742: $60k/mo Selling Baby Sleep Masks, the $72k “Secret” Detailing Business, $500k in Print on Demand Candles, and more

20:09Cody Berman:That's shopify.com slash side hustle. All right. So you've heard of pet sitting as a side hustle, but have you heard of chicken sitting? I can't say I have. This is one of my favorite finds from this month. The title is my favorite. This is a business called Chicken Tenders, which is by far the best business name that I've come across. This is chicken sitting. They also do chicken coop clean outs and actually have a chicken coop kind of startup consulting service where it's$350 to$600 something for an onboarding. Like, look, you want to have backyard chickens, but you don't know what you're doing.

20:46Nobody does at the beginning. Like, we're here to help you out kind of in that first four to eight weeks of getting your chicks and setting them up and making sure they're safe and happy and healthy and all that stuff. and the chicken sitting service on this page is, I think they say$35. We'll come by a couple times a day, which actually seems cheap for that level of service, but we'll let them out. We'll put them back in at the end of the day. You got to be within 10 miles. So it's hyper localized. And so it depends how popular are backyard chickens in your area, right? It's kind of one of these other rising trends where people want to be closer to their food supply and everybody loves farm fresh eggs that you might be able to sell shovels into, which is exactly what Chicken Tenders is doing in the Austin area.

21:29And then beyond that, I saw similar services coming in and charging, you know, 150 bucks for this coop clean out service where we've had pooper scooper businesses on the show before, which is like, this is essentially what that is, except for chickens. And it's kind of a dirty job, but homeowners may not want to do it themselves. And so that's where you come in. Yeah.

21:47Cody Berman:I mean, I don't know if these guys, Chicken Tenders, based on the branding, maybe not do other animals, but my mind's just spinning. I mean, there's so many different kind of odd animals that you could do this with. Like you could do this for horses, you could do this for other types of livestock. I'm sure there's people, there's farmers who also want to go away, go on vacation. So if you are in an area like this, where there's a lot of farms, where there's a lot of people that need specialized care, I mean, I feel like you could just take over that market. Yeah. What's the next up and coming thing?

22:14Like I've heard of people kind of having micro goat herds, you know, kind of in their backyard or like rabbits, something beyond just dogs and cats, like having your own backyard beehive was a thing for a minute. I don't know if that still is where it's like, you know, high perceived barrier to entry. And like, you can't just find some random pet sitter to come over and do it. It's like you want to have some animal care expertise in that area.

22:38Cody Berman:Yeah. In my research for this episode, I was just looking at like weird, unusual side hustles there was one woman who is breeding and selling worms to local reptile owners okay and she was selling like thousands of worms some days and this became a six-figure business for this lady and she was literally growing these worms originally in her bathtub and then she started like kind of a bigger worm breeding operation i feel like yeah these niche pets are maybe an underserved market that people i mean there's just so many ways that you can build businesses on top of these unusual creatures. Yeah, we'd come across a cricket breeding in sales service, where it's similar.

23:14I'm going to sell to these reptile owners that need to feed their pets crickets. Think it was, you know, solve your own pain point kind of a thing where it's like, I had a hard time finding these for my pets. And so I was like, I know other people are dealing with the same issue, so I'll go out and solve that problem.

23:27Cody Berman:And then to your point with the pooper scooper business, I don't remember the exact revenue numbers that he shared on the episode with you, but there's a couple of businesses out there that have kind of nationalized. There's pooper scooper businesses doing multiple like eight plus figures top line yeah which just seems crazy like they're just showing up scooping poop for 10 minutes and charging 100 bucks but it's a business that you know people don't want to do the work and so they'll pay someone to come in real quick and scoop it up and some of these people running these businesses are just making out like bandits yeah if you can start with that mentality too of you have a labor layer as we talked to one of those pooper scooper people it's like i never went out and did it myself it was always the intention to build it into kind of this repeatable process where you plug people into the system.

24:11So we get scaled geographically and build clients for recurring cleanups. And I think you could probably do the same thing because it's so fragmented, right? If I asked you to say, who's the go-to chicken coop cleaning person? It probably doesn't exist. So that signals kind of an opportunity to build that bigger regional or maybe even national brand in that space.

