606: Side Hustle Stacking: How One Extra Income Stream Can Lead to More

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1:15What's up? What's up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, part of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. The one idea that I've advocated for on the show is this. Simplify first, diversify second. You're going to have something working first before you can even worry about diversifying. But this is an episode about that second part. How do you know when it's time to diversify? When is it time to branch out? How do you add a side hustle to your side hustle? And how can one income stream unlock more?

1:47Today's guest is a pro at this with several projects all stemming from an original blog. In fact, we covered that blog's origin story 10 years ago on the show. That's crazy. From Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro, Bjork Ostrom. Welcome back to the Side Hustle Show. 10 years. Maybe we can schedule it. I'll put it on my calendar. A little more frequently. A once a decade interview. And we'll see like which one of us in our 70s is still showing up with the podcast in front of us recording episodes. Yeah. Episode 6 ,000 and something. Where are they now? Update. Our seventh interview in the once a decade series.

2:24It's great to be back, Nick. It's been fun to see your journey. It's awesome. I just love that so much Much of this is continuing to show up every day, and you're such a great example of that. So it's fun to be here with you talking about all things entrepreneurship, side hustle, business building. Let's do it. Well, it's been a blast to be able to do what I do and get paid for it. I think it's the best job in the world. We're playing around with a new format this week. We're calling it three rounds with Bjork. Round one is this idea of side hustle stacking. Round two is the donate a business idea round, a business you could start today, something that ought to exist into the world.

2:58and business around three rather is the triple threat a marketing tactic that's working right now a favorite new tool or new to you tool and bjork's favorite book from the last 12 months we're going to start off with round one stacking complimentary entrepreneurial pursuits you've started a ton of projects pinch of yum the original food blog food blogger pro helping other food bloggers get started and grow in this space wp tasty like pinterest plugin the new one clarity.com. Let's start with the first spinoff, which was, I think, food blogger pro. Talk to me about the origin of that. Pintri Viam is a food and recipe website and social media accounts, primarily personal brand.

3:38So it's my wife, Lindsay, who's producing that content, publishing that content online. We monetize those through traditional advertising. We work with an ad network called Raptive. We also work with sponsorships on Instagram. So Lindsay has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. And so she has a lot of attention there. What happened was 14 years ago when Lindsay started Pinch of Yum, she was really interested in all of the same things she's interested in today. Recipe development, photography, storytelling, connecting with an audience. And by chance, I was interested in the things that were really complementary to that.

4:15So like business development type stuff, search engine optimization, growth tactic type stuff, and also just some of the more boring logistical things that need to happen behind the scenes for food and recipe sites or just a business in general. And so what ended up happening is we had this great pairing. And for a while, I would write about kind of the business side of building the site on Pinch of Yum. And from that, we got a lot of other creators who followed along with our story because they were also trying to figure it out. And so I would write a blog post and say, hey, here's the things that we learned about how to use an ad network or the things that we learned about search optimization.

4:57Eventually, we had enough people following along there where we were like, there might be something here to create an actual community around this group of people. And that's where Food Blogger Pro came in. So we launched that probably three years after starting Pinch of Yum. That was in 2013. and we've kind of done different versions of that along the way where we've seen an opportunity and then we create a business around that all within the niche of publishing and usually with a focus on food content it's interesting because it's like well lots of people teaching you how to blog but a lot fewer people teaching you how to start a food blog and so it's i'm going to take this tiny segment and become the go-to person the go-to source in this tiny little niche and i think it's something that you've done really well.

5:42And in response to, well, yeah, you kind of went the proactive route and you put out content on this and started to build a critical mass of following and questions and answers around that, but saying, okay, I'm not going to build it first. Like I'm going to almost pre-validate it very inexpensively. I mean, it takes your time to create that kind of content, but not going out and spending eight weeks filming a course or something, and then trying to go out and sell it. Yeah. And we actually sold access to the course before we had built any of it. So it was like the ultimate pre-validation. Okay, we're going to sign up.

6:13I think there's maybe$10 ,000 that came in. We kind of used that money to seed the initial round of building the website. So yeah, it was exactly that. And so it was originally course membership content. What else was there or is there today? Very similar. There's deals and discounts for certain services, subscriptions that would be beneficial for people in the food space. there's a forum there's training we do live q a so we'll have an industry expert we had somebody who has a pinterest agency and kate all from simple pin media comes on it's like here's the state of pinterest and here's what's happening in pinterest we might do that with seo or food photography so it's really industry specific things and anything in the world of publishing podcasting as an example or instagram there's a subset of that where you have to be different in terms of your strategy based on the type of content that you're producing.

