Doug: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. My name’s Doug Cunnington, and today I’m gonna talk about how I would get started if I was working online again, and I put working online and air quotes, because I’m gonna cheat a little bit. There’s a couple things going on here. Number one, last week I published an episode and basically it was like, what happened to niche sites?
I didn’t go too in depth, but I covered a site that was sold a few years ago, probably for around a million bucks. And now it’s probably worth a few, a few thousand. I mean, I, I have no idea. We’re just speculating, but essentially like things grew over the years. I mean, I got started in insights in 2013 and then, you know, there was a rise and there was a fall and I think someone could actually.
Cover a lot of different aspects of like online business, how it shifted from say, 20 maybe like, let’s call it 2005 until right now, so the last 20 years, and just kind of cover it from a documentarian perspective where. You can find old footage from back in the day. Different business models like, uh, you know, niche sites.
You have drop shipping, some other stuff that you could throw in there. Amazon got bigger. There was fulfilled by Amazon, FBA. And just various other business models. I mean another is just online courses. All this stuff that we kind of talk about on the show here. So you could cover all that, like really in depth and, and chat with people and how it changed.
And I mean, the fact is in, in 2005, if you wanted to have like an online course, you probably had to get like. A custom software solution, and nowadays you can have a course set up in a few minutes and you could record a video course on your phone or from your phone that we all carry in our pocket now, which is.
Absolutely crazy. So, so anyway, you could cover like the rise and fall and have a handful of episodes, like long form video essay type things. You could have conversations, you could do a whole, you could do a whole thing. And a lot of people would probably listen ’cause there’s lessons that we can learn along the way that, you know, you can generalize them to be relevant now.
All that said, you know, I, I got an email in the last week. It was actually for my other podcast, mile HiFi, which I encourage you to check out. And it’s more about personal finance, financial independence, and we end up talking a lot about lifestyle and happiness, that kind of thing. So I got an email and when I.
Peel away all the irrelevant stuff. What we’re thinking about today is how someone could get started online. So this, this person said that they want to keep working their existing corporate job, but they also want to get started with the side hustle and they’re interested in YouTube and content creation.
The tricky part, and I fell into this, not a trap, but let’s call it quicksand. Alright, so we learn things from people that are sharing content, content creators, whether they’re bloggers from a few years ago, or maybe they’re podcasters, or maybe they do video, or maybe they’re on TikTok or whatever, they’re.
Their format is, but we learn from content creators and many of us think, oh yeah, I learned from them. They seem nice. I like them. I have a similar background. Whatever. Somehow we, we feel related to the people that we’re watching whatever it is they’re creating and you think, oh, maybe I, I should do that too.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. I mean, it worked out well for me. It works out well for a lot of people and I. Basically you learn from a content creator. Then you think, oh, wanna follow in their footsteps, they seem happy, blah, blah, blah. So you go down that route. So this guy. It was like, I wanna get started on the side.
YouTube seems good. He watches other creators. He’s seen me, for example, right? So I seem happy and successful. There’s always a flip side of the coin there, but, but essentially, I mean, I, I am happy and I think I am successful, but this, this is my own definition anyway, the point is, so this dude was like, Hey, I want to kind of.
Do this other stuff. Maybe I’ll do a course in the future. I wanna help people, blah, blah, blah. So the thing is, I don’t know if I recommend that just in a general sense, it’s very volatile right now. A few years ago I would’ve said, ah, you know, you can get started blogging, do you know, some content, written content that is, and then you could probably earn some money.
Not a huge amount, but maybe a few hundred dollars per month. Enough to like make a difference in your life and to give you sort of the proof that you can do it. So when, when I think about it and I’m like knowing what I know now and when I reflect back, I think I got pretty lucky. Maybe a few times.
Timing was on my side. There, there was, um, sort of a rise of niche sites. Like I said, SEO was getting more mature and tools were becoming more sophisticated and more useful and people kind of understood, or we pretended to understand the algorithms out there and we’re like, okay, if we do these things, we can’t get traffic.
We can earn money. And the fact is. I think my timing was just good. I mean, it was a growing industry and you didn’t have to be that good to be successful, which is great. I mean, that’s actually where you want to be. So like if you could position yourself now, that would be the piece of advice that I would give you.
If you’re like, how, what should I start working on these days? Well, I don’t know, but video is probably good. So video is growing. It will continue to grow. It’s a little bit harder to do. And I think it will be perhaps more immune from AI impacts. I mean, the fact is like if you’re, if you have a personality and you’re creating stuff and you have original ideas, like you will be somewhat insulated.
