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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
YAPClassic: Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom
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- [00:00]
Yap Host
Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify, Found and Airbnb. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com profiting. Found gives you banking, invoicing and bookkeeping all in one place and was created for busy entrepreneurs. Try Found for free@found.com Profit Inc. Hosting on Airbnb has never been easier. With Airbnb's new co host network. Find yourself a co host@airbnb.com host as always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@youngandprofiting.com deals. Yep. Gang, gang, gang. Earlier this week we aired my latest interview with Mr. Side Hustle himself, Nick Loper. In that episode, we talked about his very first appearance on the show. That was episode 10 when he was one of my first ever guests. I was a baby podcaster in this episode. Well, now's your chance to experience that conversation as well in this Yap Classic episode. Now this was recorded back in 2018, so it may sound a bit different than the podcast does today, but this is so much more than just an interesting archive exercise. And that's because Nick shares some solid gold nuggets of wisdom that are still useful today. You're going to hear Nick talk about his very first side hustle, what he calls the three laws of side hustle physics, as well as which personality types do especially well when it comes to side hustles. So if you're considering a new side hustle or looking to expand an existing one, then why not prime yourself with a double dose of Nick Loper this week. You won't regret it. Without further ado, I bring you Nick Loper.
- [01:58]
Interviewee
So I thought that we could get started with getting acquainted. So an icebreaker, if you will. I was on your website and I saw this list of 25 facts about yourself, one of which I found really interesting. You took a cold shower for 500 days in a row. Can you tell me about that? Why on earth did you do that?
- [02:18]
Nick Loper
I know it sounds awful now. So this was kind of in the 2014-2015 15 time frame. Started actually with a guest of mine on the side Hustle show who was talking about, you know, taking cold showers, starting out as a, a fat burning hack like to boost your metabolism for for the rest of the day because you're going to expend calories like heating your body up long after the shower is over. But then what he found was it was effective for that. But what he also found it was effective for just like motivation. And he's like, if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard because it sucks. You just, you feel like you're ready to t anything. And I kind of found the same thing. And I said on air, I was like, you know what, that sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might have been totally placebo, but at that time started to get more coaching clients. Traffic started to pick up. I don't know, for whatever reason, I was into it. And so I did it for over a year. I guess it was effective. Maybe it was what I needed at that time.
- [03:18]
Interviewee
Would you recommend it to others?
- [03:20]
Nick Loper
Absolutely. Get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Do it for 30 days or even maybe the baby steps way to do it. It would be to end your showers cold, which is kind of what I tend to do today. Because that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water.
- [03:35]
Interviewee
That's funny. That sounds horrible. So how did you become the chief side hustler at side Hustle Nation? Tell us about yourself, your journey, how you got started with it all.
- [03:47]
Nick Loper
My original side hustle was when I was working corporate was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called shoesniper.com and it would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes and it earn money as an affiliate. So, you know, if somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission. And while I was running that and the site had almost a 10 year run, we were always looking for stuff on the side. And it was kind of like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul search and be like, well, what do you want to be known for when people google you? What do you get excited about talking about? And it was that prospect of lower risk entrepreneurship. You know, how do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that, you know, really never gets old and still doesn't get old because there's a million and one creative ways that people are doing it. And that's kind of where the side Hustle show and the side Hustle Nation blog kind of were born from.
- [04:53]
Interviewee
So right now, are you a side hustler? Like, how many side hustles do you.
- [04:57]
Nick Loper
Have A lot of them overlap. And so my days of experimenting with a lot of this stuff are kind of limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e commerce experiments with like Amazon and ebay, and I still do a little bit of that, but that's kind of taken the back burner. The side Hustle blog has kind of become in the podcast, have kind of become the main focus, but there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that through self publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists. But some other sites that were started during that time are still around. Starting some experiments in the investing world and it all, you know, it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income having like a single point of failure.
- [05:47]
Interviewee
Yeah. So to that point, why do you prefer or recommend having side hustles over a 9 to 5 job?
- [05:54]
Nick Loper
Well, not necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom, right, is control over your calendar, how do you spend your time, how do you spend your days? And if you can piece together an income on your own terms rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's kind of where it came from for me. And I would definitely advocate focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second. So try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things with an unfocused effort, because I think that's harder to see results from.
- [06:28]
Interviewee
Why don't you give some context to our listeners about side Hustle Nation? So, like, what is side Hustle Nation?
- [06:33]
Nick Loper
Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, that could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. Like, I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe, maybe there's this vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger, as it definitely did for me with the shoe business.
