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From Zero to Side Hustle
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When it’s the last bagel in the break room
☀️ In 1784, Benjamin Franklin joked that Parisians slept through free morning sunlight, then paid for candles to stay up at night. His fix? Fire cannons at dawn.
Nobody fired the cannons. But the clocks moved again this weekend, and the point still stands: people keep paying for things out of habit, even when a cheaper way exists.
That's what we look for every morning: small habits, overlooked inefficiencies, and someone getting paid to fix them.
Pour the coffee.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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Elon Musk. Jensen Huang. Washington. What’s the Connection?
AI is moving into the physical economy.
Elon is building it. Jensen sees it in Agriculture. Washington is backing it. And DIT AgTech is already putting it to work in livestock.
Most investors haven’t connected the dots yet.
At $1 a share, you still can.
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The Snack Machine In The Apartment Lobby
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Tenants, hotel guests and night-shift workers want a cold drink or a bag of chips at 11 p.m. without leaving the building. The building manager wants them happy, but has no interest in running a snack shop.
That's the gap: the building wants snacks on site, and nobody on staff wants to stock them.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Put your own snack and drink machines in the lobby or break room, keep them full, and keep the money. Marcus Gram buys a Coke for 55 cents at a warehouse club and sells it for $1.75.
The business makes money one can at a time. But it grows one building at a time, because every new lobby is a new machine.
►Marcus Gram was earning $17 an hour when he saved up, moved to Philadelphia in 2018 and bought two machines for about $4,000. By 2022 Joyner Vending brought in more than $300,000 a year in sales from 21 machines, and he kept about half. Part-timers do the restocking, so he works about four hours a week.
Zooming out: the lobby is the storefront.
Think: apartment complexes, motels, warehouses, college dorms.
🥢The winners will be the people who sign the building before they buy the machine. Gram checks how many people live or work somewhere before he pitches it. His best spot, a Philadelphia gaming venue, was on track for about $100,000 in one year.
🍜 The risk is the spot. A 2024 survey of vending owners found the average machine brings in about $309 a month before costs, and some bring in $75. A machine in the wrong lobby just sits there.
You might also like ⇢ A Milwaukee Man Spent $7,000 On Two Machines. Here's Year One
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What's your take?
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The Phone Call That Booked A Builder In Five Minutes
Who used it: Yari Ising, owner of My Favorite Cleaning Co, a house-cleaning company in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, calling local home builders.
What it got them: a client booked within five minutes of the first call, and another right after the second.
The recipe: what she said on the phone, as printed by ZenMaid:
hey, do you guys by chance ever need cleaning companies to clean your brand new builds
📋 Why it works: every new house needs the drywall dust cleaned out before the buyer walks in, so the honest answer is usually yes. And a yes-or-no question costs the builder nothing to answer.
Swap this for your niche: "brand new builds." Ask a property manager about move-outs or a real estate agent about new listings. A builder who says yes has more houses coming, so make ten of these calls this week.
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Don't Miss This
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TLDR AI is a free daily email curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers: the new tools worth trying and the research worth understanding, summarized for 1.1M+ readers.
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Who Edits Sermon Videos For Churches
Churches pay editors to cut each Sunday's sermon into short videos, 30 to 90 seconds long, for Instagram and Facebook. It's worth mapping now because the software got cheap fast, and the smallest churches still aren't being served.
Who's here:
The big guys: Subsplash · apps and online-donation software for 20,000+ churches, bought for $800 million in 2025. It owns Pulpit AI, which cuts clips automatically for $39 to $129 a month.
The middle: REACHRIGHT · done-for-you social media, with sermon clips starting on its $797-a-month plan; SermonView · six clips for $58 a month.
The solos: Jorge Diaz in Orlando · $150 for three clips, delivered in two to three days.
🗺️ The gap: filming. Every service above starts with the church sending in Sunday's recording. Half of U.S. congregations have 65 people or fewer, and in a 2019 survey 69% of churches under 50 put no service online at all.
Why it's empty: money and the clock. One Massachusetts church pays a camera operator $150 to $200 a week, but REACHRIGHT estimates churches under 100 people spend $0 to $50 a month on clips. And nearly every church meets Sunday morning, so one person can only film one church a week.
Don't sell a weekly camera person to a 40-person church. Sell a one-time visit to set up a phone, a tripod and a microphone and train one volunteer, then edit their clips from home at Jorge Diaz's prices.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the strangest place you've ever bought a snack from a machine. RForward this to the friend who always knows the building manager. See you tomorrow.
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