Nick Loper
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Sure. Well, these will parallel Newton. So somebody wants to get nerdy and talk about physics. So law number one is like this inertia and momentum law where you might remember from physics, right? An object at rest is going to stay at rest and an object in motion is going to stay in motion until acted upon by an external force. And we see this over and over again with people who
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
are on the sidelines looking to get into the game, there has to be some motivating factor to get you to move, to take action, to register that domain name, to put up your profile on Upwork, to try and get that first client, to put yourself out there. And maybe that's a meeting with your boss that doesn't go as well as you planned.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
One of my favorite moments on the show was a photographer, a journalist I had on the show, He just won International Sports Photographer of the Year or something like his highest award in his industry goes into his boss for his annual review. And his boss is like, man, I fought for 4%, but I could only get you a 3% raise. And he's like, you gotta be kidding me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And he's making like 30 grand a year doing this. And he's like, this is not gonna work. And so that was the motivating factor to kind of get him off the sidelines and start thinking seriously about
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
starting his side hustle so that's kind of the first law and it goes both ways like once you're in motion we see this over and over again ideas start to pop up that you never would have had just based on conversations that you have or things that you come across during your research and that it's really powerful like this you know inertia and momentum law law number two is this law of force and
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and impact. And so this is Newton's law of acceleration. Acceleration of an object occurs based on the force that was applied to it. So the smack of that 3% raise after winning the highest award in your industry, that was a pretty hard smack. And so it motivated Vincent to take off in a hurry. He told me he would have been happy with 10%.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And so that wouldn't have been a big enough impact to really change his life.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, this was kind of like hit home. We were at this beach vacation this summer and you're at the pool all the time and you're like, man, I really should hit the gym more because I see all these people who are super fit. And so maybe that's a motivating factor. You could see it in health, you could see it in business, you could see it in relationships. It happens all over the place.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And then the third law is this action and reaction. So for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. And so we're recording this on election day and somebody just posted like, whether you vote or not, that's a vote. And so that got me thinking about this. There's an equal and opposite reaction. And even if nobody... theoretically reacts to your stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Because I wrote a personal blog for years and years and years that nobody really read outside of my friends and family. Well, that was a reaction. It was a reaction that told me that, hey, you better write about stuff that people care about. And it wasn't all for waste because it was practicing skills of writing online and learning WordPress and learning all this other stuff.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But it can be depressing when on the surface, it's like, yeah, there was no reaction. Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The big three for the site right now are freelancing, like we talked about, e-commerce, and blogging and podcasting, content marketing types of businesses where you're like, okay, I'm going to set up an online presence to talk about this subject matter that maybe I'm an expert in, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm learning this subject matter, and monetizing through ads, through affiliate relationships, through digital products.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I've seen it work across introverts, extroverts, young, old. It's really a matter of figuring out, okay, what's my offer going to be and how can I get that in front of my target customers?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
This is good. Let's dive into this a little bit more. So... What's the hypothetical business that you're thinking about testing?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Okay, perfect. So if you're looking at Etsy, where I would start is the existing listings on Etsy and the existing listings on eBay, Amazon, Redbubble, some of these other similar marketplaces where people might be buying this stuff. If there are other people... making sales, that's a fantastic sign, right? There's money in that market.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The second thing that I would probably do is Etsy costs, I think, 20 cents to put up a listing. It's almost free. So you create your listing very affordably. And so if it's a handmade product, I would just create one of those so you can take nice pictures and put up that listing for 20 cents. Etsy has on-platform advertising that you can use to drive traffic on top of their
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
listing optimization tools and keyword tags and stuff like that. But one thing that you probably want to do before paying for traffic is to land some social proof on your Etsy page, which is the number of likes on this page, the number of sales that you've made. So you can see that with some initial reviews from friends and family.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You might even just give these away and say, I'd really prefer if you ordered this through Etsy to help out my appearance on that platform. And you find that kind of a similar strategy, not just on Etsy, but on iTunes. Hey, can you review this podcast on Udemy? Hey, could you review my course on Amazon? Hey, could you review my book?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Like just to kind of seed the platform with a little bit of social proof. So the algorithms start to work in your favor. And so people, when they do land on that page, they say, okay, this isn't a ghost town. There's actually, you know, something, there's something to this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, and maybe that's feedback too. If nobody wants your thing, if you can't get your friends and family to buy it, that's probably a sign that it's not the best business to go into.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I'm still really high on podcasting specifically because I forget the latest stats, but it's probably something like 40% of the population even knows what a podcast is. And so that leaves a huge chunk of the pie left to go out and grow over the next 5, 10, 15 years. As people discover on-demand audio and they're probably going to react like I did, this is
