616: Lifestyle Creep, Luck, and Why Every Podcast Guest Has an Online Course: Q&A w/ Nick

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1:16And why does it seem like every podcast guest is selling an online course? What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show. Light on the theory, heavy on the tactics. It's the business podcast you can actually apply. And today we're diving into the listener mailbag for a little Q &A session. First question that came through, I love this one, why are so many guests selling an online course? That was a listener question I got recently. I thought it was a good one. It shows you're paying attention. First of all, there is some truth to that perception. I looked at the last two years, the last 100 Side Hustle Show episodes, in between 20 and 30 % of them featured a guest that had a course or a product directly related to what we were talking about.

1:57So why does that happen? There's a few reasons. First, it's kind of been the unwritten rule of media for decades, whether it's TV, talk shows, radio, and now podcasts. Look, you help me with content my audience is going to find helpful or entertaining, and I give you a platform to drive exposure for your thing. It could be the new season of your show, your book, your podcast, your upcoming movie, your service offering, or what's common in the entrepreneurial world, especially the entrepreneurial podcast world, your online course. Now, another thing to consider is it's hard to expect somebody to give up an hour of their time for that interview, especially if they're busy entrepreneurs.

2:32And especially like in the case of the side hustle show, if the expectation is going to be, you're going to be sharing behind the scenes stuff about how your business works to potentially create more competition for yourself. If there's nothing in it for that guest, just like you don't usually see your favorite celebrity making the rounds, doing interviews unless they've got something to promote. The podcast world operates similarly. Now, I don't know if other broadcast media is the same way, like our guests paying to be on Jimmy Fallon, but some podcasts actually charge guests a multi-thousand dollar appearance fee for the exposure they're going to get as a result of being a guest on that show.

3:11And to be clear, I've never charged guests to be on the Side Hustle show. I can only imagine how difficult that would be to not turn every single episode into a thinly veiled infomercial, if that were the case. Now, I love it. I love it when I get a guest who is purely excited to share their story. When there's no call to action, they just want to give back. They want to motivate and inspire others. And for the Side Hustle Show specifically, I'm in the fortunate enough position that that actually happens a decent percentage of the time. Listeners reach out, hey, I listened to this episode. I took action.

3:43I'd love to share my story. But when that does, a funny thing happens. I get listeners messaging me, hey, loved your episode with so-and-so. What's the best way to get in touch with them? I'm thinking about starting the business that they talked about, just add a few questions. And it happens often enough that I've had guests reach back out after a few months and say, hey, I'm thinking about creating an online course because I had so many people looking for you or even paid consulting on their topic. So an online course could be a great way to leverage their expertise. Now, here's the thing. It's my job as the podcast host to make the content compelling and helpful, even if you don't want to buy the book, even if you don't want to see the movie or enroll in the course, right?

4:23And under this model, we all get free content paid for by advertisers. I try to make sure my guests have a great experience. Sure, I am happy when they see positive results, of course, but my primary responsibility is to you. That's the most important thing. my primary responsibility is to the audience. Because if I'm not serving you, if I'm not making your life better in some way, it doesn't take long before I don't have an audience anymore. In any case, I thought that was a great observation, a thoughtful question about why so many guests seem to have an online course. And hopefully this sheds a little bit more light on why that is.

4:59And if you have a guest in mind with nothing to sell, but a great story, send them my way. question two is I want to sell my urban gardening blog. Do you have any tips for being proactive in finding a buyer besides putting it up for sale on Flippa? This was a question from the Facebook group. I think that's awesome that you have set your business up for an exit. And yes, Flippa and other marketplaces are definitely a viable option. We're not seeing multiples as high as we did a few years ago with content sites selling for 35 to 45 times monthly earnings in some cases, but can still be a great payday.

5:35My first thought here is to look for other gardening or home related publishers that might see your site as a strategic acquisition, either to keep as a standalone brand or under an online media umbrella, or to fold into their larger content site. Now, I swear I saw an example of this where somebody was buying up competitors, but keeping them operating separately, and they ended up in a unique position where they owned like half of the first page of Google listings for a bunch of different keywords. Didn't matter what you clicked on. There was one parent company behind half of those listings. The reason I would look for that kind of strategic buyer is probably going to get a better price from somebody who knows the space.

6:17They've got maybe a future vision of your site as a piece of that broader business. That's probably where I would look first and do a little proactive outreach there. Question three is let's talk lifestyle creep. As your income grows, how much do you allow? This one came from the ChooseFI Facebook group. Now, lifestyle creep is a quick definition. If you're not familiar with that term, it's the tendency for your expenses to creep up as your income grows. And I think that's fine, provided you're spending on things that improve your quality of life. You worked hard for that, so enjoy it, right? But it's also important to do that with a full understanding of both the costs, the near-term costs, and the opportunity costs.

