650: 7 Proven Ways to Generate New Business Ideas, with Real-Life Examples

23:37Some would be like, hang on, like this is shilling, self-promotion. And then someone would be like, no, hang on. He's actually doing this. He's been doing it consistently. That's okay. And I think that's really the way it goes. And I mean, such a strong part of Reddit is the community. And that was the other thing. It's like, I would listen to feedback. Someone would say, hey, that deal's no longer live. I'd be like, oh, okay, let me update it. Or like actually chatting to people. It's not just post the link can be done. It's post the links, engage, ask questions, have other people contribute, really buying into that community aspect.

24:04Yeah, being a part of it. In that sense, you weren't relying on SEO for discoverability. It was like, I'm going to shortcut the audience building phase, go directly to the hungry crowd who wants this stuff. Again, that's episode 583 with David Paxton. What do you like doing? What are you good at? And who can you connect with that might value those things? That's the intersection method. And maybe you've seen the ikigai Venn diagram type of picture, Japanese word loosely translated to reason for being or purpose, where your ikigai, and apologies if I'm butchering that pronunciation, but it lies at this intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what can get paid for and what the world needs or what the market wants, maybe a little more broadly.

24:48Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, the comic strip, described it as finding a combination of potentially common different skills or traits that when combined can turn into a superpower. He gave the example of being a slightly above average cartoonist and a slightly above average humorist, but combining the two to make a really successful comic strip. James Clear, the same way, gave himself a little more credit. He called himself a 90th percentile writer. Not the best in the world. Not going to put that kind of pressure on yourself, which on its own, probably not enough. But then combine it with what he also described as a 90th percentile marketer.

25:23And all of a sudden, it's a really powerful combination. And Atomic Habits goes on to sell millions of copies. Christy DeSilva was another example from the podcast in the last year. She gave this example in episode 627. Everyone was saying like, niche down, niche down, niche down. And I was like, but I don't even know what I like to do yet. So I took some time and I did a little bit of everything. So I was just a virtual assistant. I did like admin, content creation, systems, all the things. And after about six months, I would say, I decided, you know what, I don't want to do everything for everyone.

26:00And that's when I decided to invest in my first business coach, where our first session together, basically, she had me just like word vomit all the things that I loved about my job and did not love about my job. And we very quickly realized at the end of that session that what I was really passionate about was getting people organized. And the pathway to do that was through systems. So at this point for my clients, I had already set up my two favorite tools, ClickUp and HoneyBook. I've also set up different CRMs and project management tools for people, but I felt very strongly that these were the tools that I wanted to master.

26:42And at the time, I'll be honest with you, Nick, I actually didn't see many people in the online space just niching down into specific tools and being like pros. They had ClickUp Consulting at the time was a very small group of people. HoneyBook Pros wasn't even a thing. I was one of the first like 12 HoneyBook Pros. And so it felt like, again, this like leap of faith, like starting is leap of faith, continuing, you're constantly having to believe in yourself. But then niching and taking such drastic turn was definitely like a mindset thing of like, I feel like this is the right thing, but I hope that it pays off.

27:26And pay off it did. Christy went from generalist to specialist and ended up 10xing her hourly rate. As a result, she was interested in and excited about building systems. She had some skills in a couple specific software tools, and she could potentially get certified through those platforms as a fast track way to connect with potential clients. That is episode 627 in your archives if you want to go check it out. But this is the intersection method. What do you know? What do you like? And who do you know? What's the network? And maybe your network's network. Who, what kind of people do you know to go a little bit broader?

28:01And at the intersection of those is a potential side hustle. Number five is the scratch your own itch method. This is solve your own problem, the saying goes, because other people are probably facing the same issue. For Lou Rice in episode 589, inspiration for her Kindle e-reader strap struck in the middle of the night. So you drop this thing on your newborn's head, obviously probably upsetting for him. And then you're like, shoot, what happens next? Yeah, I mean, very upsetting for me too, right? And I think it's that new mom's middle of the night, hour-long breastfeeds, and you don't want to be on your phone all the time.

28:35So reading a Kindle is a great option. And that happened about 2 a.m. Ben ran in. We were all crying. But the next day, Ben's a bit of a creative type. He had a piece of silicon, a silicon mat, and he fashioned a really crude strap with staples. And he gave that to me to try out. And after a month of that, I was pretty hooked. I didn't want the Kindle without it. I was able to obviously do a lot of things one-handed as you need to when you have a baby. So we kind of thought, oh, this could be something. And this is like 2021. Had nobody thought of this before? They had to be a competitive product on the market.

