579: Million Dollar Business Ideas For The Taking With Nick Loper

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Welcome back to the podcast, the show where I cover all of the latest strategies and current events related to e-commerce and online business. In this episode, I invited my good friend Nick Loper from Side Hustle Nation back on the show to give you some realistic side hustle ideas that you can start right now with very little money. But before we begin, I wanted to let you know that tickets are now on sale for Seller Summit 2025 over at sellersummit.com. The Seller Summit.

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is the conference that I hold every year that specifically targets e-commerce entrepreneurs selling physical products online. Unlike other events that focus on inspirational stories and high-level advice, mine is a curriculum-based conference where you will leave with practical and actionable strategies specifically for an e-commerce business. Every speaker I invite is deep in the trenches of their e-commerce business, entrepreneurs who are importing large quantities of physical goods, and not some high-level guys who are overseeing their companies at 50,000 feet.

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I personally hate large events, so the Seller’s Summit is always small and intimate. Every year we cut off ticket sales at around 200 people, so tickets sell out fast, and we’ve sold out every single year for the past 8 years. If you are an ecommerce entrepreneur making more than $250,000 or $1 million per year, we also offer an exclusive mastermind experience with other top sellers. The Seller’s Summit is going to be held in Fort Lauderdale, Florida from May 6th to May 8th.

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Right now, this is the cheapest the tickets will ever be. So head on over to sellersummit.com and grab your ticket. Now onto the show.

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Welcome to the My Wife Could a Job podcast. In this episode, I have my good buddy Nick Loper from Side Also Nation back on the show. And today we’re going to give you a bunch of million dollar business ideas for you to take. Awesome. It’s become a tradition. I think this is our third round of business idea giveaways. If you like this format, make sure to go back and check out the other two. We’ll link up those episodes in the show notes for this episode. Now I want to pitch you an idea that came to mind recently. This is

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a household item that I can almost guarantee you have several of in your house that experts recommend you replace probably more often than you do. This item, experts say, can contain up to 16 different species of fungi, and up to 10 % of the weight of this item is now dust mites and their waste. Do you have a guess of what this is? Is it a water filter?

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This is neither of those. This is your pillow on your bed. Oh, no way. OK. So the idea that I want to pitch is pillows as a service, a pillow subscription service. You would take some quiz, determine are you a back sleeper? Are you a side sleeper? OK, what density? What thickness is going to be perfect for you? And then we’re just going to ship you a new one of those every three to six months, whatever the cadence is that turns out to be like optimal for cleaning.

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this thing and having a less gross sleeping experience. kind of like that. So is it the pillow or the pillowcase or both? I think it’s the pillow itself that, you know, obviously, you know, wash your pillowcase as often as you care to. But like the pillow itself collects all of this nasty stuff that just is difficult to get rid of. Interesting. I kind of like that idea. I’m very particular about my pillow, though. Yeah.

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That’s I like a personalize it. But once you once you find one that you like, it’s like, OK, I’ll just keep getting that one. I like that idea, actually. I never thought of that because come to think of it, one of my buddies cannot sleep at night. And then he started, well, changing his sheets like three times a week. And that actually fixed it. Interesting. So this is similar, I think. Yeah, we spend, you know, we’re supposed to spend, you know, eight hours a day sleeping. So you spend a lot of time, a third of your hours on top of this thing.

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and you start to think about like, oh, this is kind of gross dead skin cells and everything else is going on in there. like, yeah, we should probably replace this more often than we do. I can’t remember the last time I got a new pillow. You know why I like recording these episodes with you, Nick, is we have completely different ideas. So mine are kind of very e-commerce focused, selling focused. Yeah, well, there’s an e-commerce angle to this, right? No, no, there is. is. is. So my idea was

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Because right now I run an e-commerce store and a lot of us don’t want to be doing customer service, meaning like answering phones and whatnot. And you know how AI is all the rage right now. And so a lot of stores are having these chat bots, just being like the first line of defense. it’s really easy to just train your chat bot to know your products. And so I was thinking of service. And again, you have to figure out how to do all this stuff, which is not surprisingly not that complicated.

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train them up, and then offer it as a service to just create one of these bots, customer service bot for an online store or any store that just knows the products and can answer simple questions. And so this would be a process of feeding in all the product details and… Exactly. Kind of like the frequently asked questions, basically like the database of knowledge. And you could probably feed in chat transcripts from like the previous 10 years of human customer support representatives.

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and say, well, how did they respond to this? I mean, the least techie way to do this is to literally just create a spreadsheet of all the products, product descriptions, and everything, and then just send them into an AI bot and train it just for that store as a service. Yeah. OK. And then targeting, the question is, would you just send cold pitches to people on Shopify, do random product searches, see what stores show up?

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So what I would do is I would just go through the Shopify database of stores and just start reaching out to them through their contact forms. There’s a lot of demand for this, I know, because I’m a member of all these forums and people are asking how to do it. And then there’s like ridiculously overpriced services that offer more than this, obviously. But at the base level, it’s a very simple thing that an individual can do for other companies.