7:00Your savings rate, your personal profitability as a household, how much is left over after all your expenses, that's the single biggest lever that you have on your path to financial independence. If you make a lot and spend very little, it doesn't take long before your assets can cover your lifestyle, on paper at least, and you can find all sorts of calculators online to show you that every$100 you save today is really worth$400 in 30 years or something. But you have to couple with that with, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. Life's short. You got to find a way to enjoy the present, to enjoy the journey while not screwing your future self.

7:35But the idea that you're going to live super frugally for 15 to 20 years to achieve fire, financial independence, retire early, and then all of a sudden turn on that spending habit, that's not realistic. Frugal habits die hard. It's something that Britt and I have experienced firsthand where we'll be stressing, stressing is probably a strong word, but you know, contemplating, should we buy this thing that the kids need? Maybe it's the next size up for a pair of shoes or something because it's on sale and the sale ends tonight. But if we buy them not on sale, it's only an extra 20 bucks. And given the nature of retail, there's probably another sale coming down the road in a few months when he might actually need them.

8:14So our fixed expenses, thinking about the lifestyle creep thing, our fixed expenses probably maxed out when we had both boys in preschool four days a week. I don't remember the exact number, but I'm sure it was over$3 ,000 a month. And now that they're both in school, to have that coming back to the bottom line, it's a lot easier to justify some conscious lifestyle creep. There's three grand that we were previously spending that we're not anymore. Could we spend one of it to make life better in some way? Could we spend two of it? You know, it's like you weren't missing it when it wasn't there.

8:45Now, in our case, that's been things like paying for the more convenient airport parking. It's been making some home improvements. It's going to the workout classes we like, even though it's more than working out at home. It's hitting the easy button on occasion with takeout and meal delivery. Where we've been hesitant when it comes to lifestyle creep is committing to long-term increased expenses like you would if you bought a bigger house. Along with that comes the bigger mortgage, the higher property taxes, the higher utilities, or really any recurring service. You got to be sure it's really worth it.

9:21And to be fair, a lot of these are fairly low risk, pretty easily reversible. The bigger challenge is dealing with the mental fallout of the lifestyle slipping, the opposite of lifestyle creep. If you find yourself needing to cut back on spending because your income suddenly decreases and that means giving up on luxuries you've grown accustomed to, it feels like a lot of like a big loss. Even if the trimmed back version is still a perfectly healthy lifestyle, that's where the hedonic adaptation comes into play here. It's pretty easy to get used to a certain level of convenience and comfort and hard to go back to a place where that's no longer feasible, even if it's still better off than people were 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

9:59We can talk about this stuff for hours and which specific lifestyle upgrades are worth it, but that's how we tend to think about it. Spending definitely became easier as our income increased and it's become easier when certain big ticket expenses like childcare went away and it became easier after hitting financial independence number we were comfortable with, or at least a coast number we were comfortable with. But take a look at your income and expenses. And if you have a big gap to play with and you're happy with where you're at work wise, absolutely enjoy the fruits of your labor. Let that lifestyle creep a little bit.

10:31I've got more Q &A 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. The last thing you want is inventory errors or your point of sale crashing when new customers are trying to buy for the first time. So make sure your business is ready for the busiest time of the year with help from our sponsor, Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, including dozens of side hustle show guests and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US. Shopify has thousands of templates and tools to make sure your site looks great and is functional at the same time.

11:07And if you ever have any issues or questions, Shopify's award-winning customer support team is standing by 24-7 so you can get back to business as fast as possible. If you want to give your customers the best shopping experience this holiday season, you need Shopify. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle and make this Black Friday one to remember. Question four is I noticed your email links are all broken.

11:43What's going on? What happened? Well, what happened was in March, we switched from ActiveCampaign to ConvertKit. And one of the unintended consequences of that move was all the ActiveCampaign links died. Seven years of them. Not a great user experience for people who kept those emails in their inbox to refer back to, but that's what happened. Sorry about that. And why the move? Why the change? A few reasons for that. I mean, first of all, ActiveCampaign, great tool, super powerful. I was attracted to ConvertKit by their investments and their commitment to the broader creator economy. They've added a ton of cool features, including like subscriber referral programs, their sponsor network, their creator network, which truthfully haven't fully explored yet, but I'm liking the platform so far.

12:31It's funny, the interface and design is miles ahead of where ActiveCampaign is. And there are some really thoughtful features, but there's other stuff where it's like, ah, dude, I kind of liked it better the old way. I liked it better the ActiveCampaign way. Now, my frustration with ActiveCampaign was my inability to reach anyone when I had questions about my account and specifically about a big price increase, I'm of the thinking that, look, everything is negotiable. And that was my intent. I would have liked to have thought of myself as a fairly valuable long-term customer. I've been with them since 2017, had over a hundred thousand subscribers.

