The Ramen Hustle
From Zero to Side Hustle
|
||
|
|
My investing strategy
💰 Warren Buffett still lives in the house he bought in 1958, drinks Cherry Coke, and spends his days reading annual reports. His fortune wasn't built on flash or shortcuts. It came from doing boring things exceptionally well, for a very long time.
That's the game we're playing. We're looking for durable, cash-flowing businesses that reward patience and good execution.
The best opportunities are usually closer and simpler than the hype suggests. Let it compound.
(P.S… did you notice the new branding of The Ramen Hustle? We hope you like it.)
|
|
First Up, Our Sponsor
|
200 Ways To Make Money With AI
Ready to transform artificial intelligence from a buzzword into your personal revenue generator?
HubSpot’s groundbreaking guide "200+ AI-Powered Income Ideas" is your gateway to financial innovation in the digital age.
Inside you'll discover:
A curated collection of 200+ profitable opportunities spanning content creation, e-commerce, gaming, and emerging digital markets, each vetted for real-world potential
Step-by-step implementation guides designed for beginners, making AI accessible regardless of your technical background
Cutting-edge strategies aligned with current market trends, ensuring your ventures stay ahead of the curve
Download your guide today and unlock a future where artificial intelligence powers your success. Your next income stream is waiting.
|
The Agency That Only Serves One Trade
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Local businesses like plumbers, dentists, and injury lawyers need to show up in Google and rarely have the time or skill to make it happen. General marketing agencies serve all of them badly, reinventing strategy for every new client and burning out on the churn.
That's the gap: a generalist rebuilds the playbook for every client, and a specialist writes it once.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Pick one vertical and become the agency that only does SEO for that trade. The review-generation scripts, the Google Business Profile checklist, the landing-page templates, the keyword maps: you build them a single time, then redeploy the same system across every client in the niche.
►Michael Borgelt started 51Blocks in 2009 with about a thousand dollars and grew it to $2.6 million in annual revenue on a 30-person team. The number that proves the model is retention: an average client lifetime value of more than 2.5 years, the kind of stickiness a generalist agency almost never sees, because the specialist keeps producing results the client can feel.
Zooming out: the business isn't SEO, it's one repeatable playbook sold over and over to the same kind of customer.
Think: monthly retainers, a white-label version other agencies resell, and a recurring hosting or reporting add-on layered on top.
🥢 The winners go one trade deep. Retainers run $1,000 to $7,500 a month, and because the work is templated, every new client costs far less to serve than the last, so the moat is a playbook, not a pitch.
🍜 The risk is that the whole business sits on rented land. A Google algorithm update can erase a client's rankings overnight, AI-powered search is compressing organic clicks, and results lag the invoice, so churn is highest in the first months, before the playbook has paid off. You control none of the platform you depend on.
You might also like ⇢ Smart guide to local SEO pricing tiers
|
What's your take?
|
People Spend $90 Million a Year on Star-Shaped Zit Stickers
A pimple patch is a tiny hydrocolloid sticker you slap on a blemish overnight. Starface makes them yellow and star-shaped, sells packs of 32 for around $15, and was on track for about $90 million in revenue in 2024, having sold over a billion of the little stars.
Roughly ninety million dollars a year for stickers you put on your face and throw away in the morning.
🤯 And they're not the only one. Hero Cosmetics built the rival Mighty Patch into the number-two brand in the US acne category and sold to Church and Dwight for $630 million in 2022. There is a nine-figure war going on over dots you cover a zit with.
Could you enter the ring with your own version?
|
Special Offer
|
You're Invited: Live Tax-Smart Investing Webinar
Your portfolio could be losing more to taxes than you might realize. On August 20, Range's CFPs and CPAs share the portfolio moves that can help you maximize your after-tax returns — join us live, and bring your questions for Q&A.
This webinar is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any security. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Range defines "high earners" as households with income over $300k.
|
The Idle Camera Gear Nobody's Renting Out
Professional cinema cameras and lenses are absurdly expensive and sit unused most of the time, which is exactly the setup a peer-to-peer rental marketplace is built for. The map is worth reading before you enter.
The players: ShareGrid is the US peer-to-peer leader, historically concentrated in Los Angeles and New York. BorrowLenses is the big business-to-consumer incumbent, now owned by Lensrentals, but it rents its own inventory rather than connecting owners. Wedio runs the peer-to-peer model mostly in Europe, and Fat Llama handles rent-anything gear more broadly.
🗺️ The gap: peer supply is dense in LA and New York and thin everywhere else, even as film production booms in tax-credit hubs. Georgia alone logged $2.6 billion in direct production spend in a recent fiscal year and ranks first in the country, yet peer-owned rental inventory there lags the demand badly. The opening is not a national app. It is owning the liquidity in one booming non-coastal metro, Atlanta first, with a real insurance and deposit layer, before expanding.
The reason those markets sit empty is the same reason they're the opportunity: a dropped cinema camera is a five-figure claim, so trust and density have to come first. Solve that in one city and the gear is already there, sitting in closets.
|
Hungry yet?
|
|
|
Enough talk. Go cook.
Thanks for reading The Ramen Hustle. Go buy, build, or fix something small and real this weekend. Reply and tell us which idea you'd actually run. We read every one. See you tomorrow.
|