7:06And so we kind of cover all of the different things that you'd need in order to build a food and recipe following online and all the different strategies from the artistic things, food video or food photography to more of the technical things. Like what does structured data for search engine optimization look like for a food site? So that's kind of what we cover from a content perspective and do that in multiple different ways. So now lots of drama in the Google world. in terms of algorithm updates in the last several months. Are you seeing new food bloggers weather that storm and be able to compete with some larger sites and build up their EEAT and everything else that Google is looking for in ranking new content, new food content in particular?

7:49All across the board, we've seen and talked to people who have been like, shoot, this is a real bummer because I had worked hard for five, 10 years. I'd built up really great following and traffic, search traffic, Google pushes out an update and they're like, it's the helpful content update. And they're like, I have really helpful content. And I've been creating content that feels like it was in line with what Google would recommend and somehow they're penalized. And that's a huge bummer. And you also see people on the other side where it's like an update comes out and they benefit from it. Traffic goes up.

8:22In our world, we've seen both. We've seen people who have been hurt by it, people who have benefited from it. I think a better way for us to frame Food Blogger Pro, and there probably is a rebrand in our future, is like Food Creator Pro. Most of the people who are coming to us now are like a social media platform first. They grew a following on Instagram. They grew a following on YouTube. They grew a following on TikTok. And now they're starting to think more holistically around like, hey, I should also build a site so I can point people somewhere. That's an interesting evolution over the last 10 years where it's like the blog may be a component of it.

9:00The website may be a component of it, but it's probably not the main thing anymore. Or, you know, it's a piece of the pie rather than the main thing. That's a really interesting shift. So kind of the food creator pro is maybe more accurate going forward. All right, so that is side hustle stack number one, basically like taking something that's already working, pinch of yum, and answering some of the questions. We wanna do what you did, right? If we were to go down the same path, guide us along that way. So food blogger pro becomes a thing, validated with pre-sales, like very low risk, right? You knew there was an audience for it.

9:31What was the next product or whatever that stacked on top of that? To speak to that real quickly, I think this is me speaking to people who are listening. My guess is there's a subset of this group of people who are kind of exploring what is going to be my side hustle? What am I going to do? One of the things that you can do, and this is what we did, which helped us build another business, was as we were trying to figure out the current business that we were in, we were creating a business. And so when I talk about doing kind of some of those state of the business reports, the first one we did was like our site earned$20.

10:05And here's what we're trying to do. We're trying to get that to$40. Like we were documenting the process. I think there's an opportunity, even for people who don't know what they are doing, to start the process of doing their thing by documenting their journey into it. This is the work in public thing. This is a common unlock. Even going back to Matt Voknok, it was repairing motorcycles in his garage as his side hustle, but sets the camera up in the corner, you know, doing repairs. Now he's got over a hundred thousand YouTube subs. Like it's become, the content has become a thing more than much more than turning wrenches ever was.

10:47And I think it becomes a flywheel in that it's also great advertiser. Like for somebody who sees him working on a motorcycle, you start to know him, you trust them. And so it's like, maybe I'll bring my motorcycle there and get it fixed. Or like you see that with like people who do a car detailing business. And the other thing though, that I think it does, and I think this is really valuable is that it's a little bit of a pressure system that forces you to refine your process, your skills, your expertise, because you are being documented. And for him, my guess is he's a better motorcycle repairman because of the fact that he sets a camera up and records himself doing it.

11:31And so not only does it become a great advertiser for you, not only does it also become potentially a business where you have subscribers, but I think even if nobody showed up at your business and nobody subscribed to you, you still would probably be better at whatever it is that you're doing because you're going through the process of documenting it. So I feel like it's worth pointing out and a consideration for people who are listening and kind of in that exploration stage that there's value in you working in public or whatever it might be. So the next thing for us was we had Pinch of Yum, we had Foodblogger Pro, And then we had these two software services called NutriFox and WP Tasty.

12:12NutriFox was a nutrition analysis website. WP Tasty was a WordPress plugins business. I say was, they still exist, but we sold those. So we built those companies and we sold those companies. They're no longer part of what we have as our kind of holding company, which is Tinybit. So we sold those, it was about two years ago. But that was the same thing. We noticed that there was a need for us to have certain functionality within our website. And so we built a tool, in this case, the bigger company was the WordPress plugins business, that allowed us to do the things we wanted to do. And then what we did is we packaged those up as plugins and then sold those to other WordPress site owners.

12:54So we were going to go through the process of creating it anyways. And then it made sense for us to package those up and offer them as a product themselves as well. So that was the next thing in kind of the journey. All right. So we're hitting on lots of common themes here. We have the document the process, work in public, good things can happen. Next, we have the solve your own problem, scratch your own itch kind of idea validation phase. Were these pre-sold prior to development or is it like, hey, we're going to build this anyways for our own use and then we can sell that license to somebody else?

