591: The 10 Best Side Hustles of the Year

25:25So I was like, man, I am not going to work until I die. Like, I'm going to be retired by the time I'm 30, you know? So I was like, okay, I sat down. I was like, what businesses are actually making money. You know, if I'm at the gym, if I'm hanging out with friends, if I'm out selling real estate, showing a house or whatever. And that's when I was like, okay, car washes, laundromats, storage unit facilities. So like those were like the three that I really went hard and put a focus on trying to acquire. Where were you shopping? I was looking around like on loopnet.com, correctsy.com. I was doing driving for dollars, kind of like the whole wholesaling method, but with businesses and just scouring the internet.

26:06Can I pause you? What do you mean by driving for dollars? So driving for dollars, I was like driving around looking for kind of like ran down businesses and I would slide a note under the door with my number on it asking if they're interested. Yeah. If they're like the building is still there, but they're not, it doesn't appear that they're operational. That or it looks really ran down because I'm trying to find a motivated seller. So I'm trying to find one that's ran down that doesn't look like it's been in business for a while or whatever. Okay. And so you come across, so LoopNet is one that I've heard of.

26:37Crexie is new to me. And so I was just, you know, looking around what might be available. I found a car wash for me, but they're asking$2.4 million in Seattle. They're like, and it still looks kind of run down. It's marked as like a development project. So was it through one of those searches or how'd you come across the property that you landed on? So I've been searching for forever. And apparently this car wash had just hit the market. I didn't even know it was listed yet. And a friend of mine told me about it because I had mentioned it to her. And she told me, she was like, hey, this one's for sale.

27:13It was in my same town. So I just hadn't seen it yet, but it was like up for sale. I just had not actually laid eyes on it being listed yet. Okay, that's great. So what's your next step? Next step was I contacted the sellers, took a tour of the property, got the financials, made sure this thing was actually making money. Then we went from there. So what was the sticker price? Or do you remember what the sticker price was? It was$150K and I talked them down to$140K. So I got it for$140K. And that's based on a multiple of their last 12 to 24 months of earnings? I don't really know how they came up with the number, but that was just kind of what they threw out there.

27:53That's what they wanted. It included the business and the land or was it leased on top of the land? Nope. Land, building, business, equipment, everything. Wow. I got to move to Tennessee. That sounds way better than 2.4 million. Yeah, for sure. So the owner, they want out, they've listed it for sale, but then they're thinking, Hey, I'm going to get this$150 ,000 payday. That's a big gap between expectation and like, well, Hey, I've got$2 ,000 in my pocket. How am I going to buy this thing? So talk to me about convincing this seller financing deal to say, I'm going to take it over. I'll pay you every month out of the proceeds of the business.

28:31He's like, no, that doesn't necessarily sound that attractive if I got a cash offer on the table. Right, exactly. Yeah. So like I said, they wanted out of it. It was for sale. So they had a motive. They did not want it anymore. They got it passed down. They didn't want it to begin with, really, from what I could tell. So the turnaround time with me doing the creative financing method was a no-brainer for them. I could take it off of their hands in two weeks. So they wanted out of that. And then with me paying down on the loan, I cut down on the capital gains tax that they had to pay whenever we refied it.

29:06As well as they were still getting money every month and I had already taken it off their hands. So they were very happy to let me go ahead and have it. so they didn't have to go through a 60-day closing process with like a lender, underwriting, stuff like that. Yeah, I see a lot of similarities to what you call like real estate wholesaling, looking for these motivated sellers. Maybe it's a burnt out landlord. Cody Sanchez talks about lots of reasons why business owners would sell a profitable business. Like it got handed down to them. I don't have any operational experience. Maybe I live two hours away.

29:38Like, I don't want to deal with this. Maybe I'm moving. Maybe just I'm done with it. I want to retire. Yep. And she talks about like the transfer of wealth from the boomer generation to Gen Z, Gen Y, and just lots of reasons why people would want to get out. That's what we're seeing a lot of the boomer generation. They're getting out of it. Kids don't want it. Maybe they're moving away. So yeah, that's definitely a big factor. From there, Hannah went on to describe some of the upgrades she made to improve the monthly income from the business and how she spends around 30 minutes a day to run it in exchange for around$5 ,000 a month in cashflow.