24:30Cody Berman:I was just looking at your episode. So that guy reached three plus million in revenue from the Pet waste removal. Wow. Inspiring. Yeah. His lifetime value when he said it was like, oh, our LTV is like$3 ,000 in some markets. And it was like, that's crazy. Because as long as that dog is around making a mess in the backyard, like, and you get used to paying for the service. It's like, what are we doing messing around with all this digital stuff, Nick? We should just be scooping poop. There's something to be said for looking up from the laptop every now and again and just going out, getting your hands dirty, solving a real problem.

25:03Cody Berman:Absolutely. The next one I have is also a local service, and this is an appliance rental business that I came across that actually got some press from Chris Corner, because this is a 23-year-old kid doing$10 ,000 a month, renting out washers and dryers, which is crazy on its own. But what's even more interesting is most of this stuff is acquired for free or for very little, like$150 or less. So he's breaking even on his upfront equipment costs almost immediately. And he says he has churn of like one and a half percent per month. So out of his roughly 200 monthly clients, I guess that's two to four of them turnover.

25:49And he's got to go pick up those machines and go find someplace else to put them. but really really interesting in this space because the value add is like look you're spending money at the laundromat it's a pain it would be much better to just do it at your own apartment or at your own place but new appliance or even a used appliance sometimes could cost hundreds of dollars and so he kind of sits in that middle ground of like well just rent it for me for less than what

26:11Cody Berman:you're paying at the laundromat what i really found interesting about this business was it's so sticky right like i feel like most people like even if your tenant leaves let's say you rent a some tenant, they rent the washer dryer for a year. Well, that next tenant comes in and you're like, hey, you can either buy your own set or you can rent these for$50 a month or whatever it might be. It's a no-brainer for them. Who wants to go through the work of finding their washer dryer and bringing it in? It just seems so easy. So it seems like such a sticky business. He's not really fighting for the recurring revenue at all.

26:41Cody Berman:And he's 23 years old, which is even more inspiring. Yeah. He's another candidate for the Retired by 30 plan. Absolutely. And he said he's working five hours per week, has zero employees, like you mentioned. Yeah, this one just is a slap in the face to the people with that finance degree and everything else. It's like, well, here's a simple way. Five hours a week, no employees, recurring revenue, checks a lot of boxes here. I think what's really cool about the current environment is just the sharing economy as a side hustle in general has blown up in the past 10 years. like it used to be you know just airbnb and this is even like 2012 like i think when you first started being an online influencer if you will nick like the sharing economy didn't really exist now it's like you know it started with airbnb then people rented their cars out on turro now people are renting washers and dryers people are renting out their pools in their backyard they're renting out photography equipment they're renting out their trampolines they're renting out inflatable bouncy houses like this sharing economy has just blown up so much and i think so many people are sitting on assets that could be making them so much money if they were to just explore some of these opportunities out there.

27:46Yeah, this is an interesting one, and especially kind of like the low risk way to test it. So it says he's creating Facebook marketplace listings priced at his target rental rate of$50 to$60 a month, waiting to get a bite, waiting to get a lead, and then going out and trying to source that thing. The question mark for me is like it's Facebook Marketplace and also Facebook Marketplace for the supply side. And so it's like, why aren't the renters also looking at Facebook Marketplace to go find themselves a cheap appliance and just rather than committing themselves to five,$600 a year expense, if they could go out and do the same thing that this guy's doing and get it for free or getting get it for 150 bucks.

28:26Cody Berman:I mean, it might just be the simple fact that people don't want to shell out whatever it costs to buy a washer dryer, even if it is cheap. I don't know, maybe this guy's just a whiz And he has all these price alerts set up on Facebook Marketplace and people aren't seeing these opportunities. But if you go and buy a new set, you're looking at like over$1 ,000 for a really nice washer dryer set. Yeah. The risk here would be, well, obviously this is manual and physical labor. You got to be able to move these things. You got to be able to store them. You got to have maybe some level of basic repair knowledge.

