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🚀 From zero to side hustle. Cup noodles in the dorm, billion-dollar dreams on the whiteboard
This is 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. Take it & make it better.
IN TODAY’S EPISODE
🇺🇲 SAM is ready to pay
💵 Investing on a budget
🔐 UNLOCK exclusive Insider Deal Desk access
🧑💼 SMB 2026 trend
📦 The brutal truth of Amazon FBA
🦃 The most famous turkey
FRESH IDEA
Government Contracting
Most business owners have no idea there’s an entire parallel economy running right next to them.
It’s called government contracting—and it’s all out in the open.
On SAM.gov, federal agencies quietly post what they want to buy: training, consulting, landscaping, cleaning, IT support, marketing, construction trades, fleet services, you name it. You don’t need a login just to look. You don’t need to be a giant company. You just need to understand the game.
There are two main types of postings:
Market research / “Sources Sought” – this is the government asking, “Who’s out there? What can you do? What would this cost?” It’s like them wandering the aisles reading reviews.
Active solicitations – this is, “We are buying this now. Send us your offer by this date.”
When enough qualified small businesses respond to that early market research, agencies are allowed to set aside the real contract just for small players: women-owned, veteran-owned, HUBZone, or regular small businesses. Sometimes, if the fit is tight enough and you have the right status, they can even sole-source work directly to you—no big guys invited.
❌ Most small businesses never see any of this. They’re busy chasing one-off jobs while multi-year contracts worth $50K, $200K, $500K+ quietly get awarded to whoever bothered to show up and follow instructions.
That creates a whole second opportunity.
🛩️ Gov-contract navigator services for small businesses:
Helping them register, pick NAICS codes, and get set up on SAM.gov
Finding good-fit opportunities and filtering out the noise
Drafting responses to Sources Sought and full proposals
Coaching follow-up: capability statements, briefings, outreach to small business reps
You can be the translator and deal sherpa between “confused local business owner” and “confident government vendor”—and take a fee or percentage on the contracts you help them win.
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INVESTING ON A BUDGET
Someone just spent $236,000,000 on a painting. Here’s why it matters for your wallet.
The WSJ just reported the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.
While equities, gold, bitcoin hover near highs, the art market is showing signs of early recovery after one of the longest downturns since the 1990s.
Here’s where it gets interesting→
Each investing environment is unique, but after the dot com crash, contemporary and post-war art grew ~24% a year for a decade, and after 2008, it grew ~11% annually for 12 years.*
Overall, the segment has outpaced the S&P by 15 percent with near-zero correlation from 1995 to 2025.
Now, Masterworks lets you invest in shares of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso. Since 2019, investors have deployed $1.25 billion across 500+ artworks.
Masterworks has sold 25 works with net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.
Shares can sell quickly, but my subscribers skip the waitlist:
*Per Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd
🔒[LOCKED] INSIDER DEAL DESK
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🔑 UNLOCK private deal teardowns of real online businesses for sale.
We look at its revenue, profit, and acquisition listing price. Then we break it down like an operator, not a fan.
👀 What makes it interesting (or dangerous)
📈 Where the upside might be (pricing, marketing, ops)
🚩 The red flags and questions I’d ask before touching it
💰 How you can duplicate it
It’s not a “copy this exact playbook” thing — it’s better. You’re getting unfiltered notes on how to think about buying or building small businesses like an insider, so you can start spotting opportunities (and landmines) in the wild on your own.
FREELANCER TREND
Reinvention Is the New Superpower
In 2025, disruption didn’t crush small and mid-sized businesses—it forced them to reinvent how they work.
These “reinventor” small businesses leaned hard into AI + experimentation. The most confident leaders were far more likely to weave AI through sales, marketing, customer service, finance, and operations, while also investing in company-wide AI upskilling so their teams could actually use these tools day to day.
Freelancers are the quiet engine behind that reinvention. This report shows 31% of the most confident SMBs tapped independent talent for advanced skills like AI, data analysis, and strategic creativity—and SMB job posts on Upwork requesting freelance AI skills jumped 44% in early 2025.
🚀 For a small business, this is huge: instead of hiring a full-time AI lead, data team, or new marketing department, they can bring in specialists on-demand to redesign a process, launch a pilot, or stand up a new revenue stream—then scale what works. Freelancers turn reinvention from a scary “big bet” into a series of affordable, reversible experiments. 🚀
HUSTLE AUTOPSY
Amazon FBA DEAD in 2025? Here’s The Brutal Truth
Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) is simple on the surface: you ship your products to Amazon’s warehouses, and they handle storage, packing, shipping, and a big chunk of customer service. In exchange, you get access to the world’s busiest online mall.
And that mall is massive. Amazon pulls in hundreds of billions in annual revenue and controls a huge share of U.S. e-commerce. Hundreds of millions of shoppers have their credit cards already saved, and most product searches now start on Amazon instead of Google. For a new seller, that sounds like a cheat code.
But here’s the brutal truth in 2025:
Amazon is evolving from “platform that helps sellers” into “platform that monetizes sellers.” Fees have climbed across the board: storage, inbound placement, inventory “penalties,” and ads. Search results are increasingly pay-to-play, which means you’re not just paying to use FBA—you’re often paying again in Amazon PPC just to be seen.
At the same time, Amazon competes with you via its own brands and gives bad actors plenty of room to copy, sabotage, or undercut your listings. You get reach and trust, but you give up control and margin.
So is Amazon FBA still profitable?
Yes—for focused operators who treat it like a real business, not a side gamble. If you understand product research, branding, PPC, and inventory math, there’s still money to be made. But as a “quick and easy” side hustle? That era is over.
The smarter play: use Amazon as one channel, while you build a brand, an email list, and a store you actually own.
See Travis share exactly what happened when launching a private label business on Amazon this year with complete transparency and real numbers.
HUSTLE HISTORY
The $1 trillion turkey
🦃 Thanksgiving went from a regional harvest-and-church day to a national money machine once three things locked in: a fixed date, mass media, and retail marketing.
In 1941, Congress set Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November, which effectively nailed it into the calendar as the kickoff to the winter holidays.
Retailers quickly realized that if Thanksgiving marked the “start” of Christmas, then the day after could be a built-in national shopping event. Department-store parades, especially Macy’s 1924 Thanksgiving parade in New York (originally a store promotion with floats, animals, and Santa), trained Americans to see Thanksgiving as the on-ramp to holiday shopping.
By the mid-20th century, this morphed into Black Friday, and later Cyber Monday, turning Thanksgiving weekend into the most valuable retail block of the year. In 2024, about 197 million Americans shopped over Thanksgiving weekend, spending roughly $235 per person, and U.S. holiday sales overall are now brushing the $1 trillion mark.
Food brands leaned in too. Turkeys became the star: Americans spent an estimated $983 million on Thanksgiving turkeys in 2024, with brands like Butterball supplying roughly one in three birds and using things like the Butterball Turkey Talk-Line (launched 1981) as massively successful marketing.
Thanksgiving is now both a family ritual and the front door to one of the most profitable commercial seasons in the U.S.
HUSTLE TOOL
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QUICK SIPS
📚 Must-Read: Here’s how Garyvee grew his $60M wine cellar
📈 Trending Story: Bezos's Costly Mistakes
💬 Founders Story: How Uber, Airbnb, And Spotify Used MVP To Become Startup Unicorns