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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When your name is called in the meeting
🎸 John Mayer was told to move away from blues guitar. Instead, he got better at it. Then he built a career around the thing other people thought was too narrow.
That is the business lesson: the niche everyone tells you to leave may be the one worth owning.
We keep looking for businesses built the same way.
Small lane. Deep expertise. Very hard to replace.
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Check this out 👇🏽
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2 minutes. Your URL. A customer profile worth using.
Most founders can describe their product. They can't describe their customer. Not in a way that actually changes how they sell.
HubSpot for Startups built a free tool to fix that. Paste in your URL, answer a few quick questions, and it generates a structured profile of your best-fit customer. Firmographics, buying triggers, the works.
Takes 2 minutes. No spreadsheet required.
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He Sells Farmers A Maze They Can't Design
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
A family farm with a harvested corn field in October owns an asset that earns nothing.
What it does not want is to learn GPS mapping, maze topology and crowd flow. That is a second profession.
That's the gap: farms want the October revenue, and none of them want to become attraction operators.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Sell the design and the playbook, and let the farm keep the gate. That is licensing rather than service: a farm that runs a maze once runs one every year, and the back catalogue resells elsewhere for free.
He doesn’t own a single acre. He owns the back catalogue.
►Brett Herbst built a demo instead of finding customers. In 1996 he rented a field in American Fork, Utah and cut a maze. Eighteen thousand people came through in three weeks, the press covered it, and the phone rang. "People started calling, wanting help doing their own mazes and I realized I could charge a fee to help them." The MAiZE has designed over 6,000 since, licensing at $2,900 to $7,400 a year.
Zooming out: the demo was the sales team.
A Rutgers budget for five acres puts first-season costs near $25,825 against $56,500 of revenue.
🥢The winners will run it once themselves first. Rent ground, build it, publish the number, sell the playbook to everyone who calls. A number nobody can argue with does the selling.
🍜 The risk is that the year happens in twelve weekend days, with the money committed before a ticket sells and no make-up date for rain. Herbst: "You can make $50,000 or loose $50,000 it just depends." Growth is capped by geography, since the exclusivity radius that protects your farms caps your own.
You might also like ⇢ Inside the Weird World of Corn Mazes, From Three Acres to Sixty
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What's your take?
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From bankruptcy to $75M
Aaron Gaynor built a new-construction plumbing company to roughly $3.5M, and the 2006 housing crash took all of it. The bankruptcy took his house, his car and his job. At 28, a single father, he was sleeping on the couch in his mother's two-bedroom apartment and had to borrowed $50 from his sister.
What he tried next: the same trade pointed at homeowners instead of builders. Not a pivot to something easier, a pivot to the customer who does not disappear in a recession. A burst pipe is a burst pipe whether or not anyone is building houses.
♻️ What transferred: two things, both of them nouns. The first was his master plumber's license, which is the one asset a bankruptcy cannot repossess and which takes years rather than money to replace. The second was the builder relationships from the dead company, and he re-entered through the least glamorous door available: after-hours warranty calls on houses he had already plumbed himself. Those builders knew the work was his, so the warranty list was revenue at a moment when he had no marketing, no truck fleet and no bank account. It was not a network in the LinkedIn sense. It was a list of specific addresses where somebody owed him a phone call.
Where they are now: Eco Plumbers runs Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati at roughly $75 million a year, selling around a thousand service memberships a month.
The failure did not teach him resilience. It bought him a customer list that survived the company it came from.
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A One-Man Portable Sawmill, All The Way Down
The machine. A working manual mill runs $7,895 to $10,895; hydraulic starts around $32,995. Ignore the $2,995 hobby machines, they will not hold up to custom work.
What you charge. Industry guidance runs $80 to $155 an hour, or $0.35 to $0.75 a board foot, up to $2.00 for figured hardwood. A working Oregon sawyer publishes $155 an hour with a four-hour minimum. Minimum job charge, $100 to $200.
What it costs you. Blades at $25 to $35, or $35 to $100 when you hit a nail. Fuel and maintenance around $4 an hour. Insurance $900 to $1,400 a year.
What's left. A manual mill cuts about 1,000 board feet a day, so a good day is $500 to $900. Which looks like a $15,000 month.
🧮 What breaks it: an extension enterprise budget models a working custom mill netting about $1,207 to $1,357 a month, and a survey of actual owners found roughly half sawed between 1,000 and 20,000 board feet in a whole year, with about 40 percent earning nothing at all. The gap between $15,000 and $1,200 is not the saw. It’s that logs do not arrive on their own, that stacking and stickering is billed at $75 an hour for two people because it takes that long, and that air-dried lumber needs a year per inch of thickness before you can sell it.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the seasonal thing your town wants and nobody runs. Forward this to whoever owns land that earns nothing in October. See you tomorrow.
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