0:00

Here are 10 side hustle trends

0:02

for 2025. What's up, what's

0:04

up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to The

0:06

Side Hustle Show because your nine to

0:08

five may make you a living, but

0:10

your five to nine makes you alive.

0:12

Today we're tackling some side hustle trends

0:14

that you should be aware of because

0:16

they might impact what business you start

0:19

and how you think about scaling it.

0:21

And to help me out with these

0:23

is a longtime friend and friend of

0:25

the show. He's been covering online side

0:27

hustles even longer than I have from

0:29

nichepresuits.com. Spencer Hans, welcome back to The

0:31

Side Hustle Show. Nick, it's great to

0:33

be here, longtime listener, follower of the

0:35

show. And of course, we've connected a

0:37

couple of times in person. It's always

0:39

fun to talk about side hustles, niche

0:41

projects, if you will. So yeah, really

0:43

excited to jump in. Yes, couple old

0:46

timers here. We'll go

0:48

for it. So almost all of our

0:50

content starts from the question, how

0:52

do I make extra money? And to

0:54

answer that, I think it's important

0:56

to know where the market's been, where

0:58

it is today, and maybe where

1:00

you see it potentially going. So that's our

1:02

goal for today, 10 or maybe more. We'll

1:04

see what happens as we get going.

1:06

10 observations from a couple, like we said,

1:08

a couple old guys that you can

1:10

use hopefully to make some more money this

1:12

year. And trend number one that

1:14

I want to bring up is for the

1:16

last year and a half or so ever

1:18

since this helpful content update is what I'm going

1:21

to call the shrinking SEO

1:23

landscape. Rand Fishkin has called it

1:25

zero -click publishing, but just in

1:27

the search results you see

1:29

more AI answers, AI snippets, you

1:31

see more Reddit, you see

1:33

more user -generated content, you see

1:35

these like huge like image Card

1:37

blocks like side oscillation used to rank for

1:40

a lot of like listicle type of content But

1:42

now like this huge chunk of the page

1:44

is getting like well We'll just parse out all

1:46

the items on your list and put a

1:48

little image by it like well Pushes everything else

1:50

lower lower down on the page. You know,

1:52

what are you seeing with niche pursuits? What are

1:54

you seeing with publishers trying to combat this shrinking?

1:58

piece of the pie plus, user changing.

2:00

Like I know from my own

2:02

personal experience, like I find myself using

2:04

chat GPT as a search engine

2:06

or as an answer engine rather, more

2:08

often than Google these days. Yeah.

2:10

Quickly changing landscape, a lot is going

2:12

on in the SEO world. I

2:14

think you hit on that sort of

2:16

the zero click landscape that we're

2:18

entering in. I've seen a lot of

2:20

publishers that, yeah, their answers are

2:22

being taken by those AI overviews that

2:24

Google is putting out. Not only

2:27

has there been a lot of Updates

2:29

right you mentioned the helpful content

2:31

update, but a lot of Google core

2:33

updates that feel like a lot

2:35

of small publishers have been impacted heavily

2:37

with right, but even some large

2:39

publishers I've talked with privately with that

2:41

Their rankings in Google haven't changed

2:43

like they still rank number one for

2:45

the term or number two for

2:47

the term right that they originally ranked

2:49

for but because there's now this

2:51

AI overview they don't get as

2:53

many clicks, right? So the

2:55

rankings technically haven't changed. They still

2:58

are the number one organic result for

3:00

whatever, but they're getting less clicks

3:02

because people now just read that AI

3:04

overview, right? Yeah. And so there's

3:06

that, that Google has changed. And then

3:08

the other thing, I'm in the

3:11

same boat with you. And I think

3:13

a lot of people are like,

3:15

I am starting to use chat GPT

3:17

a lot more, right? Because it

3:19

remembers what I searched previously. Like I'll

3:21

say, Hey, I'm starting a little side

3:23

hustle on this. And then I might ask

3:25

it a series of questions like, what do I

3:28

need to get started? And then I might

3:30

ask, you know, later, what products

3:32

should I buy to help me with

3:34

that? Right? And it's just like this ongoing

3:36

thing that You don't really do

3:38

on Google very well. You'd have to

3:40

type out like two paragraphs to

3:42

do it. ChatGPT just remembers your previous

3:44

searches. Hey, you can give it, you can

3:46

provide it a lot more context, a

3:48

lot more detail. We're like, hey, we're visiting

3:50

Japan with two boys. They're seven and

3:52

nine. What do you recommend for this two

3:54

week itinerary? And it like spits out

3:57

this detailed day by day thing. It's

4:01

frustrating from the content creator perspective because

4:03

somebody had to create that for it to

4:05

crawl. If their business

4:07

model was monetizing with ad

4:09

revenue or affiliate clicks, where

4:11

are they left? What's the

4:13

incentive to keep creating this

4:15

content for the AI to

4:17

chew on? Where does it

4:20

go? For a time,

4:22

a little still a little bit

4:24

torn, there's still got to

4:26

be... Some value in being a

4:28

primary source like scooping a

4:30

story, you know providing first -hand

4:32

Experience and review content, but if

4:34

it ends up just getting

4:37

aggregated and scraped and resummarized I

4:39

don't know why why are we

4:41

doing this? It's extremely frustrating right to

4:43

the content creator because you're exactly

4:45

right somebody had to create all those

4:47

different itineraries to Japan,

4:49

right? That chat GPT had to

4:51

learn on, right? So we as

4:53

publishers over the last, you know,

4:55

however long you've been publishing have

4:57

been creating and researching. And

4:59

a lot of people have been traveling

5:01

to these locations and taking pictures and,

5:03

you know, travel bloggers in particular have

5:05

been hit really hard. Food bloggers in

5:08

particular have been hit really hard, right? Where

5:10

AI can now just spit out the recipe

5:12

for you. That's that sort of thing. And

5:14

so where does that leave? Publishers,

5:16

I don't know the writing.

5:18

answer going forward. Other than

5:20

we're in this really big

5:22

shift, this big transition phase

5:25

of, boy, you either need

5:27

to provide really unique content, or

5:29

like you said, maybe scooping

5:31

truly groundbreaking stories, or your writing

5:33

is just so fascinating that you

5:35

can build an audience, you have

5:37

an email list. people truly

5:39

following you for your personality or

5:42

for your writing abilities or for

5:44

whatever it is that makes you

5:46

unique. So building an

5:48

audience is just becoming

5:50

so important, right? Because if

5:52

you're just there for that transactional

5:54

query and you are making money

5:56

with ads in the past, that

5:58

may be not a very strong

6:01

business going forward. Yeah, it's

6:03

a challenging, a changing landscape.

6:05

And maybe that brings us

6:07

to trend number two in

6:09

light of the SEO challenges

6:12

or the search traffic challenges. I'm

6:15

still, maybe this is old school, but I

6:17

still think you ought to have a website as

6:19

your home base, something you truly do own

6:21

and control. But we've seen this shift

6:23

towards what we might call social

6:25

first audience building or social first publishing,

6:27

where I'm going to go out into

6:31

Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter,

6:33

and like try and bring people back

6:35

into my world or try and go

6:37

where, you know, go where my

6:39

audience already is and try and create

6:41

content, build up reputation authority on whatever

6:43

topic it is on these other platforms

6:45

and then... Question

6:48

mark, question mark, question mark. Step

6:50

three, monetize a profit. It's like,

6:52

it's not as simple as it was,

6:54

you know, just pasting in an AdSense or

6:56

a Mediavine script and saying, well, now

6:58

I get paid you, so I got revenue.

7:00

Right. Yeah, exactly, right. For

7:02

a long time in particular, as

7:04

we talk about... and blogging a

7:06

lot. The model was like, okay,

7:08

get this organic traffic from Google.

7:10

And now that pie is shrinking.

7:13

I think a lot of content creators are

7:15

trying to get that organic traffic to

7:17

avoid having to do paid

7:19

media, but they're doing it, like

7:21

you said, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter,

7:25

LinkedIn, pick your platform. YouTube

7:27

is a big one. And then

7:29

what are they doing with that audience?

7:31

It all just depends. I

7:33

agree that, hey, that should be

7:35

maybe one arrow in your quiver

7:37

of like, okay, what's the organic

7:39

reach that I can get? Where

7:41

am I publishing my content? Pick

7:44

a platform, whatever it is, Instagram, YouTube.