13:23Yeah, these weren't pre-sold. So these were once we had it to kind of like what we would consider a helpful, functional point. We offered it as a product that people could buy and sign up for and use. And, you know, it's like a slow build and then you build it up and then you have a team. And we had somebody in the role of general manager who would oversee the day-to-day. We had a contracted developer that we worked with to do those who eventually was W2 for a little bit. And then a customer support team as well. What came next or what else have you stacked on top of this expertise and authority in the food blogger space.

13:58So the other noteworthy one would be a site called Clarity, C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com. And that was our first play into going beyond food. Like it's great for people who have a food site, but it's not only for people who are doing food content. And essentially Clarity is this hub that brings in WordPress data. It brings in Google analytics data and it brings in Google search console data and then it allows you to sort and filter and understand your content in a really easy way and an example of something that you could do is you could sign up for clarity and then once all that data is brought in you could look and say hey show me all of the content on my site posts and pages that have images without any alt text which is like best practice you want to have alt text on your images and you'd really quickly be able to surface that and see that or you could say, show me any content that has broken links.

14:53Like you have a link on the page, but it's broken or another one that's really important. Show me pieces of content on my site that don't have any internal links from other pages on my site. So it's almost like you can do kind of a little mini audit with it. And so that's a tool that we've been really excited about. We've been working on that for a few years. We use it ourselves day to day. That's a true like software as a service SaaS tool. And you don't have to be in the food blogger space to use anybody with a website that's been around any length of time, like this is kind of one of these ongoing projects, like the site audit project.

15:26Well, what posts don't have any internal links? Like you said, what posts don't get any traffic anymore? Like, do we really need this progress report from Q3 2015 anymore? Like, you know. And a huge part of it, to your point, like oftentimes with a site like yours or a site like ours, you've been publishing content for a lot of times, you might look back and be like, gosh, we posted this article on like, in our world, this like pre-made cookie dough that we really love. It's like, that's just not what we didn't actually do that. But like, that would be an example of like a post and it probably doesn't get any traffic.

15:58We should just delete it. It's kind of to use the garden analogy for people who have been publishing content for a decent amount of time. Sometimes the strategy isn't like you have a garden and you're just going to plant more into it. the strategy is like you're just going to really pay attention to the plants that you do have the posts and the pages update those make sure they're healthy reshare them with your audience and that's going to be one of the most strategic things you can do as a content creator is really treating your existing content well going back and updating it making sure that it has everything that it needs as opposed to just churning out new content and so clarity is kind of built with that in mind where there's a new wave of content creation, which is updating and maintaining existing content as a priority, oftentimes alongside creating new content.

16:51Yeah, totally. There's usually a better ROI or maybe a more predictable ROI in updating that old post that had dipped a little bit in rankings than rolling the dice and trying to hand it out completely new post that may never make it to page one. So I'm with you there. More with Bjork in just a moment, including three ways you can identify whether that new project is worth pursuing or if it's just a distracting shiny object. That's coming up right after this. Whether you're a seasoned business or you're experiencing your very first Black Friday, Cyber Monday, you need a platform that can handle the rush.

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19:17More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's q u o.com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number quo, no missed calls, no missed customers. Now the question with all of these projects is, how do you know, maybe we should just double down on what we're already doing? Like, what if we poured all that time and effort and energy into pinch of yum versus starting a course of community versus starting software businesses versus doing all these plugins? How do you know what's a shiny object versus what could be a meaningful second income stream.

19:59One of the questions you can ask is like, is the adjacent thing making you better at the first thing? And in the case of Foodblogger Pro, the answer to that was yes. Like it for sure requires us to take time to like spin up a membership site and to sell that. And there's a lot of considerations around just what does it look like to create a thing. But it's different than if we had gone and started a shoveling business or snow removal business is maybe a better way to say it. We're in Minnesota. And so like you could easily start a snow removal business. But one of the things that happens and one of the reasons why it's easy to continue to do it is just as an example, like I get on a call once or twice a week, just like this, you and I, and I have a conversation with an expert on how to be better in the world of food publishing.

20:48And that's extremely complementary to what we're doing. It's kind of like I'm doing these consulting calls, really. Somebody's saying, here's how to do search optimization better for recipe websites. Or somebody is saying, here's what's working well on Pinterest or Instagram or TikTok. Or here's a strategy that you should consider. So I think that's one of them. Like if you can create an adjacent thing that is making you better at the first thing, there's not as much risk in lost ROI because chances are it might be that the thing that you are doing is actually making you better at the first thing.

21:29So I would say that would be the one consideration. So trying to find something that's complimentary or it makes sense. Yes. It's on the shoulder of the thing you're already doing versus being completely out in left field. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think the other thing is sometimes it actually is just better to keep doing what you're doing and to go deeper on it and to get hyper focused on it. And I would say there's one reality where both Lindsay and I are obsessively focused on Pinch of Yum. In that reality, just purely from a finances standpoint, there's a high likelihood. Like if I were to bet, my bet would be financially we'd be in a better spot if that was who we are and how we operated.

