Serving up weekly intel for small biz owners since 2025

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Welcome to Issue #2 👋 

You write an email, test it, and test it ten more times. All looks good. You’re feeling content. Smug. But come game time and… the email clips. If you’re one of those subscribers who got a clipped Issue #1 last week, I’m sorry! (Sorry for packing it with so much stuff your inbox literally says I cannot.) I promise I’ll write shorter editions. If it still clips, click Read Online at the top right for a smoother experience.

Thanks for all the amazing messages and ideas you’ve been sending in. We’re going to grow an incredible community together.

66% of Gen Z and millennials have, or plan to start, a side hustle. Tell me yours: [email protected]

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This week…

1. INSPO ↣ New Zealand tacos and a shop in a pool

2. TIPS ↣ Make a list. Make many lists…

3. IDEAS ↣ You look a bit wonky, mate

4. TOOLS ↣ Tintin and Popeye – and now they’re yours

5. TOWN HALL ↣ Opportunities & wins from FS subscribers

01. Inspo for starters

People building amazing businesses.

↣ There's a real-life local flour mill opening in New York, a sentence that apparently hasn’t been said since 1688 (?!). Via Grub Street:

↣ Other starters building in the big 🍎:

• A bunch of Aussies are opening an Australian pub called Old Mates. Live music and Australian beer. As Esquire said a year ago: “NYC’s coolest bars and clubs have one thing in common: they’re run by Aussies.” Is this true? I need confirmation 🦘

• The many wonders (& beautiful people) of Happier Grocery, founded by Wells Stellberger.

• I ❤️ everything about Chowa Library, a cultural center, event space and shop that sells gorgeous handcrafted kiribako boxes. Read more.

↣ Amir Loloi left Iran for the US when he was 16 years old. He bartended, waited tables, worked at Burger King, sold ice cream, worked at a rug company, and eventually started his own brand, Loloi. In 2023, that brand sold ~2.3 million rugs. That’s… a lot of rugs.

↣ If you happen to be in Tokyo tomorrow between 4-8pm, go say goodbye to Almost Perfect, a 100 year-old rice shop that, for the last 6 years, was run as a very special creative residence by owners Luis Mendo and Yuka Okada Martín Mendo.

↣ In 2019, Marc and Avery Claire Wrigglesworth quit their jobs in finance and moved to Georgia to save Avery's family’s cattle farm from foreclosure. Now they operate a pasture-raised beef company called Lily Hill Farm 🐮

↣ And just two months ago, Meghan Kim quit her corporate accounting job in SF to make Sudoku books and journals under the brand Mindful Sudoku. Visit her online shop and Substack.

↣ Kelvin Crosby – aka the DeafBlind Potter – is legally deaf and blind, yet has built an incredible pottery practice and businesses helping others navigate their disabilities, including See Me Cane, a lighted 'white cane' to make the user more visible at night. Watch this beautiful short film about him.

↣ Here’s a good story for you. Sean Yarborough is from Kentucky, spent more than a decade in the Mission district of San Francisco – including a period of homelessness and on food stamps – and is now serving the most hyped tacos in Auckland, New Zealand under the name Broke Boy Taco. It started as a pop-up and he’s now got a permanent location. His IG feed is a gift.

• In fusion-taco-related news back in the US: A year ago, Aree Thao was running an accounting firm in Milwaukee and had never made a taco in her life. Now she runs an Asian-inspired taqueria in El Paso, Texas.

↣ Bookshops on wheels = a winning concept 📚️. Check out Bissett Books in Nova Scotia run by Ariel Bissett, and Small Print Books in LA, run by filmmaker Colter Freeman.

↣ Looking for the perfect site for your next retail space, restaurant or boutique hotel? Why not snap up one of America’s apparently endless list of abandoned, beautiful train stations? It’s a thing!

↣ Or you can do what the founders of Bij de Tijd, a shop in the Netherlands, did: turn a former swim school into a midcentury vintage store. The shop floor is literally in the old pool!

↣ It's officially Lunar New Year 🐍. Check out these awesome Asian snacks, condiments and other delicious things on DELLI, an online marketplace for indie food/drink makers (from the team behind Depop).

↣ Makoto Arii is the founder of a new fragrance hair oil brand from Japan called Diffar. The products, made from 100% natural ingredients, are developed in a lab at the foot of Mount Fuji.

↣ I won’t post too many links to X/Twitter, but this thread on how Iowa-based Jared Doerfler launched his putter company Hanna Golf is ace ⛳️ . It involves buying an industrial CNC milling machine, keeping it in his garage, and learning how to use it on YouTube. (Jared also writes Perfect Putt, a newsletter on the business of golf.)

↣ Becky and Huw from Paynter Jacket put together a list of 50+ small businesses – clothing brands, experiences, publishers, shops – that they love. I love a lot of them too. It’s a wonderful list. Shop away.

↣ In Eagle Rock, LA, co-founders Karina and Kendall of Flowerhead Tea have opened an unbelievably colorful tea club, coworking, retail and event space called Flowers Finest.

↣ The owners of this cafe slash record store in Osaka have put an actual slide in the place. What’s not to like?

↣ Custom stamps for businesses (h/t Feed Me).

↣ A day in the life of Sophia Cheng, the founder of the fruit jelly snack brand Oddball.

↣ And the perfect name for a coffee shop run by a church? Sacred Grounds ⛪️

You received this email because you’re subscribed to For Starters, a weekly briefing for the next generation of small biz owners. Tell me all the crazy biz ideas you have in the shower 🚿 [email protected]

02. Tips for starters

Roll up your sleeves.

