← The Side Hustle Show
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- [00:02]
Nick Loper
The path to a $250,000 a year independent income stream. This is the state of Solopreneurship in 2026. My guest today is a self described reluctant entrepreneur who now runs a couple digital marketing and copywriting agencies in addition to being a sought after strategic marketing consultant and the creator of the Strategic AF Newsletter from Adrianatica.com Adriana Tika welcome to the Side Hustle Show.
- [00:28]
Adriana Tika
Hey Nick, thank you for having me on your show. Excited to be here?
- [00:31]
Nick Loper
You bet. I'm exc. Excited to dive into this. You've compiled this research report called the State of solopreneurship, which is something we can all relate to, especially as side hustlers. And at the top of the report, you highlight the difference between owned channels and relationship channels. And I wanted to get your take on what those. What does that mean? What are. What are owned channels versus relationship channels?
- [00:54]
Adriana Tika
Owned channels versus also borrowed channels? I know a lot of people use the term owned audience. I don't like that term because you don't own the audience, you own the access to them. But essentially a known channel is anything that gives you direct access to your audience without the mediation of an algorithm. So you can use social media as a borrowed channel, where you start building relationships, and then email marketing as an owned channel, where you deepen those relationships and you build trust and credibility.
- [01:25]
Nick Loper
Okay, so an owned channel would be your email list and a borrowed channel would be Twitter, where if the algorithm buries you, then you're not getting any visibility.
- [01:34]
Adriana Tika
Exactly. Not even from the people who already chose to follow you. Because we all know that social media feeds don't work like that anymore. We're in the interest graph era, where the content that gets fed to you is based on what the algorithm decides you're interested in at a specific point in time. So if you have a leaky dishwasher, you're going to see content about fixing your dishwasher, buying a new dishwasher for months.
- [02:00]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm always hesitant to like even give anything the thumbs up because it's like, no, I like that post, but I don't need to see a thousand other ones like it. It's a weird thing how they try and get you pegged in. But what was the takeaway from the report on these two different marketing channels? Obviously, everybody wants to have this owned channel that you have this direct relationship. In my case, it'd probably be the podcast and the email list. But you almost have to spend some time on these borrowed channels to try and go find Go find your people. Like, go where the people are already hanging out, whether it's LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or anything else.
- [02:34]
Adriana Tika
One of the most interesting finds in the report was that even though 36% of people, the majority of respondents, said that LinkedIn was their primary revenue driver, when asked which channels they will double down next year, they all chose owned platforms, or the vast majority chose owned platforms like email communities, podcasting. So it's a very interesting discrepancy because we're kind of expected to double down on what works. We keep doing the same thing over and over again until it stops working, and it usually does. But people have started to figure out that social media will not work as well in the long run, and so they decided to double down on platforms that they have control over. And this, to me is very interesting and possibly a sign of maturity from the cohort that answered my study.
- [03:30]
Nick Loper
Yeah, the trend that I see is, you know, short form or social media content to a newsletter or to an email list, kind of as an intermediate step where it's, you know, short form answers a question, solves a problem. Look, if you want more of this or if you want the detailed playbook, comment, whatever the keyword is, and then there's like a manychat automation, or maybe if you're just starting out, it's, you know, a manual process. But, you know, lots of people have kind of graduated to manychat through Instagram or wherever else and say, okay, well, here's the link to whatever it is you requested, and there it goes to the opt in page, and you're kind of off to the races from there. And some people are so dedicated about it where it's like, it's almost every thread that they post or almost every video that they post kind of has this little call to action at the end. And it's. There's this almost inherent understanding where it's like, I'm on borrowed time here. You know, the algorithms may shift at any point, and I need to get people off of this to something where I can have a little more control over the attention that I have.
- [04:29]
Adriana Tika
This is something that I've been obsessing over lately. And I recently wrote a newsletter issue about how attention is no longer a straight funnel, but rather a very complex and complicated loop. So you cannot expect someone to find you on social media, then subscribe to your newsletter. If you don't prompt them to do so, then buy from you, all in a single line. The truth is that most of us discover someone, then we forget about them, then maybe we find them again a couple of months later, which is when we might subscribe to their email list as well. And it might take months or years before we even consider buying something from them. So if you look at attention as a loop rather than a narrow funnel, you start to understand why people put so much time and effort into deplatforming people and sending them to a platform that they control and where they can deepen that relationship without algorithmic mediation.
