do it. Would you pre sell, pre book different things to minimize your risk. But this is definitely a trendy one that we've seen some, some buzz about.
- [46:19]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, and it's currently looks to be in three locations.
- [46:22]
Nick Loper
Oh yeah. So it, so it is mobile. So he's moving around to different beaches.
- [46:25]
Blake Hutchinson
In Seattle and so presumably, you know, he's got large capex startup costs, he's going to acquire the saunas and then he's got a, well, he or she's got to find the locations and then you know, find enough people who want to use it regularly enough to want to buy the monthly subscription or membership. But this is super interesting and it's tapping into a very, very fast growth industry. Hot cold treatment industry is really, really attractive right now and he's clearly tapping into that.
- [46:54]
Nick Loper
Yeah, absolutely. There was, you know, some data around longevity. We're going to shock your cells into recovery mode by you know, cold treatment and ice baths and you know, on the sauna side. So kind of taps into some of that trending topic again. Another shovels in the gold rush type of Example with a little bit more startup cost than some of these other ones that we're looking at. But potential upside, potential sellable down the road.
- [47:20]
Blake Hutchinson
Yeah, I mean it's really about just finding either something you're really passionate about or finding a gap in the market, isn't it?
- [47:26]
Nick Loper
Well, Blake, this has been a ton of fun. It's new in the life. What's got you excited these days?
- [47:30]
Blake Hutchinson
I still get really pumped by just watching all of the entrepreneurs come on to flip and sell their life's work. In some cases that's a couple of years. In many cases it's many, many years. And everything From Jerry, the 16 year old founder, from Geometry Spot all the way through to we recently sold a YouTube channel for a 75 year old retiree. And so I just get so passionate and excited by all of the entrepreneurs doing really cool stuff in the marketplace. So we're still really passionate just about making, making exits easy for as many people as possible. And acquisition. Entrepreneurship is something, you know, we still don't think enough people are talking about because it's one thing for you and I to go through all these ideas, but sometimes it's hard to come up with the idea. So you can actually just buy a.
- [48:14]
Nick Loper
Side hustle, actually skip the idea and the zero to one phase.
- [48:17]
Blake Hutchinson
Skip the zero to one phase. Buy something that's established and you know, I'm still really passionate about helping people understand that industry. And we've got some new cool things coming out, new ways to search for these assets, using AI as a, as a way to, to help you to find the assets you might want. Because sometimes it's difficult to know what you might want. But to your point, you said upwork before. We can go to Flippa as well and just browse what people are actually selling. And it gives you a great deal of mental stimulation. And you'll get some ideas from that.
- [48:43]
Nick Loper
Yeah, totally. Well, I gotta know, what was the 75 year old's YouTube channel about?
- [48:47]
Blake Hutchinson
So his name was Marty Geller, 75 years old. He sold it for $40,000. I think if I remember correctly, it's like handyman content. So fixing stuff.
- [48:56]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that works. Some people are buying like the residual revenue from these videos if they're evergreen and saying, okay, we, we expect them to continue to rack up views and, and ad revenue. Or like if I have a handyman presence myself, then I'm going to continue, I can continue to add content or I can hire people to go build out that content to kind of continually fuel it. Is that how you, you see it going down.
- [49:21]
Blake Hutchinson
That's exactly, exactly what happened. So it's less about subscribers and it's more about views. And, and as we said before, YouTube's a search engine. So if I type in heater outage, you know, from thinking about this, this house that I rented and the heater turned off and I had to go to YouTube to figure out how to reset the heater, but, like, my heater's not working. Someone will Type that into YouTube and a video will pop up. The video has been there for seven years and it shows how to press the free buttons that will reset the device for you. Now, that's evergreen content. It's not going to go anywhere. Literally tens of millions of views. And as you said, you're buying the back catalog. It's a little bit like how MGM might buy the back catalog for the betas. It just happens to be that this is for highly niche content.
- [50:01]
Nick Loper
That makes sense. Well, Flippa.com check them out over there. F L, I, P P A. We'll link that up in the show notes. If you love hearing of these unique kinds of creative side projects, I've got a whole series like this on the show. Making money, going after robo collars, interior design for dorm rooms, pay what you want, poetry, headstones for pets, a million different ways to make extra money. And I'm confident you'll find some inspiration in those archives. All of those and more I have conveniently packaged up for you in a Spotify playlist. No opt in required. All you gotta do is follow the link in the show notes. You'll be able to add that to your device. Big thanks to Blake for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation. Com deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle show. Hustle on the.