724: The Path to $250k+ Per Year: The State of Solopreneurship in 2026

18:07Nick Loper:Yeah, that's exactly the point. And I mean, there's no right or wrong here. You just have to decide what game you want to be in. Do you want to be in the traffic game or do you want to be in the relationship game? We each have our strong suits and weak suits. So decide your game and go for it.

18:21Adriana Tica:And I think it makes sense. And this is common amongst side hustle show guests is more started with a service-based business than any other model. And I think the reason for that is, you know, it's low overhead, it's quick to see results. It's almost just a slight pivot from working a day job where it's like kind of this mindset shift of, look, I'm already an entrepreneur, just maybe my day job just happens to be my biggest client so far or yet. And I can go out and sell the same skill set or a different skill set with the other hours that I have in the week. It's kind of a natural progression.

18:55Adriana Tica:Nathan Berry called it his ladders of wealth creation. It's like, look, working a job, trading time for money. It's freelancing, still trading time for money, but now learning the skills of invoicing and sales and kind of running your own thing and graduating to productized services where it's set deliverable, set fee, set price, an agency where you're overseeing other people doing the work. And then kind of beyond that was full product, software, marketplaces, really more complex businesses where I got to build both the supply side and the demand side and everything else. But it's kind of mirrored in your results too, where even at the$250 ,000 and beyond level, a lot of people still playing in the services space.

19:36Nick Loper:Yeah, absolutely. And an underrated benefit of starting out with services is the fact that having one-on-one relationships with your clients will give you more ideas on what products to build. You don't have to guess. People can tell you directly what type of products they would buy, and you will build better products and more in-demand products if you spend some time in the services space.

20:00Adriana Tica:Yeah, that reminds me. We had a guest, this was probably 10 years ago, who had something. He was doing email copywriting or something for real estate agents. And then after doing that for a couple of years, they all have the same issue, or their email provider sucks. Well, maybe we could build a software tool to go out and just do that and sell that. You already have this kind of built-in customer base, client base. And it was kind of by being in the trenches and by listening to the common pains and problems that come up, to your point exactly, it kind of gives you an idea of what product to build next.

20:33Adriana Tica:And there's a John Lee Dumas line about that. He's kind of like, I didn't know what to build. I just asked the audience. And they told me, well, how did you launch this podcast? Okay, well, we'll teach you how to build a podcast. Like, how are you selling so much of this course on webinars? Like, okay, well, we'll teach you how we're doing our webinars and just kind of on and on and on. We'll just ask the audience. They've got the answers. If you can build the audience, that's probably the bigger challenge.

20:56Nick Loper:Absolutely. That's how I build products these days as well. I see which of my emails gets the most replies. If someone's interested in a topic, maybe they'd be interested in a product related to that topic. Then I asked them, hey, would you buy this? At what price point did you buy this? And so on. You know, you do your best to validate demand before you spend ages building something.

21:16Adriana Tica:Do you go down the pre-sales route of saying like, well, look, if I get 20 people to give me a hundred dollars right now, I'm going to commit to this? Or how do you go about it?

21:25Nick Loper:I don't do pre-sales. I've never done them, but I do survey my people and create wait lists. I find like pre-sales are often outsourcing demand validation to your audience and their wallets. And I think they're great if you're just getting started, or maybe it's a new format, you've never done that before, you want to validate, you want to do a presale. But if you already have an established audience who bought from you, it's time to show more confidence in what you're thinking about building. So what I, for instance, rather than building a course from scratch, I first sell it as a live workshop.

21:58Nick Loper:And then I either take that recording and sell it on demand or re-record on my own and sell it as an on-demand product, but I can validate with a live product. If the sales don't go as planned, I can simply kill it or spend an hour of my time doing a workshop with very few people. Do you have an example of one of those and like the price point and the attendance? Yes. The first course I launched was actually Audience Accelerator, something that, of course, that teaches you how to build an audience that buys from you, you know, not turn yourself into the next Kim Kardashian, but create an audience that supports your business.