- [05:26]
Nick Loper
Yeah. She mentioned LinkedIn was the primary revenue driver for the respondents to your State of solopreneurship survey. Why do you think that was? Is it kind of a business to business? What type of sales or what type of services were people selling?
- [05:40]
Adriana Tika
Yes, it's absolutely a bias of this cohort because most of them are in B2B. And if you're in B2B, you're on LinkedIn. But also, I think it tells us something about the way platforms are structured because if you go on LinkedIn, you expect to see business content, and when people's expectations are met, they are more likely to decide to buy something. I know a lot of people who do B2B. They're also on Instagram or TikTok, for instance, but it creates sort of a cognitive dissonance for people who maybe go there to find funny cat videos or catch up on the latest news and then they find a super serious post that invites them to grow their business overnight, 10x your business in 3 months or less. And this cognitive dissonance they did not expect to see that there makes it harder for them to act on such content. So if you're on social media, on Instagram or TikTok to watch funny videos, you're probably on LinkedIn looking for business opportunities or business content, which is why it's easier to generate revenue directly from LinkedIn.
- [06:45]
Nick Loper
Okay. The majority of your respondents happened to be selling to other businesses, you know, small, medium, large, versus selling to consumers, where in my mind, the consumer market is a lot broader, but maybe it's harder to reach. What's your take on that?
- [07:04]
Adriana Tika
The sales cycles are definitely shorter in B2C versus B2B. And the higher you go up the food chain in B2B, the bigger A company, the longer the sales cycle is going to be. But throughout most of the studies, you're going to find you'll see that B2B is more profitable because most business owners know they need to invest to make more money. Pretty much everything you sell, if you sell the same product to B2C and to B2B. It's going to be more expensive even if you look at coaches. For instance, if someone coaches you on communication skills, they're going to charge more for a corporate workshop than they're going to charge for a B2C workshop where people simply want to be to speak more clearly in their day to day lives.
- [07:47]
Nick Loper
Okay, that makes sense. Where business owners are more likely to invest in their growth. Although we've had lots of examples on the side hustle show selling to consumers, you know, with it, whether it be like a cleaning service, you know, lots in the kind of home services space where it's like it's easy to reach the decision maker. Sometimes you just got to go knock on their door and ask them.
- [08:05]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, that's very true, but there's a
- [08:07]
Nick Loper
little bit more to it on the, on the B2B side and maybe a higher ceiling.
- [08:11]
Adriana Tika
And this is why B2C is often perceived as easier again because of the length of the sales cycle and because it's easier to reach the decision maker not just in their homes, but also on social media. For instance, if I were to sell BTC, I'd definitely be on TikTok and Instagram.
- [08:29]
Nick Loper
Okay. Yeah, I guess it depends. Go where your people are hanging out. Sure. For you. What have you found is the most effective driver for your agency or for your consulting services?
- [08:38]
Adriana Tika
Email. Hands down, it's email. Over 80% of my clients tell me that I found you on social media but bought from you because of your emails. And this is a good time to circle back to what I was saying about deepening the relationship on the channel that you own. Because social media rarely allows for nuance. People expect short form content, snappy takes, whereas in an email it's a longer format. You can explore nuances, you can give better advice, and you can showcase your personality more than on social media. Especially if we're talking about text based social media.
- [09:16]
Nick Loper
Are you running people through a like a dedicated welcome funnel or onboarding sequence that ends with an offer pitch or is this kind of through the cadence of my weekly newsletter at the bottom? Hey, and by the way, if you want to hire me, if you want to work with me, hit reply or I'm curious what the call to action looks like.
- [09:37]
Adriana Tika
It's both. I have a welcome sequence that I'm actually very proud of because it's personalized. When someone subscribes to my email, they get a gift. This is the subject line of the first email they get. Welcome, can I send you a free gift? And to give them that gift and to make it personalized, I ask them a question. I ask them what their biggest challenge is. They have three options. When they choose one of them, they automatically get sent a sequence with resources that helps them fix that specific challenge. And throughout and over time, they're going to get also pitches for paid products that solve that exact challenge. And they're going to see my products through my newsletter, my weekly emails. But I've never been one to create very long and detailed sales sequences. I prefer to make sure through my weekly newsletter that people know what I sell and whether it's a good fit for them and let them make that decision in their own time. So, yes, I have a welcome sequence that both helps my subscribers and helps me make more sales, but it's with super soft pitches.
- [10:44]
Nick Loper
Got it. I think that's really a cool way to do it. Is kind of that almost unexpected to choose your own adventure. Well, what are you struggling with? Kind of a common question to ask in an opening email, but then taking it one step further, it's like, oh no, I actually have some resources based on what you answered, I could send you down this little sub series of messages that's probably going to be more helpful and relevant to you. That's a pretty cool strategy there.
