Tuesday | Episode #187

🚗 Toyota didn't become one of the world's biggest automakers by building faster cars. It obsessed over eliminating tiny inefficiencies on the factory floor. Small improvements, repeated thousands of times, became a massive advantage.

That's the kind of business we chase. Not the flashy idea, but the boring system that quietly outperforms. Time to build.

If you're a high earner, small tax moves add up fast. On August 20, join Range's CFPs and CPAs live as they break down the tax-smart investing strategies that help you keep more of what you earn — with an open Q&A. Free to attend.

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^{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.}

What’s the problem?

Every fryer in every restaurant produces used cooking oil that legally cannot go down the drain. The kitchen wants it gone on a schedule. It does not want to become a licensed waste hauler, learn the EPA rules, or store a reeking tank out back.

That's the gap: a smelly, boring chore for the restaurant is a recurring commodity route for you.

What's the big idea?

Run a collection route: pump each restaurant's oil tank on a schedule, then sell the clean used oil to biodiesel refiners. The trick is not buying low and selling high, because the numbers are close. It is acquiring most of the oil free or cheap, packing accounts tightly, and earning a premium on clean, dry oil.

►Eazy Grease, where Artem Kamalov is a co-founder, has rolled up smaller collectors into one of the largest independent networks in the country, running routes across the East Coast and Florida. The model math is friendly to a small operator: refiners pay roughly $2.40 to $3.60 a gallon for clean oil, and an operator with about 500 accounts clears north of a million dollars a year, with stated margins running 33% to 66% of revenue.

Zooming out: the business isn't grease, it's a dense recurring route on a commodity somebody else pays you to take.

Think: grease-trap cleaning as an upsell, restaurant contracts locked a year at a time, and buying out a retiring collector's book of accounts.

🥢 The winners pack the route. Servicing 30 accounts inside five square miles beats 30 scattered across fifty, so the margin is density plus a clean-oil premium, and every new restaurant on an existing route is nearly free to serve.

🍜 The risk is that the oil is a traded commodity and everyone knows it. Prices swing with the fuel market, grease theft is a real and expensive problem, and a used vacuum truck and tank can run $80,000 to $150,000 before the first pickup.

The Ramen Hustle next step:… sign one restaurant. Offer a single kitchen free, reliable pickup, prove you show up, and let that one account teach you the route before you buy the truck.

You might also like ⇢ How to make a million starting a used cooking oil company

Freeze-dried candy, the airy, crunchy version of gummies and taffy, went from a TikTok curiosity to a category the giants now chase.

The signal that it is real: Mars launched freeze-dried Skittles and M&M's, and Ferrara did the same with SweeTARTS and Lemonheads. When the majors pile in, the easy generic money is closing. But the entry cost for a solo maker is genuinely low: a home freeze dryer runs about $2,500 to $3,500, margins on a $6 bag run 75% to 85%, and shelf-stable candy qualifies under most states' cottage-food laws. One maker, Candeeze, rode organic TikTok clips past 30 million views to the top of its category and 19,000 units a week.

Where a small maker still wins:

► The money isn't in freeze-drying Skittles, because Mars does that now. It's in the specific small batch the factory will never run.

Apple just secretly added Starlink satellite support to iPhones through iOS 18.3.

One of the biggest potential winners? Mode Mobile.

Mode’s EarnPhone already reaches 490M+ users that have earned over $1B, and that’s before global satellite coverage. With SpaceX eliminating "dead zones," Mode's earning technology can now reach billions more in unbanked and rural populations worldwide.

Their global expansion is perfectly timed, and investors like you still have a chance to invest in their pre-IPO offering at $0.52/share.

With their recent 32,481% revenue growth and newly reserved Nasdaq ticker, Mode is one step closer to a potential IPO.

Tap into a $1T opportunity — invest now at just $0.52/share and get up to 20% bonus.

^{Please read the offering circular and related risks at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation A+ Offering.}

^{Mode Mobile recently received their ticker reservation with Nasdaq ($MODE), indicating an intent to IPO in the next 24 months. An intent to IPO is no guarantee that an actual IPO will occur.}

^{The Deloitte rankings are based on submitted applications and public company database research, with winners selected based on their fiscal-year revenue growth percentage over a three-year period.}

In 2012, a former waitress named Tabatha Bundesen posted a photo of her snub-faced house cat, Tardar Sauce, and the internet decided Grumpy Cat was a star. Bundesen did the smart thing: she trademarked the scowl and licensed it, into plush toys, books, a Friskies deal, and a Lifetime movie.

The instructive part is the coffee deal. A beverage company paid $150,000 upfront to license the face for one iced-coffee drink, the Grumppuccino. When the licensee wandered outside the deal, selling coffee grounds and t-shirts it never had the rights to, Bundesen's company sued and a jury awarded $710,000 for infringement. The licensee paid nearly five times the original license fee for coloring outside the lines.

Still cooking: the cat died in 2019, but the trademark did not. The scowl is still a licensed, protected brand.

The asset was never the coffee. It was the face, and the paperwork that fenced it.

💰 Solopreneur Win: Nick Bruni turned a childhood card obsession into $2 million-plus a year reselling vintage Pokemon through Old Skool Pokemon.

📡 On Our Radar: Only 27% of US adults report having a side hustle in 2025, the lowest share since 2017 and down from 36% a year earlier. Bankrate

🧲 Swipe File: Land-book is a hand-curated gallery of thousands of real website and landing-page designs you can study section by section.

🛠️ Useful Little Tool: Photoroom strips the background off a product photo in one click, free in the browser.

🌱 Quiet Opportunity: Knife-and-tool sharpening is a near-zero-inventory service worth $90 million in the US in 2024 and growing about 7.5% a year.

🧾 Money Model: Gift-card breakage is nearly free revenue, with unredeemed cards typically booking at a 2% to 4% breakage rate of total sales.

📚 Book We Keep Coming Back To: Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath spent 25 months on the bestseller list and explains why some ideas travel and most don't.