The Side Hustle Show - Full Episodes - 17 Business Ideas Free for the Taking!

What's up, what's up Nick Lover here? Welcome to the side hustle show because you're nine to five and may make you a living, but you're five to nine and makes you alive. Today, we're given away a bunch of business ideas. And to help me do it is my good friend Steve Chu.

Steve is a serial entrepreneur who runs a seven figure e-commerce business at BumblebeeLinens.com. A seven figure blog and podcast at my wife quit her job.com and also a conference in the e-commerce space called Sellers Summit. It's been probably seven years, seven, eight years since Steve has been on the podcast. So long overdue to get him back and kind of spitball and brainstorm on some different ideas that we think should exist in the world or maybe they already do, which is not aware of them from a personal pain points or just ideas that we think would be kind of cool from personal pain points or frustrations.

And I want to lead off with one that is a frustrating business of mine. And that is when you're checking out on any e-commerce store and maybe you have experience with this from BumblebeeLinens is you see the promo code box and so naturally you open up a new tab and you start searching for store name, promo code or store name coupon code. And invariably the same sites show up at the top like the retail me knots and the coupon cabins of the world. And none of the codes ever actually work.

It's so frustrating. My idea number one is the coupon code site where only codes are verified and they actually work. And I know affiliate marketing enough to know they just want to set their cookie. They just want to get the last click so they get their commission.

It doesn't matter if the code works or not. But as a user, it's so frustrating. I think Google would start to reward the site that actually has a decent user experience and actually delivers what they promise in those headlines. So that's idea number one for me.

What's your take on that? So I love how you started with this one because I do have a lot of experience with this. So first off, to prevent this from happening, I usually actually hide the coupon code field, you actually have to click on it to even display it. So it prevents people from going off.

But in answer to your question, we have this issue all the time. People go off to coupon sites and their bogus coupons and then they get mad at us as a store when that happens. So my solution to that problem and it's it's tangential to your solution is I have a special coupon page for my own store that I put out that ranks number one for coupons for our store. And it says real coupons for bumblebee linens that will actually work.

So that's how we solve that problem. But in answer to your question, there's all these tools, right? That it's like a Chrome plugin. It literally tries like a million coupon codes kind of on the side.

I think honey is like the most popular one, right? Yeah, I use like a capital one shopping for that. And sometimes it actually does save you money and then get you a little percentage cash back sometimes too, which is cool. But that's almost what you need is like the programmatic solution to see what's actually going to work.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the first thing that I do when I check out at a site too and I see that coupon code field. And I'm pretty sure it can be done, right? All you got to do is just have a tool that just goes around to all the stores and the database and then just trial the codes and just make sure they're verified.

I don't know why they don't do that. Those sites like retail me not. Maybe you start doing it like in a specific niche first and say like, okay, we're going to dominate real coupon codes for even like web hosting or something like in something where you know, there maybe there's not that many providers. You don't have to do this across 5,000 different e-commerce stores.

You can say like, okay, these are you start with a specific niche or something. Maybe that would be a compelling offer. Maybe it's an add-on to a site that already has product reviews in a specific niche or something. But that's something that is definitely a pain point whenever I'm shopping online.

Like, it eventually just give up and pay full price because it allows some at a certain point, it's not worth the time it takes to go and dig 20 pages deep to try and find something that really works. You know what some people do is some stores give out coupons if you've abandoned their cart. So some people will start check out and then wait and make the purchase the next day. I hope so getting that coupon code.

Yeah, the abandoned cart email automation. Exactly. Yeah. Since you start out with e-con, let me just start out with a pain point here.

And this applies to anyone who has a website, a WordPress site, Shopify store, whatever. When you install like a plug-in on your site and you uninstall it, sometimes not everything gets uninstalled. And this is kind of malicious on behalf of some companies. Some companies leave behind this code that allows them to track the visitors to your website even though you've uninstalled the plug-in.

So in this recently plagued a couple of students in my class. So if there was some service that just makes sure that everything was uninstalled, that would be a pretty useful thing for anyone who's like doing any sort of online stuff. So kind of like a database or WordPress cleanup service essentially like make sure you're running the code as lean and clean as possible. Or just when you uninstall something, you just make sure it's uninstalled.

I mean, the unfortunate reality is, and most people don't know this actually, but little bits of code are left behind. Yeah. And then information is actually sold off, which is the scary part. All right.

So you need another plug-in to make sure it's a truly uninstalled for that other plug-in. Exactly. I didn't mean to start out like the two technical solutions at the front, but I was just piggybacking on your e-commerce one, start out with. That's all good.

I'll do another one kind of in the online space. And this is something that has been top of mind as my wife and I have recently moved. We're about a year into our new house. And so she's like big into, well, what kind of furniture should we need at this couch done really do it for maybe more?

It's from 10 or 15 years ago. How do we upgrade some of the stuff that we have? And so she's looking at, you know, pottery barn and craten barrel and West Elm, which I would consider like higher end stores. And I'm like, we have young kids.

We can't have nice things. It's just going to get destroyed. And so I want to find the Ikea or Wayfair or Target, like equivalent or alternative to these. I think this actually could be a compelling affiliate site to say like, here's the high end stuff or here's the medium high end stuff.

Here's what it costs. Here's like, you know, the features and benefits of that. Here's something that looks similar. And I think you get a bunch of traffic from Pinterest.

I think you get a bunch of traffic from even SEO, Google, like, you know, this product versus this product, long tail search and cash in on affiliate commissions, even though on those heights, like, you know, those programs are typically in though, you know, one to 5% affiliate commission range, but still on a $2,000 item or a multi hundred dollar item. I think that stuff starts to add up commission wise with some traffic volume. Or you can do what Asians do and just wrap the whole thing in plastic. And then it'll just last forever.

