Serving up weekly intel for small biz owners since 2025

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Welcome to Issue #3 👋 

Starters are taking over the world. The data backs this up: more businesses are being formed than ever before (457,544 in December in the US alone – wild!). But you can also just sniff it in the air: businesses are being plotted, brainstormed and hatched everywhere you look. And some other evidence: nearly 1,000 of you have joined For Starters in only a few weeks, which has blown me away.

Let me know what you’re dreaming up: a side hustle, a shop, a retail empire or, even better, something so weird and out there and new that the word for it hasn’t even been invented yet.

I’d love to hear from you and I always respond: [email protected]

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This week…

1. INSPO ↣ $$$ gardening & America’s best general stores

2. TIPS ↣ String Ting’s founder on copycats & going viral

3. IDEAS ↣ Saunas and plumbers = million dollar businesses

4. TOOLS ↣ Finance for small businesses

5. TOWN HALL ↣ Opportunities & wins from FS subscribers

01. Inspo for starters

People building amazing businesses.

↣ Self-taught gardener Kevin Espiritu has spent more than a decade making educational gardening content online. Today, his company Epic Gardening now brings in $50m+ yearly 🪴🤯

↣ In 1986, 28-year-olds Marcy and Geoff Larson – an accountant and chemical engineer – moved to Alaska and opened the first brewery in Juneau since Prohibition. Their beer brand Alaskan Brewing is now one of the most environmentally friendly on the planet. 🍺 Here’s why:

↣ This guy who owns a watch factory says you shouldn’t start a watch company ⏱️ And yet! There are opportunities everywhere, if you look hard enough. One of them: a luxury watch servicing company. I inexplicably have two watches waiting to be serviced through a watch company’s official repair service. It’s sort of a pain in the ass, expensive, and takes forever. WatchCheck, founded by Linden Lazarus and Will Haering, is trying to remove the friction.

↣ Over in Australia, Marina Sano and Jing Xuan Teo run Amplify Bookstore, the country’s only ‘online-ish’ bookstore specialising entirely in books written by Black, Indigenous and people of colour authors. They started selling online, and have recently opened a brick and mortar in Melbourne 📚

↣ Check out outofuseberlin, founded by couple Sissi Pohle and Pat Scherzeris. They run a vintage and antique shop that sells online and at pop-ups. Love this fun interview with them in Friends of Friends.

↣ The FT’s editors made a big list of the world’s greatest record stores. Whaddya think? 🎶

↣ Meanwhile, Wildsam has found the 27 greatest general stores in America. Quite literally makes my heart go boom 💖

You received this email because you’re subscribed to For Starters, a weekly briefing for the next generation of small biz owners. Tell me the business idea that keeps you up at night (but in a good way). [email protected]

02. Tips for starters

Roll up your sleeves.

Rachel Steed-Middleton is founder of String Ting, a cult-favourite brand known for its handmade beaded phone straps, seen on the wrists of… well, everyone. Since starting the company in 2020, the Canada-born, London-based starter has turned a £70 investment in beads into just over £5m ($6.2m) in revenue. String Ting, which now has a team of thirteen, is entirely bootstrapped – and profitable. We love to see it.

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On starting

I wasn’t trying to start a business when I started String Ting. It was born from looking back at a lifetime of being fidgety and creative. In grade five, my best friend Amy and I started a business selling ‘devil sticks’. We didn't have the internet, so we were literally just coming up with guesses of how to make these things. We sold them at school. One mom was like, Well aren't you just a little entrepreneur? I thought it was an insult. I had no idea.

My sister used to take me to the bead store when I was a kid. I also used to raise money all the time, because that’s a value of ours – lemonade stands and all of that. Years later, I would do bead activities with the kids, and when Covid hit I had a bag of beads leftover. I wanted to show the kids that, even though we were okay, a lot of people weren’t. So I made bracelets, which is the bead store equivalent of a lemonade stand, to raise money.

