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Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today I’m gonna talk about what I would do if I was starting over again now in 2026, and maybe we can assume that I don’t have any skills. Which maybe that’s not a huge stretch, but for the sake of this episode, no skills. Maybe, uh, you know, just some corporate experience generally.
It and tech related experience roughly, you know, like I did before I got started. But these kind of episodes are always popular because I think people are looking for. Ideas for themselves of course. But whenever I’ve done one in the past, it seems like people do want to hear what’s going on. Now the caveat, which I probably mentioned in the episode like this that I did last year, ’cause it has a great headline.
What I would do if I was starting over in 2026, the thing is I’m not trying to start anything right now and I’m not. Looking really closely at different opportunities and stuff like that. And I don’t have firsthand experience. However, I do have experience starting other things in the past. And one of the other caveats is like a lot of stuff that I do see out there, it kind of seems like bullshit.
You know? It’s a little too good to be true, and often people have a specific financial incentive to convince you that. You know, you can do a certain thing because you’ll have to buy a tool or buy their coaching or whatever. But I got a couple ideas and I’ve exchanged emails with a few folks in the last couple weeks hearing about what they’re working on and that kind of stuff.
So if you’re watching on YouTube, you know. The view is a little bit different. If you’re just listening, I’ll describe it for you. I’m sitting on Georgie’s bed. Georgie is, she kinda lays off to the side, but in the studio I have my standing desk kind of up front and typically that’s where I record this show.
Behind that, there’s a couple tables where I record my other show and it’s set up so like four people could sit up there. Usually there’s only two, but. Georgie’s bed is huge and it sits right in front. It’s typically out of camera, but she’s having a really good nap today and I was like, it looks cozy down there.
I’m wearing PJ pants. It’s like 20 degrees outside. It’s very cold outside today, I think it’s snowing a little bit. So we’ve had like roller coaster weather here in the Colorado area hasn’t been as cold as normal. It is, uh, probably normal temperatures today, but. In the last week, it’s been mid sixties.
It’s been very warm all winter long. We will have a couple days here and there where it gets a little cooler, but overall pretty warm. Anyway, it’s cold outside and I was like, she looks cozy. She doesn’t wanna walk right now. Why don’t I just sit on her bed and pet her while we record the episode, which is how I should do like all of the episodes.
This one I’ll probably do much better every now and then. She wakes up and kind of stretches. So again, if you’re watching on YouTube. You will see this. We’ll get into it today. Number one, I would probably give print on demand a shot, specifically digital printables on Etsy, including giftable. So the thing is, I haven’t been looking much for side hustles and different things to get started, but I’ve talked to.
A couple friends that have been doing this for a few years, and I recently interviewed, um, Cody Berman, and he started earning good money in a fairly short amount of time, and he did it again a couple years later. And the recent interview, it was I think 114 days, he had a, I can’t quite remember, maybe a thousand dollars a month.
But the point is. he quickly reached a respectable amount of money for a side hustle, and he did start things from scratch even though he did have experience. So obviously he knew his way around the tools and the kind of products that seemed to work. But if you go back to that interview, you hear his approach generally and you know, here’s one of the cases, right?
Like he’s talking about how. You could do this, but he has a course and it’s like, well, he has a financial incentive to make it sound like a great viable business model. That said, I talk about the print on demand business model and what Cody is doing, and Emily Odio Sutton as, um, she’s doing giftable, so, you know, no, no clothing typically, but it’s like coffee mugs and like mouse pads and, um.
Whatever journals, stuff like that. There’s a many different little products you could, you could do and she’ll focus on a specific demographic like teachers or something like that, and then come up with a bunch of different products, a bunch of different blurbs or text or designs based on the target demographic.
And then she’ll make. Hundreds of them. And same thing with Cody. You just kind of make a huge volume of products. They’re print on demand, so you don’t have to hold inventory, buy a bunch of t-shirts and like keep them at your house and send them off like it’s all print on demand. So from a startup cost standpoint, seems awesome.
