669: The Piggyback Principle: The “Lazy” Way to Build a Successful Side Hustle

The Side Hustle Show

Nick Loper

Business, Education, Entrepreneurship, How To

4.7 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Piggyback Principle is a business idea framework that looks at popular market trends or “ecosystems” and seeks ways to support or supplement those trends. It’s a faster way to start a business because you can capitalize on what’s already hot with an additional or complementary product or service. Basically, your side hustle can ride piggyback on a larger business or trend. You could even say that my now-retired shoe-business was a piggyback business on the e-commerce trend and the comparison shopping trend. It’s a concept I first wrote about 10 years ago, but at that time, I took a pretty narrow view by just talking about marketplace trends. At that time, it was things like the rise of WordPress, or the popularity of the Paleo diet. Now, I’ve broken this principle into three stages: Idea generation Startup creation Marketing/growth And to make this practical, I’m bringing in real-world examples from fellow entrepreneurs who’ve used this approach to build real businesses. Here are the new and updated trends for the Piggyback Principle in 2025. Full Show Notes: The Piggyback Principle: The “Lazy” Way to Build a Successful Side Hustle New to the Show? Get your personalized money-making playlist here! Sponsors: Mint Mobile — Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month! Indeed – Start hiring NOW with a $75 sponsored job credit to upgrade your job post! OpenPhone — Get 20% off of your first 6 months! Gusto — Get 3 months free of the leading payroll, benefits, and HR provider for modern small businesses!

Transcript

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0:00.0	The piggyback principle, the lazy way to build a successful side hustle. My kids will tell you,
0:06.3	it's easier to get a piggyback ride than climb in the mountain by yourself. And you've heard
0:10.7	the metaphor that a rising tide lifts all boats. But the secret is those tides are all around
0:16.7	us. And you can take advantage of them in just about every area of your business. I'm tackling
0:21.0	three of those areas today, starting with idea generation, then we'll cover the startup or
0:26.1	creation phase, and close with the growth and marketing segment. For all of those, I'm going to show
0:31.4	you how to get a piggyback ride. In the world of cycling, it would be drafting. If it was swimming,
0:37.1	it's like, how do I swim
0:37.7	downstream instead of against the current? And I believe there is a way to do that. And that's
0:42.4	why I want to propose the piggyback principle in this episode. It's a concept I first wrote about
0:47.5	probably 10 years ago on the Sine Nussel Nation site. But at that time, I took a pretty narrow view of it.
0:53.0	Really, it was just about taking
0:54.4	advantage of marketplace trends. At that time, it was things like the rise of WordPress or the
0:59.7	popularity of the paleo diet. And of course, those trends shift over time, but all else being
1:05.2	equal, I'd like to be in a business where there's going to be more customers tomorrow than
1:09.6	there are today. We may have talked about this recently, but I remember a guy from Philip Morris coming to talk
1:14.5	to our group in a business school, and we were like, isn't cigarettes a dying industry?
1:19.9	And he had to admit that it was, but it was slowly declining around 3% a year, he told us.
1:24.7	That's the opposite of a piggyback principal business.
1:28.0	Make life easier for yourself by setting up shop where demand is increasing. So how do you find those kinds of
1:33.7	ideas? Lots of different ways to go about it. One interesting place to start is exploding topics.com.
1:39.5	I really like this site because it just shows you on the homepage, it's a random feed of things that have increased in search volume over the last several months or several years.
	...

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