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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When they ask if I want to stay late.
📚 J.K. Rowling kept the rights to Harry Potter instead of taking the biggest deal available.
The lesson: don’t sell the asset that can keep paying you.
We look for businesses built the same way. Keep the customer list, the brand, the process, the rights.
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The Barrel A Distillery Can Only Fill Once
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Under federal rules, bourbon must be stored in charred new oak, so a distillery fills any given barrel with bourbon exactly once.
After that it owns the thing forever, and accumulates a yard of them: wet, 120 pounds, expensive to move, worth real money to somebody else.
That's the gap: distilleries want the barrels gone, and moving 120-pound objects is a different business.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
The same object sells at wildly different prices depending on who is asked. Brewers want it wet, furniture builders dry, decorators only care what the headstamp says.
The barrel doesn’t change. The buyer is the variable.
►Ben and Jess Loseke started Midwest Barrel Co. in September 2015 when Ben listed forty used wine barrels on a Facebook auction to see what they would clear. The phone did not stop. His first buyers were five Nebraska breweries he could drive to, which is the part worth copying: freight is the killer, so he started inside a radius where it did not exist.
Zooming out: the object is a commodity and the buyer list is not.
The spread is public. A Kentucky wholesaler posts $70 a barrel at truckload, or $65 each if you collect twenty yourself. Midwest Barrel retails them at $89.99 to $319.
🥢The winners will solve freight before sourcing. Four barrels fit a pallet, 288 a trailer, and there is a $100 handling fee before a carrier is booked. Start inside a driving radius and the cost disappears.
🍜 The risk is that the supply is a symptom of someone else's boom: barrels only pile up while distilleries are filling. Both ends can also route around you. One brewer: "We almost never use a broker because we've got the relationships."
You might also like ⇢ Brewers Throw Out 4.7 Million Wet Tons of Spent Grain a Year
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What's your take?
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Don't Miss This
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Stop losing deals you should be winning.
Bad leads. Slow deals. Objections you didn't see coming.
That's not a sales problem. You're selling to the wrong people.
Most founders never stop to define exactly who their product is actually for. So they pitch everyone, convert few, and wonder why the funnel's broken.
HubSpot for Startups built a free tool that fixes the root cause in 2 minutes. Paste your URL, answer a few quick questions, and get a clear profile of your best-fit customer.
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Narrating Audiobooks From Your Closet
Why everyone's here: for about six years this was the best remote-work story going. ACX let’s anyone with a decent microphone audition for indie authors, royalty share meant the author paid nothing up front, and a narrator with a spare room could build a catalogue that paid for years. It was a real opportunity and the people who took it early were right.
The evidence it's crowded: the flood is not narrators, it is titles. Publishers reported over 750,000 active audiobook titles in 2025, a 43 percent increase in a single year. Amazon's Virtual Voice, which turns an ebook into an audiobook with no human at all, produced more than 40,000 Audible titles while still in beta. One blogger counting Audible's new releases by hand found 2,253 of 2,697 new romance titles in a single week were Virtual Voice.
🚩 What's happening to prices: a working narrator now publishes rates opening at $85 to $100 per finished hour for inexperienced voices, against the $260 to $380 that circulated in the boom years. The floor is set by the machine: production-grade AI audio is quoted at $49 to $199 for ten finished hours, against $1,600 to $3,200 for a person to narrate the same book. Worth being precise, because it is the interesting part: AI titles are still only about 0.03 percent of audiobook revenue. Listeners are not buying them. The flood is competing for the shelf, not the ear, and it is the shelf that sets what an author will pay.
The narrow door: the top tier held. Professional narrators with a track record still command $200 to $400 per finished hour. The door closed on the entry rung specifically, which is the rung every course was selling.
If you have the room and the microphone, point them at something a machine cannot fake yet: live event capture, corporate training, or the author who wants a person because their readers can tell.
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The Man Who Put A Coin Slot On A Mattress
In 1958, a salesman named John Houghtaling was struggling to sell vibrating mattresses, which were expensive and which nobody wanted to buy outright. So he took the motor off the mattress and built a unit that clipped onto any box spring already in the room.
Then he stopped selling them altogether. He placed them in motels for free and split the coin box with the owner, 80/20 in the motel's favor. A quarter bought fifteen minutes of Magic Fingers.
The average box took eight quarters a week. Across roughly a quarter of a million units, that came to an estimated $2 million a month.
Still cooking: Best Western banned coin-operated devices from its rooms by name in 1967, the card-swipe successor never landed, and the company eventually went bankrupt. A mail-order outfit now owns the rights and sells a modern unit for $119.95.
He didn’t sell a single mattress. He sold fifteen minutes at a time, in a room he didn’t own.
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Hungry yet?
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| The Sides | ||||||
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate, and that's the week. Reply and tell us what a local business currently pays to throw away. Forward this to somebody who thinks the boring stuff is taken. See you tomorrow.
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