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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
🗑 From trash to cash
🧑🎓 For marketing leaders: how to get bigger results
🤑 5 questions every entrepreneur needs to ask
🤳 When making millions was easy…
🦈 Baby Shark sung its way to an IPO
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FRESH IDEA
Apartment Trash Vallet
Apartment trash is one of those tiny frictions that annoy everyone but belongs to no one—tenants hate late-night dumpster walks, managers hate overflowing bins and complaints. You step in as the Hallway Trash Valet: for a flat per-door monthly fee, you walk the halls 3–5 nights a week, collect bagged trash from doorsteps, and take it to the dumpster.
For a 60-unit building at $12–$15/month per unit, that’s $720–$900/month from one contract, often taking under an hour per pickup night. Stack a few buildings along one route and you’ve built a part-time, high-margin, recurring-revenue service. Your pitch to managers isn’t “trash pickup” – it’s fewer complaints, cleaner property photos, and extra NOI (they can mark it up and pass it through to tenants).
3 Real-World Examples
WhiteGloves Waste – Timothy Upshur’s “butler bin” valet trash & recycling service for apartments. WhiteGloves charges the property a set rate; the property then marks it up and passes the cost into the lease. $20–$35/month per unit for 5-day-a-week pickup.
Trash and Go, LLC – Osvaldo Rocha’s DFW valet trash company, started with ~$300 and grew to tens of thousands in monthly revenue. He was ejected nearly 100 times, then finally got a regional manager to sign his first contract. Grew to multiple properties (6+ initially, targeting 10) and later reached ~$23K/month revenue with very high margins by servicing properties before and after his 9–5.
Accelerated Waste Solutions – Fred Tomlin & Sherrod Hunter’s valet trash + junk-hauling franchise system serving thousands of units. They sell B2B contracts to property managers (per unit per month). Properties pass the cost through to residents and keep a spread as ancillary revenue. They framed it as “mailbox money” for property owners and recurring revenue for franchisees, backed by software proof (GPS + photos), not just a guy with a cart.
Together, these founders prove the “hallway trash valet” idea isn’t just theory—it works in the wild, at every level. The through-line: none of them reinvented technology—they solved an ugly, obvious problem that everyone else ignored.
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PLAYBOOK
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🔒[LOCKED] INSIDER ACCESS
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🔑 This is actually more than just a calculator…
It’s a rent (or mortgage) - destroying game engine.
You plug in multiple variables, and this thing instantly turns that scary number into a bunch of tiny, winnable missions:
👀 A simple daily goal and weekly goal
📈 You’d need X sales of a $10 or $20 product
🚩 You’d need Y hours at $20 or $50/hr
💰 You’d need Z clients at $100 or $250/mo
🚀 Plus so much more…including solutions
It basically taps you on the shoulder and says:
“Relax. Here are 5 different ways this could work.
Pick one and run the play.”
🎁 Refer 2 friends who’d love this newsletter.
Then we’ll send you this interactive Replace Your Rent Calculator
🧠 Think of it as getting a money strategy session in spreadsheet form… that also happens to be weirdly fun to play with.
THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Are you obsessed with the problem or just excited about your solution? Obsession sustains you when the solution fails. Excitement fades when building gets hard.
What are you giving up to do this and is it worth it?
Think about the real opportunity cost: time with family, stable income, career growth, health, relationships.
Who will tell you the truth when you're lying to yourself?
You need someone who isn’t just supportive but honest. Founders with a mentor, peer group or partner make decisions faster. Without external honesty, you'll believe your own stories.
Are you prepared for this to take 3 times longer than you think?
Successful founders don't run out of resources before they find answers. Optimism won’t get you far. You need preparation: financial, emotional, relational.
If you fail at this, will you regret trying or not trying more?
Founders who would regret not trying push through more obstacles. They also feel more satisfied regardless of outcome. Treat setbacks as data and learn new ways to work around problems.
HUSTLE GRAVEYARD
How Vine made millionaires
…then left them stranded.
Vine’s six-second loops didn’t just launch memes—they briefly launched an entire millionaire class. The app, bought by Twitter and launched in 2013, grew to over 200 million users at its peak and became a cradle of surreal, hyper-compressed comedy that “made us scream, laugh and cry,” as one retrospective put it. Brand money poured in: advertisers paid around $3–$5 per 1,000 followers, so a Viner with 1 million followers could get about $5,000 per sponsored post.
Top stars like King Bach made $10k–$15k per month, while others like Nash Grier could command $25k–$100k for a single ad, and mid-tier creators like Matt Cutshall earned ~$75k a year with just 323k followers. Lele Pons became the first to hit 1 billion loops and amassed 11 million fans.
Vine didn’t die because people stopped loving the content—it died because the business underneath never caught up. Twitter bought Vine in 2012, but never built a real monetization engine or clear product strategy around it. As creators pushed for revenue sharing and a creator fund, Vine leadership said no, while Instagram and later Snapchat rolled out longer videos, better discovery, and more ways to make money.
The future of the creator economy is almost the opposite of Vine’s story. Instead of being locked into a single platform, today’s creators build multi-platform, business-first careers: ad revenue, brand deals, subscriptions, digital products, live events, and direct-to-fan memberships on platforms like Patreon and Fanhouse. The space is already worth around $250B–$500B and is projected to hit $1T+ by the early 2030s.
SCALING AD SPEND
Is Your Ad Spend Really Paying Off?
See how creator-led partnerships can boost sales with Levanta’s Affiliate Ad Shift Calculator.
Get instant insight into potential revenue lift, ROI gains, and efficiency improvements based on your current digital advertising strategy.
Run your numbers to find out how small shifts could drive big results.
SUCCESS STORY
Can’t get it out of your head
In 2015, a simple kids’ song called “Baby Shark” quietly entered the internet—and then ate the world. The animated short has since pulled in 16.4 billion+ YouTube views, averaging 4.7 million views per day, making it the most-watched video in the platform’s history. That flywheel of attention powered Pinkfong, the South Korean children’s cont?ent studio behind the track, from a viral clip factory into a global kids’ IP business.
Today, Pinkfong makes money through a mix of YouTube ad revenue, licensing and merchandising (toys, books, clothes), live shows, apps, and streaming deals built around Baby Shark and a growing slate of other preschool characters. In 2025, the company took the next step and went public on South Korea’s Kosdaq exchange with a $53 million IPO, with shares jumping as much as 61.8% on day one before settling up 9.34%. Now the bet is whether Pinkfong can turn one mega-hit into a lasting kids’ entertainment empire.
QUICK SIPS
📚 Must-Read: The ladders of wealth creation: a step-by-step roadmap to building wealth
📈 Trending Story: 41-year-old’s side hustle brings in $125,500 a year, and costs $0
💬 Founder Story: This Couple Started a Side Hustle in Their Backyard. It’s Now a Global Brand With $200 Million in Revenue
That's a wrap for today. If you found this useful, forward it to someone who's tired of trading hours for dollars.
See you next issue.
— The Ramen Hustle Team