28:57It sounds like he's targeting relatively simple machines without a ton of bells and whistles. It mentions making relationships with used appliance stores because maybe they're going to tack on a warranty afterwards to reduce some of your repair risk. I think it said somewhere in here that roughly 3 % of the inventory in any given month is going to need some kind of attention, whether that's remote troubleshooting or whether that means going to the apartment and getting your hands dirty and trying to fix it yourself. Oh, here it is.

29:22Cody Berman:I recommend Whirlpool direct drive washers. And to be making 10 grand a month relatively, not necessarily passively, but like hugely time leveraged at 23 years old is a major win. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, this guy is well on his way to financial freedom. Five hours a week making 12 grand a month. Like what other niches? Like every time there's like a unique rental business because we had a guy doing mobility scooters. We had a guy doing, you know, reusable moving totes, like giant, you know, Tupperware type of boxes. Oh yeah, that was a great episode. We've done photo booths and the portable hot tub guy, I love this type of business where it's like you buy something once and get paid for it over and over and over again.

29:56I think that's really cool. There's probably a space in generators for special events. I came across one. It was like the porta potty rental service, but elevated. It was like the luxury bathroom trailer rental type of thing. We had another guy doing actual pull-behind trailers, like kind of flatbed trailers for trucks. And I think he had some land. He had some space where he was storing those. but relatively inexpensive to acquire. And it's kind of targeting that equipment that for the user of it, it's like, I don't need to own this. Maybe you only need it one off. And it's like, so it makes sense.

30:31It makes more sense to rent it rather than go out and buy it. Maybe you could do air conditioners. It would probably be pretty seasonal, but like a portable AC unit for the summer could be a good one. Or like even exercise equipment.

30:42Cody Berman:It's like, do you really, do you want to test drive the Peloton before you commit to buying it? Are you really going to use that treadmill like you rent before you buy kind of a thing yeah i mean i think at this point in this economy like the opportunities are literally endless like anything that people want for a short period of time that they're not using on the daily i guess they could be using on the daily you're just one buying it yeah is an opportunity for you to make money and it's a lot less capital than like a real estate for example you're not putting a down payment on a house like you're buying a washing machine for a hundred bucks on facebook marketplace just the risk is way lower Yeah, I'd be curious how he deals with the inevitable evictions that come along with people who stop paying.

31:24Or now you have that awkward conversation of like, well, I got to come and get this and find a new home for it. Either bring it to my garage in the meantime. That's probably the downside here. It's like relatively low churn, but inevitable that some of the Stripe payments fail or some of the recurring billing eventually falls apart on some of these.

31:43Cody Berman:Absolutely. One thing to be aware of, but if you got all those extra hours in the week to solve those problems, you're still doing okay. And if you're sourcing the things you're renting for free, then maybe just cut your losses when the tenant gets evicted and you can't get into the house. Yeah, there you go. All right. Have you heard of this artist, Zanya Monet? I did hear about her a little bit. I don't know a lot about her, but I don't think she's a real person. Is that correct? That is the punchline. Zania Monet is AI-generated. She has 650 ,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, including 14 million plays on her top song.

32:21And what's interesting about Zania is she's actually signed a record deal, a$3 million record deal on the back of her popularity over here, which is just a fascinating, a brave new world in the world of AI art, essentially, creating music, without being a musician. And so the tool that people are using for this is called suno.com. And the kids have actually played around with this. They're like, we want a high energy, upbeat song for a trick shot video that we made. And it comes back with kind of this poppy, punchy, ping pong ball in the red solo cup type of music. And it's like, that's actually pretty good.

33:03So I'm kind of surprised by this one. The question mark for me is surrounding the marketing is it's like, if anybody could do this and Suno costs like, you know, 10 or 20 bucks a month, like it's super, super inexpensive. And so what do you do to stand out from everybody else doing this? Either finding an underserved niche or finding a creative marketing channel that other artists aren't doing, but definitely an interesting one. AI music royalties from Spotify.

33:29Cody Berman:Yeah. I think that Xenia, I was going to call her a girl, Xenia, the AI robot person, she got sued because there was some similar artist that said her she looked like her she sounded like her so there's definitely a lot of gray area in this space there was this mega song that blew up on soundcloud and it was like quote unquote drake featuring the weekend but neither of them were actually in the song or ever said the words okay but the person was making a bunch of money off of it so like there's a lot of gray area and i think we're going to see this a lot more as AI voice, as AI video gets better and better as people impersonating others and making a lot of money off of it.

