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Mindy: Side hustles can be great for earning extra income, but they can also be great at wasting your time for little in return. Today, we’re chatting with Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation about how to choose the right side hustle for you. It doesn’t matter if everyone you know is making bank doing product representations and brand ambassadorships. If you’re an introvert, this probably isn’t the right side hustle for you. Nick has tips for getting started, including a prompt template to help you gather your strengths in one place so you can feed it into your AI of choice so you can start exploring side hustles that might not be so mainstream, but will be a perfect fit for you.
Mindy: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my former side hustler co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Thanks, Mindy. Good to be here. Um I’ve substituted side hustling for having arguments about Bitcoin with random internet strangers. We are so excited to be joined by Nick Loper today. He is the brains behind sidehustlenation.com and the host of The Side Hustle Show where he talks exclusively about side hustles and how you can set yourself up for success. We did a recent podcast episode talking about how someone could go from broke at 50 to retired at 60. And one of our recommendations there was go listen to Side Hustle Nation. Go listen to Nick’s Side Hustle Show and sign up for the site and spend one hour a week, one way on one drive of your commute, and we believe that you will earn not just the minimum hourly rate for like an Uber or a basic side hustle, but that you will have idea after idea germinate and you will be making at least $10,000 per year if you apply yourself. Nick, welcome to Bigger Pockets Money and do you agree with that assumption? Is that is that a is that a good pitch for why people should listen to the side hustle show?
Guest: Yeah, I appreciate that shout out. Absolutely.
Scott: From your experience, how do we get honest about what the realistic potential of side hustling is for someone with a full-time job. Um and what should people be looking for out of a side hustle, you know, in a realistic sense in the first year when they may not feel like they bring a lot of really unique skills to the table.
Guest: Yeah, we can dive into all of that, especially the skill side because that’s I I really like that part of the conversation. But starting out taking kind of an honest inventory of what hours do I realistically have to dedicate to this? Like, okay, if I’m working 8:00 to 5 plus commute, plus kids, plus after school activities, plus plus plus, like how much is left, right? And so you can kind of start with this time audit exercise. We all have dealt the same number of hours in a week, but it looks different for everybody. And I, you know, a friend of mine was like, I’m pretty sure my four kids uh hours per week looks a little bit different than you know, a single 20-something person. So taking an honest inventory of where your time is currently going and saying, okay, could I realistically do half an hour in the morning before work? Could I realistically do half a hour? And I kind of frame it that way, like the book ends of your days because it’s where you probably have the most control over over your own time before you start like putting out fires and reacting to everybody else’s agenda. And maybe I could do four or five hours, you know, one day on the weekend and maybe it adds up to 10 hours a week, right? It’s kind of just as a ballpark like being honest. First of all, like what time do I have to dedicate to this? And then second, like what is my dream scenario side hustle goal? Like everybody’s like, okay, I want to be able to quit my job. It’s like, well, let’s dial it back. And I think on a previous episode we talked about the side hustle snowball where it’s like, could I cover my car payment? Could I cover my gym membership? Could I cover my cell phone bill? Right? There’s these little milestones, there’s little wins along the way, but you got to make it meaningful enough for you to keep going when the times get tough when you’re like, I’m not seeing the results right away, or how do the motivation to see it through.
Scott: My hypothesis is, right? Let let’s take let’s take somebody who’s really just starting out, right? like we we use this persona we call her Barb or Nancy depending whether she has debt or not. and she’s been a stay-at-home mom for 25 years and is now terrified and starting out on the next phase of wealth building. entry-level job, 40 hours a week. You know, we we thought, hey, you’re going to have to basically just grind it out. You’re going to change you’re going to trade hours for dollars in the initial phases and there’s a number of relatively low skill um options like Uber or dog walking or whatever that can get you started. Would you agree with that hypothesis and then how would you suggest that this person begin the journey of identifying one of these future goals? Like at first it’s just I need extra money. But then it becomes I think something more and there are multiple options there. How would you frame that journey for us?
Guest: Yeah, you have to have kind of that both near-term, what am I going to do today, and pair that with, well, what does success look like three to five years from now? The plug and play type of apps that you mentioned, the Rovers and the Uber Eats and the door dashes stuff. Like that’s that’s a really good stop gap. Like limited barrier to entry, it’s a skill you already have. Like you can get started like this weekend, right? But your earning power is capped, right? It’s a skill that almost everybody has, so it’s not particularly unique or like and even Uber it’s like we’re investing heavily in self-driving cars. Like does this even exist in five years? You know. So there’s that. Like what does success look like five years from now? Cuz we tend to focus a lot on the the downside risk of starting a business or starting a side hustle. What if it fails? What if I look dumb? What if nobody cares? is important because like you want to make sure you’re not taking a swing that’s going to bankrupt you, but playing for a swing that has a meaningful enough upside that that’s a win, right? It’s like if you look at somebody else who’s walked that path that you’re considering, and what does their life look like today? Are they still grinding 80-hour weeks or do they have a little more freedom and flexibility in their days, right? That’s kind of the the benchmark that you can use. Okay, if I can reverse engineer what they did and apply it to my own situation, that would be meaningful. And it’s hard because you don’t necessarily like try and advocate, like you don’t need to know steps two through 10 to be able to take step one. because it’s like the analysis paralysis can be very real, but like try to point the trajectory in a way that would be a big win for you.
Scott: I’m approaching it again with this lens of like an entrepreneurial mindset where nine out of 10 businesses fail. So the obvious response to that is not to not try businesses, but to start 10 businesses, right? And then one of them should succeed statistically. That’s that’s how I bring it to the table. And and I think that that goal is is is for a lot of people when they start side hustling. Like when I was in my 20, 23, I did a bunch of side hustles. I was a tutor. uh I tutored this high school kid in in math for a little bit. It was really terrible hourly rate because I had to drive there, get paid like $10 an hour or whatever it was, then drive home. It was a horrible rate, although I liked I liked him. And then, you know, there I I drove for Uber, I I started these these businesses. and and none of them really worked until things did work, right, eventually. And that mentality is I think what I’m trying to to bring to the table here is you don’t really know that goal. How do you pursue a path that either makes you much more per hour or provides you something much more fun or flexible. How do I think about that experimentation flow, which is probably what most people who go down the path of listening to your show, that’s probably the evolution that most of them take to get to wherever they they end up.
