575: 3 Questions, a $10k Launch, and 8,516 Warners: My 2023 Mid-Year Progress Report

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1:18What's up, what's up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. Normally on the show, I've got an amazing guest for you and we're breaking down the tactics that made their side hustle successful. But today I want to take a minute to give you a look at what's been going on in my business, the business of Side Hustle Nation for the first half of the year. These are the projects and experiments that I've been working on so far this year. Some have worked well, some not so well, but just a little inside baseball this week on what it's like running a 10 year old online media business.

1:53In fact, it was in May that the website and podcast hit that 10-year anniversary, which is just crazy to think about. And even more fun is that I know a lot of you have been along for that journey almost the entire time. You've gotten to see the evolution of the show firsthand. The question people have been asking me lately is, are you going to do that for another 10 years? Do you have another 500 episodes in the tank? How long do you keep this going? And my answer has historically been, as long as it's fun and rewarding, yeah, I'm going to keep doing it. And thankfully, it's still checking those boxes.

2:28But it is something that I think about, like, how could I evolve the business so it's less reliant on me showing up and getting behind the mic every Thursday? Because my theory is that you care more about the content than you do about me. Somebody else could show up and ask these questions as well, or probably better than I could. But then I think, man, you'd be crazy to give this up. This is the best job in the world to have the schedule flexibility and the lifestyle freedom and the cash flow. It's it would be pretty tough to walk away from. And then, of course, I'd have to answer the even harder question.

3:00Well, what next? I think it's better to retire to something than to retire from something. And I don't know if I've got a good answer for that or what I would rather be doing than sharing creative ways to make extra money. It's the best. And that said, the door is still open to testing out a co-host relationship. if you or someone you know has a curious mind, maybe they've got some side hustle experience and bonus points if they've got some podcast experience. Let's get in touch. We'll have that conversation. But let's take it back to January. I didn't do any New Year's resolutions as I haven't for many, many years, but instead set an intention to install a couple new small daily habits.

3:40Habits that science says can have a meaningful impact on your happiness and well-being. The The first one was to walk a mile a day. And I'll admit it's super helpful that my son's elementary school is about a half a mile away. So if I go there back at least once in the morning or in the afternoon, I could check that one off. That hasn't happened every single day, especially with summer break going on. But I would say probably happened most days. And it's felt great to get far more steps in than I was getting before. The second new habit installation was to renew a nightly I done this and gratitude journal habit.

4:17This has been an on again off again habit of mine for years, but one that truthfully was mostly off lately. And so the three questions I try to answer every night are what did I get done today? What am I grateful for? And how am I going to win tomorrow? This allows me to celebrate and acknowledge the day's work. hey, no matter how small, sometimes it's like, hey, I cut the grass. Sometimes it's work related. But what did I get done today? Mark down that feeling of positive progress. Number two is practicing gratitude. And it's funny, I find myself noticing more and more small moments to be thankful for.

4:54And I think it's practicing that gratitude muscle. And then finally, it's that idea of winning tomorrow today, which was a line from an old interview that we did with John Lee Dumas. And I think he borrowed it from his time in the army. Like, how are we going to win tomorrow today? Failure to plan is planning to fail all that stuff. Let me itemize out my biggest priorities for the next day, the night before. So I know exactly what to work on and in what order when the time comes. So I'm starting my day in proactive mode instead of reactive mode. And because it only takes a few minutes, haven't missed a day all year.

5:29I actually found I really look forward to this kind of nightly journaling habit after putting the kids to bed. It's a way to clear my own head before kind of shutting down for the night. And it's a light and simple habit that has won over heavy and complex. For the first several months, what does this look like in practice? I was just doing this in a blank notebook. And in years past, I've experimented with apps on the phone and an email prompt that would come every night. But I think there's something to putting actually a pen to paper for this stuff. And then I thought, well, shoot, huge side hustle nation can benefit from this habit as well.

6:03So in May, I created the three question journal. It asks those three questions every day. What did I get done today? What am I grateful for? How will I win tomorrow? So all you got to do is fill in the blanks to make positive progress and gratitude a habit. That is at 3qjournal.com is where you can check it out. I've got it priced at least for the time being as low as Amazon will let me or almost as low as Amazon will let me. So I don't expect this to be a huge moneymaker. I'm at$17.18 in royalties so far. But my hope is that people can grab a copy and build the same simple daily habit because it's really become a part of my day that I look forward to.