30:13And the detractors are gonna say, well, congrats, you just bought yourself a job. But based on that time input, it's a$300 an hour job so that you could hire help for and one that comes with equity should she wanna turn around and resell it. So I thought that was a really cool out-of-the-box example of inserting yourself into an income stream that's already flowing. So episode 571 for that full story with Hannah. And that was side hustle number six on our list of the best side hustles of the year. I'll be back with more of my favorite side hustle show moments right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what if-itis.

30:49What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot. They phased down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps turn what ifs into why nots. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to the very guests on this show. What if I can't design a website? Shopify's got you with ready-made templates to match your brand style. What if people haven't heard about my brand? Shopify helps you find customers with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns.

31:24And what if I get stuck? You can tap in to Shopify's award-winning 24-7 customer support. Let's turn those dreams into and give them the best shot at success with Shopify. Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. Shopify.com slash side hustle.

31:51As 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 3000 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. And here is what is really cool.

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33:12One of the more creative use cases that was shared this year was from Becky Beach in episode 582, who was using AI to help generate digital product ideas and to help create them. You can actually ask ChatGPT to give you product suggestions based on your niche, so you can do a prompt, which could be, please give me. I'm really polite to check GPT. So I always say like, please give me like 10 product ideas in the money-saving niche for printables or digital products or just whatever. And it will spit it out. It will give you like 10 different product ideas or you can even ask it for 20 ideas or just any amount you would want.

33:48And it gives you all these ideas. But then you can also take that data it gave you and actually go on and research for yourself to see if it's trending on Google, if any of it is doing well on Etsy. Are people on Etsy getting sales with this topic? My top selling product ever was my home planner. And it has lots of home organization in there, like home checklist, like organizing checklist and cleaning checklist. And I just like researched the market for a cleaning planner and it did very well. And I saw on Etsy, there was lots of other cleaning planners doing well. Home planners were also doing well.

34:20So I thought, well, maybe I could combine both like the cleaning, the organizing together and also decluttering. And I made this home planner and it's doing so well. I've made probably like$50 ,000 in sales since I created it. Wow. Just on Etsy alone or combined like through your store? Well, my Shopify store, like my Etsy store is fairly new. I have just 200 sales, but on my Shopify store, I make like over 10 ,000 a month on my products alone in that store. Yeah, that's interesting. So combining a few different buyer avatars or buyer personas, like I'm looking for organizing, I'm looking for decluttering, I'm looking for cleaning.

34:55Okay, why don't we unbundle those? Of course, sell them all individually, stock, add more SKUs to the shelf. but then also have a bundle of those and higher perceived value. I think that makes sense. When you bundle up your printables or other products, even make a course bundle or an ebook bundle, it just does so much better on Etsy, I noticed, than to just have a one-page printable because those don't sell as good. And they also don't sell as much. They probably sell like$1 or less for just one page. But if you have like lots of different pages together, I do at least 30 pages in my printables.

35:28And those tend to sell a lot more. While we were live on that call, I asked chat GPT for some digital product suggestions in the side hustle niche, and they were pretty solid. Of course, it's still on you to go build those out, make them look nice and do the marketing for them. But at least you're not starting completely from scratch. It's a super popular episode with Becky, episode 582 in your archives. That's AI assisted digital products. That's number seven on this list. Side hustle number eight is the daily deals affiliate business. So I really enjoyed David Paxton's story in episode 583 for a few reasons.

36:02First, it's a model that I think can be replicated across a ton of different niches. His was dailygolfsteals.com, where he was sharing the best deals on golf products every day, inspired in part by Cameron Stover, another side hustle show guest who was running a similar business in the hunting space. And second, David turned the traditional, you know, wait six to 12 months to see if I get any kind of traction with an online affiliate business model. He turned that on its head by going straight to a deal-hungry crowd of golfers on Reddit, in this case, and earned two grand in his first month. That's in contrast to writing dozens or hundreds of articles of content and hoping and praying that eventually you start to see some traction and traffic in Google, which I think would be difficult in this type of business anyway, because it isn't super evergreen content.

36:49It's like these time-sensitive deals that may or may not exist six months from now. And the third thing that was really impressive was David's systemization for automating and outsourcing big chunks of the business. I mean, committing to anything daily is a big challenge. I feel like committing to doing the podcast every week, there's always another Thursday coming around. So in his case, doing it daily, you got to set up some smart systems in order to make it sustainable. And here's how he described doing that early on for daily golf steals. I'd say one of the things I'm likening back to that first month was like, from the beginning, I was like, hey, there's something here.

