Not every biz needs a plan

Start the business of your dreams.

Happy Friday 👋

It’s a chunky one today, so I’ll keep this brief…

Any Londoners out there heading to one of the five thousand biz-adjacent events this weekend? London Coffee Festival, Offprint, Photo London, etc. Maybe see you there? (Wear your FS 🧢 and I’ll wear mine.)

As ever, get in touch and tell me what you’re working on and how I can help. —Danny

In this issue:

• Inspo ➠ Inspiring layoffs

• Advice ➠ Ugmonk’s founder

• Ideas ➠ What’s a business for?

• Resources ➠ Reclaimed materials

• Town Hall ➠ “I published a book”

👋 Did a smart friend send this to you? For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next-gen of small biz owners. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, former editor of Courier mag and host of Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast.

📥️ Get small biz inspo & advice, every Friday → Subscribe for free

📬️ Tell me your dream business → [email protected]

1. Check out the adorable brand of “the smallest coffee shop in Paris.” The identity work for Minicafé, located near the Seine in Île Saint-Louis, was done by Tokyo-based French-Californian designer Elisa Michelet. ☕️

⎯

2. Slime might sound like a TikTok trend, but Christine Ly and Olivya Soth turned it into a $5m biz. Their brand, OG Slimes, started as a college side project with a $2k investment, and now runs out of a full-on warehouse in LA. They drop new slimes every Friday at 3pm PST and sell out fast. The product’s fun but the execution’s sharper, with 🔥 branding and a loyal audience that shows up week after week. → Start small, stay weird, and scale when it makes sense. 💰️

⎯

3. And being laid off can also be… inspiring? LA-based Melanie Ehrenkranz writes the newsletter Laid Off (“The coolest place on the internet to talk about being laid off”), which features the stories of people who have recently lost their jobs. Reading it, you quickly realize how many people turn their worst week into something surprisingly good – and how many turn to entrepreneurship! → This is what I call the top of the starter funnel…🎢

⎯

Jeff Sheldon calls himself “a designer by trade, an entrepreneur by accident.” As the founder of Pennsylvania-based Ugmonk, he’s spent the past 17 years quietly building one of the most interesting design-led brands in the US.

Hey Jeff, Ugmonk got famous for t-shirts. What’s the story there?

I was in college and designing whatever I could get my hands on, so I started submitting t-shirt designs to crowdsourced design sites. People would vote on them and they’d pick the top one each week. I ended up winning after trying a bunch of times and I got a cash prize of $500. I was like, I’ve made it! They sent me the shirt and I got to feel something I’d actually designed.

That was when everything clicked: Why don't I just do this on my own? By 2008, my wife and I were newly married. We were getting boxes of shirts, folding them, bagging them, and shipping out orders. Five orders here, 10 there. And it soon just snowballed. I didn’t have a business plan. It was literally just, this is really fun, let’s see how it goes.

That was the start of Ugmonk. A side project that turned into a brand that really wasn’t supposed to be a brand. Somehow we’re still doing a version of that 17 years later.

How did the desk and productivity tools enter the picture?

For the better part of Ugmonk’s history, it was all t-shirts. I was the t-shirt guy. But the goal was never to be an apparel brand. T-shirts just happened to be the medium at the time.

I ended up spending so much time at my desk and I wanted a better setup. So I hacked together an IKEA shelf with some legs on it and I made a monitor stand with $20 worth of parts. I made a leather mousepad, too. I posted these on early Instagram and my t-shirt customers were like, “When are you selling your desk stuff?”

I realized there might be something more here than just shirts. What if I could manufacture and make physical hard goods? If you look at it on paper, workspace tools have nothing to do with shirts. It doesn’t really make sense until you see the design, quality, and attention to detail that ties it all together.

I’m sure it was a steep learning curve…

I was going in green. I’ve since learned all the things not to do. I could write a book on all the manufacturing woes and struggles we’ve had!

I’d love to know about the Kickstarter you ended up launching.

I was running the t-shirt business and suddenly had all these people interested in my personal workspace. So in 2017 I launched a Kickstarter to create what I called Gather, a modular desk organizer. We wanted to raise $18,000 and ended up raising… $430,000. Getting that money helped validate the idea, go to manufacturing, and pay for tooling. It changed everything. Beyond the Kickstarters, we’ve been bootstrapped. This is why we haven’t grown in a ‘hockey stick’ trajectory. We’re not really pouring gas on the fire.

You tell a great story on your site in which a banker explains to a fisherman how to grow a business, only to realize the ultimate goal is the lifestyle the fisherman already has.

I don’t know when this mentality started: the idea of trying to grow quickly, move fast and break things – and if that fails, just pivot and launch another startup and raise more money, and if you’re in debt, just keep raising. It influences a lot of people as they’re getting started. They think, “Well, I saw somebody on Shark Tank do this.”

Lots of people build a business with an ‘exit’ in mind.

Yeah, they’re thinking about that pot of gold. For me, that’s a weird starting point. It forces you to make decisions very differently.

I love the process of making things, physically picking up a thing and saying, “I designed this.” I still get the most joy and fulfillment from that. If you love the process of writing, why would you want to just run the publication and hire a bunch of writers? For the chef that loves being in the kitchen: do you want to run a franchise and have multiple locations or do you want to cook?

I don’t want to just manage a bunch of people and check my bank account to see if the numbers went up or down. But figuring out a sustainable way of growing a business and doing it in a way where I can still be hands-on isn’t easy.

What advice do you have for starters?

There are too many people planning to plan a business plan. People are stuck in a classroom setting in their mind and too afraid to start. But once you start, you’ll quickly realize what you know, or don’t know, or what sticks. 

