#40 - Nick Loper of SideHustleNation.com
[#40] - Being expert enough with Nick Loper
Welcome back to the final episode of season four, and what a season it has been – but it’s not over just yet! Joining me to wrap up this serial-entrepreneur season is founder and chief side hustler of Side Hustle Nation, Nick Loper.
Have you ever had the itch to get a side hustle going!? If so, you will love this episode! If you have ever researched how to start your own side business, chances are high that you’ve come across Nick’s go-to website, www.sidehustlenation.com. Through his website and books, Nick guides start-up and seasoned entrepreneurs from all corners of the globe to make extra money, amplify their power and security and create a business they love.
In this episode, Nick talks us through his impactful career throughout his college days, how he pivoted through business ventures and what it means to be expert enough when launching a business. Nick also shares his windng road into the virtual assistance world, reveals his take on filtering through business ideas, and discusses whether social media is necessary when kickstarting your entrepreneurial journey. Key points throughout this episode include:
An introduction to Nick Loper.
Early pitching days and mastering door-to-door sales.
Entering the world of internet marketing.
Finding inspiration from failures and pivoting into a new career.
Standing out in a crowded space.
The beginning of Side Hustle Nation.
The ups and downs of an entrepreneurial journey.
How curiosity is key in business and the importance of gathering feedback.
Why entrepreneurs should focus on niching down.
Introducing sales and marketing to first-time entrepreneurs.
Do you know where your customers hang out?
Overcoming imposter syndrome sirens and embracing social media.
Nick’s business book recommendations.
Nick’s advice for finding your first ten customers.
Connect with Nick Loper:
https://www.sidehustlenation.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickloper/
Connect with First 10 Podcast host Conor McCarthy:
https://www.first10podcast.com
https://twitter.com/TheFirst10Pod
https://www.linkedin.com/in/comccart/
Resources:
Nick Loper Books:
https://www.amazon.com/Nick-Loper/e/B009N31662
The Go Giver by Bob Berg.
The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco.
https://www.themillionairefastlane.com/
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman.
https://www.oliverburkeman.com/books
Check out my podcast partners!
Buzzsprout:
https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=1389931
Otter:
https://otter.ai/referrals/ETRNKY16
Calendly:
https://calendly.grsm.io/ilev18qxpn1e
Produced in partnership with podlad.com
SPEAKERS
Conor McCarthy, Nick Loper
Nick Loper 00:01
I'm gonna be a blogger, right? But I was kind of like, I don't know if I want to like share this with friends and family, but I want random people on the internet to somehow find it. This is where you disconnect, so being unafraid to tell people what you're doing so they can let the referral engine start spinning.
Conor McCarthy 00:19
Hello, and welcome to season four of the First 10 Podcast. I'm your host, Conor McCarthy, and I help people start and grow their businesses. I do that through joint ventures collaborations, coaching, and online workshops. In each episode of this podcast, I interview business builders about the early days of starting a business about how they found their first 10 customers and got off the ground, so that you can learn what works and what doesn't. Check out my website Connormccarthy.me for more details. My guest today is Nick Loper and I couldn't be more excited to have Nick on the podcast. This is the last episode in the fourth season of the First 10 podcast and this season has been all about serial entrepreneurs, those entrepreneurs who have built multiple businesses over the years, and it's been fantastic to hear all the lessons about how people did it again, again and again. If you've ever wondered what it might look like to start your own side hustle, and you've gone googled the phrase side hustle, Nick's name has probably popped up close to the top of the search results. He has one of the authority sites on side hustles called SideHustleNation.com. In this conversation, we get into the early days of that, as well as his past ventures. And we also talk about what it means to be expert enough to launch a business. We talk about deconstructing your business ideas. We get into whether you need to have a social media presence or not. Nick dives into what it's like to have an experimental mindset about getting your first 10 customers. We also chat about what it's like to enter a quote unquote 'credit space'. Lastly, we talk a little bit about validating your business ideas. Oh, and Nick shares his trademark Loper clothes in this episode. So please do enjoy this episode with Nick Loper and thanks for listening. First of all, Nick, welcome to the show and thank you very much for taking the time to be with us here today.
Nick Loper 02:04
You the man, Conor. Thanks for having me.
Conor McCarthy 02:06
Can you just give us a quick 60 or 90 second overview of what you do right now.
