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
Like if you don't break even after one job and you know, that's kind of off to the races and you could even go sell the job before buying the machine, you know, hey, can I come back next week and do pressure washing for you? And you don't even need to spend the $2,500 upfront, like if you pre-book it. But longer term, I'm still trading time for money. I don't have a lot of leverage in this.
And so we talked to some really inspiring younger entrepreneurs recently who were doing a window washing business or car detailing business where it's like, I can find other people who know how to do this work probably as good or better than me. I just need to be the marketing arm. I need to be the administrative arm, the scheduler.
Kind of being a better administrator, better operator, and then just finding trustworthy people to go out and do the work. And so similar to your agency, your social agency model, where that has got some scalability and some legs to it.
I think for handmade products, you got to figure out where the demand is. And it's probably going to be on Etsy and maybe Amazon Handmade if you can get accepted into that program. The challenge is, and there's some keyword research tools that can help you with evaluating Etsy demand.
And to their credit, Etsy has a lot of public data where they'll show you the number of sales that each shop has made. They don't tell you on the individual product level, as far as I'm aware, but Rather than trying to create demand from scratch, it's so much easier to fill demand. So trying to figure out what is already selling and how can you put your own unique spin on it?
So that's where I would go, especially if I don't have an existing audience. I'm going to be relying on Etsy's audience in this case to say, hey, these products are popular. How can I throw my hat in the ring and try and capture some of that demand?
Well, Etsy is nice from that standpoint because all it costs you is 20 cents to put the listing up. But we had a guy who was doing these Renaissance style pet portraits. And I think he had actual Photoshop experts on his team. You probably do this with AI now where people, customers would upload a picture of their dog and he would put them in this frilly Henry VIII type of outfit.
And it was all print on demand. And he'd ship these guys the products. Something like that would be really interesting, like AI-powered type of thing, where it gets, like if you're doing the print-on-demand thing, very much a volume game, where the people I see having the most success have thousands of products out there. And you're just dealing with copycats all day long. If something sells...
The bots or the other people who are watching that say, oh, we better make a copy of this shirt because somebody bought it. And it can be really challenging, but it's super rewarding when we get those Redbubble sales notifications or those merch, Amazon merch sales notifications. It's passive income once it's up there.
Yes. Now, the advantage to building your own audience, obviously, like you have much more control because it's Etsy's customer. It's not yours. It's Amazon's customer. It's not yours. We had a woman on last year. The site is called Strapsicle. Strapsicle is this little silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle so you can read with one hand. And the origin story was fantastic.
I was breastfeeding my son and the Kindle dropped on his head and everybody was really upset. Like, there's got to be a better way. None of the existing straps were great. So we went out and invented this thing. And what she did, which was, I thought, really smart, Lots of influencer marketing, partnering with TikTokers. BookTok was the sub-community that she found.
People who were really into Kindle and tapping in. Hey, let me send you a free thing. No obligation, no strings attached. And here's an offer code if you'd like it. And...
was selling the crap out of these things with you can imagine like it doesn't weigh anything almost no cost to ship almost no cost to manufacture and then when it was time to launch on amazon they had this existing audience that they could push over there to leave reviews to go and buy the product where i think most people start amazon first and then try and wean themselves off wean back onto their own shopify powered platform and so much harder to go that other direction
Yeah, this is probably tier three, tier one services, tier two products. Tier three is this really flexible hybrid content-based business, audience-based business where it could be a social following, it could be a blog following, a podcast following, a YouTube following. And once you have people paying attention, the entire playbook opens up.
Yeah, sure, you could sell services, you could sell products, you could sell attention in the form of advertising or affiliate partnerships, but it really is a powerful place to play. And that's really where I've spent the bulk of my side hustle and entrepreneurial time over the last decade.
10 years to try and figure out how to get more traffic, how to get more listeners, how to get more email subscribers and plan in that space. Because the scale is almost infinite, right? It takes, as you know, the same effort and energy and investment to create an episode, a podcast episode that 10 people listen to or 10,000 people listen to or 100,000 people.
And so it's a really unique platform in that way. And the same thing with social content or video content.
Yeah, you got to niche down. And so to say I'm a general virtual assistant, it's kind of a race to the bottom. But if you say I am your QuickBooks bookkeeping assistant, okay, now I've got a lane that I can play in. Or I am your funnel optimization assistant. I am your community manager. I am your... podcast editing provider, lots of different sub-niches.
You can even ask ChatGPT, what are a hundred different services I could offer as a virtual assistant? And there's going to be a few on that list where you're like, I know how to do that. And even if you're not completely, you know, the world's foremost expert on that, I guarantee you will be after you get a couple of clients to do the thing.
And then you can start to agency-fy that, you can start to productize that. And I You might have some fun doing it. Or you might find, I really didn't like doing that. I'm going to try option B. Go try something else.
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