Tuesday | Episode #172

⚾ Billy Beane built a playoff team out of players nobody else wanted because he stopped paying for the things scouts loved. Not the swing, not the jaw, not the radar-gun fastball.

He paid for on-base percentage, a boring stat the rest of the league treated as beneath them, and it turned out to be the thing that actually won games.

That’s the whole hunt here too. The best businesses are rarely the ones that impress people at a dinner party. They’re the overlooked number somebody else was too proud to chase: the unglamorous service, the boring niche, the customer nobody wants to court.

We go looking for the on-base percentage of small business, the quiet thing that pays while the highlight reel gets all the attention.

Grab a stool. Let's find the boring number.

What’s the problem?

Rural landowners end up with the same mess: overgrown fence lines, brush choking the tree line, a field going to scrub. The old fix is a bulldozer, which scrapes the topsoil and leaves burn piles and hauling bills. Nobody wants to spend six weekends behind a chainsaw either.

That's the gap: landowners want the acreage cleared, not the equipment, the burn permit, or the lost weekends.

What’s the big idea?

Forestry mulching does it in one pass. A grinding attachment on a skid steer chews brush and small trees into mulch left as ground cover, so nothing gets hauled or burned. Andrew Jenkins added it to his landscaping company after clients kept asking, and rented the head rather than buy the ~$30,000 attachment.

Mowing lawns fills the summer. Mulching fills the winter.

►Mike at Three Oaks Property Management in Florence, Alabama prices the work at roughly $1,200 a day and booked 31 jobs in 2025, running clearing off the trucks and crew he already had.

Zooming out: one attachment turns a mowing route into a clearing business. The same head opens five billable lines: clearing, trail cutting, fence-line and right-of-way work, invasive-species control, and storm cleanup.

🔺  The winners are operators who already run a landscaping or property business. They own the trucks, the insurance, and the customer list, so mulching is a new line, not a new company. They sell it to the mow list and turn dead winter into booked days.

🔻 The risk is the crowd: candles are cheap to start, so the aisle is crowded and margins get thin the moment you sound like everyone else. Bootstrapping through the early years, when a third of sales land at Christmas, is hard.

The Ramen Hustle next step:… pick one memory and pour it. Test one nostalgic scent with a name that means something before building a catalog.

The goal isn't to sell candles.

It's to own a feeling people re-buy every season.

You might also like ⇢ Forestry Mulching: The Numbers Behind a One-Machine Service

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Every creator launch throws off a big first-week number, and that number lies. When a membership or a course goes live, the whole audience buys at once, the top line spikes, and then it settles into whatever small slice actually re-subscribes. The real business is the settled number, and founders who read the spike as the baseline end up building for a company that was never there.

What they uncovered: Monica Lent launched a paid community, Blogging for Devs, with no ads and no sponsors: $12/mo or $96/yr, plus a $180 lifetime deal for the first members. Week one pulled in $5,000 from 69 members. Then Stripe showed the real picture: recurring revenue was $516/mo against $300+/mo in software costs. The launch was a cash event. The business underneath it was almost break-even.

The mistake most creators make is counting lifetime and annual deals as if they were monthly income. Those deals raise cash fast, which feels like momentum, but every lifetime sale is a customer who will never pay again.

Lent split her revenue into recurring versus one-time on day one, so she knew her true monthly number the week she launched, not three months later when the cash slowed and the panic started.

What they learned: Sort every dollar into recurring and one-time before you celebrate anything.

Lifetime deals do two jobs at once: they fund the launch and they cap your ceiling. The first buyer is not the developer who wants to start blogging.

It’s the developer who has already blogged for months, gotten almost no traffic, and is annoyed enough to pay $12 for a room full of people fighting the same problem.

Flea Market Flippers (Rob and Melissa Stephenson) move around 90 items a year. In 2019 that ran to $79,000 in sales and $62,075 in profit.

Nine flips, on the record:

🍱 Pick of the litter: the $125 to $3,000 steamer. Best dollar profit on the cheapest buy-in.

💰 Solopreneur Win: Symphony of Leaves founder Rene Rubens turned loose-leaf tea into a debt-free business pulling $15,000 to $30,000 a month depending on the season.

🛠️ Useful Little Tool: Plausible is the cookie-free Google Analytics alternative a bootstrapped team of 10 built because they were sick of dashboards that were slow, creepy, and confusing.

🌱 Quiet Opportunity: Mobile pet grooming is growing 15 to 20% a year, more than double the pace of the salons it is quietly pulling customers away from.

🧾 Money Model: 180Sites sells contractors a done-for-you website for a flat $180 a month with no custom quotes, and that flat fee carries it past $950,000 a year.

📡 On Our Radar: Courts are ordering roughly $104 billion in tariff refunds back to businesses, and a chunk is landing with the small operators most likely to actually spend it.

🔍 Worth Studying: After testing 40 videos, Duolingo found its winning formula was a trending sound plus a slightly menacing tone, then killed everything that flopped and doubled down on what hit.

🕳️ Rabbit Hole: When egg prices spiked, Rent the Chicken started renting out backyard hens for $545 a season with the coop included, and turned it into a real business.

That's the table for today.

If a card here made you rethink something, forward this to the friend who keeps saying they want to start something and never does. Hit reply and tell us which one you'd actually run.

And tap the poll up top so we know how today's Hustle landed.

Back in your inbox tomorrow. Keep the burner on.

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