Brian Winch calls it “America’s Simplest Business.” What started as a side hustle way back in 1981 has now grown into a $650k a year operation. So what does Brian do? His company picks up litter from parking lots. Sadly, it's still an essential service (boo litterbugs!), but has very low startup costs and Brian says you can earn $30-$50 an hour doing this on the side. What prompted Brian to pick up the phone and ask property management companies if he could handle their litter picking contracts?...
Jan 18, 2018•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast "I teach women how to get dressed in the morning." That's how Kelly Snyder from AdoreYourWardrobe.com introduced herself to me at FinCon. (The more "official" tagline is that Adore Your Wardrobe teaches women how to confidently dress their unique bodies through the principles found in math and science.) There's a niche for everything, right! It’s a really cool business idea that sits firmly outside of the usual internet marketing space and has helped thousands of women be less frustrated and a l...
Jan 04, 2018•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's no secret that Amazon FBA is one of the hottest side hustles going right now, and it shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon. FBA is Fulfillment by Amazon, the program that allows you to list your own products for sale on Amazon, tap into their giant audience of customers, and have them handle all the shipping when orders come in. The trick is figuring out which which products to sell, and that's where Greg Mercer comes in. Greg has launched over 100 successful products on Amazon, inclu...
Dec 28, 2017•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Is your website guilty of these common sins? How secure is your site, really? WordPress is like the new toy you unwrap on Christmas morning -- you know it's going to be awesome, but there's some assembly required. To break down some of the most common website mistakes, I invited my friend Anthony Tran on the show. Anthony runs MarketingAccessPass.com, a web design and development agency, as well as AccessWP.com, a WordPress support company offering unlimited support for a low monthly subscriptio...
Dec 21, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast I felt gross. I was tired from chasing a toddler around, out of shape, and fighting a series of frustrating injuries. And I realized it was hurting my output at work. Building a business takes real energy and real brainpower, and I wasn't performing optimally because my body wasn't performing optimally. I knew I had to do something about it. A friend introduced me to Rob Dionne, a certified personal trainer who works with clients online and in person. He also co-hosts the Open Sky Fitness podcas...
Dec 14, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast A lot has changed in Ryan's "buy low, sell high" business built on Amazon's FBA program. This week’s episode is a “where are they now?” show as I catch up with Ryan Grant from OnlineSellingExperiment.com. Ryan first appeared on the show back in 2014 on episode 61. Back then he had just quit his $50k a year job to sell online full-time using retail arbitrage. (He’d started out flipping textbooks in college and then got into Amazon FBA retail arbitrage; buying low from stores locally and re-sellin...
Dec 07, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week’s show is a roundtable episode on the topic of YouTube, and specifically how 3 different channel hosts have gone about growing their presence and profits on the YouTube platform. My esteemed panelists are: Jon Shanahan from The Kavalier, a men’s style / men’s fashion channel. Pete Sveen from DIY Projects with Pete and DIYPete.com, a home improvement channel and website. Matt Tran from Engineered Truth and EngineeredTruth.com, a career advice channel. They explain how and why they start...
Nov 30, 2017•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's like owning a parking lot, Jefferson Lilly explained. And you can earn 20% cash on cash returns too. That got my attention, though those returns are coming from a surprising real estate niche: mobile home parks. Jefferson Lilly is a mobile home park investment expert, educator, and industry consultant who has been featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg Magazine, and on the ‘Real Money’ television show. Through his company Park Street Partners, they currently own about $50 million worth o...
Nov 23, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast You might know Michelle Schroeder-Gardner from her super-popular blog MakingSenseofCents.com where she gets hundreds of thousands of readers and makes 6-figures a month. Around $50k of that monthly revenue (or more) comes from affiliate marketing. Michelle’s online journey started in the summer of 2011 when she decided to start blogging about paying off her student debts, “I didn’t know what blogs were at the time… I literally didn’t know that you could make money with a blog,” she said looking ...
Nov 16, 2017•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast In my annual member survey, one of the 3 most common obstacles I hear is the money needed to start a business. As in, "I don't have enough money to start a business." (The other 2 are time and ideas.) It's kind of a chicken vs. egg problem: you need money to start the business and you need the business to earn the money! But the truth is that most side hustles these days don't take a ton of cash to get off the ground. In fact, most of the businesses I've started have cost less than $500 to start...