7:46

Yeah, and I would probably say pick one

7:48

to start with. study

7:50

it, learn it, own it, and

7:52

go deep, you know, simplify first,

7:54

diversify second. But then do lead them

7:56

to a website or to an email

7:59

list or some central hub where, hey,

8:01

you interact with your audience on

8:03

a more intimate level. A lot

8:05

of businesses do that well, and

8:07

it's just, I used

8:09

to say, hey, go to Google

8:11

and get that organic reach, but

8:13

maybe, yeah, it is more a

8:15

social approach. I think that's, I'm

8:17

seeing that a lot. Yeah, I

8:19

think it's going to lead to

8:22

more thoughtful or more creative monetization

8:24

strategies where it's like if the game plan was

8:26

to just, you know, blanket the web, like

8:28

trying to target, you know, long tail

8:30

search queries, you're going to have to

8:32

have a more in -depth knowledge base around

8:34

that topic to be able to monetize with

8:36

a, you know, coaching or

8:38

consulting program, like solve somebody's specific

8:40

problem. You're going to have to go

8:42

up market in a way if the

8:44

bottom end of that information -based search.

8:46

Traffic is just gonna get eaten by

8:49

AI. Yeah, and you know one other

8:51

thing for people to consider that I'm

8:54

seeing is video first

8:56

content is a bigger

8:58

moat Right, it's gaining

9:00

in a lot of

9:02

popularity the platforms tiktok

9:05

Instagram YouTube right are

9:07

probably if you're willing and able

9:09

to get in front of the

9:11

camera Create great videos whether it's

9:13

shorts or long -form videos that

9:15

is going to have a little bit

9:18

bigger moat than if you're just to

9:20

do written content, because AI can spit

9:22

out written content all day long, but

9:24

it hasn't quite gotten to the place

9:26

where it can replicate you and I

9:28

quite as well. There's still a moat

9:30

there. If you can do video first

9:32

content, I think you can build an

9:34

audience faster. Okay, that makes sense. You

9:36

played around with any AI assisted video,

9:39

like you're doing any Hagen, Spencer,

9:41

what's like your little avatar talking

9:43

on the screen? I haven't gone

9:45

as far as, you know, my

9:47

avatar so much, AI B -roll, you

9:49

know, elements that I can add

9:51

to my videos, done some things

9:53

like that, or other sort of

9:55

silly B -roll. I had some

9:57

B -roll on a YouTube video recently

10:00

where I was talking

10:02

to an artificial

10:04

intelligence... you know, person, it was

10:06

quite obvious that they were not real.

10:08

It was sort of like an inside

10:10

B -roll joke or whatever, but so played

10:12

around, but not like made it a

10:14

main portion of my videos at this

10:16

point. Yeah, video first,

10:18

social first, create

10:21

that bigger moat where

10:23

if you have that firsthand experience,

10:25

like any to you on camera, you're

10:27

building that relationship and trust that is

10:29

a much deeper relationship. And same thing

10:31

with podcasting, like hard to build an

10:33

audience, but once you have people, paying

10:36

attention like really, really valuable audience, especially

10:38

if they're going to spend 45 minutes

10:40

a week with you in their earbuds,

10:42

right? You build that relationship much more

10:44

powerfully than somebody, you know, googling

10:46

something and like skimming a blog post

10:48

for, you know, 90 seconds and then

10:50

they're on to the next thing. Yep.

10:52

Exactly. The next one on my list,

10:54

it kind of relates to this video

10:56

first and maybe we could call it,

10:59

you know, short form videos. Eating

11:01

everything like the tick -tock application

11:03

of the planet, but the

11:05

one that comes to mind is

11:07

the It's kind of like the call

11:09

like the fall of the follower and

11:12

the rise of the algorithm where it

11:14

no longer like

11:16

Give the example of like by logging

11:18

into Facebook or Instagram or any of

11:20

these platforms like half of the stuff

11:22

in my feed is from accounts that

11:24

I don't follow have never followed have

11:26

no relationship with but it's stuff that

11:28

the algorithm thinks I will like and

11:30

It does a pretty good job of

11:32

that because for me, it's like a

11:34

lot of data visualization and maps or

11:36

baseball statistics because it knows I'm going

11:38

to stop and try and figure this

11:40

out. What is this thing trying to

11:42

show me? Or it's like a lot

11:44

of ski videos like, oh, watch this guy go over

11:46

some crazy jump. You have to

11:48

watch the landing to see if he makes it. And

11:51

they know it's going to stop the

11:53

scroll even though I don't follow any of

11:55

these accounts. It's just a weird thing.

11:57

So the good news is, if you're a new creator,

12:00

If you create something that's compelling, you have the

12:02

chance to punch above your way class and get

12:04

seen by, you know, more than your three followers.

12:07

The drawback is if you have a bit of a following, you

12:09

still have to play the algorithms game. And,

12:11

you know, unless it's really

12:13

compelling, even the people who do follow you,

12:15

probably not going to see your stuff. Yeah, exactly.

12:18

You know, on YouTube, we've always accepted this.

12:20

When you go to your YouTube homepage, you

12:22

expect to get recommended videos, right?

12:24

That most of the videos you're

12:27

seeing in your recommendations are not channels

12:29

that you've subscribed to, right? From

12:31

day one, we've always just sort of

12:33

accepted this on YouTube. You're

12:35

exactly right. It's creeped into Facebook,

12:37

Instagram, other platforms where you go

12:39

through. You're not seeing your friends

12:41

posts anymore. You're seeing, you

12:43

know, whatever sort of interest the

12:46

algorithm has assigned to you. And so,

12:48

you know, hey, good for their

12:50

business, I guess it's maybe increasing engagement,

12:52

but you're exactly right that I

12:54

have seen like some really small Facebook

12:56

pages, for example. that they

12:58

can have something go absolutely viral.

13:01

They only have 10 ,000 followers, but

13:03

one of their posts gets like 10

13:05

million views, right? Just because for

13:07

whatever reason, it's triggered this algorithm and

13:09

it can get in front of

13:11

a really, really large audience. So there's

13:13

a lot of opportunity there. If

13:15

you can kind of figure out what

13:17

types of content work really well and you

13:19

can kind of game the algorithms a

13:22

little bit on these platforms. But as a

13:24

user, we may or may not love

13:26

this situation, right? People call it brain. We've

13:28

got a lot of brain rot in

13:30

our feeds that we got to get past.

13:32

So, you know, which

13:35

one wins out there? I don't know. But then

13:37

it's like, what's the benefit to the creator? Like,

13:39

okay, I got a lot of views, but...

13:42

Facebook paying these creators

13:44

based on the views

13:46

that you played around with their, what do

13:49

they call it, their partner program or publishing

13:51

program or something? Yeah, their performance bonus program

13:53

is exactly right. And I could talk about

13:55

this a lot. I don't know if this

13:57

is like another side hustle, whatever

13:59

number we're on here. Yeah, go for

14:01

it. Facebook performance bonus program

14:03

is a really interesting

14:06

program. So think of

14:08

it, I mean, think of it like

14:10

the YouTube partner program, right? You know,

14:12

we all see Mr. Beast videos. He has

14:14

ads in his videos. The YouTube pays

14:16

him, you know, AdSense revenue, ad revenue. That's

14:19

exactly what Facebook is doing that.

14:21

If you get accepted to this performance

14:23

bonus program, and not everyone gets

14:25

accepted, but I do happen to have

14:27

a Facebook page that is accepted

14:29

so I can talk intelligently about this

14:31

program, that once you're

14:33

accepted, you get paid based

14:35

on essentially views and interaction. of

14:38

your posts, right? So if you do

14:40

have something that goes viral, gets a

14:42

million views, gets a ton of comments,

14:44

gets a bunch of, you know, thumbs

14:46

up or whatever, you will make more

14:48

money. And so I have a particular

14:50

page that my best month ever was

14:52

just over $5 ,000 and that was

14:54

about two months ago, right? On average

14:56

now it's doing $3 ,500 to $4 ,000

14:58

a month and it's just a very

15:00

obscure, random topic that isn't

15:03

like, you know, popular. It's not like

15:05

mainstream news or anything. It's more like

15:07

nostalgic type stuff. Like, hey, remember the

15:09

80s when this happened? That's not really

15:11

what my page is, but kind

15:13

of in that vein, right? Nostalgic stuff. Okay.