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OK, so you go sell it as a service and the pitch being, we’re going to save you so many human hours of customer support time, or that first line of defense, right? If we can reduce the number of inquiries, and you see this on so many tech support, where it’s like, check out our knowledge base, or check out our frequently asked questions. Do you still want to submit a ticket? Did this question, did your question get answered? Sometimes it’s not even clear that you’re going to get, that a human is going to read your question.

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Yeah, and oftentimes, like if you look at our most commonly asked questions is where’s my order and or what should I buy? Like I’m looking for this. What should I buy? And you can answer that question really easily with an AI bot because that knows your products. So. OK, yeah, that’s that’s interesting. I help people on their decision make not just, you know, tech support, troubleshooting triage, but like actually on the front end of, well, this is my situation. Help point me in the right direction.

07:19
Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, OK. I’ve got one that I’ll throw out. This is probably under the umbrella of smart home automation. But I’m going call it the second guess remover. Because how many times have you pulled out of the house, and it’s not until you turn the corner out of the neighborhood that you start to think, did I close the garage door? And now that you’ve planted that seed of doubt, your wife is like, I think we did, but I’m not really sure.

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Why don’t we just go back and check? And so the second guess remover is, you know, maybe it’s an app on your phone. Maybe it’s some way to either remotely close it with some smart device or it just, you know, some way to double check like, yes, in fact, we did close it. And you turn around and nine times out of 10, of course you closed it because you always do. But one time, the one time I can remember where we didn’t actually close it was when we were starting our 13 hour drive from California back up to Washington. And we turned around and we’re like,

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oh crap, we were gonna be gone for a couple weeks, and this thing was wide open. So it’s like that, for that reason, we always do turn around and go check. How did you know that it was open? It was just that seed of doubt, like, we better turn around and we better go check. Yeah, so actually, I haven’t talked about this publicly, but our house got broken into a couple weeks back. And so now we’ve got like cameras everywhere. So I guess that would accomplish the same thing as this.

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Yeah, if you had the camera pointed at the garage, you could check. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I like that idea. I do that all the time, actually. I second guess myself all the time. It’s bad. It’s bad. Yeah. It is like, of course you closed it, because that’s just part of like the pulling out of the driveway process. But sometimes it’s like, did I hit the button? I don’t know. Another one, while we’re on the topic of theft deterrent in this ballpark, a neighbor of ours has

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You know how people have the yard signs like this home protected by Xfinity monitoring or ADT or even like simply safe. You see all the stuff. This guy went a different route and his sign said something like this home protected by a trigger happy second amendment voter or something. I was like, hey, that’s a bold move. I don’t know if this guy is armed or not, but it’s enough if I’m a prospective criminal to be like, I’m going go to the next house.

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I think that would work in 49 out of the 50 states in California that would not fly. You don’t think so? I don’t think so. But you’re right. mean, yeah, they might think twice. I mean, it’s all about being less appealing than the next house. Right, right. Try to make it broken into. Right. Yeah. Make it just again. How can I make myself less of an easy mark, less of an easy target? So my next idea also has to do with shopping. But this is a trend that’s been happening.

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all over Asia. I’m not sure if you watch TikTok or any of those, but there are these people. So there’s this one lady who’s who’s famous for this amid all over the news. She made thirteen point seven million dollars in seven days live selling on the Chinese version of TikTok. And she’s just taken other people’s products. I thought TikTok was the Chinese version of TikTok. There’s like a doying is a doying is a Chinese version. The Chinese version of TikTok has educational videos and stuff, not the stuff that we have in America.

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but it was just this lady holding up stuff, you know, then just holding up for like three seconds and then sliding it over. And so basically there’s a lot of e-commerce stores that want exposure to this audience. So you can offer live selling services. And again, you don’t need an audience to do this on TikTok, is the beauty of it. But if you just go on, it’s a consistency thing and you go on, sell.

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There’s a whole career of people doing this now, but they’re not doing it on a mass market trying to recruit other companies to list their goods. So this would be, I’m the micro influencer selling random stuff? So basically you send me your product and you reach out and then you will just live sell on Facebook, TikTok, just stream all at once. And you just be like a virtual salesman, kind of like an affiliate.

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in a different way. Like remember we had affiliates in the web world where you click on a link. Yeah. This is literally like the home shopping network. OK. But if you don’t have any following like who’s who’s that’s beauty of it. You don’t need a following on these platforms as long as the your selling style is appealing over time you will you know these platforms like TikTok will find people that watch you. OK. So are you sending your wedding linens to

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people doing this kind of thing? can see if we can move funny about all this, the reason why I came up with this is I like, I was going to do this for our own products. Yeah. But like who wants to see a middle-aged Chinese guy selling wedding linens, right? I would want to find someone probably female for our products, probably, you know, in the demographic that we’re looking toward for doing this. And so what’s funny is a lot of these ideas that I’ve come up with here today are things that I actually need.

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for myself and I know stores are looking for this.

12:45
Interesting and so and tick-tock affiliates have already been big. It just hasn’t been organized as much We’ve heard from some ecom sellers that they’ve had some pretty good success going after micro influencers in their niche and even People kind of doing product reviews and pointing towards a tick-tock shop Yeah I think the problem is you have to go out and find these people Whereas if there’s someone, know, who’s very eloquent and and good on camera and you go to the store

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More often than not, they’ll be like, hey, sure. Because it’s all on consignment anyways, right? You don’t have to pay the person until they make a sale. OK, all performance-based where you kind of set a target, the cost of acquisition. Yeah, pretty much. OK. All right, that’s new to me. I don’t spend any time on TikTok or these other ones. I don’t really know. Let’s see, what’s next on my list here? Oh, we have.