- [11:07]
Adriana Tika
Yeah.
- [11:07]
Nick Loper
One of the interesting findings in The State of Solopreneurship report was that on average, it takes three years to get to $100,000 in profit as a solo business. And it kind of reminded me of the thousand day principle that comes from the Tropical MBA podcast, where their thousand day principle is like, it's going to take you about three years of effort to replace the salary from your day job if you're starting over from scratch on your own. And I was like, oh, that's. And now you kind of back that up with data, whereas there's this kind of anecdotal. So what are you seeing there on the revenue front?
- [11:43]
Adriana Tika
To be honest with you, this is why I started the State of solopreneurship because I was enraged with all the survivorship bias you see online. On social media and on traditional media, everyone makes six or seven figures. Everyone got there in three months or less. And I knew from my clients, I knew from my own business, that is not the case. It takes much longer. Not to mention all the thousands or hundreds of thousands of businesses that have failed and we know nothing of. So I asked my respondents point blank, how much do you make and how long did it take you to get there and what do you know under three years, making over 100k is very, very rare. And if you look at individual respons responses, you'll see that there's usually some supporting context. For instance, someone makes over six figures in their first year, but it's because this is their second business and they were able to use whatever leverage they gained from their first business to prop this one up.
- [12:40]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it always takes longer than you'd like. And I think on the one hand I could see it was like, oh, it's gonna, it's gonna take me three years. I'm here for instant results. But on the other hand, maybe that's encouraging to say, like, well, if you're in the middle of that, if you're in the slog period of creating the content of putting the offers out of kind of, you know, casting that net of reputation and trying to, like, build up a body of work, hey, you know, the data suggests that you're. You're doing just fine.
- [13:12]
Sponsor Voice
Right.
- [13:12]
Nick Loper
You don't expect to be there just yet. It's going to take a little bit of time. And then you had almost everyone on your survey list of who was making a quarter million dollars or more was beyond that three year mark, where it's like, this is where the flywheels really start to spin, where you kind of dialed in your systems and your offers and things are really rolling for you.
- [13:32]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, absolutely. And the reaction I got most often from this report was, thank you. Now, I do not feel like an outlier because a lot of people were saying I don't make enough. I look around me and everyone's either a millionaire or on their path to get there, and I'm not. And after seeing this report, most people breathe a sigh of relief. Yes, it takes time. And if you didn't get there in three months by working four hours a day from a sunny beach somewhere, you're fine. Business is hard. It's supposed to be hard.
- [14:07]
Nick Loper
More with Adriana in just a moment. Including the most common monetization path for
- [14:12]
Sponsor Voice
these solopreneurs, plus the unconventional lead magnet
- [14:15]
Nick Loper
strategy that's working better than free downloads. All that and more coming up right after this.
- [14:22]
Sponsor Voice
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- [16:28]
Nick Loper
yeah, and the other thing is like, you know, there's the dream of passive income online, but for the majority of respondents, you know, the top two monetization channels were services like, I'm going to solve this problem for you. Either, you know, I'm going to do it myself because I have expertise in this area, or I have an agency business where I'm kind of overseeing the fulfillment channel business. But it was interesting to see where it's like the dream is one thing, it's passive income, ATM machine, cash machine from the Internet. But the other times, even after building the audience and putting all these offers out, it's still work to do the fulfillment.
- [17:03]
Adriana Tika
Absolutely, because people will always pay more for you to take a problem off their plate than for you to teach them how to do it. And this is what most passive income sources do. They teach you how to do it, how to do whatever your client's interested in. And there's also the length people forget to account for how long it takes to build an audience big enough to sell info products in a passive way and to generate enough revenue to support yourself.
- [17:31]
Nick Loper
Yeah, now those did make the list. Here we have digital products, you know, ebooks, templates, we have self paced courses. There are some kind of more passive or digital delivery type of elements on here, but they make up a smaller piece of the pie. And it's probably to your point is like, well it's almost a volume game unless it's really high ticket type of stuff that is just almost by bait nature where it's like you only need 10 clients to make a decent living if you're going to do the service route. But you might need an audience of 10,000 or 100,000 if you're going to make a good living selling sponsorships or something like that.
- [18:05]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I mean there's no right or wrong here. You just have to decide what game you want to be in. Do you want to be in the traffic game or do you want to be in the relationship? We each have our strong suits and weak suits. So decide your game and go for it.