In fact, that might even be a good business, right? You want your furniture to last forever, just hire someone to just wrap the whole thing in plastic. But an answer to your idea, actually, there are companies, it turns out, and the only reason I know this is because we bought furniture, when we were in your situation, when we had young kids, there's like a handful of furniture places, I think in North Carolina, I want to say that actually make the furniture for Crane Barrel and those people. So you can actually buy directly from them at drastically reduced prices.

And it's the same furniture, it's just not branded under their thing. So yeah. Okay, that would be the equivalent of like the private label product at the store or the store brand products at Safeway or something. Correct.

The only downside, because I think we ordered from there, is that it takes a long time for the furniture to be fabricated. I think we waited like two months for it or something like that. Very good. And that was idea number three for me.

In a new affiliate niche, that would be something that would be compelling for me, just because you know, relatively evergreen demand with relatively longer shelf life products. They're not changing out every season like I was doing in the footwear niche and in high ticket sales. So it doesn't take necessarily a huge dollar volume. You know, or sell an 80 dollar pair of sneakers and making a commission on that.

Oh, selling a $1,500 couch and collecting it, you know, maybe a commission on that. So that was something that if I was starting a new affiliate project would be on the short list there. That was idea number three. Oh, what's next for you?

All right. So I'm going to switch gears in this one since we've been talking about kids. And my kids are a lot older than yours, Nick. My daughter actually just started high school like yesterday.

In fact, as of the recording. So there are these consultants. And it's important for us for them to get into a good college. There are these consultants that will work with your child to plan their curriculum and everything to give them the best chance of getting in the college that they want.

Of course, they still have to get good grades on their own and everything. But there is a certain track and way of doing things so that, you know, you have a better chance again in the school that you want. However, these services like this one that we were looking at, it costs $12,000 per year. And you're supposed to start from freshman year all the way to junior year, right?

So that's $36,000 of high school. So you get into the college if you're. Yeah, right. They work with your kid all those years, okay?

I did some research into this. I think it'd be pretty easy. Well, maybe not easy, but to put together a web service that's self-serve that just kind of lists like what classes you should take depending on what you want to do and what college you want to go to. And so it's like this gigantic database.

So let's say you want to go to like UW, right? Is that the college where you live? That's right. Go Huskies, for sure.

So UW and I want to go into biology. What classes should I take? I go to this high school. And then it tells me, and then what extracurriculars might be good?

Like what does UW look for and that sort of thing? And then you have this plan. And then you don't have to pay 12 grand to some consultant. Yeah, interesting.

It doesn't, it doesn't seem that complicated. It's been a long time since I was applying to college, but yeah, just, you know, take the challenging classes, do well in them and hope for the best. I don't know, but it's a hard, it's a harder to get in now. Where I live, it's an arms race.

Every single parent has paid for this service for their child. Wow. At least my friend group. And but it just sounds steep, right?

Yeah. Yeah, there's got to be a way around that. You know, our mutual friend, Dr. Ryan Gray, who runs medicalschoolhq.net, I want to say.

But he's got a whole host of podcasts. And so we've crossed paths at lots of podcasting events. He started at an app solution or a web app solution for this specifically for med school admissions to say like here's like, how are you tracking? You know, how are you performing on all these different prerec classes?

And so maybe something similar to that, just a little bit broader in just case, like, you know, elite college admission game plan kind of thing. And yeah, there's, if the one on one service is 12 grand a year, there's plenty of margin to come in and undercut that and even have office hours that you can have some level of one on one time or a group coaching time inside of that too. Totally. Anyone out there creates a service.

I've probably signed up. There you go. Anyone listening? Yeah.

What else you got Nick? All right. And number five for me is what I'm calling a similar web, but for podcasts because as a podcast guest and even as a podcaster, the universe of available stats, well, you know, how many downloads does this show get? How many people actually tune into this show is really hard to come by.

It's really opaque. And that's kind of by virtue of all the different hosting platforms and all the different listening apps. Like it's hard to aggregate this data. And I don't know if it's something that people would have to opt in for, but you can go to similar web or you can go to a trev, and you can get an estimate of how much traffic a website is getting.

And it's like, I would love to see something similar for podcasts like any, even they go down into like demographic data. You know, what are their top keywords? And you know, what are the top pages on their site? It would be really cool to see the same thing for podcasts to say what, you know, what are their top episodes?

You know, where are people tuning in? What types of people are tuning in? Because I get invited onto other shows and that's awesome. But we've had to start implementing kind of a bit of a vetting process to say, well, it has the show published 25, 50 episodes.

Like, are they going to stick around? Do they have a meaningful number of reviews in Apple podcasts or Spotify? Like, are people, you know, is the audience engaged enough to go in and leave a review? Do they have a website?

You know, are they, or they just hosted on anchor? Are they kind of like certain things might be bread flags or certain things might be a check box to say, okay, this might be worth proceeding for. So this is something that I would love to see. I don't know how many people would get used out of it other than podcasters, but it's a growing, it's a growing field, for sure.

I think it's very useful for anyone who wants to sponsor podcasts too, right? I'm shocked that this hasn't been done yet. I mean, I've been podcasting for eight years now. Yeah.

And given that all the other online stuff that we do, Nick, which has incredible stats, I'm surprised that podcasts are so lacking. There must be some reason why people haven't jumped on this. There must be some like technical reason why it's difficult or something like that. I don't know.

Yeah, it'd be cool to see kind of a centralized database. But even for arranging like episode swaps or promo swaps on top of the advertising things, like, okay, you can turn a send a screenshot, but it would be cool to be able to align up with a similar sized show and say, hey, I'll shout you out. You shout me out versus sometimes you're trying to do a promo swap. But it's like, well, this show is five times the size.