6:44Brain dump what happened, get it out of your head, appreciate the good things that happened, and make a note of what's important tomorrow. So again, you can start your day in proactive mode versus reactive mode. Again, 3qjournal.com. I think you'll like it. And quick side note here, this is actually my second journal project. And the first one was the progress journal in 2018 progress journal.net for that one. And that one is still great for short term project based sprints. It's organized into these four week time blocks, and you write down your most specific goal for that time and you track progress toward that goal over that four week time block.

7:22But for sustained daily use, I found that structure was a bit too rigid, which is why I've been happier with the three question journal as my new kind of daily driver for that kind of thing. Again, so that's the three question journal, 3qjournal.com is where I'd be able to get it at the lowest price ever launch price there. The next project was creating a podcast playlist quiz. And you may have heard me plug this on the show. For full disclosure, I completely stole this from Shannon Weinstein, who I interviewed for the show in February. She hosts the Keep What You Earn podcast, and she described driving email signups through this clever little playlist generator quiz.

8:05And I think I even said on air, I'm totally stealing this. And the funny thing was, I'd already bought a license to the exact same quiz software she was using. It's called Interact. Tryinteract.com is where you can find it. I bought it on Black Friday and I'd added a separate kind of choose your own side hustle or find out what side hustle is best for you type of quiz. I added that to the homepage of the site. So I put this playlist together quiz in Interact and there's a few short multiple choice questions and then the results are six different playlists that it'll recommend based on your responses and those playlists are built in Spotify, if you're wondering like technically how that gets done.

8:43And it's super encouraging to see a really nice distribution among the results, like no piece of the pie is better than 24 25%. So in terms of results that the quiz has generated, so far, 4500 people have started it gone to the landing page, which is hustle.show if you want to go check it out. Of those 3300 have completed the quiz and 2 ,500 have signed up for the email list through that quiz. So how that part works is at the end, it'll ask for an email if you want to see your quiz results, and then I can send them to your inbox. So you just have it on file. But if you don't want to enter your email, there's a little link that says, just show me the results.

9:24It'll tell you which playlist is recommended. And I think in Interact, if you want to set this up for your own business, I think there's a checkbox. You could say, make that required or make that not required. I would love to collect emails. I want to encourage that, but also love if people just wanted to listen to the show too. That would be fine. So we'll have that as an option there. So 2 ,500 opt-ins, that's a great result from that little experiment. And maybe even more important is hopefully it gets listeners deeper into the content. If you listen to one episode, great, happy to have you.

9:56But if you listen to five or 10, now the side hustle show becomes a bigger part of your life. You're more likely to recommend it to a friend. We start to build a deeper relationship. So back to the podcast playlist quiz that's built through Interact. Interact integrates directly with ActiveCampaign, my email service provider. So those quiz opt-ins get sent directly over there. They're added to the list in that way. But in March, I was about ready to jump ship from ActiveCampaign and start the painful migration process to another email service. And I say painful because the tentacles are wrapped around me pretty tight at this point.

10:31I've been with ActiveCampaign since 2017, and we've got hundreds of opt-in forms and probably a dozen different automation sequences and integration with several other tools. In addition to Interact, it would be a ton of work to migrate all that to another service. And these software companies know that. They know the switching costs can be pretty high. So what happened, citing inflation over the winter, they move to make a pretty steep price increase. And this is less than three months after my account hit a new subscriber tier threshold in December. We crossed over the 100 ,000 subscriber mark.

11:07So my email costs would have essentially doubled in three months. And it was already my biggest monthly expense before any of that. So not super happy with ActiveCampaign at this point. I try and reach out. I say, look, I've been a customer for years. I've been an advocate for you guys. and we ultimately settle on this prepaid annual plan at a slight discount over what they'd originally proposed because it would take weeks of work to unravel and switch everything over and then I'd have the learning curve of a new software tool too. So I decide this prepaid annual plan is going to be the best option.

11:40It's the devil you know in a way. So I pay the invoice in the morning. It's like six or seven thousand dollars, probably the biggest single one-time expense in the history of the business. And a few hours later, I get a note from somebody who's requested their personalized playlist. And they're like, Hey, dude, this email came through blank. And I said, Well, shoot, that's weird. Let me see what's going on. So it turns out, not only did they jack up rates, they removed features. In my case, it was the conditional content blocks that I was using to deliver the specific playlist results from the quiz.

