The Side Hustle Show

What started as a 2-week challenge with a friend 6 months ago, has turned into a business processing $3,500 in orders a day!

Luke Emery has a background in design and portrait painting. So, he decided to utilize these skills and his e-commerce experience and start a business selling custom pet portraits.

Van Woof specializes in putting your dog or cat into a Renaissance-style oil painting, looking like they really posed for the portrait.

This isn’t Luke’s first e-commerce business, but it's taken off like a rocket!

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: $3500 a Day in Etsy Sales in 6 Months

Ever thought about buying a semi truck and renting it out?

Yeah, me neither, until I came across Ericka.

Apparently there's big money to be made in trucking, but like any other side hustle, there's some strategy, risk, and nuance to the business.

Ericka Williams owns 12 of these giant 18-wheelers, which can generate thousands of dollars a month in profit.

Ericka has gone from delivering pizzas as a side hustle to owning a painting company, to now managing an investment portfolio that includes both real estate and semi-trucks.

If you're interested in real estate, there’s a parallel to consider with this business model. Trucks are assets you can acquire with leverage (meaning other people’s money), and essentially rent it out for weekly or monthly cash flow.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: $1000 a Week Cash Flow ... from a Semi Truck?

Interested in growing a community and building a profitable blog around something you - and most other people - will inevitably go through?

That’s exactly what Katie Emery did when she decided to stop dying her hair after 25 years and transition to natural gray hair.

Kate had questions about the transition, but couldn’t find the answers she wanted online. In fact, the information she found was mostly negative.

So, she decided to start her own blog, KatieGoesPlatinum.com, to provide comprehensive information about gray hair, and to show women that growing out their grays could be fun and empowering.

In just two years Katie has grown her blog to an average of $6,000 a month in revenue. She’s also grown a passionate community and is helping other women go through the transition to natural gray hair.

Ready to start a blog of your own? My free video course will help you get online quickly and affordably.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: $6k a Month Blogging About Gray Hair

Our annual Friendsgiving celebration has been put on pause this year, but one tradition lives on.

This is year 3 of a special Thanksgiving Side Hustle Show episode showcasing creative side hustle ideas that make real money.

If you like this format, I’d love for you to check out the first two in this series -- those are episodes 310 and 363 -- both are in the Top 10 all-time most popular episodes.

Ready? Let's do it!

Full Show Notes: 11 Creative Side Hustles That Make Real Money

Zero to 55k subscribers and $50k in revenue in 8 months?

That’s exactly what Codie Sanchez with Contrarian Thinking, her newsletter about investing and entrepreneurship.

Codie's a former journalist, turned institutional investor, turned online business owner. 

I've thought about content businesses mostly in the context of blogging, podcasting, or video -- but what if email is your content channel?

After all, the challenge that many other content channels face is "how to get people to join your list."

Codie's model, in a true "contrarian" way, cuts out that middleman.

This episode is sure to have you thinking a little differently about how you approach building an audience and building an online business.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: Zero to $50k: How to Grow and Monetize an Email Newsletter

What little purchases or changes have you made that had an outsized impact on your overall happiness?

This is something of a sport in our house.

Bryn and I kind of joke that we have this mission to optimize everything, whether that’s the:

We've taken great joy in these incremental improvements. We often ask ourselves, “How can we make this 1% better?”

If we can make those 1% improvements consistently over time, they start to compound and we’re way better off than when we started.

I put the call out to several friends and listeners:

What little life upgrade or optimization have you made recently -- with great results?

Tune in to hear 21 little life upgrades -- the habits, products, or tools that don't cost a lot of time or money, but make a big impact.

Full Show Notes: 21 Little Life Upgrades: Small Optimizations to Improve Your Days

We’re in the middle of a massive labor shift from employees to entrepreneurs.

In this episode, I want to try and equip you with some skills, frameworks, and mindsets to help navigate that shift.

If you want to make money online, there are a million ways to get it done, but it usually boils down to one thing: helping people.

To help me walk through this stuff I’m joined by Austin L. Church.

Austin’s a writer, brand consultant, and online entrepreneur. He’s been making his living online for the last 12 years, with some of the exact strategies we’re talking about today.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: Make Money Online: The Freelance Business Blueprint

Want to get started with an online business but don’t feel like you’re an expert in anything?

Maybe you’ve started a business but you’re struggling to monetize it?

A few short years ago, Shane Sams and his wife Jocelyn were school teachers.

In their off-hours, they built several successful online businesses, including ElementaryLibrarian.com, which sold for over $1 million in 2017.

Today they run FlippedLifestyle.com along with the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, to help others try and replicate the success they’ve had online, and specifically take advantage of the membership model.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: Minimum Viable Memberships: Build a Recurring Revenue Online Business

Josh Belk is a full-time college student, he works full-time in web design, and in what little spare time, he’s started a $6,000 a month mobile detailing business with his younger brother.

This idea came about when Josh connected the dots between obsession and opportunity.

On the obsession side, Josh would always see his brother out in the driveway cleaning his car.

On the opportunity side, he received an email about business ideas anyone could start, and mobile car washing was one of them.

He asked his brother if he wanted to team up to see if they could make some money cleaning cars -- and with that, Belk Mobile Detailing was born.

Tune in to hear to the full podcast episode to hear how the pair:

Full Show Notes: How a Couple College Students Started a $6000 a Month Side Hustle

How can you instill the skills and values of innovation and entrepreneurship in kids?

And if you can teach it to kids, why can’t you teach it to grownups?

This week I’m joined by Don Wettrick, an award-winning middle school, and high school teacher and the CEO and co-founder of StartEdUp, which has a mission to empower students and teachers to apply innovation and entrepreneurship in the classroom.

He’s author of Pure Genius: Building a Culture of Innovation and Taking 20% Time to the Next Level, and also the host of the StartEd Up Podcast.

Tune in to hear:

Full Show Notes: Raising Innovative and Entrepreneurial Kids: The Next Generation of Problem Solvers