Your neighbor's dead tree is worth $89

🚀 From zero to side hustle. Venture capital? Never heard of her. This is The Ramen Hustle, your weekly playbook for turning small bets into real checks. One idea, one hustle, one step closer to freedom. Start now.

IN TODAY’S EPISODE

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——— Happy Holidays! ■□□□□□□ ———

FRESH IDEA

The Post-Holiday Tree Removal Goldmine

33 million real Christmas trees get sold every year in the US. By January 2nd, most of them become somebody else's problem. That somebody could be you.

Here's the pain point nobody talks about: real tree owners dread disposal. Needles everywhere. Heavy and awkward. Doesn't fit in the trash. Most cities only offer one pickup day that's easy to miss. The opportunity window is tight but lucrative: December 26 through January 15. That's your money season.

Pricing is simple. Charge $50 base fee for standard trees. $75+ for trees over 8 feet. $100+ for apartment buildings where you're hauling up or down stairs. LoadUp charges $89 minimum nationally. You can undercut them and still pocket serious cash.

Customer acquisition doesn't require ads. Canvas your neighborhood the week after Christmas. Leave simple flyers on doormats. Post in local Facebook groups. Hit Nextdoor hard. One viral post can book your entire week.

The scaling hack: partner with your local mulching facility or city recycling center. Most offer free Christmas tree drop-off through mid-January. You get paid to pick up, dispose for free. Double dip by grabbing free mulch to resell in spring.

Book 8-10 pickups in the same neighborhood on the same day. Efficiency is profit. Twenty trees at $50 each is $1,000 in a single day of work. This hustle has a built-in upsell too. "I'll take your tree stand and old lights for an extra $20." People say yes because they want the whole problem gone.

The best part? These same customers need yard work in spring and summer. You're not just removing trees. You're building a client list.

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RAMEN RIFF

The Salary Negotiation Coaching Playbook

Levels.fyi started as a free salary database. Thousands of tech workers anonymously shared their compensation packages. The site became the go-to resource for anyone wondering if their offer was competitive.

Then they added coaching. Now they charge up to $2,500 per client for negotiation help with guaranteed results. Their coaches are ex-FAANG recruiters who know exactly how these companies structure offers.

The pricing tiers tell the story. $500 gets you help with one offer and a $5K minimum increase guarantee. $1,000 covers multiple offers with a $10K guarantee. The executive tier runs $2,500 with a $40K guarantee or your money back.

Read that again. They guarantee a $40,000 increase for executives or they refund the fee.

The competitive advantage is obvious: they have real salary data from 200K+ submissions. Their coaches know exactly what companies pay because users told them. That information asymmetry is worth thousands.

The business model is elegant. Hire experienced recruiters as coaches on commission. They only get paid when clients get results. Lead generation comes from the free tools that drive millions of visitors. Convert a tiny percentage into coaching clients and you've built a money machine.

The market is massive. Most people never negotiate. They leave money on the table because they're scared or don't know how. That fear is your opportunity.

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——— Almost there ■■■■□□□———

STEAL THIS

The Boring Website Making $7K/Month

IconBuddy indexes 226,377 free, open-source icons. Danish Yusuf can't sell the icons themselves because they're open source. So he sells the search experience instead. People happily pay $69 for faster access to free stuff. Let that sink in.

Danish acquired IconBuddy for $4,000 when it had zero revenue and zero traffic. He saw what others missed: designers waste hours hunting icons across dozens of scattered websites. One unified search solves that problem instantly.

The validation came fast. He launched on Product Hunt and hit #1 Product of the Day with 745+ upvotes. Then Hacker News front page for 20 hours. Thousands of signups rolled in. Still no revenue, but proof that people wanted this.

His first monetization attempt was sponsors. He signed six design companies and made $2K in three months. Unsustainable. He had to find new sponsors every month.

This pivot changed everything. He built a Figma plugin so designers could search icons directly in their workflow. The plugin hit 19K+ installs and stayed in Figma's trending section for 20 days. Then he added a lifetime subscription for premium features: unlimited search, the plugin, an icon manager. Started at $49, raised to $69 with no drop in sales.

Nine months after acquiring for $4K, IconBuddy hit $72K ARR. He reinvested profits to buy the .com domain for $3,999 because the psychological upgrade matters.

The lesson is pure gold: if you save people time, you can charge for it. IconBuddy proves you don't need to create anything original. You just need to organize what already exists better than anyone else. What else do people waste time searching for?

KNOWLEDGE DROP

The $750 Billion AI Search Shift

McKinsey dropped a bomb: by 2028, $750 billion in US revenue will flow through AI-powered search. Google AI Overviews already appear in 50% of searches. That number hits 75%+ within three years. Unprepared brands could lose 20-50% of their search traffic. That's not a typo.

Here's what's changed. 44% of AI search users now say it's their primary source of information, beating traditional search at 31%. People ask ChatGPT and Perplexity before they ask Google. The answers come without clicking through to your website.

The terrifying part? Only 16% of brands currently track their AI search performance. Everyone else is flying blind while the game changes beneath them.

SEO is becoming GEO: Generative Engine Optimization. The signals that matter are shifting. AI platforms cite sources differently than Google ranks pages. They value first-party research, expert quotes, brand mentions across trusted publications, and structured data that's easy to parse.

Your new job: get mentioned in the publications that AI platforms trust. Media coverage, industry publications, and expert roundups now directly impact whether AI surfaces your brand in answers. Digital PR went from nice-to-have to essential. The convergence is real. The same content that ranks on Google also gets cited by ChatGPT and performs on social. Authority, originality, and trust work everywhere. Stop treating channels as separate games.

The brands that adapt now will own the next decade of search. The ones that don't will wonder where their traffic went.

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