This is the million dollar business in your backyard. What's up? What's up? Nick Loper here. Welcome to The Side Hustle Show. It's the entrepreneurship podcast you can actually apply. And I've got an incredible story for you today. Today's guest went from zero to 350 recurring customers in his first three months in business, starting as a side project and rackeded up over three million dollars in revenue last year, all from the not so glamorous service of pet waste removal.

And if that wasn't enough, he says, you know what, there's so much opportunity in this space.

I'm going to teach other people how we did it. And that's turned into another almost million dollar a year side hustle

from swoop scoop.com and the Poop Scoop Millionaire community, William Milliken. Welcome to

The Side Hustle Show. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Nick. I appreciate it. You a bet it has been

quite a journey from this little side project idea to cleaning a quarter million yards,

a couple hundred thousand yards at this point. But it is late 2020. You're working in digital

marketing and you come to this realization that, look, I could be waking way more,

running the kinds of businesses that were hiring you for marketing help than just being the hired marketing help. What led you to the pet waste niche? Yeah, so my, I guess my first home service company was in the trade. So I have a electrical company. I got a garage door company. And I had a buddy from high school that I grew up with. We went to elementary school, middle school, high school, grew up down the street, and he wanted to start a business with me, and started investigating, said, what kind of skills

do you have? You have any, like, trade skills, can you, but he had basically no skills, couldn't do

plumbing, couldn't back up a trailer, couldn't do, like, lawn care. And at the time, my wife was

pregnant, I was busy working on the businesses, so she had hired a pooper scooper. And they just weren't doing a very good job,

not very professional, didn't show up a lot of the time. The billing was weird, no uniforms, anything like that. And I thought, maybe we give that a shot and just kind of see what happens. I honestly wasn't expecting much because when I get into a new industry, one of the first things I do is I check to see how much like Google search volume there is just to get an idea of demand. and there's pretty much no search volume for this service.

So I said, eh, we'll, we'll give it a shot and see what happens anyways. And I'm glad we did. So you didn't let that be a red flag. Like nobody necessarily, they don't know what to think. They don't know what to look for it. Exactly. So that's actually how we ended up, ended up growing was not with a lot of Google at first. It was just trying to find ways to get in front of people and let them know that that service exists. And once that started happening, things just started to snowball from there.

Yeah. That's interesting to say, people aren't necessarily going out proactively looking for it, but I still think there's some demand. I mean, your wife had hired a service. So you knew there was at least some kind of demand, people looking for help here. Yeah, nobody likes picking up dog poop. So at least I don't. I don't know about you. No, this was, because we've done a few episodes with Erica Kruppen from Kruppin's poop and scoopin. And similar. She's like, this was a pain point for her. And so the light bulb goes off and says, well, if it's a pain point for me, other people probably don't like doing it, maybe there's a business there. Absolutely. And there's some other things that were really appealing about it too. Like it cost almost no money to get started, which was a big one. You don't have to worry about hiring like journeyman electricians or people with 8,000 hours and all these crazy licenses. like when you want to scale it up, it's a lot easier to hire people. You don't have any

like cost of materials. You just got like trash bags. You're not buying a bunch of like home

service equipment. Sure, sure. Okay. So checks the box. Low specialized skills required,

low startup costs. And despite no search volume, there's some, I feel like

there's some demand out there. Yeah. And there was other service providers doing it. And maybe

interestingly, they weren't doing a great job. Like, despite their lack of branding and lack of

effort, they were still getting business. Yep. Yep. 100%. Do you do anything else pre-startup phase, like in the idea validation or competitive research? Honestly, it wasn't a lot of information out there. You had your local competitors, so you can kind of get an idea. You had Erica Kruppen was one of the OGs, had a YouTube channel. So basically that was the only information we had. My business partner runs the ops, so he didn't even have a dog. So I remember when we were first getting started, he threw a bunch of rocks out in his backyard. And he was like sweeping up rocks to time himself to see how long he thought an average yard would take. Okay. So there's a lot of trial and error, especially when we were starting off. That's funny. You picture the guy with a stopwatch, like in any kind of sports

montage movie. Yeah, yeah, we should go back and make that. That's a good idea. So what happens

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