And that's not necessarily an equitable swap. So that's I guess where that pain point is coming from for me. Next for you. Since we're talking about podcasts, there's something that I kind of thought of too.

The way you traditionally grow podcasts is you go on someone else's show or you have someone do like a read for your show, right? If somehow that could be like automated and bartered like ahead of time. So like, I go on a site and I say, hey, I want to be mentioned on Nick's show. So you have like just some set thing.

And then like I have like a set recording or like a script and I just pay the money. And then you just read it. You approve it and then you just read it and it's just all automated like that. Have you heard of Audrey?

I think it's Audrey.io. A U D R Y. No. This is a platform I'm planning around with a little bit because it does kind of facilitate those, you know, host red promos.

And also you can upload your own trailer, like your own promo trailer and buy access to these. And they do a little bit to verify that this show gets, you know, 5,000 downloads and this is their price to include these. And this is like their timeline to deliver. So they're attempting to solve that.

The problem is it's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the available podcasts in the universe. And so it's like, well, this is cool, but it would be awesome to see a broader reach there. It's definitely like a chicken and egg problem, right? You got to have a lot of podcasts for people to want to join it.

And you have to have high quality podcasts on there also. Right. It's a chicken egg problem. Yes.

Audrey.io. Yes. Audrey.io. Okay.

Cool. In the meantime, you just have to kind of network, right? With other podcasters in order to make this happen. So I've been meaning to get out to podcast movement, in fact, and just meet some other podcasters.

It's true. I haven't been to that event in a long time. It's challenging. It's like, even you go to FinCon, everybody's in kind of the personal finance space.

And so you have that in common when you roll up to podcast movement, or I went to podcast this year in Orlando, and it was like the standard conversation, hey, nice to meet you. What's your show about? Oh, I talk about true crime for empty nested moms. It's like cool, cool niche, but like, I don't really know what the next step to any sort of collaboration is.

So that's why I find it challenging. It's cool because you bounce ideas off a bunch of different people in a bunch of different niches. That's what's awesome about those podcast events, but it is a little bit more difficult. I found to find people in your space or even kind of in the shoulder spaces.

That's where I say, you know, I've seen some of the biggest benefit and some of the biggest spikes in the growth of the side hustle show is by becoming the side hustle guy in that personal finance space. I never really considered myself a personal finance expert, but a lot of these shows talk about investing, talk about saving money, talk about budgeting, and it's like, oh, it's a natural progression to say, well, at a certain point, you got to address the income side of the equation. Maybe we ought to talk about side hustles. Let's call up Nick.

And so that actually worked really well to grow the show. I'm kind of off a lot of tangent at this point. No, no, I love your show, Nick. I mean, I think you do a great job.

And yeah, you're right. Everyone wants to make more money in side hustles, so the way to go for sure. All right. So I was number five, kind of similar web for podcasts.

Oh, is it my turn? Yeah, go ahead. Oh, that was your thing. OK, let's see.

Let me go down my list. OK, here is one. And again, these are all parenting because my kids are older and they're going off to the high school and stuff. I want a service that you can hire to give like a pep talk to your kid.

So this is what I found. And maybe you've experienced this too, Nick, but my kids don't listen to me. So if I tell them something, it goes and wanting it out the other. But if I were to get someone else who has like authority or credentials in what I want to get a gun, OK, you just have them and you just zoom with them.

Like you bring them on, you say, hey, this guy is like the foremost expert on biology. And he says you should do this. And then they have a short conversation via zoom and then listen to him and not you. I would love that service.

You think it would be like cameo before but I am for kids like you kid celebrities. Does it need to be somebody they would recognize from YouTube or some place? I don't even that'd be better, but it doesn't have to be. The person just has to be in like a position of authority or have credentials, I think.

OK. I don't know if you've experienced, I mean, your kids are still young, right? They're still young. They don't listen to me either, but they, I don't know if they would, I don't know if they would listen to anybody else in a similar way.

Well, let me be an example. I was playing basketball with my kids and one of them was really into basketball. And I was trying to tell her how to shoot a little better. And she's like, did you even play?

And I'm like, well, I mean, I played rec. But if I could get like a basketball coach, I mean, an NBA player would be awesome. But like just basketball coach to come and say the same thing, I think she would listen to him more than me easily. Yeah.

And I think there's definitely something to that. That would be kind of cool to build out and find your, find your network of vetted experts in a variety of fields. And maybe again, you start with one niche and you branch out from there. But again, two-sided marketplace, difficult to find critical mass on both sides, like the expert side and then the demand side, the parent side.

But I think there is something to that for like, how do I get somebody else to say? Probably the same thing. But in a different way or from a different position of authority and get people to pay attention to it. Yeah, because it has to come from someone else.

And Nick, I hope this doesn't happen to you. I just have this feeling it happens to all parents. I think so. I mean, I remember going through it as a teenager myself with my parents.

So I imagine it's just one of those, one of those things. Yeah. All right. The Pepp talk service for kids that is number six expert backed pep talks.

I like that. Number seven for me, this could be an e-commerce thing. I'll get your take on this. So I have a, apparently, I have a normally small head.

And so I have a really hard time finding hats that actually fit and don't come down and hit my ears in a funny way. And the ear, I don't know, my ears stick out. And I don't know if it's a factor of being bald, but like I'd like to wear hats to protect my head from getting sunburned. So two old for wearing like, you know, the fitted new era hats to, to bald to wear like trucker hats because like the mesh in the back would be bad news.

I just, I feel like, because I've seen some, there was a company I came across recently that was doing like, you know, custom fitted jeans or something like where they, you know, take all these measurements and they were, we guarantee you like the custom fitted, like you'll never have a better fitting gene. It's like, okay, somebody ought to do the same thing for hats. I would totally pay for that service. But whenever I search for custom fitted hats, what comes up is like customized fitted hats.