Nick Loper 02:09
Right now I host side hustle nation and the side hustle show podcast, this is exploring new creative part time business ideas, ways to make extra money. Every week on air, we do that for eight years, almost nine years actually, it's been a labor of love and actually a life changing project for what started as a $50 mic, corner of a living room, kind of like duct tape. Anybody listening to this thing? So it's bee,n it's been a totally life changing journey to kind of deconstruct and share the stories of other have been there, done that side hustle entrepreneurs, and be able to build an audience and a business on the back of that.
Conor McCarthy 02:48
It's It's pretty incredible what you've done for anyone. I'll obviously include all the details in the show notes. But for anyone who doesn't know what you do, I highly recommend checking out Nick's website and see the backstory. Speaking of the backstory, you have a lot of experience starting new businesses and helping other people start businesses. Could you just go back in time a little bit and tell us about starting any one of your businesses, even side hustle nation and what it was like getting those first 10 customers?
Nick Loper 03:18
The business that like first really hooked me on entrepreneurship was this painting business, you know, residential house painting in college, and you know, they assign you up and say like, well, you know, here's here's the map like go go nuts, you know, go see how many paint jobs you can sell. And it was just knocking on doors. And I remember sitting in my truck on some like rainy March evening and trying to like, psych myself up to go, like, okay, practice my pitch. Okay. I'm Nick. And I'd love to give you a free estimate for house painting this summer. And just trying to get motivated to do it. You go knock on the first door, ring the doorbell and I think like nobody was home and you don't go out to the next one. And eventually somebody answers the door. And you know, you have conversations with people, most people are relatively pleasant, and they see you you know, you get your little, you know, branded polo shirt on and I would actually jog in between the houses, on the off chance that somebody either saw me from across the street or they you know, happen to be looking through the window. I felt like that would appear to be more more interesting than somebody like trudging up the driveway with a clipboard. And then the only challenge was like, if somebody lived at the top of the hill, like I'm panting by the time I get up there. Like do you need a drink of water, sir? Yeah. But it was a lot of fun. You know, trying to just one on one, you know, getting in front of customers where they already are and it kind of snowballed from there.
Conor McCarthy 04:44
Oh, I love it. Both that's so smart to actually you know, be seemed to be kind of hustling for the work I guess. I did see you it's like, this guy's working hard. So what do you remember any you know that that's literally door to door sales. Do you remember what it was like to get those first people who said yes? Was there anything about the way you pitched your work?
Nick Loper 05:08
You know, it was kind of a multi step process, you know, the first step was getting somebody to agree to an estimate, or, you know, agree to, you know, even just to share their name and phone number, basically, when you call them back later, Hey, can I set up a time for Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon, whenever you and your partner are free, you know, we'll come by and get this done. And then it was like delivering the estimate, and then trying to book the job from there. So it's like a, you know, multi step process. But you know, it was kind of, like, a lot of sales is like, kind of a numbers game where, you know, X number of leads, enter the top of the funnel, and then a certain percentage of those turned into estimates, and, and then a certain percentage of those turned into booked jobs. But it was, I don't know, it's just an eye opening experience. And it's like, you know, a bunch of 19 year olds with paint sprayers, like, everything that can go wrong, does go wrong, but you, you work through it, and it's all on you to kind of figure it out. So it was very, very formative experience and a humbling experience because, you know, up until that point, I was kind of like, you know, I'm so I'm so smart, I got this whole, this whole life thing figured out. And it's like, you know, it'll, it'll take you down a few pegs.
Conor McCarthy 06:16
Take you down a few pegs, exactly. So so after that illustrious painting, house painting career, what was next?
Nick Loper 06:23
Next was dabbling with the internet marketing stuff. So I was really fortunate to kind of be early days in the E commerce world, the affiliate marketing world, this started through an internship in Seattle for an online footwear retailer that was, you know, was a mom and pop kind of brick and mortar shoe store, who in the early days of the internet had some crazy idea to put Well, what would happen if we put some of our inventory online and hooked it up to this little shopping cart. And so by the time I came on board as there, you know, entry level marketing intern several years later, of course, like, you know, now they've got this whole warehouse, and the online portion of the business had grown way, way faster than that tiny little, you know, single location, brick and mortar store. But that was, that was my first exposure to pay per click advertising, and SEO and affiliate stuff. And so it was really cool. It was after that internship that I started doing affiliate marketing on my own, also in the footwear niche, eventually having a site built in the comparison shopping model, where you pull in the catalogs from Zappos, and Amazon and all these other footwear retailers and show you well, where can you find the best price on your next pair of shoes? We had all these cool product level, you know, coupon integrations in which brands were excluded from this deal? And how much is shipping gonna be? I don't know, it was a, it was a lot of fun. But it like a lot of businesses had a had a finite lifespan, comparison shopping is not what it once was where, you know, nowadays, you know, this will just start a product search on Amazon and assume they have the best price instead of starting a product search on Google and, you know, if trying to find out one of these resources.
