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From Zero to Side Hustle
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Showing off your new shoes at work
👟 Vans got started making shoes for people who kept destroying them. Skaters were wearing through canvas sneakers in weeks, so a small California company built a thicker sole, padded collar, and sold direct from its own factory store.
The customer was not a demographic. It was a complaint.
That is where we keep looking. Not for a market that might want something, but for a specific person already losing time, money, or patience to a problem. Find the complaint. Build around it. Let the market come later.
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First Up, Our Sponsor
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The Yard Sale That Became A Franchise
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Every office has a closet of dead laptops nobody will throw away. The data is a liability and several states will not let you landfill them.
The IT manager wants the closet empty and a certificate of destruction, not a weekend wiping drives and finding a refiner.
That's the gap: the equipment is worthless and disposing of it is a legal decision nobody wants to own.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
Money stacks three deep on the same box. Rehome the working machine, harvest parts from the dead one, scrap the remainder. The wedge is the collections everyone else refuses: City eWaste targets pickups under 4,000 pounds, beneath what the majors will drive out for.
Nobody pays for the box. They pay for the decision.
►Matthew Rogers backed into this buying rain-soaked servers at a 2018 Tennessee yard sale and teaching himself teardown off YouTube. Franklin closed its own electronics recycling division during COVID and contracted with him; Williamson County then approved drop-off at five convenience centers. The resident is not the customer. The county is, and that contract is hard to dislodge.
Zooming out: the collection point is the business, not the material.
Any material a county must accept but cannot profitably handle works this way. Paint, propane tanks, fluorescent tubes, refrigerant appliances.
🥢 The winners will be the ones who take the jobs that are too small to drive to. That band has almost no competition because it is defined by everyone else's minimum.
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What's your take?
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Microstock Contributing
Microstock used to be the dream side hustle.
Take photos once, upload them to a marketplace, and get paid every time someone downloaded them. A coffee shop photo, a laptop-on-desk shot, a smiling business team, a sunset, a handshake. One file could sell over and over again.
For a while, that worked because platforms rewarded contributors who built big portfolios and stuck around. The more you sold, the better your payout tier became. You climbed the ladder once, and you stayed there.
That game has changed.
Shutterstock’s current contributor structure now runs on annual levels. Contributors can earn between 15% and 40%, but those levels reset every year on January 1. That means even experienced contributors start each year back at Level 1 and have to climb again.
So the old pitch, “upload general photos and earn forever,” is much weaker now.
The market is crowded, payouts are thinner, and AI-generated images have made generic stock even easier to replace.
🎯 The narrow door that still works is access. Photos and footage still have value when they show something AI cannot easily fake or legally replace: real people with proper releases, real workplaces, real equipment, real medical settings, real industrial environments, real local businesses, real events, real construction sites, real agriculture, and real processes.
That is the better angle.
Do not compete with everyone uploading “person using laptop.” Compete with the photographer who can get inside a dental office, welding shop, warehouse, machine shop, farm, lab, gym, restaurant kitchen, or construction site and capture the real thing.
The business is no longer just “take good pictures.” The business is owning access to places a prompt cannot go.
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Check this out
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The Future of AI in Marketing. Your Shortcut to Smarter, Faster Marketing.
This guide distills 10 AI strategies from industry leaders that are transforming marketing.
Learn how HubSpot's engineering team achieved 15-20% productivity gains with AI
Learn how AI-driven emails achieved 94% higher conversion rates
Discover 7 ways to enhance your marketing strategy with AI.
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The Blank Tee Under A Printed Apparel Brand
Before a printed apparel brand chooses the design, ink, packaging, or ad angle, it makes one quiet decision that affects everything:
What blank shirt is this printed on?
That choice seems small, but it changes how the customer experiences the product. The print might get the attention, but the blank tee decides whether someone actually wears it again.
BulkApparel’s T-shirt pricing page shows the ladder clearly:
Gildan 5000: the cheap volume option for events, giveaways, fundraisers, and bulk orders. Starts around $2.64
Gildan 64000 Softstyle: still affordable, but softer and more fitted. Starts around $2.98
Bella+Canvas 3001: the common choice for brands that want a more retail-style feel. Starts around $4.73
Comfort Colors 1717: garment-dyed, heavier, softer, and more recognizable by touch. Starts around $6.78
The interesting part is the spread.
Going from a cheap blank to a better blank might only add a few dollars to your cost. But the rest of the operation stays mostly the same. The design work, printing setup, labor, packaging, shipping, and customer acquisition do not magically get cheaper because the shirt underneath feels worse.
That is why the blank matters.
A customer might not know the name “Comfort Colors 1717,” but they can feel the difference when they put it on. It feels heavier. It feels softer. It feels more like something they bought from a real brand, not something they got for free at a company picnic.
🥄 The better angle: do not compete only on the graphic. Compete on the feel.
For a printed apparel brand, the blank is not just a supply cost. It is the part of the product the customer lives with after the design gets their attention.
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Hungry yet?
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Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate, and that's the fortnight. Reply and tell us which of these nine you would actually start. Forward this to somebody who thinks the boring businesses are all taken. See you Tomorrow.
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