|
|
From Zero to Side Hustle
|
Pretending I’m hearing the work gossip for the first time
Nathan Fielder opened “Dumb Starbucks,” turning a dead coffee shop into a media spectacle by adding one word.
The bit was ridiculous. The insight was not: attention can be the product.
That’s the kind of move we look for. Change one detail, give people a reason to look twice, and let the market do the rest.
Grab a fork.
|
|
First Up, Our Sponsor
|
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.
|
Twenty-Five Vet Clinics On One Route
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
When a pet dies at a clinic, the family wants the body handled with dignity and the ashes back in a box they can accept.
What the clinic does not want is a furnace in the back, an air permit on the wall, or that conversation happening between appointments.
That's the gap: the clinic wants the problem gone, and nobody wants a crematory next to the exam rooms.
WHAT’S THE BIG IDEA?
The clinic is the customer, not the grieving owner. One relationship buys every death in that building for years, and clinics stack into a route.
The furnace cost is fixed. What comes out of it is priced five different ways.
►David and Royce Ann Crawford started Cherished Memories in Killeen, Texas in 2009 with one retort costing about $50,000, and built a route now serving twenty-five clinics at 150 animals a month. Above that fixed cost sits a ladder from communal disposal to urns at $65 to $400. David spent 25 years as a funeral director first. The network came before the furnace.
Zooming out: the route is the asset, not the furnace.
Texas doesn’t license this under funeral rules. The gate is a $900 air permit, and one operator publishes $60 to collect from a vet against $160 from a residence.
🥢 The winners will be the ones who buy a route instead of building one. Deb Chebatoris rode along on pickups before committing, then bought the business with its clinics attached. The hard part is the relationships, not the equipment.
🍜 The risk is that the product is trust and nobody can verify it. In April 2025 Pennsylvania charged a funeral home owner with returning unknown ashes to 6,500 owners. One bad story costs you a clinic, not a customer.
You might also like ⇢ What American Families Actually Pay, by Weight and Service
|
What's your take?
|
The Chair That Comes With Twelve Years
In resale, finding the thing is the cheap part. Anyone can learn to spot an underpriced item, and everyone eventually does, which is why sourcing luck is the worst possible foundation for a business. The operators who last build something that turns a mediocre unit into a good one on purpose, every time, and then sell the guarantee rather than the object.
Steve Crandall started Crandall Office Furniture in a basement in 2002, buying twelve-to-fifteen-year-old Steelcase, MillerKnoll and Haworth chairs and stripping them back to the frame. A remanufactured Herman Miller Aeron sells at $799 against roughly $1,800 new, and it ships with a 12-year warranty. That warranty is the actual product. It is also the thing a flipper cannot offer, because a flipper does not control what happens after the sale.
The company now runs 25 people across 34,000 square feet and has put $1.2M into an expansion. Worth being honest about the clock: that is 23 years, not an overnight story.
The mistake most people make in resale is treating the margin as the business. Buy at $200, sell at $500, repeat. It works until the supply of underpriced chairs dries up or somebody with more time outbids you.
Crandall built the opposite: a repeatable input stream plus the parts and labor to make any unit good, which means he does not need a lucky find. He needs a truckload of ordinary ones.
What they learned: the first buyer is not "someone who needs a desk chair." It’s the person who has already decided they want a size B Aeron, has priced a new one, and is searching the model number rather than the category. That person is not comparing you to a used-furniture store. They’re comparing you to $1,800, and the warranty is what closes the distance.
|
For our Marketers
|
Your Competitors Just Hired an Entire GTM Team. No Humans.
AI agents are doing the work of full GTM teams. Pipeline, content, customer service. The startups using them aren't waiting for headcount approvals.
Get the free Practical Guide to Agentic GTM for Startups and see exactly where to start.
|
One File, Sold Ten Thousand Times
The people making 3D models used to sell their time. Now a growing number of them sell the file and go to bed.
Epic collapsed the Unreal Marketplace, Sketchfab, ArtStation and Quixel into a single storefront called Superhive Market, and set the creator split at 88/12 against the 70 percent most app stores pay. It accepts Blender, Maya, Cinema 4D and Substance content, not just Unreal, which quietly widened the seller pool from game studios to anyone who models.
The unglamorous math is published, which is rare. Superhive, formerly Blender Market, posts both its commission tiers and its lifetime payouts: $51,569,986 paid out to 6,206 creators across 5.6 million items sold. That is roughly $8,300 a creator, and the honest read is that most sellers earn a little while a few earn a lot.
The money isn’t in modelling something beautiful, it’s in modelling the boring thing a thousand people need and nobody wants to build twice. A tree that ships with correct collision meshes will outsell a cathedral.
|
Hungry yet?
|
|
|
Enough talk. Go cook.
That's the plate. Reply and tell us which one you'd actually try. Forward this to the friend who keeps saying there's nothing left to start. See you tomorrow.
|