Conor McCarthy 08:03
But even even back in those days, the numbers game still applies, I'm guessing it was how do we get eyeballs on this stuff to convert into sales ultimately,
Nick Loper 08:13
Yeah, that's the equation really online or offline equals traffic plus conversions. And then maybe the third pillar of the you know, the Perry Marshall tactical triangle is the economics of it, like, you know, price, and you know, how much you charging and stuff, but traffic and conversions. And so it was, in my case, driving traffic with Pay Per Click advertising on really long tail, like product specific search terms, like if somebody, you know, they're not searching for shoes, they're not searching for, you know, running shoes, they're not searching for, you know, you know, even one tier down, they're searching for, like, New Balance model, you know, XYZ, like the very, they're ready to make their buying decision, they're just looking for the best price or where to find it. And so that was, you know, how I was able to buy traffic and have that convert reasonably well. And at that time to, you know, a lot of these retailers really saw affiliate marketing, as you know, we're going to front load our customer acquisition costs, we're gonna pay a high percentage, especially for a physical product, you know, 10, 15 20%, in some cases, which is, you know, nowadays be lucky to squeeze out 4%. from Amazon, these companies were really investing heavily in customer acquisition reasoning, if we get somebody to buy one pair of shoes from us, then maybe they'll buy shoes for the whole family, or, you know, maybe we'll be able to keep this customer for 10 years. And so that was the business really played in the margin between the cost of traffic and then what that traffic was worth in terms of those affiliate conditions.
Conor McCarthy 09:38
Also an amazing experience for you to get into online marketing at that early stage of the internet when things were, well, the tools I'm guessing weren't half as sophisticated as what they are today and that just the knowledge about how to do it probably wasn't as widespread.
Nick Loper 09:54
It was a lot more expensive to develop anything. It's like you know, this was pre wordress, pre my awareness of WordPress. So as you know, it was like, you know, probably ended up costing a little over five figures to get the, you know, just to build out this comparison engine and now there's probably, you know, off the shelf software that would do it a lot faster. And I remember that from it was the, you know, the Netflix story like this, that'll never work or whatever that title of that Netflix book. He talks about, you know, getting this thing off the ground, you know, they had to raise $2 million initially to build the website and buy servers, because there's no AWS, there's no stripe, there's no Shopify, no nothing. Wow, it's like, oh, now, a lot of this is a little more plug and play.
Conor McCarthy 10:41
Yeah, absolutely. And so, so jumping forward again. So you, you're kind of doing these restarts all the time, between the painting, and then the digital marketing. What was after that, what was your next run of getting first 10 customers into something?
Nick Loper 10:57
Yeah, on the side from the shoe business. So three years into the shoe business, you know, I felt I finally felt comfortable to give my notice at work and turn in the keys to the company car and say, Okay, I'm gonna be a full time side hustle, like a full time entrepreneur at this point. And it was on the side from that project started, you know, a bunch of other semi related projects in the online space, that for the sake of disclosure, like most of them didn't go anywhere. And I started a handbag site, because a lot of my advertisers like also sold accessories, handbags and luggage. And so that was a was a natural extension already have these partnerships. Horrible flop. I started like a sandal site was like, maybe I could get even like nicher and like, only focus on but it's like super seasonal, lower price points, like just for lots of like, you know, duplicated effort in a lot of ways. Didn't really work. I started a wine related site, which had no business, I don't know anything about wine. I don't care about wine. It's just this kind of a garbage site. But it was in the research for that site that I stumbled into another idea that did end up working. So I found this site that was like reviewing wine clubs, like these different like memberships, where they'd send you three bottles of wine every month or something. I was like, oh, and they had like this user generated content down at the bottom, people could drop in their own reviews of this wine club. And then they would affiliate link out to the thing. Oh, that's that's kind of interesting. What can I you know, this seems like an interesting business model, like what can I pivot that to, in an area that I am more interested in or know something a little bit more about, and a business that came out of that was called virtual assistant assistant.com, which was Yelp for outsourcing company or TripAdvisor for different virtual assistant services. And that ended up you know, I was burning that for nine years, and actually sold it late 2020. But that was really my first experience with WordPress, as you know, beyond just as a blog platform, but WordPress as a CMS, it was my first YouTube videos, my first social media account, my first guest posts, my first email list, it was a really important kind of experience too and being a part of that industry for the better part of a decade was was really kind of cool to cover and watch it grow.