37:24I don't know quite what it is. I don't know quite how big it is. But with a couple thousand dollars in the pocket, I was like, I can actually make this doable. I'm not going to be able to personally spend an hour every single day or two hours every single day sourcing deals. But I think there's a path to making this workable and kind of coming up with both processes and automation or tools that can make this doable. So we did a couple of things. So one, I actually hired a couple contractors. So I reached back out to the university golf team back at my alma mater at UVA. And I said to them, I was like, hey, golf startup, trying to do something cool here, would love some help in sourcing deals, we'll pay you, all that good stuff.

38:00So I reached out to one people who do the sourcing. And then a second person also on the team who was doing the upload. So every day we need to get the newsletter ready, we need to get the Reddit post ready, we need to do the social media, and basically started to get this yin and yang going. in terms of people who could take over so they could take a step back from the day. So that was kind of step one was get some people in place, sort of paying them to take off some of the operational burden. And then the second piece that I did, and I'd say scrappiness is very much front and center to daily golf deals.

38:31I was like, I think there's a way that I can do this and make this smoother and actually have some backup on why this is a deal. A lot of these affiliate partners are going to provide you with catalogs. So they want you to be able to see what inventory they have, what the stock levels look like. They give you the links, the images, the descriptions, which people use in a variety of different ways. And I said to myself, like, hey, if they're giving that to me on a daily basis and they're updating it daily, there's actually something kind of an interesting, I don't call it arbitrage opportunity here, but some way to say, okay, what did yesterday's catalog look like?

39:03What did today's catalog look like? And how do they differ? Didn't write a line of Python before this, but I was like, I can probably figure this out on Stack Overflow and other methods to say, okay, let's compare those two. Where are the price drops? And where are there actually new products available? And what I was doing was basically across, I think it was about 10 different partners coming up with that list. So when my guys were looking for the deals, they could just go, they'd sort of type in the FTP, sort of pull down a sort of short list of these potential deals, and then pick a handful.

39:33Not every single deal was going to be found from there, but of the seven that they're trying to target, maybe they're getting three or four. And that just cuts down the time immensely. Man, when he started talking about product catalogs and comparing yesterday's price to today's price. I was having flashbacks to my old shoe comparison shopping site, but could you do something similar in an industry that you're a part of or a hobby that you're interested in? I think Daily Golf Steals. I think his model is ripe for replication in a number of different niches. Again, episode 583 with David Paxton.

40:04Go check that one out if you missed it. That is number eight on this list. Number nine is Harry Duran and the example is getting paid to be curious. As you know, one of the major themes of the side hustle show is there's a niche for just about everything. And while it might help to have some expertise in that area, that's not even a requirement like Harry showed us in episode 586. Harry started the Vertical Farming podcast in early 2020 as a side hustle to his podcast production agency, Fullcast. So he knew podcasting, but he had no background in agriculture. He had no connections in that industry.

40:39He was just curious to learn more about it. And his example is number nine on this list. This is another one that I think can work in a ton of different niches. Harry set out to interview founders and leaders in the vertical farming space who probably wouldn't have given him the time of day had it just been cold email. Hey, can I pick your brain? But there's something about having a podcast that reduces that barrier and gets you access that you might otherwise not have. I think what a lot of people overthink sometimes is this idea of reaching out to people and saying, oh, this person's never gonna say hi.

41:12I'm a little embarrassed to ask. They don't know who I am. And the first thing I did is I whipped up Airtable, one of my favorite apps. I just started dropping in all these companies, vertical farming companies, just doing my research. Who's the CEO? Who's the founder? And building my list. Some people call it a dream 100, but people I wanted to have a conversation with. And when I started early, those early conversations, I would say, hey, I'm reaching out to name one, name two, name three, these CEOs. And people would see that. And even though I hadn't actually had the conversation with them, by virtue of them seeing that name, they're like, oh, he's going for like the big names in the space.

41:43Once those people started confirming, I would change the language. I would say, I've now confirmed a interview with so-and-so. And then obviously, once I started stair-stepping. Just kind of banking on the name recognition that people are going to know who those other names were. Okay. And then once those started getting confirmed and scheduled, I said, I've now scheduled an interview. So I just kept changing language. Obviously, once I recorded, I've recorded three interviews with A, B, C, and D. And where the side hustle comes in is through Harry's sponsorship packages. On a traditional cost per thousand audio impressions model, he might be earning 50 bucks an episode because it's a relatively small niche audience.