15:15

So I get some of that stuff too.

15:17

Like here's, you know, here was the billboard,

15:20

you know, top 12 modern rock

15:22

chart from 1994. And you're like,

15:24

I remember those songs. Exactly.

15:26

Stuff kind of like that. Remember this, you

15:28

know? Okay. And it might be an

15:30

image of something that was, you know, from

15:32

20 years ago, 30 years ago or

15:34

whatever. Yeah. I remember like blowing

15:36

into the Nintendo cartridge. Exactly.

15:39

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. Is this something

15:41

that you're, someone on your team is

15:43

sourcing this type of material, like coming

15:45

up with this on a consistent basis?

15:47

Yes, it is. I've, you know, I

15:49

managed it from, from the beginning, but Like

15:52

you I've got a lot of other things

15:54

going on So I found somebody that they

15:56

run it they manage the entire process they

15:58

source the content You know write up the

16:00

descriptions and interact with the Facebook page

16:03

where they are essentially doing everything at

16:05

this point Okay, I'm just you know

16:07

kind of managing and making sure everything's

16:09

working well So it's hardly any of

16:11

my own time So I you know

16:13

pay this particular person you know VA

16:15

to run it and manage it and

16:17

I take whatever profits I get yeah

16:19

Is it mostly image content, video? Like

16:21

what's working well? Yeah, it's pretty much

16:23

image content. Yeah, where we might ask

16:25

a question about, you know, do you

16:27

remember this or, you know, did you

16:30

ever experience this or whatever it is, you

16:32

know, we'll write something on it. We

16:34

might put a caption on the image, you

16:36

know, but yeah, it's image content. We

16:38

don't do any video content at this

16:40

point. So. Okay. That's

16:42

an interesting one. Yeah. How many views

16:44

it took to make that $5 ,000 plus

16:46

the ramp up period to get there

16:49

and more side hustle trends with Spencer

16:51

coming up right after this. Free

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19:11

so this particular page just got into

19:13

the bonus program. I want to

19:15

say July of last year. So that's

19:18

about nine months, something like that.

19:20

And I don't remember the first one

19:22

or two months, but it was

19:24

under $1 ,000. But quickly

19:26

after that, since late

19:28

last year, call it October,

19:30

November, it's been making a

19:33

couple thousand dollars a month. So only two

19:35

or three months of getting accepted. Now

19:37

the page was about a year old before

19:39

that. Was the one that you started or did

19:41

you buy it like for the existing

19:43

base? I had started. I had started

19:45

this particular page from scratch. Okay. And

19:47

I was trying to send traffic to

19:49

my website, you know, to, you know,

19:52

make things go viral, send them to

19:54

the website, make money from the ads

19:56

on my website. It was

19:58

like maybe making a couple hundred dollars

20:00

a month. But once I got accepted to

20:02

the performance bonus program, I went all in

20:04

on, I'm just keeping everybody on Facebook. I'm

20:06

like, hardly send them

20:08

to my website at all because

20:10

I'm making a lot more. And

20:12

so to answer another, I think

20:14

you asked like how many views

20:16

does it take? So my highest

20:18

viewed month where I made about

20:20

just over $5 ,000, there was 30

20:22

million views or impressions. Like

20:25

essentially 30 million people scrolled

20:27

past our content at some point.

20:29

So it's a lot. But

20:31

on Facebook, I

20:34

mean, things can absolutely blow up. It can add

20:36

up. And the page has about 100

20:38

,000 followers, just so people are aware.

20:40

OK, so yeah, so all those views

20:42

have translated into some people clicking and

20:44

saying, OK, we'll follow you now. Exactly.

20:46

OK, do you have a sense of

20:48

how often your VA is posting new

20:50

stuff? We post like 10 to 15

20:52

times every day. OK. So it's a

20:54

lot. So it's, you know. It's a

20:56

serious thing. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's two,

20:58

three hours a day. She's in there,

21:00

you know. posting images and interacting. Yeah,

21:02

it's a legit thing until Facebook ends

21:05

their performance bonus program and it's all

21:07

crushed. But for now, we're putting a lot

21:09

of effort into it and it's working.

21:11

Until the rug gets pulled out. The

21:13

one that shows up a lot in

21:15

my feed is Jeff Rose. Like

21:18

good financial sense. Like his stuff shows

21:20

up a lot. Oh, yeah. And he's

21:22

like trying to trigger people politically. A

21:24

lot of these like he just grabs

21:26

like screenshots of somebody, you know, play

21:28

both sides. Like I get the senses

21:30

like completely agnostic. I don't really care.

21:32

It's like, but I want to spark

21:34

those engagements, spark those reactions and try

21:36

and get people to click on this.

21:38

I bet I imagine he's doing

21:40

pretty well with this bonus program as well. Yep. Yep,

21:43

no, and that's smart. We do similar things. So

21:45

go into like your, you know,

21:47

Nintendo example, right? We might post an

21:49

image of like nine games and say,

21:51

pick your favorite if you were stuck inside

21:53

all day or something, right? And everybody,

21:55

oh, Mike Tyson's punch out, you know,

21:57

that's the one I want to do.

21:59

Or, you know, it's stuff kind of like that.

22:02

So it's fun stuff. Yeah. It's like engagement

22:04

bait in a way. It's like engagement bait

22:06

sometimes. Totally. Oh, this

22:08

is great. I get people to bait. Oh,

22:10

for sure. Yeah. Okay. I haven't applied to

22:12

do this. I need to find a VA

22:14

like yours to come up with this type

22:16

of content, even if it's side hustle related.

22:18

That could be an interesting way to grow

22:20

the page and another revenue stream if the

22:22

page views are going down on the main

22:24

site. Yeah, absolutely. There's potential there. All right. What's

22:27

next on the list for you?

22:29

Let's see. We kind of talked about

22:31

artificial intelligence kind of showing up

22:33

everywhere, but there's people that

22:35

are truly starting like artificial intelligence businesses,

22:38

right? So call it vibe

22:41

coding, right? We now have

22:43

people using these tools that

22:45

they're not coders, that they're

22:47

building software products, they're building

22:49

apps, they're building little tools

22:51

that people are paying for

22:53

or using, right? And so

22:55

if you have followed Peter

22:57

Levels on Twitter, for example,

22:59

he's built a game using

23:02

artificial intelligence. It's like an

23:04

airline simulator. Okay.

23:06

Like an airplane simulator type game that

23:08

thousands of people can play at

23:10

the same time. So everybody's like doing

23:12

flight simulators together. So you gotta,

23:14

I don't know, I haven't played it,

23:16

but you're dodging other planes and

23:18

it's just absolutely, you know, blown up,

23:21

but he built it all with

23:23

artificial intelligence and He has

23:25

a large following, so he

23:27

has been able to get

23:29

a lot of users very quickly.

23:32

That's a big part of it, is having that built -in audience.

23:35

And now he has sponsors in the

23:37

game that are paying, like, hey, we'll

23:39

sponsor the cloud, or we'll sponsor the

23:41

building. And so he

23:43

posts it, but it's... insane

23:45

numbers. Like it's over $50 ,000 he's

23:47

made in this. It's

23:49

like less than a month old, right?

23:51

Wow. And so, but there's lots

23:53

of other examples now of people

23:55

that are building tools and apps

23:58

and actually selling them or, you

24:00

know, allowing people to use

24:02

them all using, you know,

24:04

cursor .ai as a tool. There's

24:06

lovable AI. There's all

24:08

these tools you can use where

24:10

you basically chat, you know, you chat

24:12

with the AI and it builds

24:14

the app for you. Yeah. Isn't that

24:16

not? It's just like natural language. This

24:18

is what I want to build. It's

24:20

crazy. Yeah. We did a whole episode

24:22

about this with Pete McPherson from do

24:24

you even blog. He's built out a

24:26

handful of these different tools. His latest

24:28

one is like an email

24:31

list gadget, list gadget, I think it's

24:33

called, but he's got several of

24:35

these exited, at least one of them.

