|
|
From Zero to Side Hustle
|
says everyone
🚗 In Back to the Future, Doc Brown says he invented the flux capacitor on November 5, 1955, after slipping while hanging a clock and hitting his head on the sink.
That was 71 years ago today.
We like that a household chore gone wrong sparked the movies’ most famous invention. Plenty of real businesses start the same way: someone spots a small annoyance and realizes others have it, too.
Let's dig in.
|
|
Special Offer
|
💻 You built it. Someone else would pay for it.
Here's a side hustle idea hiding in plain sight: Turn the tools you already use into digital products.
Think about all the things you've built to make your life or business easier.
A ChatGPT prompt library that saves you 10 hours a week.
A Notion dashboard that keeps your business organized.
An Excel spreadsheet that tracks every dollar of profit.
A website template that gets clients up and running faster.
An AI agent skill that automates repetitive work.
A collection of SOPs that helps someone launch a business from scratch.
Now imagine packaging those things up and selling them.
That's the idea behind Kurodyne, an AI-native marketplace where you can sell software, AI agent skills, prompts, templates, spreadsheets, courses, and other digital products.
You don't need to build another SaaS company or spend months creating a course. Start with something useful you've already made, package it with instructions, set a price, and publish it.
And here's an interesting opportunity: Kurodyne is offering the first 100 people from The Ramen Hustle free access!
The next digital product you sell might already exist on your computer.
|
The $1,000 Car Haggler
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Buying a car means hours at a dealership, a price that keeps moving, and add-ons pushed on you after you've said yes. The dealer always knows more than you do.
Buyers want a fair price. They don't want to spend a Saturday fighting for it.
That's the gap: buyers want a good deal on a car, and nobody wants to be the one who haggles for it.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Sell the haggling. The buyer names the car, you get written prices from dealers, and you bring back the best one. Tomi Mikula's company charges a flat $1,000 per car, with no cut of the sale and no money from the dealer.
The business makes money from the fee. But it grows from the recordings, because he livestreams his calls with dealers and every video works as an ad.
►Tomi Mikula spent more than a decade selling cars. He started Delivrd by negotiating for strangers he met on Reddit, for free, and did about 50 deals before charging anyone. Today he has five negotiators, and the company brings in about $200,000 a month in revenue.
Zooming out: people will pay for a skill they only need every few years.
Think: renovation bids, moving quotes, wedding vendors.
🥢The winners will be people who already know how the other side sets its prices. Dealers come back for the steady buyers, too: more than 2,000 dealers have signed up to take Delivrd's customers, according to CBT News.
🍜 The risk is trust, and in some states, paperwork. California requires a dealer license for anyone brokering car sales, so check your state's rules before you charge. Competitors already sell the same service for $999.
You might also like ⇢ A $5,000 Markup Into $3,000 Under Sticker
|
What's your take?
|
A California City Will Pay $1,000 To Paint A Utility Box
Who's asking: the City of Union City, California
For what: an original, hand-painted mural on one of the gray metal boxes on street corners that hold traffic-light wiring. Applicants must live or have a studio in Alameda County.
Paying: $1,000 per box, half before you start
🎟️ How common is this: SamSearch lists seven city bids like this since 2016, and nearby Newark paid the same $1,000 a box this summer.
Search your city's website for "utility box" and "call for artists," and look at last year's winners to see what got picked.
|
Buying A Pressure-Washing Business, All The Way Down
A pressure-washing business cleans siding, driveways and decks for homeowners. In 2021 a forum member was offered a whole one-man company for $50,000.
What it costs to start. $50,000 for two machines, a trailer, the phone number and a list of 1,200 past customers.
What you charge. About $275 a job. The seller did 260 jobs last season, about $71,500 in sales.
What a job costs you. Bleach, fuel and insurance. Insurance alone runs about $4,000 a year.
What's left per job. In one dataset, owners keep about 41% of sales, so roughly $28,600 a year.
🧮 What breaks it: whether the customers stay. $50,000 is a little under two years of that profit. If every customer books again, the buyer earns it back in about two years. If 3 in 10 leave each year, it takes four. If half leave, it never pays off.
And only about 200 of those 1,200 names booked last season. In the same thread, a man who bought a window-cleaning business heard from about 350 of his 4,000 customers in three and a half years.
Before you pay for a customer list, ask the seller to call 50 of the names with you and count how many book. That count is what the list is worth.
|
Hungry yet?
|
|
|
Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the worst add-on a car dealer ever tried to sell you. Forward this to the friend who's about to buy a car.. See you tomorrow.
|