Welcome to The Ramen Hustle, your weekly newsletter serving up hot, scrappy business ideas, helping you go from zero to side hustle. The only rule? Don’t just read it. Steal it.
In today’s episode:
💰 Profit per golf ball
🔊 The future of your voice
👨🏻🍳 Stop overplanning and start cooking
👾 A no-code success story
A niche, scrappy business for you.
Imagine you hit three golf courses, hunted lost balls for an hour at each stop, cleaned the haul in a sink, sorted the premium brands, and sold online. No inventory cost. Quick cash.
That is the hustle: free golf balls turned into cash ⛳️
We surveyed many people running this exact side hustle and found a repeatable range: about $1,200 to $2,400 per month doing it part-time. The weekly time math is straightforward:
4–5 hours finding and retrieving balls
1–2 hours cleaning and sorting
1–2 hours listing and selling
That’s ~8–10 hours per week.
Here’s the play:
You introduce yourself to the course manager or owner and offer a free service: “I’ll retrieve the balls from your lakes and dispose of them at no cost.” Some public courses want to keep used-ball sales in-house, but many higher-end clubs don’t want to sell used balls in the shop. Build a small route across a few receptive courses and you’ll consistently pull hundreds of balls per month.
Use a ball retriever for the shallows, a rake for margins, and persistence in the woods and rough. No need to dive. Clean at home with warm water, a light brush, and a towel; sort by brand and condition. Storage can be as scrappy as egg cartons or buckets.
Sales channels are simple: Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, eBay if you’re willing to ship. Pricing spreads from retail to bulk:
$1 per ball for good condition
$12 per dozen
$1,200 for a 500-ball bulk lot
Those bulk moves are the accelerator. Sell 500–1,000 balls twice a month, and you’re right in that $1.2k–$2.4k range without dozens of small meetups.
The Ramen First Step
You start with a short list of nearby courses and one simple pitch. In the pro shop you ask for the manager, smile, and offer help: “I can clear lake edges and rough for free on off-hours and dispose of what I collect.” You’re not pushy. One “yes” becomes two as you make it easy—early mornings, no disruption, no mess.
You’re not chasing one-off buyers. You’re building a route and a roster. The superintendent texts after a storm and gives you the green light for the lake edge on 5 and the marsh on 14. The coach wants a standing order of a practice hundred every other week. The league captain asks for a reserved premium dozen before matches.
The side hustle turns into a small system that reliably throws $1,200–$2,400 a month—almost pure margin—back into your pocket.
Next week, you’ll add one more course to the route and a second bulk listing. Same loop. Tighter turns. Better photos.
🏌🏽♀️ Now go take your swing at it!
Rate this hustle:
One rising trend worth tasting before it gets overcrowded.
A solo creator sits down on Friday night with a laptop and a cheap mic. By Monday morning they have an English podcast, a Spanish version, a short audio letter for their newsletter, and a teaser clip for social. Same voice. Same style. New reach. That is the magic trick voice cloning just unlocked.
Voice cloning is simple to picture. You feed a clean recording of your voice into a tool. The tool learns your tone and timing. Now it can read anything you write in a way that sounds like you. No studio. No marathon retakes. No scheduling chaos. The reason it feels sudden is that three things finally clicked at once. Better models. Cheaper compute. Easier tools.
The biggest impacts:
Podcasts get new life. You can release a daily cold open that reacts to news or drop short bonus clips for members.
Audiobooks and courses go from months to days. You can narrate your backlog without vanishing into a booth.
Newsletters become audio letters. Readers who are busy can listen on a commute or a run.
Support content sounds warm instead of stiff. Product walk throughs and answers feel human.
Localization opens doors. You can greet new listeners in languages you do not speak and still sound like you.
People build trust with their voice. A clone can help or hurt that trust depending on how you use it. When used well, a clone lets you show up more often without sounding tired or rushed. It lets you save your real voice for the parts where presence matters.
Risks and ethics
There are real concerns. Consent matters. You should never train on a voice that is not yours without a clear agreement. Scams exist. Detection and watermark tools are getting better but you still need common sense. Copyright and name rights vary by region. A short plan covers most of it. Get permission in writing if you use another voice. Disclose use of cloning to your audience. Keep training data private. Add watermarks when you can. Have a plan for takedowns if someone spoofs you.
⚡️ Overplanning Instead of Cooking
You know this trap: The brand deck is gorgeous, the LLC is filed, and the color palette sings… and there is still no one to sell to. It feels like progress because boxes get checked, but none of those boxes ask for a credit card.
Real momentum starts in the kitchen. Go test your offer, talk to ten people, collect three yeses, and deliver something useful this week. A plain page, a checkout, and a calendar link will beat a “coming soon” site every time.
Trade perfection for proof. If a customer buys the rough draft, it is worth refining. If no one bites, you just saved months and a legal bill. Keep the loop tight.
Build, show, ask, adjust.
Businesses built entirely with no-code tools.
The hustle and the vision
Ohana started as a simple, scrappy fix for a common student headache: subletting safely and fast. The founders saw two broken extremes—Craigslist roulette on one side and full-price leases on the other—and set a clear vision: a trustworthy, college-friendly sublet marketplace with identity checks, transparent listings, and payments that felt as smooth as any modern consumer app.
They chose to build the entire product on Bubble, betting that no-code speed would let them ship features weekly, test supply in new campuses, and iterate their trust and payments flows without a full engineering team.
How they built it with no-code
On Bubble, Ohana assembled the marketplace stack—user accounts, listing CRUD, search and filters, messaging, payments, and admin tooling—inside a single visual environment. The team leaned on Bubble’s data models and workflows to version features quickly, while keeping ops lightweight enough for a tiny team to run campus expansions, support, and fraud prevention.
That velocity mattered: they report 9× year-over-year revenue growth and hitting profitability in 14 months, milestones they credit to speed of iteration rather than headcount.
Results today
Ohana’s traction moved beyond “student side-project” into a scaled marketplace story. Public materials cite tens of millions in transactions on-platform and sustained revenue growth; social posts from Bubble leadership highlight $16.2M+ in host earnings on the way to a “$40M marketplace.” The company has also drawn outside attention and capital as regulations shifted in their favor, including a $3M raise backed by ex-Airbnb operators to fuel growth in New York City. In short: a real business, still built on no-code.
If you want a similar path, copy the sequence: validate a painful wedge in a fragmented market, ship a trustworthy workflow fast on Bubble, and adjust as needed.
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