Wednesday | Episode #178

⚽Ted Lasso arrived in England to coach a sport he’d never played, and almost everyone counted him out. His advantage wasn’t some secret tactic. It was paying closer attention to people, building trust, and taking the small details seriously.

The businesses we chase aren’t the ones that sound impressive at dinner parties. They’re the ones quietly solving boring problems for customers who gladly pay.

We care less about what looks exciting and more about what works. The numbers tell the story. The next real opportunity is usually smaller, stranger, and closer than you think.

Today’s Menu:

🤝 Ten-dollar favors

🏢 Who's buying boring businesses

⏳ Three years, then it clicked

💼 Boring niche = better business

What's the problem?

People grieve pets like family, and a photo buried on a phone doesn't feel like enough. They want a one-of-a-kind, hand-made portrait, and there's no mass-produced version that carries the same weight.

That's the gap: an emotional, irreplaceable purchase has almost no price ceiling once the artist has a reputation.

What's the big idea?

Sell custom pet portraits on commission, priced up as demand outgrows your hours, with prints and digital files to catch the buyers who won't pay for an original.

The artist sells a painting. What the buyer takes home is the dog they lost.

►Sarah Miller started by posting on her college Facebook page that she'd paint classmates' pets for about $10 each. She raised prices in steps as the orders kept coming, and her most popular commissions now sell for around $195, enough to go full-time after graduation. She isn't a fluke: Tiffany Dnaka has roughly doubled her pet-portrait revenue year after year since 2021 on the same one-painting-at-a-time model.

Zooming out: the business isn't paint. It's a made-to-order memorial with a waitlist.

Think: memorial portraits, pet photography sessions, digital-only commissions, breed-specific illustration. At the top end, studios like Puptrait charge hundreds per session and hundreds more per print.

🔺 The winners will be the artists who build a recognizable style and a steady referral pipeline, then raise prices as demand outstrips the hours in a day. The scarce resource is the artist's own hands, so the ones who win price like it.

🔻 The risk is that every portrait costs real time, so revenue is capped by how fast you paint. Scaling means raising prices, hiring, or moving into prints, and discovery leans on marketing that can go quiet. A commission business with no waitlist is just a slow job.

The Ramen Hustle next step:… paint five for free. Post in a local group, paint five pets at cost to build a portfolio and referrals, then raise your price every few orders until they stop coming.

The goal isn’t to sell paintings.

It's to build a premium, referral-fed commission studio with a waitlist.

You might also like ⇢ Pet portraits are changing how people remember their companions

Buying a small business has become a full-blown online movement, and a whole stack of tools and money has grown up around it. Almost all of it points at the same shelf.

Who's here:

🗺️ The gap: Everyone above is fighting over the same on-market inventory. Nobody has cracked cheap, systematic sourcing of the off-market, sub-million-dollar, boomer-owned businesses that never get listed at all.

Why it's empty: Because off-market sourcing is manual and miserable. It's cold calls, direct mail, and county-list grinding to owners with no succession plan, most of whom aren't ready to sell. It doesn't package into a clean software feed, which is exactly why the tooling companies aggregate listings instead. The payoff for the person who does the grind is real: lower multiples and no bidding war, because there's no auction.

A scrappy version is to run the off-market outreach as a done-for-you service for the flood of searchers who won't do it themselves.

Day one: In 2013, Kevin Espiritu bought a domain for a gardening blog and then basically let it sit for three years while he worked other jobs. No audience, no capital, no plan.

The first customer: There wasn't one, exactly. The first dollars came from strangers landing on gardening how-to posts through Google search, then clicking AdSense and Amazon affiliate links. He built the audience one search result at a time, plus a few subreddits he ran himself.

What the first $1,000 took: By the summer of 2016, when he finally quit his job to go full-time, the site was earning about $400 a month. It took months of daily posting and filming before that crept up to a few thousand a month.

🍜 The unglamorous part: He spent three years on something that made almost nothing, grinding out hundreds of articles and videos nobody clapped for. In his own words, it was "demotivating and demoralizing."

What it took wasn't money. It was outlasting three years of silence.

When Amar Ghose started, the advice every bootstrapper heard was to build tools for people like themselves: other founders, marketers, developers. That's where the buzz and the early adopters were.

He did the opposite. He built scheduling software for maid and cleaning companies, a fragmented, unglamorous, price-sensitive vertical that other founders ignored precisely because it wasn't cool. His customers weren't chasing shiny tools; they had a real, boring, recurring problem, so they stuck. He bootstrapped ZenMaid to roughly $200,000 in monthly recurring revenue by owning a niche nobody else wanted.

The takeaway is small and sharp: sell useful software to people outside your own industry, not clever tools to other founders.

💰 Solopreneur Win: Starting with a bucket and a mobile setup, 22-year-old Alan Tursunbaev grew his car-detailing business to about $75,000 a month.

🧾 Money Model: Each well-placed ATM earns its owner $180 to $540 a month in surcharge fees, a cash-in, cash-out route you can service on weekends.

🔍 Worth Studying: Liquid Death turned canned water into a $1.4 billion brand by spending on entertainment instead of ads, so study how they make content people share rather than skip.

🕳️ Rabbit Hole: Professional mermaid Elle Jimenez charges a $500 minimum for parties and up to $10,000 an hour for high-end events, tail included.

📡 On Our Radar: The July QuickBooks Small Business Index pegs average small-business revenue at $50,330 a month while hiring dipped slightly, a useful benchmark to size yourself against.

🏪 Founder Story: Play-Doh began as a wallpaper cleaner and only survived because a nursery teacher repurposed the dying product into a toy that has since sold over 3 billion cans.

📚 Book We Keep Coming Back To: The $100 Startup profiles dozens of people who turned a skill they already had into a business for under $100, then reverse-engineers the pattern behind the ones that stuck.

That's the tray for today.

 If someone you know is sitting on a skill and no plan, forward this along.

Reply and tell us which idea you'd actually run. We read every one.

See you tomorrow.

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