Mark Byrne created a vodka brand that turns wasted coffee fruit into alcohol. Now he's building Neutrality Co, an industrial scale operation in Costa Rica that doesn't sell bottles of vodka, but circular ethanol by the drum.

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Why Mark’s excited:

“Going into B2B ethanol was baked into the plan from the start, but we had to go down a long, windy road to get there. We launched Good Vodka, in part, to show what was possible with our raw material — coffee fruit. And, over the years, we tried various ways to distill the product in the US. But ultimately, the best way to do it was to build our own distillery, in a coffee region, right at the source. And I’m so glad we did, because it meant we didn’t have to compromise. This distillery is the dream: it’s fully circular, net zero, and it’s designed to make a tremendous amount of booze. It just took 10 years to make it real.”

And a hard won piece of advice:

“Make a list of everyone who has a stake in what you’re doing — not just shareholders, but members of the community, government officials, suppliers, your landlord, everyone — and dedicate real time to making sure they like you and want you to succeed.”

03. Ideas for starters

Biz ideas & market gaps.

↣ Analog dreams. Melbourne-based FS subscriber Jes Hoskin wrote in about ‘offline publisher’ Analog Sea (which I mentioned in Issue #1). This got us talking about a potential pendulum swing against AI businesses and other analog inspo. Jes: "I would love to know more about businesses that are starting and scaling in an analogue way (without using the word phygital, haha). Are we going to see a catalogue / mail-order resurgence?"

• Only 24 hours later, I grabbed a coffee with FS subscriber Jack Green, co-founder of Paper Run, which helps DTC brands reach customers through direct mail. Jack: “Brands want to communicate with their customers, tell them about sales, offers, loyalty, new products. But 1/2 of emails don’t ever get seen. Mail is back because nobody from Google decides what comes through your post box.”

• When the world embraces pixels, does smart money move to paper? Any other examples of businesses moving against digital grain? Let’s start a list. Send carrier pigeons and smoke signals my way.

↣ Mental models. I find mental models – clever ways of representing, in your mind, how something in the real world actually works – extremely useful for life and business. You might too. Here are 25 for 2025.

↣ Selling ‘wonky’. That’s British for slightly damaged or weirdly shaped, but good to go. “77% percent of UK adults YouGov surveyed last November said they’d be likely to purchase wonky produce next time they went shopping, with 72% driven by lower prices. 63% percent are motivated to reduce food waste.” Why not open a wonky marketplace for ___? (fill in yourself)

04. Tools for starters

Resources ↣

Here’s a list of copyrighted works from 1929 that entered the US public domain earlier this month. This means you can freely copy, share, and build upon the original works and characters of icons like Tintin and Popeye, without paying a dime. (Later versions and adaptations may still be copyrighted and trademarks might apply). Tread carefully, but have fun. Lawyers, feel free to weigh in.

Reddit can be a small biz owner’s best friend (after For Starters). Here are subreddits (i.e. forums) you might find useful: r/smallbusiness, r/Business_Ideas, r/Entrepreneur and r/EntrepreneurRideAlong. For instance, here’s someone designing a water bottle with a breakdown of costs.

Reads ↣

• Why Yemeni Coffee Shops Are Suddenly Everywhere in Texas (h/t WITI)

• How far would you go to make a friend?

• The charm bracelet shop that keeps going viral

• Gen Z and the rebirth of the London supper club

• One winemaker’s fight to preserve Armenian wine

• Brands after vibes

Just for fun ↣

• A bakery owner discovered a regular customer was her long-lost son.

• The weird ways that ancient traditions and religion meet modern tech.

• 100 year-old photos of London shops. Recognize any?

• The beautiful, detailed, industrial photography of Christopher Payne.

✱ Town hall

🏫 Shoutouts, wins & opportunities from FS subscribers. 

↣ Tristan Watson is the founder of Fieldtrip Supplies, an outdoor gear brand on the Northumberland coast of England. “It all started with a waxed canvas picnic bag that’s been in my family for over 30 years,” Tristan tells me. “It’s a really simple design, but it’s the bag we grab whenever we’re heading down the beach, and it’s easily got another 30 years of life in it.” The idea behind Fieldtrip was to make durable products like that bag. They launched last year with a stacking set of insulated steel cups.

• “This year we’ll go from a single product to a whole range, so we’ve got a lot to learn about how we manage that from a marketing and a logistical point of view. I’m really keen to learn from founders who’ve been through that process to understand what we need to watch out for.”

↣ “We got tired of seeing other ‘sustainable’ agencies and writers sell out when it comes to things like AI and fossil fuels, so we started our own thing,” says Marianne Eloise, who runs a values-first creative agency with her husband Karl Smith-Eloise called CHOLLA. They do copy, strategy, tone of voice and branding for clients in hospitality, food, lifestyle, fashion, and next-gen materials.

• “We would love to take on more clients and help them to scale while sticking to their earth-friendlier vision.”

↣ Gerard and Kat Papet are a father-daughter duo who run a small coding academy in London called DiscoG. They teach kids and teens about coding, robotics, electronics and AI, and their students have gone on to study at the likes of Oxford, Cambridge and King’s. “Last year we reached an exciting milestone when we hired our first full-time employee,” Kat says. “He studied computer science with us during his GCSEs and A Levels, went on to achieve a 1st Class masters degree in computer science at King’s College London, and is now back with us, helping the next generation of coders thrive.”

• This year, Kat and Gerard want to learn more about how AI can be used to personalise the learning experience.

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