Conor McCarthy 13:17
Yeah, wow. That's incredible. You really did try. You tried a lot of things, sandals, footwear, but it was the wine into the virtual assistants thing. So what did you bring with you, that enabled you to kind of leap into the virtual assistant Business?
Nick Loper 13:28
Yeah, it was this idea of expert enough, you know, knowing not being, you know, the guru preaching from on high, but being like a practitioner, like, okay, I've hired a handful of virtual assistants myself at this point. And early on, definitely had this question and pain point of how do you know how this process works? Like, how do you? Are you supposed to pay taxes on this? Like, do you? You know, are these people gonna steal my ideas? Like, how do you deal with security, and just how, you know, which of these companies are legit? And it was, you know, born out of that curiosity, to start creating these profiles and collecting reviews? And anybody like if somebody was mentioning this company on Twitter, good, bad or indifferent. Like I would, you know, you know, message saying Hey, would you would you mind coming over here stopping, stopping by and dropping in a review, would ask the company's like, if they had any happy customers, like, hey, would you have them come by and just to, like, try and see the initial content on the site. And then, you know, several years later kind of took on a momentum of its own and became kind of the, you know, the go to for that industry or the no big review platform for that industry. I think that's still a totally viable business model today, and like reviewing products that aren't already reviewed 1000s of times on Amazon, like reviewing software reviewing, you know, direct to consumer type of stuff. Like I think there's a place to play there.
Conor McCarthy 14:56
That's really interesting because to me that it's, it's so useful, whether always seems so kind of crowded. But this is probably something you hear a lot. I mean, and we can not to jump forward. But you know, you deal with, you're in touch with so many entrepreneurs launching every kind of side hustle. What are your thoughts on so called crowded spaces?
Nick Loper 15:14
It's only going to be more a year from now. Like the side hustle show, so that started a couple years after the virtual assistant site, it seems like did the world really need another, you know, entrepreneur interview podcast, like it seemed crowded then right, which is kind of nuts to think about. But, you know, JLD was was going Pat Flynn was going, Amy Porterfield and Mixergy, of course, was going strong. Like there was David Siteman Garland had like the rise to the top like, the format had been done, right. So it wasn't anything new and different, but maybe trying to build a unique bringing a unique spin to it and say, Okay, well, we're gonna focus on the side hustle angle, and I like your angles, specifically, like, we're not going to do you know, how I built this, you know, cover this whole story I like, I like this, you know, the first 10 customers, because that's always the most interesting part like the, you know, the hustle to go and, you know, move from zero to one, I think it's a big challenge.
Conor McCarthy 16:10
And I love the way you phrase, you said it off camera as well. Whereas like, zero to one is, is the thing, like, that's the, the idea of escaping gravity to get out into space. You know, it's like all this energy, and it's such a, it's the vital stage really, to get something off the ground.
Nick Loper 16:28
It's such a challenge much more, it's so much easier to go from one to 10 than from zero to one, like, it's just the inertia, the gravity of it all and like to get somebody to pay you, or even to pay attention to you. It's a challenging thing right now. But yeah, it's become more crowded, more competitive, and it's only likely to continue to, to be that way. So it's like, we know the old several, you know, when was the best time to plant a tree, you know, 30 years ago. But you know, all else being equal, you're probably going to wish you started today, because you'll be a year older when you finally do get started.
Conor McCarthy 17:02
That's safe advice. So side hustle nation, when, when and how did that come about?