- [18:20]
Nick Loper
And I think it makes sense. And this is common amongst side hustle show guests is more started with a service based business than any other model. And I think the reason for that is, you know, it's low overhead, it's quick to see results, it's almost just a slight pivot from working a day job where it's like kind of this mindset shift of look, I'm already an entrepreneur, just maybe my day job just happens to be my biggest client so far or yet. And I can go out and sell the same skill set or a different skill set with the other hours that I have in the week. It's kind of a natural progression. Nathan Barry called it his ladders of wealth creation where it's like look, working a job, trading time for money. It's freelancing, still trading time for money, but now learning the skills of invoicing and sales and kind of running your own thing and graduating to productized services where it's set, deliverable, set fee, set price, an agency where you're overseeing other people doing the work. And then kind of beyond that was full product, you know, software marketplaces, you know, really more complex businesses. Where I got to build both the supply side and the demand side and everything else. But it's kind of mirrored in your results too, where Even at the $250,000 and beyond level, a lot of people still playing in the services space.
- [19:34]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, absolutely. And an underrated benefit of starting out with services is the fact that having one on one relationships with your CL will give you more ideas on what products to build. You don't have to guess. People can tell you directly what type of products they would buy. And you will build better products and more in demand products if you spend some time in the services space.
- [19:59]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that reminds me, we had a guest, this is probably 10 years ago who had something, who was doing email copywriting or something for real estate agents. And then after doing that for a couple years, they, they all have the same issue, their email provider sucks. Well, maybe we could build a software tool to go out and just do that and sell that. You already have this kind of built in customer base. Client base. And it was kind of by being in the trenches and by listening to the common pains and problems that come up to your point. Exactly. It kind of gives you an idea of what product to build next. And there's John Lee Dumas line about, you know, he's kind of like, I didn't know what to build. I just asked the audience and they told me, well, like how did you launch this podcast? Okay, well we'll teach you how to build a podcast. Like, how are you selling so much of this course on webinars? Like, okay, well we'll teach you how we're doing our webinar. Is it just kind of on and on and on? Well, just ask the audience. They've got the answers. If you can build the audience, that's probably the bigger challenge.
- [20:55]
Adriana Tika
Absolutely. That's how I build products these days as well. I see which of my emails gets the most replies. If someone's interested in a topic, maybe they'd be interested in a product related to that topic. Then I asked them, hey, would you buy this? At what price point did you buy this? And so on. You know, you do your best to validate demand. Before you spend ages building something.
- [21:14]
Nick Loper
Do you go down the pre sales route of saying like, well look, If I get 20 people to give me a hundred dollars right now, I'm going to commit to this? Or how do you go about it?
- [21:23]
Adriana Tika
I don't do pre sales. I've never done them. But I do survey my people and create wait lists. I find like pre sales are often Outsourcing demand validation to your audience and their wallets. And I think they're great if you're just getting started or maybe it's a new format. You've never done that before. You want to validate, you want to do a presale. But if you already have an established audience who bought from you, it's time to show more confidence in what you're thinking about building. So what I, for instance, rather than building a course from scratch, I first sell it as a live workshop and then I either take that recording and sell it on demand or rerecord on my own and sell it as an on demand product. But I can validate with a live product. If the sales don't go as planned, I can simply kill it or spend an hour of my time doing a workshop with very few people.
- [22:15]
Nick Loper
Do you have an example of one of those and the price point and the attendance?
- [22:20]
Adriana Tika
Yes. The first course I launched was actually Audience Accelerator, a course that teaches you how to build an audience that buys from you, not turn yourself into the next Kim Kardashian, but create an audience that supports your business. I ran it as a live workshop. My goal was to to have at least 10 people buy it. This would have shown me that there is enough demand for it. I think I had like 50% more than that in the initial run. And then I re recorded it as a standalone course with more supporting materials and it's still selling to this day after two years. But this is how I went about it. I told people, hey, I'm doing this. If you want to know when it's live, sign up to a wait list. Then I emailed my wait list more often than the rest of my list and that was it.
- [23:07]
Nick Loper
What was the price point for the live workshop? This is kind of a cool strategy that I haven't tested yet.
- [23:12]
Adriana Tika
I think it was 100 something dollars and then the course was $200. But it's bulkier, meatier and has more supporting materials. But these days what I usually do is that the live workshop is more expensive than the on demand version because there's live interaction. There's a Q and A section where you can start your questions, not listen to someone else ask their questions. And yeah, I think it's only fair. But this was my first try, my first iteration.
