DNP Unscripted 009: How to Master the Side Hustle with Nick Loper from the Side Hustle Podcast

Dr. Pagenta: Dr. Nurse Podcast fam, welcome to the Dr. Nurse Podcast. I’m so happy that you decided to join me today. Today we are talking with Nick Loper. He helps people earn money outside of their day jobs. He’s an author and online entrepreneur and the host of the award-winning show, side Hustle Show podcast, which features new part-time business ideas.

Each week as chief side hustler at the side hustle nation.com. He loves deconstructing the tactics and the strategies behind building extra income, which you guys know if you’ve been listening to my podcast at all, that I’m all about it. Welcome Nick to the podcast.

Nick Loper:  You bet. Thanks for having me.

Dr. Pagenta: I am so excited to talk to you today. I can’t even contain it. I first wanted to just kind of have you describe to my listeners kind of your story, how you see yourself, kind of what you envision or you kind of, how you see your role in day-to-day life.

Nick Loper: Oh my gosh. Well, husband and father, first and foremost. And then outside of that I’ve been doing this podcast for like 10 years, and that’s just nuts to me.

It started as a $60 mic in the corner of the living room and like, you know, has anybody gotta tune into this stuff? And it has. I mean, it was completely life-changing experiment. It took a long time to be fair, but it’s been an absolute blast to kind of source and share these incredible side hustle stories, and that’s what most of it is, is me pointing the mic at other people and saying, well, How’d you come up with that idea?

How’d you build that? How’d you get customers for that? How’d you figure out how much to charge? How did you grow that thing? All that stuff was driven by my curiosity in the early days, and it was fascinating, and it still is now 550 something episodes later. It’s incredible.

Dr. Pagenta: So, yeah, so I, I heard about you through your podcast and then I wanted to do my own research and so I bought your book, the Side Hustle which I just Oh, wow.

Love. I read it. I love it. I think it’s fantastic. It’s a really great place to start for someone that’s looking to generate a thousand dollars a month or more from working a side game on your off time and as a nurse. And nurse practitioners, a lot of us do shift work, and so we have time off. And so what I’ve been noticing through different conversations, Nick, is that when nurses get quiet and they spend a little time alone and they let their souls talk to them, they start creating and they’ve been able to create some really incredible businesses and merchandise, product type businesses and a lot of stuff that’s been really neat on top of using our nursing skills to create.

You know, me, medi, you know healthcare, healthcare related businesses as well. So I, I thought we could chat a little bit today, if you wouldn’t mind, kind of describe how a nurse can get started with a side hustle and kind of where you would take someone if they were like, all right, Nick, I wanna jump into the side hustle game.

Nick Loper: Where do I even start? Yeah, so the common advice is to, you know, draw that ideal Venn diagram of your, you know, skills in one box, your hobbies and interests in the next box, and then you know what you’ve been paid to do and you know what you would love to do. And like the magical overlapping center is like, oh, that’s the ideal side hustle for you.

And what we found is for a lot of people, There’s no overlap. It’s like, well, my skills are over here. My interested hobbies are over here, and like what people would pay me to do is like off in this other circle. And it’s like, well, well then what? And so instead, I think it makes more sense to start with pains and problems.

And actually just this morning recorded an episode with a friend of mine on just like business idea brain dump. Like, look, here’s, you know, a couple dozen. Business ideas that, that auto exist in the world or that you could start like, and almost all of them were born out of our own pains and problems with kids like trying to sign up for summer camps or, you know, he, he, he threw out like the pet discouragement service.

Like, oh, the kids really want a dog. I want the service that like, has a really difficult to train dog and they just like, shows you how hard this is actually gonna be. And so just throwing out ideas that auto exist into the world, but a lot of ’em born from pains and problems and so, Normally like to be.

A little more, you know, optimistic. But for this exercise, you gotta put on your, your pessimist hat and just take notice of all of the annoyances that happened in your day-to-day life. Everything that your spouse or partner is complaining to you about. Everything your kids are complaining to you about, everything your peers, neighbors, coworkers, like you start to pick up on like, oh, everybody seems to be griping about this thing, or This is a pain for me.

