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In partnership with
‘tis the season for pumpkin spice
☕ Nathan Fielder turned a struggling coffee shop into “Dumb Starbucks” and got people lining up just to see what the hell it was. Four days later, the health department shut it down.
The stunt was absurd. The lesson was not. The shop did not have a coffee problem. It had an attention problem.
That is the play we keep looking for: find a boring market, do one thing differently, and give people a reason to look twice.
Let’s eat..
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You'll want this!
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Send A Cake Instead Of An Email
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
The inbox of anyone worth pitching is unusable. Hundreds of near-identical emails a week, all personalized by the same software, and ignoring every one is rational.
No founder wants to build a gifting operation and source bakeries in twelve cities for one meeting.
That's the gap: everyone knows physical mail still works, and nobody wants to run the logistics of sending it.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Turn a sales message into an object a person has to carry through the front door. Daymaker takes the pitch, has a cake made locally, and hand-delivers it at $99 flat. It owns no bakery, only the coordination.
The product is a cake. The thing being sold is an interruption nobody can archive.
►William Lindholm delivered more than a thousand cakes around Oslo in five months before working out what the business actually was. The version that landed aimed at impenetrable calendars: seven cakes sent to venture firms including a16z, Sequoia and Index came back as five partner meetings. Saleshandy studied 53.1 million cold emails and found even top campaigns book two to three meetings per hundred sends. He went from invoicing $6,000 in February to $120,000 three months later.
Zooming out: the channel is not the cake, it is the reception desk.
Anything signed for gets past the filter, because there is no bulk version of a human standing in a lobby.
🥢The winners will be the ones selling to a small, high-value list. At $99 a touch, the list has to be short and the deal has to be large.
🍜 The risk is that novelty is the whole mechanism, and it stops the day the second cake reaches the same front desk. Worse, the best-paying accounts are the likeliest to refuse it, since enterprise and public-sector buyers ban unsolicited gifts.
You might also like ⇢ He Sent $2,000 of Cake and Closed $200,000 in a Month
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What's your take?
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Font Licensing
Every business buys type and almost none of them understand what they bought. It is one of the last creative markets where a single person can still sell a product they made alone, at their own price, on their own website.
Who's here:
The big guys: Monotype has spent two decades buying the field, and now owns Linotype, ITC, Bitstream and MyFonts, FontShop, URW, Berthold, Fontworks, Colophon and, since 2021, Hoefler & Co. It has been owned by private equity since 2019. Adobe Fonts and Google Fonts sit alongside it and set the floor at free.
The middle: Fontstand, Type Network and Creative Market, distributing other people's libraries for a cut.
The solos: OH no Type Co sells Vulf Mono at $45 and Polymath at $499 straight off its own site, no distributor involved.
🗺️ The gap: there is no enforcement layer for small foundries. Monotype, Adobe and Google run automated audits of websites and send licensing demands. A one-person foundry has no equivalent and no realistic path to building one.
Why it's empty: because US law barely protects the thing. Under 37 CFR 202.1(e), typeface as typeface is not copyrightable. Only the font software file is. So a claim needs a registration on specific code, anyone is free to redraw the design from scratch, and the recovery on a $45 license will not cover the letter that demanded it.
The workable version is the other side of the envelope: flat-fee font license audits and cleanup for small agencies, who are exposed, uninsured, and currently have nobody to call.
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Don't Miss This
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Ellen Bennett's First $1,000
Day one: $300, and a job as a $10-an-hour line cook at Providence in Los Angeles. No factory, no patternmaker, no retail experience. What she did have was a working knowledge of what a professional kitchen ruins about an apron in six months.
The first customer: she went to LA farmers markets at dawn, where restaurant chefs do their own buying, and made friends with them over produce. Not a pitch deck, not a cold email. Standing in the same line at 6am, repeatedly, until people knew her. Baco Mercat placed the first order Hedley and Bennett ever took.
What the first $1,000 took: orders of a few aprons at a time, sold to individual chefs she had personally met, at a moment when she was still cooking full shifts to pay for the fabric.
🍜 The unglamorous part: the first production run was, in her own words, "a four out of ten." The fabric pilled, the aprons shrank, and the straps came off within a day of real use. Chefs she had just spent months befriending got a bad product with her name on it. She re-sewed the fixes herself between twelve-hour kitchen shifts.
The $300 was the easy part. The expensive part was standing at a farmers market at dawn often enough to stop being a stranger.
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The Rental Pricing Rule
Atlanta Party Rentals uses a simple rule that protects the business before the truck ever leaves the warehouse:
Delivery only kicks in when the rental order is at least $1,000, and delivery starts at $250.
That does two smart things at once.
The $1,000 minimum makes sure every delivery is worth the trip. If you are loading gear, driving across town, unloading, picking it back up, and cleaning it afterward, a tiny order can quietly kill your profit.
The delivery fee separates the rental value from the logistics cost. The customer is not just paying for tables, chairs, tents, or decor. They are paying for the convenience of having everything show up, get dropped off, and disappear when the event is over.
📋 Why it works: rental businesses do not just make money from the item. They make money from route efficiency. The gear may be priced by the day or weekend, but the real cost is the site visit. A clear order minimum prevents low-ticket jobs from clogging the schedule, while a delivery fee makes the logistics visible.
Swap this for your niche: set your delivery minimum at the lowest order size that makes one site visit profitable. Then charge separately for delivery, setup, pickup, or rush timing so the customer understands what the convenience is worth.
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. What's the weirdest thing anyone's ever sent you to get a meeting? Forward this to the founder still A/B testing subject lines. See you tomorrow.
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