There’s a little bit of software you might have to pay for. And when you go over to Etsy, you have to pay, I can’t remember some nominal amount, say 25 to $50 each year to use the platform. But other than that, the startup costs are just your time. And that’s one of the key things. When I was getting started with niche sites and stuff, it was like.
Buy some hosting, a little bit of software, and you could kind of get going for a couple few hundred bucks and back in the olden days, you could start earning money in. A few weeks, maybe a little over a month or something like that. Again, in the old days, you could get a little traction, not enough money to pay for your expenses yet, but you would get a couple pennies here and there and it kind of prove the business model and gave you confidence to keep going.
So that’s super important and I think there’s very low downside on the print on demand side of things. You can take a look. If you have been to have like graphic design experience, that could be helpful, but typically people are just using Canva and Canva’s, a powerful tool. You could probably use the free version of that for a little while.
I have a paid version. I think they’ve been raising the prices over the years, but overall it’s a great tool and I’m sure you can find alternatives that are cheaper. I don’t know the quality, but typically there’s probably many alternatives out there for a popular tool like Canva. If you’re watching this, you probably have some SEO or marketing background, and while the industry has shifted.
Dramatically. And really the way people are using the internet is different than it was. You know, people used to read blogs regularly, but they really, they don’t read blogs in the same way. There’s still blogs out there, but if you were starting something new, I wouldn’t recommend you start a blog. So SEO has changed, but many of the same ideas, I believe still apply completely for AI related things.
Before we got started, I did one minute of research really prepared for this show. Did one minute of research. On the, the different things that AI ha or the different things that SEO has shifted to within ai. And the thing is, people use the internet differently, but businesses still need help showing up wherever people are searching for them.
So previously. Someone maybe Googled something and they went to their search engine of choice and that was the route. But now they may still be doing that. They may still go to Google and Google shit, and maybe there’s an AI summary, a little overview. I searched for. Something recently, and there’s like a, an AI assistant within the search, and you could ask more questions, which is actually, that’s a good tangent.
I can go on in a second here. But it shifted and I looked up these these different things. So a IO. Which apparently is optimization for AI tools. Then there’s GEO that’s ranking within AI search, and then a EO, which, um, maybe that’s AI engine optimization. I don’t know. They didn’t even define it in the Reddit thread that I looked at, so I was like, fuck it.
They’re just putting letters together. I don’t know what it is. Sounds like it’s AI related. One minute of research and it was Reddit, so what the fuck am I supposed to do with that? Anyway, there are, there are plenty of businesses that still need help in some capacity in my interpretation. Of the information I got from conversations with folks that are still running agencies, they’re basically like, yeah, it’s kind of the same principles.
Like there’s some different things out there, but overall you’re doing the same kind of stuff. You put out content, it needs to be high quality. Maybe you show up in ai chat bot. Conversations and stuff, if that’s what people are using to figure out what restaurant to go to when they’re traveling or something.
But overall, it’s kind of the same idea. Now I’m on Shauna Newman’s email list and she talked a lot about, uh, Reddit marketing in the last podcast that she was, uh, with me on, and basically. She put together, you know, a package seems like the Reddit marketing is really blowing up.
I believe one of the reasons is Reddit shows up in Google search a lot because they’re, they’re in bed together as we know. Which is why like when I did my little research, I ended up on a Reddit thread and I’m like, ah, I’ll, I’ll do what I can here. People will understand what I’m talking about. So anyway, that is a whole like set of, uh, it’s a whole business, right?
Like she can do Reddit marketing and just kind of shift and pivot as the. The market changes as the mechanics of how people are using the internet and how SEO techniques are morphing into AI related search. Again, however, people are getting the information, however people are searching it, it’s going to continue to shift and as AI gets better, and then people.
Adapt or maybe other tools pop up and instead of going to like chat GBT directly, they’re using some, you know, intermediate tool instead. There’s still a need out there and is certainly worthwhile if you’re like, oh, alright, I have these SEO skills, how can I transfer that over to AI related stuff? I think that’s a fine way to go.