12:13this is a really cool feature. I use it quite often where, you know, if the tag such and such exists, display this text or this link in the email and, you know, vice versa. If it doesn't, if it, if that tag doesn't exist, don't show them that. And so we use this all the time. I'm normally pretty chill. I was so hot. I was like shaking. I just paid you$7 ,000 and you return the favor by breaking my automations in the smugness, oh my gosh, of the live chat rep and her copy and paste canned responses. I wanted to jump through the screen. Oh, sorry, that's no longer available on your account. There probably wasn't even a sorry in there.

12:53It was just sorry, that's no longer available. That feature is no longer available on your account level. Thankfully, a couple hours later, deep breaths, Andrew in customer support, give this man a raise. he comes through in the clutch. He re-ads that feature to my account. Very likely saved a customer. I was ready to drop everything and find another provider. It was kind of a dark moment for me. Oh, the other weird thing related to email this spring. So I, you know, occasionally I'll log in and look at the growth of the account. How many new subscribers are signing up? That kind of thing. And a typical day is between 100 and 200 new signups.

13:30Great. But every now and again, And I would see these spikes to 600 or 800 new subscribers in a single day. And I'd be like, dang, maybe I'm just a marketing genius. Maybe there was a press feature or something I didn't know about that hit. I go viral. Did somebody share my link? I don't know what happened. But digging a little deeper, I discovered they were all from one lead magnet, from one opt-in form. It was the newsletter niches lead magnet that I had created for the episode with Daniel This Year Corbett from Grants for Creators. Awesome episode. 544 in your podcast feed, how she started and grew this paid newsletter.

14:04She was at, I think, $1 ,300 a month at that point in a little under a year. That episode, episode 544 again, over 50 ,000 downloads, done pretty well, done pretty well on YouTube as well. So I assumed, I guess a lot of people want to start a paid newsletter. Like, hey, that's a hot new side hustle. Sure. I attempted to correlate those spikes in subscribers with increased traffic to her show notes page on those dates, but didn't really see anything out of the ordinary in the analytics, which maybe should have been a red flag. But I was like, okay, fine, you know, on to the next thing. A few weeks later, I was testing a different email integration, this time trying to make sure Teachable students were getting added to ActiveCampaign.

14:44And I noticed something a little weird. Those Teachable students were getting added, but in between each enrollment, like interspersed by mere seconds, it turned out several, completely unrelated to the Teachable thing. Several other subscribers were getting added too. It was all from that newsletter niches opt-in. I was like, man, is this thing going viral again? But then I noticed like, okay, every single one of them has a Yahoo email address and every single one of them has the first name Warner. So now I'm like really confused and scared, like what's going on? So come to find out that over the course of a couple months, 8 ,516 Warners had joined my list.

15:24all with Yahoo email addresses. Very clearly some sort of spam trap hacked email. Not one of them ever opened a single message. No idea really what the end game is of dumping a bunch of fake subscribers onto somebody's list, except maybe to hurt long-term deliverability. No idea. Was able to get them all deleted. And then I added one of those annoying CAPTCHA forms to that specific form on the Grants for Creators show notes page to prevent future warners from getting through. And in any case, super weird and equally weird, I thought that that kind of behavior didn't trigger some sort of alert from ActiveCampaign itself.

16:05But since deleting them, at least when rates have improved, well, I got 8 ,500 dead subscribers off the list. As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call, it's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer, and it means your team can share one number and collaborate on calls and texts just like a shared inbox.

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18:25Just go to Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. And one more thing on the email front, and then I can share what's been going on on the blog, website, podcast side of the business, along with some upcoming projects. So earlier this year, I was rereading the book from six to seven figures by Austin Netsley. Austin's a longtime friend of mine. It's a great book about systems and scaling your business, especially removing yourself as the business owner from being the bottleneck and transitioning into being more of a leader slash manager.

19:05I didn't even make it through more than a few chapters this time because I came across a line from one of Austin's homework summaries at the end of a chapter. He asked, look, what's the simplest and most direct path? And the answer was obvious. The answer hit me. It was selling more products and services to the existing audience. How can I better serve the listeners of the show, the readers of the website, the members of the Facebook community, the subscribers of the email list? Growing traffic, growing listenership. That's great. Those are important things, but the simplest and most direct path was not those things.