- [07:04]
Interviewee
I have a little trouble distinguishing a side hustle from a part time job or a second job. How do you personally define what a side hustle is?
- [07:13]
Nick Loper
Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential, like that it's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus Okay, I drive for Uber or I'm delivering pizzas, or I'm doing instacart deliveries or something like that. Right, like that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind. But at the same time, you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting the podcast. It's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people. And that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged. And I think there's a lot more upside, even just like starting a freelancing business. Like, I'm going to do freelance writing and do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.
- [07:59]
Interviewee
So I was doing a bit of research on the show and I found out that more Americans are working a side hustle than ever before. And to be exact, there are 44 million Americans with a side hustle today. Why do you think the motivations to start a side hustle are so much stronger than they were in the past?
- [08:18]
Nick Loper
That's a weird. It's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great, unemployment is at record lows, yet why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive. Right. Housing, education, insurance, or health care, like all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages. So that's a driving factor. Like just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it. And the more positive way to look at it is I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch. That is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about. That's probably driving some of that as well. And those are kind of the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people are like, well, I need to make rent next month. That's. You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint.
- [09:22]
Interviewee
Yeah. And from my perspective, I really think it's all about the digital innovation that's going on. Like, there's so many different digital platforms where people can do freelance work, whether it's fiverr or upwork and mobility. You know, like, you can just make money off your phone now while you're on the train. You know, I used to do that years ago, but I just feel like it's easier. There's so much more space to play because we've got the Internet now, and there's just so much more that you can do with your free time to monetize it. So I think it's also like digital impact, too.
- [09:55]
Nick Loper
Yeah. That word play that you just used is really key in approaching it that way. Saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out. If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, onto the next thing.
- [10:18]
Interviewee
I also read that half of millennials report having a side hustle. So this is really big for the younger millennial generation. Why do you think it's so attractive to younger millennials, specifically? Most of my listeners are younger millennials.
- [10:32]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I think it's that cash strapped nature. Look, we're dealing with a debt load. We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases, and it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively. When I was first starting the shoe business, like, I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends, like, outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch tv. But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?
- [11:12]
Yap Host
Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
- [11:17]
Sponsor Representative
What's up? Yeah, fam. I travel so much for my job these days, and on top of that, I've been spending more time in Miami. In fact, I'll be down there keeping myself warm most of the winter.
- [11:28]
Yap Host
I love to travel, but at the.
- [11:30]
Sponsor Representative
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- [12:22]
Interviewee
You mentioned that you have a blog. It's a very cool blog. That's actually how I found you. I was looking for ways to monetize my podcast and came across one of your blogs.
- [12:30]
Nick Loper
Oh, nice.
- [12:31]
Interviewee
And one blog that I saw that I thought might be interesting to kind of recap for our listeners is this three laws of side Hustle Physics. Do you mind explaining what those three laws are?
- [12:42]
Nick Loper
Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton, so somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law, where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who are on the sidelines looking to get into the game. There has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on upwork, to try and get that first client to put yourself out there. And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned. One of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer journalist I had on the show. He had just won International Sports Photographer of the Year or something. Like his highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review. And his boss is like, man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise. And he's like, you gotta be kidding me. He's making 30 grand a year doing this. And he's like, this is not gonna work. And so that was the motivating factor to kind of get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about starting his side hustle. So that's kind of the first law. And it goes both ways. Like, once you're in motion, we see this over and over again. Ideas start to pop up that you never would have had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research. And that is really powerful. Like this inertia and Momentum law law number two is this law of force and impact. And so this is Newton's law of acceleration. Acceleration of an object occurs, you know, based on the force that was applied to it. So the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack. And so it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry. He told me he would have been happy with 10%. And so, like, that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change his life.
- [14:50]
Interviewee
I just want to pause here for a second because I love that, for me, rejection is such great motivation, you know, and it's like every time I've ever been rejected, it's been when I've, like, pivoted to something that is, like, a life achievement for myself. So I think that if you get rejected, if you feel like you've been let down, it's the best time to put that negative energy into something positive and do something different and impactful for yourself.
