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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When your birth year starts with “nineteen-nintey…”
🎮 The Game Boy launched with a green monochrome screen while rivals had full color. On paper, it was worse. It sold 118 million units.
Its edge was battery life: 30 hours on four AAs versus about five for the color competition. The real customer was a kid in the back of a car.
We like that shape. The winning product is often worse at what the category measures and better at what the customer actually lives with. The spec sheet misses that. The customer doesn’t.
Let’s eat.
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The Man Who Buys From Dead Restaurants
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
A restaurant closes and the lease keeps running. Inside is a kitchen full of stainless steel, bolted down and impossible to move quickly.
The owner wants it gone this week with a check in hand, not a lesson in appraising a range or disconnecting a gas line while the rent bleeds out.
That's the gap: the equipment is worth far more than he will get, and speed matters to him more than price.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Name one number for the whole room, haul it, then sell it slowly. The spread is enormous because you buy at the speed the seller needs, not at retail: in one recent case a Montague convection oven went in at about $2,500 and out at $9,500.
He’s not buying equipment. He’s buying the seller's calendar.
►Fred Bush entered the trade in 1976 and works out of Corona, California. A recent feature follows him through a failing pizzeria: $4,500 for about thirty pieces that cost the owner at least $75,000, and that he expects to relist near $15,000. The other half is a 26,000 square foot showroom and a 30-day warranty, which converts somebody's worst week into inventory a stranger will trust.
Zooming out: the margin is not in the buy, it is in the storage.
Any asset expensive to own and urgent to sell works this way. Restaurant kitchens, dental chairs, salon stations, print shops.
🥢 The winners will be the ones with paid-for space. Cash goes out at the truck and comes back one piece at a time over months, so the constraint is capital and square footage. Patience is the actual product.
🍜 The risk is that your supply is other people's failure. Bush says it plainly: you are catching people at their lowest. The margin has to survive refurbishment labor and a warranty you honor.
You might also like ⇢ Rochester's Max Restaurants Auction Off 25 Years of Excess Inventory
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What's your take?
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The Farm In A Shipping Container
Freight Farms sold a genuinely good-sounding thing. A shipping container fitted out to grow leafy greens year-round in a parking lot, no land needed, climate-controlled, financeable, marketed as a business you could simply buy. Founded in 2011, it installed more than 600 farms and raised $32.5M. If someone told you to build a durable business around indoor agriculture, this is close to what you would have built.
The numbers: fourteen years. 600+ units in the field at north of $100,000 each. Chapter 7 on April 30, 2025, with $593,916 in assets against $7,010,826 in liabilities, $6.94M of it unsecured, meaning growers and suppliers recover nothing.
🧯 What actually killed it: it was a one-time capital sale into an operation whose output is a commodity. Almost nobody bought a second box, because the first one did not clear enough to justify another, so growth depended entirely on a permanent supply of first-time believers. One Boston-area grower was paying 33 cents a kilowatt-hour to produce lettuce that competes with California lettuce. The company was not selling a farm, it was selling the idea of one, and that market is finite by definition.
The stated reason across the trade press was cooling investment in agricultural technology. The real reason is that the buyers' unit economics never worked, and a company can only outrun that for as long as new buyers keep arriving.
Would it have worked if… the boxes had produced something that could not be shipped in from a cheaper climate.
If your customers cannot make money with what you sold them, your growth is just a queue of people who have not found out yet.
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Ithaca Hummus's First $1,000
Day one: invested about $5,000, four large cooking pots, a blender and ice cream scoops for portioning. No facility of his own. Chris Kirby rented a summer-camp kitchen at 4H Acres for $200 a month and made hummus on weeknights after class, squeezing the lemons by hand.
The first customer: coolers in the car and the Ithaca Farmers Market on weekends. Then he walked into local groceries and pitched the deli manager directly, in person, rather than trying to get on a buyer's calendar. When stores said he could not be added to their distributor call, he did not accept the answer. He bought a printer, ran it off his car's cigarette lighter, and managed their shelf inventory himself.
What the first $1,000 took: tubs at a time, market by market, one deli manager at a time, through a season of weekends while still in school.
🍜 The unglamorous part: the morning he checked a store he had fought to get into and saw that exactly one container had sold.
The $5,000 bought pots. The printer in the car is what got him on the shelf..
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the asset in your town that is urgent to sell and expensive to store. Forward this to somebody who thinks liquidation is a sad business. See you tomorrow.
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