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
amazing how did i waste so many years listening to nonsense on the radio but i could listen to stuff that is gonna help me grow personally and professionally like really excited about that the the key then is okay how can i reach those people in the 40 that already do know about podcasts how can i reach those people in a way that is either helpful or entertaining a friend of mine kind of gave me this was five or six years ago at a conference gave me the rule of the internet which i
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
quote all the time. People are only ever online for one of two reasons. Number one, to be entertained. And number two, to solve a problem. And you can think of it, that's Facebook and that's Google. To be entertained or solve a problem. And the podcast may bridge the gap there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Some friends have called it infotainment, where you're providing educational content, hopefully in an entertaining way, but putting the listener first. And It's a practice. It's a crap. Like the first 50 episodes of The Side Hustle Show, awful. You know, I'm embarrassed to go back and listen to those, but it just took a while to hit my stride as a host.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I don't know, you're like a radio professional, so you're doing great right out of the gate, but it's a practice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I definitely wouldn't leave your job if you're at that $200 to $600 a month level. What I would like to see is a track record of earnings history... six to 12 months, and other people will be more aggressive than this, of replacing not necessarily your day job salary, but at least your monthly expenses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So you know you're not going to be dipping into your emergency fund, your savings, to try and get to that ramp up period. The exception to that has been from folks where the day job really is the bottleneck. And you say, hey, if I had an extra 40, 50, 60 hours a week in some cases, I know I could get this thing to the next level where it could support me, where it could support my family.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's when it might make sense to make the leap where it looks on paper prematurely. It has to align with your goals too, right? Some people have no intention of leaving their day jobs. Hey, I love my work, but I do this stuff on the side because it's fun, because it's interesting, because it provides play money for whatever reason. It's building my skills.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's exercising a different side of my brain. So not everybody is out to quit their day job.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's an interesting one. So the negativity comes from a couple places. The first is that... you kind of economic macro positioning that we talked about where it's like, you know, what a sad state of affairs that 44 million people feel the need to side hustle. Like, why can't it be like the old days? Right. That's maybe one angle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The other angle is just like maybe the word hustle, like as the connotation of like, I'm going to scam people or something like that, not recognizing the It just means your effort, like control what you can control, work as hard as you can when you can and be smart about it. Actually, side hustle nation comes from a quote from an old baseball coach of mine.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
He's like, look, you're going to have bad days at the plate. You're going to have bad days in the field, but hustle never slumps. And I was like, okay, I really like that. That stuck with me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Oh my gosh. So we talked about the freelancing consulting stuff. If you have a skill that's in demand, absolutely understand that your boss, your company is probably taking a large percentage of your value. A friend of mine was a tutor for Kaplan or one of these big tutoring companies. He was making 18 bucks an hour, which was Awesome for him, like in his early 20s.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The company was turning around and charging the parents like a hundred bucks an hour. And he was like, wait a minute, I have this skill. I could go out and sell that directly to my customers. So I like that freelancing marketplace. Perfect first side hustle as a way to get your feet wet, understand that you have value outside of your business card, outside of your paycheck.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My wife and her business partner on the side from her job started a photography business, completely unrelated to her engineering job. So it doesn't have to be, I'm an accountant by day, so I'll do accounting at night. We talked about the podcasting stuff. We talked about kind of like the online...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
authority, business, blogging, content marketing businesses, I continue to see and I continue to be impressed by some of the numbers that these guys are posting. I just talked to a guy this afternoon who was selling $45,000 a month worth of a online course that teaches you how to start a microgreens farming business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