24:37

And it was really interesting how he

24:39

recommended, okay, I want to start off by

24:41

asking chat GPT like, Hey, I want

24:43

to build. this big picture,

24:45

what do I need? And it'll

24:48

list out like, here's what you need to do is

24:50

like step two, go to cursor, natural language. Here's what

24:52

I want to build. These are the features of functionality

24:54

that I want to have. This

24:56

is what I'm thinking. It's like, boom,

24:58

boom, boom, you know, it's like, and now you have

25:00

a semi -working version and then you ask, you know, if

25:02

you ask it to troubleshoot itself

25:04

and do the QA testing. Yeah. And

25:07

now you got to go figure

25:09

out the marketing and sales piece is

25:11

always the challenge of that. And

25:13

his recommendation was to start with your

25:15

own pains and problems, scratch your own

25:17

itch. And we call it the unbundling

25:19

of different tools where I may not

25:21

need the whole feature set of an

25:24

Ahrefs, for example. But if I could

25:26

do this one little piece of it,

25:28

maybe that's something that people would be

25:30

worth paying $9 a month for or

25:32

$19 a month for. Yeah. Now

25:34

it's super fascinating. And

25:36

I've seen, I've seen several examples kind

25:38

of like you mentioned of people that are

25:41

building tools. Maybe they're not even selling

25:43

them, but they're building tools for their own

25:45

business to just make their life a little

25:47

bit more efficient, like building their

25:49

own essentially WordPress plugin. Like I want,

25:51

you know, something to do this

25:53

on my website or fix, you know,

25:55

a thousand images, you know,

25:57

and I I don't know how to do

25:59

that. I'm not a programmer, but I'm smart

26:01

enough to ask an AI tool how

26:03

to do that. And it spits out code

26:05

for me, right? To improve my own

26:07

business. Yeah. The one that I got all

26:10

excited about the other night was maybe

26:12

this could just be like a

26:14

custom GPT tool is like so ever after

26:16

every. Episode hit stop recording. My

26:18

next step is to look at the transcript

26:20

and kind of mark up for the editor

26:22

You know the the questions that didn't really

26:24

land or where the conversation went off the

26:26

rails right just to tighten that up a

26:28

little bit and provide a better listening experience

26:31

My thought is to build that custom

26:33

GPT, like feed in a bunch of before

26:35

and afters. Like here was the original

26:37

recording. Here's what made the final cut. Learn

26:39

from this, maybe upload 10 or 15

26:41

of those. And then like here's the next

26:43

raw transcription. Like could you provide some

26:45

suggestions on what to trim from this episode

26:47

to tighten it up a little bit

26:49

and just to see what kind of results

26:51

maybe that would speed up my review process

26:54

a little bit. Yeah, now

26:56

there's like so many applications of different

26:58

things that you can do across your

27:00

entire business. an

27:02

exciting time, right? But things are

27:04

changing so fast. But the

27:06

good news is that like such a

27:08

small percentage of people out there, even

27:10

though everybody listening may have

27:13

heard that, hey, I can actually

27:15

get AI to do some coding

27:17

for me. Very, very few people

27:19

actually take that step to actually build

27:21

something still. So the

27:23

opportunities there, you just still need to

27:25

be willing to jump in, take

27:27

a risk, build out

27:29

your idea and do it.

27:33

potentially becoming cheaper to build a software

27:35

business. And there's still opportunity there.

27:37

I do think for the next few

27:39

years, there's still only going to

27:41

be a tiny sliver of people that

27:43

actually take that step and do

27:45

this. Yeah, this is an interesting one

27:47

from a software entrepreneur like yourself. Like,

27:49

oh, if we go back 15 years

27:51

ago, you know, does Long Tail Pro just

27:54

take a fraction of the development

27:56

time and effort and cost to

27:58

build something today? Probably

28:00

so. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

28:02

If I were to start from scratch, you

28:05

know, I'd probably still have to work

28:07

with a developer, but I bet I could

28:09

get it 50 % of the way there.

28:12

You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It

28:14

would definitely be way cheaper to build something

28:16

now. I like this idea of building

28:18

something for your own use and then maybe

28:20

with a few tweaks, it's almost

28:22

like white labeling to a different

28:24

audience. Like if somebody else of

28:26

another podcaster wanted to utilize the

28:28

same, you know, editing assistant.

28:31

maybe they could do that and then

28:33

maybe someday a descript wants to

28:35

buy that from me and I've

28:37

got a nice little chunk of

28:39

change for my exit. Yeah, exactly.

28:41

And so here's another side hustle

28:44

trend that I'm seeing that's very

28:46

related. So I think we piggyback

28:48

on this is creating free tools

28:50

or free websites that perhaps are

28:52

generated with AI or not. Either

28:56

way, but I've been covering

28:58

on my YouTube channel.

29:00

I cover a lot of

29:02

free games or free

29:04

tools, you know, free calculators.

29:06

A lot of these things, like

29:08

for example, a couple of them

29:10

are really simple tools like a

29:12

YouTube thumbnail downloader. All you do

29:14

is you pop in the YouTube

29:16

URL and it pulls the thumbnail

29:19

for you, right? Another tool I

29:21

covered is you upload an image

29:23

of yourself. and AI

29:25

detects the shape of your face. Do

29:28

you have a round face or

29:30

an oblong face or an olive

29:32

face? I didn't even know this

29:34

thing existed, right? But

29:36

for example, the face shape, it's

29:38

called, oh, what's the website? Anyways,

29:41

I can't remember the exact website that

29:43

it's called, but it gets something like

29:45

two and a half million visitors every

29:47

month. Wow. that are coming, people just,

29:49

they want to know the shape of

29:51

their face. It's a little like face

29:53

shape quiz thing. Yeah. It's like face

29:56

shape AI. You upload an image of yourself

29:58

and it says, oh, you've got an oblong

30:00

face. You know, congrats. They're

30:02

just monetized with ads, right?

30:04

But there's lots of calculators. Like

30:07

there's a sleep calculator. A

30:09

fun one is

30:11

snowdaytocalculator.com. You put in your zip

30:13

code and it predicts if you're going

30:15

to have a snow day tomorrow. what

30:18

are the odds that school's gonna

30:20

be canceled tomorrow, right? Okay.

30:22

And that gets like three million visitors

30:24

a month during the winter months, right? Wow.

30:27

So there's a lot of these little

30:29

either free tools or there's lots of

30:31

games. There's tons of examples of games

30:33

out there. You could just think

30:35

of some silly word game or shape

30:37

game or whatever it is. Yeah.

30:39

You make it free, monetize

30:41

with ads. The thing can be built

30:43

with AI or simple coding. Right?

30:46

So a lot of these free websites,

30:48

free tools, a lot of these

30:50

things, I'm still seeing do really, really

30:52

well. Do you know the

30:54

secrets behind the what's driving the traffic

30:56

for like the face shape predictor or

30:58

the snow day predictor or anything like

31:00

that? Well, like the face shape

31:02

one does really well in Google. It

31:05

is getting a lot of organic traffic.

31:07

And this is something that people are searching

31:09

for? Yeah. Like, here, if I search,

31:11

what's the shape of my face, I want

31:13

to get the, oh,

31:16

detectfaceshape.com is

31:19

the website, right? Yes,

31:21

people are searching for this. I was

31:24

blown away. like the keywords, like it's

31:26

hundreds of thousands of searches every month

31:28

for a bunch of these. So that

31:30

is a Google play. The Snow Day

31:32

Calculator 1 gets a lot of repeat

31:34

visitors. Once people find it, they just

31:36

know, hey, this is, I don't know why

31:38

so many people look at this, but people

31:40

that want to get out of school, they're,

31:42

hey. 100 % sounds like something my kids would

31:44

check every morning. Exactly. There's clouds today, maybe

31:46

I can get out of school tomorrow. Exactly

31:48

what they're doing. Yeah, you're like, well, it's

31:50

54 degrees, so don't get your hopes up.

31:53

That's right. It's fun stuff. No, this

31:55

is cool. This has always been on

31:57

the back burner. What is

31:59

the niche tool or a

32:01

little calculator? Maybe with

32:04

the help of AI, maybe it's

32:06

a little simple game, one that we

32:08

talked about after a recent

32:10

trip. We went to Hawaii with the family

32:12

and we're snorkeling along. six

32:15

-year -old will tell you the story of like, you

32:17

know, the giant turtle attack is like, of course the

32:19

turtle is paying him no mind at all, but

32:21

like the water was kind of cloudy and it shows

32:23

up like two feet in front of our pace.