Nick Loper 17:08
Yeah this is 2013 and now we're a couple years post, the virtual assistant little side project, which which we made a side project for I'm still running the shoe business, that's still kind of like the main thing my bread and butter, but it was as a result of kind of a low point in the shoe business. So that had lots of ups and downs and twists and turns like a lot of entrepreneurial journeys. But you turn it, you know, it's turning around and asking a lot of the questions that I'll ask the audience today, you know, what are what are other people coming to you for advice on? What do you ever get tired about talking about, you know, what's, you know, what's really exciting and interesting? What are you curious about? And this idea of deconstructing different business ideas? Which can, you know, again, why I think you have a great concept for your show, like, you know, trying to figure out where the money comes from? Where does the customer come from, like always being very, just inquisitive on like, well, that's a really, you know, you'd see business models, like in the, even the airport, or the airline, like magazine, or in Sky Mall or something like, that's, ideally, they come up with that, you know, Are people really buying this thing? What are their margins, like, all that stuff was really interesting. So I rebranded this, you know, old personal blog that I had that nobody ever read into side hustle nation again, you know, paying attention. Well, what what are the people who have successful blogs have in common? Well, they have a niche, you don't have a niche. So you know, pick something, the podcast was almost done out of peer pressure, because the people that I was paying attention to, at the time, when you want to build a personal brand online, you got to have a podcast, or YouTube, you know, those sorts of options, and I definitely don't want to do video. So maybe maybe podcasting is the lesser of two evils. And I still so I ordered the mic, and I, you know, it just sat on my desk for weeks. And it's like, you just you look over at it, and you're like, nothing is gonna happen. And so you scheduled that first interview, buddy. So, gratefully, Chris Kilbourne agreed to be guest number one. And it was just, you know, trying to get over that, get over that hump. And then, you know, once you commit to it, you're like, Okay, this is something that I find, I really enjoy doing. And I'm seeing just enough interaction to, to justify continuing to do it.
Conor McCarthy 19:29
And what surprised you about because when you love something, you've got an idea in your head about what it's going to be what it's going to look like and how it's going to do. What surprised you the most about the kind of the feedback or how people received it in the early days.
Nick Loper 19:44
It was surprising I thought of myself as a writer for first and foremost because I had this personal blog and I'm, I've always enjoyed the craft in the process of writing and feel like I'm much better than I am still good, I guess I can barely form a sentence, put me on the spot. But within the first year, the podcast, you know, grew three times faster. And so that was really eye opening to me like, okay, maybe this is less competitive than the world of Google. I mean, there's far fewer podcasts and websites. Okay, so that maybe makes sense. But that doesn't necessarily even need to be about me sharing, you know, my expertise is mostly me pointing the mic, in fact, for that entire first year, is entirely interviews, you know, pointing the mic at somebody else, and trying to get them to share their stories. And so that was really eye opening. And, you know, even if you zoom out now, over the course of nine years, like, you know, the first user on the charts is like, you know, barely above zero. But it was, it was motivating. And it was just enough traction, to kind of keep it keep it alive. And you had people who were, who were tuning in who were commenting on episodes, and was like, oh, you know, people are I remember, like the first 50 Download day on the same chart. And it's like, I'm reasonably confident I, if I have, you know, punched above my weight class, or outside my own circle of contacts right now. It's like, it's kind of scary, you know, put something out in the world. And like, what are what are people gonna think about it?
Conor McCarthy 21:14
Yeah, and people turn around and say, Actually, we really like it. It's like, Oh, Jesus, it's working. I hope you're enjoying this episode, and that there's some actionable and insightful advice that you can take out to your business. Helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast, and want more information, including a bunch of free resources on how to find your first 10 customers and grow your business, check out first10podcast.com, that's 10 one, zero, or find me on Twitter @thefirst10pod. Now, you probably hear what I'm about to say on every podcast you listen to. And it makes a really big difference to the show. If you find this podcast in any way useful or enjoyable, I'd be so grateful. If you left me a review on iTunes, it really does make a big difference in terms of other people discovering the podcast. Also, if you leave a review, you will get to see your name and the review in lights. What I'll do is I'll design your words and post them online, tagging you and your project along with it. I know it's a pretty sweet deal. Okay, let's get on with the show. What was the first batch of people who really took an interest in side hustle nation, or they're kind of shared characteristics?