29:12We had a little look around, obviously on Amazon. There are similar products, but they were pretty ugly. They had like little metal claws or they're very industrial looking. Okay. And nothing kind of sleek and stylish like our straps are. So the silicone means it's the perfect fit. Like it molds to your hand. When we spoke, she was selling like 50 grand a month worth of these simple, lightweight Kindle straps. And I know she's gotten some great press since then, from pain and frustration to opportunity. Here's how Gar Russell described the origin story of his RV rental business in episode 625.

29:47You have this idea like it's going to be a fantastic birthday present for your lovely bride or an anniversary present rather. And hey, honey, we got this RV. Let's go. We're going to have all these fun times in the woods. Imagining the years of outdoor fun and adventure ahead of you. And her reaction is not quite what you're hoping it will be. Yeah, we got to the campground and we got set up. I thought all was going well. the first morning when she's chasing our toddler around and seven months pregnant with number four. And she said, I'm going home, baby. And I thought, oh, what did I forget? And I didn't forget anything.

30:24She was just miserable and she was done camping and we were supposed to be there six more days. Yeah. So that's not how anybody wanted it to go down. No, no, not at all. And I went right into panic mode of, oh my gosh, I just bought this RV for a lot of money and my wife doesn't want to be here and jumped onto Craigslist and threw it up for rent. Okay. So you've got this big expensive asset slash liability at the moment, but hopefully it turns into an asset sitting in the driveway and said, well, shoot, what am I going to do with this thing? So you turn around, put it up for rent on Craigslist.

31:00What kind of reaction does that get? Any takers? Yeah, you know, it blew my mind. I literally had inquiries coming in within a couple hours. So the light bulb like immediately went off. People are, hey, I need it for this weekend, because that was in July when I purchased it for. So it's like in the middle of summer, and people are like, oh, hey, we're going camping this weekend or that weekend, you know? Sure. So it was wild. That is idea generating framework. Number five, scratch your own itch. Figure out what annoys you. You can keep a mental note of all the things that frustrate you, that you spend money to solve.

31:34You look at your credit card statement. What is a disproportionate portion of your spending going towards? What do you wish you didn't have to deal with? What are the things that your friends, neighbors, co-workers complain to you about? Because on the other side of all of those is potential business idea, potential side hustle. We've got a couple more idea generating frameworks coming up for you right after this. There are less than 100 days left in 2025, which means less than 100 days left to hit those goals that you said or to refocus your energy on what really matters. If you've got some catching up to do and maybe you've been procrastinating on taking that next step, our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the role you need to fill and find them fast.

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32:49Just go to Indeed.com slash Side Hustle Show right now and support our 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. One of the tools I personally see make a huge difference for business owners is Quo, formerly OpenPhone. It's the same great business phone system you've heard me talk about before, just with a new name. When you're running a business, you know that every missed call is a missed opportunity. So Quo, formerly open phone. This is the number one business phone system that streamlines your customer communications.

33:23It works through an app on your phone or your computer. So no more using your personal number as your business line. No more carrying two phones around. With Quo, your team can share one phone number and collaborate on customer calls and texts just like a shared inbox. So anybody can jump in to keep response times fast. And this is where it gets super cool. You can set up Quo's built-in AI agent in just a few minutes to handle calls after hours, answer customer questions, and capture leads on autopilot. I want to invite you to get started for free. Plus, Side Hustle show listeners get 20 % off your first six months at quo.com slash side hustle.

34:00That's q u o.com slash side hustle. Look at them getting that three letter domain q u o.com slash side hustle. And if you've got existing numbers with another service, quo will port them over and no extra charge. Whoa, no missed calls, no missed customers. Idea generation framework number six is called expert enough. The idea here is you probably have an area of your life or maybe several areas of your life where you know more about than the average person. And this one can be a little tricky because once you know something, it's hard to imagine not knowing it. It's called the curse of knowledge.

34:36And you almost assume everyone else must also know this thing. It's not that special, but you'd be surprised that other people might pay to access the stuff that's in your head that is second nature to you, the stuff that you don't think twice about. Here's how Hugo Ortega described it in episode 602 last year. So basically, working as Yaw Crew, it's really, really common for people to have envy towards your job, ask you, how did you get into this? What do I need to do to do the same thing? It's kind of something that we blow off because you wouldn't be surprised how many people ask me. I give them the breakdown, I explain it, and then everyone goes, well, okay, cool, I'll do that sometime.