32:25

Oh yeah, scary. So he's like freaking out and I'm

32:27

like... did you see a shark or something? You

32:30

know, it's a way we can make like a

32:32

crossy road style game, but it's like turtles and

32:34

sharks and jellyfish or like something where you have

32:36

to like go across the ocean this way. I

32:38

like it. You know, maybe there's something a

32:40

little browser based game that you could

32:42

do based on that. And who

32:45

knows, maybe people find it. Yeah, absolutely.

32:47

And I honestly think there are

32:49

thousands of ideas that sometimes the sillier

32:51

the better, right? Because they might have

32:53

a chance to go viral. either

32:56

create a really great game, right? Or

32:58

if it's something silly that's fun that

33:00

people might talk about, you know, it's

33:02

got the opportunity to be shared a

33:04

lot and can do well. So lots

33:06

of opportunity there. Yeah. I saw a

33:08

Twitter post about this and I'll see

33:10

if I can dig it up for

33:12

the show notes, but it was a

33:14

bunch of like software or little tool

33:16

ideas. And it was, you know,

33:18

sometimes it's something simple, like how to

33:20

improve images in Word or like, you

33:22

know, maybe you can kind of piggyback.

33:25

a question -based query with Word,

33:27

Excel, some software

33:29

tool, and maybe there's some

33:31

layer on that you could add

33:33

to that for a workplace. Maybe

33:36

if people are swiping the company credit

33:38

card, they think less about it than pulling

33:40

out their own money. So maybe there's something

33:43

there. Yeah. And to

33:45

piggyback on that a little bit, we

33:47

talked about, hey, Google is changing

33:49

organic traffic. It's searching for a lot

33:51

of content creators. The one

33:54

area that I am seeing organic traffic

33:56

still do really, really well. are

33:58

these tools, these games,

34:00

right? Because when somebody is

34:02

searching for that particular problem,

34:04

what is the shape of

34:06

my face or whatever the

34:08

query is, they actually

34:10

do need to go to that

34:12

tool or that website to get

34:14

that information. So that is the

34:16

one area that if you wanna

34:18

try and get that organic search,

34:20

you need to be thinking more

34:22

about tools, actual products or games, something

34:25

people can go to and actually

34:27

use. and interact with on your website.

34:30

Okay, very cool. The next

34:32

one that I have on my

34:34

list is what I'm calling the

34:36

death of the online course and

34:38

the rise of the higher touch, higher

34:40

engagement offer. And I don't

34:42

know if this is a factor

34:44

of AI or a factor

34:46

of just like online course fatigue

34:48

where it's like that lower

34:51

ticket, maybe the $100 to

34:53

$500 online course is they

34:55

could really a

34:57

really difficult place to play in right now, in

35:00

my opinion. And what we're seeing is a shift

35:02

towards the, you know, thousand, two

35:04

thousand, maybe two to $10

35:06

,000. Yeah. As much

35:08

as $30 ,000 for like some

35:10

really high touch. You have a

35:12

dedicated coach who's going to

35:14

hold your hand. Maybe there's some,

35:16

you know, onsite local, you

35:18

know, retreats or workshops that are

35:20

included in this. But it's,

35:22

it can kind of a transition

35:24

away from, you purely on

35:27

-demand pre -recorded video -based

35:29

course to a more

35:31

high engagement. Maybe there's a community

35:33

element to this. Maybe there's

35:35

live coaching elements. And

35:37

so if you're thinking about structuring an

35:39

offer, that's just something to keep in

35:42

mind for... you know, going forward. Yeah,

35:44

and I think part of that

35:46

is that there's so much information

35:48

for free on YouTube through video

35:50

content. I think that's part

35:52

of it, right? Is that, hey,

35:54

maybe I used to buy a

35:56

video course for $200 or $500,

35:59

but now I can get 90 %

36:01

of the way there just with

36:03

free content on YouTube. So people are

36:05

like, if it's just... maybe

36:07

I'm not gonna do it, but I

36:09

do believe that you're exactly right. More

36:12

and more people are

36:14

craving in -person type

36:16

meetups or community -based where

36:18

you can interact. either

36:21

in smaller groups, you

36:23

know, maybe you have a mastermind that's

36:25

part of this community that you can

36:27

meet up with on a regular basis,

36:29

or you get that more high touch, like

36:31

you said, that's what I'm

36:33

seeing. And same with me, you

36:36

know, I'm part of an

36:38

online community that I've paid for

36:40

for a few years, but

36:42

I don't pay for the education

36:44

part of it. It's

36:46

really just the community part of it. Yeah.

36:48

That I'm there because I like the people

36:50

that are in the community and you know,

36:52

when I have a problem, I have a

36:54

group of people I know and I trust.

36:56

I know they're experienced. I can bring up

36:58

an issue and I know I'll get an

37:01

answer. Yeah, this community base, we've seen people

37:03

shifting from like a on -demand evergreen model

37:05

to more of a cohort based if you're

37:07

going to do the course thing. That's right.

37:09

It's like, we're all going to go through

37:11

this together. It has a defined start date and

37:13

a defined end date and you

37:15

know, everybody, there's no working ahead. Like

37:17

we're gonna do this together and

37:19

like that safety in numbers or

37:21

strengthening community, I think can work really well.

37:23

And it makes it probably easier to sell

37:25

than just something, well, it's always available. You

37:27

can buy it tomorrow, you can buy it

37:29

the next week, doesn't really matter. It's like,

37:31

you gotta get in cause we're starting on

37:33

Tuesday. Yep, exactly right. Yeah. I think those

37:35

types of models work well. Seems to be

37:38

the trend. That's what I'm saying. More

37:40

side hustle trends with Spencer in

37:42

just a moment, including a seldom

37:44

talked about publishing channel, Spencer's latest

37:46

side hustle and the businesses that

37:48

AI isn't touching anytime soon. Right

37:51

after this. Do you say

37:53

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37:55

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40:04

One other trend that

40:06

I found interesting or maybe

40:08

maybe it's been going on forever. And

40:10

I was just like playing in the

40:12

organic sandbox too much. But like, you

40:14

know, more and more entrepreneurs incorporating paid

40:16

media, paid traffic, paid acquisition strategies and

40:18

really trying to break down. their

40:21

value chain of well, what is a customer

40:23

ultimately worth at the end of the funnel?

40:25

Or you know, what is a visitor really

40:27

worth to me? What's an email subscriber worth

40:29

to me? How can I go out and

40:31

profitably buy those customers? Like it

40:33

was insane, the amount of

40:35

money flowing through meta from one mastermind

40:38

group or coaching group I was

40:40

a part of last year. It's like

40:42

everybody in the room was spending

40:44

thousands, tens of thousands of dollars a

40:46

month with Mr. Zuckerberg. And I

40:48

was like, what an amazing business that

40:50

they built. Yeah. Yep, exactly right.

40:52

But I mean, that's sort of the

40:54

golden opportunity that's always been there

40:56

is that if you know that it

40:59

costs you a dollar to acquire

41:01

a customer and you can make $2

41:03

for every customer that you get in

41:05

the door, You're gonna just spend as

41:07

much money as you possibly can, right?

41:10

And I've personally never landed on that perfect

41:12

business where I can just spend tens

41:14

of thousands of dollars every month and I

41:16

know I'm gonna make tens of thousands

41:18

of dollars in profit because I'm buying that

41:20

traffic. But some people have, some

41:23

people have. One of those

41:25

examples that has been very

41:27

public about it is Matt

41:29

Paulson, he owns marketbeat.com where

41:31

it's a financial newsletter business

41:33

where he spends essentially

41:35

as much money as he possibly can

41:37

to get people on his email list.

41:39

And he now has, I think it's,

41:41

it was either five or six million

41:43

subscribers that he just passed. Wow. On

41:45

his email list. So it's a huge

41:47

business at this point. And he's calculated

41:49

out, okay, I know I'm going to

41:51

make this much in the first week, you

41:54

know, because we send this many emails and this

41:56

many convert. We know we're going to make

41:58

this much after the first month or lifetime value

42:00

of the customer. And so he just keeps

42:02

pouring gas on the, on the fire

42:04

there. Well, yeah, so you can

42:06

get that flywheel spin and yeah, spend as

42:08

much as you can. Yep, exactly right. And

42:10

so this might be part B of this

42:12

side hustle trend. The trend that maybe has

42:14

been around for a little while is newsletters.