And then, You could turn, because on the other side, like that’s what I typically spend money on, is like, make, make this pain go away. Like, so like I was trying to strip wallpaper off our bathroom, it’s like, ah, I think my time is probably better spent. So like going on TaskRabbit and like finding like somebody else could come and do this for me for a couple hours.

Yeah. But like on the other side of those pains and problems is often a business idea. I think it’s easier to sell. Those types of you know, easier to sell pain pills than it is to sell vitamins, right? Like, I wanna, Ooh, ooh, my back, my back hurts. I need this to stop right now. Versus like, okay, how can I prevent this from happening in the future?

Like, ah, it’s, it’s not urgent yet, but if you can be on the pain side a little bit easier to get started and find customers that way.

Dr. Pagenta: Yeah, I think that’s really cool what you’re, what you’re describing, and what I talk a lot about in my podcast is gap closers. So finding something that needs to be filled, finding a problem that needs to be fixed, these are things that you can easily do by just paying attention to the world around you.

And as nurses, we’re in the trenches with our patients. We see these things happening, and we have a unique front row. To finding simple problems, and there’s a lot of nurse inventors that have, again, come up with different fixes and been able to, you know, invent things for that exact thing that you’re describing of a problem.

But again, for the nurse that’s just like, Hey, listen, I wanna start, you know, possibly a coaching business or, you know, I went through and wrote down a bunch of things that you could do as a side hustle as a nurse, and so we talked about nurse, writer, nurse blogger, nurse, podcast, YouTube, digital products, merchandise.

There’s a lot of things that you can get into as a nurse, and one of the things that a lot of nurses are also super interested in is creating passive income, which I actually feel like is this unicorn that we’re all chasing that doesn’t exist cuz I think everything has to be managed. I don’t think that you ever get away with just.

Something completely passive. You have to have your hand in everything. It’s just a matter of how much and then how much you know time do you have to put on the four end to kind of get that passivity in the back end. So what would you recommend for a nurse that’s like, okay, so I hear you find a, find a problem, fix it.

How do I then get that to continue to pay me and, and, and not require me to have to work on it all the time? Or is like, like I’m saying, is that a myth? Is that something that doesn’t exist?

Nick Loper: It’s I mean, that’s one of the great debates of online business, like is, is passive income real? And it’s like the, there’s the irony.

I was thinking about this in the shower the other day. It’s like, I don’t get paid. All the best thoughts. Yeah, all the best thoughts come in the shower. Like, I don’t get paid while I’m working so I can get paid. While I’m not working and it’s like this kind of the weird backwards Yeah. Paradox, but yeah, it’s like trying to set up, so passive income comes in probably four different flavors, right?

There’s the, you know, I can go buy an income producing asset, I can buy a rental house, or I can buy a dividend paying stock, right? Problem is, you know, takes money to make money. The other option is like, well I can go out and build a passive income or an income generating asset, you know, a digital product that, you know, create once, sell it over and over again.

I think that one. Is probably the most viable, like low, low startup costs, like not a lot of investment aside from your time to go out and try and build this thing. And we can talk about different marketing channels for those. Passive income method number three is to like rent out an asset that you already have or could you acquire?

Like we had a guy, high school teacher who was renting out portable hot tubs, and I was like, this is fascinating. He, he sent me a message on Facebook. He’s like, Nick you talked about. Some unconventional rental business. Like maybe it was a guy had like a bounce house you know, inflatable party business or something.

Yeah. And he’s like, I got one for you. I do pot hot tubs. It’s like really hot tubs. Like, how does that work? You know, how, what do you keep ’em? He’s like, dude, I, you know, I’ve got a fleet of like 25 of these things. They’re always rented out, you know? And he had this whole formula, well you, wow. Buy ’em used for this price and you rent ’em for this price per week or per month.