and grow the stuff in your garage and sell it to the farmer's market and to local restaurants. And it just blew my mind that there was that much demand in a niche I had never even heard of. And I'm really excited by stuff like that. People having this new ability to kind of monetize these little skills, hobbies, interests that they might be able to put out there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, make it easy for me. Make it step by step. Absolutely.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that was my initial reaction too, but I keep getting proven wrong. People starting relatively new sites. Again, another guy I talked to today started a mattress review blog in the UK. So just even a tiny little island where apparently 15,000 people are finding his site every month and clicking on his affiliate links to go buy these mattresses.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But because the price point is high enough and the commission is high enough, he's able to make a full-time living doing that. So, you know, on the blogging front, the trap I want people to avoid is like, okay, I'm going to start a personal blog and expect that that makes money. You know, the ones that I see doing well are the blogs that have content that solve specific problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
As you're creating every piece of content, think, okay, how is somebody going to discover this? Usually it's going to be Google. Usually it's going to be Pinterest. But thinking of these user-to-content platforms, that's a term from Rosemary Groner who runs TheBusyBudgeter.com. It's like a personal finance budgeting site that's gone crazy. How are people going to discover this? And if...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
you know, if it has some nonsensical, clever title that only makes sense to you, you know, probably nobody's going to click on that. Probably nobody's going to come and read that. And it's like, you're going to pour your heart out. You're going to pour hours into creating this stuff. Like make sure that you're setting yourself up for success.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It's something that somebody is looking for and, you know, you're giving them the best chance to find it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
The day that I quit, I was out to dinner with my boss and this had been kind of on my mind for months, really, because I was building the shoe business on the side from this corporate gig. I was out to dinner with my boss and I'm like, okay, this is the day. I'm going to break in the news. I'm out of here. I'm going to get my notice.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
It still took me a couple beers deep into this dinner to build up the nerve to do it. Because it's like, is that allowed? Can I cut my own paycheck? I went to school. I have these obligations. Is this actually going to work? And I had several months of earnings history at that point. So it wasn't completely...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
you might've heard the definition of an entrepreneur is somebody who jumps off a cliff and it's going to figure out how to build their parachute on the way down. Like that was, that was not me. And it was still super scary. But after I told him it was like this huge weight off my shoulders and it just like, okay, this is real. Like, let's go, let's go do this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I would say once you have at least six months of earnings history to cover your expenses from the side business. So you're not jumping without a parachute. You've got something that you know is working and you think you can get to the next level if you're going to free up some time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Hit up sidehustlenation.com slash ideas for a constantly updated laundry list of part-time business ideas that you can start today and no opt-in required. And of course, we'd love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show available in iTunes and pretty much every other podcast player app as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
I know, it sounds awful now. So this was kind of in the 2014 to 2015 timeframe. It started actually with a guest of mine on the Side Hustle show who was talking about taking cold showers, starting out as a fat-burning hack. to boost your metabolism for the rest of the day because you're going to expend calories like heating your body up long after the shower is over.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But then what he found was it was effective for that. But what he also found, it was effective for just like motivation. And he's like, if this is the hardest thing that I have to do today, and some days it's really hard because it sucks. You feel like you're ready to tackle anything. anything. And I kind of found the same thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I said on air, I was like, you know what, that sounds awful, but let me give it a shot. And some good things started happening. It might have been totally placebo, but at that time, I started to get more coaching clients. Traffic started to pick up. I don't know, for whatever reason, I was into it. And so I did it for over a year. I guess it was effective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Maybe it was what I needed at that time.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Absolutely. Get out of your comfort zone a little bit. Do it for 30 days or even maybe the baby steps way to do it would be to end your showers cold, which is kind of what I tend to do today because that's less, for some reason, less jarring than just like jumping straight into the cold water.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
My original side hustle was, when I was working corporate, was a footwear comparison shopping site. It was called Shoesniper.com, and it would aggregate the product catalogs from Zappos and Amazon and all these other online footwear retailers and tell you where you could find the best price on your next pair of shoes, and it earned money as an affiliate.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So if somebody went and bought that pair of shoes through Amazon, the site would get a commission. And while I was running that, and the site had a almost a 10 year run, was always looking for stuff on the side. And it was kind of like during one of these lower points of that business, doing some soul searching, be like, well, what do you want to be known for when people Google you?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