42:17

Newsletters as a business, right?

42:19

I think is what I'll put

42:21

that category in is a lot

42:23

of people are sort of foregoing

42:25

the traditional website and they're truly

42:27

just focusing on, we just get

42:29

people on the email list. And

42:32

then we have sponsors that pay

42:34

to be listed in our email newsletter, right?

42:36

A little ad spot. And so you

42:38

get 50 ,000 or 100 ,000 people on

42:40

your email list and you know you're

42:42

going to make $1 ,000 every time

42:44

you send an email newsletter out to

42:46

your list. You do that two times

42:49

a week, right? All a sudden you're

42:51

making $8 $10 ,000 a month. And so

42:53

this has been a trend, definitely a

42:55

side hustle trend that I've seen is

42:57

monetized email newsletters and that is the

42:59

platform. Like that's it. Yeah,

43:01

it's interesting. Well, we create all this

43:03

content with the goal of getting

43:05

people on my newsletter. What if the

43:07

newsletter is the content and it's

43:09

working really well for some people and

43:11

maybe an even clearer path towards

43:13

that lifetime value of a subscriber metric

43:15

that you're trying to figure out and

43:17

like, okay, now I can go

43:20

out and buy subscribers. Essentially, we've talked

43:22

with Ryan Smeddon on like the

43:24

Naptown scoop, like local newsletter for Annapolis.

43:27

Well, you know, based on this ad load and

43:29

this frequency, it's like exactly what you described.

43:31

Like, oh, yeah, I can totally go out and

43:33

buy subscribers. But like for a local newsletter,

43:35

it's like, well, the population is 80 ,000. Like

43:37

I'm going to cap out at some point where

43:39

it's like, you know, the market share is

43:41

only so big, but for something that is a

43:43

little bit broader. then you really

43:46

can't go huge with it. Yep. Or

43:48

you go to more locations, right? It's

43:50

true, franchise it out. Yeah, we do

43:52

five cities now, you know, or whatever.

43:54

So, but yeah, yeah, super interesting, you

43:56

know, email newsletters as a business. Yeah.

43:59

And we've got a few newsletter based episodes that

44:01

went with Ryan on the local side. We've

44:03

done, Cody Sanchez been on

44:05

the show like early on in her journey,

44:07

this journey to her first like

44:09

50 ,000 subscribers. So it's

44:12

definitely a viable model there. If the

44:14

websites are going to be a little more

44:16

difficult, there is other ways to monetize that

44:18

content, other ways to create and

44:20

share that content. The next one on

44:22

my list is what

44:24

I'm calling everything as

44:26

a service. you know, you can't just pay

44:28

for something now. You got to pay

44:30

for it every month. And I don't know

44:33

if this is, you know, the product

44:35

of Netflix or product of, you know, everything

44:37

is just, you know, it's a tiny

44:39

amount. It's just, you know, a little bit.

44:41

And it becomes from the consumer side, like

44:43

almost, hey, sure, I can afford that. But

44:45

at a certain point, it's like the death

44:47

by a thousand paper cuts. It's like, oh,

44:49

it's just one more. There's one more little

44:51

SAS tool to add on. But from the

44:53

entrepreneur's standpoint, it's almost baked into your pricing

44:55

model this assumption that it's going to

44:57

be a recurring monthly thing. And

45:00

so you can lean into that

45:02

and get people used to paying

45:04

for your thing over and over again.

45:06

Yeah, and I was just looking

45:08

at a perfect example of this, a

45:10

hosting company, you know, where usually,

45:12

you know, in the past, you might

45:14

get a domain along with your,

45:16

you know, hosting package, but now a

45:18

lot of hosting companies, you get

45:20

a full website builder, you know,

45:22

that's a visual builder, you get

45:24

the hosting, you get the domain. Now some

45:27

are offering AI tools, you get an AI

45:29

image generator, you get an AI, you know,

45:31

writer, you get, you know,

45:33

an AI blogging tool. You

45:35

get, it's like everything

45:37

to run your online

45:39

business now and it's

45:41

just one friendly monthly

45:44

fee, right? But

45:46

yeah, I'm seeing that more and more

45:48

as these companies that are building in

45:50

lots of tools and it's like, well,

45:52

I'll just spend 10 bucks a month

45:54

to do all that then, I guess.

45:56

Yeah, it makes sense if you're providing...

46:00

a consistent service if there's a community

46:02

element to what you're doing like,

46:04

hey, it's 50 bucks a month. It's

46:06

100 bucks a month. Stay a

46:08

member of this community. We've seen people

46:10

doing paid newsletters. Sure, the free

46:12

newsletter tier offers this, this, and this,

46:14

but the paid tier offers a

46:16

way you're just seeing the tip of

46:18

the iceberg. So here's more in -depth

46:20

curated content, whatever is behind the

46:22

paywall. We talked about it in the

46:25

context of little micro SaaS projects,

46:27

software tools, lots of different ways to

46:29

go about it. But thinking of

46:31

that recurring revenue first versus a one -off

46:33

purchase. And this relates to the online

46:35

course thing too. It's like, hey, I'm

46:37

going to collect $200 one time upfront

46:39

payment. You got lifetime access to the

46:41

thing. We've seen a little bit of

46:44

a shift and maybe it's the entrepreneurs getting a little

46:46

more savvy. Well, that's great for my

46:48

launch. But then what happens 12 months

46:50

later, it's like, and I keep having

46:52

to serve these people. over and

46:54

over again without collecting any additional revenue. So

46:56

we've seen people shift that pricing model

46:58

to more community -based or add a

47:00

recurring element to it. Yep. I

47:03

think that's smart business. Anytime you can add

47:05

recurring revenue, I think that's smart business.

47:07

Cool. Oh, you got another one?

47:09

Yeah, I do. I've got a couple more.

47:12

This is, I don't know if you call

47:14

this a side hustle trend other than I've seen

47:16

this opportunity and I haven't seen it

47:18

talked about a lot. I don't know if

47:20

it's been covered on the side hustle

47:22

show. Maybe it has been. So forgive me

47:24

if this has been mentioned, but people

47:26

are publishing content on MSN. So I don't

47:28

know if you've seen small publishers, you

47:31

know, MSN.com, truly

47:33

MSN.com, right? A

47:35

lot of... people tend to still

47:37

have that as their homepage. It gets

47:39

millions and millions of views every

47:42

month, but you can be a publisher

47:44

to contribute content to MSN.

47:47

And I just had a

47:49

buddy just this last month.

47:51

He's had a few things

47:53

go really viral and he

47:55

made just over $20 ,000 just

47:57

from publishing on MSN. Wow.

47:59

Right? And so, It's

48:02

one of these really unique opportunities.

48:04

You can apply to get your website

48:06

approved. So if your organic

48:08

traffic is going down from Google, well,

48:10

you can publish content on

48:12

MSN.com. They're still getting a

48:14

ton of direct traffic, right?

48:17

And the population of viewers

48:19

on MSN is probably skews

48:21

a little bit older. And

48:23

so if you have content that does really

48:25

well in that demographic, you

48:27

can get millions of views. I've

48:30

heard of lots of people doing this,

48:32

but I happen to have a buddy that's

48:34

been giving me updates over those last

48:36

month. He's doing really, really well. Yeah.

48:38

We're a part of

48:40

the MSN publishing program, Microsoft Start

48:42

program. It was maybe called early

48:44

on. It may have changed. We've

48:47

never had anything go that viral, but

48:49

I think our best month

48:51

is maybe 150, 200 bucks

48:53

a month. So it's not 20

48:55

,000, but it's another place to

48:58

syndicate. the content that you're already creating

49:00

for pretty low lift. One of

49:02

the strategies that was shared

49:04

with me is like if you

49:06

can somehow like sync your RSS feed and

49:08

I don't know, I've got like a lot of short

49:10

code and stuff in my posts where I was

49:12

like, I don't know if that would look right or

49:14

I don't know, maybe they would strip

49:16

that out. But if you can syndicate your

49:18

RSS and like if you're creating listicles

49:20

like the top 12 ways to make money

49:22

online in 2025, like it will

49:24

create like a gallery. And so people have

49:27

to page through. obnoxious from the

49:29

user standpoint, but MSN is racking up

49:31

more page views, racking up more ad views,

49:33

right? And so that's going to improve

49:35

your take, your rev share from that content

49:37

versus having a scrollable list

49:39

post. Yep. And I think a

49:41

lot of people are now publishing

49:43

content directly just on MSN. It's

49:45

not even on their website, right?