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We have one. you have solar panels on your house? We do not. OK. This is something that we’ve been trying to figure out and contemplate, even though we live in the gloomy Northwest. We have a south-facing roof and very simple roof structure where it’s like, OK, this would be good. And it kind of pains me every summer when it does get hot out. It’s almost this greenhouse where it’s like, we’re just soaking up all this juice and just absorbing it. We’re not doing anything with it. How could we harvest this in some way?

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But the world of solar sales is pretty opaque and sometimes a little bit shady and people making all kinds of promises about, well, this tax rebate. And then you can claim the depreciation on top of this. And other people are like, yeah, that’s not a thing. Who told you that? so the idea here is the local consultant person who can kind of play matchmaker, analyze your

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your situation and your needs. And they might tell you, look, this is just not a fit for you. But we’ve got relationships with the local vendors, the local installers, and figure out, what is a realistic and good price for this type of install? And we also just had a few months ago the bomb cyclone 2024. This was like a mass power outage event where half a million people or something out of power. And we were down five days or something in the dark. And I had to toss all the

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food out of the fridge. Thankfully, no property damage in this storm. it was like, you got everybody thinking about like, well, what is my home energy backup plan? Like, is this a battery system? Is this a generator system? What makes the most sense? And this was a once in a generation event. So was like, well, maybe if I just allocate what I would have spent on a battery towards a hotel room and restocking the freezer, like, could survive the next several storms and it would still be coming out ahead. But it’s something that a lot of people were thinking about.

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In response to that so it’s kind of the the home energy backup consultant I know on a previous one of these we talked about the you pitched the zombie apocalypse consultant. Yeah, it’s like in that same Same thing, you know since we’re talking about solar there was this article that I was reading where like within like the first couple years the Effectiveness of your solar panels degrades dramatically because dirt gets accumulated on this

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So how about like a service where you just go around and clean people’s solar panels? Yeah, we can boost the efficiency. we can get you back. Yeah. I mean, that wasn’t one of the ones I had on my list, but your idea made me think of that. Yeah, put it down. All right. Here’s one that literally I just thought of the other day as I was eating at a restaurant. So I was ordering from a Chinese restaurant for Chinese New Year, which just passed. And I noticed that the company that I was ordering from

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was offering to pay $3 per photo of their food so they could populate the app with like authentic pictures of their food. And these photos are meant to be casual, so they come across as authentic, right? Not like a stage shot. And so I was thinking my business idea is to just go around to these restaurants, there’s this need, and offer to just take organic pictures of their food. And maybe in the beginning you just do it exchange for a free meal,

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kicks, but maybe over time you could turn this into, you know, a real business because restaurants want people taking pictures and making videos of their food and posting them, whether it be on the app or are on their own accounts. they’re trying to incentivize like a crowd sourced image gallery basically like, of course we’re to have our, you know, fancy professional product photographer come in and take these shots. But you know, it looks

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more it looks more legit it looks more official if it’s you know just random customers posting pictures of their food yeah if it’s a customer like holding up the plate or the food or eating it or whatever okay instead of like a stock photo and so they were willing to pay three dollars per photo wow and of course we did this yeah take some pictures yeah you just take a picture of the food that you just got like eating it so clearly there’s a demand here and maybe you can do this on a mass scale

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And it only takes one to get a toehold. And then you start going to the neighborhood or the restaurant down the street. Like, did you know these guys must be onto something? They’re paying $3 a picture to get these different things. Is just to populate Yelp? Or where they putting these things? So the one that I used, I can’t remember the service. There’s a whole bunch of these delivery services that they have. maybe like DoorDash. We didn’t use DoorDash, but DoorDash could be one of those, right? It’s one thing to see like

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photos of just the food, it’s another to see real people enjoying the food. OK. OK. And so maybe that’s a way to, I don’t know the economics behind it, but if they’re willing to pay $3 a photo, clearly there’s a demand for this. Yeah, so that helps. Maybe that helps their average order value. That helps their conversion rate in these apps or something. Yeah, conversion rate, probably, yeah. Huh. Interesting. Yeah.

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I just wanted to take a moment to tell you about a free resource that I offer on my website that you may not be aware of. If you are interested in starting your own online store, I put together a comprehensive six-day mini course on how to get started in ecommerce that you should all check out. It contains both video and text-based tutorials that go over the entire process of finding products to sell all the way to getting your first sales online. Now this course is free and can be attained at mywifequitterjob.com slash free.

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just sign up right there on the front page via email and I’ll send you the course right away. Once again, that’s mywifequitterjob.com slash free. Now back to the show.

