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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When there’s no coffee in sight
🎬 The Princess Bride made about $30 million in theaters in 1987, then found its audience on VHS and cable. Now millions can quote it by heart.
The demand was there. It just came through a different door.
We watch those side doors: overlooked buyers, untapped markets, customers nobody counted.
Grab your chopsticks.
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Buy The Government's Junk Pile
Kitchenware confiscated or abandoned at the Indianapolis International Airport is transported to the Indiana Department of Administration warehouse for storage. (Photo by Mackenzi Klemann/Indiana Capital Chronicle.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Cities, school districts and state offices replace desks, tools, trucks and textbooks all the time. Most of the old stuff gets sold at public online auctions, on sites like GovDeals (a website where governments auction off what they no longer need).
The agency wants the warehouse empty, not 200 textbooks to photograph and mail one at a time.
That's the gap: the government sells by the pallet, and buyers pay by the piece.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Win a cheap lot, haul it home, and resell the items one at a time on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Indiana's state surplus office says resellers are its main customers, and its items average $252 each on GovDeals.
The business makes money on the flip. But it grows from the auction feeds, because the same agencies list new lots every week.
►Shannon Jean, who coaches resellers, told the Side Hustle Show that one member, Mindy, paid $1 total for two pallets of books. She sold about $5,000 worth within a month, at $200 to $400 a book. Shannon says his members make anywhere from "a couple of grand" to "20 grand" a month.
Zooming out: the auction is your supplier, and it restocks itself.
Think: textbooks, lab gear, office chairs, shop tools.
🥢 The winners will be the ones who pick one category and learn its prices cold. Knowing the resale price before you bid is the whole edge.
🍜 The risk is the fine print. Most surplus sells as is, where is, meaning no returns and you haul it yourself, often within five business days. Some sites add a 10% buyer's premium on top of your bid.
You might also like ⇢ What It's Really Like Buying A University's Old Truck On GovDeals
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What's your take?
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Why A Potter Sells Plates To Restaurants
Most makers think the big win is getting into a store chain. A New Jersey potter found that the better customer is a business that wears out what you sell and has to buy it again.
What they uncovered: Jono Pandolfi makes plates and bowls for restaurants and hotels. In 2012, while still working alone, he landed a 6,000-piece order from the NoMad hotel in New York. Today his studio of about 40 people makes about 1,200 pieces a day, according to New Jersey Monthly.
In 2010 he had orders from Crate & Barrel and Anthropologie, the kind of deal most makers dream about. His own company timeline says that's when he learned "the difficulties of wholesale" (selling in bulk to stores that resell your work) and refocused on restaurants.
Restaurants were simply a better buyer. There's no store in the middle taking a cut, and plates chip, break and walk out with diners, so the orders come back. One chef also tells the next: after the NoMad job, Afar reports, the introductions to other chefs followed.
What they learned: pick a buyer who uses up what you make. A gift shop buys your candle once and resells it. A spa that burns candles every day reorders every month. The same is true of aprons for a café, soap for a salon, or printed menus for a diner.
His first business buyer was not "restaurants." It was Will Guidara, a friend from his old band, who in 2004 needed bud vases and small dishes for the cafés at the Museum of Modern Art. If you make something, your first buyer is probably one person you already know who runs one business that uses it up.
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Don't Miss This
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Your buyer asked ChatGPT. It named your competitors.
Search didn't die. It moved.
Your buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity what to buy, and act on the answer. If you're not in it, a competitor is.
ChatFeatured does the work to get you cited. Most customers see their first citations inside 7 days.
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A Man Bought A Dead Whiskey Brand's Name For $245
Michter's was a Pennsylvania whiskey maker that traced its roots to 1753 and was out of business by 1990.
In the late 1970s, a young Joseph Magliocco got his first sales job at his family's liquor company. The assignment: clear out a pile of unsold, gold-plated King Tut decanters full of Michter's whiskey.
In 1997 he noticed the Michter's name had been abandoned and bought it for $245. It came with no whiskey, no recipes and no bottles. The revived brand sold 150 bottles its first year. Since then the company has put more than $8 million into a single Louisville building, and in 2023 it released a bottle that sold for $6,000.
Still cooking: sold in all 50 states and more than 60 other countries.
A name people still remember can be worth buying even after the company behind it is gone.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us what your county is auctioning this month. Forward this to the friend with a truck and a free Saturday. See you tomorrow.
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