22:36Nick Loper:I ran it as a live workshop. My goal was to have at least 10 people buy it. This would have shown me that there is enough demand for it. I think I had like 50 % more than that in the initial run. And then I re-recorded it as a standalone course with more supporting materials. And it's still selling to this day after two years. But this is how I went about it. I told people, hey, hey, I'm doing this. If you want to know when it's live, sign up to a waitlist. Then I emailed my waitlist more often than the rest of my list. And that was it. What was the price point for the live workshop?

23:11Adriana Tica:This is kind of a cool strategy that I haven't tested yet.

23:14Nick Loper:I think it was a hundred something dollars. And then the course was$200, but it's bulkier, meatier, and has more supporting materials. But these days, what I usually do is that the live workshop is more expensive than the on-demand version because there's live interaction. There's a Q &A section where you can ask your questions, not listen to someone else ask their questions. And yeah, I think it's only fair. But this was my first try, my first iteration.

23:44Adriana Tica:Yeah, this is a really interesting one because you have some immediate buy-in and we've heard the line that people who pay, pay attention. So they're far more likely to show up than, hey, I'm doing a free webinar on whatever topic. It's like, no, there's a paid workshop, right? We're only going to have 15, 20 people who are serious enough to raise their hands and plunk down the$100. And now all of a sudden you have this asset that is validated. If you only got three people to sign up, you're like, well, maybe that offer didn't really resonate. Maybe I don't need to turn that into a kind of a paid course and build a dedicated sequence or funnel around it.

24:14Adriana Tica:But really quick way to kind of validate an idea.

24:17Nick Loper:And for bonus points, if you go this route and do a paid workshop first, when you do launch the on-demand course or masterclass, you launch it with social proof. you're going to have social proof from the workshop, from the live workshop iteration. Got it.

24:33Adriana Tica:The other surprising finding in this report, surprising, maybe not surprising, was the size of the newsletter list of the respondents, the size of the email list for the people who responded was pretty small. Most people had less than 500 subscribers, even beyond that, probably two-thirds had less than 10 ,000. So it wasn't this huge media-based business where the audience was the business or the content was the business. It was more really highly targeted. Am I kind of summarizing that correctly?

25:10Nick Loper:Yeah, absolutely. And I think this ties in really well with the fact that most of them sell services. If you sell services either done for you or done with you, you don't need that big of an audience because everything you sell is priced higher than an on-demand product. So this is how they can make more money on a smaller audience.

25:33Adriana Tica:What do you see as a typical flow or funnel? And granted, like we talked about, multiple touch points, omni-channel, oh, I heard about you over here. I heard you on this show. I saw your social media post. I joined your email list. Six months later, I finally decided to hire you. But if the flow was more sequential to say, you know, social media post, you know, showcasing your expertise, what would be like a typical lead magnet to offer type of flow for some of these agency businesses or service-based businesses?

26:02Nick Loper:It depends on the industry they're in, obviously, but I know a lot of them generate very warm leads from paid or free workshops. And if the workshop is paid, it's going to be a low ticket product. This is a very, very good lead magnet these days. And also I found that time, the time spent to build trust and credibility matters a lot. Irrespective of lead magnets that people may download and forget about somewhere in a dusty folder. If you can get people to regularly open your emails, you're one step closer to converting them into buyers. Yeah.

26:37Adriana Tica:So do you find some of that most common call to action is just join the newsletter with no freebie, no hangout next Thursday on the workshop or, you know, download the free cheat sheet or like I'm curious, what do you see working to get people off of the borrowed channel platforms onto the email or owned platforms?

26:55Nick Loper:So a strong lead magnet will get you more volume, but a bunch of those people are going to download the resource that you promised and then unsubscribe. Whereas if they subscribe for your newsletter and for your thinking alone, they are more likely to eventually buy from you. This is the distinction I see. So if you want to go for volume, create a killer lead magnet, whatever that may mean for you and for your clients. If you want to go for depth, get people to subscribe for your thinking, for your point of view, for your big idea.

