The Side Hustle Project

In this episode we’re chatting with Matt Nelson, the creator behind WeRateDogs—the twitter sensation @dog_rates, that has more than 2.5 million followers.

The account shares images of cute dogs with a rating on a scale of 1-to-10... although just about every dog gets a rating above 10... because, well... Matt believes dogs are pretty great.

At 20 years of age, he just finished his sophomore year of college and he’s juggling this side project he started a year and half ago—with a full course load and internship.

Despite all of his competing priorities, he’s been able to amass an incredible social following including 173,000 followers on Instagram and 167,000 followers on Instagram.

AND, he’s monetizing his audience—over the past four months, he’s generated $50,000 in revenue—largely from the sale of merchandise from his website, weratedogs.com.

In today’s episode, we’re talking to bestselling author Max Altschuler, the CEO of SalesHacker, author of Hacking Sales and his brand new book coming in March 2018—called Career Hacking for Millennials. Max has helped build 3 multi-million dollar businesses today and he still has his hand in a LOT of different companies... whether they’re side projects like his new venture, Sutra Coffee or as an investor or advisor to nearly 40 SaaS startups. Originally from Long Island, New York... Max went to college at Arizona State University where he got his first real taste of business. He and a few friends won a business plan competition, got a $2,000 grant, and started building out a campus-wide bike-sharing program that was backed by the university... but this was 2009 and the US was in the depths of one of the deepest recessions we’ve seen in nearly a lifetime. So, Max and his partners couldn’t get funding for their business and they had to close down shop. He learned a lot from this first experience and it eventually brought him to San Francisco where he worked for the online education startup, Udemy as their very first sales hire. After spending a couple years building out the company’s sales process, Max launched a side project called SalesHacker—a live event that netted him a $60,000 profit on his first go-round. Pretty shortly thereafter, he dove head first into growing SalesHacker into the business it is today... generating over $3 Million in annual revenue from events, media partnerships, sponsors, and products... on top of that, they’re bringing in over 100,000 monthly readers. Growing that business has led Max to launching more side projects like Sutra Coffee—a h

In today’s episode, we’re talking to Lewis Howes, the best-selling author of The School of Greatness and The Mask of Masculinity. Today, Lewis has over half a million followers on Instagram... he’s the host of a Top 100 iTunes Podcast—The School of Greatness that features interviews with people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Casey Neistat, Rob Dyrdek, Daymond John, and hundred more. Lewis also has a blog with millions of readers, he’s been on Good Morning America, The Today Show, Ellen and I could keep going on and on... but things weren’t always this way for Lewis. In fact a little over 10 years ago, he was completely broke and living on his sister’s couch—not even able to afford rent. Originally from a small town in Ohio, Lewis got into sports in high school... and pretty quickly excelled on the football field. He went on to play professional arena football, but an injury landed him out of the sport permanently. After taking some time to recover, get back on his feet, and begin figuring out what he wanted to do with his life now that football was out of the picture, Lewis turned back to his interest in sports marketing and began combining that with social media... Pretty soon, he launched his first business as a LinkedIn consultant and about the same time began sharing publicly about his life & business over on his blog. And the rest is history...