EPISODE #48
When the caffeine starts to kick in
🚀 Monday motivation: the AI revolution needs teachers, not just builders. This is The Ramen Hustle, where we find opportunity in the capability gap.
Today’s Download:
🔼 Beat the big boys on Wall Street
🤖 Teach AI tools
🪟 Window cleaning goldmine
💻 Solo entrepreneurship is a rising wave
📶 The content that outperforms posts 3:1
Click here to feature your side hustle, business idea, or question in an upcoming newsletter.
🥇 NOW YOU KNOW
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🔥 FRESH IDEA
Charge $300/Hour Teaching AI Tools
Source: YouTube
A marketing director can spend 6 hours fighting with ChatGPT and still ship a worse draft than you can make in 20 minutes. That frustration is the business. And people are charging $150–$300/hour to untangle the weeds for them.
Most professionals are stuck in the awkward middle right now. They’ve tried AI tools. They’ve seen the demos. But in real life, they’re still copying and pasting into prompts like it’s 2023, getting bland output, and giving up after two tries. Companies rolled out AI subscriptions faster than they rolled out training. The result: AI exists in the org, but it isn’t actually changing how work gets done.
That’s why “AI trainer” is quietly becoming a premium service. You’re not teaching machine learning. You’re teaching usage. The same way Excel consultants get paid because spreadsheets are powerful but confusing, AI trainers get paid because most people don’t have repeatable workflows yet.
Here’s what “cracked the code” looks like in the wild:
Matteo made $400,000 teaching companies AI, despite being non-technical. His angle: practical use cases, not theory.
Maven course creators build cohort training that can scale beyond 1:1 sessions, and Maven itself markets “earn up to $30k” on a first cohort launch.
Ernie the Attorney sells an ongoing ChatGPT workshop for lawyers at $179/month, showing how niche positioning converts better than generic “AI coaching”.
One practical move: pick a profession you already understand and build a 1-page “AI cheat sheet” for them. Then post one weekly demo where you show the transformation (messy input → clean output → saved time).
People don’t hire trainers because they love learning. They hire trainers because they want the result without the confusion.
Rate this hustle:
📍 LOCAL HUSTLE
Window Cleaning Routes Making Bank
Kyle Ray - founder of Geek Window Cleaning
The easiest way to make $1,000 in a day isn’t a fancy online business. It’s 10 boring storefronts that need clean glass every two weeks.
Kyle Ray did it the unsexy way. He started cleaning windows with about $100 of equipment, then turned it into a real business by switching from random jobs to repeatable systems. His company hit six figures in 2024, and he told Business Insider he expects $1M in 2025 by leaning into two things: ranking on Google and selling recurring service plans instead of one-offs . That’s the whole mechanism. Window cleaning only becomes a “route business” when customers pay you on a schedule.
Pricing supports the math. Even basic market research shows homeowners routinely pay meaningful rates for window cleaning, and it’s easy to validate in your city before you buy anything.
More inspiration (how operators are actually doing it):
A 20-year-old operator shared that after upgrading equipment and hiring friends, they were “clearing $1,000/day easily” once the job became a repeatable route.
A franchisee with Elite Window Cleaning reported earning over $50,000 in a single month, showing how route density + recurring commercial accounts can scale fast.
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🚨 RED ALERT
Solo Businesses Are Eating the Economy
Marc Lou (ShipFast / micro-SaaS portfolio)
A lot of people don’t “start a company” anymore. They start a one-person money machine with no payroll and no meetings.
This isn’t a vibe shift. It’s structural. The U.S. had 30.4 million nonemployer businesses in the latest Census nonemployer dataset, with $1.8 trillion in receipts. Even more telling: from 2012 to 2023, nonemployer businesses grew about 2.7% per year, while employer businesses grew around 1.1%.
What’s powering it is leverage. Software replaced headcount. Contractors replace departments. AI reduces busywork. One-person operators can ship what used to require a small team.
Real-world “solo” creators showing up:
Marc Lou (ShipFast / micro-SaaS portfolio) — Marc published that he made $1,032,000 in 2025 across multiple products by shipping fast, stacking small offers, and staying lean.
Tony Dinh (indie products portfolio) — Tony shared he hit $1M in annual revenue and broke down how he grew via B2B sales, resellers, and shipping multiple small products.
Pieter Levels (PhotoAI + solo product empire) — A deep-dive shows PhotoAI reaching around $132K/month while Pieter ran a portfolio reportedly totaling $250K+/month across products as a solo builder.
Justin Welsh (one-person creator business) — Justin posted that 2025 revenue hit $2.834M+ while operating at ~91% margins, proving “one-person” can scale without a big team.
LifeMathMoney (solo creator on Gumroad) — This creator wrote a breakdown of crossing $1,000,000 in Gumroad sales, explaining the product + audience strategy behind it.
Quick move: pick one service you can deliver in 48 hours, sell it as a fixed package, and use contractors only for the pieces that slow you down.
🏃 CONTENT PLAY
Behind-the-Scenes Content
The most convincing marketing isn’t a polished “launch post.” It’s a shaky phone clip of the work actually happening.
People trust process because it’s hard to fake. The shift got sharper in 2025 as feeds filled up with AI-smooth content. Sprout Social’s research found 55% of consumers say they’re more likely to trust brands committed to publishing human-made content. Buffer also called out the same pattern: AI helps creators move faster, but “authenticity is still needed” or content starts feeling cheap.
What this looks like in practice:
Sports teams leaning into raw “pregame” and locker-room moments because unfiltered clips feel more human.
Social teams loosening brand rules and experimenting more, because rigid polish gets ignored.
The Ramen first step: post one “proof of work” clip per day for a week. Screen-record your process. Show the mistake. Show the fix. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s letting people see you doing the thing they want to learn or buy.
READING MATERIAL
🔋 Home batteries are having a ‘VC goes nuclear’ moment - Base Power raised $1B to scale residential storage, showing how fast energy + grid anxiety can turn into real demand.
🥤 Kitchen soda to $500M+ revenue is a real thing now - Poppi went from DIY experiments to a mainstream ‘better-for-you’ beverage giant.
🤩 Celebrity brands usually flame out. This one didn’t - Rhode sold for $1B and reportedly hit $212M in net sales as of March 2025, showing what modern distribution + demand looks like.
🎯 One app can replace your entire messy stack - Keeper’s list breaks down freelancer tools for invoicing, organization, and taxes (simple and practical).
🛒 Ecommerce isn’t the hustle. Distribution is - Omnisend’s 2025 report digs into what people are actually doing to make side income work