And it's like, well, that's, that's not really what I'm looking for. I was trying to find the right keywords to advertise this thing and come up with the manufacturing capability to get it done. I imagine the technology exists to do this. So the ones that show up right now are ones where you can customize like the design on it.

Yes. And not guys. You know, I'm just thinking, I mean, that would have to be like a custom hat if you want to make it. So would you be willing to pay like hundreds of dollars for it?

I wouldn't pay hundreds, but I would pay probably double or triple what a normal hat would cost just to have something that would be confident that would fit. I mean, I had this Kelly Moore painting hat that I wore like all through college, all through painting and wore for the next 10 years until it was like destroyed, like ran it through the wash one too many times. It just got shredded. And it was like so bummed.

It's like, that was my favorite hat. And I was like trying to replace it ever since I have this like keen footwear hat that I got like from a internship in college that fits pretty well. But it is similarly like getting shredded. And so it's just that I have several hats, but like not very few that actually fit the way that I like.

And so yeah, I would definitely pay for something to have it in the rotation for the next decade. So that Kelly Moore hat was one of the few that fit your head. Yeah. Interesting.

Okay. So it's already out there is what you're saying. I went through. I like to I found all these pictures of me like, Oh, here's me in Paris rocking the Kelly Moore hat.

Here's me at Machu Picchu rocking the Kelly Moore hat. Like trying to get them to like send me another one. And you know, they said, Oh, thanks for rocking our our brand or something like they didn't give me any hat. Yeah.

That sounds surprised that there isn't something out there like that actually. Yeah. I mean, people are doing it. People are doing it for like dress shirts.

People are doing it for jeans. I think there's somebody out there probably is doing it for hats or we'll be doing it for hats in the future. All right. Since we were talking about I was talking about sports earlier.

There's one and it's only because my daughter's really into volleyball also. And I've been working with her like I act as a setter and she hits. But you notice like almost every other sport has a machine that that does stuff like a basketball. There's an automatic machine that returns the ball to you if you make the shot.

As far as I know, there's no like volleyball setting machine. I don't know how many you guys listening out there actually play volleyball. But you just put the machine out there. You just feed it some volleyball and it just sets it for you to hit.

It would seem like pretty obvious that that machine is needed. They have that tennis. Yeah. Right.

A tennis serving machine or like, yeah, I just, okay, I'm going to work my back in. So this machine is just going to spit them at me, you know, for as many balls fit in it. It totally seems like it could be a thing. But I've been looking for this volleyball setting machine and I know it's probably expensive.

But, you know, I'm getting old like when I play volleyball with that, I try to play volleyball with them every weekend. And I can't walk for two days after. So it's a lot of wear and tear in my body. It's definitely a young person sport.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. This was, I don't know if you were there. We were playing basketball before maybe traffic conversion summit or something in San Diego.

It was a wrecked for a week. I don't know. I was just like, never played basketball to begin with. And then like just, I know, let's sprint up and down the court for two hours.

But it was, it was good times. Yes. Well, you don't play basketball because you're tall. I am tall.

So I get like picked early whenever we're doing pickup games and people assume like, oh, it's going to be good. Like, no, I guess I can, I can stand other hoop and like rebound occasionally. But you know, I got to kick it out to somebody else to actually make the shackle and getting older and it being sore from all of these things that shouldn't make you sore. That brings me to my next idea.

This is, and this may exist, but I would love to see kind of a personalized science-backed wellness service. I'll try and explain what I mean by that because I have done wellness effects. I think this blood testing service for the last several years. And it's kind of cool.

It gives you a snapshot of all of your blood levels in certain proteins and cholesterol and stuff. And now having done it, you can kind of see the snapshot and how things progress over time. And then you can book a call with a handful of the partner doctors and stuff that they have through the site. But where it kind of stops short is just like the ongoing, I mean, I guess you could do it every month.

It would get kind of expensive if you did. But just we have no idea what's going on inside our bodies. Like how do we optimize this machine that we rely on to do our work and live our lives at BRBestSelves? It is kind of frustrating in a way to not know, like, so there's the testing side of this.

And then there's the like actionable recommendations in plan side of this in terms of diet, exercise, supplements down to, well, what is the optimal time of day to be taking such and such supplement if you need them? I just really think there's something that would be worth paying for on this front. Like after you reach a certain level of financial stability, where do people want to naturally invest next? They want to invest in their health.

And I think this is something that would be worth looking into at least for me. Does this involve getting blood drawn? It could. The wellness effects definitely does.

And so that's why I tend to do it just like once a year. But if there was a way to, even if it was, you know, my cousin was diabetic. So he'd do like the fingerpricks almost constantly. And then he ultimately had kind of like a machine hooked up to him.

And so maybe there's a way to do it now, like through a patch to get like more real-time data or you could see how certain foods impact your glucose levels or something. I don't know. I just feel like we probably have the technology to do a much better job. One medicine is very good at being reactive and solving problems once they come up, but it would be really cool to see something on the preventative side or the optimization side before those problems tend to crop up.

I would totally pay for that. But that company sounds like something pretty complicated to put together. Yeah. Probably takes them big bucks.

But yeah, I would sign up for that in a heartbeat, especially since I have kids. Like I want to stay alive for them to totally. Until I got grandkids and that sort of thing. So my next idea is like something on the complete opposite spectrum of that.

It's just something that frustrates me. And you can share your experience here. We drink a lot of sparkling water in our house. So we'll go to Costco and we'll pick up those giant 36 packs of Kirkland sparkling water.

And if you look at the can, at least in California, I'm not sure if it's like this in Washington, but you can get five cents back, I think, per can. Yeah. But we're always too lazy to do that. What is it happening is we just we recycle them, of course.