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I’ve got one that is related to software price increases. I think you and me both share a frugality gene. so whenever some tool that I’m using jacks up the price, it pains me a little bit. And it pains me that the switching cost is so high, it pains me that I feel kind of powerless to do anything about it. And so it makes me want to research alternatives, better, faster, cheaper alternatives. The one that really hit me was

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lead pages recently where to their credit, they had not increased the rate in 10 years. And so was like, I understand this is due for a rate, but it was such a shock because it almost doubled. I was like, really? Like, hey, I’ve been a customer for 10 years. Is this what you’re going to do to me? And I spent the whole day researching alternatives and trying to migrate over to optimized press for 25 % of the price. So the service that I want to pitch is the software migration service.

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And it doesn’t have to be lead pages. could be anywhere you see people complaining about a price increase. It could be people looking for filling the blank product alternative, like Zapier did this a couple of years ago, where they really increased their rates. anytime you see people complaining about that, there may be an opportunity to be like, hey, I’m a specialist in migrating from this thing to this thing. And maybe you build some tool to help you do it. I don’t know. There’s probably a way to do it.

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And the thing is, a lot of these are kind of proprietary closed off software systems. Like maybe it’s a little more challenging than that. But if you get good at it, I imagine you can knock these out pretty quickly. You know, it’s funny that you mentioned Zapier because I can’t remember how many years ago when Zapier doubled their prices, I moved everything over to Make. Yeah, me too. Oh, you did? It wasn’t called Make. Make acquired the company. can’t remember what it was called. was like IntegraMat first. IntegraMat. That’s what it was.

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But yeah, because in the challenges, there’s a learning curve. It’s like, well, I already know how SafeHear works. Do I really want to do this? Is worth the time? It’s like, well, if I’m going to have this for another five or 10 years, then yeah, it adds up every month, but totally. Yeah. I like that. You would have to specialize in something, but yeah, that’d be really easy to do because people tend to complain on Reddit, right? Right. And you could say, hey, I just use this to migrate. And it’s like your own service. Yeah.

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I love it. I like that one. like that one. Can I go again while we’re on the topic of Reddit? as you know, the world of SEO has kind of been turned upside down in the last year, year and a half or so with Google really prioritizing both AI search results, but also sites like Reddit and Quora, kind of these user-generated content type of sites. I’ve actually met somebody doing this, but they’re providing Reddit marketing services where we’ll create these different

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accounts and we’ll kind of build up their Reddit credibility. So it’s not like they’re just coming in and spamming links, but they’re kind of like strategically and intentionally highlighting your brand in kind of an organic Reddit approved way in a lot of cases where you could start. Well, if Reddit is all of sudden siphoning off a bunch of my traffic, like how can I get in front of that traffic in a way that at least from the outside looking in appears to be authentic and playing by those rules?

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Those gamification services started happening almost immediately after. Have you been approached by the Reddit services? Not by anybody serious, that I can tell. I mean, I’ve been approached, and I always thought it was spammy. the people who approached me. But yeah, there are companies paying lots of money for this service. absolutely. Because basically, it’s a ghost writing.

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service where they’re taking your content, your ideas and putting it up there. And like you’re probably not going to get the same traffic, the same traffic value, but it’s a way to get your message. Our mutual friend Spencer Hawes, think, tried one of these services. Oh, okay. And he had some good results. I know you probably had him on this podcast at some point. Yeah. I’ll have to catch up with Spencer for sure. Yeah. Okay. So my next idea.

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has to do with the fact that we recently moved my mom into our neighborhood and she was moving from a gigantic house to a little teeny tiny house because you know housing is so expensive over here. Anyway, she had to get rid of a lot of stuff and you if you go to these estate sale people it’s all like a super sketchy industry. Like you have, they can’t give you prices on anything and they just kind of give you this check and they don’t even give you like an itemized

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list of what was sold and for how much they just kind of hand you this check at the very end, which I found really sketchy. We interviewed a whole bunch of these services, but so I was thinking there’s a lot of people moving, right? And they need to get rid of their stuff. So why not just put like an above board, uh, sort of selling service where you’ll offer to just eBay all of their stuff. And it’s completely transparent. You show them the auctions, you just go in, you take photos,

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For some reason, I could not find a service that was willing to come to my mom’s house, take a full inventory, and just list everything on eBay. Oh, OK. No, I like this. It taps into the trend of empty nester, baby boomers downsizing. a typical, what’s it a state sale fees? They take 40%, 50 % of everything they sell? Yeah, they pretty much take half. But it’s the lack of transparency that bugged me.

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Like they can’t make any promises and they don’t even give you the itemized list of everything. At least the ones that I interviewed in Maryland. And I could not find a place that was just willing to eBay everything and come to the house. Like you can bring all your stuff to them and they’ll eBay. I found those services. Okay. I met a guy a couple of years ago who was doing something similar. It wasn’t, maybe some of it was eBay, but another segment of his business was like a dedicated.

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like auction site, like almost a dedicated estate sale type of sites. Like I’ll manage the whole thing for you, partnered with local real estate agents who kind of knew the customers as they were selling their house and knew they were going to need to get rid of some of this stuff. And it was all on consignment. It was all on performance. well, whatever sells, we’ll take a cut and we’ll pass on the rest. Yeah. I mean, the key for me was transparency. Yeah. Right. I like to see the auctions and whatnot and sure, you can take your cut.