Guest: Yeah, I would argue that the tutoring and the Uber driving probably set you up like kind of the the mentality, like almost the identity of like I am a person who’s willing to do the extra work even if it’s not like, okay, it wasn’t a home run success in terms of becoming a million dollar business, but it was like almost this mental win, I’m able to earn money outside of a traditional job. And like that’s really empowering for a lot of people. Does that make sense?
Scott: Of course, yes.
Scott: And so the question is like I didn’t do science behind that. I just like tried something and then tried the next thing. Nowadays, we’ve got you. There’s a there’s a science, there’s a there’s a there’s a path. There’s like hundreds and thousands of examples that you’ve pursued there. So how would someone like take that first step but then actually begin incrementally moving in a better direction even if they don’t have that goal defined yet.
Guest: Yeah, this is the probably the primary skill that separates the people who take action from the people who are like perpetually stuck on the sidelines. And year after year I run the survey and it’s like half of the audience is like almost this entrepreneurial voyeuristic, like they’re like, oh that sounds nice. I mean they’re kind of like they tell themselves they’re waiting for that perfect idea uh this you know inspiration to strike. It’s like there is no such thing as the perfect idea. The perfect idea is the one that you’re like inspired enough, excited enough to take action on, to take that first step. A friend kind of liked it to your first move in in a game of chess, like I’m just putting my pawn out into the world. I’m going see what kind of reaction it gets. So where I typically start is kind of this inventory of skills, interests, hobbies, like what have I gotten paid to do in the past? What do other people ask me for advice on and we can get into the, you know, AI assisted brainstorming sheet. But kind of where does my excitement lie? If I’m looking for that type of side hustle with more upside potential than driving for Uber or something like that. That’s kind of where I start and I try to pair that with pains and problems. you could have they call it like the what sucks uh notes app in my my my phone just like taking inventory of what uh other people are complaining to me about, what my spouse, partner, co-workers like what’s annoying to them? Or what do I find annoying? What pains or problems have I overcome in my own day-to-day and try to figure out like, okay, is there a match here where there could be a business idea on the other side? We had a woman who built a business, a pooper scooper business, pet waste removal business. She’s out looking staring in her backyard, like kind of dreading this chore, and then the light bulb goes on, like, well, if it’s a if it’s a chore for me, if it sucks for me, it probably sucks for other people too. Other people will probably be willing to pay to make this problem go away. And sure enough, they were. And like when we recorded, she had 100 weekly recurring clients and now she had other a team of pooper scoopers going out and doing the work and it was just kind of like that one using that pain point exercise.
Scott: Smells like freedom.
Mindy: Thank you for the the pity laugh here, Mindy. That I I actually might have been more than a pity laugh on that one.
Mindy: No, that was funny.
Scott: Let’s talk about that person if we can or an example like that. This person, did they start with that? Was that their first one? Their first concept that they explored or was that the evolution after trying multiple other activities that that sucked, you know, frankly. And then got better over time. Like that then the idea for what would actually work as a side hustle appeared to them. How do they evolve to that point?
Guest: Yeah, I’m not sure in her case uh specifically, we talked to another gentleman in in a really similar business and he’s like, okay, I ran a a garage door company or I ran a plumbing service and it was kind of you know, almost arrived at the same conclusion in a different way where he’s like, my wife was pregnant, we hired this, you know, pooper scooper service to come out and I don’t know why we’re on the poop train, but that’s just kind of top of mind for some reason. But in this case it was like, look, my wife was pregnant, we didn’t have time to deal with this, so we hired the service, but you know, we never knew when the guy was showing up. He didn’t have a uniform or anything. It was like the billing was really weird. It’s like the barrier to this seems so low to do better than the existing operators. And so was like, what if we just took an honest swing at this to see if we could get some market share. And it’s exactly what happened. that company is called swoop scoop and they’ve cleaned like quarter million yards at this point. They’re all throughout the Northwest. It’s like become a really, really like a multi-million dollar pooper scooper business kind of from that similar inspiration of like, is this the best that’s out there? We’ve had people on the show saying the same thing like, I was I was trying to get my piano tuned and nobody like the people doing it are 80 years old and they just don’t return your call. Like they don’t they’re generally not hungry enough for the business to to go after it.
Scott: I think there’s a lot of a lot a lot of truth too. If you could pick up the phone and respond, I mean, I use a plumbing business that’s way more expensive than a individual plumber for everything but the huge jobs because of that dynamic, right? I’ll pay I would much rather pay three, 400 bucks to deal with a problem securely that I could that I that maybe I could get for done for 200 bucks than I would you know, I I think it’s a great concept and and the pooper scooper business is obviously along those lines.
Guest: We’re kind of working through the the framework here. If you’re that person who’s kind of business agnostic or like, look, I don’t have any specialized skills. First like give yourself some credit. Like if you existed on the planet for any length of time, you probably have some skills. Uh and some might be worth paying for. like psychologists call it the the curse of knowledge. like all of us, like we’ve been podcasting for years and years and so it’s almost hard to imagine not knowing how to do it. Like how do you structure the show or how do you, you know, produce this? It’s like to you know, it’s hard to imagine Einstein like not knowing basic algebra right? It’s like once you know the thing, it’s hard to So, first of all, you know, give yourself some credit, go through the exercise of like, okay, what skills have I gotten paid to do, what other people asked me for help with, all that stuff. You know, the very first tier is like that plug and play tier where it’s just simple. Uh you know, usually app based, you know, you don’t have to do the marketing, the it just, you know, the notification pops up, do you want to accept this gig? Do you not. The next tier is what I call kind of like business in a box side hustles where there’s maybe a little bit more upfront work, maybe a little bit more upfront investment involved. and like in this category, I would call like um vending machines where it’s like, look, there’s a proven playbook out there. You just got to go find the location, you got to do the math on the equipment financing and it’s there. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Um we had another guy who was doing mobility scooter rentals and it was really similar. Like the demand was already there. How do I step in front of that demand? And it’s just like, okay, put on my marketing hat and I have to make some upfront investment in uh in equipment there. Had another guy who was doing like parking lot sweeping where it’s like this is an existing service that, you know, property management companies like strip malls, property managers like either already pay for and they’re happy or they’re not happy with their service, like choice A or B, or they don’t know that this exists and now it’s your job to get in front of them. And so kind of like going where there’s already demand or trying to create a little bit of that demand, kind of like that business in a box, like follow somebody else’s playbook. I think that’s probably tier two of the, well, I don’t really care what kind of side hustle I start, but I just want to make some money.
