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From Zero to Side Hustle
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Cheers to us!
Episode two hundred.
We started The Ramen Hustle because most business advice comes from people who have never had to make payroll. We wanted the receipts instead.
Two hundred issues later, the lesson is still surprisingly boring: the best businesses are rarely the flashy ones. They are the ones where somebody spotted a job people hate, figured out what it was worth, and kept showing up until the thing became a machine.
That’s why we keep ending up in places like drainage, upholstery, used books, restaurant equipment, and whatever else nobody on LinkedIn is excited about.
Thanks for reading. Two hundred down. Many more weird little businesses to find.
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A Thousand Dollars Of Mushrooms Bought A Farm
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Restaurants and shoppers want lion's mane and oyster mushrooms that were alive yesterday. The grocery supply chain cannot do it, because they last about a week.
So the freshest mushrooms in town come from whoever grows them there. In most towns nobody does.
That's the gap: the product spoils faster than the supply chain moves, handing the category to whoever is closest.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Indoor growing, at real margins. Four square feet yields roughly 16 pounds every two weeks at over 75 percent margin, at $24 to $30 a pound retail.
The mushrooms are the product. The farm status is the asset.
►Kyle Beaver started Ten Mile Mushrooms in 2018 in a spare room with $300 of straw and poly tubing, keeping his day job. The move that changed it was administrative. Documenting a little over $1,000 in annual sales and filing farm tax returns met the USDA's own definition of a farm, qualifying him for an FSA beginning farmer loan of up to $600,000 with no down payment. That bought 70 acres and a warehouse.
Zooming out: the qualification was worth more than the crop.
Growing in a tent is a small business. Becoming a farm is a category change, and it comes with credit no small business gets. FSA resets rates monthly, though: it was 6.000 percent in August 2026..
🥢The winners will sell to growers as well as eaters. Beaver ships ready-to-fruit blocks nationwide, to people who reorder. The second business is selling shovels to the people you taught to dig.
🍜 The risk is leverage against a crop with a one-week shelf life. One bad spawn bag ruins hundreds of pounds of substrate, and the $24 to $30 price breaks when a second grower appears. This sector has failed at scale, with Smallhold filing Chapter 11 in 2024.
You might also like ⇢ Teaching Other Growers Is the Second Business
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What's your take?
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7 Places That License Your Work And Publish Exactly What You Keep
Adobe Stock: photos and video, no application to negotiate · 33% photos, 35% video
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Epidemic Sound: music, plus an annual bonus pool for streaming · 50/50, forever
Zazzle: put a design on their products and set your own cut · 5% to 99%, you choose
Kobo Writing Life: ebooks, direct to their store · up to 70%
Draft2Digital: ebook distribution to everywhere else · they take about 10% of retail
🍱 Pick of the litter: CGTrader - One 3D model keeps selling indefinitely, and unlike everywhere else on this list, your percentage goes up on its own as sales accumulate.
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You Can Pay A Courier Company To Stand In A Hallway all night
Washington Express is a DC courier business with a service line called line standing. They send a person to the hallway outside a congressional hearing room and have them wait, overnight if necessary, so that a lobbyist can walk up at nine in the morning and sit down. It costs $60 an hour with a three-hour minimum, so $180 to hold a spot on a marble floor.
Orders have to be in by 6:30pm the day before the hearing.
🤯 And they're not the only one. Line standing is a standard offering across the DC courier trade, sold by Trans Time Express, All State Courier, Real Courier, with no particular subtlety.
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's two hundred! Thanks for reading them. Reply and tell us what you want more of, and we'll go find it. See you Monday.
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