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But at least in Maryland, the estate sale people that I went through, it just felt like kind of dirty to me. So I think there’s a need. Yeah, I really like this one. And then do that realtor partner angle or start with friends and family who are going through this process, get a few reps under your belt and figure out how to streamline that process and then provide that. Because it’s kind of the anti-positioning. It’s like you position it as, you know, we’re

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transparent, where the homeowner advocate, there’s different ways. It’s like when you see cruelty free on a shampoo or any other product or something, you’re like, now I automatically assume that every other thing is filled with cruelty. And you’re like, well, that’s an interesting anti-positioning. Yeah, just the fact that you can see the auctions that they’re conducting and what the actual selling price is, that’d be good enough for me. OK, cool, cool, cool.

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Um, what else do I have? Do you have a aura ring? No, I do not. Yeah, me neither. And the reason I don’t is I believe the sleep score is largely irrelevant where it’s like, I’m going to wake up today and I got to be the best version of myself. You know, whether I slept well or whether I slept poorly, I still got to show up. I got to be a dad. I got to do all the things. I got to go crush the day. And so it’s like,

27:38
Maybe there’s an opportunity for the aura ring that just shoots back, 98, 99, all the time. It’s like, nailed it last night. You might feel tired, but no, the data says you did great. You might as well go out and crush your day. Something that’s been on my mind is like, sleep is getting a lot of attention lately with recognizing how important it is for brain recovery.

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you know, all sorts of different health consequences. And it’s like, yes, do all the things to make sure you try and get the best night’s sleep possible. But it’s kind of silly, like, oh, I’m not going to do what I plan to do because I only got a 73. Like, well, really? Like, you still have to go do your day. So this is like a positive reinforcement type of ordering. Yeah, I like that. It doesn’t even have to be connected to any data. Like, it just has like fake looking Bluetooth or something.

28:36
I’d consider getting the aura ring because I know what you eat has a lot to do with how well you sleep. So by just eating certain things and then taking the score, you can narrow it. Because I know, for example, if I eat something super greasy, like Chinese food, example, like the night before, I don’t sleep that well. And it’s taken me years to figure that out. Whereas maybe something like that ring could have told me. So maybe more like an application specific type of ring. Where you enter in what you ate.

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and then you get the data to see if there’s any correlations. Some of those simple things, and maybe it’s just like a reminder in the morning, like Carpe Diem. It could be something simple, like a simple push notification, like, hey, today’s the day. Go get it. You’re not getting any younger. We had some guys on the show years ago. That was their app. I think it was called We Croak. And it was just like a daily death reminder. was kind of like the memento mori thing. It was like, hey, just.

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just to, know, I don’t know, 127 PM, hey, just a heads up, you’re gonna die someday. it’s like, well, shoot, I better go get after it. Nice, nice. So this next idea is, I hope Tony doesn’t get mad at me, but what was funny about this next idea is I got it from her during Seller Summit. So Seller Summit is the annual e-commerce conference that I run. And hilariously, at the last event,

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she was actually helping some attendees optimize their dating profiles. Because there these guys that they come to Seller Summit every year and they’re still single. we just struck up this conversation like, yeah, how do I improve my dating efficiency? So Tony looked at their profile and they’re like, OK, you need to change this, this, this, this, right? So now, with a whole bunch of these AI image tools and whatnot, and AI just in general to help with the copy,

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you can easily put together a profile that at least gets your foot in the door, and then it’s up to you to screw up the date or whatnot. But so Tony was doing these, helping people with their dating profiles for at least two or three people at the event. And I was like, Tony, should do this business, her next side hustle. Exactly, exactly. And there’s all these AI tools that can touch up your existing photos to make you look better from an existing photo that you upload too. Yeah. So. Yeah, no, I had a friend who recently did

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an AI LinkedIn headshot. They fed in a bunch of existing pictures like, hey, this was a lot faster and cheaper than hiring a photographer. Yeah. I mean, of course, you know, once people all start doing this, you’re not going to be able to believe anyone’s profile, but you know, at least it gets you in the door. know, I mean, how many of these dating profiles are, you know, completely honest and truthful to begin with? That’s true. That’s true. But it’s very easy to screw up one of these two because certain people are looking for certain things, right?

31:27
Yeah, my brother’s role was, know, anybody who had, you know, anything Seahawks related was like an automatic out. He’s like, I do not care about football. Anybody who’s like, you know, holding a beer was like automatic out. He’s like, is he sober? And it was just, you know, it’s kind of interesting. Like everybody has their own different filters and criteria where for somebody else who have been like, hey, know, you’re drinking beer and watching football. It sounds like my kind of guy. My kind of person. Exactly. Exactly. But the conference shows that a lot of people need help in this department. So there’s clearly a demand for.

31:57
Yeah, think that taps into some other trends too of people postponing a lot of major life decisions, getting married later in life, having kids later in life, the loneliness epidemic. This is a real thing, help people find their partner. That taps into a big, big market. That is until AI becomes that partner, but that’s a topic for different episode. That’s another episode. I just aired a

32:24
recently was like I interviewed my AI self like Robo Nick, know, just prompted chat GPT to respond as me. And it did it surprisingly well. It’s like, hey, that’s, that’s kind of the answer I would have given. And you know, it only made up a few facts, which were a little weird, but it did surprisingly well. like, are you published you publish on your podcast? No, I haven’t tried that yet. That sounds like a very interesting episode. Yeah, I mean, because you’ve got, know, this 10 year body of work out on the internet, too, where you know, it absolutely could respond to Steve.