35:12And I just kind of got used to doing the same pitch, copy and pasting the same notes over and over. But I saw that more and more people were making money online, and it was becoming more and more common for people to be able to work from their laptop. So I was based on a boat at the time in the Netherlands. It was really cold. It was winter. It was bleak. It was snowing all the time. And it was this huge contrast between what I'd been previously doing, whether it was in the Caribbean or in the nice Mediterranean waters. And I just thought, maybe there's something I can do on the side so I can transition less to doing this and maybe kind of work a little bit on the boats, but also have something on land.

35:44Because ultimately, I knew that I didn't want to be permanently on the boats. And it wasn't the first side hustle that you thought about or that you started, was it? No, no. Actually, I was trying a few different things. I was looking at dropshipping. I was in the middle of building a website trying to sell different Chinese trinkets and different things. I was thinking about a lot of different things. Ultimately, I kept coming across more and more people that were doing information products or courses based on stuff that they already knew. And it seemed like people were really successful when they actually either had the knowledge or they had the passion for the topic that they were thinking about.

36:17So that got me to thinking about the niche that I currently work in. And I was thinking, well, there's not that many people that actually work on yachts. There's a famous TV show that a lot of people think they know about yachting, but it's kind of a caricature of my industry. But anyway, I thought maybe this is something that I have that other people would like to do. I mean, I knew that people had been asking me about it all the time. So I just thought maybe I can package that together and show people how to do it. And that could work. Yeah, it's interesting. It's a very niche type of career, but still something where you've been able to find a large enough audience that's interested in it to say, okay, we can turn this into a business.

36:52Yeah, it's definitely helpful if you've got the actual knowledge and experience to go out and do that thing. definitely helpful than just the current trend inside us as well. Let's just regurgitate a bunch of AI and spin up a website and see if it ranks. It's like, I don't know how sustainable that's going to be long-term. And in your case, it was kind of like this aspiring yachty career advice seeker, like people trying to kind of land their first job in the space. Like that was kind of a thesis of who I'm going to target. Right. That was probably my original target as well. But then I also wanted to target people that maybe just wanted to travel.

37:24They wanted to work abroad or make money just in an unconventional way because that was pretty much what I was doing. When I first discovered yachting, I'd never been on the water much. I didn't even know how to swim at the time. And while I was backpacking in Southeast Asia, I met someone who was doing this job. And just the more and more they told me about it, it sounded more and more appealing. And again, my love for travel was really what drove me into the industry. It wasn't so much a love for boating or a previous sailing experience. So I figured that it'd be nice to try to find people that were in the same situation as me because I felt like if I could do it and I could have a successful career getting even up to the position of captain that I thought a lot of other people might be able to do the same thing.

38:01So here's a quick exercise. Make a mental note or even a physical note of the stuff that people ask you questions about. That's a sign that you've got some perceived expertise in that area. You might not be the world's foremost thought leader on the topic, but you don't have to be if you're just a step ahead of your target customer. Like Hugo found, you just might be expert enough. You can also take stock of the problems or challenges that you've overcome, the things that you found frustrating but figured out a solution for, or the things that come easy to you that other people struggle with. And that's a sign that you might be expert enough.

38:35Again, that's episode 602 with Hugo, building an online expert-based business based on his experience working on yachts, working on big boats. That's framework number six. And before we move on to our final framework, I think it's worthwhile to share a counterpoint. for expert enough, a counterpoint for this one, where you can actually build expertise over time by following your curiosity. And the side hustle show is probably a good example of that, where I had a little bit of side hustle experience when I started. I'd already quit my job to run the side business full time, which I figured at least gave me some authority to start talking about this stuff.

39:11But I've definitely gained a whole lot more experience by embedding myself in the space for the last 11 and a half years. But the counterpoint that I had in mind is Harry Duran from the Vertical Farming podcast. Get this, Harry was running a podcast production company, but he didn't have any agriculture experience. He didn't have even any connections in that industry. It was just something he was curious about. So we started recording conversations with leaders in the vertical farming space and built a really inspiring side hustle on the back of that. Here's Harry on how he landed his first guests.