Nick Loper 22:26
That's a good question. And a lot of people from the early days, it's fun to see what they're working on today. Because there's a lot of times there's been, you know, two or three pivots along the way since then. But one thing I learned early on, was the necessity of having a clickable title or a compelling sounding title, where it was the, you know, Episode Five, it's like, you know, how one Fiverr seller earn enough to buy a house in his first year. And that was kind of the pitch that they sent me or, you know, somehow connected with this guy, an article fighter, and he's still active on Fiverr. But he's like, he's like, Wait, what are you possibly selling for $5 that you could make all this money. It's like, Nick, Nick, you know, it's all about the upsells you gotta like schooled me on, you know, his process for that, but having a compelling sounding title, because the barrier to entry on podcasting was instantly is, you know, kind of a pain to, I gotta find my app. And then I gotta find your show, and I gotta find the episode that I'm looking for. Like, so, if your title isn't compelling, like, you got to deliver some value of that, and they got to deliver on that value. So that was one thing. So early on, we focused a lot on online business, you know, the blogging, podcasting, YouTubing, you know, content creation stuff, and that's still the focus today, the niche site stuff, you know, we're gonna make money with Adsense or E zoic, or media vine adthrive, or we're going to, you know, make affiliate clicks off to Amazon or whoever. We focused a lot on freelancing service based businesses, and still do today. You know, whether those be online or local services, I think we've seen some really fun examples in the local service arena. And then a lot on the E commerce side. So you know, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, product flipping Craigslist, you know, those were kind of the business models that were going on, early on. But one thing that was interesting because it you know, the advice that I got early on was you need to niche down, you want to be become the go to guy for Amazon FBA or something. It's like, but I don't know that that's not the show that I want to create, like, I want something that's a little bit more broad. And that, you know, is detrimental in some ways, because it's, you know, it's the shiny object syndrome, but, and you get people who are like, Well, I just listened to, you know, just binge on 300 episodes. Like, that's cool. And I'm, I'm flattered by that but like, pick something, you know, you're gonna take action on it. Like it's not necessarily meant to be, you know, a you know, binge from episode one to Episode 300 or episode 500. But it's, it's a lot of fun to showcase different ideas and because there's there's some common threads. But there's also like, a million different ways to get it done.
Conor McCarthy 25:12
Yeah, yes, that is a great. That's really good to hear. Because I totally hear you have a lot of people, there's so much good content now to consume around starting a business that your full time job could be consuming content about starting your business. If someone comes to you and says, I've got an idea for x, what are the first three things you would say? Okay, go to these things first.
Nick Loper 25:35
Yeah, that's awesome to have an idea to start with is I guess I find people in two different camps, right? There's the camp of I've got too many ideas. I don't know what to pick. And it's like, okay, you know, I've been there from time to time, but more often I'm the other person, especially early on, it's like, if I, if I just have the right idea, right? The right idea, I could be a great entrepreneur, and you find people kind of in these two different camps. And for the person on that side, it'd be like, Well, hey, you know, there's 500 episodes, go check out sidehus.com/ideas. There's a million ways to get it done. But for that person who already has an idea, I think your next stage is like, well, how like, what is the lowest risk way? I can validate this? How can I go from zero to one? How can I get a customer to say yes to this thing? without investing $30,000? In a website, without buying business cards or wrapping my truck or whatever? It is, like trying to get somebody to say yes, and if that's, you know, I don't know, we, we should dive into an example of like, what that might what business idea? You're, you're kicking around?
Conor McCarthy 26:37
Oh, no, I actually don't have one on top of mind. But but in the past, I've I feel like I've had so many that I've either started and not followed through on or I just didn't even start, to pick end from that kind of analysis by paralysis, you might say, I've kind of not even getting there. So I'm on the spot. Now I'm trying to think of a random idea that we could kick around.
Nick Loper 27:01
Well, there's something like, so I'll give you a couple examples like that were that were for me too heavy for liftoff. Like they were too technical. They were too like, they probably could have been cool. But I don't know, like, so when in college, my friend when you call them up on his cell phone, instead of hearing like the general like, ring, ring, like while you're waiting for pickup, like it would play some song that he chose. And this was like an add on service from his cell phone provider that he could do is like, I never heard of this before. Like, this is really cool. What if you could, you know, play ads based on your location, and it'd be super annoying, but it was like you could have free cell phone service, like add support. It was like, I don't know anybody in the telecom industry. Like, I don't know anything about like how this would work. But it was like, that was one idea. And then the other idea that I wanted to do was like, fancy hands, which was like a, you know, on demand personal assistant service, plus Pinterest plus affiliate marketing. And it was like, Okay, if I could, you know, think this is a cool looking piece of clothing, and then you know, crowdsource what? Actually it is, and where can you find it and collect an affiliate commission on that? And have this army of personal shoppers gonna do it? That's like, I don't know, it was just, it never got past the idea stage. So, yeah, that's kind of where he, you know, try and try and start small. And so maybe if, like, if you are trying to do that personal shopper thing, like, okay, you know, maybe you can find somebody who is already have a heavy Pinterest user and say, like, Okay, could I? Would it be valuable to you, if I could curate, you know, some of these outfits based on the stuff that you're pinning, and maybe that evolves into something, but like, you know, do the things that don't scale first, and then try to figure out the scale later is what happens a lot of times in this like, early validation stage.
