The Ramen Hustle
From Zero to Side Hustle
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When it’s a “5 in 1” body wash
🧼 Dawn dish soap is about as boring as a business gets. It’s a bottle by the sink, doing one job, over and over. But its grease-cutting formula, instantly recognizable blue bottle, and decades of marketing helped turn a basic cleaning product into a household staple and one of P&G's biggest brands.
That is the kind of business we like. Find something people already buy.
Make it better. Make it memorable. Keep showing up.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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Don't Get Left Behind.
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Buying Words for $11, Selling Them for Thousands
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every new company needs a name and the matching web address, and the good ones are increasingly taken. Founders will pay real money to skip the hunt and buy the exact name they want, already registered by someone who saw it coming.
That's the gap: a domain costs about eleven dollars to register and, to the one buyer who needs it, can be worth thousands.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Register brandable, in-demand web addresses before the companies that need them exist, hold them, and sell to the buyer for whom that exact name is worth a premium. Or build the tool that helps everyone else find them.
►One flipper registered a plain .com for $11 and sold it about six months later for $2,650, a roughly 200x return on a thirty-second purchase. The smarter, recurring version is what Kirill Zubovsky did: he built Smartynames, a tool that auto-generates brandable available names, and took it to about $1,000 a month within four months of a single launch post, earning referral commissions every time someone bought a suggested name.
Zooming out: the business isn't one lucky flip, it's either a patient portfolio or the tool everyone else pays to search.
Think: niche-specific names like healthcare or local trades, expired-domain hunting, appraisal and brokerage services, or a naming tool with affiliate payouts.
🥢 The winners treat it as a portfolio and a system, not a lottery ticket. The ones who build the tool layer, generators and brokerage, earn recurring money instead of waiting on a single sale.
🍜 The risk is brutal and worth stating plainly: the vast majority of domains never sell, with industry sell-through estimated in the low single digits, so you bleed ten to twenty dollars a year in renewals on dead inventory. It is pure speculation, and registering a name too close to an existing brand invites a trademark complaint or lawsuit.
You might also like ⇢ The AI startup behind Smartynames
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What's your take?
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The One Thing to Check Before You Buy a Business
When you buy a small service business, you are paying a multiple of its profit. So the question that decides the whole deal is simple: is that profit actually coming with it?
When Alicia Powers bought Price Builders, a 33-year-old San Diego contractor doing about $1.6 to $2 million in revenue on $250,000 of owner earnings, the seller wanted to keep all the work-in-progress, the unfinished jobs already sold and underway, and run them through separate accounts. She saw the trap immediately: "if that SDE doesn't exist, then what are you buying?" If the seller pockets the profit on the jobs currently in flight, the buyer is paying a three-times multiple on earnings that are literally walking out the door.
🥄 The single most important thing to nail down in a service acquisition is who owns the pipeline, the unfinished jobs and the signed-but-unstarted work. She restructured the deal so she started fresh rather than paying for revenue tied to the old owner's jobs. The purchase price is set on profit, so protect the profit you are actually buying.
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35-year commercial cleaning business, Beaver County PA: $700K
Revenue: $647,210
Asking Price: $700,000
Cash flow (SDE): $255,726
Multiple: 2.74x SDE
Why they're selling: Not disclosed
What's included: 24 staff (7 full-time, 17 part-time), equipment, $91,532 in fixtures, medical and office contracts
The case for: a 35-year book of contractual medical and office cleaning at 2.74 times earnings is exactly the kind of recurring, unsexy route an acquirer hunts for. The staff and contracts are in place, current management will stay, and $255,000 of owner cash flow on a business this established is real.
The case against: the asking price is higher than a full year of revenue, which is rich for commercial cleaning, where contract retention matters more than tenure. No reason for selling is disclosed on a 35-year business, and 17 of 24 workers are part-time, so turnover and contract renewals are the whole ballgame.
🥢 Buy or pass? A reasonable multiple and decades of recurring contracts against a price above revenue and a silent reason for selling. Hit reply with your call.
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People Are Paying $349 to Rent a Goat for Prom Photos
You send a request, and a farm drops off a live goat at your house for the day so it can appear in your prom or engagement photos. Oba Farms near Dallas rents one out for about $349 for 24 hours.
Roughly three hundred and fifty dollars to have a goat photobomb prom season, delivered to your driveway.
🤯 And they're not the only one. Joyful Goat Rentals in Birmingham does a 30-minute photo session for $150, and goat rental is a real cross-country category, from novelty photoshoots to yoga classes to weed-clearing herds.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the tray for today. Forward it to someone who'd rather build something real than chase the next shiny thing. Reply and tell us which idea you'd actually run. We read every one. See you tomorrow.
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