- For Starters
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- Be cheerful, start a business
For Starters is a weekly newsletter for the next-gen of small business owners. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, former editor of Courier mag and host of Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast.
Hey starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Painting pooches
Advice ➠ The meaning of life
Ideas ➠ Wedding crashers = $$$
Tools ➠ Your optimal caffeine intake
Community ➠ This is who you are…
P.S. LOTS of new subscribers this week. Thanks for being here. I can’t wait to see what you start. (And email me to share what you’re working on!)
➠ Get inspired
Bootsie: “Hope no one notices me…”
1. The dog painter. Hong Kong-born, UK-based Jeff Yeung makes a living as an incredibly talented dog portrait artist. I ran into Jeff last weekend at Nagare, the Japanese cafe in east London, where he ran a 2-day pop-up for his brand Dogs By Jeff – and there was a queue of people waiting to get their dogs immortalised by his brush (20 minutes, £50).
I asked Jeff how he got started…
🐶: Hello! How’d you get into the dog portrait biz?
“It wasn’t my plan A! However, I got frequently asked by dog lovers to paint their pups when I was selling dog-themed cards and prints in artisan markets. So I decided to answer the call and paint it on the spot for people.”
🐶: When did you realise, ‘Wow, this can be an actual business’?
“I painted nearly 300 dogs over Christmas 2024! That’s a huge wake-up call.”
🐶: What’s your most memorable dog client?
“PIGU, a beautiful 12 year-old Samoyed with kidney failure. His owner said he had to commission me before it’s too late. I painted PIGU and posted it to the USA. PIGU passed away exactly a month after his portrait arrived in his human’s hand. It’s like he knew its time and he needed the portrait to comfort his human, too.”
🐶: Do you see yourself painting dogs forever, or is this just one chapter in a bigger creative journey?
“I was a graphic designer / zine-maker / collage artist… now I’m a “dog artist”. It’s surely one of the biggest chapters and I just don’t want to turn the page yet. After all… who doesn’t like to work with / for dogs, right?”
🐶: If you weren’t painting, what would you be doing for a living?
“I would probably be working a 4-hour yard marshal shift in an Amazon depot just a 3-minute drive from where I live.”
2. Kyoto’s new creative hub. Photographer Dominick Sheldon and set designer Whitney Hellesen fell in love with Kyoto on their honeymoon back in 2017. Now they’ve returned on a mission: to restore a traditional machiya townhouse in the city’s Nakagyō Ward and turn it into an artist residency, library and gallery focused on photography. They’re calling it 834 MIBU. → Where do I sign up? 📸 🏯
3. Bánh mì dreams. I’ve been following the amazing journey of Tai Nguyen, who’s growing a bánh mì business in Finland called Bamilami. Tai started with an old van from Facebook Marketplace, has now got 4 locations, and his sandwiches were voted the best lunch in Helsinki last year. He shares tons of lessons, genuinely hilarious stories, and amazing vibes on TikTok and Instagram → Def worth a follow 🥖
4. Tasty books. In 2021, sisters Gabrielle and Danielle Davenport — one an actor and writer, the other a creative producer and curator — launched BEM, an online shop that sold food books focused on the African diaspora. Now they’re gearing up to open their own physical shop — a cafe/bookstore in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood. → Love a good online to IRL story. 📚️
5. Shop talk. In 2021, Ecuador-born Valentina Pozo opened up Tumbao – a shop filled with Latin American design, clothes and accessories – on NYC’s Lower East Side. Valentina says it’s the largest curation of Latin American fashion in the world. Now she's launched a podcast, “dedicated to the people shaping Latin American fashion and identity from the inside out.” → Listen here. 🎙️
6. Sydney’s sign guy. Check out this profile of Ian Tran, who runs the Australian sign-making & fabrication studio Domus Vin. → Look at all these shopppp signsssssss. 🪧
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➠ Starter wisdom
A whole vibe.
This 2,400 year-old mosaic, uncovered in southern Turkey in 2012, features a relaxed skeleton, chilling with a pitcher of wine, a few loaves of bread, and wearing a really cool cap.
It also has the words*…
“Be cheerful, live your life”
Surely this was a lesson for future generations of starters on the importance of perspective and rest while grinding nights and weekends turning side hustles into profitable businesses. Right?
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➠ Good ideas
Draw it.
1. Hand-drawn → Why are we drawing on everything? (I ❤️ this trend btw)
2. ‘Buycotting’ → When you actively choose to shop with a brand because you vibe with their ideas & views. The opposite of boycotting. Here are some good social enterprise brands to buycott in London.
3. Hotel merch → The cool souvenir you bring home is increasingly coming from the hotel you stay at.
4. Stranger of honour → There's a French company that lets wedding couples sell limited invites to complete randos, in order to offset the cost of everything. Genius, weird, wild.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Some good stuff on this list of 20 AI tools for creatives (‘that won't replace your job’)
📚️ Reads
A Century in Sound: A Love Letter to Japanese Listening Cafes. Tokyo Weekender
In Defense of Thinking Small. Byline
Laid Off: And Designing a Toddler-Friendly Cafe in DUMBO. Laid Off
Maine is struggling to find the next generation of lobstermen. This Northeastern student has the answer. NGN
Side projects as the key to the good life. Palm Report
Conkers' Vision of England. Highsnobiety (by FS subscriber Jack Stanley)
31-year-old raised $40,000 on GoFundMe to open one of few Black-owned camera stores in NYC—it brought in over $1 million last year. CNBC (Courier profiled Dom 3 years ago!)
The Pain of Perfectionism. New Yorker
Fascism For First Time Founders. Tech Dirt
To tip or not to tip? The Londoner
SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO. NY Magazine
How an Iconic Austin Brand Is Reinventing the Record Store. Texas Monthly
Slow Your Roll: This Aussie Digicam Thinks It’s a Film Camera. Broadsheet
🧠 Findings
20 minutes → That’s how much “N2 sleep” (a deep phase of non-rapid eye movement sleep… basically a solid power nap) you need to have better ‘eureka moments’, according to a new study.
☕🫠 → There’s a formula to tell you how much coffee is perfect for daily performance. (I’ll generally take this number and multiply it by 4.)
🙃 Fun
First there was inKONBINI, the game in which you ran a small-town konbini in Japan. Now there’s Vacation Cafe Simulator — a game in which you run a restaurant in Italy.
The founder of NYC cake shop From Lucie has got a beautiful new cookbook
The best cities for launching a biz in the US. And the most boring cities, full stop. (I’m just the messenger…)
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➠ Our community
I’m deeply interested in knowing more about YOU: Who you are, what you want to learn every week, and what you’re dreaming of building.
That’s why I’ve got a subscriber survey.
Maybe you’ve already filled it out? (~377 of you have so far, thank you!)
I plan to use this info to:
make more useful content every week
make For Starters a much better product overall
I also want to share insights every now and then.
Here’s a fun one: the vast majority of you haven’t yet started a company, but are planning to soon (you’re in that big fat pink slice below…)
That’s pretty cool.
Wanna see more insights & stats in the coming weeks? Lemme know!