Episode #63
🧠 Wednesday is a reality check: what’s the one bottleneck killing momentum? The Ramen Hustle digs up an operator-style fix, plus a weird little distribution channel most people ignore because it isn’t “sexy.”
Me refreshing Stripe like it owes me
The hustle: Google erased them from the map
Field note: The invisible skill stack worth 6 figures
The Gap: Your job is to remove decisions
Fresh find: They cleared $175M selling POGs
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The Suspended Listing Lifeline
A local roofer wakes up to a dead phone, checks Google, and sees the unthinkable: their listing is suspended. No map pin, no reviews, no calls.
✅ You’re selling restored lead flow on a deadline, not SEO help.
WHY THIS WORKS
A Google Business Profile suspension is a unique kind of problem: it’s not “marketing.” It’s an operational outage. For most home service businesses, the map listing is the #1 inbound channel, and when it disappears, the revenue drop is immediate.
That creates a rare service opportunity with three traits that make it scale-friendly:
Urgency: owners aren’t shopping for “better SEO,” they’re trying to turn calls back on.
Asymmetry: the fix is documentation + process, not creativity. Most owners panic-edit and make it worse.
Repeatability: the same triggers show up over and over (verification issues, address/service-area conflicts, policy violations, edits, duplicates). That means checklists beat genius.
The unique hustle idea here is productizing reinstatement as incident response: a standardized “sprint” with a proof pack, minimal-safe edits, and a tight appeal process.
The twist: turn this into a two-step funnel that scales
Paid Diagnosis (same day): identify likely trigger + map the exact proof needed
48-hour Reinstatement Sprint: assemble proof pack + submit appeal + follow-up cadence
It’s an emergency purchase with immediate ROI. Competition is low because it feels like “support work,” not glamorous marketing. Checklists + templates make it trainable and delegatable. Partnerships create steady referrals (agencies hate doing this). Prevention plans turn one-time chaos into recurring revenue.
PROOF IT’S REAL
Joy Hawkins and the Sterling Sky team basically turned Google Business Profile reinstatements into a product because the pain is immediate and existential. Sterling Sky sells a “Google Business Profile suspension help” service with a clear promise and a flat fee, which is rare transparency in local SEO.
BrightLocal’s coverage adds context on how common and disruptive suspensions are for local businesses (not a one-off edge case).
👉🏼 Charge $149 diagnosis + $800–$1,500 sprint. Two wins/week can clear $1,600–$3,000.
Then add recurring revenue: a $99/month “Profile Lock” plan:
Monthly profile audit (edits, categories, address consistency)
Review monitoring + response cadence
“Suspension prevention checklist” for staff
Quarterly proof pack refresh (photos, signage, docs)
This is how you scale it: one-time outage fix → recurring risk management.
THE PLAYBOOK (Step-by-step plan)
Niche down to home services (roofing, HVAC, plumbing, garage doors).
Build a Proof Pack checklist (license, utility bill, signage photos, business registration, address rules).
Offer paid diagnosis + fast turnaround (same day / 24 hours).
Make minimal edits only, then appeal (no panic changes).
Track and follow up carefully (status log + timestamps + escalation rules).
Upsell prevention monitoring (“Profile Lock”).
Partner with web designers, lead gen shops, and agencies (they want to hand this off).
Publish a simple “suspension checklist” lead magnet and run it as ads targeting “GBP suspended” keywords.
FIRST CUSTOMER SCRIPT (copy/paste)
“I run a same-day diagnosis + 48-hour reinstatement sprint: identify the trigger, assemble the proof pack, submit the appeal correctly, and manage follow-ups until calls are back. Want me to do a quick diagnosis?”
Rate this hustle:
Transform Internal Comms Chaos Into Clarity
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Copywriting + Editing: The Invisible $149K Skill Stack
Win: A freelancer income breakdown posted on Reddit reported $149K total revenue in 2021 across writing + proofreading/editing.
Mistake: Writers only sell one deliverable (like blogs) and leave money on the table.
Fix: Offer ‘content + cleanup’: writing plus editing plus repurposing into email/LinkedIn posts.
Opportunity: Turn every blog into a 5‑asset kit and charge per kit, not per article.
One-liner: Bundling adjacent skills turns one client into multiple invoices.
Finding opportunities on Pinterest
“Analog hobbies” are back, but not in a boring way. Pinterest’s 2026 trend forecast and the coverage around it point to a rise in aesthetics like poetcore, with people searching for fountain pens, letters, and old-school vibes. It is not just nostalgia. It is people trying to slow down in public.
That shift creates a real opening: small “starter kits” for identity hobbies. When someone gets curious about journaling or letter writing, they do not want 400 options. They want a clean first purchase. A pen that feels good. Paper that does not bleed. A simple set they can post.
This is the opening for a scrappy physical product lane that does not need a huge audience. It needs good taste and tight bundles. Your job is to remove decisions. Then sell refills, not reinvention. You can even keep it digital first with a “starter list” and affiliate links, then graduate into shipping kits once demand proves itself.
The opening: Build a $19 “Poetcore Starter List” page, then upgrade your best-selling bundle into a shipped kit.
Solopreneur Win
A solo founder built an Airtable add-on into a $23,000/month micro-SaaS (with ~600 paying customers) and shares the exact “platform playbook + growth breakdown” you can steal.Competition Gap
Millie ran her cleaning business on pen-and-paper until it started leaking money, then flipped to self-serve booking + faster comms and says it helped her business grow 9x—a neon “sell the system, not the cleaning” gap in local services.Entrepreneur News
Baseten just pulled in $300M at $5B valuation (Jan 2026), a loud signal that “AI inference ops” is becoming a paid problem you can productize as a solo operator (cost audits, deployment setups, migration help).Swipe File (Steal This)
Here’s a free Notion swipe file packed with 800+ real ads, emails, and landing pages across 20+ industries—perfect for “copy the angle, not the brand” days.