- [23:42]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is a really interesting one because you have some immediate buy in. And we've heard the line that people who pay pay attention, they're more, far more likely to show up than hey, I'm doing A free webinar on whatever topic. It's like it's a paid workshop, right? And we're only going to have 15, 20 people who are serious enough to raise their hands and plunk down the hundred dollars. And now all of a sudden you have this asset that is validated. If you only got three people to sign up, you're like, well, maybe that offer didn't really resonate. Maybe I don't need to turn that into kind of a paid course and build a dedicated sequence or funnel around it. But really quick way to kind of validate an idea.
- [24:15]
Adriana Tika
And for bonus points, if you go this route and do a paid workshop first, when you do launch the on demand course or masterclass, you launch it with social proof. You're going to have social proof from the, from the workshop, from the live workshop iteration. Got it.
- [24:31]
Nick Loper
The other surprising finding in this report, surprising maybe, maybe not surprising, was the size of the newsletter list of the respondents. The size of the email list for the people who responded was pretty small. Like most people had less than 500 subscribers. You know, even beyond that, probably two thirds had less than 10,000. So it wasn't this huge, you know, media based business where the audience was the business or the content was the business. It was more, you know, really highly targeted. Am I kind of summarizing that correctly?
- [25:08]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, absolutely. And I think this ties in really well with the fact that most of them sell services. If you sell services either done for you or done with you, you don't need that big of an audience because everything you sell is priced higher than an on demand product. So this is how they can make more money on a smaller audience.
- [25:31]
Nick Loper
What do you see as a typical flow or funnel? And granted, you know, like we talked about in multiple touch points, Omnichannel. Oh, I heard about you over here. I heard you on this show, I saw your social media post, I joined your email list. Six months later, I finally decided to hire you. But if the flow was more sequential to say, you know, social media post, you know, showcasing your expertise, what would be like a typical lead magnet to offer type of flow for some of these agency businesses or service based businesses?
- [26:00]
Adriana Tika
It depends on the industry they're in obviously, but I know a lot of them generate very warm leads from paid or free workshops. And if the workshop is paid, it's going to be a low ticket product. This is a very, very good lead magnet these days. And also I found that the time spent to build trust and credibility matters a lot, irrespective of lead magnets. That people may download and forget about somewhere in a dusty folder. If you can get people to regularly open your emails, you're one step closer to converting them into buyers.
- [26:35]
Nick Loper
Yeah. So do you find some of that most common call to action is just join the newsletter with no freebie, no hangout next Thursday on the workshop, or download the free cheat sheet. I'm curious, what do you see working to get people off of the borrowed channel platforms, onto the email or owned platforms?
- [26:54]
Adriana Tika
So a strong lead magnet will get you more volume, But a bunch of those people are going to download the resource that you promised and then unsubscribe. Whereas if they subscribe for your newsletter and for your thinking alone, they are more likely to eventually buy from you. This is the distinction I see. So if you want to go for volume, create a killer lead magnet, whatever that may mean for you and for your clients. If you want to go for depth, get people to subscribe for your thinking, for your point of view, for your big idea.
- [27:24]
Nick Loper
Okay. Which might be the result of having seen half a dozen of your social media posts or seen you across the Internet. And you know what, this person is speaking my language. This person is really thoughtful. I want more. I want to make sure I don't miss it the next time there's an algorithm update. I want to make sure I get it in my inbox. So looking for the hand raisers for the more in depth relationships, if I'm hearing that right.
- [27:48]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, exactly.
- [27:49]
Nick Loper
All right, so the big trends here, obviously email is still the primary relationship. It's something that you can control and get into people's inbox. Like that seems to be everything old is new again and it just seems to never go out of style. So I think that's really telling, really interesting, even at this stage of the Internet. And then there was a future looking segment to the report asking respondents, well, knowing what you know now, where are you going to be spending more or less of your time on in the future? And so obviously the email and the newsletter, you know, had a big say, yes, I'm going to spend more time here. And people were very optimistic with how many hours. Like almost everything was like, yeah, I'm going to spend more time on this. But one thing that was interesting was like the blog and SEO was showing a big market increase, which was kind of surprising given the state of AI in the search results in SEO. I was wondering if you could speak to that.
- [28:46]
Adriana Tika
Yes, it's also interesting that blog and SEO also had a significant decrease. If you look at the graph.
- [28:52]
Nick Loper
Yeah, it was split.