What are some things you would have done differently?

Delegating sooner. I tried to do everything myself for many years. That’s not sustainable. It’s simply not possible for someone to power through everything themselves. Especially now that I have a family. You need to have a balance.

How big is your team now?

Just me, two others, and a part-time staffer that comes in to do product assembly and helps with shipping and inventory.

From the outside, Ugmonk could be a 50 person company! When the product and branding is high-quality, it’s hard to know who’s actually behind the curtain.

I take that as a compliment, but sometimes I have to say, “You guys remember we’re just a couple of people – don’t come at us like we’re Amazon!”

We’ve got passionate fans that care about Ugmonk. But a cold audience coming in through an Instagram ad are just looking to consume something. That’s a challenge, especially given all the competition. You’ve got your Walmarts, Amazons, Ugmonks, tiny little single-person businesses, and everything gets lumped into a single group or idea in a customer’s head: “I just buy a thing and it shows up at my door.” It’s hard for people to understand how different these companies really are.

How can you, or we, help consumers make that distinction?

What I’ve actually realized is that people care less about your story as the main reason to buy the product. Instead, your story helps to back up the product. People won’t necessarily support you just because you’re a small business. People want awesome products. Which means they’ll care about supporting a small business if that business makes awesome products.

Is it easier to get started today than in 2008? More tools, but more competition.

The new tools have made it way easier to bring something to market. It’s been cool to see how democratized things have become. But the innovation part is still hard. A lot of brands still miss on the actual product itself – the product DNA. In the direct-to-consumer era, a product can look amazing and the marketing is great, but you often get it and you’re like, This thing leaks. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit.

I’m obsessed with trying to marry design and aesthetics with function. If I’m bringing an object to market, I want it to perform and work as good as it looks. I want it to improve someone’s life, not be a pretty thing you put in the corner. If a t-shirt looks amazing but it doesn’t fit right… nobody will want to wear it. That’s as simple as it gets.

⎯

⎯

What’s a business for? World-gobbling growth? World-changing impact? The insights from Ugmonk’s Jeff Sheldon recall two things…

1. This pitch-perfect cartoon from the New Yorker, above.

2. And this quote from David Heinemeier Hansson, co-owner of 37signals, creator of Ruby on Rails (and Le Mans racing driver):

⎯

🛠️ Tools

→ Renée, a digital marketplace for reclaimed creative materials.

📚️ Reads

→ Everyone says they’ll pay more for “Made in the USA.” So we ran an A/B test. Afina

→ Slack: the key to resilience in a world that keeps breaking. In nature, business, and life, survival doesn’t belong to the optimized – it belongs to those with a built-in buffer. Big Think

→ What is millennial hobby energy? Culture Study

→ Larry Gagosian bought a Hamptons bookstore. Better than it becoming a pilates studio. Feed Me

→ Why Gen Z is flocking to teahouses instead of bars. Across the country, contemporary tea shops appeal to those seeking alternatives to bars and nightlife. Bon Appetit

→ The interests of the founder vs. the audience in building a brand. Whose voice is more important? Self-Projecting Projections

→ The invisible labor tax of ambition. There’s a tax no one warns you about when you’re a young creative. gr8 collab

→ 9 racket clubs turning courts into creative communities. From tennis to pickleball and padel, these are the women-focused, racket collectives that you need on your radar. Hypebae

→ How to get celebrity investors to back your business. HBR

🧠 Findings 

→ 88 days. How long the average adult spends staring at a screen per year 🫠

🙃 Fun

→ “The dumb things I’ve done over the past six months in producing chili oil on a commercial scale with zero food manufacturing experience.”

Major congrats to subscriber Eli London for publishing his first photobook. Below, Eli shares how he got the project off the ground.

⎯

The photo community in New York is very inspiring and after a friend released a book it got my wheels turning about how fun it would be to comb through my own archives and compile a selection of photos for my own book. After spending more than a year on this thing, ‘fun’ isn’t necessarily the word I would use to describe the process. Frustrating, humbling and most importantly, rewarding, are the most accurate words.

The big challenges for this were the fact that a) I’ve never done anything remotely this large and b) I’m not a designer. So I was essentially my own project manager. I also had to teach myself how to use InDesign to put the book together. It’s not perfect and that was probably the biggest challenge for me, realizing that perfect is the enemy of good. I find that especially true for something like art which is completely subjective. I could tinker with the photo sequencing and selection and layout until the end of time and still not be entirely satisfied. I realized at a certain point I would just have to go with it and be satisfied that the thing is as good as it’s going to get.

I decided to self publish because, in all honesty, none of the small publishers I emailed about it were interested and I felt it was more important to get this thing out in the world rather than wait to see if anyone bit. I found a book printer and decided to set up a preorder page for the book to a) figure out a reasonable number to order and b) to get some cash in to use towards the order so I wasn’t completely fronting the cost.

Don’t be afraid to ask for help – within reason. One of my friends who is a former editor-in-chief of a publication edited all the essays in the book and another friend who is a design director, designed the cover for me.

The best advice I have for anyone who wants to do something similar, as cliche as it sounds, is to just start doing the thing. I thought about making a book for months and months before I actually started making the book. It wasn’t until I actually started the process that the idea became a reality. It evolved into something completely different than I thought it would, but I never would have figured that out if I didn’t start it in the first place.

⎯

Thanks for reading!

🙏 “This really is a must-read for anyone starting something.” –Meg Hovious, Founder of here*

📬️ Share your updates & feedback: [email protected]

👋 Follow us: @itsforstarters & LinkedIn