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Mindy: I mean, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. I think that is what stops a lot of people from starting in the first place is you don’t have to come up with some brand new idea. You just have to be better than your competitors. And like the the pooper swooper thing, you said they’re doing like 250,000 different houses. Obviously, it’s, you know, a whole team there. But one thing you want is rich clients. Rich clients are they will absolutely pay for your services, but you have to deliver. And I guarantee you they are dealing with somebody right now in some capacity that is not delivering. So, uh it goes back to your uh what’s the suck factor. If it sucks for you, it’s going to suck for somebody else. So figure out what is annoying you in your life. How easy is that? Just walk around your house and be like, what annoys me today? Drive to work. What annoys me today. And you will get so many ideas of just things that annoy you. They won’t all be jobs that you could do. They won’t all be side hustles you can do, but I see that as being a very big inspiration piece to to getting you some ideas that either are different or are the same. You’re annoyed because your pooper scooper guy only comes once every other week even though he’s supposed to come every week and he doesn’t wear a uniform and he sends you bills before he gets there. I’m so blasé about this, but it’s not that hard to be better than somebody else.
Guest: It’s not even necessarily about conquesting market share from an existing service provider, is that the pie continues to get bigger as elderly homeowners, millennial homeowners who are really busy and the kind of child rearing age of their lives. It’s like, I don’t I just want to I don’t want to deal with this anymore. Like there’s got to be somebody else who could come do this for me. And like you think about the elderly homeowners, I’m not getting up on a ladder to clean out the gutters or wash the windows anymore. It’s like the pie keeps getting bigger for those types of like blue collar home service type of businesses. It’s not even necessarily like, oh, I’m going to go take food off some other guy’s table. It’s like just the available total addressable market continues to grow there.
Scott: I want to push back here on a couple of these concepts because I think for one of the challenges we’re going to have here is is the three of us are very entrepreneurial. I have no fear about starting a business. I don’t have issue forming it, getting insurance, getting the website stood up, creating intake forms for clients, figuring out where those people are searching for those, putting together a marketing campaign that’s creative and moving. Like that’s an overwhelming body of activity to many people who are thinking about a side hustle, right? It’s it’s it’s it seems like, okay, that’s like a checklist to to complete that’ll take a couple of days to to to maybe us, um as as folks have have done a lot have a lot of entrepreneurial experience and small and large businesses, but for someone who’s just starting out, that’s a step I believe that’s beyond what we’re talking about here. And they’re they’re going to be more like, well, I just want to like make some money in the next month that is good. And and Uber, I understand I can do the drive for Uber and get all that set up and I’ll make you know maybe 10 to 20 bucks an hour depending on how good I am at putting myself in position to get demand surging or whatever. But I’m thinking like what are other ways to get that first step going? The point I want to get across with today’s episode is it starts by drive with driving for Uber or the equivalent. Then it moves to optimizing surge demand for Uber. Then it moves to this kind of like next level more realistic skill for you. Then it moves to a business in a box. Then maybe you hit a nice winner like a multi-million dollar pooper scooper business, but what’s what’s that like realistic first and second step here? Because that’s what I I think it’s more tangible people can feel on the journey. I think it’s going to be much more representative of the typical side hustle journey than these big these these big garage door businesses. Even though garage door can be remote first, see what I did?
Guest: Maybe a helpful lens to look at it through is uh Nathan Berry has this framework who calls the ladders of wealth creation. where it’s like, you know, ladder number one is working a job. is trading time for money. it’s, you know, it’s simple. it’s like where almost everybody starts. And for him he says like, I was flipping burgers making five bucks an hour at Wendy’s. That was my first job. You know, tier two is that freelance service, and it could be, you know, Uber could be under this bucket or door dash could be under this bucket. where it’s still time for money, but it’s like you’re you’re kind of on your own. You know, maybe in this case the apps are delivering you customers and like maybe a step higher on the ladder is I’m doing my own marketing for customers here, but I’m still doing a skill, solving a problem and getting paid for it, right? It’s still kind of like time for money. Ladder three was, you know, how do I productize that in some way where it’s like people can buy the solution without necessarily having to talk to me. They click a button on a website and then either I deliver the very packaged service, it’s like I will do design you a website with five pages or I’ll do your LinkedIn ghost writing posts for a month. You know, something, you know, set deliverable, set price and either you’re delivering it yourself or now you started to build kind of a little, you know, agency maybe, you have other people on your team delivering that service. that can be on ladder number three. And he says, you know, ladder four where get the software company play. It says, you know, software services, it’s marketplaces, it is, you know, more complex businesses where it’s like much higher level of skill to build. And his argument was like, look, you can skip some ladders, but you can’t skip learning the skills along the way. I mean I think that’s the point that you’re trying to make is eventually like maybe I would love to have this, you know, million dollar business, but I’m still going to have to learn the service based skills, the customer service, the billing, the marketing, all of the little steps along the way. Like you can’t skip those even if I want to skip to another tier. Am I am I on the right track there?
Scott: Yeah, absolutely. And so so let’s take, you know, somebody who’s who’s starting out and is not going to move up those next tiers. What are some inspirational ideas that we can get started with or examples that you have that are not pooper scooper, big businesses, but hey, you’re going to make 12 to 20 an hour doing the basic apps. Here’s ones that make 25 to 50 that might be accessible to you. What are what are some of the ideas there that you’ve come across?
Guest: Gotcha, gotcha. Have we talked about sharetown on the show before?
Scott: No, I don’t think I’ve heard of this.
Mindy: No.
