|
|
From Zero to Side Hustle
|
The answer you give when you’re lying about finishing the report
🧊 In 1930, Albert Einstein and former student Leo Szilard patented a refrigerator with no moving parts after a family in Berlin died from leaking fridge gas. A Swedish appliance company bought one of their patents, but safer refrigerants arrived before their design reached a kitchen.
Even Einstein couldn't beat the clock. Sometimes a good idea just needs the right timing.
Coffee's on.
|
|
First Up, Our Sponsor
|
|
|
The Online Store That Sells Only Dollhouse Parts
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Dollhouse builders need tiny staircases, windows and furniture, and many stores that sell them look like they were built in 1998.
Big shopping sites bury these parts under toys. Specialty shops are hard to search and harder to buy from.
That's the gap: a loyal, picky buyer with nowhere good to shop.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Build one clean online store for one narrow hobby, and let a wholesaler ship the orders. That's called dropshipping: you list the product and take the payment, the supplier packs the box, and you never buy or store stock. You keep the difference, usually 30% to 40% of each sale.
The business makes money on each kit. But it grows from Google, one narrow search at a time.
►Amanda Austin, a digital marketer in Erie, Pennsylvania, picked dollhouse parts because people searched for them about 2,000 times a month and the competing sites looked old. She met a supplier with 20,000 items at a Las Vegas trade show and listed 2,300 of them. By mid-2019 she averaged $4,000 a month in sales and $800 in profit on two hours a week. By 2020, every month since December 2019 had cleared five figures.
Zooming out: the hobby picks the customer, and the wholesaler is the warehouse.
Think: model trains, aquarium plants, fly-fishing gear.
🥢The winners will turn first orders into second ones. More than 20% of her orders come from returning customers, helped by a reminder email to people who leave items in their cart.
🍜 The risk is selling stock you can't see. Her supplier's inventory feed broke, her store kept listing sold-out items, and she spent months on partial refunds. Thin margins also mean paid ads rarely pay off.
You might also like ⇢ $20K A Month Selling Tiny Cinder Blocks
|
What's your take?
|
The Chicken Chain That Sold Restaurants Faster Than Chicken
Minnie Pearl's Fried Chicken was a 1968 restaurant chain named after the Grand Ole Opry comedian. It was sold as franchises, meaning local investors paid for the right to open one under its name.
Two Nashville lawyers, brothers John Jay and Henry Hooker, licensed her name and started selling. By February 1968 they had sold the rights to almost 300 restaurants, with five open. A franchise cost $20,000, buyers put 10% down, and the company counted the full $20,000 as earnings anyway.
Investors loved it. Shares went public at $20, hit $67, and by September 1970 traded at 44 cents. The company had sold 1,400 franchises by then, but more than half of the roughly 250 restaurants that opened had closed. The federal stock regulator later ruled that its 1968 profit was really a loss.
Still cooking: Closed by 1973. Two of its oddly shaped buildings were still standing in Lubbock, Texas in 2018, one of them a laundromat.
|
Don't Miss This
|
Turn your expertise into working software
Describe what you want to build
Get real software, not a prototype
Lovable handles payments, logins, databases
Change any detail yourself, any time
Put it in front of customers this week
Discount of $5 applies to first month of any paid plan. You need to sign up via this webpage in order to claim the discount. The discount applies to new and returning users without an active paid plan. Terms apply.
|
What A Booth At An Antique Mall Really Leaves You
An antique-mall booth is a rented corner inside a shared antique store. You stock it with yard-sale finds, the mall's cashiers ring up your sales, and you pay rent every month.
What it costs to start. Rent runs $100 to $500 a month, with a median of $275 for a 10-by-10 space in an October survey of 35 malls. Most malls also keep 7% to 15% of each sale.
What you charge. New York dealer Diana, who blogs as Adirondack Girl @ Heart, sold a $1 wicker basket for $24 and a $4 painted wooden tub for $35.
What it costs you. Her goods cost about 10% of what they sell for, bought at yard sales and estate sales.
What's left per month. In December 2016 she sold $425, paid $42 for the goods and $130 in rent with no commission, and kept about $253.
🧮 What breaks it: sales against rent. Her rule is that a booth must sell three times its rent. At $275 rent, that's $825 a month. Take off 10% for the mall and 10% for the goods and you keep $660, or $385 after rent. With her items averaging about $15, that's 55 things sold, and 55 more found, priced and hauled in, every month.
An Atlanta dealer on a resellers' forum estimated that about 90% of the sellers in his mall didn't cover their rent.
Before you sign, ask the manager what a typical booth sells in a month. If it's less than three times the rent, keep looking.
|
Hungry yet?
|
|
|
Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the hobby you'd build a store for. Forward this to the friend whose house is full of tiny furniture. See you tomorrow.
|