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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When the computer glitches mid-type
🐠 Pixar’s Finding Nemo had a challenge: making an underwater world feel alive without overwhelming viewers with endless detail. The team used light, color, and ocean currents to create depth and movement while keeping the story focused on a lost fish and his dad.
The limitation sharpened the story.
We look for that in business, too. The best ideas aren’t always bigger or flashier. Sometimes a constraint forces you to focus on what matters most.
Grab a bowl.
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Headshot Day At The Office
Dan St Louis shot headshots in college for beer money
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every company website, LinkedIn page and conference badge wants a professional photo of each employee. Most teams have a mix of vacation crops and blurry phone shots.
The office manager wants everyone looking the same on the team page. They don't want 30 people booking 30 studio appointments across town.
That's the gap: the company wants matching photos, and nobody wants to leave the office to get them.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Bring the studio to them. Set up one flash and a backdrop in their conference room and photograph everyone in 5 to 15 minutes each. An Atlanta photographer charges $1,200 for a half day, up to 15 people, plus $25 a person for extra retouching.
The business makes money on the shoot day. But it grows from new hires, because every company keeps hiring.
►Dan St Louis shot headshots in college for beer money, then restarted in 2019 while working at a San Francisco software company. He emailed coworking spaces and local businesses, and it "took off like wildfire": 1,500+ sessions in his first studio year. HeadShots Inc now lists 100+ corporate customers around the Bay Area.
Zooming out: the conference room is the studio.
One office leads to the next one in the building. Think: law firms, real estate brokerages, banks, coworking spaces.
🥢The winners will be the ones who make the day effortless for the office manager: a schedule, a sign-up link, photos back within a week. One office manager who looks good will recommend you to the next one.
🍜 The risk is skill. Posing 30 nervous people and keeping the light identical takes practice, St Louis put about $7,000 into his first studio setup, and cheap AI headshot apps are pulling prices down.
You might also like ⇢ Ten Headshots For A Corporate Client: What Do You Charge?
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What's your take?
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The Last Line Of A Candle Maker's Cold Email
Who used it: Krysten Kauder, co-founder of Candier, a message-candle brand, emailing store buyers (the person who decides what a shop stocks) and magazine editors.
What it got them: about 50 emails a night, one or two replies, and usually one of them said, "Sure, send me a sample."
The recipe: every email was three or four sentences, and the last one never changed:
I'd love to send over the product if you're interested.
When the samples landed, she followed up with one line:
I saw you received our samples. Let me know your thoughts.
📋 Why it works: it asks for a free sample, not an order, so saying yes costs the buyer nothing. The follow-up assumes the sample arrived, which makes replying easy.
Swap this for your niche: your product. Keep the email to four sentences, end on that line, and send it to 20 shop owners this week.
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From 200 Dead Websites To A Blog Semrush Bought
Brian Dean founded Backlinko, a blog that teaches people how to get their websites to show up on Google, and sold it to the software company Semrush in 2022.
What died: starting in 2008, he built about 200 one-page websites, each meant to rank on Google and show ads that paid him per click. They made "maybe a 3k a month" for a couple of months. Then Google changed how it ranks pages and wiped them out, twice. He ended up "broke in my dad's basement, having Dinty Moore beef stew for dinner every night," he told Tim Ferriss.
What they tried next: one real website, and in 2012 a single blog about the subject he now knew best. It cost him about $500 to start.
♻️ What carried over: the skill. Those 200 dead sites had forced him to learn how Google decides what to show (SEO, short for search engine optimization). That know-how became the entire subject of the new blog. He was teaching the one thing the failure had taught him.
Where they are now: Backlinko had more than 500,000 visits a month when Semrush bought it, at a price nobody disclosed (Semrush's announcement).
The dead sites were an expensive course in how Google works, and the course became the product. If something you built failed, write down the one skill it forced you to learn and ask who would pay to learn it from you.
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Two Circus Performers Started A Rag Route
Cintas rents uniforms and supplies to more than a million businesses, and it started with two out-of-work circus performers collecting rags.
When the Great Depression shut down their circus, Doc Farmer (a self-described trapeze artist and animal trainer) and his wife Amelia began collecting old rags in Cincinnati, cleaning them and reselling them to factories, the Cincinnati Enquirer reports.
By 1957 the family business had 12 employees and $180,000 a year in sales. In 1940 their son swapped the old rags for proper shop towels, the cloths factories use to wipe grease off machines. Their grandson Richard later grew it and renamed it Cintas. In the year that ended May 31, 2026, Cintas brought in $11.26 billion.
Still cooking: a public company based in Mason, Ohio.
Somebody has to wash the rags, and it turns out that somebody can do very well.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
TThat's the plate. Reply and tell us which office in your building has the worst team photos. Forward this to the friend with a good camera and a free Tuesday. See you tomorrow.
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