39:46And then I started early with influencers in the space, people who were writing news sites about vertical farming. I got those early people on. And then I started going for the CEOs and thankfully a couple of them said yes. Isn't that funny? I want to pause there because like, if you're just a dude, you say like, hey, can I pick your brain, call it up some random CEO or cold emailing them. You'd be like, who are you again? Like, no, I'm not taking your call. But if you say, I have the vertical farming podcast and you are clearly a leader in this space, would you give me an hour of your time? All of a sudden, it's like, it kind of flips that conversation.

40:17And they're flattered by that invite in a lot of cases. And it's a chance to talk about what they're doing and hammer home their agenda. I think it's really cool. I think what a lot of people overthink sometimes is this idea of reaching out to people and saying, oh, this person's never going to say hi. I'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 a founder and building my list. Some people call it a dream 100, but people I wanted to have a conversation with.

40:45And 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. Once 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, Okay. And stair-stepping. Just kind of banking on the name recognition that people are going to know who those other names were.

41:16Okay. 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. Harry went on to explain how he booked a$9 ,000 sponsorship deal before releasing a single episode. And it was something like$80 ,000 in total sponsorships over the course of the show for a very part-time project. in a niche he had no expertise in. So maybe we should call this framework number 6.5. Curious enough in contrast to expert enough, but a super inspiring story. Again, 586 in your archives if you wanna go back and check that one out.

41:52Number seven is the probing for pain method. And this can be incredibly profitable if you know how to ask the right questions. How this generally works is calling up a business owner. Could be someone you have a previous relationship with. Could be somebody you never met and asking questions like, Hey, tell me a little bit about your business. What's the biggest challenge facing your industry over the next five years? What does a typical day look like for you? What's the most frustrating or time-consuming part of your business? Jonathan Stark is a pro at this. He explained how it works in episode 505.

42:22Okay, so let's assume that you're good. You're really good at something. You know you're good at it. You don't have to be the best in the world at it. You just need to be a lot better at it than the people you're going to serve. So, you know, for example, if you want to sell web development services to web developers, you need to be great. But that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about here. Let's say you totally understand how Facebook ads works and you want to help. We'll use dentists again. So you say it's getting picked on. Yeah. Dentists are like my favorite vertical. They're a great one, actually, because virtually everyone knows one.

42:54So if you do something for dentists, you can basically go to a party and literally everyone at that party can recommend can introduce you to a dentist. Fair enough. Okay. Anyway. So let's say you do Facebook ads for dentists. You already know Facebook ads. You taught yourself that maybe you did it for fun on a side project or whatever, but you just consider that you know a lot about it probably more than the average dentist. Yes. And then what you do is you go to that party or you just email your friends or you, you know, in some private forum, you say, Hey, I am thinking about putting together a new service for dentists.

43:27Does anybody know anybody that you'd be comfortable introducing me to so I could talk to them about this business idea? And you're going to get virtually every, you know, assuming you have some friends and family, you're going to get a bunch of names. Okay. Then either you have them intro you or you reach out to the dentist directly and you say something along the lines of, you know, hey, I got your name from Bob and I'm thinking about starting a new business. But before I do that, I want to talk to a few people like you or experts in your field and find out if I'm barking up the wrong tree or this is valuable to anybody.

43:58This isn't a sales call in any way. I just want to pick your brain for 15 minutes. And in exchange for that, I would love to answer any questions you might have about Facebook ads or other things that, you know, other sorts of social media advertising. Okay. I've had some people go nuts with this and send out maybe a hundred emails like that. Other people just send out maybe 20 emails like that. And in both cases, you get a you get about a 10 % response rate, people are generally pretty happy to help you out with stuff like this. As long as one, they believe that it's not a sales call, right? And to that you're not some kind of like, direct competitor who's trying to find out trade secrets.

44:41Okay, okay. So you have to be really sensitive about those things. And the kinds of questions you ask them when you get them on the phone, but But assuming that you're sensitive to that sort of thing and it makes perfect sense why you're asking given questions, then it's really not that much of a problem. So when you get them on the phone, you say, hey, you know, in your mind, you're thinking I have this hypothesis. I think I have this problem that would be valuable to be, you know, dentists would find valuable to be solved. And you validate that without leading the witness too much. so you don't want to put words in their mouth like hey if i offered uh you know a service where i advise you about your facebook ads or i manage your facebook ads for you uh you know at night or whatever then would that would you pay for that how much would you pay for that because that's too it's too much it's people are either going to be nice and just say yes or they're gonna it's gonna feel weird and awkward and salesy i prefer to ask questions that are more like Like the last time you did some advertising, how did you do it?