But in the back of my mind, since I'm cheap, that I should be getting five cents back on all of these cans. So the services I was thinking of is just someone who just goes to the neighborhood and picks up your recycling. And they give you like 50% of whatever you're recycling. Okay.

Like a profit share on the refund. Yeah. Yeah. So they just go and just make the rounds in the neighborhood.

You sign up every house on your block. And they just pay you right out. They just give you a monthly thing based on your consumption of recycling. Yeah.

This would be a great business idea for the kids to get involved with. Because we actually did this. I guess we just went to a scrap metal place. Maybe it was a recycling center in Livermore, because we would, you know, we just pick up the cans that people left on the side of the road or like, you know, out in the parking lots or whatever.

And you save them up and we take them in and they would weigh them. And we had like, you know, just a cardboard box size of these things versus, you know, some guy had like garbage cans full of them. And it's like, it's, that's cute. Why don't you go first with your kids?

And we go in, they weigh this stuff and they gave us like $5.50. The kids were thrilled. Like it was like free money. Like we found this money.

We made this money. So I actually think this is really cool. I think this would be a great one to do. And that profit sharing angle is, is kind of a unique way to do it.

Like you look, you're not going to drive to the recycling center. Let's be real. You're not in the curbside thing. That's what everybody does.

But yeah, you paid for it. You paid this, you know, can deposit when you bought this thing. And so here's a way to do that. I like that one.

I was just like coin star. Have you used coin star before? I had this whole article on coin star, like in the very, very early days of my blog, you know, preside oscillation. This is like, you know, an article on Nickloper.com, like from 2009 or something.

And it was like the beautiful business of coin star. Like here, you give us a dollar and we'll give you 90 cents. Like what a fantastic business model. But yeah, no, it's similar.

It's the same thing. You got all this stuff you're reluctant to go to like the bank and get it changed for bills, right? And so you take a little less and you get bills that you can actually use or gift certificate sort of things. Same principle.

Yeah. I think that could be good. I'm going to, I'll pitch that one to the kids because they, you know, they're always like, they're starting to get to that age of like, well, how do we make money? You know, so all fun and games until dad has to drive to the recycling plant every day though.

Yeah. It depends on what kind of volume of of cans that are coming through. It starts to fill up the whole garage. Yeah.

Number, so that was number 10, the neighborhood recycling service with the profit sharing extra incentive. I think that I think a lot of people would do it just to support the kids in the neighborhood. But, you know, if you're going after, you know, business clients or something like, you know, may, you know, we'll give you a little bit of kick back from what we collect from your area. And then you have some accounting complexity there.

But I think that would be a cool incentive to get people to participate there. Number 11 for me is what I'm calling class pass for golf. So I have started playing a little bit more golf in the last 12 months, mainly with my dad. This has been his like retirement hobby.

And so occasionally he'll be like, hey, we got an extra spot in our force. So once you come out and hack it up, and say, oh, okay, cool. What's kind of surprising is you don't see so much of like season passes for golf, like you would in skiing or other hobbies, whereas like, okay, I just want to pay once. I want to pay my five, six hundred bucks at the beginning of the season.

And then I'm good. Like it's unlimited. You don't see that so much. And so I was like, well, I wonder, you know, number one, why that is.

And number two, like, could you put something together to aggregate a bunch of participating courses and sell that as a bundle or sell that as almost like a lead gen for these courses? If you like it, you know, come, come play more. I don't know. What do you think about that?

I like that idea. Actually, I'm just trying to think how would work. But yeah, a lot of people want to play in a variety of courses. And this would be a great way to just try them out.

It's kind of like movie pass, too, right? Right. In a way. Yeah, I like this idea.

I wonder how it would be priced. Because every course has its like its own price point, too, right? They're all across the board, at least where I live. Yeah.

Yeah, sometimes it can be very expensive courses and sometimes the more budget-friendly ones. But just kind of surprising to see, you know, if I want to, like if I want to commit to this hobby, similar to skiing, you know, what's the most economical way to do that? Like movie pass. You know, if I know I'm going to do it.

And maybe that's why they golf courses don't do it. Because it's like shoot, you know, only our, you know, heavy users would do that. We're going to be cannibalizing all the greens fees we'd normally be getting. And it's, you know, a high fixed cost, high investment business, like to operate a golf course where you have limited, I mean, similar to airlines, like, you know, if that T-time doesn't get booked, like that's lost revenue for them.

And so maybe it's a way to fill up some of that. You see a little bit with like golf now where the courses use that to fill some of their unsold inventory. But I don't know, maybe another, another angle like for courses that are having a hard time. There's restrictions on like when you can use it and stuff like that to say, you know, not to not cannibalize their peak times that they've already booked at full price.

But I definitely like the idea, actually, yeah, for sure. Because golf is just one of those sports where you, where the scenery matters too, right? And to try to have, you know, a variety of courses to play on would be great. Yeah.

I like that idea a lot actually. All right. I think that would be kind of cool. All right.

Number 12. It's all you. Okay. All right.

So this is one that I just recently had a problem with. So I went on vacation to Florida and I came back and my plants died. So the idea that I'm talking about is you leave your plants at this place. I don't know what it like a plant kennel, I guess.

Okay. Okay. They'll just water it and they'll take care of it for you so that when you come back, like not all of your plants die. Because it's a pain in the butt to have a friend go over just to water your plants, right?

And we came back to take your plants to the plant kennel though. I don't know which is worse. Well no, they would just come by and pick it up. Oh, okay.

Okay. Right? They come by and pick it up. They take care of it for you and then when you come back, you know, your plant is outside your door and alive and well nurtured and well, well, well cared for.

Well cared for. Probably better than you would care for yourself. Yes. The plant kennel.