Nov 09, 2017•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast By day, Bryan Orr helps runs an air conditioning company in Central Florida, and by night he’s a father of 9 -- yet somehow he's found the time to build his HVAC School podcast into a 5-figure a month business in less than a year. And it might sounds like an overnight success, but Bryan's actually been side hustling for quite a while, mostly in the podcasting and freelance audio production space. Tasked with training technicians at his day job, he had the idea to put it into an on-demand audio f...
Nov 02, 2017•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “You have a skill, but you’re not using it correctly." That the tough love advice Vincent Pugliese's father gave him. Vincent was working what he thought was his dream job as a photojournalist. He'd just won the most prestigious award in his industry (International Sports Photographer of the Year), and he and his wife Elizabeth had a baby on the way. Yet the newspaper job didn't pay well. With the impending arrival of their son, Vincent took a hard look at his financial picture: he was in his mi...
Oct 26, 2017•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Quit my job? “That’s stupid,” Kim Anderson said. But she eventually did, and it turned out to be a really smart move. Together with her husband Cressel, they paid off $93k in debt in less than 2 years, setting themselves up for a life of “financial flexibility.” They did it through a combination of conscious spending, creative side hustles, and having a clear goal in mind. And perhaps what’s more exciting is what that new time freedom has allowed: starting a family, starting new businesses, and ...
Oct 19, 2017•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Would you trade $1000 for $2000? How about $10,000 for $18,000? If you're anything like me, I'll make those trades all day long! Well, Deacon Hayes is doing exactly that every month through his blog, Facebook ads, and affiliate marketing. Although he'd been blogging for years, his traffic and revenue had kind of stagnated. Inspired by the success of The Penny Hoarder using a similar strategy in a similar niche, Deacon decided to jump in and throw $1000 toward his new Facebook Ads experiment. Wit...
Oct 12, 2017•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dustin Lien from StrategicSauce.com reached out to me with an interesting pitch for an episode. Dustin had experienced a side hustle failure and wanted to know if the Side Hustle audience would be interested in hearing his story. I threw the idea out to the Side Hustle Facebook Group and received an overwhelming amount of feedback saying, “Yes,” they wanted to hear the “other side” of a side hustle when it fails. In this episode Dustin lifts the lid on a business he invested a large chunk of tim...
Oct 06, 2017•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast The holy grail of side hustle business models is software, right? Built it once and sell it over and over again for almost zero incremental cost! Having built the online graphic design tool Snappa to $33k in monthly recurring revenue in 2 years, Christopher Gimmer rounds out our "recurring revenue" theme for the month. The software as a service aims to help bloggers and content creators make perfectly sized social media graphics or blog images easily and professionally. “Create online graphics i...
Sep 28, 2017•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Three years ago Design Pickle didn't exist. It wasn't even an idea in founder Russ Perry's head yet. That's why it seems crazy to me that today the unlimited graphic design service is doing $400k in monthly recurring revenue! Back in 2014 Russ was running a creative agency, but he started to hate everything about it. “I felt like I was in a prison of my own creation,” he said. By January 2015, he'd shut down his agency and started working as a freelancer. Not wanting to build a similar prison ag...
Sep 21, 2017•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Zeona McIntyre is earning $12-18k a month through her portfolio of vacation rental properties and her "co-hosting" service for other property owners. All this has afforded Zeona financial independence at a very young age, as she built her operation largely by piggybacking on the growing popularity of Airbnb (get $40 off your first trip!). She first became aware of Airbnb and the potential to earn some extra revenue back in 2011. She was in massage school at the time, but a friend of hers in New ...
Sep 14, 2017•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast From the spare bedroom to $15k in monthly recurring revenue, Sam Gonzalez has grown the subscription style service UrbaneBox.com (affiliate link) all on the side from his day job as a police officer. He noticed his wardrobe was getting pretty outdated and with family and work life, he didn’t have any time (or desire, really) to go shopping. So he decided to do something about it and create an online subscription box business with a cool value proposition: $120 worth of designer clothes for $60. ...
Sep 07, 2017•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast It’s time to dive into the ol' listener mailbag and answer a few questions in this week’s edition of The Side Hustle Show. It’s been 6 months since the last Q&A show I did (where does the time go??) and I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since then. I picked 20 to talk through in today’s show. Like this format? This is the 4th installment of "20 Questions" so feel free to go back and binge on the older ones too: 219: Growing Traffic, Monetization, List-Building, a Day in the Life...