I mean, I don’t think AI is gonna be able to take over that sort of personal relationship that. Happens when you do create content and you have, like I said, a bit of a relationship with the people that are consuming it. So I think that’s a little bit insulated and it’s harder to do. People are nervous to get in front of the camera to record themselves and that sort of thing.
You put yourself out there and you, you set yourself up for criticism and you have to have a thick skin to be able to handle it and. You have to have, you know, you have to be dumb enough to think you can do it, but skilled enough and smart enough to actually execute and follow through with it. So I think, I think I would focus on video, but I would also look at.
Like what you’re interested in. Of course. ’cause like you’re probably gonna be in this for the long haul and if you want to be successful, like you can aim towards hopefully something that you’re interested in, but also something that is just kind of a growing industry. So even if you’re not the best, even if you show up.
And you’re doing okay. Like you’ll probably come out in air quote, successful however you define that. But the point is like, you don’t want to go to an industry that’s like contracting or not growing. You have to be really good in those. It’s even more competitive. But if you’re in, I’ll just. In general, I’ll say if you’re in into AI stuff, that is a growing overall industry.
We don’t even understand the scope that it might be in the future. That’s probably a really good place to spend time. And when I was winding down the niche site courses and the niche site content and that sort of thing, I was starting to lean into ai ’cause I was using the tools. It was interesting. I actually got quite a few views.
If you go look back at the, the video archive out there that I have, I mean, it’s just the videos on my channel. So if you go to the channel, you can see I was publishing a handful of AI related videos. They were doing well. I was interested, but then when it came around to it, I was like, I’m not that interested and I’m using the tools a little bit.
Not as much as other people, and I don’t care that much, so I stopped doing it. That would be a great area to focus on because you can take whatever your existing experience and skills are, take that and sort of layer it on top of like AI and then go in that direction. I, I, I’ve seen a lot of people essentially, you know, become coders.
And they’re using AI to help them build tools and that sort of thing. Side note in for a long time listeners and viewers out there, you know that I was on many email lists and I would see what people were up to and blah, blah, blah. I’ve unsubscribed to many of those ’cause I was just like, you know what?
I don’t, number one, I don’t care as much. I don’t care as much. And then the other part is I was like, some of these people like. It feels like they’re trying too hard. That’s never a good look. Right. And it’s, it is hard to tell. That’s me judging other people as you judge me now. But the, I mean, it’s a natural thing to do, but basically I was just like, these people are a little bit full of shit.
And I could see it like I, I could see it because they seem like they’re trying a little too hard. They seem a little desperate. They’re like, Hey, like here’s, you know, I’ll skip some of the details, but it’s just like, I don’t think that shit works. And if it does, they don’t have a long enough. Timeframe to have actually tested this well and gotten some longevity out of it.
So I’ll be vague ’cause like, I mean I’m on, I was on several email lists, so I saw this on many different emails so I could generalize and I’m not talking about anyone in particular. So keep that in mind. Not anyone in particular, but I unsubscribe to a lot of these ’cause I was just like, ah, some people are full of shit.
The other part is especially around software, when people are, when they don’t have a software background, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t try, but I’m just as a former software person and I was a project manager, so I was like I was able to observe the importance of testing and as a user of software.
I mean, it really sucks when they fuck something up, when, when the company pushes a new version out and they fuck something up that worked before and they don’t have a good really regression testing system. And there’s a whole, I mean, testing is difficult. So when people are pushing out tools really quickly and they don’t have a software background, they don’t know how to test stuff properly.
So you end up with like kind of buggy, kinda shitty software. So when people are literally like, Hey, I’m gonna build this tool super fast. I’m like, well, I definitely don’t want to use that tool. In fact, you, you may know like, uh, if you have a bit of a, you know, if you have a channel or something like that, if you have an email list or whatever, like.
People constantly are like, Hey, I built this tool. Do you want to check it out and see how it goes? The answer is fucking no way. I don’t want to test your tool that you haven’t. Like tested before. I don’t wanna learn a new thing. Number one, I’m lazy. I don’t wanna learn a new thing. I’m, I don’t have this problem that you’re proposing.
There’s a solution to it. Additionally, if you just built the thing in the last couple weeks, then fuck, like I know you haven’t tested it that well. And when you, when you push other updates, and I mean even software, like people with software backgrounds. That do know how to do this, you end up with bugs out there.
