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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When the ‘fridge cig’ hits
🥤 Coca-Cola sold just nine drinks a day during its first year in 1886. Today, it’s one of the most recognized brands in the world.
A slow start doesn’t always mean a bad idea. Sometimes a business needs time, repetition, and the right distribution to find its stride.
That’s the kind of business we look for: unremarkable at first, then quietly, stubbornly good.
Service is on.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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The $12-A-Car Photo Job
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every used car on a dealer's website needs 25 to 30 photos before anyone will click on it. Dealers take in new cars every week, so the photos never stop.
The dealership wants every car online fast. It doesn't want a salesperson walking the lot with a phone between customers.
That's the gap: every car needs photos, and nobody at the dealership wants the job.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Show up at the lot, shoot each new car in the same spot, upload the photos to the dealer's inventory software, and get paid per car.
The business makes money per car. But it grows per dealership, because one lot keeps refilling and the next lot is down the street.
►A photographer posting as KadeW on the DealerRefresh forum says he shoots for nine dealerships at $12 a car, and other members said photo companies charge at least about $20. In Sacramento, Peter Duffy grew Dealer Image Pro to nearly 50 dealerships and sold it in April 2026.
Zooming out: the job is the photos, and the business is the weekly loop of lots.
Think: RV dealers, boat dealers, equipment yards.
🥢The winners will be the ones who price like a business, not a favor. The same forum thread told KadeW he was leaving money on the table, and he was already weighing a raise to $15. Starting at $20 a car is easier than raising prices on dealers later.
🍜 The risk is software. Tru Images reuses library photos when a matching new car arrives, and AI tools can now fake a studio background. Used cars are the safer bet, because each one has to be shot for real.
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What's your take?
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A Job Board For Ranch Hands, All The Way Down
RanchWork.com is a website where ranches pay to post openings for ranch hands, and job seekers browse for free.
What it costs to start. Peter Askew took over a ranch job site that dated to 1998 and rebuilt it with cheap, ready-made website software (The Bootstrapped Founder). A similar board built from a ready-made design runs about $425 for the first year.
What you charge. Ranches pay $95 to $295 per post, depending on how long it stays up.
What a job costs you. Almost nothing. Credit card fees take about $6 of a $195 post.
What's left per job. Nearly all of it.
🧮 What breaks it: Askew says the site has brought in about $399,000 over ten years. That's about $3,300 a month, or 20 to 35 paid posts every month. Those posts come from Google: he inherited an old site Google already trusted, and it gets about 90,000 visits a month. A brand-new board starts at zero.
Before you build a board, find 20 employers in your niche and ask three of them what they pay to post a job today.
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Don't Miss This
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AI research, explained in one morning email
Most of what shapes AI next year is sitting in a research paper today. Keeping up with them is a full-time job, and the abstracts don't help.
TLDR AI is the newsletter that does the translating. Each morning you get the handful of papers worth knowing about, curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers, with a plain-English summary of what they found and why it matters.
You come away smarter about AI research in the time it takes to finish your coffee.
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Airbnb Cabins In Broken Bow Got Crowded
Broken Bow, Oklahoma is a lake-and-forest town a few hours from Dallas, where people buy cabins to rent to vacationers on sites like Airbnb.
Why everyone's here: during the pandemic, Dallas families wanted a getaway they could drive to, and the rental data showed big nightly rates. Daniel Shin, a doctor, built a cabin there expecting about $650 a night.
How crowded it got: about 400 rental cabins before COVID, more than 2,400 by late 2023, and about 3,000 now, according to local manager SkyRun.
🚩 What's happened to prices: Shin planned on $650 a night and got $420 to $450, and by mid-2024 he was losing money every month. Market-wide, the share of nights booked has fallen from about 55% to about 37%.
Is there still a way in? Narrowly. A local brokerage says big group cabins near the lake still do well when bought at today's lower prices (The Short Term Shop). Shin says he wouldn't buy again.
If a rental market looks hot, count the listings before you look at the nightly rate. Find out how many existed two years ago before you buy anything there.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us how many cars on your nearest lot say "photos coming soon." Forward this to the friend who's always behind a camera. See you tomorrow.
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