It’s like, wow, super cool. He had this whole process for sanitizing and everything. So that was number three. Kinda like renting out this asset, like another way to get paid over and over again. And his wasn’t. Totally passive cuz you’re like, well I gotta go deliver this thing. Yeah. I gotta, gotta set it up for the customer and all that that Sure.

And then number four would be reverse passive income. Like what are the expenses that I can cut out, the recurring expenses that I can cut out and save money on a on a recurring basis. Those would be the four types of passive income, but we can go back to that, you know, creating these digital assets.

We had John Haws on the show probably like 2016 timeframe. He now runs nursing.com. He’s like, made some investments in this domain name over the course of several years. But he started, I wanna say, when he was still a nursing student, like creating these. Study guides and putting them up on Amazon.

And he got very specific in, you know, these nursing study guides and had like 25 or 30 titles by the end of this year. He was making money from book royalties. He created like a medications app, like help you memorize, you know, what medications solved, what problems, what are their, you know, don’t mix with this and all the kind of different things that you need to know for the, for the testing and for patient care.

And his was an example of, you know, kind of turning. What was happening in his life, you know, I’ve gotta study for this stuff anyway, so I’ll go create the digital product related to it. Yeah. And turning that into some asset down the road. And he’s built huge, huge community and website on the back. Wow.

Of those early early days. But it doesn’t have to be in the nursing field either. It could be you know, around any, any topic that you’re somewhat curious about. And I say that just because. I think that’s what fuels you to keep going when you don’t see the immediate results right away. Yeah, that’s what it was for me.

Some of my best content has come from that point of curiosity.

Dr. Pagenta: Yeah. I have two things to say. First, you have a quiz online that I love. I took the quiz on your website where basically you. You asked a series of questions like, what amount of time do you have? What are you interested in? You asked these very poignant, specific questions about kind of what you’re looking for from a side hustle, and then you spit out with this quiz.

Examples of what you can be doing based on what you’ve got allotment in your time for, which I thought was really helpful and a great place to start for a nurse that’s maybe wondering what else could you be doing? Another thing that you said that I agree with is sometimes your side hustle doesn’t and maybe shouldn’t be in what you do.

And I think the reason why I say that is because of nurse burnout, right? Yeah. So we’ve got a lot of nurses that are exhausted and. They’re wanting to do something else. I mean, they are leaving the bedside in droves. We are gonna come in, we’re gonna be having a, we had a nursing crisis before. Mm-hmm.

You know, covid 19. Now after the pandemic, we have even more nurses that are like, I’m outta here. Like, I don’t wanna do this anymore. The joy and the love of what I was doing, I don’t wanna do anymore. And what I’ve been finding is that working part-time has been something that more and more nurses are considering and wanting to do, which then frees up that space.

Outside of that, outside of work for you to go and do something else that you really, really enjoy. And so that’s the reason why I also feel like what you’re offering and what you are talking about is so poignant because what if you can go and create something else, not even related to nursing, that you’re like, I wanna sell hot tubs.

And you enjoy selling hot tubs and you’re a nurse on the weekends being like, why not? Why not? And what if That is the balance that strikes the balance for you to make really good money on the side, but then also keep your foot in the door with nursing and not get burned out. Because again, I think a lot of nurses go into nursing for that with the, with the heart of I want to help people.

And what we end up doing is we end up burning them out and it’s not, it’s not conducive to keeping good nurses like we need, like nursing care is everything. I just had a baby two months ago. The nurses made the difference. Like the doctor was in there for 45 minutes, he was gone. You know, but yet the nurse, the nursing care was, what was there day, you know, moment by moment, second by second.

Yeah. And so we need good nurses. We can’t, we can’t burn them out. But we, I think we need to create kind of this hybrid system where we’ve got nurses that are, you know, working from overflow and not from deficit, you know?

Nick Loper: Yeah. And so that’s really nurses. Yeah. Those l and d nurses are like, they’re the best.