So all that to say. There’s there’s some BS out there as, as there has always been. And I, you know, I think back to some of the tools that I, I purchased say in like 20 13, 20 14, there were tools that would set up, I. Like old blog spot.com or wordpress.com websites, the web two point ohs, the people that have been around for a while, you know what I’m talking about.
But basically you would set up these free blogs out there. You would publish a bunch of garbage. Which were created. I mean the, the content was from like article spinners, so it was a kind of a search and replace type situation. So you ended up with kind of unique content, but it didn’t make any sense. No one would actually, I.
Read it. So I bought this software that would like set those up and then you would could hook it up to a quote article spinner and then it would publish these garbage articles out there. And I remember watching a review from some guy and he was like, this is awesome. Like you do this and you have to do that and it runs in the background and blah, blah blah.
So I paid like $400 for this software and he was like, this is how you build the links and you have the different layers and the blah, blah, blah. And of course it didn’t fucking, I mean it barely worked then like, but the thing is it took forever to like configure all this stuff and I followed all the instructions.
And the thing is like the guy was selling it. As an affiliate. So he was getting a 50% commission on it. And you know, thinking about it now, I’m just like, oh, how was I so dumb to think that that software was gonna work really well and that it would. Have some longevity. And the thing is, like I did get rankings like back then, but it was a tail end of when that sort of horrible link building worked at scale.
And it did. I mean, the thing is it did work for a while, but then at some point Google figured it out. And again, this is like 11 years ago, which it’s crazy. I’ve been working on this stuff for that long. So. Anyway, back, back on topic. So I would say if I was, if I was starting or if I was giving advice to the person that that wrote in video is good, I would do that.
It helps you. Im improve your communication skills. It could lead to opportunities in the future. So if you have a YouTube channel and you’re, even if you’re not that successful, if you have a YouTube channel and you have a little bit of traction, there’s a strong chance you should be able to say, speak at conferences because you have stuff to share.
You have things that you could help people with, and it’s not always success. In fact, one of my. One of my talks that I potentially will pitch in the future. I didn’t feel like going this route this year in 2025, but I had I have success in the past, but in the last year, the things that I tried didn’t work out, and I’ve shared it on the show.
But like, I tried to do a podcast accelerator, which went fine. I had a few people launch their shows. It went fine for the like alpha. Version. The very first little trial that I did, I only had three people in there, and then when I rolled it out, no one purchased it. When I tried to sell it at scale, no one purchased it, so that kinda sucked.
So that was a failure. I launched a podcast, which went kind of okay. And then it was in the SEO space, which S-E-O-S-E-O interest has gone down dramatically and. Yeah, so that pretty much flopped. I’m very good at getting rid of sunk costs now, so as soon as things kind of tapered off, I was like, you know what?
I’m out. I’m not, I’m quitting this. I’m quitting that other thing. I’m not gonna relaunch that. So I have like a handful of failures that I could share. All that to say, if you have a YouTube channel, you have a little bit of a following. You do have things to share. So I know I’m going to, uh, FinCon the conference later on this fall.
And I saw some talks that I’m sure will get a lot of people to sit and watch and listen and learn, and it’s like, how’d it go from zero to 1000 subscribers on YouTube? So it’s like people are interested in that first step. People are interested in the big headlines, like how to have a seven figure podcast or whatever.
But at the same time, it’s like there’s, there’s more people trying to get from zero to one than there are one to, you know, 10,000 or whatever. So anyway, if you have a YouTube channel, if there’s a good chance you’ll be able to. Speak at conferences, you’ll be able to network effectively and you’ll improve your communication.
So it’s a good space to be in overall. And you know, video translates so even if you’re like, Hey, I’m gonna do. You know, YouTube, that video translates over to other video platforms, whether it’s, um, you know, fill in the short form video platform that you care about. So that’s a good spot to be in. Now the way I’m gonna cheat is I would probably, like if I.
If I was starting from nothing and I have like the laptop and no network and whatever, I would potentially look at the content creation space. However, me personally, I don’t really like that, uh, sort of social media aspect of it, so I would probably. I would probably not do a ton. So I say, you know, what would I do to work online?
I would probably not work online very much. One thing in my neighborhood, I’ll skip the details of the HOA drama ’cause it’s. Well, I’ll tell you a little bit, but there’s always dumb stuff going on with HOAs, right? I mean, I think most people would be like, I would prefer not to live in an HOA community, but many of the newer neighborhoods do have them, and some older neighborhoods still have HOAs, but maybe they’re not as restrictive and maybe they don’t do as many things anyway.
