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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When the office doesn’t have a party planning committee
🎂 For decades, “Happy Birthday to You” reportedly generated $2 million a year in licensing fees. In 2015, a judge ruled the lyrics belonged to the public.
Millions sang it without knowing someone was getting paid.
We look for that kind of business: one small thing everyone uses, one overlooked right to charge for it.
Let’s eat.
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Free Workshop: Turn a Tiny Audience Into $10k/month
We’ve driven over $10M in revenue for our newsletter clients and are unpacking the plug-and-play system thousands of people are using to turn a small email list into $2k-$10k/month.
(…without needing to quit your job, without needing to get on camera, and without needing prior experience).
We’ll show you how to start a newsletter in <30 minutes, scale to 1,000 readers, and make your first $10,000 in revenue.
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The $300 Band Tee
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Old concert, wrestling and movie T-shirts from the 1970s to the 1990s turn up in thrift stores for a few dollars. A few of them are worth hundreds to a collector.
Collectors want the original shirt from the tour they went to. They don't want to dig through the racks of 30 thrift stores to find it.
That's the gap: the shirts are in the bins, and the buyers are online.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Hunt the racks for old tour and promo tees, learn to date them, and sell the real ones on eBay. A single row of stitching on the sleeve and hem usually means a shirt was made before about 1996, according to Keep It Classic's guide.
The business makes money on a few big hits. But it runs on knowing what to skip.
►Defunkd, run by James Applegath, has sold more than 10,000 tees on eBay since 2004. Its monthly look at eBay sales showed the ten best vintage tees from one month in early 2026 selling for $280 to $999, from a 1976 Red Sonja shirt to a 1991 SummerSlam wrestling tee. In 2025 a 1992 Grateful Dead tee sold for $4,500.
Zooming out: the tag is worth more than the print.
Think: concert tours, wrestling events, movie promos, defunct sports teams.
🥢 The winners will be the ones who learn one category deeply, like 1990s wrestling or a single band's tours. Knowing a real tag from a reprint is what turns a thrift-bin shirt into a $300 one.
🍜 The risk is fakes and misses. Reprints of famous shirts are everywhere, and most old tees sell for far less than the headline numbers.
You might also like ⇢ A Teen Paid $3 For A Goodwill Jacket That Could Be Worth $250,000
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What's your take?
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How A Running Program Spread To All 50 States
Most people with a class or program that works try to run every location themselves, and they stall at the number of places they can personally be. A running program for girls grew by letting local people run it in their own towns for a fee.
What they uncovered: Molly Barker started Girls on the Run in Charlotte in 1996 with 13 girls, twice a week for 12 weeks. At first she coached the sites herself. Then women in other towns asked to start their own. Each became a local group that paid $5,000 to join and $800 a year to use the name and the program, raised its own money and trained its own volunteer coaches. Today it reaches more than 175,000 girls a year in all 50 states.
What made it travel was sameness. Every group taught the same material under the same name, and its leaders were trained before they started. One group in Dayton, Ohio served more than 1,000 girls last year on its own.
Not every group lasted. By 2007, about 20 of roughly 160 had closed, mostly when the person who started one in her town had to cut back.
What they learned: if people in other towns ask to copy what you do, charge them to run it under your name, hand them a trained playbook, and let them raise their own money. The same works for a kids' camp, a fitness class or a trivia night.
The first buyer was not "communities across the country." It was one woman who read about the program in a 1998 Runner's World story and wanted it in her own town. Your first licensee is the person who already emailed asking how to do what you do.
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Dryer Vent Cleaning, All The Way Down
Dryer-vent cleaning means clearing the lint out of the pipe that carries hot air from a clothes dryer to the outside, and homeowners pay for it because a clogged vent slows the dryer and can be a fire risk.
What it costs to start. A basic rod-and-brush kit is $46.99. A pro brush set that spins on a drill is $440.
What you charge. A Boise company charges $119 for a standard cleaning.
What a job costs you. Almost nothing in materials, plus 30 to 60 minutes and the drive.
What's left per job. Most of the $119.
🧮 What breaks it: a Charlotte dryer-vent business with three employees brought in $356,000 and kept $130,000 in profit (Acquisitions Anonymous). At $119 a job, that's about 3,000 cleanings a year, or roughly $43 of profit each after the van, staff and marketing. So the job is not cleaning vents. It is booking a dozen a day close together, which is why one New Jersey company drops its price to $84.99 when a neighbor books too.
Before you buy the brush kit, call two homeowners association managers and ask whether they'd let you run a building-wide cleaning day.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the best shirt you ever passed up at a thrift store. Forward this to the friend who always checks the tags. See you tomorrow.
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