13:06And to be fair, not knowing a ton about the inner workings of running an email delivery business, but I had to imagine they had some margin to play with price-wise to get me to stick around. But it was a big challenge. I was not impressed with that customer support or sales support. They ended up stripping away some features from my account without even telling me. I think they were banking on the switching costs being too high, being too big of a pain to actually do it and unravel the last seven years of opt-in forms and integrations all across the internet. And it was a big pain. It was a big project, which to their credit, ConvertKit said, hey we'll handle it we want your business we'll do the migration and they did but overall convert kit i think better feature set a company that's more in line with side hustle nation and the creator economy at a similar price point it just happened that all the old email links broken all the new ones are working all the convert kit ones are working so for march forward should be just fine but any emails before that probably have broken links in them so if you find those if you come across those and can't find those resources through google or something else let me know and I'll see if I can dig those up for you.

14:12Question five is how much of success is attributed to luck? Now, 15, 20 years ago, I would have wanted to dismiss luck almost entirely. Go make your own luck. The harder I work, the luckier I get, right? And my thinking on it has evolved a bit. You know, hard work, being proactive, seizing an opportunity, obviously still super important. but there definitely is an element of right place right time an element of luck in almost everything that we do for example i think it's a lot harder to get attention for a new podcast today than it was in 2013 to be sure still felt crowded then but nowhere near the level of quality and quantity of competition that's out there today another example my original side hustle the price comparison site for shoes it started out during a time when a relative beginner could still go out and buy profitable text link ads from Google.

15:07And sure, I put in the work, but that was lucky timing. And I never would have started that business had it not been for an internship with an online shoe store during college that I might never have even found out about that internship had it not been for my roommate pointing out their little classified ad in our school newspaper. That was lucky, right? It was one of these seemingly insignificant at the time moments that turned out to be a major turning point for the next 20 years. It's a weird fork in the road scenario to play out. How different might life look if he didn't share that with me?

15:43But how can you increase your luck? How can you improve your odds? A friend of mine recently shared this article that has an answer to that. It was called How to Increase Your Luck Surface Area, written by Jason Roberts. He writes, quote, the amount of serendipity that will occur in your life, your luck surface area is directly proportional to the degree to which you do something you're passionate about, combined with the total number of people to whom this is effectively communicated. It's a simple concept, but an extremely powerful one because it implies that you can directly control the amount of luck you receive.

16:19In other words, you make your own luck, end quote. So those are the two ingredients. Do work you care about, share with others. creation plus marketing product plus sales increase your luck surface area. I thought that was pretty cool. Question six is how much do you need to earn on an annual basis for your side hustle to be worth it? Now, obviously this is going to be extremely subjective based on your goals, your financial situation, and how much time you're investing into your side hustle. On the one end of the spectrum, we can probably all agree if you're hustling an extra 20 hours a week and don't have any income to show for it, not worth it, right?

16:55And maybe the exception there is a startup phase of a business where you're laying the foundation, you're building an audience, you're building a product, and you expect to see revenue soon. If you're just spinning your wheels, clearly not worth it. But how much do you have to make for it to be worth it? My suggestion is to find a dollar amount that's meaningful to you in some way. It could be$100 a year, doesn't matter. And one way to do that is to find an expense that you want to erase. I call this the side hustle snowball. How it works is you itemize out your monthly expenses from smallest to largest, from your cell phone bill or life insurance or Netflix account or gym membership, all the way up to your car payment, your childcare, your rent, your mortgage.

17:37And then I look for ways to erase those expenses with extra income. How can I make my Netflix free? Well, maybe I could sell something on eBay? How can I cover my cell phone bill? Well, maybe I could do a focus group or answer some surveys. How can I cover my car payment? Maybe I could start freelancing. What this allows you to do is celebrate some smaller side hustle wins along the way, even if it's not replacing your day job income, even though you're not going to retire early from it. It was still worth it, both from a financial standpoint, but hopefully also from a skills learned or connections made standpoint.

18:11Question seven is what kind of things can I rent out for a profit? I heard about people doing inflatables and bounce houses, but I don't think I could set those up. Well, I like rental businesses, you know, an opportunity to get paid over and over again from an asset you buy once. Inflatables are definitely one option. If you're not comfortable setting them up yourself, maybe you could hire a helper. But some of the other rental businesses we've talked about, I'll link up the episode numbers and the resources for these in the show notes. Other rental businesses we've talked about include portable hot tubs, photo booths for brand activations and weddings and company parties.