32:54
Link that episode up. I want to listen to that one. right, I’ll send that one. That sounds like a great idea, by the way. Yeah, love it. All right, what’s next? Is it my turn? It’s your turn. I got a couple more, too. Next one for me is in the world of content creation. And I’m calling this I’m feeling lucky for podcast editing. And so what we’ve learned over 10, almost 12 years of podcast editing, is

33:24
at least as much about what you don’t say as what you say, like what you don’t air. And so my job as the host is to cut the fluff, cut the stuff that doesn’t add to the conversation or like, you went off this tangent, really go anywhere or that question kind of landed with a dud, like, okay, fine. And so my job after recording has been to go through the transcript and find those little sections, just to try and tighten that up. And maybe we’ll record for an hour and try and find the best.

33:53
50 minutes and maybe there’s a sliding scale on this, you know, I’m feeling lucky editor. I think this is going to rely on AI. You feed in the transcript, you feed in examples of past episodes that you really like. And my thought is this is going to make suggestions on where to trim the fat. could you cut out of this and not lose the overall message and takeaways, but just make it a tighter listening experience? I’ve been waiting for a tool like that.

34:22
as long as I’ve been podcasting. I think the closest thing that I’ve used for that is a tool called Opus Clip. Have you tried that tool? No, this is like the, we’ll make AI shorts for you. Yeah, it’ll make shorts for you, but it actually does a reasonably good job of picking out like something that you can just cut to the front, you know, to get that hook and the attention. Okay. But something like that more along the lines of what you just described, I would definitely pay for it.

34:52
No questions asked. Because it’s like the time, that’s the time consuming. This is where I love being a podcast guest, where I just show up and as soon as a recording is done, my work is over. But as the host, it’s like, well, now I got to review this whole transcript to figure this out. And thankfully, we have an editing service to help perform those actual cuts. if there was even just a starting point, maybe that’s what it is. It’s like, OK, we want to end the sliding scale. It’s like, I want to.

35:20
How strict did you want it to be? Like, okay, it’s only going to keep the best 15 minutes. I think that would be really, really hard. But if you’re just, want to trim 10%, uh, you know, give me the bottom 10 % of this episode and maybe it will make suggestions on that. So all these ideas that I’ve given you are just ones that I’ve come up with as a result of things that have happened in my life. So as I mentioned before, my mom just moved in our neighborhood and you know, as you get older, you want to spend more time with your parents, right? And what I’ve discovered just hanging out with my mom a lot more.

35:50
is that she has all these stories to tell that you don’t know about that you probably wouldn’t have asked when you were younger, right? And so there was this service that we used a while back where the company basically just emails your mom or your parent a list of questions and then they compile their answers in a book for you, right? But I was thinking of taking that one step further. So this is a book that sits on my shelf that I treasure now because it’s all stories. what service did you use for that? I forgot what it was called.

36:20
but I can find out for your listeners if they want. The problem with that service though was like the parent or whatever has to do a lot of writing. It’s actually quite burdensome for them, especially if English isn’t their first language. So what I was thinking about doing was taking that one step further. All you have to do is come up with the questions ahead of time and then you just take a film crew and you just go interview that person. That way you have it on video. I think that would be much more valuable than

36:48
the book, I love the book, don’t get me wrong. But it was just kind of hard to make sure it got written in. Whereas with video, if you send a film crew there, you know, there’s no, you know, it’s just off the cuff. And it’s actually your parents speaking, which is a valuable keepsake for anyone to have. Yeah, and then they can turn it into like a documentary style. Yes. Yeah. And maybe that could be an extra service. You turn it into you do the editing and you turn into a documentary.

37:16
I think this would be really cool because you’re exactly right. I looked into some of these, you know, parent story capture services and you’re exactly right. It’s like it really it’s not. I mean, it’s a gift. That’s what we’re looking at for Christmas gifts. But it’s like, is just a lot of work. Like how all of a sudden every month it was a lot of work. All these questions. And, know, for what real benefit? Like you already know these stories. This is more of a gift for us. But it was really challenging. And it kind of first came to mind with

37:48
my grandpa on my dad’s side. listen to the hardcore history, like 18 hour saga of World War II in the Pacific. And I know we served there, know, quartermaster or something in Northern Australia. That’s like all I know. But it’s like, what else, you know, what was your level of involvement here? Like, did you see combat? What was it like being shipped off at 20 years old across the world? Like, all that kind of stuff, you know, is

38:15
is gone now. And I think this is a really powerful one to potentially capture some of that for future generations. And this is instantly why I interviewed my mom for the podcast. It wasn’t for my listeners. You know, it was more so I could have her on the episode so you could do the same thing just audio wise to just over zoom. It’d be, you know, kind of informal. And if you’re good at asking questions and getting extra information out like me and you are, for example, we could turn this into a service.