Yeah. Yeah, they’re saint. Yeah. Somebody pointed out to me like, well, they’re the only people in the hospital that get to like work with happy people, like people who are excited to be there. I was like, oh, I never thought of it that way. Cause I mean, just the patient’s required, like at our, just at our kids’ doctor’s appointment, he’s like crawling up the wall in fear, out of getting the shot and the patience of a saint.

This lady just, yeah. Look, it’s, you know, and she just waited while he just threw his tantrum. I was like, oh my God, this is so embarrassing. But totally. I, I get, get that. Yeah. Where do you, so where do you wanna go? So there’s lots of service-based options, which, you know, doesn’t really get you out of that time for money predicament.

Yeah. But could also be a bridge. To say yeah, I’m still, I’m spending my off hours on this side hustle in kind of a service-based business. You know, maybe it’s coaching, maybe it’s consulting, maybe it’s, you know, being a doula. Maybe it’s doing C P R instructions, some of these ideas from your list, but it, you know, it kind of.

Empowers you in a way to say like, well, I’m more than my paycheck, or I have the ability to earn beyond just at the end of my shift. Does that, does that make sense?

Dr. Pagenta: Yes, a hundred percent. I agree. And that’s what I’ve found through building my podcast and building my other streams of income. So I have an Etsy shop that I’ve been creating digital content I’ve actually created with another company.

We were able to partner up with another company and create booklets with digital information that helps nurses out at their clinical sites. So we partnered up with a company to do that and then we kept the rights over the book so that we could go and sell them on our digital site as well.

So we’re getting a little bit of revenue from that. And so I’m just kind of building up these little streams, kind of like what you’re saying. And I know. You’ve got almost, is it 17 streams of income coming in? Something? I mean, something like that. Something insane. So again, I think it’d be interesting to hear how you kind of added on streams and how you went like, okay, so I’m gonna go ahead and take this on because I think what I’m struggling with is just.

The amount of time as a, as a mom, and you know this as a dad, you know, I’m trading time with my children for the work that I’m doing that sometimes isn’t paid, and it’s really hard to stay motivated. What are some things that you do? How do you decipher like, okay, I’m getting into this one. I’m not getting into this, I’m gonna build this, or I’m, how do you choose what you end up pouring your time into?

Nick Loper: Gosh, it’s, it’s so hard. And that’s, that’s the trade off. I was like, well, what am I, what am I really doing this for? Like what’s the, what’s the end game here? And one of the, you know, exercises that I’ll have people go through is they’re evaluating different side hustle ideas. Like, I’m trying to choose between these five things, like try and project out.

Three to five years of a reasonable degree of success. And you can find somebody who has walked that path and is a little bit ahead of you and you can kind of see, well, what does their day-to-day look like? Are they still putting in 80 hour weeks or have they got a little more time freedom and flexibility?

And if I kind of followed the same path and had a. Similar degree of success, like, okay, would that be a win for me? Because a lot of side hustles, either it doesn’t scale or some of them don’t scale the way that you might like, and you’re like, well, I could do this today and I might be still doing the same thing in three to five years and that, does that really get me where I want to go?

And the answer might be no. It’s like, okay, I gotta try. Choose a different path. From the beginning. Now, I don’t want that to cripple you from taking any action at the beginning cuz it’s like you know, the, one of the most common success traits of the 500 something guests saw the Side Hustle show is you know, This bias towards action and, you know, taking step one, even if they didn’t know steps two through 10, like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna see what kind of reaction this gets in the market.

If, if it works, great. If it doesn’t, okay, I’m gonna, you know, pivot over to this other thing. I think there’s you know, a lot of people get stuck on the sidelines and I don’t want to have people stuck there too. It’s like there’s, you know, there’s a benefit from any action, even if it doesn’t necessarily generate the results you’re hoping for right away.