On trusting the journey

I’m a career marketer. I have experience in production, I understand and enjoy trends and culture, style and the importance of positioning. Looking back on it, everything I did in my career enabled me to do String Ting. Your career takes so many paths and you accumulate all these skills. You’ll end up in places and be like, What am I doing here? Why am I doing this? Later it crystallizes that you had to be there, and you had to be doing that exact thing at that exact time.

When I started, I gifted them to celebrities. I was working a high-earning job, yet I’d go to the post office with five packages. I thought there was no way I could build a business that could pay me what I needed to support myself and my daughter. But I just kept doing what I enjoyed doing. One foot in front of the other. I'd make five things, I’d sell five things. I’d make five more things, I’d sell five more things. If you lean into things you naturally love and trust the process, then once you arrive at your thing, you’ll realise your journey gave you the skills you need. Trust the process, trust the journey.

On going viral

I didn't sit there and think people would be bored, at home, taking selfies, and would want to decorate their phones. None of that was part of the strategy. It was a combination of having a product truth that intersected with a cultural truth and a moment in time. As a brand strategist, that’s the trifecta. I wasn’t trying to do that, but when I reverse engineered the journey, yeah, that’s how it became overwhelmingly viral.

This was at a time when we couldn't leave the house. I never physically saw any of the beads I was buying. I never physically met any of my suppliers. But we were connecting with people at a time of such significant disconnection. People really responded to that. 

I made this thing that goes on a ubiquitous, modern-day extension of your body and nervous system: the phone. It reminded you of your childhood and maybe a happier time in the world and in your life. I made a thing that in contemporary culture is photographed more than anything else. And I made a thing that nobody had really seen before. This piqued intrigue – we were really well-positioned to take off. Again, I didn’t brainstorm that – it just happened.

On legal stuff

I wasn’t prepared for the level of counterfeiting and copycatting that was going to hit our business. It’s a low barrier to entry business. The only competitive edge is what’s in my head. Everything else can be replicated. I’m now trademarked in Japan, China, Korea, the US and UK. But while you can trademark a brand, you can’t really trademark design. So it’s very important that you build a brand around your product, and that the brand comes from you and your vision and creativity. 

Honestly, I’ve seen full-on factories that produce counterfeit String Ting at scale! The first time it happened, I was really distracted and upset. I was totally naive to the fact that people would just blindly take my shit and claim it as their own. But people like that exist and make loads of money. They’re in it for a fast buck.

So my advice: Use lawyers. Don’t sign contracts you haven’t read or had reviewed by a lawyer. Don’t enter into any partnership agreement with anybody who belittles your desire to have a lawyer. Trademark your brand. Trademark globally. Expect copycats. 

And don’t waste your energy on what other people are doing – only focus on moving forward. Looking around you, looking back, comparing yourself to others, or having a feeling of injustice is a major distraction, an energy suck and a bad vibe. That’s the biggest mistake people can make. I wish someone had said to me earlier: this will definitely happen, don’t worry about it, just move on.

On power naps

I wake up at all hours thinking about the business. I haven't slept in five years! I regularly sleep for a half hour on the sofa in the office. It’s very embarrassing. But that’s the thing: you’ve gotta give yourself permission to be a bit off-key with how you’re going to run shit because, in the end, it’s gotta work for you.

03. Ideas for starters

Biz ideas & market gaps.

↣ Electronics don’t need to end up in the rubbish: I recently met up with FS subscriber Asad Hamir, a serial starter who’s now co-founder of Klyk, an incredible company that’s trying to make circular the new standard for business IT. Klyk opened London’s first-ever purpose-built IT recycling centre last month, where they refurbish IT products for clients like B Lab UK and Bloom & Wild, and also recycle tech to recover raw materials and turn them into new products. Any scaleups out there wanting their IT to be sustainable (and more affordable)? Hit up Asad! He’s a great guy.

↣ Sauna has reached escape velocity…

↣ More entries for our growing analog inspo list…

• David Michon, a friend and fellow author of a For S____ newsletter (the excellent design-focused For Scale), is offering a monthly, printed, in-the-mail essay to subscribers of one of his paid tiers. Print > pixels?!

• Meanwhile, editor, publisher, artist and FS subscriber Kolton Procter has just launched a monthly zine called Falowair, filled with personal essays, photography, drawings, poems and interviews. Read more and grab a copy.