- [15:19]
Nick Loper
Yeah, this was kind of like hit home. We were at this, like, beach vacation this summer, and, you know, you're at the pool all the time, and you're like, man, I really should hit the gym more because I see all these people who are super fit. And so, like, maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health, you could see it in business, you could see it in relationships. It happens all over the place. And then the third law is this action and reaction. So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so we're recording this on election day, and somebody just posted, like, whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And even if nobody theoretically reacts to your stuff, because I wrote a personal blog for years and years and years that nobody really read outside of my friends and family. Well, that was a reaction. It was, you know, reaction that told me that, hey, you better write about stuff that people care about. And it wasn't all for waste because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning WordPress and learning all this other stuff. But it. It can be depressing when on the surface it's like, yeah, there was no reaction.
- [16:26]
Interviewee
What kind of side hustles do you write about on your blog?
- [16:29]
Nick Loper
The big three for the site right now are freelancing. Like, we talked about E Commerce and kind of like a blogging and podcasting, content marketing, types of businesses where you're, okay, I'm going to set up an online presence to talk about this subject matter that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not. Maybe I'm learning this subject matter and monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products.
- [16:53]
Interviewee
And do you think that there are certain personality types that thrive in this side hustle role?
- [16:59]
Nick Loper
I've seen it work across introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer going to be and how can I get that in front of my target customers?
- [17:11]
Interviewee
Let's say I'm a millennial and I have this idea for a side hustle. How can I test the idea and make sure it's a good one before I either quit my day job or spend a vast amount of time on it?
- [17:24]
Nick Loper
This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So what's, what's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing?
- [17:30]
Interviewee
Let's say selling something on Etsy.
- [17:32]
Nick Loper
Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings on eBay, Amazon, Redbubble, you know, some of these other similar marketplaces where people might be buying this stuff. If there are other people making sales, like, that's a fantastic sign, right? There's, there's money in that market. The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs like, I think, 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free. So you create your listing very affordably. And so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents. Etsy has on platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their, you know, listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. But one thing that you probably want to do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is like, you know, the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made. So you can seed that with some initial reviews from friends and family. You might even just give these away and say, I'd really prefer if you ordered this through Etsy to help my appearance on that platform. And you find that kind of a similar strategy not just on Etsy, but on itunes. Hey, can you review this podcast on Udemy? Hey, could you review my course on Amazon? Hey, could you review my book? Just to kind of seed the platform with a little bit of social proof so the algorithms start to work in your favor. And so people, when they do land on that page, they say, okay, this isn't a ghost town. There's actually something to this.
- [19:05]
Interviewee
Isn't that so funny how you could have thousands of listeners and the best personal feedback, but if you have no reviews, you ain't shit.
- [19:13]
Nick Loper
Yeah, and maybe that's feedback, too. If nobody wants your thing, if you can't get your friends and family to buy it, that's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into.
- [19:22]
Interviewee
And I know a lot of people are thinking about these days starting a podcast, starting a blog. Do you have any advice for those folks?
- [19:29]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting, specifically because I forget the latest stats. It was probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is. And so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie, like, left to go out and grow over the next five, 10, 15 years, like, as people discover on Demand audio, and they're probably going to react like I did. Like, this is amazing. How did I waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio when I could listen to stuff that is going to help me grow personally and professionally, like, really excited about that. The. The key then is, okay, how can I reach those people and the 40% that already do know about podcasts, how can I reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining? A friend of mine kind of gave me this was five or six years ago at a conference, gave me the rule of the Internet, which I quote all the time. It's, you know, people are only ever online for one of two reasons. You know, number one, to be entertained, and number two, to solve a problem. And you can think of it, that's Facebook and that's Google. To be entertained or solve a problem. And the podcast may bridge the gap there. Some friends have called it infotainment, where you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way, but putting the listener first. And it's a practice. It's a craft. The first 50 episodes of the side Hustle show, Awful. I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those, but it just took a while to hit my stride as a host. And I don't know, you're like a radio professional, so you're doing great right out of the gate, but it's a practice.
- [21:02]
Interviewee
Yeah, Yeah. I read that the average side hustle only makes $200 a month and $600 a month if you're really knocking it out of the park. But to me, that doesn't really sound like young and profiting type of stuff. That sounds like we could do better.
- [21:17]
Nick Loper
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that $2 to $600 a month level. What I would like to see of earnings history, you know, six to 12 months and other people will be more aggressive than this of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses. So you know you're not going to be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings to try and get to that ramp up period. The exception to that has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck. And you say, hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family. That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely. It has to align with your goals too. Right. Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. Hey, I love my work, but I do this stuff on the side because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money. For whatever reason, it's building my skills. It's exercising a different side of my brain. So not everybody is out to quit their day job.