- [28:53]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, it was split. It wasn't as clear cut as email or newsletter. I think you're right. People are rediscovering things that used to work. And it's pretty much like fashion trends are cyclical. But I think it speaks to the need for deeper relationships, the kind of relationships that you can create with long form content. This is why you see that there are very few people who plan to decrease their investment in YouTube as well, because YouTube acts as a search engine and also allows you to create long form content. And I've seen a bunch of trending services like create your own blog capsule, a bunch of articles that you can send to any lead, any client, something that defines what it's like to work with you, something that people can, can sit down, read it along with a cup of coffee and understand your world better. Which is something that you can't really do on social media where everything's fast and 30 seconds and get out.
- [29:54]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm kind of torn on investing more time into SEO because it feels like diminishing returns. But at the same time, YouTube and kind of these long form evergreen website articles, the people who are looking for that stuff, they're very problem aware. And, and if you can create a resource that sticks in the search results, it can last for a really long time. So it can still be a valuable resource, valuable kind of return on the time that it takes to create that. So again, I encourage you to go check out the state of solopreneurship for yourself. You can find that@adrianatica.com and we'll be back with more with Adriana right after this, including her business idea donation for side Hustle Nation coming up right after this.
- [30:38]
Sponsor Voice
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- [31:49]
Nick Loper
All right, we are back with Adriana from adrianatika.com and we are moving on to round two, which is your business idea donation for side Hustle show listeners. This is something that you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day or just an opportunity that you see out in the marketplace.
- [32:06]
Adriana Tika
Yes, right now the biggest opportunity I see is creating a newsletter around Internet anthropology. I find that this is something a lot of people are interested in these days, but it takes a lot of research time. It's essentially explaining how certain Internet trends came to be, how creators rose to fame. Anything that you can do to explain the world of Internet better and its history, short as it may look right now, is very, very interesting and it's working very well on social media. Okay. Other than Taylor Lawrence, I don't know anyone who's going all in on this and even she's not all in on the anthropology part. So if you have the time and if you like to do research, go for it and send me a link to subscribe because I'd like to read it. Yeah.
- [32:55]
Nick Loper
This reminds me a little bit of Chanel Basilio's like growth in reverse. If you're familiar with her, like in depth, kind of rewind case studies of how Sahil Bloom grew to however many millions of followers, like kind of step by step kind of digging into, in some cases, dozens of previous interviews to build these data points of. Well, how many followers were they at at this point? But Internet anthropology, I've never heard that term before, but fascinating.
- [33:20]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, I know Chanel puts a lot of work into each and every one of her newsletter issues. And it showed, like, people reward this type of effort. There are very few people who are willing to spend as much time as she does.
- [33:31]
Nick Loper
Yeah. She probably has 40 hours into some of these reports.
- [33:34]
Adriana Tika
Yeah. At some point she told me it was around 25 to 40. So it's a lot. Especially in the early days.
- [33:41]
Nick Loper
Yeah. What would be your. I guess just publishing the deep dive research on how this trend started or how this creator rose to fame. I know Chanel's focused on the kind of the social media newsletter side, but maybe there's another angle. It's like how I built this, but just On a. You know, on a different scale or kind of pivoted to a different format. What would you do, first and foremost, to kind of get your initial traction here?
- [34:05]
Adriana Tika
I think I'd go super broad. Like, I wouldn't zero in on a person the way Chanel does. I'd speak about trends and about creators as a whole as an industry, even about fleeting trends on YouTube, on. Sorry. On TikTok and Instagram. I'd go back to the mommy blogs, which essentially shape our Internet the way we know it today. Because I know very few people know of this, but it was essentially the mommy bloggers who shaped or who set the early foundation for the creator economy. This is how I'd approach it. I make it a super valuable and interesting resource for people. But again, this takes ages in research.
- [34:43]
Nick Loper
This sounds like a passion project where, I don't know, maybe over the long term I can monetize with advertising, affiliate partnerships, I don't know. Do you see a service on the back end of that?
- [34:52]
Adriana Tika
Not as much as service. Maybe consulting. If you're into trend analysis and forecasting, I would put it behind a paywall. Ask people to pay for access to this information or simply to donate as much as they want. I know that there are a few newsletters on substack who ask people to upgrade to the paid tier, but they promise nothing in return. It's just a way for those people to support the author's work, and I find that great. Some of them do very, very well.
- [35:20]
Nick Loper
Okay, yeah, that could be a good way to do it. Almost. Paid newsletter tier. That's kind of funny. Just pay me as a donation, as a thank you. Like the buy me a coffee type of thing.