That's a really interesting one. That's again, you know, given all the startups in the Bay Area, it's almost surprising that doesn't exist yet. That's kind of cool. Because my kids, they were, they nurtured this plant for a long time, you know, because they like taking care of stuff and then we go on vacation because we haven't gone on vacation much due to COVID.

Yeah. And it's like this first longer vacation would come back and their plant, they took care for so long just died. It was heartbreaking actually. Plant kennel, I would have paid the money to avoid the anguish for sure.

What would you pay for it? Probably 100 bucks. Okay. To keep it alive.

Yeah. Keep it alive for a week or however long. Yeah. It depends like if the plant has sentimental value, right?

I mean, some people treat their plants like family members. Yeah. We brought, we brought ours when we moved and it's like, you know, we were happy when they all survived. I don't know.

They, I mean, there's all sorts of studies that say, you know, having house plants makes you, makes you happier, helps clean the internal air and all this stuff. So there might be something to that and talk about super low startup costs. Oh, yeah. Sign up some customers in your neighborhood will be, you know, watch your, similar to watch your house.

Yeah. Easy to, easy to validate that one before without any startup cost. Or the simple solution is just not get your kids plants that require water like just get them cactuses for now on that that works. They can survive a week or two in the case without without dying.

Well that kind of tees up my next one as a new homeowner. I'm thinking of a like home maintenance sold as a monthly membership or sold as a quarterly membership or as a productized service. I'm thinking like one stop shopping for, you know, pest control for, you know, touch up painting for gutter cleaning for just little small. Fixer upper projects or, you know, stuff you probably should be doing, but because you never lived here before, you don't really know how to do, you know, cleaning the furnace filter or the dryer air duct thing like all that stuff I think would be cool to, and maybe there's somebody out there that already does this.

But if you are, if you have a handyman business or something in one of those faces, you know, you could even, you could even play matchmaker if you wanted to say like, look, I'm going to layer my branding on top of this. And then I'm going to have the furnace guy come out. I'm going to have the gutter cleaner come out. I'm going to have the Christmas light guy come out.

And just all that stuff and maybe kind of like combine it with a monthly calendar of like, here's what you ought to be doing at this time to, you know, best protect your house and stuff like that. I don't know. I love this idea. I really do.

Let me just give you an example. So my mom, she's living alone right now and all the stuff just breaks all the time. And I keep telling her like, you have to do this, you have to do that. But then she never keeps track of it.

If this service existed, I would totally sign my mom up for it. And even for myself, I think I'd be willing to, I'm just thinking from both sides, like if you're running this business, perhaps you can sell like monthly credits so they don't abuse it. They can use these credits in any given month. Yeah.

Up to a certain amount for just maintenance tasks. Yeah. And so maybe it's a couple grand a year, three, five grand. I don't know how much it would be and how much it would have to be to make it profitable for the players involved.

But I, you know, I subscribe to a handful of these types of services for the business that I don't use every month, but it's almost like insurance in a way. Like one of them is like a, you know, on demand IT support for the website. Like if something breaks, or if I want to change something, like I can just message this person, like I feel good about having, you know, that's my on demand IT department in a way. And yeah.

For a lot of the stuff, like I, I could walk around the outside of the house. I could see that that is probably going to be a problem to other out. But I don't really know who to call. Like if I had a one phone number to call, like one person to message about this thing, and then they just took care of it.

Like property man, this is like so bad. Like I'm just not a handy person. Like I just, you know, it's like property management for homeowners, right? Yeah.

No, I would totally sign up for this service. I mean, I can think of a number of things with our house right now that I don't even know who to call. I'll give you just a quick example. We have this palm tree in our backyard.

And then recently the palm fronds started dropping. Yeah. But those are like seeds. So now we have like three additional palm trees just growing in random places in our yard.

And we just neglected it for so long that they're pretty big now. We need them removed. I don't even know who to call or what this clearly could have been prevented really on. Yeah.

Before I got to this point. So yeah, exactly. Like as a homeowner, you expect to spend a certain amount on maintenance anyway. Here's just kind of a way to make it hopefully more predictable, right?

Like just, you know, to lie night among your budget instead of, well, I had to replace this thing. And that was three grand. Like surprise expense. I don't know.

Maybe it would help people budget for for some of that stuff that they know they're going to have to spend money on eventually rather than just a state of neglect. That was number 13 for me. So this home maintenance productized service or property management for homeowners. Yeah.

I love it. Nick, how much time we got left for more? Do we have time for a couple more? Absolutely.

We got all the time in the world. All right. So this one is something that I just kind of came up with out of the blue because when you run any sort of social media site or you want social shares and that sort of thing, oftentimes the way you do it is you have a group of friends that just kind of give that initial kick or you can have strangers and that sort of thing. But what often happens is people take more than they give.

So if you had some sort of system where you're sharing other people's posts and that sort of thing, a service that kind of keeps track of everything so that you can't ask for a share unless you've given a share yourself and it just keeps track of all this stuff. Oh, okay. And this could work for anything. It could be like a social media post.

It could be like a blog post. It could even be just any sort of promotion. Kind of like a tit for tat sort of thing. So that's fair across the board.

Right. You see sometimes in certain groups like this share threads like, hey, here's an article I'm trying to promote. But everybody's trying to promote their own stuff, not necessarily go in and share other people's stuff. So it's like some sort of platform like, hey, I could really use some extra eyeballs or some extra likes on this new video or something.

But to be able to ask for that, there's some system where you have to go and return the favor to a handful of other people. I mean, even thinking like, you know, Facebook groups sometimes people just take, take, take and they don't post anything of value. Just even some sort of system where you're providing value and you get points for it that you can redeem later for in case something that you need. Yeah.