Guest: Okay. This is a really interesting one that’s kind of came across my desk a few years ago. Share Town is this company that is the reverse logistics provider for, you know, bed in a box uh mattress companies, for exercise equipment, for I think they do like pizza ovens, like basically like a director consumer brand that’s selling something big and bulky. They all have, especially on the mattress side, they all have like the, you know, 100 night better sleep or it’s free guarantee and like 7% of those mattresses end up getting returned. Like, know what, my sleep wasn’t any better. Take it back. I don’t want it anymore. So the mattress company can’t like take this back or they don’t really want to take it back. They can’t sell it as new. So they partner with Share Town to handle these pickup requests and rather than just land filling it, they say, well you can resell that into your local marketplace, clean sanitize it, whatever, you know, mark it down for half off for the the the normal retail price. And because you’re a private party seller, like it doesn’t really damage the, you know, brand reputation or anything like that. You know, the Share Town then partners with hundreds and hundreds of local reps around the country to facilitate these pickup requests. Like my wife and I we bought some mattress a few years ago that before I even heard about this company and they came and picked it up. they had a little Honda pilot with a little trailer thing on the back and this, I think it was a husband and wife, like, you could tell they had done this before, right? They had this mattress in and out, folded, bag, package, put on the trailer in like three minutes and we’re like, dang, that was that was impressive. because this was their whole gig and they would go around and do these pickup requests and the different share town reps that I’ve talked to say, look, 150, 250 per flip is kind of the target here and it can be done, you know, nights and weekends, it can be done as a side hustle. We’ve talked to a few people doing it full-time making several thousand dollars a month. But that’s one where you probably have a little bit more higher earning power. You do need to have transportation, you do need to have storage uh to be able to hold on to these big bulky items, but definitely higher earning power than a lot of your typical uh side hustle apps.
Scott: What about some item activity or items that don’t require heavy lifting or big physical exertion? Because you mentioned blue collar for a good chunk of these and but but scooping poop is, you know, after the probably the third hour, probably fairly physically demanding to it to a certain appoint, very unpleasant, you know, uh moving mattresses, you know, can involve heavy lifting or you know, I presume that that job comes with the occasional client who does not put it out nicely in the front step and you have to navigate a bunch of stairs and all those kinds of things. like those are heavy.
Guest: You can make money doing this, but it is it is work. You got to be willing to uh to do it and have a partner to to lift these heavy things. One of the more popular ones lately that is 100% online is kind of in this realm of AI data training. So the one that I tested was called remote tasks, uh like remote tasks, uh but there’s also data annotation, there’s also one called outlier.ai. And where this is is kind of helping the large language models figure out which prompt is best. And if you’re anti AI, obviously, don’t touch this one with a 10 foot pole. But in my experience, it was like 15 bucks an hour fully remote. and if you have specialized skills in programming, it could be like $45 an hour. So that’s one that might be uh a little more interesting to test fully from home. My experience, really tedious. It’s like, oh my gosh, the onboarding was it took several hours and it’s like, oh am I ever going to get through this? I gotta do it. I gotta do it to be able to report on it. But then even the actual work is like, well, it’s just more of the same. It’s like, which prompt do you prefer? Like, did this answer the prompt or did it follow the instructions? like, yes, no and it’s like, how would you do it a different way? and you’re like, okay, you know, I can do this, but it’s, you know, it checks the box for being, you know, fully remote, something you can do evenings and weekends.
Scott: Some of the ones that I was thinking about were we had a baby, you know, last year. and we had a night nurse come one day a week, right? Because we’re like, we just want one night of sleep for the first few months. I can I can function if I just have one night. Yeah, yeah, it’s amazing how much better off you are after because, you know, some nights you can trade off or whatever, but just have one full night for both of us to sleep. And it was like 600 bucks for each night. and they came and they they they slept in a bed for most of the night and woke up for the baby. That was the requirement with it. It was through an agency. We tried to hire one directly and when we asked for, hey, we want, you know, a couple of things here. First, like you agreed not to be using alcohol or drugs during the the the the arrangement here and that ended up that ended up not being a problem for this person to sign the agreement with that. Fine, you know, we’re going to go with this agency or whatever, but I think that the direct relationship could be because we had a bad experience with the babysitter once that did that and we we were never going to go through that again. A stuff like that seems like, oh, if you if you’re willing to work and put in the sacrifice, you don’t have to lift heavy mattresses, but you do have to show up, there are opportunities to show up on site and do those types of things that are not necessarily fully remote. Do you have any more like that where you can make really high dollars per hour without physical labor that’s involved?
Guest: That sounds like a pretty good gig. If I could make 600 bucks a night, and maybe they’re obviously they’re splitting that with the agency, but even if it’s half of that, 300 bucks, so wake up a few times in the night, like that’s a pretty good gig.
Scott: Oh my gosh, yes. this is like, my and you’re really providing a service for folks like us like that are that were that really needed like one or two good days. like it was it’s hard to lead a company when you’re waking up in throughout the middle of the night a bunch of times, right?
Mindy: Scott, you called her a night nurse. Was she actually a nurse or is this something that anybody could do? I’m assuming that the service will perform a background check and do all of that, but do you have to be trained as a nurse? Because I can wake up in the middle of the night and feed a baby and then put them back in the crib. I mean, I did that for free for four years.
Scott: There were various criteria that I do not think are are particularly onerous like infant CPR, like some some of those things. I can’t remember. I’m I’m stretching back a year for this. I probably should have looked that up. That’s what I I was going to of as like there’s if you’re willing to sacrifice, like there is a real sacrifice. You’re going to someone’s house, you’re going to stay up, you’re going to be walking up multiple times without the night. Your sleep is going to be shot. That is that is going like that’s going to happen. But you’re also earning really good dollar per hour depending on where you’re at. So that’s where I were like where I was I was wondering was if you’re willing to if you’re willing to sacrifice, but just physically can’t lift things or get on a ladder and do Christmas lights, you know, or whatever.
Guest: I think the broader strategy here would be to find those local agencies, the night nurse agency that you ended up going through and asking, well, how could I get added to your roster of available service providers? because then kind of similar to Uber, it’s like, well, the agency’s doing the marketing for you, you’re not expected to go bring your own clients. They kind of say, okay, this is your assignment. This night you’re going over here or kind of a regular weekly thing until this baby grows out of this phase. So that’s probably the strategy that I would go for. is if that’s the service I want to do, who are the who are my target customers already doing business with? And it’s like in this case this agency that shows up in the search results and kind of go from through. And maybe the AI tools will be able to help brainstorm what are some of those off the wall or unthought of services that are out there, because like typically, you know, in the online world it would be, you know, web design, ghost writing, copywriting, graphic design, that type of stuff, but in the in the offline world, we talked a lot about these blue collar services, but to your point, it’s like it could be something as simple as pet sitting or night nurse, you know, something where okay, I I’d be willing to sacrifice one night a week to make an extra 300 bucks.