Dr. Pagenta: Yeah, I read that in the last chapter of your book where you say that’s the number one thing that all the entrepreneurs just kept saying repeatedly was to just get started and to not be afraid of taking that shot. And you can, you wrote that. You will figure it. So that ends up leading to more opportunities, which is something I actually wanted to talk about too, because it was through the podcast that I reached out to this other company and I said, Hey, do you wanna sponsor my podcast?

This is what it’s about. And through that conversation with him, He, he and I, we recorded a podcast together and I said something during the podcast and he was like, I like that. I wanna come back to that. And I was like, okay. So we came back to it later and it ended up being, the thing that me and my girlfriend have been creating for the last six months for this company has been these digital booklets.

And it was literally just from the conversation that we had on the podcast. And so I think it’s very true that even though, yes, I didn’t have a plan, I wasn’t like, oh, this is gonna land me this thing. It did bring about other opportunities that were, I was able to actually generate income from that conversation aside from my podcast.

So that was one of the things that I found really, you know, kind of cool. And that you, you kind of write, you know, starting small, these low risk Side hustles, I think are really great because it’s just such a low bar. It’s such a low barrier to entry. And then as long as you just kind of keep motivated and keep working at it, and you just keep trying.

I, I’ve, I had this, this, this thing where I kind of go back to this scripture that I love where it says, you know, all work leads to something, all toil leads to profit. And so when I read that I was like, oh, so like, I can work at something and eventually this blind squirrel will find a nut. Like that’s kind of what I began to realize is that like you just have to keep at it.

And I know that sounds kind of crazy, but maybe that’s, you know, putting mantras up all over around you so you can just go like, okay, I gotta keep going. I gotta keep going cuz I’ve been doing a podcast now. Since it’s been two and a half years I’ve been podcasting. My son’s almost four. I started when he was maybe six months, seven months old.

So like, yeah, it’s been, it’s been a grind. It’s been a struggle there. I don’t get paid for this. I don’t have a, you know, all these different things and so you just have to keep going. And then you do have a book, correct? That. You know, if a podcaster, or sorry, a podcaster, a sod hustler, is kind of wanting the progress or the journal like to kind of journal through, how do I keep going?

You know, you offer them something as well, correct?

Nick Loper: Yeah. Several different books. So the one you held up earlier was the Side Hustle was kind of a broad introduction. To side hustles. You know, here are the three main business models, product, service, audience-based businesses that you could start, you know, here’s some examples.

Under each of those the Progress Journal is kind of my personal productivity journal. It’s best if you have. Something that you’re working on. Like I tend to work best in kind of like short-term project-based sprints where I could set myself a four week deadline. And I’m, I’m actually kind of going back through and kind of revisiting the structure cause it is very rigid where like, here’s a four week, you know project sprint.

And it’s like, well if your project takes longer then, you know, kind of, it spills over into the next thing. And so it’s, it’s a kind of a tight structure. But again, that’s the progress journal and it kind of tracks the daily habits that I know when I’m doing them consistently. I like. I feel better, like I feel like I won the day and it’s just sometimes some simple habits of, you know, naming my top three priorities for tomorrow, the night before.

And if I check those off in, like, you know, in practice trying to, trying to at least check off the first one before Yeah. Going into email and like reactive mode. Like, okay, I’m gonna, I’m gonna move the ball forward on my own agenda. And that’s huge for side hustlers. Like, well, we all have limited time, but if I can carve out a half an hour here, 15 minutes there, like just.

Trying to build that positive momentum. Super, super important. Just a gratitude habit, which is, is just, you know, scientifically shown to, you know, yes. Help you be a happier person. Yes. And then just trying to keep an eye on, you know, what are the, what are the key metrics in this business, in this sign, hustle, and, you know, focusing on almost.

You know, process goals versus outcome goals, especially early on, like, I’m gonna produce the podcast versus I’m gonna get 10,000 listeners, or I’m going to, you know, write 500 words for my website versus, you know, I’m gonna get a million, you know, visitors from Google or something. Like trying to think of the, what are the process goals that will eventually lead to the outcome?

