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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…
INSPO ↣ $$$ gardening & America’s best general stores
TIPS ↣ String Ting’s founder on copycats & going viral
IDEAS ↣ Saunas and plumbers = million dollar businesses
TOOLS ↣ Finance for small businesses
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:
By using cleverly designed closed-loop systems to conserve and recycle resources and minimize their carbon footprint, the Larsons have effectively eliminated the majority of the waste that brewing creates, repurposing it back into the beer-making process. They call it “beer-powered-beer.”
↣ 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 💖