34:07Cody Berman:So I think it is cool, though. I think for people who do this the right way, like there's definitely a market to be had with this AI music. Yeah, this is something to be aware of where like, you know, the opportunity is here today, but it may not be tomorrow because Suno is seeing some legal challenges where it's like inspired by this famous artist, well, you know, who's to say that that cuts a little too close? It sounded like Xenia or the person behind Xenia, Talisha Jones, was uploading her own poetry. So the prompts that she was given were more than just the generics. So she was actually feeding it a little bit of herself, but it is kind of a question mark.

34:45It's a volume game where you're going to need a quarter million plays to make a thousand bucks on Spotify. And I think it's at 87 % of all tracks on Spotify fall below the 1 ,000 stream minimum threshold to earn any royalties at all. So one of these, again, where you throw a lot of virtual spaghetti at the wall and hopefully some of it sticks, but really, really an interesting one.

35:09Cody Berman:Where I've seen some people make this into a whole thing though, is there's like, you know, there's AI songs, but it's also this person's an AI influencer on Instagram. So like they're opening up a whole bunch of other revenue streams. They're doing affiliate marketing. They have their own products and stuff, but they're also this person quote unquote making music so people are like creating just fake people who do it all so it unlocks multiple revenue streams but i've seen people do it i've seen some crazy articles and people making millions of dollars doing this stuff yeah as you're uploading now you know you got to check the box to say if this was ai generated and spotify has removed millions and millions of tracks in an effort to kind of clean up their their song base their database but i'm curious what it looks like on the front end because i don't i didn't think we saw any flag that said, oh, this was AI.

35:55Cody Berman:No. Like you start to see on Instagram now, like, oh, some of this image may be AI generated some kind of disclaimer like that. So we will see what the future holds in that. But I wanted to put that out there because I think that's a really interesting low startup cost business with the potential to scale. Obviously, a$3 million record deal is an outlier, but there's some other case studies where it's like, oh, I'm making$3 ,000 a month. I'm making$5 ,000 a month. So maybe worth playing around with. I'll see if I can play one of the kids tracks after the outro for this episode. That'd be awesome.

36:27Maybe we should have a makeup like a side hustle theme song or something, but it's pretty impressive what it can come up with. All right. We've got more to come with Cody from Gold City Ventures and The Fi Show, including his business idea donation for side hustle show listeners coming up right after this.

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38:55Cody Berman:slash side hustle. All right, we're back with Cody Berman, author of the new book, retire by 30. Make sure to grab a copy today at retireby30book.com. Cody, this is the business idea donation round. We've been spitballing a ton of creative side hustles, but curious what you might start if you had more time yourself or an opportunity you think listeners could run with. I'm going to give you two, Nick. I'm cheating because I'm scratching my own itch here. Oh, I love it. So the first one is I have not seen like one good company have virtual listing images for homes like there's all these staging companies that are charging like some houses to stage cost like 10 000 15 000 20 000 we've done some flipping we've done some real estate in our past it boggles my mind that there's not just like a goliath company that's just like the company for virtual staging it's crazy to me and we were like looking for it there was like some you could just kind of tell it was ai and it like didn't look real enough if someone were to pull this off and have like the virtual staging versus virtual listing image for flippers for people selling their homes i would love that and i looked and there's just not not there wasn't a great one it wasn't a great option for us yeah so the 10 to 15 000 option that's when like the company is actually hauling in the fake furniture and they're setting it all up and taking the pictures you're physically moving stuff yeah real furniture it's like they're moving in like real beds and like real chairs and real carpets.

