The Side Hustle Show

300! In this special 300th edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m excited to feature 5 listeners who took action on specific ideas they heard on the show or read on the Side Hustle Nation blog -- and turned that action into concrete results. Those results range from their first $1000 on the side, up to a $700k e-commerce empire, but the point is they made something happen. Tune in to hear how they g...

Remember the Red Paperclip Guy from a few years ago? In 2005, an out-of-work Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip and traded his way up to a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan. Remarkably, this barter adventure took only 14 trades and was completed in less than a year. Kyle started out small, each time seeking something “bigger and better” in exchange. For example, his first trade was th...

Rob is a professional "money multiplier." The good news, he says, is it's a skill that can be learned. You might remember Rob "The Flea Market Flipper" Stephenson from episode 147 in late 2015. At that time, he was earning $30,000-$40,000 a year flipping random products on the side from his day job. Since then, the father of 3 has taken his buy low, sell high model and turned it into a full-time 6...

"I'm this close to firing you right now." That's what Hung Pham's boss told him when he reached out about ways to get his team more engaged with the company's overall mission. "If you want passion and purpose," she said, "you've got to look somewhere else." Frustrated with the internal cultures at the organizations he worked in, Hung wanted to attend a culture-building conference. The only problem...

“I feel like this is the most important project I’ve ever worked on,” Mike said about his blog YoungArchitect.com. Mike Riscica runs a blog, podcast, and has built a thriving community for young professionals in the architecture field. The idea for the blog came from a pain point in Mike’s life, and for many others – passing the Architect Registration Examination (ARE). After failing to pass the e...

“I tell people I work on my cleaning business about an hour a day because 5 minutes doesn’t seem believable,” Chris Schwab said. Chris is the founder of ThinkMaids.com, a residential house cleaning service in the Washington DC area he started on the side while still a university student. Less than two years later, the business is doing $60k a month worth of cleaning work, all without Chris ever li...

Rene Delgado started an online drop shipping store with no ideas and no inventory and went from $0-300k in his first year in business. It was the search for an extra stream of income that led Rene Delgado to consider e-commerce; selling physical products online. “Drop shipping” is a form of e-commerce where your suppliers ship products directly to customers on your behalf. Your role is to drive tr...

Bill Nowicki has a unique side hustle. He has a podcast show called MariettaStories named after Marietta GA, a suburb of Atlanta with a population of about 60,000. Having a podcast show isn’t unique but producing a show that’s focused on a local community is something a little different – and something you might consider doing for your local community after hearing Bill’s story. Bill is a former N...

Austin Miller built a $1.2 million real estate portfolio at 31 years old -- for free. He's a side hustling real estate investor specializing in "creative" financing deals -- houses he can buy without using his own money. Austin is the author of Free Houses: How To Build Your Real Estate Investment Portfolio With No Money. His basic strategy is this: Find a killer deal on a house that needs some wo...

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. I’ve had quite a few interesting questions come in since the last Q&A episode, and picked 20 to talk through in today’s show. Like this format? This is the 6th installment of “20 Questions” so feel free to go back and binge on the older ones too: 271: Brilliant Blogging, Ruthl...

Willpower predicts academic and professional success better than IQ, or charisma, or having rich parents. It’s not the only ingredient in our success recipe, but it’s a critical one -- and one I certainly struggle with at times. Derek Doepker of ExcuseProof.com is an expert when it comes to increasing willpower and strengthening this critical success muscle we all have. He is the author of 7 bests...

May Najafabadi earned $12,000 in 8 weeks -- working just 1 hour a day. Her side hustle? After school enrichment classes teaching crafts and jewelry making. As a long-time entrepreneur in the e-commerce space, May was used to enrolling her son in these classes to buy herself an extra hour in the afternoons. Over the last couple years though, she wanted to diversify her income away from Amazon and w...

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. This has become an annual tradition on the show, and we just passed 5 years and 5.5 million downloads! If you like this short-and-swe...