Aug 31, 2017•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chris Green is one of the foremost advocates for the side hustle lifestyle. He has 10+ years’ experience as an Amazon seller, author, software provider to others involved in the Amazon ecosystem, and most recently as a t-shirt designer selling shirts on the Merch by Amazon platform. Chris calls Merch by Amazon “the best side hustle out there right now.” With no upfront capital, no shipping or returns, no customer service, and no risk, it’s certainly one of the easiest side hustles to get started...
Aug 24, 2017•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sarah Miller is still in college (and plays soccer for her school) but that hasn't stopped her from starting a pretty cool side hustle: painting custom pet portraits. She's done 300 paintings so far! But the business isn't without its challenges. She'd like to raise her rates, expand her marketing efforts to land new clients, and figure out how to make her work less of a time-for-money tradeoff. To help me brainstorm some ideas for Sarah, I invited Don the Idea Guy back on the program to join us...
Aug 17, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Over the last decade, Cathy Heller has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars from her music and helping other musicians license their songs. In fact, you've probably heard some of her music without realizing it. Songs of hers have been featured in ads for huge brands, like McDonald’s, Walmart, Kellogg’s, as well as many popular TV shows. Today, the mother of 3 balances family, her art, her agency, her online course, and her new Don't Keep Your Day Job podcast, where she interviews other entrep...
Aug 03, 2017•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Teresa Greenway is a mother of 10 who went from working part-time in a bakery to making $5k a month doing what she loves – baking and teaching others how to bake. More specifically, she teaches how to bake perfect sourdough bread. Teresa has built a really cool business around this niche at NorthwestSourdough.com. In the past couple of years, her main revenue driver has been Udemy courses, to the tune of several thousand dollars a month. The main driving force behind this? It turns out Teresa's ...
Jul 27, 2017•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast You can be a creator or a consumer, but it’s the creators that get paid. I’ve argued before that creativity is the most important skill for entrepreneurs because before you can sell anything, you have to create that value proposition. But what if you’re not creative? I believe we all have that innate creative spirit in us somewhere, it’s just a matter of flexing that creative muscle. In this episode, I talk with Carol "Stash" Stanley of StashSports.com, and David Fedewa who is an inventor mentor...
Jul 20, 2017•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast As the author of more than 70 books, Steve "S.J." Scott is one of the most productive and disciplined people I know. His latest title, Habit Stacking, became a Wall Street Journal Bestseller and served as the inspiration for this episode. (Long-time listeners might remember Steve from WAY back in the archives; he was my guest in episode 9 where we discussed how to earn money as a side hustling author.) This time though we're diving into a few of the habits that allow Steve to continually drive h...
Jul 13, 2017•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Noah Kagan is Chief Sumo and founder of Sumo.com and AppSumo.com. He blogs about his personal and business experiences at OkDork.com, and his new podcast is called Noah Kagan Presents. Noah has built up a number of successful businesses and is always toying with new ideas or looking for the next big business opportunity, so he was the perfect person to brainstorm with. If you’re stuck at the idea generation phase or pulling the trigger on your ideas, this episode is going to give you food for th...
Jul 06, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast The best advice from my last 49 guests. At the end of nearly every episode of The Side Hustle Show, I ask my guests for their #1 tip for Side Hustle Nation. There’s always a great variety of responses, and I wanted to take some time today to go through some of my favorites from the past 50-ish interviews. I first did this for episode 50, which was my first-ever solo podcast recording, and then again in episode 124 and episode 177. If you like this short-and-sweet meta-style show, be sure to chec...
Jun 29, 2017•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast As one of several side hustles, Ryan Dowd runs HomelessLibrary.com, a training program that teaches librarians how to confidently and compassionately deal with their homeless patrons. It’s something a little different from the business-to-consumer model we usually see with online course sales and comes with some advantages over the B2C market — namely potentially higher prices and the ability to perform direct outreach. By day Ryan is the executive director for a homeless shelter in Illinois, bu...
Jun 22, 2017•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Listen in on a real-life side hustle coaching call with customer acquisition and retention strategist David Hutcherson (he's the client), and sales pro Brendan Alan Barrett (he and I share the coaching duties). On the heels of last week's sales-themed episode, I invited Brendan on because of his sales background both with companies large and small. We're joined by our "client" David, who's seeking to grow his freelance/consulting side hustle and build on his decade of experience in customer serv...
Jun 15, 2017•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