And this all happens in the business world all the time kind of verbally. You know, like the, the, the rule of reciprocity, but, you know, it'd be nice to just be able to keep track of this. Yeah. I think so.

I have a couple more before we close out. These are both from the site kernel, which is KERN. Al. The first one I thought was really interesting was a reverse job board, which allows job candidates instead of responding to postings, they, I guess, post a profile of their ideal job.

Like, here's the skills that I have. Here's what I can do. Here's what I'm looking for. And instead companies can go out and say, like, yes, that, that's the person, that's the perfect person that I want for that role.

It kind of flips the script a little bit on the hiring equation. Interesting. I like that. I guess you'd have to have some pretty good credentials to pull that off, right?

Or is it just, is it like a resume or is it like just what you're looking for in the job? Yeah. Essentially, it would be kind of like a glorified resume and skills database. And it'd be difficult, you know, because the companies are the ones paying the hiring, you know, they're paying recruiters, like hiring, filling a position can be expensive.

And so you'd have to have lots of good search filters and stuff to say, oh, you know, here are the, I mean, I'm probably, you know, as a recruiter and indeed do this to a certain extent, like, oh, here are the people we think ought to be a match. I don't know how much of that is public, you know, you kind of encourage them to, you know, maybe they send an email on your behalf and encourage them to apply to your posting versus being more visible about it and saying, like, hey, these are some people you really ought to be proactive and reach out to yourself. Like you see when you're hiring people on Upwork, for example, like, oh, these, these candidates might be a good fit, you know, based on what you have put in, what you're looking for. And so maybe something like that, but for full time stuff versus freelance stuff, like on Upwork.

So it's kind of like a virtual headhunter in a way. Yeah, maybe so. Okay. The last time I hired someone not too long ago, maybe like six months ago, and I used indeed, and Zippercruder, and they do have services kind of like this.

I don't feel like they worked that well because I'm pretty sure it's like algorithmically generated somehow. Yeah. The people that I ended up interviewing, I didn't ultimately hire. I mean, they weren't bad, but they ultimately weren't the people that I hired.

So I think it kind of exists in some shape or form already. Yeah. Yeah. That's a difficult one because it's, yeah, the pool of available candidates is so large.

It's like if I'm the hiring manager, like, I'd almost rather have them come to me, but if you kind of showed me a few, like, oh, based on what you're looking for and the role that they're describing as what they think would be an ideal role, like, okay, maybe there's a way to fit that person into our organization because we really like, based on what they're showing in their profile, we think they're going to be a good fit. Yeah. Maybe it removes one step, like removes part of the initial application or something. I don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I like it though. I like it though.

I'd be curious to see how it works in practice. Yeah. All right. So I think this will be my last one.

This one's a little dark. So what? My wife is a little bit just paranoid about bad stuff happening and just with where the world is gone. And so lately, we've been buying, you know, since the pandemic, actually, we bought like emergency food, emergency supplies.

And I shouldn't classify this as paranoid because I know a lot of people are doing it. Yeah. Just in case something happens and there was a point where we couldn't get what we needed from the grocery stores because everyone just went and bought it all out, right? Right.

So what I propose is instead of just haphazardly going out and buy stuff, there's someone that just comes by and tells you what you need. And in the event, like, let's say, like nuclear war or whatever, like they give you this plan, like this survival plan in case everything were to become like the wild, wild, less someday. I would pay for that service. So it would be the prepping consultant, the survival plan.

It would be like the apocalypse consultant. That's absolutely. The apocalypse consultant. Yeah, you're right.

That is quite dark. But like here's what you need to have. Like here's food supply, water supply. You know, here's how to make sure your generator is going to work like that kind of stuff.

Well, let me tell you, during COVID, at least where I live, it was really hard to get stuff in the supermarket. And there was people just looting, you know, the mall and houses, like literally like 10 miles away, which is kind of close, right? And so what do you do in that case? Like what if they make it to your neighborhood?

Like I would like to have some sort of plan and stuff in place in case that would ever happen. Mainly because I have kids, you know, and I want to just make sure everyone's safe. In the past, I would have thought that this could never happen. But during COVID, you know, it kind of came close to that.

At least, you know, around here. Yeah, there's, I saw it saying, you know, we're nine meals away from anarchy and it's kind of scary. All the supply chain stuff is very interdependent on a lot of stuff working. And I think the early days of COVID showed what happens when even just a few of those dominoes stop working or a few of those gears stop turning.

And it can have some, sometimes some scary consequences. So yeah, that is, it is quite dark, but the apocalypse consultant, the prep consultant definitely some demand for that because like those macro fears, your wife is definitely not alone in that. And something that sometimes keeps me up as well. So I'm not that I've taken a ton of action on it, but yeah, maybe so I need the consultant to give you a little push.

A little bit of hand holding here. And like I'm almost embarrassed by it because like it feels, you feel paranoid about it. And it's like, well, everything's probably going to be fine. So we'll just kick that hand down the road.

But maybe you would feel better if you, if you did take a little bit of proactive action to say, like, okay, well, at least I did what I could do. At least I did. I took a few steps rather than just kind of blindly keeping my head down. We probably shouldn't end on a dark one.

Why didn't you end? Do you have a positive one to end on? I do. I do have one more.

This is also for the kernel. This is number 17 who was listed on kernel as fractional ownership of cash flowing businesses. And what you're probably thinking is like, yeah, that's called the stock market. Like, yeah, it totally is.

But they're describing different kinds of businesses. They're talking about, you know, kind of a local service-based businesses, your locksmiths, your laundromats, your, you know, quote, mom and pop type of businesses that when they sell, they typically sell for, we call it a 3X, you know, annual earnings multiple versus the S&P 500 trading out of 20X annual multiple. And so this is really interesting because you see this happening with, you know, crowdfunded real estate on even now for like single family homes, you can buy like a fractional stake in this cash flowing rental property and stuff. But you can do it for commercial properties through fund rise and a bunch of other platforms.

