Nick Loper
speaker
293 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Nick Loper’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
some other idea or it sparks this conversation or you meet somebody through that and the businesses start to evolve, the opportunities become visible once you're already in motion. But most people do start in that. I mean, there was me painting houses in college, trying to figure out how to sell something and go through all the steps in that process.
Obviously, you can scale it with team members by having other people do the work. You can scale it by raising rates. You can scale by productizing to a certain extent where instead of hourly, now it's just a fixed monthly cost. And you have a sense of what your deliverables are going to be. So you can sell it maybe without even talking on the phone with a customer.
Like they just click the buy button and there's a level of trust that's built up. you could scale through referral partnerships where it's almost like white labeling. Like this isn't a service that we provide, but we can partner with this other agency or this other service provider. We've seen people do that. A friend of mine did, he was running like this SEO business and eventually got
fully booked up, sold out, and he started making money not doing the work. Like, oh, but I'll introduce you to this other guy, a friend of mine, or this other business owner, and would get a finder's fee for sending work to somebody else. I was like, well, that's pretty interesting. And that evolved into a matchmaking directory or lead gen type of directory for that type of business.
Like, oh, we'll answer a few different questions about your goals and your type of business, and we'll match you, or we'll introduce you to the company that's the best fit. It's like, oh, dang, you could probably do that in just about any niche.
Yeah, very common path to go, you know, have, do the thing, get the results. And naturally, you're gonna have people asking, well, How did you do that? How did you build your podcast? Or how did you get so many social followers? You get tired answering the same question over and over again. You're like, well, let me just record the answers. We'll package this up into a digital product.
Have you connected with Stephen Key from InventRight at all? No. Fascinating guy. So he'd been doing this for decades, helping aspiring inventors license their products.
And the way we kind of framed it was rather than at this time, like Amazon FBA, private label was the hot thing, like tap into this huge market on the world's largest store, Amazon, you know, build it and they'll come almost was how shooting fish in a barrel. It was, that's at least how it seemed from the outside. His argument is like, look at all this upfront risk that you have.
You've got to buy 500, 1,000 units of whatever this product is. You've got to spend additional money on marketing, advertising, collecting reviews. And then even if it hits, you're going to be reinvesting capital into inventory, sometimes for years, before you can take those chips off the table. He's like, what if instead you just...
pitch the idea to some company that already had the marketing manufacturing and the marketing firepower to make this thing a hit. And we talked to a guy whose business was like a Pictionary-inspired card game. It's like, here's something that already exists. Here's my creative spin on it. Sold it to Mattel, maybe 5% licensing fee, which they netted like $300,000 in royalties.
This guy was like a dentist in Georgia. It was like a little side project for him. Another guest, she was like a softball player, a softball coach. And she was playing third base and her hand kept getting hurt with hard ground balls. So she had a little padded inner glove thing. She would stick inside her mitt. And that was her little licensing invention. Or somebody else had...
like a koozie, like a can holder. The little bottom would freeze and it would fit into the dimple of your Coke can or your beer can. And it was like these little pivots on products that already exist. It's just such a creative way to go about it.
It is less popular than it once was, but still can work. Dropshipping is where you don't hold any inventory, but you partner with people who do. And usually it's going to be big ticket or bigger ticket purchases that aren't readily available nearby. Like if you've seen people doing golf simulators or giant commercial inflatable bounce houses or...
maybe treadmills or treadmill desks maybe barbecue smokers type of thing but like typically bigger items where you don't have to hold the inventory you strike up partnerships with the distributors or manufacturers and you collect orders you do the marketing and then you ship it out or the distributor ships it out on your behalf or the manufacturer ships it out on your behalf and so the appeal is well i don't have to buy this thing until it's sold right and then i just make my
maybe 10%, maybe 15%. You might have pretty thin margins, which you got to pay your entire marketing budget out of that. You figure out how am I going to drive traffic? And then the other downside is I don't really have any control over that customer experience. If there's shipping delays, if something breaks, all of a sudden you're a middleman.
The customer thought they were doing business with you, but now you're almost powerless. You just have to forward messages or calls like, hey, where's my customer's order? So definitely trade-offs. It could be kind of a competitive place to play. But if you can drive your own traffic and you've got a partner that you really trust, it absolutely can work.
Yeah, as you think about what's my value add layer, is it going to be customer support? Is it going to be some sort of consultation? Oh, on your golf simulator, are you an insider in that space? Like, do you know which ones are actually better and help customers drive their decision rather than just purely competing on price?
Okay.
I'm gonna try.
I would go that service route. And if I'm thinking longer term, that agency route where trying to figure out pain points and problems, what can I solve? And if it's me personally, like, okay, I'll go pressure wash people's driveways or something. The machine is going to cost me three, 400 bucks, pressure wash somebody's house, three, 400 bucks.
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