Every house in the country is a potential repeat customer...Matt Rowell set himself the goal of generating an extra $5k over 5 years to fund some passion projects, and he’s well on his way.Matt runs AmericanEdgeSharpening.com on the side from his day job as captain of a research vessel. It’s a knife sharpening business, which was up to $250-500 a month when we spoke and is earning him $30-60 per hour.He saw an ad while posted abroad with the Navy that gave him the idea for his business. And then he took action. Matt: Picked up a knife sharpening kit Taught himself how to sharpen knives by watching YouTube videos Offered to sharpen knives for family and friends for the practice Found paying customers The best thing about the knife sharpening business?“If you drive down the road, every house that you pass has a bunch of knives in it,” Matt said. That means an almost limitless number of potential customers.Tune in to hear how Matt got started with this idea while he was deployed in Djibouti, Africa, including his equipment, how he learned how to do it, and how he’s marketed and priced his service.Full Show Notes: How to Start a Knife Sharpening Business

Can you find Amazon FBA profit from the comfort of your couch?Amit Desai of CreditCard101.us has built a business doing exactly that, and now he’s on track to sell $250k worth of stuff this year – all on the side from his day job.We’ve covered Amazon FBA and retail arbitrage before on the Side Hustle Show, but Amit has a unique angle in that he sources most of his inventory online.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Finding Amazon FBA Profit from HomeAmit’s side hustle background is actually as a travel hacker. He’s one of those guys that racks up a bunch of points and frequent flier miles, so he can go on awesome trips for free.It was at a travel hacking conference where one of the speakers presented about his Amazon business, and how he was racking up tones of credit card points by buying inventory for his business that a light bulb went off for Amit.Flipping Items for Profit on AmazonAmit realized that if he could figure out a way to flip items on Amazon and breakeven he could step up his travel game. However, he soon found out there was real profit out there, not just from credit card cashback offers and free flights.He shares some interesting examples of how he's stacked cashback and other discounts on the items he's flipping to effectively increase the ROI on his products while being able to sell them at a competitive price.You'll hear where you should be spending your time if you’re starting out in the FBA space, loads of cool apps, websites, and tools that have helped automate most of his business, and the criteria he uses when sourcing goods.Tune in to hear Amit’s favorite tools for sourcing profitable inventory, his buying criteria, and how you can stack different discounts and rewards offers to improve your margins and get a leg up on the competition.

From no business ideas and no money, to making your first sales in 2 weeks.It’s not a far-fetched goal according to this week’s guest.Alan Donegan from PopUpBusinessSchool.co.uk specializes in guiding people through this transformation, and he says that everyone has a profitable business idea in their heads – and he knows how to find it.He does this through in-person workshops that are free to attend by forming partnerships with government bodies in cities across the UK, and he’s bringing his workshops to the US soon.Alan is adamant about bootstrapping and not taking on a load of debt to start a business because he saw his family go through a multi-million dollar bankruptcy and doesn’t want anyone else to have to experience the same fate.He preaches starting a business around a passion or something that excites you. Because running a business you’re passionate about sets you apart from the competition and makes the process so much easier.He shares how he teaches his students to pre-sell and validate their ideas before putting down cash for stock that might end up collecting dust in the garage, and he outlines what makes a successful pitch.Alan also shares how he practiced what he preaches when he sold his first PopUpBusiness workshop to a housing authority in the UK selling his highest priced package right out of the gate, and his business has been gaining momentum ever since.Tune in to hear how Alan pulls business ideas out of people who don’t think they have any, how he has his students quickly and cheaply validate those ideas, and what makes for a successful pitch.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: How to Start a Business You Care About — With No Business Ideas and No Money

Jodi Carlson has been running her blog LeaderConnectingLeaders.com part-time since 2014 and has slowly built it up to $5-6k a month in revenue.The earnings come from a combination of mostly digital product sales, as well as advertising, and affiliate relationships.The surprising thing – to me at least – is that she’s done this in a niche that theoretically doesn’t have any money.Her readers and customers are almost all volunteers and they’re donating their time to local non-profit groups – in this case, Girl Scout groups.On the surface that makes it seem like it’s as tough a niche as any to tackle, which makes Jodi’s results even more impressive.She brings more than two decades of experience in Girl Scouts to the table, as a scout, then as a troop leader, and even though the blog didn’t start out with dollar signs in mind she’s turned it into a substantial income stream.“I actually started it to help myself, and to then help troop leaders in my community,” Jodi said.Jodi started documenting the activities she was doing with her Scout Troops in her blog and making PDF books so she could refer to them again in the future, and shared her articles with a small circle of other leaders in her community.It wasn’t long before Troop leaders further afield started asking for her activity books. This sparked the idea to start selling her books and growing her blog.Tune in to hear how Jodi comes up with product ideas and prices those, how she made her first sales, how she’s grown her traffic to more than 100k pageviews a month, and income to $5k + a month – all while working full-time and raising a family.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: The $5k a Month Part-Time Girl Scout BlogRelated: Check out my free video series on how to start a blog.