18:45We did mobility scooters somewhat recently. We had a story about champagne walls at weddings, kind of this wooden, nicely designed thing where people can grab champagne off of little pegs. Lots of different ideas. Like down by our lake, there's a company that from the outside looking in appears to be doing a booming business, renting out kayaks and paddle boards in the summer. I think the key is finding those one-off items and tapping into some existing demand, either through an existing marketplace, through your own marketing efforts, through social media, through SEO, or just by getting in front of people at the place where they're looking for that activity, like in the example of the kayaks.

19:24Now, question eight says, I have a video camera. So here's another rental idea. I've got a video camera I'm not using and was thinking of renting it out, but how do I make sure I get it back? My goal is to make$500 to$1 ,000 a month do you think that's doable? Well, if you're renting it directly, like person to person, you're going to want to have all of the contracts and insurance and security deposits to make sure that you do get it back and you get it back in the condition that you expect. But what's probably easier and a potentially faster way to connect with customers would be to use the buy buttons strategy of going where the cash is already flowing.

19:57If I want to rent out a video camera, where would I go? Right? And what are the video rental marketplaces or camera gear marketplaces? ShareGrid was one that I came across. And in that example, they're going to handle all that back-end paperwork. They're going to verify insurance for your renters. As far as the$500 to$1 ,000 a month goal, it seems feasible based on the rates that I see on the site from$35 to$100 plus per day, depending on the type of equipment that you have. But there's really only one way to find out. You got to test this stuff out. You got to find out for yourself. Maybe it works.

20:30Maybe it doesn't. But at least you'll be doing something. then you'll be increasing your luck surface area and maybe opening the doors to other opportunities at the same time. Question nine is, I'm currently working on an AI-inspired Instagram page that just passed 1 ,900 followers. I'd love to monetize it, but I'm not sure how. Any advice on how to take an Instagram page from just artwork and followers to making some side hustle money? So the way I see this one, I see a few different paths that this could go. First off, you could provide a service and maybe not to your followers, but just a broader service.

21:01You can make AI images for other Instagram accounts, for other brands, for other creators, people who don't want to do this themselves, don't know how to do this themselves. You're a pro. You can go do that for them. The second way would be brand deals and sponsored content. Like how do influencers make money? That's one way that a lot of them do. I think the following would have to grow significantly before that's really viable. If you're at 1900, you'd want to see it at 19 ,000, 100 ,000, right? Like every time you can kind of level up, your clout kind of improves in terms of what you can charge and what kind of brands you can get.

21:36Third would be to create an audience facing product, like maybe in this case, an AI generated coloring book or something like that. It could be print on demand through Amazon, whatever, but like an audience facing product in that same niche. Fourth would be you could create a course on how to generate AI images. If that's something that your audience is interested in, I guess you could do a quick poll and say like, Hey, this is something that you would like, or you could even do a pre-sale. Hey, I, if I get 20 customers, I'll build this, you know, refund people's money if they don't want it. And then lastly would be affiliate promos.

22:10I don't know if mid journey or any of these other AI art tools, if they have an affiliate program or referral program, but that would be another way to go. If your followers want to learn how to create this stuff themselves, Hey, you're going to want to start with a free trial of this thing. And maybe that converts into a paid thing. And maybe that converts into an affiliate commission for you down the road. But you're increasing your luck surface area, you're doing something that you care about, you're telling people about it through this account. And so I think positive things can come from that.

22:40Question 10, this is our final question for this episode, says I'm starting a new website, but I'm not sure what to put on my about page, especially since it's going to be my first entry. And the good news here is that your about page doesn't require any additional posts on the site. It could be all about you, and your target readers. It's a good place to share your excitement and hopefully your credentials to talk about your topic and what readers can expect to find on your site. For example, I use the Side Hustle Nation about page to share a little about me, a little bit about my background, but really to also try and describe and connect with that ideal Side Hustle Nation reader and how I can help them achieve what they want.

23:23You know, it's not people are tuned into the what's it for me type of thing. And of course, I want to invite them to dive deeper into the content, to join the email list. The about page says my entrepreneurial journey began at an early age, selling candy to my fellow boy scouts at summer camp and eventually painting houses in college. After graduation, I did what you're supposed to do. I got a full-time job for a giant corporation, but I built my business nights and weekends. You can do it too. Look, everybody's got their own reasons to side hustle. Maybe you want to make extra money. Maybe you want to pay off debt.

23:52Maybe you want to learn new skills. Maybe you want to use your free time more productively. Maybe you want to escape the rat race. Whatever your reason, I'm here to help. The about page also includes a list of 25 random facts about me, along with some pet peeves, which are really designed to just personalize the words on the screen. Like, yes, there's a real human here who has been studying this whole make extra money thing for a long time and would like to help you make some for yourself. and the other important thing with your about page or really with any website content it's not set in stone you can always go back and update it later as the business evolves that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in 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