Monday | Episode #176

🎛️ Rick Rubin has produced some of the biggest records of the last forty years, yet he famously can't play an instrument. His real skill is hearing the one thing that doesn't belong, then stripping everything else away until only the hit remains.

We think about business the same way. We're not here for the loudest, flashiest opportunity. 

We spend our days looking for the small, overlooked thing that actually works: the boring niche with real money in it, the proof instead of the pitch. The best ideas are usually hiding under something everyone else walked right past. The kitchen's open.

Today’s Menu:

🌾A farm in one room

🎥 Long video, sliced for cash

🖼️ Pro painter loophole

💵The $200 bestseller test

What's the problem?

Restaurants and juice bars want fresh, delicate greens all year: microgreens, pea shoots, edible garnish. They don't want to grow the stuff, and most farms are too far to deliver something that wilts within days.

So the most perishable produce is the hardest to ship.

That's the gap: the crop that spoils fastest belongs to whoever grows it closest.

What's the big idea?

Microgreens are seeds grown to the seedling stage and cut in one to two weeks. Sold by the tray to chefs and grocers, harvested to order, they earn premium prices on a crop that turns over fast in a tiny footprint.

The money’s in the trays. But the edge is in the planning.

►In Vancouver, Chris Thoreau grew microgreens in a single 320-square-foot room and built it into a business doing more than $150,000 a year, selling 200 to 300 trays a week and delivering the route by bicycle. Once he'd maxed out the growing, he turned the hardest part, deciding what to seed and when, into crop-planning software. In Utah, Brickhouse Growers shows it travels, clearing about $3,000 a week within a year of starting on one living-room shelf.

Zooming out: the opportunity isn't trendy greens. It's a short, recurring supply line to local kitchens in a footprint the size of a parking spot.

Think: edible flowers for caterers, pea shoots for juice bars, micro-mixes for fine dining.

🔺 The winners treat it as a standing wholesale route, not a farmers-market table. Accounts that reorder every week are what turn a spare room into six figures. The ones chasing one-off sales stay a hobby.

🔻 The risk is that microgreens are brutally perishable and hands-on. Shelf life is days, so an unsold tray is a loss, and every tray is seeded, watered, and cut by hand daily. Accounts churn when a kitchen closes or a rival undercuts you, and the grind wears on people enough that even working operations get listed for sale.

The Ramen Hustle next step:… start with one chef. Grow a single variety a nearby restaurant already buys, drop off a sample, and land one standing weekly order before scaling.

The goal isn't to grow microgreens.

It's to run a recurring wholesale route out of one room.

You might also like ⇢ Growing microgreens for profit starts with buyers, not trays

A single podcast episode now shows up as four hundred different clips, and the host cut none of them.

Brands and creators have started paying strangers to chop their long videos into short vertical clips, then paying per view on whatever those clips rack up. It's piecework for the algorithm age: no audience of your own required, just an eye for the ten seconds that will travel.

Bo Lucenko, a 19-year-old outside Chicago, makes about $4,000 a month clipping for creators and founders.

Where the money is spreading:

► The money isn't in going viral yourself. It's in being the person who reliably turns one long video into fifty short ones a brand will pay to spread.

There is over $70B in unclaimed property across the U.S., held by state agencies.

Search your name and state to check if you may be listed in these records.

Search & Claim Funds

An artist who sells a painting gets paid one time. An artist who licenses that same painting gets paid every time it ships on someone else's product. The image is the asset. The sale is just one of many possible uses.

What they uncovered: Surf artist Drew Brophy realized his paintings were worth more rented than sold. Instead of selling a canvas to one collector, he and his wife and agent Maria Brophy licensed a single image to more than a dozen manufacturers at once, each paying an advance plus a percentage of every unit sold.

One painting landed on skateboards, prints, t-shirts, car-seat covers, and phone skins at the same time. His licensing income grew from about $5,000 in a year to roughly $150,000 in six months during a strong stretch, from licensing alone.

The mistake most artists make is treating the artwork as a product to sell once, so they get paid a single time and then have to make something new just to eat again. Brophy treated the artwork as inventory he could license into many non-competing categories simultaneously. A skateboard company and a beach-towel company aren't competitors, so the same wave earns from both.

What they learned: You don't need more work. You need the same work earning in more places. It applies to fonts, illustration, patterns, and characters, any creative asset a manufacturer would rather rent than commission. The first buyer isn't an art collector who wants to own the original.

It's a product company that already sells the physical thing and needs an image with a built-in audience it can't draw in-house.

Who used it: Tim Ferriss, before publishing his first book. The title he picked went to number one.

The recipe: He ran Google search ads for about a week, under $200 total, pitting book titles against each other: "Broadband and White Sand" "Millionaire Chameleon" "The 4-Hour Workweek" Whichever headline got the most clicks won. "The 4-Hour Workweek" won by a mile.

📋 Why it works: You're not guessing which name is best. You're buying a small sample of real strangers' attention and reading their clicks, so the market picks the winner before you commit a dollar to building the thing.

Swap this for your niche: Change the book titles for your product names, course titles, or newsletter names.

💰 Solopreneur Win: Indie developer Marc Lou cleared $1,032,000 in 2025 running a one-man stack of tiny software products and courses, no team and no funding.

🕳️ Rabbit Hole: A West Jordan outfit called Curious Country Creations sells dried tumbleweeds to Ralph Lauren and Saks storefronts for up to $40 each.

🏪 Founder Story: With just $5,000 in savings and no fashion background, Sara Blakely landed her first Spanx order by pulling a Neiman Marcus buyer into a bathroom for a live before-and-after.

📚 Book We Keep Coming Back To: The E-Myth Revisited argues you should build even a one-person shop like a franchise prototype, documenting every task so the business runs on systems instead of on you.

📡 On Our Radar: As of July, the SBA now lets qualified owners stack 7(a) and 504 loans for up to $10 million, double the old cap, which matters most for anyone eyeing an equipment-heavy purchase.

🧲 Swipe File: Scrapbook's DTC landing-page library collects 300+ high-converting product pages you can study section by section before writing your own.

🛠️ Useful Little Tool: Photopea is a full Photoshop clone, PSD files and all, that runs free in a browser tab, versus Adobe's roughly $23-a-month subscription.

That's today's tray.

If it gave you one idea worth chewing on, forward it to someone who needs a better one than their group chat is handing them.

Reply and tell us which hustle you'd actually try. We read every one.

See you tomorrow.

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