Mindy: Yeah, I mean that’s a big chunk of change right there. And I looked it up. It’s there are night nurses, but there’s also night nannies. We might have done that. Yeah, that might be using the terms interchangeably there. I’m not sophisticated at this point on the the nuance of the terms there.
Mindy: I mean that’s not something that I ever considered, but as a when I was in my 20s, I could get by on no sleep, so I could have totally done that and you know, cuddled with a cute baby and then put them back down again. Like that’s a great side hustle for Scott.
Scott: Oh, this person was this person knew what was up too. Like they were like they they arrived on time, they left on time, they knew exactly what the things were. They’re like, I’m doing this, I can’t do these, these are what this is why, this is how things need to be set up for me, you know, this is this is how where where things need to be at and when I it was great. I was like, thank you. And we actually felt way better about that because this person clearly had just been there and done that a million times.
Mindy: And taking into account, we’re talking about Barb and Nancy, both of these people are fictitious people who have recently been divorced and they are starting from scratch. They were both stay at home moms, so they’ve already done this job for free like I did and now they can go and do this again. Yeah, it’s going to be a little difficult at first to get up in the middle of the night with an infant when you’re used to sleeping through the night, but I think that that’s a side hustle that they could thrive in. and I wish you would have talked to Nick before we had recorded that show because that would have been great to suggest to them.
Guest: Maybe Mindy go back to your point, like, you know, the query that I might punch in or ask chat CBT about would be, well, what are the services that affluent families are paying for that that would really surprise you. And this might come up on that list and then you can kind of reverse engineer. Okay, that sounds interesting to me. Number three sounds interesting to me. Are there any agencies that provide that? How can I add myself to their you know, roster in that case? like it’s kind of the same strategy like my wife and her partner used for their wedding photography business. It was like, hey, we’d shot at a handful of different venues. We really like this one. Hey, email the coordinator, email the person, your contact person there’s like, what does it take to get on your preferred vendor list? All of a sudden, you cut through all the clutter. The brides are going directly to this venue. Hey, who are your recommended photographers? Boom, boom, boom. Here’s the top three. And it’s like all of a sudden all the other marketing channels kind of faded away. It’s like that was driving the bulk of the clients.
Mindy: Yeah, Chris Hutchins from the All the Hacks podcast told the story about how he had hired somebody to cook for his family. I have the recipes. I want you to cook this recipe this exact way. My wife and I don’t have time to make these recipes, but these are recipes we know our kids will eat. They found, I think it was a stay-at-home mom who would cook these meals for them, deliver them to them, and she batch cooked them. She wasn’t delivering them hot every evening. Here you go, your food’s already cooked. All you have to do is warm it up. You know your kids are going to eat it, and Nick, you have two kids. Scott, you’ve got two young kids, so maybe they haven’t discovered that they can be picky about what they eat, but knowing that your kids are going to eat the food that’s on their plate is a huge burden off of your head at every dinner time. And when you don’t even have to make the meal, having time to make sure they eat it is even less available.
Guest: Yeah, well, it’s just the decision fatigue of like, what’s for dinner? The meal planning time, all of that.
Scott: Another one here is occasionally my like like my wife and I would love to go on a trip overnight, right? And the best way to do that is during the week. And our kids are in daycare. Can someone watch our kids, pick them up, put them down to bed, drop them off in the morning and do that. That would be a wonderful service that we’ve had a lot of trouble hiring for, but that’s got to be a dream gig for somebody, right? Somebody shows up at our house, puts them to bed, watches TV for a few hours, goes to sleeps through the night, then drops them off at daycare. like that’s there’s got to be services out there that can do that. and now we can do a trip just the two of us for that. So those those kinds of opportunities are the ones that I’m like, I’m thinking are are out there for folks that are, you know, I don’t need a big skill set. like basic references and and those types of things and show up on time and I’m confident in your presentation. Those are the things I need but there’s a basic trust there.
Mindy: I just typed into chat GPT, what Nick said, what are the household services affluent families are paying for. And there’s, you know, meal prep and all of this other stuff. But household management or family assistant. This certainly falls into that Scott, but Barba Nancy have been unpaid household management and family assistance when they were doing it for their own family. And now they could do it for other families. The key there is affluent families because you definitely want rich clients when you can make somebody’s life easier and they have an abundance of money but not of time or an abundance of money and not an abundance of ease of life, making that easy for them. I mean somebody listening to this now needs to start a company that manages household managers and family assistance and like connects with wealthy families with them. Hey oh Scott, you’ve got some time. You said you’re no you have no problem starting up a new business. Start up a business and hire these household managers and and family assistants.
Guest: Well, my business is interviewing Nick for these ideas on this. So, though there we it’s funny, we we had a woman last year, that was her business. It was a virtual house management service. And it was like, I’m not going to compete with, you know, $5 an hour virtual assistance overseas. like I’m going to intentionally position this as a house manager for busy parents, you know, busy affluent parents because it was I forget what she was charging, but it was it was not cheap. And so it was just kind of like, we’ll figure out the summer camp calendar for your kids, or we’ll do the, you know, the meal plan meal prep and maybe even will coordinate the Instacart or whatever to come and bring it all to your house. And it was like it was a pretty smart idea. and she’d grown kind of a roster of sub contractors. She started out doing it herself and made, I think it if she started out doing it herself, but then eventually brought on other team members that she trusted to to be the fulfillment side.
Mindy: Yeah, and I’m mentioning Barb and Nancy specifically because they have been stay-at-home moms and in air quotes don’t have skills. You know, they’re not going to go out and get like a job that pays $250,000 a year today because they don’t have the resume that would support that. But, you know, this isn’t just for recently divorced women who were used to be stay-at-home moms. All of these jobs are things that anybody can do.
Scott: Once you get into, are you willing to do reasonably hard physical labor? There’s got to be really good arbitrage opportunities in your time there if you can get creative, right? I one’s easy for me conceptually, right? Like hanging Christmas tree lights, cleaning windows, picking up mattresses and moving them from one point A to point B. I’m sure you you’ve heard thousands of those at this point, Nick from your from your community across those examples.