- [22:27]
Yap Host
We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
- [22:35]
Interviewee
I personally feel like side hustles have a negative appeal to some people, especially like the older generation, that you should be more traditional, you should have a regular job. Have you faced any of that negative judgment?
- [22:49]
Nick Loper
That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that kind of economic macro positioning that we talked about where it's like, what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Why can't it be like the old days? Right? That's maybe one angle. The other angle is just maybe the word hustle. It has the connotation of I'm going to scam people or something like that. Not recognizing that just means your effort. Control what you can control, work as hard as you can, when you can, and be smart about it. Actually, side Hustle Nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine. He's like, look, you can have bad days at the plate, you're going to have bad days in the field. But hustle never slumps. And I was like, okay, I really like that. That stuck with me.
- [23:33]
Interviewee
Yeah, it is catchy. And what side hustles today, like this very moment in time, would you recommend to our listeners.
- [23:40]
Nick Loper
Oh, my gosh. As we talked about the freelancing consulting stuff, if you have a skill that's in demand, absolutely. Understand that your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of value. A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making 18 bucks an hour, which was awesome for him. In his early 20s, the company was turning around and charging the parents 100 bucks an hour. And he was like, wait a minute, I have this skill. I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that. Freelancing marketplace. Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet. Understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside of your paycheck. My wife and her business partner on the side, from her job, started a photography business completely unrelated to her engineering job. So it doesn't have to be. I'm an accountant by day, so I'll do accounting, you know, at night. We talked about the podcasting stuff. We talked about kind of like the online authority business, blogging, content marketing businesses. I continue to see and I continue to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys are posting. I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business and grow this stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had never even heard of. And I'm really excited by stuff like that. You know, people having this new ability to kind of monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that they might be able to put out there.
- [25:15]
Interviewee
Yeah, I feel like courses are getting more and more popular and so in demand because people just want to lear. And if it's unique content that they can't find anywhere else, you can package that up and monetize it, you know?
- [25:28]
Nick Loper
So, yeah, make it easy for me. Make it step by step. Absolutely.
- [25:31]
Interviewee
And how about blogs? Like, is there a way to really monetize blogs these days? Cause it seems so oversaturated.
- [25:37]
Nick Loper
Yeah, that was my initial reaction, too, but I keep getting proven wrong. You know, people starting relatively new sites again. Another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the uk so, like, just even a tiny little island where apparently, apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go buy these mattresses. But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full time living doing that. So, you know, the. On the blogging front, the trap I want people to avoid is like, okay, I'm going to start a personal blog and expect that that makes money. You know, the ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems. As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to disc. Usually it's going to be Google, usually it's going to be Pinterest. But thinking of these user to content platforms, that's a term from Rosemary groener who runs thebusybudgeter.com, it's like a personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. How are people going to discover this? And if it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, probably nobody's going to click on that. Probably nobody's going to come and read that. It's like you're going to pour your heart out. You're going to pour hours into creating this stuff, like, make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. It's something that somebody is looking for and you know, you're giving them the best chance to find it.
- [27:04]
Interviewee
Okay, so we're going to close out with one last question. Tell us about the day that you quit your 9 to 5 job and what made you officially decide to start your side hustle career.
- [27:18]
Nick Loper
The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss and this had been kind of on my mind for months, really, because I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. So I had to dinner with my boss and I'm like, okay, this is the day. I'm like, I'm gonna break up the news. I'm outta here. I'm gonna give my notice. It still took me a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it. Because it's like, is that allowed? Can I cut my own paycheck? I went to school, I have these obligations. Is this actually gonna work? And I had had several months of earnings history at that point, so it wasn't completely. You might have heard the definition of an entrepreneur. Somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's going to figure out how to build their parachute on the way down. That was not me. And it was still super scary. But after I told him it was this huge weight off my shoulders and it's just like, okay, this is real let's go do this.
- [28:16]
Interviewee
And for millennials who are working as side Hustle, when should they decide to make that move?
- [28:21]
Nick Loper
I would say once you have at least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business so you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're going to free up some time.
- [28:39]
Interviewee
Awesome. Well, I really enjoyed this. Before we go, can you let our listeners know where they can learn more about you and side Hustle Nation?
- [28:47]
Nick Loper
Absolutely. Hit up sidehustlenation.com ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part time business ideas that you can start today and no opt in required. And of course would love to have you tune into the Side Hustle show available in itunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well.
- [29:07]
Interviewee
Perfect. Thanks, Nick.
- [29:09]
Nick Loper
You bet. Thanks for having me.