40:21Cody Berman:It's crazy. But I'm like, this could so easily be AI generated and look real. And I don't know, right now, there's just not maybe there is a couple of smaller tools that exist. There's just not like one major player that's crushing it. Okay, that's an interesting one. What would you do first in that space? That seems like that should exist. And maybe that's the that's the whole point of this conversation. Yeah, doesn't it? That's the whole point of this conversation. It's I'm scratching my own itch here because I'm like, how is it on a great version of this it just all the ones we got back like look fake it's like i shouldn't have to hire someone off of like upwork or fiverr to get this done like it should just be like a done for you service where you upload all the photos at your home and you have some like designer guru or some ai agent who's like really smart at this stuff just like spit out stuff for you but it doesn't exist as far as i know that's an interesting one i bet somebody could build that that would be cool all right what else you got the other one so i'm an online guy i'm always looking for like cutting edge stuff there's like the hey gens of the world where like you know i can kind of create ai videos of myself and it works okay but i wish there was like some kind of a service where they could like suggest making ai videos like for different marketing campaigns like i'm always creating like stuff for facebook ads and things like that hey cody here's a video of you like running through a brick wall hey cody here's a video of you jumping out of a helicopter like a company that comes to these like pre-packaged ideas for you like hyper realistic ai generated obviously i'm not actually jumping out of a helicopter, running through a brick wall, but I haven't found anything like that.

41:46Cody Berman:It's like kind of, it's a lot of DIYing. It's like, oh, you know, you can upload your avatar and Hey Jen and record your video and record your voice and all that stuff. And you can make like somewhat convincing videos, but there's not just like this kind of done for you a la carte. Here's, here's 10. You want, you want the action movie, Cody? You want a rodeo cowboy Cody? Do you want, you know, Cody doing X, Y, or Z? Like that would be a really cool business idea, almost having these packages of like AI videos that would just be delivered to people. So kind of like, Hey Jen on steroids, or maybe it's like a white label of the AI avatar generation, but like take it one step further.

42:21Now make me go do something that's going to stop the scroll and get attention and make it so I didn't have to come up with a prompt and go from there.

42:30Cody Berman:Yeah. It's just like a cool way to get fast B-roll super fast. If you're like a marketer, Or, I mean, I'm sure people just play around with this tool, too. Some of the new stuff that people are doing, like people are, it's like one man, one woman armies now producing these movies and like video game trailers. It's insane what like generative AI can do nowadays. Yeah, I've yet to create my Heijin avatar, but even just watching some of their stuff, like the line between what's real and not is getting more and more blurred. Oh, dude, it's so weird. Is it worth diving in here? because you have a really unique journey to financial independence.

43:05We're starting from a really young age. Look, we're going to do the online business thing. We're going to kind of take an alternative path to the normal life script. We're going to do some real estate stuff. We're going to do digital products. And within just like three years, you kind of set yourself up with a really nice nest egg that could continue to compound for decades. Can you speak to that a little bit?

43:26Cody Berman:Yeah. So what I really like about your show, and I'm very partial to side hustles in general is from a financial independence standpoint, controlling the gap between your income and your expenses is the most important metric on your path to financial freedom. So with side hustles, if you can control the income part of the equation and you can keep your expenses the same, like let's talk about that card detailing kid. He was making 86K from his day job, an extra 72K from his side hustles. Like if he's learning to just live on his day job money and then invest all of that side hustle money into things like real estate, into things like the stock market into small business, whatever he wants to invest in, that dude is going to hit financial independence in well under a decade at that rate.

44:04Cody Berman:Like it's just insane. During the early years, during my financial freedom journey, I kept my expenses like as bare minimum as possible. I was spending$24 ,000 a year, like$2 ,000 a month for like three years in a row. And my income during that third year, it kept jumping from all the entrepreneurial and side hustling things I was My income was$403 ,000 that third year, and my expenses were$24 ,000. So I had like a$375 ,000 gap between my income and my expenses, and then I invested. Yeah, a very profitable year if you're thinking in terms of what's my personal profitability, profit margins. Yeah, it was huge.

44:42Cody Berman:I tried every side hustle under the sun. At one point, I had 20-plus income streams. I've tried over 35 side hustles. I've since pared it down a bit, but I've literally tried it all. Yeah. What were the big two or three levers for you? It's digital products, which is in the form of, I have a couple of Etsy shops, Shopify store, like a whole template library. And that has since became like a courses and communities in the digital product space. So that's one kind of bundled into one gold city ventures. It's the brand. Then I have my real estate portfolio, which is long-term rentals. I have some Airbnb short-term rentals.