27:26Adriana Tica:Okay, which might be the result of having seen half a dozen of your social media posts or, you know, seeing you across the internet and being, you know what, this person is speaking my language. This person is really thoughtful. I want more. I want to make sure I don't miss it the next time there's an algorithm update. I want to make sure I get it in my inbox. So we're looking for the hand raisers for the more in-depth relationships, if I'm hearing that right.

27:50Nick Loper:Yeah, exactly.

27:51Adriana Tica:All right. So the big trends here, obviously, email is still the primary relationship. It's something that you can control and get into people's inbox. Like that seems to be everything old is new again. And it just seems to never go out of style. So I think that's really telling, really interesting, even at this stage of the Internet. And then there was a future looking segment to the report asking respondents, well, knowing what you know now, where are you going to be spending more or less of your time on in the future? And so obviously the email, the newsletter, you know, had a big say, yes, I'm going to spend more time here.

28:30Adriana Tica:And people were very optimistic with how many hours, like almost everything was like, yeah, I'm going to spend more time on this. But one thing that was interesting was like the blog and SEO was showing a big market increase, which was kind of surprising given the state of AI and the search results in SEO. I was wondering if you could speak to that.

28:47Nick Loper:Yes, it's also interesting that blog and SEO also had a significant decrease. If you look at the graph. Yeah, it was split. Yeah, it was split. It wasn't as clear-cut as email or newsletter. I think you're right. People are rediscovering things that used to work. And it's pretty much like fashion. Trends are cyclical. But I think it speaks to the need for deeper relationships, the kind of relationships that you can create with long-form content. This is why you see that there are very few people who plan to decrease their investment in YouTube as well, because YouTube acts as a search engine and also allows you to create long form content.

29:29Nick Loper:And I've seen a bunch of trending services like create your own blog capsule, a bunch of articles that you can send to any lead, any client, something that defines what it's like to work with you, something that people can sit down, read it along with a cup of coffee and understand your world better, which is something that you can't really do on social media where everything's fast and 30 seconds and get out.

29:55Adriana Tica:Yeah, I'm kind of torn on investing more time into SEO because it feels like diminishing returns. But at the same time, YouTube and kind of these long form evergreen website articles, I think the people who are looking for that stuff, they're very problem aware. And if you can create a resource that sticks in the search results, it can last for a really long time. So it can still be a valuable resource, a valuable return on the time that it takes to create that. So again, I encourage you to go check out the state of solopreneurship for yourself. You can find that at adrianatika.com. And we'll be back with more with Adriana right after this, including her business idea donation for Side Hustle Nation coming up right after this.

30:40Adriana Tica:When I started the Side Hustle Show, I had no idea what I was doing, but I did have a lot of what ifs. What if nobody listens? What if I embarrass myself? What if no one cares? But what started as a little experiment in the corner of the living room has completely changed my life. When you're ready to face down those fears and hesitations and what-ifs and launch your thing, whatever it is, it helps to have a partner like Shopify in your corner to help. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, from household names to dozens of side hustle show guests. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build that eye-catching, high-converting online store.

31:17Adriana Tica:Plus, Shopify helps you find customers with easy-to-run email and social media campaigns. And if you get stuck, their award-winning 24-7 customer support is standing by. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. when it comes to leveling up your life and your business it's wild how much the basic stuff matters like how you talk to your customers how you keep your team on the same page a cleaner more modern setup can make everything feel smoother that's why i'm excited to partner with quo for today's episode spelled q u o quo is the modern alternative to run your business communications in fact it's the number one rated business phone system on g2 with over 3 000 reviews.

32:13Adriana Tica:More than 90 ,000 businesses, from solo operators to growing teams, already rely on Quo to stay connected, stay professional, and be consistently reachable. Quo works wherever you are, right from an app on your phone or computer, and lets you keep your existing phone number. You can add new numbers or teammates in minutes, sync with your CRM, and rely on seamless routing and call flows as your business scales. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free. Plus get 20 % off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's q u o.com slash side hustle.