We’ll skip the HOA bullshit. No one wants to hear about that. But basically there are many expenses and a lot of them are like physical things that you have to do. And there’s a good ch, I mean, when I hear some of the quotes for, it’s mostly like landscaping or irrigation here in Colorado, it doesn’t rain all that much.
So like irrigation is pretty much required. If you have any sort of vegetation, even if you have like very. Like cacti and succulents and other plants that don’t need a ton of water, they still need a little bit, especially when they’re getting started. And then you don’t have to water ’em as much in the future.
Lawns are fucking bananas and trees are tough, but the point is a lot of these things are very expensive. So when you hear a quote like we planted a bunch of trees and folks volunteered and all that kinda stuff, but if we. Were to have hired a company, it would’ve been like $6,500 to plant a bunch of these trees around here instead.
I don’t know, like 10 people volunteered and they did that work. It took a little bit longer, but it’s a considerable savings overall. The point being in the physical world, there’s a lot of work to be done and that shit is pretty expensive. From what I hear, I haven’t hired too many contractors, but there’s either an issue getting people to call you back ’cause they’re so busy, there’s an issue.
Getting them to show up on time and finish the fucking job. There’s an issue with incompetence, so. The one contractor that we hired, we had a sink put in our laundry room, like a laundry sink. They don’t cost a a ton, you know, you could buy ’em at the hardware store for whatever, a hundred to $200 depending on like what kind of sink you get.
And other you know, do you get a cabinet underneath or is it just a freestanding sink kind of thing. So they’re not terribly expensive, but. In our case, we needed to have it plumbed and we also needed to have a drain like cut through the tile. So some things that are fairly straightforward for someone who has done some renovations, but I don’t have tools.
I don’t have a, you know, a tile cutter. I don’t. I don’t know how to do some of this stuff. And in this case, right, while we could watch YouTube videos, I would prefer to just like hire someone to do it. And that’s what we did. So anyway, we got this stuff going on. They installed it, and then the fucking sink was leaking, right?
The drain was leak leaking, and we, you know, figured it out right away. Within a day or two. So they came back, they tightened it up a little bit more and they were like, should be good. And then it leaked more. So I, I looked at it and they left the cardboard that was in the packaging. I. With the like the drain basket and people that know just some the lightest, most basic level of plumbing, like the drain basket, sort of like screws on, there’s some, there’s some, uh, gaskets and some other stuff in there, and you may use like plumbers, putty and some other things like that.
But basically they left, they didn’t unpack it all the way. There was cardboard literally in a place where there should have been a gasket. I mean, there was a gasket in there, but the cardboard was in there. So obviously like cardboard gets wet and then it’s permeable from moisture, so it obviously just would leak.
So I unscrewed the basket, took the cardboard out, put it back, put a little plumber’s putty in there, and the leak stopped. So anyway, there’s some incompetence too. They did come back out, but it’s like they didn’t even fucking detect that in my, I mean, I’m no plumber, right? But I know cardboard isn’t used as a seal, so get that shit out of there.
Anyway, if you had some light skills or hell, you could work for a handyman company and learn a handful of things, watch some YouTube videos, and you could probably. Find some jobs, right? Show up on time. So you could use, you know, I have digital marketing skills, so I actually could use some of the skills, even if I had no network, there’s a strong chance I could get out there and figure some stuff out.
In fact, I had a little business idea. And I mean, the thing is, you’ll run into this stuff all the time, so, and I’ll, I’ll leave you with it. So here’s an idea and. You could take this, and I’m not gonna run with it, but basically in, in my neighborhood, it’s uh, it’s about five years old now. And when it’s new constructions, they were all new homes.
When we had the walkthrough, the guy shows you, Hey, check out this maintenance stuff. Like be sure you change the, the furnace filter and there’s another thing, and blah, blah, blah. So I talked about this in a previous episode. Maybe I, I don’t know if I gave the idea, but essentially our, uh, gas meter piping was rusting.
Yeah. Yeah. I talked about the paint that I had to find. So essentially there’s a little bit of rust on some of the piping and the fittings and stuff like that, which it’s sort of normal for. You to have maintenance, you have to repaint things over time. Paint just wears, of course it matters the quality of the paint that they were do using and then the kind of prep that they did and did they put primer on there and other factors like that, it probably matters which direction.
