In partnership with
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From Zero to Side Hustle
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See ya on Monday!
🎬 When James Cameron pitched The Terminator, he started with a simple image: a metal skeleton emerging from flames. The idea was so strange and low-budget that studios passed before he found someone willing to make it.
Sometimes the idea that sounds too odd to work is the one worth pursuing.
We look for those overlooked opportunities hiding in plain sight. The ones people dismiss before checking the numbers.
Let’s dig in.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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The Weekly Dog Poop Route
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every dog with a backyard leaves a mess in it, every day. Owners want the grass clean for kids and cookouts. Nobody wants to spend Saturday out there with a bag.
That's the gap: owners want a clean yard, and nobody wants to be the one cleaning it.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Scoop the whole yard once a week and bill monthly. A new franchise near Richmond, Virginia, charges $18 a week for one dog. Fifty yards at that price is about $3,900 a month.
The business makes money one yard at a time. But it grows by the street, because five customers on one block take less driving than five across town.
►Jacob D'Aniello was working an IT job in 1999 when he heard a radio segment about pet-waste removal. Soon he and his wife, Susan, were scooping yards before and after work with a bucket and a rake, and DoodyCalls grew to more than 100 locations. Its top location alone brought in $3.2 million last year, according to the company's franchise filing.
Zooming out: the dog makes a new mess every day, so the customer needs you every week.
Any chore that comes back on its own is a route.
Think: trash can washing, pool skimming, office plants.
🥢 The winners will fill one neighborhood before moving to the next. Spokane scooper Will Milliken went from about 20 customers to 350 in a few months of advertising, and now serves about 2,500 clients
🍜 The risk is the slow leak. Milliken loses 4 or 5 of every 100 customers a month, mostly when people move or the dog dies, so you keep adding yards to stay even.
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What's your take?
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You Can Rent A Living Christmas Tree
Rent A Christmas Tree, on California's Monterey Peninsula, delivers a real tree still growing in a pot, lets you keep it for 30 days, then picks it up and takes it back to the nursery. Prices run from $35 to $440, depending on the tree.
Many of the trees are 15 to 20 years old, so some have spent more than a decade of Decembers in strangers' living rooms.
🤯 And they're not the only one. At least four others rent living trees, including a San Jose nonprofit and a landscaper in Ohio.
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Don't Miss This
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Needlepoint Isn't Grandma's Hobby Anymore
Needlepoint used to be something your grandmother did in front of the TV. Now people in their 20s and 30s are buying hand-painted canvases, a stiff mesh grid with the picture already painted on it, and stitching yarn over the paint square by square.
Demand is outrunning supply. A Dallas shop says about 80% of its customers are millennials or Gen Z and it struggles to keep canvases in stock. Finishing, sewing the stitched piece into a pillow or stocking, is booked solid: one South Carolina finisher's Christmas cutoff was August 1.
At the big end, Michaels says needlepoint searches are up 251% in a year. At the small end, Rachel Brady in Columbus, Mississippi, paints canvases in her guest room, sells them for $20 to $300, and made more than $2,000 in her first two months while keeping her remote day job.
Where the trend branches next:
Canvases of local landmarks, college logos and favorite restaurants
Finishing for stitchers who are done stitching
Beginner kits for first-timers
Stitch nights where a group pays for the seat and the supplies
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Most people who start a local newsletter wait until they have a big list before asking anyone to pay. A free email newsletter about Annapolis, Maryland, shows why selling the first ad early works better.
What they uncovered: Ryan Sneddon started Naptown Scoop in August 2020, a free daily email about what's happening in town, paid for by local businesses that buy short blurbs in it. Eleven days in, with about 150 subscribers, he sold his first package: $500 for six ads. By the end of 2023 it had about 17,000 subscribers and more than $200,000 a year in ad sales.
The usual mistake is treating list size as a gate. Newsletter consultant Dan Oshinsky says you don't need a huge list to sell ads, and that new publishers tend to charge too little when they finally do.
Sneddon put an "advertise with us" link in the newsletter from the start, so the first buyer came to him. That $500 told him local businesses would pay, and he went on to spend most of his savings on Facebook ads to grow the list.
What they learned: ask for money as soon as the thing exists. A cleaning service, a meal-prep business or a photography side gig can pre-sell the first job to one person before buying any gear, and the answer tells you whether to keep going.
The first buyer wasn't some local business. It was Jerry Sutton, who runs a small web-design company and replied to the second issue asking what an ad cost.
Your first customer may already be reading what you send. Give them a way to buy.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us the one chore at your house you'd happily pay someone to take every week. Forward this to the friend whose dog owns the backyard. See you Monday.
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