32:51Adriana Tica:Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. All right, we are back with Adriana from Adriana tica.com. And we are moving on to round two, which is your business idea donation for side hustle show listeners. This Is it something that you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day, or just an opportunity that you see out in the marketplace?

33:12Nick Loper:Yes, right now, the biggest opportunity I see is creating a newsletter around internet anthropology. I find that this is something a lot of people are interested in these days, but it takes a lot of research time. It's essentially explaining how certain internet trends came to be, how creators rose to fame, anything that you can do to explain the world of internet better and its history, short as it may look right now, is very, very interesting. And it's working very well on social media. Other than Taylor Lawrence, I don't know anyone who's going all in on this. And even she's not all in on the anthropology part.

33:53Nick Loper:So if you have the time and if you'd like to do research, go for it and send me a link to subscribe because I'd like to read it.

34:01Adriana Tica:Yeah, this reminds me a little bit of Chanel Basilio's growth in reverse, if you're familiar with her in-depth kind of rewind case studies of how Sahil Bloom grew to however many millions of followers. Like kind of step by step, kind of digging into, in some cases, dozens of previous interviews to build these data points of, well, how many followers were they at at this point? But internet anthropology, I've never heard that term before, but fascinating.

34:27Nick Loper:Yeah, I know Chanel puts a lot of work into each and every one of her newsletter issues. And it showed like people reward this type of effort. There are very few people who are willing to spend as much time as she does.

34:38Adriana Tica:Yeah, she probably has 40 hours into some of these reports.

34:40Nick Loper:Yeah, at some point she told me it was around 25 to 40. So it's a lot, especially in the early days.

34:48Adriana Tica:Yeah. What would be your, I guess, just publishing the deep dive research, you know, on how this trend started or how this creator rose to fame? I guess Chanel's focused on kind of the social media newsletter side, but maybe there's another angle. I mean, it's like how I built this, but just on a, you know, on a different scale or kind of pivoted to a different format. What would you do first and foremost to kind of get your initial traction here?

35:11Nick Loper:I think I'd go super broad. Like I wouldn't zero in on a person the way Chanel does. I'd speak about trends and about creators as a whole, as an industry, even about leading trends on YouTube, on TikTok and Instagram. I'd go back to the mommy blogs, which essentially shaped our internet the way we know it today, because I know very few people know of this, but it was essentially the mommy bloggers who shaped or who set the early foundation for the creator economy. This is how I'd approach it. I make it a super valuable and interesting resource for people. But again, this takes ages in research.

35:50Adriana Tica:This sounds like a passion project where, I don't know, maybe over the long term, I can monetize with advertising, affiliate partnerships. I don't know. Do you see a service on the back end of this?

35:59Nick Loper:Not as much as service, maybe consulting if you're into trend analysis and forecasting. I would put it behind the paywall, ask people to pay for access to this information or simply to donate as much as they want. I know that there are a few newsletters on Substack who ask people to upgrade to the paid tier, but they promise nothing in return. It's just a way for those people to support the author's work. And I find that great. Some of them do very, very well. Oh, okay.

36:27Adriana Tica:Yeah, that could be a good way to do it. Almost a paid newsletter tier. That's kind of funny. Just pay me. As a donation, as a thank you. It's like the buy me a coffee type of thing. Exactly. Yeah, Patreon with no promise of extra content. And it was like at the end of Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, it's like, hey, if you like what you just heard, it was five hours. It took us six months worth of research. If you like what you heard, a buck a show. That's all we ask. But it's like, oh my gosh, how could I not donate at this point? So based on how much effort went into that. Let's move to round three, which is the triple threat.

36:59Adriana Tica:The first part here is a marketing tactic that is working for you right now.

37:03Nick Loper:Partnerships and cross promos with my peers. We recommend each other's newsletters. We recommend each other's books, if there are any, and pretty much we try to tap into each other's audience. While this may not work on volume, it does work on depth and on audience fit more than anything I've ever tried.

