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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When you forget it’s only Tuesday
⚾ October baseball is the only time of year when a utility infielder nobody noticed in June can become the most important person in a city for three hours.
He hasn't changed. He's doing the same job, at the same position, that he did all season. The difference is that now everyone is watching.
We think about that a lot. Most of the businesses we write about were doing the unglamorous work long before anyone noticed. The work didn't change. The attention did.
Pull up a chair.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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Roll the Cans, Bill Monthly
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Trash-can valet service means rolling a customer's bins to the curb the night before pickup and bringing them back the next day. Homeowners, landlords and vacation-rental owners pay monthly so the chore just happens.
HOAs send fine letters when bins sit out, and rental guests forget.
That's the gap: people want the bins out on time every week, and they don't want to be the one who remembers.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Charge a flat monthly fee per home and pack those homes onto the same streets. CanMonkey charges $49 a month for up to two cans, with photo proof after each stop. In Atlanta, Trash Can Valet charges $35 a week.
The money comes from rolling cans. But the business grows from density: 40 homes on three streets is a route, and 40 homes across town is a commute.
►Alex Shapiro co-founded CanMonkey in the Phoenix area. The first year brought only 24 signups from homeowners, he said on a 2023 podcast. The turn came from vacation-rental owners, and by mid-2023 CanMonkey had 4,000+ properties on subscription.
Zooming out: a chore that happens 52 times a year is a subscription waiting to be sold.
A solo operator's guide puts 40 to 50 homes at about $1,400 to $2,000 a month, plus about $20 per bin washing.
🥢The winners will be operators who sell a neighborhood, not a house. One HOA newsletter mention reaches every home with the same pickup day. Every extra home on a street you already drive is almost all profit.
🍜 The risk is a chore that never takes a week off, in rain, on holidays and the week you have the flu. You need a backup person from day one.
The same guide prices 1,000 hangers at about $40. Offer two free weeks, the way Trash Day Made Easy in Charleston does. What you're really building is a tight route of homes that pay every month for a two-minute stop.
You might also like ⇢ A South Carolina Crew Selling Trash Takeout at $3 a Week
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What's your take?
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Don't Miss This
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A deal has two sides. Your stack only sees one.
Aligned shows you the other half. See what buyers actually do between meeting. See what they open, revisit, and share; so you know the exact next step to move things forward. And your champion gets everything they need to win internally when you're not in the room.
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Who Sells Campfire Wood Bundles, And Who Can't
Campfire wood bundles are the tied or wrapped stacks of split logs that campers, gas stations and grocery stores buy for about $7 to $12 each. They're worth mapping now because more parks only allow wood that has been heat-treated to kill tree-killing bugs.
Who's here:
The big guys: Best Burn Firewood, Wisconsin · says it can make over 1 million bundles a year and sells more than $1 million a year.
The middle: Boston Firewood, a family yard in Hyde Park, Mass. · $10 bundles for homeowners, wholesale to gas stations.
The solos: Eric Bruski · about 5,000 bundles a season, mostly to campgrounds; Ryder Tolosano, age 7, Elk Grove, Calif. · $7 a bundle
🗺️ The gap: Certified bundles sold at the state and national park campgrounds that turn away ordinary wood. When the Blue Ridge Parkway invited vendors for five campgrounds, the rule was that all wood "must be state or federally certified as heat treated."
Why it's empty: Certification means a kiln that holds the wood at 140°F for an hour, plus a $100 yearly fee in Tennessee. Maryland's budget analysts put those kilns at $10,000 to $100,000, and of 138 licensed firewood dealers there, they expected "at least 1" to apply (fiscal note).
Start by splitting and selling uncertified wood where it's allowed, like private campgrounds in your own county. Only price a kiln after a park campground tells you in writing it would buy certified bundles from you.
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Pat Flynn's First $1,000 Selling An Exam Study Guide
Pat Flynn's first business was a study guide for the LEED exam, a green-building test that architects take, sold as a $19.99 ebook to people cramming for it.
Day one: A drafting job at an architecture firm that ended in a 2008 layoff, and a free WordPress blog of his own LEED study notes, which he had started a year earlier just to keep himself studying (his own account).
The first customer: Google. Strangers searching for exam terms kept landing on his free notes, and the blog was drawing hundreds of visitors a day. A member of his mastermind group, a small peer group that met to share goals, told him to turn the notes into an ebook. The first copy sold on Oct. 2, 2008, at 8:40 a.m.
What the first $1,000 took: About 50 copies at $19.99. He sold 10 the first day and more than 300 that month (Archipreneur). Before the ebook, ads on the blog paid only about $600 a month (IncomeDiary).
🍜 The unglamorous part: He wrote the guide at 4 to 8 hours a day for weeks, slept more on the train than at home, and accidentally bought his own ebook four times while testing the checkout.
He gave the notes away for a year before he sold anything. If you're studying for a test other people take too, post your notes publicly this week and watch which pages strangers find.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the weekly chore you'd pay $49 a month to never think about again. Forward this to the neighbor whose bins are still at the curb from last Tuesday. See you tomorrow.
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