42:20But because it's such a niche audience, he's able to command premium rates and has earned an average of over$700 an episode over the life of the show. That's an incredible way to monetize your curiosity. He even landed a$9 ,000 sponsor before he even released an episode. And I said, for$9 ,000, you can sponsor the entire season. For me, a season is a quarter, 13 weeks and a quarter. Again, coming from that corporate marketing background, that's how marketing teams and departments think about their planning and budgets. And he thought about it for a couple of minutes and he's like, yeah, let's do it.

42:52so here's the punchline or the kicker. I hadn't even released an episode yet. Yeah. So that was an amazing aha moment. Like I was like, whoa, this is nuts. But I could see how they were thinking about this ability. And again, there was some surplus marketing dollars there that had to be put to work, but it's just a matter of really thinking about how can you best serve these companies in a way that they may not be served by some other other marketing platforms. The whole episode is great. Again, that's 586 with Harry Duran. Hopefully it gets your gears turning on an out-of-the-box way to build authority and build a business in an industry that you're curious about, even if you don't have the expertise going into it built in.

43:31And rounding out this list is Lou Rice's Strapsicle, a simple silicone strap on a mission to become the number one Kindle accessory in the world. In episode 589, just a few weeks ago, she shared how inspiration struck, breastfeeding her newborn late at night, reading on her Kindle, accidentally drops the device on the baby's head. Everybody's unhappy with that situation. So she and her husband designed this simple, lightweight little strap to keep the thing on your hand when you're reading. Now, a few years ago, the play would have looked something like this. Hey, I'm going to look at the Amazon reviews for similar products, especially those with a relatively low sales rank, meaning they're actually moving volume.

44:12They're actually selling. I'm going to check the reviews to see what people don't like about them. Specifically, I'm looking at like the two and three star reviews. Then I'm going to go work with manufacturers to address those flaws. And I'm going to try and design something a little bit better. The end goal is to get some of that sales volume that's already happening, that's already flowing, and instead just get it flowing to your new product. It was this game of relatively low risk, proven demand, evolutionary product design, and riding a rising tide of just plain old Amazon e-commerce with not a lot of marketing required.

44:44Amazon was going to be the primary source of traffic here. And when it worked, it really worked. You've seen lots of examples of people building pretty sizable FBA businesses, life changing money, life changing equity in those businesses in a relatively short period of time. But that game has shifted a bit, which is one reason I think Lou's business is so cool and kind of surprising because instead of designing that product and then going straight to Amazon, which would have made sense, it's an accessory for an Amazon product. After all, she focused all her early efforts on driving traffic and sales to her self-hosted Shopify-powered store, Strapsicle.com.

45:21What we did was I was in a couple of Facebook groups, a female entrepreneurs Facebook group, and then a local Facebook group posted in there. And it went absolutely nuts in both groups. Absolute, like hundreds of comments, loads of support. And then people started buying. And then I also posted on LinkedIn and got a huge reaction from that. So literally, we wanted to actually not do the friends and family, please buy from us, especially as we needed to find people with Kindle. Yeah. So we went that route. Was this on Amazon or was this on Strapsicle.com, like Shopify powered, like standalone store?

45:58At this stage, we hadn't launched Amazon. This was Strapsicle.com. So just literally through those, I think, three channels. And then obviously I shared it on personal Instagram, et cetera. We got close to a hundred sales, which was awesome for us because not only did it give us those customers straight away in the Facebook groups and LinkedIn, we were able to start dialogue with our customers. And that's when I really understood the power of community building. Were these specific like Kindle fan, like book lover groups or something like that? It was just kind of, it was more general. So interestingly, it was general.

46:32It was female entrepreneurs. so there was a lot of cheering me on and also oh I have a kindle I would love this and then it was I'm in Bondi Beach Sydney it was the local Bondi group and people could pick up from a cafe down the road so that was where we started but then I very quickly discovered book talk on TikTok and that really changed the game for us as well tell me about book talk yeah I don't know if you know book talk. I mean, book talk is a huge subculture on TikTok of people who absolutely love, they have their book accounts, love their books, and then they love Kindles as well. So I learned to have an affiliate strategy, go and find some micro influencers, give them a free code.