Conor McCarthy 28:48
I love that and do things that don't scale, as was one of the few mantras of this podcast, I think, I think it's so important. Because there is such a desire, I guess, to go and build the thing, build the app, create the website, whatever, before actually going out and, and validating in it in a low risk way, which I think is a really important part of that sentence. Like there are ways to test things for almost no money now.
Nick Loper 29:12
Yeah, totally. My friend Todd Tresidder runs a site called financialmentor.com. And he kind of dropped this on the side hustle show a couple years ago, he's like, and he called it like, the, the law that governs wealth growth equation or something like is he's a super smart dude. But he's like, you know, as long as you keep your risks low, and you know, you're taking swings, it's something that has some potential upside, it is really only a matter of time before you find something that hits is like, you're going to minimize your losses. But once you do find something that takes off like it erases all of that, and still can build some serious wealth.
Conor McCarthy 29:48
I love that. That's, yeah, that's, it's great. And there are I think there are now again, speaking of content, there's lots of stories. Sidehustle nation has tons of them people who just went out and did It just validated the idea of friends and family or whatever it is. And there's definite ways to do that. When it comes to sales and marketing, how do you frame even those words or those conversations with new entrepreneurs?
Nick Loper 30:13
I think of marketing more as awareness and sales is closing the deal. And so they're, you know, they work together. But so I like to focus on the marketing stuff. If the audience is big enough, you don't really have to worry about sales so much. Like, I mean, I guess I gotta sell like sponsorship spots, and stuff like that, which doesn't really feel like sales and a lot of ways like, well, here's here, here's the size of the audience. You know, here's what we talked about, here's what I think would would resonate, like, you know, what do you think is kind of like the typical clothes, and it was made same clothes from the house painting days? Here's the contract, here's the estimate, here's what it includes. What do you think, right? It's just, you know, put the ball back in their court. The casual, the casual, open, or closed, someone has in the past. But the marketing side of things, I kind of figured out, you know, top of the funnel, like, how do I get in front of people where they're already doing business? Is it Amazon? And that's why you see, you know, a handful of side hustle themed books, is it Facebook? Why you see the side hustle nation, Facebook group, like if somebody searches these keywords on different platforms, like I want them to find me, I want them to be introduced to this content, this ecosystem. Same thing on on Google, but you can find whatever, wherever your customers already hanging out, maybe it's LinkedIn, maybe it's Reddit, maybe it's, you know, the local Chamber of Commerce, you can find people in a bunch of getting creative on different partnerships and different ways to find access to those people without, you know, just my original is like, I'm gonna be a blogger, right? And just, but I was kind of like, shy, no, I don't want to I don't know if I want to, like, share this with friends and family. But I want random people on the internet to somehow find it, let alone you don't know anything about SEO, okay. But it's just this weird, this weird disconnect. So being unafraid to tell people what you're doing so they can let the Referral Engine start spinning. Because even if they're not your customers, right, it's tapping into your networks network in a lot of ways where you Well, if you're clear on who you help, and what you do for them, like, then it's easier to make that referral for you.
Conor McCarthy 32:19
Absolutely. And I love what you just said, there. I think that's stopped money. A person from hitting publish on a blog post. It's like, I want the random strangers that don't know me to know this about me. But I don't want the people closest to me to read this.
Nick Loper 32:32
I was always having the hardest time. So I had this opportunity to do local TEDx talk 2014 impostor syndrome, sirens like blaring everywhere like you don't have like, Who are you to be doing this? Right. And I had the hardest time like rehearsing in front of my, live in front of my friends. Because all of a sudden was like, Oh, this is like serious, Nick, this is like vulnerable, in a new way. Like, were you normally light hearted, jokey. It was just, I don't know, it was it was a lot more difficult than I think I expected some. There's a lot. There's a lot of truth to that. Yeah.
Conor McCarthy 33:11
Oh, god. Yeah. What do you say, I don't know if you've encountered this when you talk to freelancers specifically. But there's a lot of people who have a kind of, I don't want to do social media, when I'm launching my thing. Yeah, partly maybe out of fear at the sheer size and scale that it appears to be. Maybe partly out of putting yourself out there again, for exactly what we're talking about. Do you have any way to navigate that conversation?