38:44
It was on SNL, like where the son is interviewing the dad and then they, you know, get super vulnerable, you know, because they just have these conversations because all of sudden you put mics in front of their faces and then they turn to the camera and do like a Squarespace ad read and it’s… I haven’t seen that episode. I’ll have check it out. I think it was a fun one. Okay, so that’s kind of the…

39:10
end of life or approaching end of life, how do we capture some of these stories? You know, it’s like the movie Coco, know, and Hector is fading away like, oh, he’s being forgotten, right? How do we, how do we remember the people who came before us? I think that’s a really cool idea. And like that, you know, professional filmmaking, so like to rent out even freelance professionals to do this for a day, it’s, it’s not gonna be cheap, but it’s not gonna be like over the moon expensive. Yeah. Then the one I have,

39:37
is the opposite of that, not end of life, but beginning of life. I’m going to call this the digital baby service. This is we’re going to secure your kids’ domain name. We’re going to claim their social media handles. We’re going to register their Gmail account. And for this, we’re going to charge you, I don’t know, $100 a year. It’s going to be a decent margin because basically, all this stuff is free except for the domain, which maybe costs $10.

40:06
12 bucks a year to renew, but we’re just going to secure this for you so you don’t have to worry about it. And so when your kid becomes old enough that they care about this, you know, all of a sudden we have that locked down for you. Is this something that I did when the kids are born? I would better go register their domain names just in case, you know, we wouldn’t want anybody else to have that. So it’s something that would probably be there might be a market for that as a service. Yeah, actually, there’s a lot of things that you could do.

40:36
But yeah, it would be a service where you just lock down the names for any relevant service that you might not be able to think about, right? That you might not have necessarily thought of, besides the obvious ones. So yeah, I like that idea. I like that idea. Kind of along those same lines, my next idea is a little bit more, well, it more caters to like the personalities of the younger folks these days. So I kind of got this idea after reading an article

41:06
about how people are paying money to rent venues for social media. So for example, a lot of these, these make money online guys literally rent a jet set. So it looks like you’re on a private jet when you’re really not. Okay. And I think that’s such a, like a reflection of where society has been going, but you could profit from it by just creating a bunch of these sets, whether it be a private jet or

41:36
a luxury hotel suite or a botanical garden or just something cool where it’s literally just the set for Instagramming or doing lives from. Wow. And then just rent that time out to people. I might have a problem with this one, but I thought of it because people are paying for these services. Yeah, I think there’s probably something to that. And yeah, you have a warehouse space where you have like

42:00
four or five of these set up and people come in or you your two hour block, you know, they come in and knock out a bunch of reels or not much videos and you’re set. And this is very pervasive in China actually. So if you see like a TikTok video of a factory of someone like, you know, making stuff, chances are it’s fake. Like literally it’s just like a table and just like the backdrop of it with this machine, like rotating the same products over and over again. Okay. So

42:29
I’ve been just seeing a lot more of those, you know, debunked. Because, you know, people want to look like they’re successful or doing these things. maybe it’s just like a sad reflection of where we’re going. you know, there’s a market there for renting out these services. Yeah, this was a speculation for, for years or certain influencers like, oh, you know, they’re standing in front of the rented Lamborghini. They don’t really own that. Like, that’s not really their life. That’s like, this

42:58
I don’t know, I guess maybe a certain demographic that appeals to it’s like, who cares? It’s the younger folks. Because we’re old and crotchety now. Get off my lawn. No, but this is cool. And I do love me a rental business. We’ve talked about the photo booth business. We’ve talked about renting mobility scooters. We had a guy renting out reusable moving boxes or plastic storage bins, basically.

43:28
Here’s another example of something. Hey, build it once or build that set once and get paid for it over and over again. Yep. Cool. What do you got? You got a couple more? I’ve got, I think, one more. And this is around a personal pain point of mine. And I’m curious to get your take on this as a prolific YouTuber these days. What I struggle with is the scripting.

43:56
That’s kind of the bottleneck for me. And we’ve got this huge body of content. We’ve seen, in my mind, people stating very obvious things like, hey, have you ever thought about this as a side hustle? Really? That is getting 100,000 views? That’s the most basic idea ever. But it’s all in this scripting. So some sort of video scripting service or

44:23
you know, maybe it’s an AI or maybe it’s a human where it’s like, just, just tell me what to record. Like do it in my voice, you know, load it up. I could fire up the teleprompter or I could just do the voiceover and we’ll lay over some other imagery, but just that’s like the big a bottleneck in producing more video content for me. If you find such a service, I would sign up in a heartbeat. Uh, you’re absolutely right. The scripting is where it’s the most time consuming. I’ve got it down now where I can script something.

44:53
with the help of AI in about 90 minutes for a 10 minute video. That’s still 90 minutes though. But it’s to hear that it’s not instant for you. Well, if you think about it this way, I used to spend a lot more time on a blog post. I used to spend like three or four hours on a blog post. And what I like about YouTube scripting is it doesn’t have to be grammatically correct, nor does it have to have the proper punctuation either.

45:21
And so that’s why it’s faster for me. But yes, I’ve tried so many things, Nick, training AI to talk like me. And we have enough body of work between the two of us now that it’s pretty easy to do that. But I don’t think it’s just hard to find that replacement from what I’ve seen. What’s a typical process for you going from something that you maybe have written about? It could be years ago, but it’s still relevant to turn that into a video version.