19:37It was doing a better job helping the existing audience reach their goals. So in practice, what's that look like so far? It's looked like sending more emails and specifically calling them one-off campaigns. Sometimes it's a single message. Sometimes it's a series of emails over the course of a week, but it's an attempt to present relevant, timely, and hopefully helpful content and offers over email. Some marketers say, hey, you got to send an email every day. I say that's overkill, but there's probably a happy medium where as long as you're providing value, I think you could probably send more often than you are because consider the average person is receiving anywhere from 70 to 150 emails a day.

20:19You're a tiny fraction of their inbox. But what about unsubscribes? That's always been the fear of mine. Or I think I'm going to be annoying. They're going to unsubscribe forever. So I want to tell you the story. of Mr. Sketch markers. I'm pretty sure they still make these, but if you're not a child of the 80s, these are the scented markers that come in a beautiful 12-color rainbow set. In my case, a little styrofoam backing case. The light green and the light blue are probably the best smelling ones. You can fight me on this. Maybe pink too was pretty good, but they're the markers where you get more on your nose from smelling them than on the paper.

20:55No permanent brain damage, I swear. So friends have these. Maybe they have them at school. I want a set for home. Finally get the set. I'm probably six or seven at this time. Can't use them. Don't want to draw anything with them. Why? Because if I use them, they're going to run out of ink. This is little six-year-old Nick neuroses. Never mind that that's the whole point of having markers. An email list is the same way. What's the point of having it if you're not going to send emails? Especially if ActiveCampaign is going to charge you$7 ,000, whether or not you hit send. And to be clear, they're not going to charge you$7 ,000 if you're just starting out.

21:28So I try and remember the story of my unused Mr. Sketch markers as it relates to email. Some of the ink might dry out. Some people might unsubscribe. That's okay. That's what it's for. So starting in March, I've done six, seven of these one-off campaigns so far. Just to give you a few examples of what those have been in practice. I think the first one was for a business credit card. So I sent some content on, hey, who might qualify for a business credit card? Here's why it's important to have a business credit card so you can separate your personal and business finances. Oh, and by the way, here's a limited time offer on a big signup bonus for a specific card.

22:04We did a promo for ShareTown. ShareTown is the reverse logistics company that matches you up with local furniture and mattress returns from direct-to-consumer brands. You turn around and resell those on Facebook Marketplace or wherever else, and you profit on the spread. And the cool thing is, hey, I don't have to pay for this inventory until after it sells. So I had just interviewed a ShareTown rep who turned that into a full-time income stream. So it was an opportunity to promote that video and my review of ShareTown. I think we did a promo for the podcast growth playbook after the show hit the 25 million download threshold.

22:40Hey, this is an excuse. This milestone is an excuse to celebrate a little bit and to throw a limited time sale on the podcast growth playbook course. I've sent out emails for my review of Fundrise. hey, this is my commercial real estate side hustle. Ryan Levesque had a series of workshops on how service entrepreneurs can transition to more time leveraged business models. So kind of a mix of affiliate promotions and my own products and content on the website, stuff like that. That's what I'm considering for those one off email promotions. The biggest one was the BC Stack annual bundle sale promotion.

23:16I'll get to that in a moment. And what's cool is a couple of these, the ones that are evergreen, I'm able to add those to the welcome sequence. So new subscribers automatically going to get those dripped out to them after they join. Now, I don't have one of these lined up every week, but the ones I've done so far have been pretty well received. So going forward, probably you'll see one to two a month of these and we'll adjust course, we'll evaluate, we'll see how those perform. Now, the question is, what's the cost in terms of unsubscribes? Because every time I hit send, around 0.15 % of people choose to unsubscribe.

23:52That's one in 660 people, if my math is correct on that. And what's interesting is that that rate is pretty much the same as my regular newsletter broadcasts. So it's not like you see a big spike for sending a random email on a Tuesday. It's a self-selecting thing. It's just part of the business. In fact, you'd probably rather have somebody unsubscribed than sit dormant on your list and never open anything. like, you know, 8 ,500 warners, as that might hurt your deliverability long term. Now, one thing that I did do for the campaigns that weren't just a one off email, but it was going to be a series, you know, I'm gonna send two or three kind of have this mapped out.

24:29I wanted to give people the option to opt out of just that promotion. So I spun up a quick landing page in lead pages. It's a picture of me. It says something like, it's cool. I still like you. And when people click on that message and the link says, hey, if this isn't relevant to you or if this isn't, the timing isn't right, whatever, you know, click here. I won't message you about it again. That way they get tagged in the system to be excluded from future emails about it. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path?