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
But the realm of potential side hustles has absolutely expanded in the last 10 years with the rise of peer-to-peer gig economy type of apps, plug-and-play side hustles. Sign up for Uber and go drive around or do DoorDash and stuff like that. There's a peer-to-peer platform for just about anything.
If you have an underutilized asset in your life, whether it's your house or your car or, you know, watching other people's dogs, there's all sorts of different things that you can do. And Side Hustle Nation has been a beneficiary of that rising tide of interest. inside hustles over the last 10 or 12 years. And it's become much more mainstream.
And I think that's one part out of a necessity where like housing, healthcare, education, some big ticket expenses have not gotten any cheaper. Wages by and large have not kept pace with some of those big ticket increases in expenses. And so approaching it out of necessity on the one hand, and then approaching it out of this proactive desire to spend your free time more and
effectively, more productively. Like if your day job isn't scratching that creative itch, maybe something outside of your nine to five can do it. And we see people really tackling it from both sides.
My very first side hustle, aside from painting houses in college, like, I don't know if that counts, but the first online side hustle was a comparison shopping site for shoes. Like in the early days of the internet, 10 different stores have this pair of shoes that you're looking at. We'll tell you where to find the best price.
It was an affiliate marketing type of business where those stores would pay a finder's fee. They would pay a commission for driving sales to their sites. That was a good one. I started a virtual assistant directory and review platform called Virtual Assistant Assistant. Started in 2011, sold in 2020. That...
I was really born out of my own experience and anxiety around working with virtual team members. Of all the different companies, which ones are legit? Are they going to steal my idea? How does it work with paying them and taxes? All of these rookie questions, but then putting the directory and kind of having a front row seat as that industry really grew and expanded over that time too.
That was the hypothesis in the early days of Side Hustle Nation, where I'm going to be the guinea pig. I'm going to be the tester. I'm going to try out all these different things and report back on the results. And in the early days, that was freelance writing, a little bit of freelance book editing for nonfiction authors. Started with like a gig on Fiverr. Hey, I'll proofread your book. And as
Most books are a lot more than 500 words, but it ended up to be some pretty sizable gigs. I did a lot of like Amazon FBA clearance arbitrage in those early years because somebody told me about it on the podcast. It's like, there's no way in the era of big data that this is actually a thing.
But sure enough, you go to Walmart, you scan the products, and you're like, oh, okay, it says there's profit here. Then you ship it in and it sells immediately. And you're like... okay, I guess this is a thing, you know, doing that kind of thing, selling digital products, creating online courses on Udemy, doing the self-publishing thing, trying my hand in a bunch of different areas.
And I think it was a ton of fun to play around and do those experiments.
This is the dream job. If I can show up and get paid to do my hour, hour and a half of radio every week, I don't know why I would ever give that up. I know. It's such a kick out of scooping side hustle stories and connecting with people with really inspiring businesses that they've built. I mean, the show is primarily monetized through sponsorships.
Most of them are coming through Yap Media these days. And it took... years to be truthful before that could meaningfully be called a full-time income from the show. What was more helpful early on was recognizing podcast advertising is amplitude and frequency. How big is the audience and frequency? How often can you reach them?
And so if you have an entrepreneurs on fire daily show with a big audience, yeah, absolutely. You're going to kill it on advertising. But if you're doing at that time, a weekly show with a modest audience, I you know, does this really pencil out?
But using it as a content marketing channel to build up an audience, build up an email list, build relationships and trust, it still was absolutely worthwhile to do in the early days. And you still get all those benefits, even though the show is now monetized primarily with pre-roll or mid-roll ads rather through sponsorships.
That's the hard part. I think of it in terms of what I call the listener pyramid, you know, pyramid with four levels. You have strangers. Unfortunately, that's the biggest section of the base of the pyramid. Strangers, people who don't know you exist. You've convinced some of them to become listeners. You've convinced some of them to become subscribers.
And then ultimately what you're shooting for at the top of the pyramid is fans. These are the people who listen to everything that you put out. They're the people evangelizing for you. They're spreading the word. They're taking your recommendations.
And with every piece of content that you create, it's like trying to ascend people on that pyramid, you know, from really compelling titles and topics to hopefully get a stranger to give you a chance and listen to you for that first time. And then hopefully they do. And they're compelled to click that subscribe button to that follow button.
And hopefully they spend enough time with you in their earbuds. They become fans of yours and help spread the word.
A friend of mine in a mastermind group posed decision framework, and it's stuck with me ever since. With every decision you make, does it add complexity or reduce complexity? And if it adds complexity, okay, is it permanent or is it short-term? And is that trade-off going to be worthwhile? Obviously, like making money, it's fun.
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