45:14Cody Berman:I've done flipping in the past. I do some syndication investing. So let's nest that all under real estate. That's number two. And then the third one, it's really three. is just like kind of personal finance educator, if you will, which I'm going to bundle all my social media, my podcast, my now book in there. So those are the kind of the big three. And that's pretty much it. But before it was like, I was, you know, delivering Uber Eats on a bicycle, I was bailing Christmas trees, I was doing landscaping, I was running email marketing campaigns for people, I was planning a book tour and going on the road for three months, I was buffing boats.

45:48Cody Berman:It was like all this random stuff. Yeah, I admire how proactive and intentional you really were about this, recognizing, look, the most important lever here is that gap between income and expenses. How can I grow that as much as I can and try and keep living below my means, live lean and invest that difference at an early age, stack it into real estate, stack it into the market and then watch that compound because it opens up so much optionality down the road where it's like I got a little breathing room now and I don't have to be making this commute that I don't like to this job that I don't like to pay the bills that I have kind of committed myself to.

46:28And so I think that's really, really powerful. And like, it's not necessarily following the path of least resistance. It's following the path that's going to lead you where you want to go. Taking a pause to be intentional about it.

46:40Cody Berman:And to your point before, you don't have to do this forever. Like my expenses are way higher now. I spend a lot on travel. I spend a lot on eating out and kind of just experiences in general. My housing's still super low. I'm still house hacking. I still drive the same paid off car, but like my eating out, my experiences and travel budget has gone like 10X since those cheap years when I was living on$24 ,000 a year. But all you have to do is get it right for a couple of years. Like that was kind of why I named the book Retire By 30. And it's kind of tongue in cheek. Like obviously if you're older than 30 listening to this, You can still completely transform your financial life in just a couple of years.

47:14Cody Berman:But it's just the fact that you can do it so quickly. You can do it so rapidly. Like the book really should be called Hit Financial Freedom as Fast as Possible and then do whatever you want. But that's not quite as catchy on a cover. But yeah, if you're someone who listens to this show week in and week out, you have all these side hustle ideas, like seriously, act on one, act on two. And once you start to build up your income from those side hustle income streams and you can just, you know, live on your day job money, invest the rest, like you're going to be set after a couple of years of doing that.

47:41Yeah, it's that coast fire idea of continuing to do the work you love in the time that you want to spend on it, but letting compound interests kind of work in your favor. So again, that's retireby30book.com. The business idea donations were this virtual staging service, this virtual image listing service for real estate, for houses, and this AI video suggestion service, like an AI generated, like, hey, Jen, is your virtual avatar. But like beyond that, here are some attention getting scenes that that we've already created for you. You don't have to think about it. Just add your own voiceover or add your own text or call to action on top of that.

48:20Let's move to round three, starting with a marketing tactic that's working for you right now.

48:25Cody Berman:So this one might be unexpected. Some people might expect me to say like, you know, AI video or like some of these newer tools. What's been working well for me recently, especially with the whole like book launch and stuff is leaning hard into like personal connections, like affiliates and relationships. I think these are in today's digital world, like so often downplayed and people just like, they want to automate everything. And they, you know, they never want to talk to other people online. They like just want this side hustle that magically starts making them money. But I think there's so much value in connection and having friends and mentors and whatever space you might be operating in.

48:58Cody Berman:So that's, that's, what's working really well for me is like, not only for the marketing piece, but like just leaning on people, like standing on the shoulders of giants, people who have done it before me. Like I've talked to a lot of author friends. I know I was just picking your brain before we hit go here about your book and revamping your book. Like I think I've learned so much and I wouldn't be where I'm at today without having an amazing network surrounding me. Yeah, there's a lot to that. And that's probably something I neglected early on, where it's very heads down, looking at the laptop, trying to do my thing without any sort of mastermind or mentorship or community support.

49:31And it's like, oh, once you have this other stuff, it gets a little easier and gets a lot more fun too. That's why I continue to invest time and money and go into different events throughout the year to get out from the routine, get out from the laptop and see people face-to-face.