Yeah.

Dr. Pagenta: One of thing I was thinking about when you were talking was about your, your son and you have a son, correct?

Nick Loper: Yeah, yeah. Two boys, they’re 17 and five, two

Dr. Pagenta: boys, seven and five. And you also are, do you. So with your income, have you been able to, you’ve been able to walk away from your nine to five and kind of create that financial freedom that we’re all looking for as nurse side hustlers.

Is that something that you’ve

Nick Loper: been able to do? Yeah, I’ve been really grateful to have been self-employed actually since 2008. My original side hustle was a comparison shopping site for footwear, which is a super random niche, but I would tell you where you could get the best price at your next pair of shoes and would earn affiliate commissions from SAOs, from Amazon, from all these other online footwear retailers.

And so that was a thing that let me quit my corporate job. And so I was running that full-time and starting. Other random side projects, including the Side Hustle show on the side from that, and then kind of within a year and a half, like, well, this side Hustle stuff is a lot more fun to work on than this random shoe business.

That became the, the main focus. Yeah.

Dr. Pagenta: One of the things I think was you were talking too, is if you start get, if, if you just start getting working. Then what you will find is you may be able, you may stumble upon the thing that you really do enjoy. So again, I think it goes back to what you were saying about just getting started on something because what you, it, it will morph.

It could possibly morph into something different that you didn’t even realize. Like you said, starting off in shoes and now being, you know, this side hustle. Host, podcast owner and with all the other things that you’re doing with your books. And I’m assuming, do you have rental property as well?

Nick Loper: I don’t, I can’t afford.

Oh, okay. We got kind of burned by like direct ownership in a lot of ways. Like I’m, yeah, I’m all for. You know, rental real estate and you know, as, as a, as a fast track to financial independence, right? You got like pretty much three paths. You can do the traditional investment path, and this is like the fire community of, oh, I just saved 25 times my annual expenses in my.

You know, retirement accounts or my, you know, even my taxable investment accounts. Like okay, you know, historically the math says I can withdraw 4% a year. I’m, I’m roughly gonna be okay. So that’s method number one. Like, it works if you have a high income and low expenses, otherwise it’s like you’re probably never gonna get there.

Number two is, is real estate, especially cuz it can be leveraged and. And has lots of tax advantages too. And then the third way is the entrepreneurial path. Like, okay, how do I build my own income generating assets through the business asset class and go that way? So that’s been the path that we chose to financial independence.

Dr. Pagenta: Gotcha. My last question of the podcast, Would you share with my, again nurse that’s like, all right, so I hear everything. I wanna get started. You know, where can they go to see what you’re about? What can they do to, you know, hear your Side Hustle podcast? Where, tell ’em where, where you’re located.

Nick Loper:  Yeah, we’d love to have you tune into the Side Hustle Show you find it on any podcast app. If you hit up hustle show, I’ll be able to a personalized playlist for what episodes might be most pertinent to you based on the answers to a few short, multiple choice questions. You can add that to your device if you’re kind of in the idea agnostic phase.

You just wanna see what. What is out there? I mean, there’s hundreds of episodes. Of course, you don’t take your pick, choose your own adventure, but side hustle nation.com/ideas is my big laundry list of part-time business ideas. There’s no opt-in required over there, and so my hope is that helps people get the creative juices flow in a bit.

Dr. Pagenta: Fantastic. Well thanks Nick for coming onto the podcast. Thanks for chatting with me and telling my audience your story and where they can find you and how you can help them. Cuz that’s really what I wanna do. I wanna help nurses, I wanna set ’em free. And yeah, I think this is a great place to start is kind of in this hybrid workspace for nursing cuz we, we can’t lose good nurses.

That’s what’s happening. And I think if they had something that brought them joy that they could maybe get paid to do as well. That would be kind of the, the, the sweet spot is what I’d like to call it. So, yes. All righty guys. Thanks for listening in. As always, don’t forget to enjoy the journey of your career.