Guest: where’s the one where I get to mostly sleep and wake up a couple times to help a baby?
Scott: Or like, I’m willing to be there. I’m willing to sacrifice. I just can’t, I I’m not willing to put my body on the line.
Mindy: Yeah, moving a bed is hard.
Scott: Yeah.
Guest: Yeah. I think these these were a good starting point for sure.
Scott: Give us some more tools that you’ve developed over the years. I think you have a great AI prompt and spreadsheet and those types of things. What are some of the tools that you know, if you don’t like these specific suggestions that we have here to continue to to generate these ideas that are worth exploring.
Guest: Yeah, do you guys want to run through it? Do you guys want to be my, my guinea pig here? We can do a test live live test. This is the AI assisted brainstorming worksheet. If you if you ask in general AI, you know, what are some side hustle ideas? You kind of get general responses because that’s the articles it’s pulling. It doesn’t know anything about you, right? But if you can feed it just a little bit of information, then you’re going to get way, way better results. So if you guys want to Scott or Mindy, I don’t know, it’s probably going to come back with like host a real estate and money podcast. So we can give it a try.
Mindy: Let’s do Scott. Scott, what are you good at? You are good at running a business. You are good at making vibe coding. This is harder than it than you you think. Uh what have you gotten paid to do in the past?
Scott: My skills include, uh, I have developed a CEO toolkit in growing Bigger Pockets from X to Y, 100,000 members to 3 million between the years 2014 and uh 2024. It’s gonna be like, why why do you need to side hustle?
Mindy: Okay, okay, let’s let’s not let’s not let’s make up somebody. let’s go back to Nancy or or Barb as the example, right?
Guest: Okay.
Mindy: So Mindy what what are some of uh Nancy or Barb’s skills here? She’s again, she’s a stay-at-home mom who has been out of the workforce for 25 years and feels like she doesn’t have any skills.
Mindy: Yes, because all of this stuff she’s doing is like second nature. So she’s a good cook. She is great at managing multiple different schedules, like different calendars because uh she’s got to get her daughter to ballet and her son to football and then get everybody home in time to have dinner. So she’s she’s good at multitasking. She’s good at remembering people’s names, which is a skill. Let me tell you, that is a really good skill. Her day job is stay-at home mom right now. What has she gotten paid to do in the past? She, well, she hasn’t really gotten paid for it, but I think that this is a really important thing to note that the management of an entire household, paying bills on time, um taking the dog to the vet for annual shots, taking the kids to the pediatrician for their annual checkups. those are soft skills, but they’re also she’s great at sourcing things because her daughter has extremely tiny feet, so she needs to get ballet slippers in a baby doll size.
Guest: Okay. That’s good. Sourcing hard defined uh products.
Mindy: There you go. That’s a better way to phrase it.
Guest: What does Nancy enjoy in her spare time?
Scott: Nancy’s super good at showing up on time and is capable of appearing very professional, which is really so hard in some of these these areas. I mean you don’t want to hire somebody that doesn’t show up on time and is not appearing professional.
Mindy: That is a really good point. I mean your punctuality is a great a great feature of you even if you don’t think so or don’t realize it.
Mindy: Nancy’s hobbies include knitting and cooking. She really loves to cook. She loves to price match at the grocery store to make sure she’s getting the best deal on all of her groceries.
Guest: Nice.
Mindy: If money were no object, she would like to go to the symphony more frequently and go on bike rides.
Scott: Not the Broncos game?
Mindy: Not that last one.
Guest: Next up in the Pacific Northwest, so he’s got a team going to the Super Bowl.
Guest: Oh, we’re doing it. The kids are very, very invested into the Hawks right now.
Mindy: I’m not even sure I’m going to watch the Super Bowl this year.
Scott: Oh, you got to watch the commercials.
Mindy: Yeah.
Guest: So here’s here’s a random super random side hustle aside. I’m testing this company called Media Probe where they send you a little like sensor you wear like on your palm or you hold it and they say, here’s here’s the TV show that we want you to watch and what triggered it was the first one that they assigned to me was like the best Super Bowl commercials of the last 10 years. You know, watch this and we’re gonna measure your like biometric, you know, response to this and we’ll pay you five bucks after you watch this thing and answer a little survey. So I’m very curious to test this out. It’s like I love the Super Bowl commercials anyways. You’re gonna pay me five bucks to do this. So, not a great hourly rate but a random side hustle that I’m playing around with.
Mindy: And is it only $5 or do they give you different amounts for different shows?
Guest: The two that they’ve sent me so far have both been five bucks for an hour of programming.
Mindy: Okay.
Guest: Okay, when I was a kid, what did Nancy love?
Mindy: Nancy really loved being outdoors. She loved riding her bike and playing with her friends. She’s not a shy person.
Scott: Nancy sounds suspiciously familiar.
Guest: The third component to this is what comes naturally to you and sometimes that can be difficult to answer, so the way to flip it around is, well what do other people irrationally suck at? And sometimes like you’ll see people like struggling with Excel or they’ll be like they have a list of numbers. we like our friend literally was doing they were like adding up the cells like on a calculator like in their hand. I was like, oh, did did you know that there’s like a built in formula that will do that for you? So, you know, what do other people irrationally suck at is kind of the reframe for this perceived expertise part.
Mindy: Okay, so Nancy is very compassionate and very empathetic. People often ask her for help with very difficult emotionally difficult tasks because she’s good at that. She’s very empathetic, but she can also compartmentalize and just get the stuff done.
Guest: Okay. Time constraints?
Mindy: She works a full-time job, so let’s give her 10 to 15 hours to do this right now.
Guest: Full-time job, is it uh like traditional, normal business hours?
Mindy: 9 to 5. And how much does she want to earn from her side hustle? She would be delighted if she could earn $250 a week. So $1,000 a month.
Scott: Nah, give her 30 bucks an hour. That’s a more aggressive target I think.
Mindy: Then she’d be even more delighted to get that.
Guest: All right, 1000 bucks a month, I think that would be, that’d be a great win. And so what this does is it magically, you know, going back to Excel skills, it magically concatenates all of this into this chat GPT prompt that you can copy and paste into chat CPT or the AI of your choice.
