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From Zero to Side Hustle
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Took a little break but we’re back!
🎸 In School of Rock, Dewey Finn turns a group of overlooked kids into a band by spotting what each one does best, then building a system around it.
That’s a useful way to look at business, too. Find an overlooked skill, solve a specific problem, and build something people will pay for.
This week: holiday lights, a B2B service route, viral vinyl stickers, executive retainers, and live-auction resale.
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Christmas Lights Installations Cleared $52K in Two Months
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every homeowner with a two-story house wants holiday lights up in November. Most of them do not want to climb a ladder in the cold to hang them. Professional installers charge $200 to $2,000 per property depending on the roofline, and most customers book the same crew back the following year.
The chore is seasonal. The customer list is not.
That's the gap: Most people who try this treat it like a weekend side job instead of a route business.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
You buy LED string lights, clips, and extension cords in bulk, install them from October through December, and charge per linear foot of roofline. At the end of the season you come back, take everything down, and store the lights for next year. The same property pays you twice. The business makes money from installations. But it grows from returning customers, who cost almost nothing to rebook and drive new leads through yard signs and referrals.
► Shaggy Eells and his partner Cole Lyon ran their first full season and hit $52,500 in revenue across 43 properties. Profit was $27,300 after $17,500 in materials, $4,800 in marketing, and other expenses. Their number one lead source: yard signs planted in customers' yards. Shaggy called them "money bushes."
Zooming out: The season lasts eight weeks, but the customer list pays into year two. Repeat business cuts marketing costs, while the same crew cleans gutters in October, installs lights in November, and handles takedowns in January.
Think: a tiny roster of high-retainer clients, add-ons like a personal newsletter or podcast repurposing, and revenue-share once you can point at closed deals.
🥢The winners will be operators who build a client list in year one and spend almost nothing on marketing in year two: a returning customer costs nothing to rebook.
🍜 The risk is the calendar: you have eight weeks to make a year's worth of income, and if you under-price early jobs to build momentum, you erase your margin before the season ends. Price from day one, not after you've learned the market.
You might also like ⇢ How to Start a Christmas Light Installation Business
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What's your take?
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The Paywall Yehoshua Moved to the Front
Alpe Audio is a language-learning app built around audio content.
The recipe: A new user arrives at the app. Instead of getting full access to the free tier first and seeing the upgrade offer later, they see the subscription offer before accessing any free content.
Decline it and the free tier opens. Commit and they're in. The paywall is at the door, not the back of the house.
The result: conversions from free to paid grew 7.6x over eight months.
The lesson is not about the copy. It is about the order. Most products let you fall in love with the free version, then ask you to pay for more. By that point, the free version feels like enough. Front-loading the offer catches people while the product is still a question mark — before habit locks them into the free tier.
If you run any newsletter, app, or course with a free tier: test showing the paid offer before the free access, not after. Not a popup on day 30. A gate at the entrance. See what happens to your conversion rate.
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Don't Miss This
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TLDR AI is a free daily email curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers: the new tools worth trying and the research worth understanding, summarized for 1.1M+ readers.
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What a $10 Bet on a Storage Unit Taught About Research
Most storage auction bidders trust their gut. Teenager Michael Haskell built a research system instead, grossing $135,000 in 2025 reselling storage unit finds.
What he uncovered: His business, Mike’s Unique Treasures, buys unclaimed units and resells the contents on Facebook Marketplace and other platforms. His first unit cost $10; his first sale, a CO₂ canister, brought in $40. In 2025, he kept roughly $82,000 after interest and taxes.
Instead of guessing what’s inside, Michael uses Google Lens to identify items and a custom ChatGPT program to check market prices before bidding. “Most bidders don’t know what things are worth.”
What he learned: Access isn’t the edge. Research speed is. The same play works at estate sales, liquidation auctions, and garage sales, where fast price checks uncover overlooked value.
The opportunity is buying before everyone else knows what something is worth.
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Amazon Is Paying Regular People to Review Products on Video
Amazon started letting anyone submit short product review videos to its product listing pages. When a shopper watches your video and buys the product, you earn a commission. No
following required. No posting schedule. The video sits on Amazon's product page indefinitely and keeps earning.
The program, called the Amazon Influencer Program, used to be limited to creators with large social audiences. Amazon opened it to general applicants around 2022 and has expanded it since.
Michael Strahl earns roughly $10,000 a month from the program, according to a Business Insider report in April 2026, without a large following. Commissions run from 1 to 4 percent on most categories and up to 10 percent on Luxury Beauty — meaning a $200 skincare product earns $20 per sale from a video you made once.
Fluencer Fruit, a company built specifically to help creators maximize the program, was acquired by Wayward in 2025. That is the signal: institutional money is treating this as a real business category.
Where the trend branches next:
Home goods and kitchen (highest search intent, easy video format)
Pet care (emotional purchase driver, owners buy on impulse)
Cross-platform funnels (TikTok or YouTube driving traffic to Amazon storefronts)
Luxury Beauty (9 to 10 percent commission — disproportionate payout per sale)
Before buying anything, film 10 quick reviews of products you already own and submit them to Amazon. Track what gets approved and converts. That’s your market research.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's Wednesday. If you're finding this useful, the best thing you can do is forward it to one person with a day job who's been thinking about a side thing. See you Thursday.
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