Nick Loper 33:37
It's, it's definitely a challenge. I mean, I would focus on you know, the one maybe two core platforms where your audience is most likely to be and maybe one is your website, like it, you know, have a home base that you own, and maybe one is YouTube, or Instagram or LinkedIn, like trying to, you know, pick one to start with? And then we would I get this question a lot, especially for people who are working full time jobs, and I will do my posts on social media about my side project, because my boss is gonna see it, and he's gonna ask questions. And it could be as simple as you know, I, you know, I had, I had a couple of people reach out to me for graphic design help. So just a heads up, I'm gonna add that to my LinkedIn or something, like, be casual about it. And then you can start talking about it like, you can. Now they're aware that that is a thing that you also do, or, Oh, I had some friends asked to help me take pictures on the weekend. So you know, you might see me, you know, posting some, you know, photography stuff, you know, unrelated. Like, I don't know what, what you do when you're what you do in your spare time doesn't happen. Nobody owns you 24 hours a day.
Conor McCarthy 34:43
Yeah, yeah, that's smart. I like that. As always start small. You know, you can't get into a struggle too quickly that way. Are there any books outside of your own books, of course, which I'll link to in the show notes, any books you recommend other entrepreneurs read when they're starting out?
Nick Loper 34:58
Start fresh. Starting out, I think the Go Giver is one of my favorites. This is Bob Berg. Just on the on the mindset of being helpful first and then trusting that results will follow. I think the Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco is really good if you can get over all the talk about, you know, fancy fast cars and so like, you leave all that aside, but I think you can see his point is like, if you want to, if you if you want to make a lot of money, you got to figure out a way to help a lot of people and like, so there's there's some similarities there. But he, I think that one is worth a read. And then lately, the one that has kind of resonated recently is called 4000 weeks, which is this was not the productivity book that I expected. The premise is like a look, you know, we all got about 4000 weeks at an average lifespan, and they, they start ticking away pretty, pretty quick here. It was more about accepting the natural limits on your time, and we see everybody's highlight reel feed on social media, like well, they're starting this thing, or they're off traveling to India, or, you know, doing all this cool stuff. And so and so your like bucket list expands to this whole realm of possibilities of amazing things that you could do. And 4000 weeks argues like, you know, be present, be happy, in the moment, be realistic with what you can accomplish. And just the joy of missing out, right? There's this FOMO that is pervasive right now. But like, no, just embrace what's in front of you and make the most of that, because that's kind of where you know where the most where most of your life is gonna be. It is a fantastic book. I read it a couple of months ago. So I second that recommendation. And it is it's surprising. There's so many times in that book where you kind of go, oh, yeah, I do have this one life, which we forget in the day to day, comings and goings, and everything's so busy. And I actually I started reading his blog as well. And he's very much a kind of like, don't feel like, do less in the day than you can you can, this is his mindset because in the long term, you'll get it all done. But the chances that you'll spend your time working on the important stuff are higher, instead of doing all trying to get all the busy stuff done. Yeah. Very, very good book. I thought that was insightful. But it's not like a normal productivity book, where you got to use this project management system, and you know, use this little browser extension to block. You know, this other stuff. I was like, oh, you know, as much more on the mindset side of things, which I thought was cool.
Conor McCarthy 37:33
Yeah, yeah, it's very cool. As a last question, I always ask my guests, what advice would you give to someone who's going out to find their first 10 customers today?
Nick Loper 37:41
I think you got to think about it as an experiment. And you see what works, you put on your side hustle, lab coat and set it up as an experiment in your mind. If it works, great if it doesn't work, I mean, think of that scientist in the in the lab, like the test tube might blow up in their face, but they don't call it a failure. They just call it like, Okay, I got some results from that. And I, you know, went back to the drawing board. And I think that lessens the inevitable stings of the setbacks that come along the way. And because that's happening, that's the that's the podcast, that's all of these website projects. It's just like, well, let's see what see what works. A friend of mine likened it to a game of chess like, you know, first move when I'm gonna put my pawn out there and see what kind of reaction it gets. And that kind of dictates where do you go from there?
Conor McCarthy 38:29
Amazing. Such a great way to end the podcast. Nick, thank you so much for your time and your smarts and everything you do on Sidehustlenation, I will obviously link to that so people can find your work. But yeah, thank you. Thank you for your time.
Nick Loper 38:43
Thank you.
