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From Zero to Side Hustle
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Moving through the 4-day week
✈️ Rick Steves has made the same travel show since 1991, walking around Europe in beige trousers explaining train stations.
Thirty-five years later, he owns the category because he never chased the next thing.
We look for that in business: the unfashionable idea someone keeps compounding while everyone else moves on. The ugly ones are often the ones still standing.
Grab a fork.
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He Bankrolls Strangers To Walk The Mountains
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Elk drop their antlers every spring across millions of acres of public land. A dog chew company needs them by the ton, graded. A chandelier maker needs the big brown ones.
Neither is sending buyers into the Rockies in April, and the hikers who will are scattered, with no way to reach a buyer.
That's the gap: the supply is lying on the ground across five states, and nobody wants to be the one who collects it.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Grade and route. The grade decides the customer: premium to décor and trophy work, chalky grades to chews. Published 2025 buy prices run $14 a pound for top grade down to $3 for chalk, and the same pound comes back as $46.99 retail dog chew.
The money is in sorting. But the business is in sourcing.
►Tony Schaufler runs Rocky Mountain Antler Company and does not hunt sheds. He stakes at least ten independent buyers across the Rockies, fronting them cash so they can pay hikers on the spot, turning weekend walkers into a supply chain he never manages. Ask his margin and he will not give a number, only that it is less than a dollar a pound.
Zooming out: the hard part was never the antler, it was the ten people.
The model is agent networks: finance the collectors instead of becoming one.
🥢The winners will be the ones who front the cash. Paying on the spot beats paying on settlement, because whoever is holding a bag of antler takes the first real offer. The float is the product.
🍜 The risk is that you carry all ten counterparties. Money goes out before any antler comes back, on a commodity that has swung from $6 to $18 and back. Public land is closing too, with Colorado charging $137 an antler inside its winter window. Schaufler himself has downsized.
You might also like ⇢ Open Season 2025: What Shed Hunters Actually Got Paid Per Pound
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What's your take?
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The Rulebook That Started As A Giveaway
Most hobby builders focus on making the thing better. The ones who break out focus on making it easier to use. The product is not the ceiling. The distance between opening it and using it is.
What they uncovered: Kelsey Dionne turned ready-to-run tabletop adventures into a business, then built Shadowdark around a two-page core and a permanently free quickstart. The 2023 launch raised $1.3 million to $1.4 million. Its 2025 follow-up pulled in $3 million from 16,000+ backers, while 84 third-party campaigns built on the system in one year.
The insight was simple: remove the prep tax. A free quickstart lets someone play before they buy, turning the product itself into the sales pitch.
What they learned: don't sell to “tabletop gamers.” Sell to the person who has a session Thursday and no time to prepare.
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The Two-Line Rule That Licensed A Name Into 55 Countries
Who used it: Silent Book Club, which licenses nothing but its name. Nearly 2,000 chapters in more than 55 countries.
The recipe: Chapters are free to start and run. If you'd like to use the Silent Book Club name and logo, please register your chapter.
If you do not wish to register your chapter, you must call your event by another name (e.g. Quiet Reading Gathering).
Organizers who charge admission buy a separate license off a plain checkout page: $300 a year, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-refundable, 365 days.
📋 Why it works: it never threatens anybody. It just names the alternative out loud, and the alternative sounds like nothing. Nobody wants to invite forty people to a Quiet Reading Gathering, so registering becomes the obvious move rather than the compliant one.
Swap this for your niche: the deliberately worse fallback name you hand people who opt out.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us what's scattered on the ground near you that somebody buys by the ton. Forward this to whoever keeps saying all the good businesses are taken. See you tomorrow.
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