Guest: Okay, so we’ll paste this into chatty and it is going to come back with some responses for us that I think are much more personalized, much more telling than kind of just a generic google search or a generic prompt for hey, give me some side hustle ideas. to your point about like this house managerLike that’s going to be the first one that comes up. It’s like, yeah, this is the cleanest path to test to 1000 bucks a month. It’s funny because that mental load was the exact phrase that the virtual house manager that we had on the side hustle show talked about. We want to be your mental load assistant.
Mindy: Oh, that’s great.
Mindy: Okay.
Mindy: So that’s suggestion number one.
Guest: Suggestion number two, crisis Concierge, difficult task helper. I need help when life feels overwhelming. I don’t know if I love that one as much. Appointment and care coordinator for seniors. High demand, low competition, a big trust premium here.
Scott: That’s really interesting. I never thought about that. I like that a lot actually. That’s probably a nice big market that’s going to grow over time.
Guest: Anything senior care, I think this could be uh that could be a pretty big one. Household Ops Manager. name it boldly. It’s like the COO of your household. I like that tag line. It’s kind of cool. This is really similar to the first one.
Mindy: Yeah, but these are all skills that both Barb and Nancy could do easily whereas they are in their 50s and maybe walking dogs when they live in Wisconsin and it’s icy all the time, isn’t the best choice for them.
Guest: Yeah. And what is cool about this is it like even it gives me, it gives example tasks, but it also gives example pricing of like how much do you think an affluent family might be willing to pay for this just to relieve themselves of some of that mental load burden? And it says, hey, this could be easily worth 250 to $400 per month. And now it’s like, okay, now I just need to get four clients or I just need to get three clients and now I’m at my goal. And I think that’s really helpful. Uh specialty grocery and hard to find product sourcing was suggestion number five, you know, for diet specific foods that might be kind of interesting. like if you have dietary restrictions in your family and you’re having trouble, like I might pair that with kind of like a meal planning or even meal prep type of service where you know it’s going to be vegan, gluten-free, dairy free like whatever, you know, the dietary restriction is going to be. That could be interesting or specific, you know, weight loss intentional diet that you’re trying to follow for the family. Suggestion number six is a knitting business on on Etsy. I don’t know. That could be a little more challenging, but if you’re going to be knitting in your spare time, maybe you put some of your patterns up or some of your stuff up there for sale.
Mindy: Yeah, I had a friend who, Rose, I’m talking about you, she knit at the stop light. She would keep her knitting in her lap and she would drive and then when the stop light hit, she’d pick it up and knit. She loves knitting that much. So, she was a pattern tester because you have to make sure that the pattern works for a magazine, I think. And she got all these free patterns and I think they sent her yarn and needles too, and that was an awesome side hustle for her.
Scott: Can we adjust this prompt with my my thought because I’m still stuck on it. This is a problem I always have, but the overnight babysitting or weekend babysitting component. Can you ask a follow up, hey, consider night nursing, overnight babysitting and weekend babysitting. I’d be really interested to hear what what that looks like for this person because I’m not trusting like the local high school kid as much as great as they are and they’re busy a lot of them, right? Like the the local high school kid with that particular activity.
Guest: Yeah, so it’s kind of like defaulting to like my local Seattle area, but who knows where Nancy lives, but um it says, well, there is demand here. Here’s some uh overnight babysitting could earn 100 to $250 per night. If you do that four nights and you’re at your at your income goal. Or just on the weekends, yeah.
Mindy: Yeah, she’s she’s working her entire Monday through Friday and then she does it on Saturday, or she does it on Friday night because she still gets to sleep, right Scott? She just has to wake up when the baby wakes up.
Scott: My kids go to bed at 7:30 to 8:00 and they sleep through the night. If you want the infant, you could charge more for sure. That’s waking up through the night. you know, in the in the early days, but once the kids are sleeping through the night, you know, then then it’s a very a very different job, I feel like, because you’re you’re basically, you know, like there’s a chance something goes wrong. That’s why we’re going to want somebody really responsible in there, but most nights, they just sleep until the morning.
Guest: more than just like the side hustle listles that that I’ve published dozens of is it kind of gives you the the next action step. like, if this sounds interesting to you, if you could take on four or five clients and make $1500 a month, like here’s what I would do next, right? It tells you to get your certifications, it tells you what you might even do for marketing. it says like, okay, I might pursue, there was some note on here like, you know, post in parent groups on Facebook or start to like network on next door or you know, even on platforms like care.com here. So it kind of gives you kind of the next marketing steps and then you can kind of have this conversation of like, you know, how should I market this service?
Mindy: And once you’re good, Scott, would you have recommended an excellent night nanny to somebody else in your neighborhood, once you had an experience with somebody who was amazing?
Scott: That’s it. What you do is you say is you say after you’ve delivered a good experience to the person they’re clearly happy with it, you say, hey, would you mind sharing, you know, your your review with me in your neighborhood’s Facebook group or your next door app or whatever. Just share that in there. and you ask that every time, you’re going to get more business over time for some service like this, right?
Guest: Yeah, with trusting somebody with your kids, like this is and and chat even came back with that right away. Look, here marketing matters less than trust. I think it’s a really wise line for it to say. And we’ve had some guests kind of say something similar. This is a guy I did like not doing anything with kids, but he was doing college admissions essay prep consultant like a super, super niche uh service and he’s like, you know, I don’t do any social media. like right, I have one strategic partner who does other like college admissions consulting and she hates the essay part, so she just refers business to me. It’s like that’s all it took, you know, to build this six figure like little side hustle consulting business.
Mindy: Like people are happy to recommend people that they’ve worked with that they love, but when it comes to your kids, moms talk and moms will talk mad smack about you if you’re not good and they will absolutely sing your praises when you are good. So, the mom’s get together, oh, it was I have so many great things to say about my daughter’s night nanny. that’s it right there. What does it say?
Scott: TBT is like like he’s scrolling on the screen and he’s like chat TBT is making your point right here.
Mindy: I mean, we will talk. the moms will talk and we will absolutely recommend. Now, I’ve got I’m the older mom in my neighborhood. There’s a lot of little babies in my neighborhood. So my kids are the babysitter and my friend Sarah is like, oh yeah, hire Mindy’s daughter Daphne. She’s great. Hire Mindy’s daughter Clara. She’s great at babysitting. So they have a ton of babysitting just in the neighborhood. Those moms talk to moms in other neighborhoods and it just kind of grows and spreads. So if you’re good, your name will get out there.