I will caution you to make sure you kind of have your shit together and. I was thinking about this, I, I totally forgot, but when I first got into SEO and marketing, I was very excited as we are. You learn a little bit and you think you know everything. I was at a coffee shop working on my website one morning, and I overheard the guy sitting next to me.
There were a couple dudes and one was explaining. SEO and how to rank, and I was sitting there drinking coffee, typing away, and I was like, oh, they’re, they’re a hundred percent talking about SEO. He was talking about writing content and then explaining how Google worked. And I was like, Hey guys, I, I’m sorry I couldn’t help it over here.
You’re talking about SEO and ranking your website. I’m literally like working on this stuff and I have a couple websites, like I’m ranking number one for these couple terms and I’m selling. Uh, these products as an affiliate and it’s really cool. I ended up chatting with them for half an hour. The guy ended up hiring me.
He was like, I would pay you if you could help me rank my website. It was about, um, he was a ex Navy Seal and it was about like just pt, um, and training and getting ready to go to like SEAL training, I believe. And. I was like, yeah, sure. I mean, I think this seems pretty straightforward. I’ll need to do a little research.
And basically I had experience as a management consultant where you go to a company, you ask them like, how are things running? What do you wanna improve? What’s the difference between like where you are now and where you wanna be, and. Put together a plan on how we can get there and who’s doing what when, and how much it’s gonna cost by when.
And he was like, sure we could do that. And the reason why I caution you is ’cause like I thought I knew a lot more than I did. It took much longer for me to do the work than I expected. He did rank well and the thing is like, you know, I delivered. I met the, you know, objectives. I’m a good communicator again.
I was consulting for almost a decade at that point. So basically I could say, here’s our dashboard. We’re on target. Here’s the schedule, here’s what I’m gonna deliver, and here’s what’s in scope. Here’s what’s outta scope. So I mean, I could run a project and I was doing fine, but it did take me longer than I expected.
The crappy part, and this was. I think independent of me working on it specifically. But as we know, SEO has a lot of churn and algorithm updates and competition. So he ranked well for a while, but I think maybe like six or nine months later his rankings went down. And he was like sending me messages occasion occasionally and he was like, Hey man, like this is going on.
And I’m like, you can hire me again to like work on stuff. But like, yeah, I mean, it looks like your competitors are coming up. There was an algorithm change something, something, you know, typical stuff. And he, uh, struggled a little bit with it over, you know, over the next, I don’t know, year. Something like that, but you don’t wanna get in over your head where you’re like inexperienced and you’re like overselling and you’re like, Hey, I could do Reddit marketing and you’ve never done it before.
You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. I do not recommend you do that. Have some understanding on like what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and you potentially can take a course and get some skills under your belt, but I would be. You know, if you’re a professional and you’re charging for your services, you wanna make sure that you indeed are a professional and you can deliver whatever you’re promising.
That is one of the issues with, um, you know, the traditional SEO marketing, like a lot of SEOs would like over promise in a very dramatic way, way over promise. Like not even close to what they could deliver. And that’s why a lot of people had, you know, mistrust. Of SEOs out there. The third and fourth one, I’ll kind of put ’em together today.
Just content creation. This could take on many different flavors. I like podcast and YouTube. Other people like short form video and I can’t comment specifically on like the viability of like long-term earnings. On the short form content area, I obviously it can be done. I think you may have to have a very, very large number of followers to earn good money, and it is unclear to me like how consistent the revenue can be over a long period of time if you’re on a platform.
Where you can grow really quickly, it probably means you could also decline really quickly, which is always scary if you’re banking on, you know, earning a certain amount of money consistently so you can pay your mortgage and your bills and other shit you have to pay for, obviously. So that makes it pretty tough when you’re building on someone else’s platform.
When I was. You know, just getting started. I mean, it was a rollercoaster ride. I mean, it would be, you know, $10,000 one month and then few hundred dollars the next month, and I’m like, oh man, this is not, this is not great. You know, it feels so good when it works out, but when it’s not, then. You’re really questioning whatever it is you’re working on.