• The generation that grew up online still prefers to shop offline.

• And KICKBACK is a retro electronics company founded by brother-sister duo London and Abella Glorfield. Their story is here and website here.

↣ Closet organizers for the filthy rich. It’s a (very good) living!

↣ Plumbers and HVAC entrepreneurs are becoming multimillionaires while tech founders grind for unicorn odds of 0.00000001%. (I’m just the messenger, the WSJ said it 🤷)

04. Tools for starters

Resources ↣

• Just discovered Bags, a finance platform that facilitates low-interest loans for small biz, via an interesting Forbes profile.

• BLOQS is a membership-based factory in London. Basically a huge warehouse kitted out with machines and equipment for makers to do what they do best.

• 100 tiny changes to transform your life.

• Wallpaper has put together a list of the best design podcasts.

• Illustrator Mr Bingo walks through his spruced up e-shop.

• And a video worth its weight in gold: “What I learned from my failed coffee shop” ☕️

Reads ↣

• Pentagram has got a hilariously thick new book out featuring 1,000 brand marks (i.e. logos) they've designed between 1972 and now. A fun read for morning inspiration over a strong coffee. Grab a copy here.

• 6 lessons for startups from a museum dedicated to failure.

• What happens when you sell your company, then it goes through a huge crisis? Some lessons from Gwen Whiting and her company The Laundress.

• A new book about entrepreneurship in America, Make Your Own Job, is ruffling feathers. Haven’t read it yet, but it’s on the list.

• And here’s a fantastic piece by journalist Peter Yeung about the solar repair movement across Africa. Solar capacity there has increased nearly tenfold since 2014, but most solar kit (~75%) has begun to break down. There’s a movement in places like Zambia and Malawi to train people to fix these devices.

Just for fun ↣

• Thought The Brutalist was long? Park Lanes is an 8-hour film (!) that mirrors the length of a working day at a factory producing bowling lane equipment. Watch the day unfold in real time – machines hum, humans build. If you're in London next weekend, they're showing the whole thing at the Barbican. I’d go, but I’m also sorta planning to eat a few meals and see sunlight that day.

• And check out Geoff Mcfetridge: Drawing a Life, an inspirational doc about an artist who's worked with a bajillion brands, from Warby Parker to Nike.

✱ Town hall

🏫 Shoutouts, wins & opportunities from For Starters subscribers. 

↣ Massachusetts-based FS subscriber Kristina DeMichele started her herbal tea company Kristini's Teas in November 2020 and has been doing online sales and in-person markets ever since (on top of her job at MIT): “My full time gig at MIT is with their Sloan School of Management. I'm an assistant director of digital marketing, so I create content for all the main @mitsloan social channels, and I oversee email newsletter strategy. Such an interesting experience marketing about entrepreneurship and technology for my career, and then trying to do all those things for myself!”

• Kristina: “Now I'm trying to figure out how I want to expand (wholesale license? brick and mortar? expanded product line?) and how I want to grow my audience.”

↣ In Stockholm, Auste Skrupskyte Cullbrand is looking for brand partners, sponsors and advertisers for the next issue of her genuinely fantastic print magazine, Playground. Get in touch.

↣ Congrats to creative director and FS subscriber Kimberly Lloyd who, along with former Pentagram partner Sascha Lobe, is launching a new design and creative consultancy called Lobe Lloyd International Ltd. The two will take on projects ranging from branding and visual identity to wayfinding and custom publishing. Kimberly’s interested in connecting with like-minded people around the world – get in touch!

↣ And creative director Adam Duckett writes in with this list of ideas and opportunities for new businesses to compliment his brand design studio Covers…

• A product for place brands to better utilise their photography and video assets — this one is the most developed as a concept, a name is locked in

• A print shop that just does business cards

• A pop up coffee set up for events in and around Edinburgh

• A sandwich shop — a name is locked in

• But I’m equally very open to getting involved in someone else's business on the brand side – know anyone looking for a co-founder?!

Wanna work with Adam? Get in touch.

📩 Share your news & updates: [email protected]

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