- [35:29]
Adriana Tika
Exactly.
- [35:30]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Patreon. With no promise of extra content. And it was like at the end of Dan Carlin's hardcore history, it's like, hey, if you like what you just heard, it was five hours. It took us six months worth of research. If you like what you heard, a buck a show. That's all we ask. And it's like, oh, my gosh, how could I not donate at this point based on how much effort went into that? Yeah. Let's move to round three, which is the triple threat. The first part here is a marketing tactic that is working for you right now.
- [35:56]
Adriana Tika
Partnerships and cross promos with my peers. We recommend each other's newsletters. We recommend each other's books, if there are any, and pretty much we try to tap into each other's audience. While this may not work on volume, it does Work on depth and on audience fit more than anything I've ever tried.
- [36:17]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is a powerful one. This is something that I've seen from the guest's chair on certain podcasts, especially in the personal finance space, where the narrative is always around saving and budgeting and investing and paying down debt. And it was really helpful for me to come in and say, well, let's talk about the revenue side of the equation. There's only so much you could save. You can only live on rice and beans for so long. Let's go down and try to make some more money. And so that was a message that resonated with that audience. So kind of a cross promotion there. On the newsletter side, this is, like you said, hard to scale because it is. It's one on one. It's direct. Like, I'm a fan of your stuff. Would I like to plug this into a future newsletter? What kind of structure are you seeing?
- [37:00]
Adriana Tika
Pretty much what you described. I usually talk to people who have a similar audience and we recommend each other's lead magnet or simply each other's newsletter. I always test them first. I don't recommend anything without knowing what's on the other end, even if I know that person. And it works well because my audience knows that if I recommend something, they will find value in it. But on the other hand, it takes me a lot longer to vet partners, to spend time checking out the resources, to make sure that after I download the resource, you're not going to bombard me with six emails a day and so on.
- [37:35]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's fair. Make sure it's a win for both parties.
- [37:39]
Adriana Tika
Yeah.
- [37:39]
Nick Loper
How are you finding those people or how are they finding you? Do you set it up as a tit for tat where, look, I'm going to recommend you. And now there's kind of an unspoken expectation of like, well, I'd like to grow my audience too, or what, are you going to plug me? And like, dealing with mismatched audience sizes and stuff like that.
- [37:57]
Adriana Tika
To answer your first, first question, I find my partners either on social media or in private communities. Private communities work best for this because there's some sort of vetting for every member that's in there. So there's inherent trust. And yes, it's usually a tit for tat. It's not the passive aggressive kind of, I did this for you. Are you going to do something for me in return? No. We set the rules from the very beginning. Everyone knows when the email gets sent. They can see it. Sometimes it's Just a simple mention. Other times it's embedded somewhere in the text if it makes sense. But yes, we set up everything in advance and sometimes we even send each other reports or say, hey, you got 50 clicks? Are you seeing any new subscribers coming your way? You know, just to gauge interest levels and so on?
- [38:43]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is something that I would like to do more of. I've done a few in the past where kind of like newsletter swaps, basically. Like, you know, if you have a little segment of like you might also like or hey, check this out. Kind of just a recommended resource type of section in the newsletter. It's easy enough to plug a friend or trusted partner in that spot, but it's like it's time consuming to negotiate that every week and try and find somebody to fill in. So if anybody is interested in a swap like that, feel free, send me a note and we'll figure it out. Let's go to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now.
- [39:19]
Adriana Tika
Circle. I just launched my community, it's called the Council. And because I was using Circle as an end user, not an administrator, I didn't have to think twice about it. Circle was my first choice and I'm loving how complex and yet fairly easy to understand the solution is. So if you're building a community or thinking about migrating a community, give Circle a chance. This is not a paid promo, I'm a paying user. I just love it.
- [39:53]
Nick Loper
Plug it a little bit more because there's kajabi, there's school, there's a million different kind of hubs to host your membership. What makes Circle stand out for you?
- [40:04]
Adriana Tika
The user experience, first and foremost. It's sort of reminiscent of Facebook in the early days, so people can find their way around very easily. The forum is very well organized. You can create spaces for every topic, for every event, for literally everything you want to do. You have a ton of functionality, API integrations, affiliate programs built in, video streaming, although that doesn't work very well. Maybe they fixed it in the meantime, but the first time I tried wasn't all that great.
- [40:37]
Nick Loper
Okay, so it's like this combo of like it'll host your educational content and it has this built in community or forum component as well.