Could you live for free?That's what The Side Hustle Snowball framework proposes: to erase your expenses with new income streams.Start out with your smallest monthly expenses and work your way up: Gym memberships Life insurance Netflix Utilities Cell phone bill Car payments Car insurance Day care Student loan payments Rent or mortgage We all want our business to cover our costs of living and then some, but the "Snowball" framework (apologies to Dave Ramsey) allows you to work your way up to that ultimate goal of financial independence.Celebrate the small wins along the way.In this post / podcast episode, I'll break down the 15 income streams I'm working on right now. Which ones can you start or add to your existing business?Full Show Notes: The 15 Income Streams I'm Working on Right Now

Things were going great; he had a bunch of happy customers, he’d quit his engineering job to focus on it full-time, and he was doing what he loves.You might remember Jacques Hopkins from episode 223, where he broke down how he turned his hobby of playing piano into a solid $20k a month online business at Pianoin21days.com.BUT….Between customer support, email, social media, phone sales, and all the other day-to-day tasks, it was taking a full 40 hours a week to run.Since then, Jacques set out to automate, optimize, and outsource different elements of the business. Those initiatives cut back his time commitment to maintain the biz to just 10 minutes a day — and still grew revenue to $30k a month.Jacques isn’t one to sit still, he’s using his newfound time freedom to work on more strategic growth projects and his other project; TheOnlineCourseGuy.com.He’s launched a podcast interviewing other people who have successfully launched online courses, and sells his own course giving customers a behind the scenes look at how he built and sold his courses on Pianoin21days.com.Tune in to hear how Jacques “plugged holes” in his course, outsourced time-consuming repetitive tasks to a virtual assistant, and successfully increased his revenue while reducing the time spent on his business.Full Show Notes and PDF Highlight Reel: Catching Up with the $30k a Month Piano Teacher — How He Grew His Business While Cutting Back His Hours 97%

300!In this special 300th edition of The Side Hustle Show, I’m excited to feature 5 listeners who took action on specific ideas they heard on the show or read on the Side Hustle Nation blog -- and turned that action into concrete results.Those results range from their first $1000 on the side, up to a $700k e-commerce empire, but the point is they made something happen.Tune in to hear how they got it done, and check the text summary below.Full Show Notes: 5 Listeners Who Took Action and Are Seeing Awesome Results

Remember the Red Paperclip Guy from a few years ago? In 2005, an out-of-work Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip and traded his way up to a house in Kipling, Saskatchewan.Remarkably, this barter adventure took only 14 trades and was completed in less than a year. Kyle started out small, each time seeking something “bigger and better” in exchange.For example, his first trade was the red paperclip for a pen shaped like a fish. Then he traded the fish pen for a doorknob, and on and on up the ladder.The story certainly has some feel-good elements to it, and after a while the media attention definitely helped speed the process along, but I think it’s worthwhile to revisit because we’re all trying to “trade up.”By “trading up”, it’s important to note I’m not necessarily talking about acquiring a bigger house or a better car, but more along the lines of making bigger impacts and living better stories.I was reminded of the red paperclip story by last week's episode with Rob "The Flea Market Flipper" Stephenson. He talked about a challenge inside his community to start with something small and keep flipping the profits into bigger deals to see how much you could trade up over the course of a year.I think we all have a red paperclip story. Like Kyle, even starting with almost nothing, you can make big things happen with a little initiative and a little help from others along the way.This episode is about connecting the events that got you to where you are today, and thinking about where you want to go tomorrow.What’s the next trade you’d like to make?In the spirit of the red paperclip story, I’m going to use my own entrepreneurial journey to illustrate this; and similar to Kyle, I’ll use a series of 14 key decisions or trade points. But unlike Kyle, this took me a lot longer than a year!Full Show Notes: Trading Up: From $8.65 an Hour to Retired at 25, Plus the Next 10 Years

Rob is a professional "money multiplier."The good news, he says, is it's a skill that can be learned.You might remember Rob "The Flea Market Flipper" Stephenson from episode 147 in late 2015. At that time, he was earning $30,000-$40,000 a year flipping random products on the side from his day job.Since then, the father of 3 has taken his buy low, sell high model and turned it into a full-time 6-figure operation.Rob doesn’t discriminate what the products are he’s flipping, as long as he can pick it up for a great price he’ll flip it.I can’t blame him, since some of these single deals are worth thousands of dollars in profit. In fact, Rob only buys items he estimates he can 10x when he flips them.Since we last spoke Rob has fine-tuned his processes for finding and flipping items. He still hits the flea markets weekly, but he also uses some interesting tools and apps to find more items.He’s also found a way to save big on shipping cost, enabling him to go after bulky items with even bigger markups.In this “where are they now” episode, I invited Rob back to learn how he scaled up his business, what his buying criteria or flipping process looks like today, and what he’s got cooking next.Full Show Notes: $100k a Year Flipping Random Items: The Return of the Flea Market Flipper

"I'm this close to firing you right now."That's what Hung Pham's boss told him when he reached out about ways to get his team more engaged with the company's overall mission."If you want passion and purpose," she said, "you've got to look somewhere else."Frustrated with the internal cultures at the organizations he worked in, Hung wanted to attend a culture-building conference.The only problem? That event didn't exist.Sensing a void in the market, Hung was inspired to create Culture Summit.With nothing more than a website, a few contacts booked as speakers, and a whole load of enthusiasm, Hung started emailing prospective attendees and getting the word out within the right circles.He had more than 200 attendees for that first event and was profitable from day one.By year two, Hung’s Culture Summit, at CultureSummit.co was a 6-figure business – all on the side from his day job.This was after Hung almost gave up and his partner left the business when they didn’t sell any tickets for the first three months.Tune in to hear how Hung validated his idea for his conference, how he sold his first tickets, and how he’s grown this side hustle into a full-time business with attendees from 5 continents, and where he wants to go from here.Full Show Notes: Event Hosting: How to Bring Your Tribe Together and Build a 6-Figure Conference on the Side