And I mean, if, if it’s consistently going up and down, then at least you could count on that, but it, it was inconsistent until I figured a few things out. That said it changed a few years later, right? I mean, now these websites are, I think of the past overall. But content creation can work. Again, I have a preference for YouTube, and I feel like long form video is something that’s pretty hard to do.
I mean, I’m just publishing podcast out here, so it’s a little bit easier for me, but. Long form video. I mean, I’m a consumer myself and if you can use a long form video to support a business that you already have running, like if you have some product business, then that can work out great. For example, I am looking at a bunch of guitar pedals and stuff.
I the floor around me and I watch a couple YouTubers that do live streams and other content. And they are pedal makers that, and it’s like totally entertaining and fun and they talk about their, their products or new products and they’re just running the business ’cause people are interested in that and they are able to sell their products.
And it’s a great way to just like build community with the content. And if you already have some products that you’re selling, adding a. You know, component of content creation can be extremely valuable. The connections that you build are much greater than in most other ways, especially if it’s like, no community around your product and you only meet people when you go to maybe like a conference.
And then it’s just other industry people. So, um, having some outlet is really good and I mean. You guys see this out there on any platform, whether it is TikTok or Instagram or Facebook, like people are sharing, businesses are sharing like the behind the scenes stuff. And it’s interesting for a lot of people out there, not easy, but you know, the, the connection that you can create is invaluable.
Related to the content creation area is a newsletter, and I think I probably skipped newsletters in the past few updates like this, but a newsletter would be a direct to like connect to your audience if you’re more of the writing type and you don’t wanna do video, you don’t wanna do audio. The newsletter works if you are a writer, and of course, you know, you see this in the form of Substack where you can give away stuff for, for free.
You could have a combo of free and paid, you could have it all paid or whatever. And that’s a great way to connect directly with your audience, as in the written. Form, newsletters and email are still just as powerful and great as they ever have been. I am on a handful of newsletters. I unsubscribe to a lot of, I’ll sign up for a little while and then I’m like, I’m getting too many emails.
But basically with email, you have the ability to connect with your audience. You can send them to whatever other content you have. If you do have another business, like a guitar pedal business, you could have ’em on your email list and let ’em know when you launch. So I would say like an email newsletter goes hand in hand with the content creation, whatever platform you do, and having the ability to connect with your audience like that and the written word via email where there’s no algorithms like messing up what you’re trying to do.
I mean, I, I’m looking at some of my stats for. This podcast on YouTube and it’s buried. It is totally buried. Meanwhile, crazy thing audio side has taken off. It’s the weirdest thing. However, if you just, I mean, the thing is you, you can’t see my analytics on the podcast side, but on YouTube you can see like, oh, there’s like under a hundred views on some of these.
So it’s been an interesting little experiment recently and. Luckily talked about this. I’ve detached myself from the analytics, although it feels good when it goes up, but I kind of ignore it when it goes down. ’cause especially on YouTube. What a crapshoot. So crazy. So content creation, great route. I think, um, even if you don’t decide to stick with it, if you are creating content again, any format, audio, video, written content.
It will improve your communications, which is always a good thing, and you should be able to transfer those skills to anything else that you work on ever again in the future. Last one I’ll mention, which I hesitate, but I mean software is more accessible to everyone these days, and. If you have a problem that you think you can solve with software, I think it’s a time where you can give it a shot and get a prototype going in a fairly straightforward way using AI tools.
I haven’t played around myself. I don’t have a specific problem that I’m trying to solve. I’m gonna keep talking in the same voice. For the people that are listening, you can’t see this, but. Jordy’s screaming, so she’s kicking her legs. And I had to whisper her name ’cause I didn’t wanna wake her up, but she’s kicking her legs and um, sometimes she barks and stuff, so if we’re, if we’re very lucky, we’ll we’ll hear some barks.
But yeah, she was dreaming of chasing a squirrel. I think that’s my guess. Back to software, right? Back to the software. If you have an idea that can be solved with software, it’s worth it to give it a shot. I haven’t done any of this myself. I always caution people, actually, I think when I was talking about vibe coding with uh, Jason back, uh, in September, I was like, man, you know, people are putting together these tools, but they don’t have the software background to actually manage bugs.