- [40:45]
Adriana Tika
Yeah, absolutely. And if you're selling courses, for instance, you can add them in Circle, create separate paywalls for them. It's very easy.
- [40:54]
Nick Loper
Would it be appropriate for a free community or it's really built for like a paid membership?
- [40:59]
Adriana Tika
Oh no, you can do a free community on it if you want to do that. There are a ton of people who are successful with free communities on Circle. It all depends on your business model.
- [41:08]
Nick Loper
But then they would just need to kind of develop the habit of opening up that app or, you know, hanging out in that community. As opposed to like a free Facebook group or something like that.
- [41:18]
Adriana Tika
Yes, absolutely. And also you need to have a super strong business model behind that because Circle is not exactly a cheap platform, especially if you have a lot of members and a lot of spaces.
- [41:29]
Nick Loper
Okay, okay. That consideration as well. But cool. Circle is something that I've heard of but have not yet tested out myself. So we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode. The last part of the Triple Threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months.
- [41:44]
Adriana Tika
It has to be Content Simplified by my friend Lee Densmur. It's a book that I recommend to any marketer or content marketer or anyone who's even remotely connected to this industry, because it essentially has everything you need. It's like a manual that teaches you how to build a successful content program.
- [42:04]
Nick Loper
Okay, Content Simplified. That one is a new recommendation for me. So we'll link that one up in the show notes as well. Well, Adriana, this has been awesome. What's next for you? Maybe we should ask you to answer the, you know, what are you going to spend more time on in 2026 question. What are you excited about?
- [42:23]
Adriana Tika
I'm exc the Council, my recently launched community. I launched it in late December and I'm already spending most of my time engaging and interacting with its first members. And I love that because I can help people at a whole new level.
- [42:38]
Nick Loper
What's the promise? Pitch us on it. What's inside? How much does it cost?
- [42:42]
Adriana Tika
The pricing starts at $500 per year and it's a place where we get stuff done. I'm a strategist by design. The Council is the place where we implement things. We have accountability features. For instance, we're going to start a newsletter growth bootcamp in a couple of weeks and the goal is not learning newsletter growth frameworks, but actually implementing them in four weeks of live calls, homework, partnerships, swaps within the community, and all that. It's super hands on because I know most people talk about strategy and it looks nice on paper, but implementation is what actually moves the needle. So the Council is the corner of the Internet I've built to help people get stuff done with my help and with the help of their peers.
- [43:34]
Nick Loper
Yeah. Hang out, you know, other people kind of on the same journey as you Find your people and hang out. That's a really powerful place to be a part of as a community member, but also for you as the central connector hub of that Enjoy being that connector type of person. So make sure to subscribe to the Strategic AF Newsletter. You'll find that@adrianatica.com newsletter. You can also grab that State of solopreneurship report that we talked about. If you are wondering what type of solopreneurship or side Hustle path might make the most sense for you, I want to invite you to take the short quiz at Hustle Show. Just answer a few short multiple choice questions. You do it right from your phone and it's going to suggest a playlist of 8 to 10 of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers that you can add right to your device. You can listen in, learn what works, and go out and make some more money this year. Big thanks to Adriana for sharing her insight. Big 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 those sponsors in one place. 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.
- [44:47]
Adriana Tika
Hustle on what is a burned cd?
- [44:50]
Younger Person / Child
Something that has no value, but if it's burned, like you can't use it. What's aol? Aol? It's probably some like medical term, like I gotta go get my AOL repaired. I teared my aol. What's a pager? A pager? It's probably a guy that like repairs your books cause like they broke and he like fixes the pages.
- [45:25]
Adriana Tika
Yeah.
- [45:25]
Younger Person / Child
Okay.
- [45:25]
Adriana Tika
What's a payphone?
- [45:27]
Younger Person / Child
A payphone, you probably pay to use the phone. Where are they? Oh wait, it might be like that old thing like in Home Alone where he goes to the payphone and like drops a quarter in there and then go, hello?
- [45:42]
Sponsor Voice
Hello?
- [45:43]
Younger Person / Child
Hello?
- [45:43]
Nick Loper
Is there one in Home Alone?
- [45:45]
Younger Person / Child
Yeah. Remember? Or is it Home Alone 2 where he does it. He's like police. Police.
- [45:49]
Adriana Tika
Yes.
- [45:49]
Younger Person / Child
Okay, you're right.
- [45:50]
Adriana Tika
Oh, that is what a payphone is.
- [45:52]
Younger Person / Child
And that's the only one I got, right? Yeah.