👋 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:
💦 Follow this trend like a wave
🖼️ Invest like Da Vinci
🗣️ From the hustle community
🧑🏻💻 Imagine a world without Google
🧙🏼 Making $800k playing mystery games
THE FRESH IDEA
Commercial Fleet Vehicle Washing
📈 The U.S. had roughly 60,000 car washes in 2024. Industry estimates say that number could hit ~120,000 by 2030. For scale, that would dwarf the footprints of Starbucks, McDonald's, Dunkin', and Subway combined.
What's driving it: subscriptions replacing occasional washes, more urban parking without hose access, road salt and weather volatility, and EV owners who visit washes more often because they're not doing oil-change stops but still want that "new car" look. Property landlords like it too—modern express washes are high-margin, low-labor, and membership-friendly.
🚐 Here’s the hustle:
When a category doubles, an ecosystem blooms around it. But here's what everyone misses—commercial fleets don't go to car washes. Trades, delivery, and service companies hate pulling vehicles off routes to sit in a line. It burns payroll and fuel, and managers never get the full fleet clean at the same time.
The opportunity: Offer a weekly or biweekly, on-site wash that shows up after hours, cleans every van or truck in the lot, and hands the ops manager one invoice. You save them time, keep vehicles brand-presentable, and create a predictable route for your crew. No retail location. No expensive land. Just mobile, scheduled service that slots into their ops like trash pickup. 🛻
Who needs this: HVAC and plumbing companies, electricians, pest control, property managers, medical couriers, school districts, Amazon DSPs, rental shuttles, small municipal fleets.
Two workers can knock out 30–40 exterior-only washes in 5–6 hours.
Pricing that sells:
Exterior quick wash: $12–$15/vehicle (min. stop $200–$300)
Exterior + lite interior (vac, wipe, windows): $20–$30/vehicle
Add-ons: floor-mat extraction, headlight restore, sticker removal, ozone/sanitizing
Ramen First Step: Walk 3 industrial parks this week. Count vans. Pitch the ops manager: "We clean your whole fleet here on Tuesdays at 7pm. One invoice. Cheaper than sending drivers to wash." Repeat this process across multiple lots, and you've built a steady, route-based service with high retention. 🚀
Rate This Hustle
Wall Street Isn’t Warning You, But This Chart Might
Vanguard just projected public markets may return only 5% annually over the next decade. In a 2024 report, Goldman Sachs forecasted the S&P 500 may return just 3% annually for the same time frame—stats that put current valuations in the 7th percentile of history.
Translation? The gains we’ve seen over the past few years might not continue for quite a while.
Meanwhile, another asset class—almost entirely uncorrelated to the S&P 500 historically—has overall outpaced it for decades (1995-2024), according to Masterworks data.
Masterworks lets everyday investors invest in shares of multimillion-dollar artworks by legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso.
And they’re not just buying. They’re exiting—with net annualized returns like 17.6%, 17.8%, and 21.5% among their 23 sales.*
Wall Street won’t talk about this. But the wealthy already are. Shares in new offerings can sell quickly but…
*Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd.
HUSTLE STATS
Meet the hustler
Jax, 29, Tracy, CA. From March to October, he pursued “passive income.” It wasn’t passive—but it was instructive. 🚗💨📦
What Flopped ❌
Dropshipping: 2 chargebacks; $64 in ad spend; net –$118. 📉
Etsy: 9 sales, 3 returns; AI templates eroded already thin margins. 🧪
Domains: $212 invested; 0 buyer inquiries. 🗂️
Crypto (near-miss): Tried to follow the wave…I won’t tell you how much I lost 🛑
What Actually Paid ✅
YouTube (explainer videos): 17 videos; 1.3k subscribers; last 4 months $103.47 (RPM ≈ $2.10). ~5–6 hrs/week. 🎥
Turo (2022 Prius): 9 booked days over 3 months; $358 gross → $237 net after fees/insurance/cleaning → minus $35 tire patch = $202 take-home. 🚗
Price-drop resell automation (Chrome extension): One Prime Day run found $138 for a Facebook flip with minimal effort. ⚙️💸
Takeaway 🎯
Failure here served as training, not defeat. The results came from operational work rather than “set-and-forget” promises. Small, repeatable wins—documented and systematized—offer a clearer path forward than trend-chasing. 🔁
Thanks for sharing, Jax! 📈
INSPIRATION
The last to market wins?
Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn’t invent web search. By 1995, at least six engines launched that year—AltaVista, Excite, Yahoo! Search, MetaCrawler, Magellan, and OpenText—while earlier players like Lycos, WebCrawler, and Infoseek were already live, giving users roughly 10+ options.
Google studied the market and found three clear opportunities to outperform on:
Relevance: Google’s PageRank treated links like citations, elevating authoritative pages and demoting keyword-stuffed spam. Results simply felt better.
Speed: Lean infrastructure and smart caching delivered answers in a blink—users tried Google once and stayed.
Simplicity: A clean, uncluttered page (the famous white page) reduced friction and built a daily habit.
That clarity unlocked capital. Early demos showed head-to-head wins on relevance and response time; investors could measure the advantage.
💸 Google paired relevance with speed and scale; by 2000 it indexed over 1 billion pages, and Yahoo chose Google to power its search—putting superior results in front of millions and accelerating adoption. 🚀
HUSTLE FUSION
Escape Room × Murder Mystery
🕵️♂️🧩 Blend the puzzle pressure of an escape room with the role-play stakes of a murder mystery and you get an experience that’s both tactile and theatrical. Players don’t just open boxes; they interrogate, connect clues, and feel the plot turn because of their choices.
👉🏼 We found someone who started this hustle with ~$3,000 investment and turned it into an $800k/year escape room mystery business💡
They built a live, hosted, story-driven game venue that fuses escape-room puzzles with murder-mystery roleplay—built for repeat visits.
Groups book a 4-hour session where each player becomes a character inside a scripted mystery. They charge $400/game (often higher for premium or late-night slots). Peak cadence: 3 games/room/day → ~21 games/day, running 7 days/week.
🔐 A trained host (part game master, part stage manager) sets the scene, manages pacing, and keeps immersion high. Players interrogate suspects, follow alibis, handle physical clues, and solve modular puzzles that move the plot forward. It’s tactile like an escape room, theatrical like immersive theater, and fresh each time because the script changes.
A library of ~500 scripts keeps groups coming back with repetition.
Why it works: compared with classic escape rooms (often one-and-done), this hybrid is replayable. It started low-risk, then scaled through content depth, trained hosts, and disciplined scheduling—turning a niche hobby into a durable experience business that thrives on word-of-mouth. 📈🔥
Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays
Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.
Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.
QUICK SIPS
📚 Must-Read: The Whopper’s bold next move
📈 Trending Story: Warren’s next step
💬 Founders Story: The $1,037,100 picture of pixels