49:47

And so you can create these

49:50

like image carousels or video. I

49:52

can't remember what they're called. There's a

49:54

particular thing that you can get that it's

49:56

really just On MSN, the use have

49:58

to scroll through these 10 images. Anyways,

50:01

kind of an interesting opportunity that's

50:04

been around for a long time, but

50:06

I've seen several people doing really

50:08

well recently with it still. Yeah, it's

50:10

one of the income streams for side

50:12

isolation, but maybe there's a way,

50:14

like everything, there's a way to

50:16

triple down on the thing and really, really go for

50:18

it. You just got to pick the one that you're

50:20

going to go all in on, right? It's hard to

50:22

do them all. Yeah, publish. 10

50:25

times a day or whatever it's going to take. I

50:27

remember talking with John Dykstra a few months ago. He's

50:29

like, I really double down on email. Like

50:32

when you say double down, what you mean? He's like,

50:34

I send three emails a day. I was like, Jesus. Like,

50:36

oh, okay. We're over here doing

50:39

one or two a week. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And

50:41

next on my list is

50:43

a service -based side hustle

50:45

observation. And that

50:48

is the increase in

50:50

acceptance for fractional support

50:52

or maybe a buzzword

50:55

around fractional support, fractional

50:57

CTO, fractional CFO, stuff

50:59

like this, where if you have expertise

51:01

in a particular field, that

51:03

calling yourself the fractional person,

51:05

I think elevates you above, hey,

51:08

I'm your freelance accountant or I'm your

51:10

freelance bookkeeper. No, I'm going to

51:12

be your fractional CFO. And I think

51:14

it allows you to command higher

51:16

rates, higher prices. And plus people are

51:18

maybe becoming more willing to hire

51:20

that type of person or agree

51:22

to contract a relationship with that

51:25

type of person lends itself really

51:27

well to niche agencies, niche productized service

51:29

providers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see

51:31

this all the time, you know, from

51:33

a user perspective, if I go to

51:35

Upwork and I'm looking to hire somebody

51:37

and I get people that apply that

51:39

are sort of generalists, right? They say,

51:41

oh, I can do this, I can

51:43

do this, I can do this, you

51:45

know, I can do it all versus

51:47

somebody that says, I create financial spreadsheets

51:49

in Google Sheets and that is what

51:51

I do, right? You're gonna hire that

51:53

guy if you're looking for a financial

51:55

spreadsheet and you're gonna pay way more. Yeah,

51:58

I'm gonna be willing to, right? I'm like, ah,

52:00

you're $30 an hour versus the

52:02

$10 an hour guy, but I'm

52:04

gonna do it because that's

52:06

what you do. So if you

52:08

can be a specialist in

52:10

your field and sort of market

52:12

yourself as either the fractional

52:14

or IMB go -to email newsletter

52:16

optimization person or whatever it is,

52:19

you're going to command that

52:21

higher price. Yeah, exactly. I'm the

52:23

go -to person for viral Facebook

52:25

partner program content in your

52:27

niche. Exactly. And

52:29

that person does exist. I know who that is. And

52:32

they have a thriving business. Very

52:34

good. Very good. The next

52:36

one on my list

52:38

is what I'm calling influencer

52:41

marketing partners or influencer

52:43

co -founders where They're almost

52:45

like you might have a technical co -founder,

52:47

now it's on what you might have an

52:49

influencer co -founder or influencer partner. And at the

52:51

very top of the food chain, you have

52:53

MrBeast and Feastables and stuff, but like even

52:55

lower down, we've had examples

52:58

of e -commerce sellers on the

53:00

podcast, you're kind of tapping

53:02

into this really, really broad segment

53:04

of what they call micro influencers,

53:06

people with like 500

53:08

,000 up to maybe 10 ,000,

53:10

20 ,000 followers, like not

53:12

super viral accounts, but They've got people

53:14

paying attention to them. They have been

53:16

in the content creation game. They

53:19

know how to make something compelling and

53:21

sending them samples of the product

53:23

and really leaning into that as a

53:25

marketing channel versus trying to go out

53:27

and, you know, find traffic and

53:29

buyers the other way or other through other

53:31

channels. I mean, it's smart, right? Because

53:33

a lot of times if you have a

53:35

product, you've got a good idea, you

53:37

have zero followers. if you can

53:39

kind of skip that whole step of building

53:41

things up over the years and partner

53:43

with somebody that already has that influence, already

53:46

has that following, it's like almost a

53:48

guaranteed way to launch to success. Now you

53:50

just have to be willing to either

53:52

give up a piece of your business or

53:54

give up revenue of the business and

53:56

you don't figure out a model that works

53:58

well for you. But I think it's

54:00

a smart business for influencers that, hey, there

54:02

are a lot of people that have tons

54:04

of followers, but they don't have any good

54:07

business ideas. Like they just You

54:09

know, they have influence. Yeah. And then there's

54:11

other people that have really good ideas.

54:13

They just, they don't have any influence. So

54:15

you can partner that up, it's a, it's

54:17

a cool model. Yeah. We've

54:19

seen it from the standpoint

54:21

of it will, will give you affiliate commission

54:23

for everyone that you sell like through Amazon

54:25

creator connections or whatever. Or

54:28

we'll just send you free product or

54:30

we'll pay you a flat fee to create

54:32

this type of video. But lots of

54:34

different ways to structure it, but kind of.

54:36

the secret sauce seemed

54:38

to be either casting that really

54:40

wide net, okay, I'm going to send

54:42

out a thousand messages to these

54:44

different accounts, or finding that

54:47

one really influential partner to bring

54:49

in who you know can

54:51

drive consistent traffic. It

54:53

was on my first million

54:55

where Sean was pitching this

54:57

virtual assistant company. He

55:00

bought a stake in

55:02

that and then turned around and used

55:04

his influence. from the podcast to like drive

55:06

customers to that business. Yeah. Really, really,

55:08

really smart. All right. What's next? All

55:11

right. This might be my last

55:13

one that I have here. And I

55:15

don't know if I'm seeing it

55:17

as a trend, but it's something that

55:19

I'm going to try a little

55:21

bit. And I could see this developing

55:23

into a trend. You tell me,

55:25

you know, whether it is or not,

55:27

but actually going the other way,

55:29

more people are going more online, more

55:31

AI, more technology. Going

55:33

the other way going back

55:35

to physical products items you

55:37

can touch you know feel

55:39

so One thing that I

55:42

am actually going to be

55:44

trying is reselling items on

55:46

eBay this You know, it's been

55:48

around for how many decades now? Yeah, everything

55:50

that's old is new again. Everything that's

55:52

old is new again. So part of the

55:54

reason I'm doing this, I do have

55:56

older kids that are looking for summer jobs.

55:58

And so I'm like, what's something that

56:00

teenagers can run? And so we

56:02

just went out this weekend.

56:05

We bought Amazon return pallets. I

56:07

actually picked them up at

56:09

a liquidation warehouse. Is it

56:11

the where you been store? Somebody I

56:13

was like, that's a fantastic name for

56:15

this bin sale place, but because I

56:17

know it's in Eastern Washington somewhere. Oh,

56:19

okay. No, there actually is in the

56:21

tri cities. It's not a bin store,

56:23

but it's actually this guy has a

56:25

bunch of contracts where he, I mean,

56:27

he had like 300 pallets of just

56:30

Amazon returns, Walmart return, you know,

56:32

big box store returns. We bought

56:34

three of them. we're gonna

56:36

unpack it, try and resell it

56:38

on eBay. So it's not

56:40

a new business, but I feel

56:42

like going back to the

56:44

basics of like, there's gonna be

56:46

stuff that people are gonna wanna

56:48

buy for cheaper than they can get

56:51

in the store forever. That's never

56:53

going away. So the trend of going

56:55

to a business that isn't going to

56:57

be as impacted by all the

56:59

technological changes, I think is a smart

57:01

trend. Yeah, exactly. plumbing

57:04

service is not worried about AI.