And have customers basically. So people, there were a couple people that I know of and they would create tools with no intention of like taking it over. Um, the finish line, they would just like get users, get paying users, and they were trying to sell their software company. And they would sell these little pieces off.
So they would start something up, get a few hundred customers, sell like lifetime subscriptions and uh, or lifetime access, like one time fee. So they would get a handful of users and then they would sell it. And not always, but I have to tell you, I mean, a lot of times when people sell software companies, the next person that gets it, they don’t do anything with it.
They like let it die, a slow death and. It doesn’t always happen, but typically that is what’s happening. I’ve seen it so many times in my very, very small unofficial survey and observations. Ra Georgi woke up there, so she had a little dream. Now she’s stretching. So anyway, thing is, it sounds like the, the AI coding tools are pretty good these days, so give it a shot.
You know, you obviously can learn all the things that I was talking about, about, you know, maintaining software. You know, the thing is like, there’s gonna be bugs regardless. There’s always gonna be some bugs, but as interfaces change, as different software changes around whatever tool you’re using, then other things break.
So typically if you are creating some piece of software, it’s gonna interface with other. Either data or other pieces of software, APIs and, and generally things change over time. Updates come out and other tools and that breaks whatever it is you have going on. So it’s kind of an ongoing thing, and in it does make sense generally to pay for continued access for a specific tool knowing that.
It costs money to keep the software running without bugs. So as much as I don’t wanna have subscriptions and stuff like that, if you want to have like good software, like it probably will cost money over time and an annual subscription does kind of make sense. I sound like someone who has a software company that charges on an annual basis, but I don’t.
I, I don’t. So those are a couple things I would look at if I was starting over in 2026 with generally no skills. And again, I mean if I was starting something from scratch, I’ve used can Canva before, but like. I mean, I’m not a graphic design expert or anything like that, but I think, you know, the print on demand is a very low barrier to entry with a marketplace in place, and that is one of the big advantages with that.
If you’re creating content, then you are one of tens, hundreds of millions of people trying to put out content, trying to get attention. It’s pretty tough. No one really cares about you at all. It’s really hard to get attention out there. You don’t need a huge audience. To get started and to make it worthwhile.
But it’s hard to get noticed in a such a sea of, I mean, content in general, and a lot of it is pretty good content out there. So many opportunities. And then if you’re starting a software, you know, product of some kind, some SaaS. Again, it’s, uh, very competitive out there, and that’s one of the hard things with, you know, starting from something from scratch, like the demand is.
I mean, the demand is probably not as high as you hope or think it will be compared to the supply of, you know, products or whatever. Attention getting thing is over on the other side of the equation, it’s pretty crowded in a lot of places. You know, you start a podcast, there’s a lot of podcasts out there.
You can niche down and then expand over time, but. You know, you can overcome it. And if you, for example, if you do start a podcast or a YouTube channel and you have like a few dozen people that start watching you over the course of six months, I mean, that’s a few dozen people. That’s actually like a full room of people.
That’s a lot of folks listening to you and you can improve, you can grow faster than you think. I watch a lot of YouTube channels and listen to podcasts and new ones pop up. Okay. And if they, you know, if they have a compelling story, if they bring some skills from their, you know, previous life, they’re able to grow faster and just kind of, kind of blow up.
I mean, it happens all the time in super saturated areas and I’ve seen, you know, channels grow from whatever. Few 10,000, like under 10,000 to like over a hundred thousand in a fairly short amount of time, and they’re just like, yep, doing my thing. A lot of these, you know, I gravitate towards long form video talking, you know, 20, 30, 40 minutes.
I’ll watch long videos like that. It’s pretty fun. Okay. I think that’s it for today. Please let me know if you have something on your radar that you’re getting started where you’re like, I’m actually getting some pretty good traction out there. Or even if you haven’t started and you have no traction, but you’re like, I have seen these people talking about X business model and I am curious about it, but I haven’t dabbled yet.
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