Your pipe faces. So does does it get more sun? Does it get more wind? Is it getting wind and sand blown into it to actually wear the paint a little bit more? Or not? May, maybe it’s a little bit better protected. Maybe you, maybe there’s like a clear coat when you first moved in. You put like a clear coat protectant and that buys you a few more years.
I don’t know. So the, the point is, after a few years. You have to repaint this stuff, it’ll rust and it probably can rust for many years, but it’s better to just stay ahead of it. And if you know, you have to repaint it. So anyway, I had to fucking repaint it. Not a big deal. It took me probably a couple hours.
The longest part, like many things, the longest part is preparation. Getting ready to actually paint the paint costs $8 or something like the paint. It doesn’t even matter actually painting it. I probably spent 10 minutes total, something like that. Like every time I painted it, it was, it probably took a minute or two and I put four coats on there, something like that.
Pretty, pretty healthy number of coats on there. I mean, it looked great after one, but I was like, you know what? I’m gonna put a little bit more on here. The longest part was the prep, so I had to mask off the area, the side of my house. It was close to a fence. I had to also mask off the meter and the other stuff that I didn’t.
Want paint to get on. So you have to, you have to think ahead on that kind of stuff. And that actually takes longer than anything else. Masking it off will take longer. Si probably similar, like if you’re painting your house or whatever. Like most of the prep is like getting the surface ready, like getting the drop cloth out and masking off the trim, other stuff like that.
So the business idea is. All of the houses in my neighborhood basically have the same issue unless someone has gone ahead and already painted it. But I was like, you know what, it’s a couple, few dollars of paint. If I had a little bit more efficiency with masking off the area, which I think if I just had different, you know, materials and I knew exactly what I needed to mask off, it’d be much quicker.
And I was like, you know what? I could probably charge. A hundred to $200 to do this and just go around and say, Hey, you know, or put a little sign up or flyer or whatever, like, go look at your gas meter. It needs to be painted. I could paint it with this color. It’ll take me a day, blah, blah, blah. And. You know, technically I think the amount of time that it would take me would be like one hour.
I think once I got efficient at masking it off, you mask it off. You have to, you know, do some prep on the pipe. You just, uh, get a wire brush and get the rust off of there. You could do a better or worse job. In that, and if you really tried to get into the nooks and crannies, it would take longer, but I don’t think it’s absolutely necessary.
And um, you essentially could do several of these. Probably say, Hey, I’ll do it for 150 bucks cash and report your taxes. People, you gotta pay your taxes. But basically if you were like, you know, you could take cash, that would. Ease the burden of, uh, bookkeeping and stuff like that. I’ll put it that way.
This is all entertainment, by the way, folks. But basically I think you would have a pretty good little like side business. And the thing is you wouldn’t have to do it all the time constantly. It’s just like I can go around, ask a handful of people, maybe get like 10 people that are interested. They would tell their neighbor like, Hey, I saw someone doing some work.
Or Do you have any. Like issues over there. And sure enough, you go around and you look at your pipe and you see it’s rusted starting to corrode and it looks shitty, right? It looks kinda shitty. And the thing is like eventually you will run into an issue, so you may as well get ahead and there’s al, there’s little ideas like that all the time, like maybe.
Someone needs to, uh, in the winter, they need to winterize their irrigation system, right? If you get a, uh, compressor, like I have a, a small compressor, but I’ll often borrow one whenever I need to blow out the sprinkler system. It’s like if you have a little system, yeah, you could charge, you know, a hundred bucks or whatever and go around, blow up people’s sprinklers and it’s just a seasonal thing that you could do.
And pretty simple. Ideas like that are all over the place. So with that said. I think I would look into the physical world and maybe use some of my digital marketing skills and that would be the way that I would, I would like start a side hustle. Right now I don’t really know what the play is for starting a side hustle online.
There’s a lot of things you could try and like I said, video seems to be a good thing to be involved in ’cause it’s a growing. It’s a growing thing that is gonna continue to grow. But at the same time, like I don’t see as clear of a path as I did before. ’cause at the end of the day, you’re on these platforms like, and you’re subject to algorithm updates.
And other, other perhaps a little bit more minor issues compared to some of the Google issues we ran into, but it’s also volatile. If you have ideas, leave a comment over on YouTube or you could shoot me an email feedback at Doug show. Thanks for checking this one out, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.