10 months! Just 10 months after starting his side hustle, Jonathan Mendonsa was ready to quit his 6-figure job and take the business full-time. What's the hustle? A podcast called Jonathan co-hosts with this partner Brad Barrett ChooseFI. “You need to either be first or be different. We couldn’t be first, so we wanted to pivot and be a little different,” Jonathan said. When the project started, he...

“It’s the best-kept secret in the real estate industry,” Mark said, talking about becoming a loan signing agent. You can make $100 an hour as a part-time, and the only real requirements are that you know what you’re doing, and you have a notary license. (A loan signing agent is the person who walks you through the giant stack of forms and contracts you have to sign when you close on a new home loa...

“I set up a big business just selling somebody else’s stuff,” Wes said. Wes runs TheSalesWhisperer.com and is the host of The Sales Podcast which started around the same time as The Side Hustle Show back in 2013. He’s an Air Force vet, a father of 7, and has built up an interesting side hustle that on the surface looks like a typical consulting business but is done in such a way that it’s set up t...

When Abbey made $8000 from her 1000-person email list, she knew she was on to something. Over the last several years, Abbey Ashley has gone from earning $25 as a virtual assistant, to coordinating monster 6-figure launches of her own product. I actually met Abbey at the bar during Traffic and Conversion Summit. Her “Virtual Assistance Is My Jam,” t-shirt caught my attention and I had to know more....

You've got less than 3 seconds to make a first impression online. Is your website turning would-be customers away without you even knowing it? Your site and the words you use -- your copy -- could either be making you money or costing you big time. I invited copywriting pro Laura Belgray on the show to do some live "copy audits" of listeners' sites. Laura is a professional copywriter with nearly 2...

FoodTruckEmpire.com generates $60k a year on the side from Brett Lindenberg's marketing consulting job. Why'd he start a blog about the food truck industry? “I started the blog at a time in my life when I was looking at just a whole bunch of different business ideas,” Brett said. Originally, Brett wanted to start his own food truck. While researching how to start a food truck business he discovere...

In his first 3 months, he'd booked more than $4000 worth of work. “I’ve never been very good at working with people, so I wanted something that was flexible,” James said. Sound familiar? These are the words of someone who was not happy being a shoe salesman and wanted out. James was looking for that location independent lifestyle, and when he was approached to ghostwrite a book for $300 he knew wh...

Corey Jeffreys turned an $800 investment into $3k in the first year and has been growing his business and adding more automated processes each year. His entrepreneurial adventure began by exploring the world of real estate investing, when he happened upon a slightly different rental business model: inflatable bounce houses. Corey started out renting a bounce house to his aunt as his first customer...

“Go big or go home, that’s kinda my whole philosophy with SEO,” Matt said. And his results speak for themselves. It’s been more than 200 episodes since we last heard from Matt Giovanisci. Back then, Matt was explaining how he was growing his authority site SwimUniversity.com with epic content and strong SEO. Since then he’s started 3 more authority sites and has fine-tuned his SEO practices for ev...

A $425k exit on a 2.5 year old business!? Recently a friend of mine posted about how he sold his 2.5-year-old Amazon FBA business for over $400k, which I thought was incredible. The twist was it turned out the buyer was a familiar face as well. Spencer Haws of NichePursuits.com was the seller, and Ace Chapman of AceChapman.com was the buyer. They are both previous guests of the show. Spencer was o...

Paul Brodie is a former special needs teacher turned 11-time Amazon bestselling author. What started as a side hustle writing about his own weight loss journey turned into a string of bestselling titles on Amazon, $3000 paid speaking gigs, 1-on-1 self-publishing coaching, and ultimately the group coaching program I invited Paul on the show to share more about. Why go down the group coaching route?...

What are the quick, simple, and maybe a little "weird" productivity tricks entrepreneurs use to get more done? Well, I'm always curious about that myself so I decided to ask 26 of my most productive and successful friends for the "hacks" and tools they use every day. (And I added in one of my own to round out the list.) This episode was a ton of fun to put together and I owe a huge thank you to ev...