57:08

Computers aren't going to come and fix your pipes. Yep,

57:10

exactly. If nothing else, you'll

57:12

get some content about the

57:14

pallet flipping, pallet return business. That's

57:17

exactly right. I'm hoping I get a summer

57:19

job for my kids, maybe get some good

57:21

content for me. I expect to make approximately

57:24

zero dollars on this business. I'm hoping

57:26

that my kids, you know, earn some money.

57:28

But who knows, maybe it becomes profitable.

57:30

We'll see. I mean, that would be ideal.

57:32

Yeah. But if I can break even

57:34

on it, I'm happy. No, that's a good

57:36

way to expose them to this buy

57:38

low sell high and. Is

57:41

it worth the work of picking through all

57:43

these things, listing individual items? There's a

57:45

lot that goes into it and it sounds

57:47

like a kind of luck of the

57:49

draw. You don't get to see everything that's

57:51

in that palette before you get it,

57:53

but we do have an episode on palette

57:55

return item, palette flipping.

57:57

It's just because it's something that

57:59

comes up on people's side hustle lists. I'm

58:01

curious about it. And somebody was making

58:03

it work, but similar. They made a

58:06

couple, maybe 25 grand over the course

58:08

of a year or two in doing

58:10

it. But if they didn't, it

58:12

sounded like if they didn't have the YouTube

58:14

video of themselves filming doing it, it's like,

58:16

I don't know if we would really, it

58:18

would be really worthwhile, but that's a cool

58:20

one. I do want to piggyback

58:22

on your, well, what are

58:24

the things that AI isn't going

58:27

to impact or take away? And

58:29

part of that is this shift towards, maybe

58:31

a shift in interest towards local

58:33

services, the window washing

58:35

businesses, the house cleaning businesses, the

58:37

power washing companies, You

58:40

know mobile car detailing like these

58:42

blue collar type of side hustles

58:44

where you could start relatively low

58:46

cost relatively low risk and Don't

58:48

even need like if you have

58:50

any level of digital marketing savvy

58:53

you're probably going to be head

58:55

and shoulders above the entrenched competition. I

58:58

think that's Definitely a trend

59:00

worth mentioning because we've seen more and

59:02

more young people especially young people being

59:04

interested in those types of businesses like

59:06

low -tech good old -fashioned elbow grease,

59:09

go do the work and get paid

59:11

for it. Yeah. I think a

59:13

lot of us that have been in

59:15

the online world for so long,

59:17

we see all these shifts and these

59:19

changes and it's frustrating. We're like,

59:21

oh, how are we going to make

59:23

this online business work? Well, there's

59:25

this whole other world out there, right?

59:27

Where you can go knock on

59:29

a door and you can meet people

59:31

in person and have a real

59:33

phone number where people call you. It's

59:37

so many opportunities for side

59:39

hustles, whether it's local or

59:41

in person or just the

59:43

not online business that, hey,

59:45

there's a lot of things

59:47

that people need and will

59:50

always need that won't be

59:52

impacted by these huge technological

59:54

shifts. Yeah, very true. Spencer,

59:57

this has been awesome. I don't know how many we were up

59:59

to. I think definitely more than 10 at this point.

1:00:01

So, probably a good place to wrap up.

1:00:03

We did deliver it on our promise and

1:00:05

hopefully a little bit extra on top of

1:00:07

that. But what's next for you? Any projects

1:00:09

going on? What's the latest with niche pursuits?

1:00:12

Yeah, I mentioned the one, hey, I'm

1:00:14

kind of starting a little side

1:00:16

business with my kids. So that's going

1:00:18

to be fun. That's kind

1:00:20

of something I'm dabbling with, the whole

1:00:22

palette flipping idea. But going

1:00:24

all in on YouTube videos,

1:00:26

my YouTube channel's done pretty decent.

1:00:29

So where I talk a lot about different

1:00:31

website ideas that might still be working,

1:00:33

the type of trends that are

1:00:36

still working online. So, covering a lot

1:00:38

of that on my YouTube videos.

1:00:40

Other than that, no big shake -ups,

1:00:42

you know, with what I'm going to

1:00:44

be doing. I just keep

1:00:46

publishing some content on YouTube. Got my

1:00:48

Facebook page going. I have a

1:00:50

little Amazon influencer, you know, side hustle.

1:00:52

I've got, you know, videos there. So,

1:00:55

you know, kind of keep dabbling on

1:00:57

a few little side hustles. Keep the

1:00:59

niche pursuits brand going and we'll see where

1:01:01

it goes from there. I get the

1:01:03

impression that that may be similar. You probably

1:01:05

don't need to work anymore. You've been

1:01:07

doing this for a long time. You've had

1:01:09

some exits under your belt. You've had

1:01:11

some fantastic earning years and months. Is

1:01:13

there a retirement plan or do

1:01:15

you just keep doing this because

1:01:17

you love doing it? Yeah. I'm

1:01:19

still enjoying things, but I am...

1:01:21

much I've removed a lot of

1:01:24

things from my business that I

1:01:26

don't enjoy. So I do have

1:01:28

the opportunity and the ability, like,

1:01:30

you know, my Facebook page VA, I'm

1:01:32

not going to go in and

1:01:34

post things 10 or 15 times a

1:01:36

day, right? So I do enjoy

1:01:38

the strategy of coming up with ideas

1:01:40

and trying to plug in a

1:01:42

system or people that can run it

1:01:44

for me. So I enjoy that.

1:01:46

So I'll keep doing that. You know,

1:01:48

I'm actually, I volunteer at a

1:01:50

local pickleball organization. We have a pickleball

1:01:52

community. So I'm looking for more

1:01:54

volunteer opportunities, maybe work a

1:01:57

little bit less. But still, hey, I

1:01:59

like the excitement of, hey, there's this

1:02:01

cool new idea. Can we make it

1:02:03

work? So I haven't quite retired yet,

1:02:05

Nick, but I'll let you know. But

1:02:07

I'm doing all I can not to

1:02:09

work quite as much. Let's put it

1:02:11

that way. Fair enough. The

1:02:13

love of the game, parse out the stuff

1:02:15

that you don't like and keep what

1:02:17

you do. That's

1:02:19

trying to play in that same space. Very

1:02:21

cool. Nitchpresuits.com, check them

1:02:23

out over there. Check out the Nitchpresuits

1:02:25

podcast. We'll link up the YouTube

1:02:27

channel as well. Like I said, going all

1:02:29

in on YouTube, more and more guests are

1:02:31

saying, hey, I'm leaning in on the YouTube

1:02:34

stuff, doing more video. If the website isn't

1:02:36

working as well, I can make videos and

1:02:38

it's a lot of fun too. Thanks so

1:02:40

much for joining me. I think this was

1:02:42

a blast. If you're listening to

1:02:44

this and you want to make some

1:02:46

extra money, and you're not sure which path

1:02:48

to take, I want to invite you to

1:02:50

take our free quiz at hustle .show. You can

1:02:52

do it right from your phone. It'll take a

1:02:54

couple of minutes or less. And then

1:02:56

based on your answers, we're going to

1:02:58

give you a custom curated playlist to hopefully

1:03:00

put you in the right direction. These

1:03:02

are going to be eight to 10 side

1:03:04

hustle show episodes based on your answers.

1:03:06

Hey, what should we listen to next? And

1:03:08

if you want more Spencer in your

1:03:11

life, you go listen to his. three or

1:03:13

four signed hustle show appearances as well.

1:03:15

But hustle .show, that's your personalized playlist quiz. And

1:03:18

just again, a few short questions about your

1:03:20

interests and goals. And you can get that personalized

1:03:22

playlist, add it to your device, learn what

1:03:24

works, and then go out and make some

1:03:26

more money. Big thanks to Spencer for sharing

1:03:28

his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping

1:03:30

make this content free for everyone. As always,

1:03:32

you can head up side hustlenation.com slash deals

1:03:34

for all the latest offers from our sponsors

1:03:36

in one place. That is it for me.

1:03:39

Thank you so much for tuning in. Until

1:03:41

next time, let's go out there and make

1:03:43

something happen, and I'll catch you in the

1:03:45

next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle

1:03:48

on.