45:40And they'll explain some situation, you know, something or, you know, and that'll lead you to the next, you know, have you ever thought about this or have you ever thought about that? You're not putting words in their mouth, but you are directing them somewhat, at least on the topic area. So, you know, you don't want to get on the phone call and just come straight out with like, if you could wave a magic wand and make your dental practice better, what would it be? because they might go off and say like, oh, if this teeth whitening stuff was cheaper than, you know, that would be fantastic because it costs so much and I can't, you know, and they'll go off for 15 minutes talking about something that there's no way you can help them.

46:11Okay. Okay. So, you know, specific to your, your, your service area or your, your hypothetical service area, like, you know, what, what kind of advertising have you done so far? What's your social media presence? Right. And literally everybody on every one of these calls, I call them market research calls. Everybody is, their hypothesis is usually blown out of the water or at least blown sideways by these. And that's why they're so important. Because if you just went out and did all the work to set up a sales page for this service, or started putting together a bunch of content marketing that you were going to put on an email list, like a drip campaign, it would be a giant waste of time because it would turn out that the specifics of what people actually find valuable in your expertise space is different than what you think.

46:59And there's another important piece is that they're going to use a bunch of words that a non-expert would use to describe the stuff that you are an expert at. And you need to get those words and put them in your marketing materials so that your perfect ideal clients will recognize the message. Oh, okay. So if they're not talking about, you know, CPMs and And you know, all these different jargony words. They're like, I could really use more. I could really use more patients to get in my dental practice. Right. Yeah. They're going to talk about they're going to talk about their business in their business terms.

47:30And you need to get this is the benefit of targeting a specific market is that you pull that language that's specific to that tribe to use the Seth Godin term. And you can put that straight into your materials. So at the top of the page, when you say I help dentists with Facebook ads, they're going to read down that page and they're going to be like they're talking to a dentist. Like you obviously get them. It's going to be it's a really good trust builder, you know, from just a static static page. Or if you're doing it over email, which, you know, in this case, probably better. You know, it's it's amazing.

47:59The difference you get their heads nodding immediately. Oldie, but a goodie. That original call with Jonathan Stark. If you scroll down to number 505 in your podcast feed, you should be able to find it. My hope is that this episode has shown you there's no one right way to come up with your side hustle idea, your next business idea. but there are lots of different methods and exercises to try if you're struggling to find something that resonates with you. To recap, what we covered, number one was rip, pivot, and jam. This is take somebody else's business model, pivot it to a new market, a new geography, and jam, go out and do the work.

48:32Number two was the sniper method. Look at a broad serving product or market and or service and figure out how can I carve out a tiny little sliver where if everybody else has a shotgun, how can I be a sniper rifle and just carve out a tiny little niche. Number three is the shovels in the gold rush method, looking for trends and opportunities and figure out, okay, how can I support the miners in that space? How can I tap into those trends with something that would be beneficial to them? Number four is the intersection method. This is what you know, what you like, and who do you know? How can you get connected with people that might value those other two things?

49:07Number five is the scratch your own itch method. This is looking at your own pains and problems and saying, well, if I've got this struggle, it's probably a struggle for somebody else as well. Lots of examples of that in the archives. Number six was expert enough. This is looking at the areas that other people ask you questions about. You have some perceived expertise and authority in that space. You might not even think of yourself as being an expert there, but other people do. And that's a good sign. And there might be a market there. Six and a half, we took a pause to talk about curious enough, the counter example to expert enough, where if you can bring some unique curiosity into a space.

49:42You can build credibility and authority over time with the example of Harry and his vertical farming podcast. And number seven was what we called probing for pain. This is a little bit of the market research, the one-on-one conversations. What do people really want and how can you use their own words to build a service that would be beneficial to them? And then of course, the other method, number eight, is to just go binge on the Side Hustle Show until you find something that sounds good. We've got hundreds of ideas to choose from. So lots of different episodes mentioned in this one. I'll do my best to link up those specific references in the show notes.

50:16Easiest way to get there is follow the show notes link in the episode description. You find the full write up on all of these different frameworks. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. As always, you can hit up side hustle nation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. So fire off that text message to somebody who's looking for their next side hustle.

50:46Until 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.