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
Oh, I like this one. This is actually my wife's side hustle. So she does wedding photography. She does family photos for holiday cards and stuff like that. What it was for them from hobbyist to professional was getting up the nerve. And this was 10 plus years ago. But add on Craigslist, we'll shoot your wedding. Her and her partner will shoot your wedding for 200 bucks.
I think it was like starting super, super low because in this business, portfolio sells. if I am a bride and you don't have any wedding pictures, you're going to have to cut me a real good deal for me to take a chance on our wedding day. But that's what they did. And they booked up and I was like, who is looking for wedding photography on Craigslist?
And maybe today it would be Facebook groups or Facebook marketplace, you know, different places to play. But in that era, you know, that site had some eyeballs and sure enough, they booked up 10 or 12 weddings, you know, they raised their prices with each one. And now they charge four or $5,000 for this wedding package.
But they had to have that portfolio to build up the experience of doing it live under the pressure, like a family photography, like, okay, it didn't work. We'll just do it again next weekend. We're not going to restage this whole weddings.
We got to get it right the first time to building up the confidence to do that and building up the confidence to charge more and more in land, higher paying clients, better venues. and all of that, and lots of cool stuff.
So they found a strategic partnership with one of the wedding venues in California, whereas like, and the conversation might be as simple as what does it take to get on your preferred vendor list? Who are the companies that you work with over and over again? And they're like, fill out this application or, you know, make sure you have this insurance and we'll add you.
Like it was not a difficult process. And now all of a sudden, kind of a steady stream of weddings come through there. It could be, One cool one, partnering with the local school PTA, like if they have a silent auction, okay, we'll auction off a photo session. So we get in front of all the parents at that school and you just kind of start the word of mouth.
It's like micro local influencer marketing almost. It only takes one person who knows a lot of other families to start to refer you out. Yeah.
This is where probably pause and first give yourself some credit. You probably have some skills by definition, like any job you've had, like that was a skill somebody thought was worth paying for. At the very low end of this, it could be those gig economy jobs. type of jobs. It could be the Instacars, the DoorDashes of the world. The downside is obviously time for money.
It could be limited upside on that sort of thing. But it could also be something like other what we call like plug and play side hustles. Like we've covered becoming a mobile notary loan signing agent. If you have an attention to detail and you can get a notary license, you're qualified to do this work.
And it's not, rocket science is not particularly exciting, like watching people sign papers, but it's not the end of the world either. It could be taking surveys or doing online market research, focus group type of stuff. I think these are fun. Like I probably do three, four, 500 bucks a year worth of this stuff.
It's like, oh yeah, come to our online panel about credit card rewards or talk to us about your favorite video editing software. Like, All right, sure. That's totally fine. It could be a bunch of apps will pay you to play mobile games if you're into that kind of thing.
Like another popular one in the past year or two has been this company called ShareTown, which is similar like plug and play where ShareTown specializes in product returns for direct to consumer brands that sell like bulky stuff like furniture, exercise equipment, mattresses. I think they do pizza ovens as well.
But like, you know, how all the mattress companies have like 100 night better sleepers free guarantee. And so a certain percentage of people were like, you know, either on night one or night 99, they're like, ah, it wasn't for us. We want to return it. And so then as the local share town rep, you get dispatched to go pick it up. You clean it up.
You resell it because Casper, whoever it is, they can't take that mattress back. They don't want it back. And so this is their way of helping the customer out. And I assume recouping a little bit of the cost at the same time.
Yeah, so you mentioned Fiverr, obviously Upwork for the freelance marketplaces, Rover for pet sitting. There's a peer to peer site for just about anything. The challenge is to find one that is up and coming and less saturated or maybe more niche. What I would probably Google is the service or skill that you have in mind plus marketplace or plus platform and see what comes up and maybe
page two of Google, maybe lower on page one. And then you can plug that brand name into Google Trends and see like, is it increasing? Is it decreasing? Just to try and catch something that's on the upswing rather than one that is already just loaded to the gills with service providers.
I love this question because everybody is here at one point or at some point you find yourself in this exact position. What you have to remember, and I'm still guilty of this, I want you to remove the phrase, I didn't have time from your vocabulary. Instead of I didn't have time, the phrase that you need to get into your head is I prioritized something else. And it's totally fine.
to prioritize something else. But that little mental shift of being honest with yourself, I prioritized watching Netflix or I prioritized hanging out with my kids. That's all totally fine. But you might find that you're prioritizing some suboptimal things. So that's the first step. Next step is getting consistent with carving out time either daily or weekly to make progress on the thing.
If you don't block it off in the calendar, it's not going to happen. It could be a half hour first thing in the morning. It could be 15 minutes after the kids go to bed. It could be Saturday mornings on the weekend. Do it and do it consistently because it's so hard to get that momentum spinning. It's like trying to push that boulder down the hill.
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