37:23Adriana Tica:Yeah, this is a powerful one. It's something that I've seen from the guest's chair on certain podcasts, especially in the personal finance space where the narrative is always around saving and budgeting and investing and paying down debt. And it was really helpful for me to come in. It's like, well, let's talk about the revenue side of the equation. There's only so much you could save. You can only live on rice and beans for so long. Let's go out and try and make some more money. And so that was a message that resonated with that audience. It's kind of a cross-promotion there. On the newsletter side, this is, like you said, hard to scale because it is one-on-one.

38:01Adriana Tica:It's direct. Like, I'm a fan of your stuff. I'd like to plug this into a future newsletter. What kind of structure are you seeing?

38:06Nick Loper:Pretty much what you described. I usually talk to people who have a similar audience and we recommend each other's lead magnet or simply each other's newsletter. I always test them first. I don't recommend anything without knowing what's on the other end, even if I know that person. And it works well because my audience knows that if I recommend something, they will find value in it. But on the other hand, it takes me a lot longer to vet partners, to spend time checking out the resources, to make sure that after I download the resource, you're not going to bombard me with six emails a day and so on.

38:42Adriana Tica:Yeah, that's fair. Make sure it's a win for both parties.

38:46Nick Loper:Yeah.

38:46Adriana Tica:How are you finding those people or how are they finding you? Do you set it up as like a tit for tat where, look, I'm going to recommend you. And now there's kind of an unspoken expectation of like, well, I'd like to grow my audience too. Or what are you going to plug me and like dealing with mismatched audience sizes and stuff like that?

39:04Nick Loper:To answer your first question, I find my partners either on social media or in private communities. Private communities work best for this because there's some sort of vetting for every member that's in there. So there's inherent trust. And yes, it's usually a tit for tat. It's not the passive aggressive kind of, I did this for you. Are you going to do something for me in return? No, we set the rules from the very beginning. Everyone knows when the email gets sent. They can see it. Sometimes it's just a simple mention. Other times it's embedded somewhere in the text, if it makes sense. But yes, we set up everything in advance.

39:38Nick Loper:And sometimes we even send each other reports or say, hey, you got 50 clicks. are you seeing any new subscribers coming your way? You know, just to gauge interest levels and so on.

39:50Adriana Tica:Yeah, this is something that I would like to do more of. I've done a few in the past where kind of like newsletter swaps, basically. Like, you know, if you have a little segment of like, you might also like, or hey, check this out. Kind of just a recommended resource type of section in the newsletter. Like it's easy enough to plug a friend or trusted partner in that spot, But it's time consuming to negotiate that every week and try and find somebody to fill in. So if anybody is interested in a swap like that, feel free, send me a note and we'll figure it out. Let's go to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now.

40:26Nick Loper:Circle. I just launched my community. It's called the Council. And because I was using Circle as an end user, not an administrator, I didn't have to think twice about it Circle was my first choice and I'm loving how complex and yet fairly easy to understand the solution is so if you're building a community or thinking about migrating a community give Circle a chance this is not a paid promo I'm a paying user I just love it

40:59Adriana Tica:plug it a little bit more because there's Kajabi there's school there, you know, there's a million different kind of like hubs to host your membership. What makes Circle stand out for you?

41:10Nick Loper:The user experience, first and foremost, it's sort of reminiscent of Facebook in the early days. So people can find their way around very easily. The forum is very well organized. You can create spaces for every topic, for every event, for literally everything you want to do. You have a ton of functionality, API integrations, affiliate programs, built-in video streaming, although that doesn't work very well. Maybe they fixed it in the meantime, but the first time I tried it, it wasn't all that great. Okay.

41:44Adriana Tica:So it's like this combo of it'll host your educational content and it has this built-in community or forum component as well.

41:52Nick Loper:Yeah, absolutely. And if you're selling courses, for instance, you can add them in Circle, create separate paywalls for them. It's very easy.