49:47Cody Berman:It's so easy to get buried in the laptop, but yeah, I like to pull myself out once in a while and I'm like, wow, I've actually made a lot of friends in this space over the past eight plus years I've been in it. Time flies when you're having fun. How about a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now? Where I've been having a lot of fun is with like vibe coding. And so I've used Replit and I've used Cloud Code. Both of those have just like blown my mind and how far they've advanced in the past year and a half or two years since I started using them. It's like you could have an idea for an app and have something somewhat operational within an hour or two.

50:20Cody Berman:It's like, it's honestly mind blowing. You don't need to know any coding at all. So I've been having a lot of fun and like some of these are just like silly little ideas. Like I'm just peddling around on the weekend and whatever, but I don't know, that stuff's just fun to me just building and vibe coding yeah what are you building you building like internal tools for gold city or what's going on yeah building some stuff for gold city we have turned it into a bigger project that we haven't announced yet so i can't say too much but we're building a software we're building a software tool kind of top secret but i started messing around originally on replit with it and i was like wow this like i got a lot farther than i thought i was going to get with that yeah it's been a lot of fun i mean we started making you know with the kids like a browser-based little push button game and it was just an intro intro to using Cloud Code.

51:04Oh, cool. It created the first version in like two minutes. And from there, it's like, oh, can you increase the gravity? Or can you make it go faster after level 10? And it's really interesting. So I've been playing around with building different automations and even like Chrome extensions and trying to build a couple apps. It's not as easy as the gurus would make it out to be on YouTube, but it's also where it would have been impossible for me even a year or two ago. Definitely a cool place to play around. If you can think about it, you can kind of will it into existence if it can be done with some of these coding tools.

51:35So really cool.

51:36Cody Berman:It's fun. The last question in the triple threat is your favorite book other than your own from the last 12 months. So I was going to ask for clarification. I reread a book within the last 12 months. It's a book that had a huge impact on me because I really wanted to mention this again because it just hit different and better the second time, even though this book changed my life. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. that book when I first read it back in 2017 I think it was just blew my mind but I feel like I wanted to reread it because I'm like I know so much more stuff now like am I still going to have the same wow effect that I did back then like based on what I know now and there was stuff that I just completely forgot was in there and so like having a reread so many years later now that I've you know built multiple businesses I've you know my net worth is not negative like it was when I first read the book like I'm in such a different place mindset wise, financially, everything.

52:27Cody Berman:And it still hit. It was still such a good book. And there was still, there was so much that I forgot that was in there that I'm like, oh, maybe that's the reason why I think X, Y, and Z because I read it in the four hour work week all those years back. Yeah. I probably 18 years or something for me. So I need to go back and have another pass. Reread it. It's, it's worth it. All of the eliminate, automate, delegate stuff, all the 80, 20 of everything. The deal framework. Yeah. Yeah. Be, have, do. I mean, it's, it's a classic. It's one of the required readings for, anybody in the passive income or side hustle space trying to get out from a traditional life of working 40, 50 hours a week for somebody else.

53:03Cody Berman:Yeah, if you haven't read it in 18 years, I would definitely suggest a reread with your new lens on life. All right. I'll put it on the list. We'll link that up in the show notes as well, along with Cody's new book, Retire by 30. You can grab yours at retireby30book.com. Check him out at The Fi Show. We will link up Gold City Ventures as well. Big thanks to Cody for sharing his insight. Big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. SideHustleNation.com slash deals is where you'll find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show.

53:39That 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.

54:23We'll be right back.

54:35Bye.

54:53It's really not passive. Dropshipping products I've never seen. Running Facebook ads to a landing page machine. My LLC is rex, a certain deal away. I've got a course about my course. You should be there. I optimize my thumbnail 47 times. A-B tested, every hook and every rhyme Side hustle, side hustle, making that bread Twelve tabs open, zero sleep instead Passive income while I'm lying in bed It's not past it, it's really not past it It's not past it, it's really not past it It's not past it, it's really not past it Thanks for listening to the show. Now go build something, gotta go. Sorry, hustle, shy, hustle, making that bread.

56:0412 tabs open to your sleep instead. Passive income while I'm lying in bed. It's not passive, it's really not passive. Sorry, hustle, shy, hustle, making that bread. 12 tabs open to your sleep instead. Passive income while I'm lying in bed It's really not passive Oh yes, it's really not passive It's not passive, it's really not passive