22:15Like if we didn't do anything else and we just hyper focused on growing Pinch of Yum. I think that two considerations within that are number one, we have to consider who we are as individuals. And who I am is like, I really love zero to one. I love starting a thing. I love building a thing. And if I'm going to show up on your podcast a decade later and still be excited to talk about this stuff, I'm going to have to be doing things that make me excited. And for me, it wouldn't have been going super, super deep on SEO for a food site and a recipe site. That's an important consideration. Trying to eke out your incremental 5 % or 10 % every month.

23:00Yeah. And it would have been great if that was me. And I think that financially would have been probably better if that was true, but it's just not who I am. And so I think that's a huge part of it. Like, how do we continue as creators, as entrepreneurs, as business owners to like continue to show up inspired every day? That's a factor in our success and needs to be considered. I would say the other thing is there's something to be considered around diversification. and in the world of anything online it can change really quickly and we've seen that you talked about helpful content like yeah you're one algorithm away you're one algorithm away yes you know if i'm relying on pinterest then the rules changes i'm relying on google and then the rules change instagram you build a big following on instagram and so there's all these different layers of diversification like within the pinch of yum ecosystem we have an email list we have an instagram account we have the blog itself like all of those are kind of mini diversifications yeah that we've had within that system but then we also have like a membership site in food blogger pro we have a software service so there's a certain level of diversification there in the online businesses but then we also do commercial real estate and that's like another diversification into something very different it's like brick and mortar it's slow moving it's antiquated industry like that's interesting i didn't know that that's cool yeah so that's like i would say it's like taking some chips off the table and 100 putting it into something that is completely uncorrelated to the online completely uncorrelated yeah it's like there's a pizza hut and an edward jones and like those are our clients and they're probably not going to be affected by an algorithm in the same way that like we would be with pinch of yum again though to your point i think it's a really valid one and if you are somebody who can go deep and can focus and you find something that works keep doing that if you can continue to like stay engaged and interested in it it sounds like that's kind of one of the beliefs that you have and i would like affirm that for anybody listening to say like before you go out and like diversify like crazy or kind of stack these businesses like we talked about just continue to like drill if you strike oil continue to get that oil until it's all gone yeah yeah get well again it's good i think some people are like oil this is awesome to have oil i wonder if i can get oil over here and then you go and drill and it's like oh you could just continue to stay where you were and just continue to go deeper which is a lot easier than like drilling somewhere else and so i think to the extent that you can be somebody who does that i would say go for it and continue to do it i think it's really wise to continue to go deeper as opposed to trying to like spin up a correlating thing especially to do that too soon.

26:03Yeah, no, those are really helpful. So the shiny object test was number one, is the adjacent thing making you better at the main thing? Like, yeah, is it going to be complimentary? Is it going to be like, I think Tim Ferriss put it this way when he's starting his podcast, how do I make it a win for me? Even if I lose, even if nobody tunes in 100%. Yeah. Number two was consider who you are as an individual. What do you like doing? What are you most excited about? What are you curious about? I think that really hit home for me. And that's the reason the show still exists. 11 years later is it's still interesting and exciting to learn about different side hustles.

26:37And finally, this diversification play, like I want to continue to get while the getting's good, but I also want to take some chips off the table and maybe allocate 5%, 10 % a month, like put it into something. How can I get paid over and over again from this work that I do once something that's uncorrelated, unrelated, and just build up this other little piece of the income pie over here. Those are all really good. Yeah, totally. Well, that's round one, side hustle, stacking, incremental income streams, all that fun stuff. Round two is donate a business idea. So I'll kick it over to you. If you had time for something new, what would you start?

27:11The thing that I really like to think about is what is an industry that is evolving? What is an industry that is trending? And then what are the tools that that industry needs? What are the support mechanisms that that industry needs? There's this rise in people creating content. You're one of those people. I'm one of those people. We now have like multiple friends who have built creator businesses. And these aren't friends like that. We became friends with them because they were creators. We were friends with them. They became creators. And now that's what they do full time. Like it's just people are doing this as a job.

27:50And what we're seeing is these solopreneurs, these kind of independent business owners, have these really specialized needs for people to come alongside them. And there are people building those businesses. So an example is our friend Landon. He shoots video for us, Pinch of Yum. He also shoots video for his friend TJ, who does birth order humor on TikTok and Instagram, like middle child does this, older child does this, has like multiple millions of followers. but there's all sorts of different specific needs that creators have and so one of them might be you are an expert in file organization and that's just always what you've done really well you have opinions on it and you're really good at creating organizational structures for a remote team that has significant media assets i spent probably a week researching this okay we have video files we have photos, we work with a remote team.