47:16That's what I did. I spent hours, I researched all of these kind of, I wouldn't even call them influencers. They were just people that had 2 ,000 or 3 ,000 followers, maybe a bit more. I reached out to them, told them a bit about our story and offered them a sample to try. And I knew they loved Kindles because I'd searched all the Kindle hashtags to find them. So I sent the product out, absolutely loved it. And the bonus of that is I gave them a code to share with their followers. So then they were actively promoting for me sometimes daily, weekly. And then I was also gathering all this UGC content that I could then use for my own marketing.

47:53so that actually in the first three months of business really helped grow the word about Strapsicle wow were you like native to the TikTok platform like it's still a black box mystery to me oh is it oh yeah but you're like oh shoot I'm gonna reach out to these micro influencers I'm gonna send them my stuff I'm gonna get them an affiliate code it sounds like super premeditated super intentional like super strategic it wasn't at all but I would say Nick I mean Nick you need to get on the TikTok, but it is. Yeah, I mean, the organic growth opportunities from TikTok are still so strong. And I think, look, I was just on this, I was still on mat leave.

48:32I had this time, Archie was in take care. And I was like, I'm just going to run at this. I've got two more months before I go back to work. So doing this and then seeing the traction, this strategy brought, this tactic brought, I was like, keep going, keep going. I don't know if you've heard the quote from, I think it was Paul Graham, early on, do the things that don't scale. And for me, that really stuck. It's like, spend the time, just reach out to people. People with relatively small followings love to hear from you. They probably haven't had many brands reach out. And it was only after that did Lou and her husband in Strapsicle launch on Amazon, where Lou believes they were rewarded in the algorithm by being able to drive their own traffic.

49:13Really cool case study for anyone interested in e-commerce or product Marketing episode 589 from just a few weeks ago, if you want to go check that out. So to summarize our top 10 side hustles of the year, number one was Ryan Golgoski's web design service, a unique pricing model, recurring pricing model, high margin agency business. Number two was renting out mobility scooters or more broadly a niche equipment rental business. Lenny Tim was our case study in that one. Number three was Shelly Marmer's$50 ,000 a month portfolio of travel blogs. Every time Somebody tells me blogging is dead. I keep getting examples like Shelly's.

49:49The line that stood out, hey, nobody cared about me and my travels. They cared about how I could help them travel better. Put yourself in your reader's shoes and let that dictate the keyword and content strategy. Number four was the Amazon Influencer Program. Still stands as the easiest money that I've ever made online, uploading these simple product review videos. Even the kids, they made combined 40 bucks selling Legos and Squishmallows in November. And I gave them each their$20 bill. They kind of like were like, great. You don't understand. You just made passive income from the internet. That's really hard to do.

50:20A lot of people spent a ton of time on this. They're like, okay, cool. So hopefully trying to impress upon them what actually happened there and really getting them to recognize how cool that actually was. So that was number four, Amazon influencer program. Number five was Cody Smith's pet waste removal business. But beyond that, really just a masterclass in local SEO. I consider that a must listen if you have any sort of local service business. Number six was the idea to go out and buy some cash flow and maybe you could even do it with no money down like Hannah Ingram did with her self-service car wash in Tennessee.

50:52Number seven was AI assisted digital products with Becky Beach. Kind of interesting use of chat GPT in that one. Number eight was the niche daily deals service monetized with affiliate relationships, affiliate partnerships like David Paxton's daily golf steals.com. Number nine was curiosity pays the example or the case study being Harry Duran's vertical farming podcast, a really niche podcast, but has done extremely well with that. And finally, number 10 was Lou Rice's Strapsicle, a very simple Amazon accessory, a silicone strap that goes on the back of your Kindle device, selling 50 grand a month worth of those riding the back of some micro influencer marketing strategies.

51:36It was really inspiring to hear that one. So those were our top 10 side hustles of the year. If you want an easy way to check out all of those episodes. I went ahead and created a Spotify playlist with all of those included that I will link up in the episode description. Or if you want something a little more personalized, you can go to hustle.show, just answer a few short multiple choice questions, and you can build your own personalized playlist with the episodes that will be most helpful to you based on your answers. So you've got a couple different options there. There's the public best of the year playlist or hustle.show to get one customized to you.

52:10Big thanks to all our incredible guests for sharing their stories this year. We couldn't do the show without you. It really is inspiring to hear what you come up with. If you have a story to share, hit me up. Love to hear them. We've got a full calendar coming for you in 2024. I also want to thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. As always, you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. It really does make a difference when you go through those links. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend.

52:43So why not fire up a text message right now and say, hey, check out these cool side hustle ideas. Happy New Year to you. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show. Hustle on.