And so their pitch is, well, you know, how is nobody doing this for these, you know, local, small cash flowing businesses that can kind of roll these up in a way? You buy them and take advantage of kind of these marketplace inefficiencies and distribute cash flow to investors in that way. Lots of SEC hurdles and regulations to try and tackle this, but might be interesting to do even on a small scale. If you can pull some cash together and have some management expertise in running these things, that's the biggest thing is like, well, but that problem has been solved on the real estate front.

Like, oh, we have property managers in place. Like, we have, you know, deal vetters in place. Like, so it's been solved on real estate, but hasn't been solved to my knowledge on this cash flowing local business side of things. I think with cash flowing businesses, it's a little harder, right?

In real estate, I think it's pretty straightforward. You get a property manager and you're all good with a whole bunch of different types of businesses. You almost need different expertise, I think, for each individual type of business, which I think would make it harder. But essentially, that's what a private equity firm does, right?

Yeah, totally. Yeah, started up in, well, like, I'm going to aggregate a bunch of cleaning companies, like where the owners want to sell or something and maybe start in one niche and distribute investors cash back to them and keep the operators in place or put operators in place. And maybe there's even some efficiencies like, well, do we really need three separate owner operators in this one area? It's going to be in the same geographic area.

And that was something that I would be tempted to invest in because of those market inefficiencies. Like, yeah, they take it a lot of time and sweat equity to manage. But if there was a more efficient way to do that somehow, I think that would be kind of cool. Yeah.

So this is essentially like a private equity firm of boring businesses or non-sexy businesses, right? Because those businesses are going to still be around, right? There's always going to be like the laundromat down the corner or I came up with some of the other examples you gave were, but like the post office or like the, like a landscaper or a cleaning service, yeah. Yeah, those are always going to be around because people need those services.

So yeah, I can see that as like a pretty good, like way to just diversify your assets. Yeah, I like that idea. Yeah. I don't know.

And I know a lot of these like crowdfunding sites where they're trying to do this fractional ownership thing. They can only operate in certain states. And there's a lot of regulatory stuff to combat there. But maybe there's an opportunity to start something on a smaller scale without raising venture capital and, you know, spending an arm and a leg on legal fees.

But that was number 17 for me, this fractional ownership of cash flowing businesses. Again, idea, courtesy of kernel, kernel.al on that one. Was it 17 startup business ideas? Steve, any parting thoughts?

Any parting thoughts? No, I think we went through a lot more ideas and I thought we were going to get to, but I think a lot of these are just doable for anybody to be honest with you. Some of the more advanced ones like the medical one might be at a reach for, you know, a lot of people, but a lot of the ones we named are doable. Like you could literally just go out and try these, test it, see if you can make a couple bucks and then just gradually scale if you want to.

Yeah, I love geeking out on this stuff all day. It's like, I feel it exercises this creative muscle. It's like, if you told me, I got to come up with 10 new business ideas. Like that sounds kind of stressful, but you start thinking about your own pains and problems.

Like that's where most of these kind of came from. And of course, you get some inspiration from that Kern, A. Hell site as well. Mywifequitterjob.com, check, check Steve out over there.

It's got an awesome podcast for anybody in the e-commerce online business space. One of my favorites, he does an awesome job with it. Mywifequitterjob.com slash free is where you can get yourself signed up for Steve's free six day e-commerce mini course on how to start a profitable e-commerce business of your own. I have one quick update from the last round of business idea.

Giveaways that we did that was episode 469. If you like this format, go back, check that one out. One of the ideas that we floated in that one was a service I called E-Race Me, which was basically get my information off of all of these like white pages sites on the internet. And shortly after that, I can't remember if this company reached out to me or somebody, you know, tagged me and pointed me to them.

But a founder service called removly.com, remove a LY.com that does exactly that. You pay them an annual fee to do that and they scrub all these different sites and directories for your personal information and they submit those requests to get those removed. So I was like, oh, that was pretty cool. This does exist and somebody is out there building it and making money doing that.

And actually it was interesting. It had a little bit of back and forth with the founder and said they started out proactively targeting, you know, YouTubers and influencers like, hey, you got this big online following. You got a million subscribers on YouTube. Just a lot of large numbers.

A certain percentage of those is going to be crazy, right? You probably don't want your information out there on the internet. And so it was like an easy sell for these people who already had businesses had established the following. And so I thought that was kind of a cool way they got their first customers there.

I'm surprised you're not using that service. We've been using it for like over five years now. No, I did. Yeah, no, I signed up right away.

I don't know, like before. It's been around a little bit. Maybe this is a topic for a different episode, but like I've had some experiences with the crazies in the past. So it signed up immediately.

Yeah, there was this Tim Ferris article from a couple years ago, you know, where he talked about like, let's just say you have 100,000 people paying attention to you online. If you think of a town of 100,000 people, there's going to be, you know, one or two nut jobs. And you know, what do you do about that? And so that kind of inspired that.

I'm sure. Because I would like to go in and you manually submit them. But it's like, it's a game of whack-a-mole, right? Yeah.

You need a service to go and do that stuff for you. Otherwise, it's just super time consuming. But yeah, that was one that came up. Well, big thanks to Steve for stopping by sharing these ideas.

Thanks to Gusto and Hulu for sponsoring this week. Again, SideHussell Show listeners get three months free from the leading payroll benefits in HR provider for small businesses at gusto.com slash side hustle, g us t o dot com slash side hustle. And you can reach a new audience for your business with Hulu's streaming ad service for as little as $500. Check it out at Hulu add manager dot com slash stream.

That 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.