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From Zero to Side Hustle
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My after work “me time”
🎮 Tetris spent most of the eighties in a rights dispute so tangled that three companies believed they owned it, including a government ministry.
The game was finished in 1984. Who could sell it took until 1989 to sort out. The people who made the money were the ones who understood the rights, not the ones who wrote the code.
That lesson keeps turning up. In small business, the valuable thing is often sitting in a document nobody read closely.
Read the fine print. That is where the money hides.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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NVIDIA's Founder Says Farmers Should Absolutely Use AI
“If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI.”
That’s Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.
And he's pointing to one of AI’s biggest untapped opportunities: Farming. It’s an industry facing mounting pressure to produce more with less and it’s still massively under-automated.
DIT AgTech brings AI, nutrition automation, and real-time data to livestock production, helping ranchers boost productivity and get more from every animal.
And it’s already proven in one of the world's toughest livestock environments:
500+ units deployed
370,000 head of livestock on the platform
Up to 55% higher daily weight gain
Now expanding into the U.S. and Brazil, DIT AgTech is targeting a 300M+ head cattle market. And the biggest barrier to adoption? Gone. Ranchers get the technology for free when they sign up for a three-year nutrition plan.
DIT AgTech can scale adoption faster, which means more data and more recurring revenue.
Invest before this early-stage opportunity gets harder to access.
𝘐𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥. 𝘋𝘐𝘛 𝘈𝘨𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘊 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://bit.ly/4bzuWCi
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Pallets Are A Currency, Not Trash
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
A distribution center receives thousands of pallets it never ordered. Some arrive broken, none can be stored, and the docks fill until the bays stop working.
The warehouse manager wants empty dock space by Friday, and somebody else deciding which boards are salvageable.
That's the gap: the pallets are an asset to somebody and a blockage to whoever is holding them.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Swap, sort, repair, resell. The spread is published and it is the whole business: damaged cores trade around $2.75 and a repaired Grade A sells near $9.04, with cores up 133 percent in three years. Wood that fails inspection is ground and sold as mulch and fuel rather than hauled away at a cost.
Drop empties, retrieve fulls. The same trailer earns in both directions.
►Rafael Guerrero runs Oak Creek Wood Products in Wisconsin: about $3 million before 2020, $15 million in 2021, and the block-pallet manufacturing line alone now around $20 million a year. That line is new production, not reuse, which is the tell. The recycling loop built the relationships; manufacturing is what they were worth.
Zooming out: the reuse yard is the sales channel for the factory.
Standing inventory is the other half. Wisconsin neighbor BTL Pallet holds 25,000 repaired pallets, so a customer who calls Tuesday gets pallets Tuesday.
🥢 The winners will be the ones who own the return leg. A one-directional truck cannot compete with a circular one, and that is a routing advantage, not a pricing one.
🍜 The risk is that freight eats the map. A Grade A pallet costing $10 at a yard thirty miles out costs $14 delivered from three hundred, so a weak local market cannot be escaped. The price run is also partly consolidation: a new yard buys cores from the people it competes with.
You might also like ⇢ How Local Companies Promote Circularity Through Pallet Reuse
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What's your take?
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Don't Miss This
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You or Your Company Should Have A Podcast
No studio. No production team. No need to figure it all out yourself.
Amaze Media Labs provides everything you need to launch a professional audio and video podcast—from strategy and recording to editing, distribution and audience growth.
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The Footage You Never Published
Every camera owner has a hard drive of material nobody ever watched. That drive is now inventory.
Frontier AI labs are buying rights-cleared video to train on, and they want volume and variety rather than polish. Troveo says it has paid $50 million to more than 7,000 content owners across 7 million hours, on per-minute deals rather than one-time stock sales.
The small-operator numbers are on the record. Singer Peter Hollens made $33,000 in a year licensing old video, at more than $33 for every hour of content an AI company uses, with roughly 1,400 hours still sitting on drives. A handful of creators have crossed $1 million.
Where the trend branches next:
Dashcam and driving footage, which is continuous and effortless to generate
Point-of-view footage of hands doing a task, wanted for robotics training
Regulated verticals with restricted access: dental, construction, veterinary
Dead channels and agency archives, where the shooting is already paid for
► The asset is the outtakes, and the person who owns them has already paid to create them.
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The $60M Feature They Almost Left Behind
The Stitch team.
RJMetrics was supposed to be the big win.
Jake Stein and Bob Moore built the company into a serious analytics startup, raised venture money, and sold business intelligence software to ecommerce companies. But the market shifted. Cloud data warehouses like Amazon Redshift changed what customers expected, and RJMetrics’ tightly bundled analytics product started to feel less flexible than the new “modern data stack” forming around it.
The slowdown was painful. Stein later said RJMetrics stopped growing, and the company had to lay off 25 people, about a quarter of the team. In 2016, Magento acquired RJMetrics and turned the core product into Magento Analytics.
But buried inside RJMetrics was something more interesting.
The team had built an internal data pipeline product that helped move customer data into warehouses. It was not the main thing RJMetrics was selling. It was a smaller piece of infrastructure created to support the bigger analytics product.
That piece became Stitch.
When Magento bought RJMetrics, the analytics product went one direction and Stitch spun out as its own company. Two years later, Talend acquired Stitch for about $60 million.
That is the lesson.
RJMetrics did not “fail” into a brand-new idea. It found a valuable piece inside the old idea. The original product got squeezed by the market, but one component inside it matched where the market was going next.
♻️ What transferred: not the whole company. Not the old pitch. Not the original dashboard product. The thing that transferred was the data-ingestion feature customers still needed.
Before you shut something down, do an inventory check.
What feature do users still ask about?
What internal tool saved your team the most time?
What workflow worked even if the full business did not?
What tiny piece would still be useful if you stripped everything else away?
The part that survives is rarely the part you thought you were selling.
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Hungry yet?
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In partnership with
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us what is sitting on your hard drive. Forward this to anyone about to shut something down. See you tomorrow.
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