What do you get excited about talking about? And it was that prospect of lower risk entrepreneurship. You know, how do I build a business on the side? How do I make extra money that, you know, really never gets old and still doesn't get old? Because there's a million and one creative ways that people are doing it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And that's kind of where the Side Hustle Show and the Side Hustle Nation blog kind of were born from.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
A lot of them. And so my days of experimenting with a lot of this stuff are kind of limited. So I used to do some freelancing, used to do some e-commerce experiments with like Amazon and eBay. And I still do a little bit of that, but that's kind of taken the back burner. The Side Hustle blog has... kind of become in the podcast, so kind of become the main focus.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But there still are a dozen income streams related to that and not related to that through self-publishing, through affiliate marketing on the site and on a couple other sites that I still run. Sadly, the shoe site no longer exists, but some other sites that were started during that time are still around, starting some experiments in the investing world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And it all adds up versus trying to rely on one source of income, having like a single point of failure.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Well, not necessarily a preference one over the other, but the ultimate freedom, right, is control over your calendar. How do you spend your time? How do you spend your days? And if you can piece together an income on your own terms rather than on somebody else's terms, you're more likely to have that freedom. So that's kind of where it came from for me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I would definitely advocate focus first, simplify first, and then diversify second. So, you know, try and get one thing, one business, one income stream off the ground before going crazy and trying six things, you know, with an unfocused effort because I think that's harder to see results from.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Basically just a blog and podcast for people trying to make extra money outside of traditional employment. At the very low end of that, it could be like babysitting, walking dogs, delivering pizzas. I think all of those count as side hustles. There's a connotation that...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
a side hustle has a little bit more of an entrepreneurial upside where maybe you're not directly trading hours for dollars or maybe there's this vision, this hope, this dream that it could become something bigger as it definitely did for me with the shoe business.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Probably the textbook definition would be that upside potential. It's something that you have ownership over. Maybe it's an asset that you own versus, okay, I drive for Uber. Or I'm delivering pizzas or I'm, you know, doing Instacart deliveries or something like that. Right. Like that's, that absolutely counts as a side hustle in my mind.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But at the same time, like you're limited on how much you can do by your hours in the day versus with you starting today. the podcast, it's all of a sudden from a single mic and two people having a conversation, you could reach thousands and thousands of people. And that is really powerful. It becomes a little bit more leveraged.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And I think there's a lot more upside, even just like starting a freelancing business. Like I'm going to do freelance writing, I'm going to do freelance podcast editing, whatever it is.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
That's a weird, it's a weird time, right? It's a weird statistic because on the surface, the economy is great. Unemployment is at record lows. Why are 44 million people feeling the need or the desire to go out and make extra money? So I think part of it is reactive, right? Housing, education, insurance, or healthcare, all of those costs have grown way faster than real wages.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
So that's a driving factor, just the straight up cost of living and people feeling the crunch to make ends meet and pay down student debt. That's maybe the negative way to look at it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
And the more positive way to look at it is I have the ability and the desire to start something that scratches a creative itch, that is something that I have control over, that I'm interested in, that I'm passionate about. That's probably driving some of that as well. Those are the people that are more interesting to talk to than the people like, well, I need to make rent next month.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
You're approaching it from a completely different standpoint.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, that word play that you just used is really key. And approaching it that way, saying, look, this is going to be a fun experiment. I'm going to see what happens. I'm going to put some content out there. And approaching it that way lessens the sting of failure and kind of puts you more into a scientist role where it's like, okay, this is my hypothesis. I'm going to test something out.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
If it works, great. If it doesn't, okay, on to the next thing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
Yeah, I think it's that... you know, cash strapped nature. You know, look, we're dealing with a debt load. We're dealing with a higher cost of living in most cases. And it's just, okay, how do I make ends meet? And the way I approached it was like, I was just looking for a way to use my free time more productively.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
When I was first starting the shoe business, like I moved across the country for my day job, didn't have any friends like outside of the office, really. And so I had a lot of free times, nights and weekends. I was like, well, I could play Xbox with my buddies back home or just sit there and watch TV.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Nick Loper, Master the Art of Side Hustles to Create Lasting Freedom | Entrepreneurship | YAPClassic
But so, you know, how can I be more intentional, be more effective with these hours that I've been given and try and make something worthwhile out of it?