Episode #59
🧰 Thursday is ops and outreach day. The Ramen Hustle hands you a clean angle to pitch, a “why now” hook, and a way to package proof so you get replies without sounding like a marketer.
When you raise the price and nobody notices
The hustle: James Bond of college essays
Field note: How to get Notion to pay you $1M
Trend: The future of TikTok for creators
Fresh find: He made $8.78M from Exploding Kittens
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The 24-Hour Essay Rescue
A parent reads their kid’s college essay draft at 11:30pm and realizes it sounds like every other essay. The deadline is Sunday. Panic turns into a credit card swipe fast.
✅ You’re selling confidence and clarity, not grammar fixes.
WHY THIS WORKS
College essays are emotional purchases. Families don’t want to gamble on something tied to a student’s future. Most people don’t need “editing.” They need a structured process that pulls a real story out of the student and turns it into a clean narrative.
The twist is packaging: a 24-hour Essay Rescue that includes a short interview. Instead of marking up a doc, you extract the story, rebuild the structure, and give a revision plan. That interview is why parents pay.
Deadlines create urgency and premium pricing.
Interview-led story mining beats generic editing.
A fixed package feels safer than open-ended hourly tutoring.
Referrals happen naturally once results land.
Seasonality helps: demand spikes every year.
PROOF IT’S REAL
College admissions consulting looks like “helping with essays” from the outside, but the New York Times’ guide makes it clear why families pay: the process is confusing, high-stakes, and full of deadlines that are easy to botch without a system. That stress creates a premium market for someone who can turn messy ideas into a clean narrative and keep a student on a timeline.
Ethan Sawyer, the founder behind College Essay Guy, has basically productized the work. His frameworks and step-by-step resources show how families buy clarity and structure, not “creative writing,” which is why the best consultants sell a process that reduces panic.
Package pricing beats hourly. Start with $199 Draft Review, $499 Essay Rescue, and a $999 multi-essay bundle.
At $499 per rescue, selling two per week is roughly $4k/month. During peak weeks, 10 rescues is $4,990.
THE PLAYBOOK
Create 3 packages (Review, Rescue, Full Coaching).
Build a 12-question story-mining script.
Use a rubric: hook, specificity, voice, reflection, ending.
Offer a 24-hour rush slot (limited).
Cap revisions (2 rounds) and define boundaries.
Partner with tutors and counselors.
Post before/after (anonymous) to prove transformation.
Use deposits to lock turnaround.
FIRST CUSTOMER SCRIPT (copy/paste)
“I do a 24-hour Essay Rescue: 20-minute interview, story extraction, restructure plan, two revision passes. Flat rate is $499. Want me to diagnose the first paragraph today?”
Rate this hustle:
The Notion Goldmine
Win: Thomas Frank reported his Notion templates generated over $1M in revenue in 2022 by becoming the go‑to person in that niche.
Mistake: Creators stop at ‘selling the file’ and miss the real money in upgrades and support.
Fix: Add a premium ‘implementation pack’ (customization, examples, and a mini course) so buyers pay for certainty, not the download.
Opportunity: Build a template + onboarding sprint for one audience (realtors, coaches, agencies) and charge a setup fee on top of the template price.
One-liner: When the template is the ‘front door,’ support becomes the highest-margin add-on.
TikTok is basically telling brands the same thing audiences are telling everyone else: show up like a person. Their official “What’s Next 2025” trend report frames the shift as community-driven content and authenticity becoming the baseline expectation. The message is simple: polished ads do not land like they used to. Real demos do. Real creators do.
That changes what people consume, and what sells. Short “proof clips” are beating long explanations. A 12-second “here’s the result” video moves faster than a landing page. This opens a lane for operators who can make low-friction content for businesses that are not natural on camera.
The scrappy service here is not influencer marketing. It is proof production. Shoot 10 tiny clips that answer objections. Show the before and after. Show the process. Show the receipt. Then hand the files to the business so they can run them as ads, posts, and website proof.
Solopreneur Win
After a decade of not building, Pauline Clavelloux jumped back in and stitched together a product portfolio doing $100K+/year, and her breakdown shows the exact “what I shipped + how I sold it” loop you can copy.Founder Story
This founder hit $50,000/month shipping “healthy surprise” subscription boxes, and the interview lays out how he got the first customers and grew it into a repeatable revenue machine.Tool Stack
This “AI lead gen in 5 steps” guide shows how to automate prospecting and follow-up with agent-style workflows, so you can productize a turnkey “leads on autopilot” setup for clients.Competition Gap
A 2025 lead-form response-time study found 39% of firms take 2+ hours to respond or never respond at all, which is basically a flashing sign to sell “instant follow-up + intake automation.”
Swipe File (Steal This)
Swipe this Meta ads teardown showing £89,200 in 19 days at 7.2x ROAS—the post spells out what they tested so you can copy the creative + conversion-event setup.AI Script (Copy/Paste)
Copy/paste these 2026-ready sales prompts (including a MEDICC lead-qualification system prompt) and turn them into a reusable “qualify → route → next step” bot in minutes.