Mindy: And the same thing with household managers and crisis concierges. Is that the plural for concierge?
Mindy: Okay, so Nick, that was an awesome Google Sheets file that you shared with us. Where can our listeners find that?
Guest: sidehustlenation.com/bpmoney and you’ll be able to download it for free there.
Mindy: Woohoo! Thank you Nick. That is awesome. For all of our listeners, if you are thinking about a side hustle, that little AI prompt is really, really helpful to kick out a bunch of different ideas for you. And you know, take take your time with it. My skills include, start thinking of it now and then enter it in. And use it over and over again. It isn’t a one use only thing. Use it over and over and see what you can refine. Oh, these are great ideas except I don’t want anything to do with cats because I’m allergic. And then it’ll spit out a whole bunch of other things. And AI is kind of crazy how good it is.
Guest: I think of it as a starting point, a starting point of the conversation for brainstorming where you can be like, you know, on second thought, uh, I’m already trading time for money. my day job. I’m willing to invest something. Like, don’t show me any service based businesses or don’t show me any, you know, client work type of businesses. And it’ll come back like, oh, here’s some media based businesses or content based businesses that you could try instead.
Scott: Yeah, and like, I don’t want how do I not compete with minimum wage high school kids, right? That that are doing this kind of thing, right? That’s that’s going to be another another challenge for for for some of these. and the way to do that is be that next level professionalism, the service that they can’t provide, the consistency. Those are all areas, ways to look I think for for this stuff. But I think this is, I think this is fun and I think this is a a great starting point here and I I think the challenge is how do you take some kind of action even if it’s making minimum wage if you’re interested in this or or something very small, but then evolve quickly to something that is actually generating a a better per hour rate, something that is more scalable, something that is more in the true business world and treat it like an evolution. That’s that was the big the big thing I wanted to come in with today and it sounds like there’s this is a great starting point for leap frogging that minimum wage first step here is is is using your prompt and and using that to to form a better hypothesis than you might otherwise have come up with.
Mindy: Nick, where can people find you online?
Guest: Would love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show. You’ll find it on all your favorite podcast apps and YouTube. Um and then check out the the brainstorming prompt. Uh again, sidehustlenation.com/bpmoney to uh to take a look at starting, playing around with that and see what kind of ideas it comes up with for you.
Mindy: And Nick, how many episodes do you have now on the Side Hustle Show?
Guest: Uh 720 something.
Mindy: Yeah, 720 episodes with all different types of side hustles. There’s if you can’t find an idea from Nick’s show, maybe side hustling isn’t for you. It’s been 14 years. It has to make you feel old. 14 years, holy cow. That’s awesome.
Mindy: Nick, thank you again for your time. It’s always a delight to talk to you and we’ll talk to you soon.
Guest: Cheers. Thanks.
Mindy: All right Scott, that was Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation and the side hustle show. What did you think of his amazing ideas for how to choose your next side hustle?
Scott: I thought it was great and I think I’m going to keep beating this drum a little bit around entrepreneurship and FIRE because, you know, immediately Nick’s brain goes to all the business opportunities. Here’s how here’s how to do this. Just put some figure out how to get in front of the demand. It’s it’s running a business. It’s an entrepreneurial bug that some people, I think me, you, Nick, clearly have and other people don’t and it’s totally fine not to have that. And that’s why I was pushing so hard on what are jobs that don’t require or side hustles that don’t require this like true business mindset that are just more like I can just show up and I can get paid a much fairer or much higher rate per hour with even basic skills if I’m willing to sacrifice, but not necessarily sacrifice my body. That was the next piece, right? If you if you’re 24 and you’re willing to sacrifice your body on the weekends, you can make a lot of money, I think. Um if you’re, you know, and and and you’re willing to pick up heavy things or or move them or get on ladders. I think there’s big big opportunity there. That’s obvious, I think, relatively speaking, but I think that the the bigger question is, how can somebody who doesn’t have that that same desire or ability make money? and I thought that was there was a really good discussion around that.
Mindy: I do too and I think it’s really, really important for you to be honest with your skills, your time availability, your personality, your physical strength. Scott, you might not want to move mattresses, but you absolutely could move mattresses, whereas I can probably get by with it, but you know, there’s a lot of people who like that’s not an option. Mattresses are heavy, they’re awkward, but Share Town did exercise equipment. I am not moving a treadmill. In fact, I have a treadmill in my basement and I did not get it down there. We had to have somebody come and help Carl take it downstairs.
Scott: Oh man, watching the guy move the treadmill was unbelievable, right? I can’t do that. I’m I’m I mean maybe maybe I could if that, but I’m a powerlifter at this point, right? an amateur journey in powerlifter and so that that’s those things can really get big.
Mindy: and very, very heavy. So that like Share Town might be awesome for you if you’re 6’8 and weigh, you know, 300 pounds of solid muscle. but you know, that might not be a great side hustle for the four foot eight ladies in our audience who weigh 80 pounds. there’s lots of different options available for side hustling. I love his AI assisted side hustle brainstorm document or worksheet. Again, you can get that at sidehustlenation.com/bpmoney. download that for free. It is a great starting point. and then once you’re into the AI, it’ll spit out some ideas and then you just refine like we said, I don’t want to do a service related. I don’t want to do a physical job or you know, I want to do more of this. It’s so easy to just get these ideas and then you can really start thinking about and finding and pinpointing something that’s going to be a great fit for you because a side hustle that you hate is just like a job that you hate. You don’t want to do it at all.
Scott: I love it. I’m looking forward to the uh the the next review for the Bigger Pockets Money podcast coming in saying, I’ve listened to Bigger Pockets Money since the very beginning and 2016 and now I quit my job and shovel poop for dog owners uh three to four days a week. So, that’s the the big takeaway there. All jokes aside, there are lots of creative businesses and if you can find activities that your neighbors, friends, family, peers don’t like to do and want to do them for them. I think there’s a big opportunity, especially if you’re willing to humble your humble yourself and do the work that nobody else wants to do.
Mindy: All right Scott, should we get out of here?
Scott: Let’s do it.
Mindy: That wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, after a while, Crocodile.
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