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From Zero to Side Hustle
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“it’s only Tuesday?”
📺 Sesame Street premiered on November 10, 1969, borrowing a trick from TV commercials: short jingles and repetition to teach kids letters and numbers. Even each episode was “brought to you by” a letter.
They didn’t invent a new way to hold attention. They borrowed one that already worked.
That’s a lesson for small business: sometimes the best idea is already working in another industry.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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Sales Owns Retention, Not Just Closed Deals
Pebl’s Chief Business Officer, Dutta Satadip, joins The GTM Garage to show how Pebl merged Operations and GTM under one leader, and how it aligned goals and incentives across the customer lifecycle.
You’ll also see how Pebl uses AI across that lifecycle and the stack behind prospecting, pipeline, and handoff to onboarding.
15 min conversation. 15 min open Q&A. For Seed to Series A teams.
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Joke Mugs For Speech Therapists
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Everyone has a coworker, teacher or nurse to buy a gift for, and a "World's Best" mug feels lazy. Buyers want something that shows they know the job. They don't want to design it.
That's the gap: gift buyers want a present that gets the job joke, and nobody is making one for every job.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Write a funny line for one specific job, put it on a mug or candle, and list it on Etsy. A print-on-demand company like Printify prints and ships each item only after someone orders it, so you never hold stock. Items sell for $18 to $30, and the seller keeps about 30%.
The business makes money from mugs. But it grows from the search phrase, because one listing that matches what buyers type keeps selling.
►Emily Odio-Sutton was a college administrator in Melbourne, Florida, when she opened an Etsy shop for under $40. In about two years her shops brought in more than $560,000 in sales, and one 15-minute design has sold more than $27,000 on its own.
Zooming out: every job has an inside joke, and every job has people buying gifts for it.
Think: speech therapists, dental hygienists, new nurses, school bus drivers.
🥢 The winners will research before they design. Odio-Sutton uses a keyword tool to find phrases like "teacher appreciation candle," with plenty of searches and few competing listings. About 95% of her sales come from Etsy's free search results, not ads.
🍜 The risk is how easy this is to copy. A mug joke can be cloned in an afternoon, so she keeps her shop name private. And Etsy's rules mean a borrowed meme can get your listing pulled
You might also like ⇢ Is Etsy Print-On-Demand Still Worth It In 2026?
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What's your take?
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A Homeowner Will Pay $500 To Clean Her Gutters
Who's asking: Jane D., a homeowner in Canton, Massachusetts
For what: clean out the gutters on her second story, which have plants growing in them. It's an extension-ladder job, so bring a ladder stabilizer, gloves and a friend to hold the base.
Paying: $500, posted on Airtasker, an app where people post a chore and a price
🎟️ How common is this: eight homeowners posted gutter jobs on the same board in one month this fall, from $50 to $800.
Search Airtasker and your local Craigslist for "gutters" every few days until the leaves stop falling, and answer the posts with a price first.
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Don't Miss This
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Sponsored by The Street Sheet. †Selected ideas highlighted in Street Sheet Research; performance measured from the date of publication through Oct. 6, 2026, compared with SPY over the same period. Examples may not be representative of all ideas. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Not personalized investment advice. Membership renews at $199/year after year one unless canceled.
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A Gift Box Made Only For Women Pastors
Most people starting a subscription box aim at a big group, like "Christian women" or "moms," because it sounds like more customers. A Minnesota pastor filled her first boxes by picking a group so small she already belonged to it.
What they uncovered: Ruth Hetland, a Lutheran pastor, started ConseCrate in the summer of 2020: a monthly box of four to six items for ordained women, like a book, a tool for ministry, soap or candles, often made by other pastors. Boxes started at $35.32 a month. She posted the idea in a Facebook group of women pastors, opened pre-orders, and had 164 subscribers before the first Christmas. It has held at about 500 subscribers, a size she keeps on purpose so she can keep her church work.
The mistake is the big audience. A box for Christian women lands on a crowded shelf: Cratejoy, a subscription-box marketplace, already lists several, starting around $25 a month. Hetland saw how few things are made just for women in ministry, as she told Grow Christians, and her tagline says it plainly: "Because she doesn't need another cross."
Because the buyers know one another, they did the marketing, sharing the box with colleagues on social media.
What they learned: sell to a group you're already part of, small enough to reach with one post where its members gather, and let them pay before you buy anything. A nurse could do it with a snack box for her hospital's night shift; a home daycare owner could do it with a kit for other providers in her state.
The first buyer was not "Christian women." It was a Lutheran pastor and mom in that same Facebook group, who wanted something made for her job instead of one more cross.
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A Recipe Blog That Lost Google Twice
Clean Eating Kitchen is a free healthy-recipe blog that earns money from ads shown to each visitor, so more visitors means more pay.
The setup: Carrie Forrest started it in 2009, with most readers arriving from Google searches for recipes. When a Google ranking change cut her traffic by about two-thirds overnight in 2019, she fixed her site and deleted weak posts, and climbed back to new highs. Most of us would have done the same.
The numbers: at the 2022 peak, ads paid her $20,000 to $30,000 a month. Today it's $4,000 to $5,000, and she has let go of nearly all the contractors who helped her. She still publishes, at about a fifth of the traffic.
🧯 What actually killed it: about 90% of her income depended on people arriving from Google. After the first drop she rebuilt the same way, and in 2023 ads were still more than 80% of her income. Then Google began answering recipe searches with its own AI summary at the top of the page, and Pew found people click a link about half as often when one appears.
She points to the AI summaries. The real cause is that the 2019 warning didn't change where the money came from.
Would it have worked if… she had used the recovery years to earn a real share of her income, say a third, from the email list she'd been building since 2014.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the inside joke only people in your job would get. Forward this to the friend who's impossible to buy gifts for. See you tomorrow.
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