45:52
there’s different, there’s a different formula, right? You can just read off the blog posts and have that be compelling. You know, what’s funny is that’s how I started my YouTube channel. Yeah. I just read the posts and you’re right. That doesn’t work. Well, I can corroborate that. Uh, so what you, can just feed it into chat, GPT or Claude. Yeah. And I have a prompt for this because I do less of this now, but I had a process for this where you give it a prompt.

46:20
And since we have enough workout that you can say in the voice of Nick Loper or Steve Chu. And it comes out with something that you can modify into a script. And then you also have to make changes to it. So it’s not, it still takes time, but it makes things much faster. Because there’s a whole big difference between SEO written blog than there is a compelling YouTube video.

46:46
Well, speaking of YouTube, you’re closing in on half a million subscribers over on the My Wife Quit Her Job channel. What kind of videos do you find do well? Like help me out on the YouTube. I can’t. it’s been a struggle. It’s been a struggle, Nick. So I teach e-commerce and what I found is that if I just go and teach e-commerce on that channel, it gets like no views. Right.

47:12
Because that’s not what people want. The common folk does not want e-commerce strategies, which is unfortunately my specialty. mean, that’s what I like creating content about. So the struggle is mixing that content, my teaching content, with something that the mainstream viewer actually wants to see. So it’s basically dumbing down the content, maybe that’s not the right word, making it more appealing to the masses. That’s the secret.

47:40
Any videos that have done particularly well for you? I mean, I have a whole bunch of videos that have gotten over a million views that that when I published them at the time were topics that were in the news too. So recency helps to what people are searching for and wanting to look about, you know, read about. And right now, if you think about it, I feel like the world is in chaos right now. At least the U.S. is in chaos. There’s tons of topics that people are searching for right now.

48:06
And you use like a TubeBuddy or a vidIQ to? I use vidIQ. Okay. To come up with, you know, what’s the metric you’re looking for? Like minimum search volume or minimum score there? I don’t actually even look at search volume anymore. I mean, I do as a last step. should say, I shouldn’t say I don’t look at it at all. Okay. But I’m just trying to create topics that I know I can do a good job writing a good hook for. And then keyword research is actually secondary. It didn’t start out that way, but now that’s how I do it. Okay.

48:36
Yeah. Hook first. Okay. I got one more that I got one more idea. Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. For the audience before we go. Um, this is something that once again, I got from talking to with my mom because we hang out a lot more now. She lives right down the street. This is what I call like a forgotten skills online course series. So my mom, you know, back in the old days, she was telling about all these skills that she had to do from first principles. Like there’s a lot of things we take for granted now, right? That, that everything’s machine made and whatnot.

49:06
But back in the day, they did stuff by hand. so we’re talking about skills like Asian calligraphy, Morse code, how to read a map. I don’t know. I don’t think my kids know how to read a map, right? Because it’s a skill that you don’t need anymore because you have GPS and whatnot. Metalworking, old school photography where you’re developing photos with the chemicals and everything. Just a way to document and teach all those old school things and put them in one place.

49:37
I mean, what’s the point of learning Morse code at this point? You try to signal, send to somebody a telegram? Well, so the idea is there’s a bunch of people out there that, like for me, as an example, who would want to just learn these things from first principles. My personality is such that I don’t like depending on services handling everything for you. Because once something goes down, you’re in trouble.

50:07
So I actually would like to learn these things from first principles and I can’t be the only one out there. Fair enough. How to read a map I’m on board with. Metalworking has not been relevant to my life ever since like metalworking merit. Well, are just examples for me, right? Like Asian calligraphy, know, artistic things that are not as big of a deal now, but they’re still beautiful. I think the art should be carried on.

50:35
to future generations, that sort of thing. That’s fair. And even would be more relevant, it’s just like fixing stuff around the house and not being like powerless to just throw your hands up in the air. Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. And we had a light go out this weekend and I do what I know how to do. Well, I’ll replace the bulb. And then that didn’t do it. And so then I’m like, hey, dad, what does it mean if you replace the bulb and the light still doesn’t work? He’s like, well, maybe your switch went bad.

51:04
Okay, how do I test that? Well, we got to take it apart. You got to use this little multimeter thing, which he had, which we don’t have. So he brought it over. It’s funny you say that. Look what I got right on my desk. Fancy.

51:19
All right, those are all the ideas that I’ve got. You got anything else? I think that’s pretty much it. Yeah, we’ve covered a lot in this episode, actually.

51:29
Hope you enjoyed this episode. All of these side hustles are great ideas that you can start right now with very little money. For more information and resources, go to mywifequitherjob.com slash episode 579. Once again, tickets to the Seller Summit 2025 are now on sale over at sellersummit.com. If you want to hang out in person in a small intimate setting, develop real relationships with like-minded entrepreneurs and learn a ton, then come to my event. Go to sellersummit.com.

51:58
And if you’re interested in starting your own e-commerce store, head on over to my wife, quitherjob.com and sign up for my free six day mini course. Just type in your email and I’ll send the course right away via email.