42:00Adriana Tica:Would it be appropriate for a free community or it's really built for like a paid membership?

42:06Nick Loper:Oh, no, you can do a free community on it if you want to do that. There are a ton of people who are successful with free communities on Circle. It all depends on your business model.

42:15Adriana Tica:But then they would just need to kind of develop the habit of opening up that app or, you know, hanging out in that community, as opposed to like a free Facebook group or something like that.

42:25Nick Loper:Yes, absolutely. And also you'd need to have a super strong business model behind that because Circle is not exactly a cheap platform, especially if you have a lot of members and a lot of spaces.

42:36Adriana Tica:Okay, okay. That consideration as well. But cool. Circle is something that I've heard of, but have not yet tested out myself. So we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode. The last part of The Triple Threat is your favorite book from the last 12 months.

42:50Nick Loper:It has to be Content Simplified by my friend Lee Densmer. It's a book that I recommend to any marketer or content marketer or anyone who's even remotely connected to this industry because it essentially has everything you need. It's like a manual that teaches you how to build a successful content program.

43:11Adriana Tica:Okay. Content Simplified. That one is a new recommendation for me. So we'll link that one up in the show notes as well. Well, Adriana, this has been awesome. What's next for you? Maybe we should ask you to answer the, you know, what are you going to spend more time on in 2026 question? What are you excited about?

43:29Nick Loper:I'm excited about the council. I recently launched community. I launched it in late December and I'm already spending most of my time engaging and interacting with its first members. And I love that because I can help people at a whole new level.

43:45Adriana Tica:What's the promise? Pitch us on it. What's inside? How much does it cost?

43:48Nick Loper:The pricing starts at$500 per year, and it's a place where we get stuff done. I'm a strategist by design. The council is the place where we implement things. We have accountability features. For instance, we're going to start a newsletter growth bootcamp in a couple of weeks. And the goal is not learning newsletter growth frameworks, but actually implementing them in four weeks of live calls, homework, partnerships, swaps within the community, and all that. It's super hands-on because I know most people talk about strategy and it looks nice on paper, but implementation is what actually moves the needles.

44:31So the council is the corner

44:34Nick Loper:of the internet I've built to help people get stuff done with my help and with the help of their peers.

44:41Adriana Tica:Yeah, hang out, you know, other people come on the same journey as you find your people and hang out. That's a really powerful place to be a part of as a community member, but also for you as the central connector hub of that enjoy being that connector type of person. Make sure to subscribe to the Strategic AF newsletter. You'll find that at adriannatica.com slash newsletter. You can also grab that state of solopreneurship report that we talked about. if you are wondering what type of solopreneurship or side hustle path might make the most sense for you. I want to invite you to take the short quiz at hustle.show.

45:17Adriana Tica:Just answer a few short, multiple choice questions. You do it right from your phone and it's going to suggest a playlist of eight to 10 of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers that you can add right to your device. You can listen in, learn what works and go out and make some more money this year. Big thanks to Adriana for sharing her insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping and make this content free for everyone. You can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from those sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen.

45:50Adriana Tica:And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.

45:55Nick Loper:What is a burned CD? Something that has no value. But if it's burned, like you can't use it. What's AOL? AOL? Mm-hmm. It's probably some medical term. Like, I gotta go get my AOL repaired. I cared my AOL. What's a pager? A pager? It's probably a guy that repairs your books. Because they broke, and he fixes the pages. Yeah, okay. What's a payphone? A payphone? you probably pay to use the phone. Where are they? Oh wait, it might be like that old thing like in Home Alone where he goes to the payphone and like drops a quarter in there and then go, hello, hello, hello. Is there one in Home Alone? Yeah, I remember.

46:52Nick Loper:Or is it Home Alone 2 where he does it? He's like, police, police. Yes, okay, you're right. Oh. That is what a payphone is. Is that the only one I got, right? Yeah. I'm so.