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- 30 ideas to spark something new
For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next generation of small business owners. Inspiration and ideas, every Friday – for free. It’s curated by Danny Giacopelli, formerly of Monocle and Courier magazines.
Hey, starter! Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Bagels, rugs, padel
Advice ➠ Plant the f*cking tree
Ideas ➠ Calculate your “leap capital”
Tools ➠ A new way to name your biz
Town Hall ➠ Subscriber shoutouts
➠ Get inspired
Team Pete’s | Credit
1. A time to grow. Back in 2019, husband-wife duo Steven and Sara Peterman, along with co-founder Erica Gonzalez, opened up a small general store in a historic neighborhood of St. Petersburg, Florida. “Our love for bagels began as a part of the equation, but quickly grew into the heart of our family-owned business,” they tell For Starters. 6.5 years later, they’ve grown their biz Pete’s Bagels and General Store to 3 locations, 65 employees, a sister shop, and a dedicated production and bakery facility. Oh, and they make 3,000 bagels every Saturday.
The starters are also now gearing up to raise $$ to expand the biz further, they tell us…
“Arriving at this point and looking toward the future of Pete’s, it was important to us to find a way forward that didn’t forfeit what we love most about our family-owned and operated business. With increasing competition in our area (several supported by private equity), we sought out an opportunity where we could potentially compete a little bit, while maintaining our independent ownership.”
They chose to fundraise on SMBX, a marketplace that connects individual investors with mom-and-pop shops, which retain 100% ownership. Congrats, team. For Starters subs know I love a good bagel, so I’m looking forward to a future London branch in the coming years… 🥯
2. Old craft, new audience. Here in the UK, there’s a father-daughter rug-dealing biz that’s been getting lots of buzz. Thames Carpets, run by Iran-born Bahram Javadi-Babreh and his 27 year-old daughter Sophie (who quit performing arts school in London to join her dad), are doing all the right things. And the media attention has followed. So refreshing to see a family business like this get the spotlight it deserves. 👏
→ Read this recent interview with Sophie in Vogue Arabia and check out this profile on them (with great photos!) in FT.
3. Padel! Tons of starters are building in this fast-growing racket sport 🏓
The sporting retreat: Couple Sam and Mary are on a mission to build England’s most beautiful racket club in the Wiltshire countryside. When it opens (they’re still building / digging / designing), they’re gunning for Racquet Garden to blend padel, antique furniture, gardens and wellness. They’re filming all the behind-the-scenes happenings on their IG.
The magazine: And the fine folks at Racquet mag just launched a new padel title this week. Looks great.
4. Best bar in the world. In Hong Kong, Bar Leone, co-founded by bartender Lorenzo Antinori, has just been crowned World’s Best Bar 2025. Lorenzo, a starter if there ever was one, got into the industry by chance: he took a part-time job in a bar while studying law in his hometown of Rome, and founded Bar Leone in 2023. Big things can happen. 🍸️
5. Yet again: you can just do things. And did you know that the ‘father’ of the Xbox is not only a renaissance man who creates sourdough bread from 4,500-year-old Egyptian yeast, but is now also building a super-secret startup in LA called Pacific Light & Hologram that aims to cultivate lab-grown chocolate? (That sentence takes a while to digest.) The website for his biz is intentionally, hilariously evasive. Read more in the LA Times. 🔮
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➠ Starter wisdom
U a shrub or a majestic tree?
It’s tempting to create 100 products or features and pray that your customers will find just one of them interesting enough to whip out their credit card.
But… just maybe, the smarter move is to have enough conviction in what you’re building to go all-in on just one thing, and let it grow.
That’s what Dave Snyder says in a great piece in Design Observer that frames the act of design as sort of compound interest. His main message: “Plant the f*cking tree.”
Trees don’t pay off tomorrow. They pay off in a decade. They compound quietly, making everything around them better, shade, value, beauty, longevity. Most products? We treat them like shrubs. Plant twenty features, hope one sticks. Feature bloat dressed up as “innovation.” It’s impatient, and it’s stupid.
The smarter play is restraint. Plant the tree. Solve the one core problem. Put the craft in. Then let time and real user behavior do the work.
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➠ Good ideas
1. Maintenance → Stewart Brand, the genius behind Whole Earth Catalog, has got a new book on pre-order with Stripe Press called Maintenance: Of Everything, which “invites us to understand not only the profound impact maintenance has on our daily lives but also why taking responsibility for maintaining something—whether a motorcycle, a monument, or our very planet—can be a radical act.”
A few things…
Stripe Press (yes a publishing house run by a payment processor) has been doing some extremely interesting projects.
Check out this film they made about Stewart, We Are As Gods.
And look at this gorgeous book cover! 🤌
2. Leap capital → “A specific quantity of money or other resources and an accompanying story that someone uses to convince themselves that it is reasonable to make a change in their work life.” For instance…
“For some, $50k is not nearly enough. One guy told me straight-faced that once he had $10 million, he could finally take a break to write the book he wanted to write. Another tech guy told me he would only quit once he fully replaced his $300k tech salary via a side gig. Others need less, like Angie Wang 安吉, who quit her job and traveled for a few months with only $7,000 to her name.”
3. Job hugging → Then again, not everyone is ready to quit their job!
4. Cupsan → A biomaterial made from London’s discarded coffee cups.
5. Nostalgic tavern → Minimalist millennial interior design in restaurants is getting swapped for dark wood and grandma’s tchotchkes.
6. Rent a shelf → Rent a shelf in a shop from £50 a week. The shop takes a 10% cut of sales, but handles everything else.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Untitled is a new software tool that helps biz owners find a name that resonates.
📚️ Reads
Screw finding your passion. Mark Manson
Obvious Shirts and the business of fandom. The New Consumer
He was a TV writer. Now he ‘tattoos’ mugs and teaches others how to make their own. LAT
The Plantman Gives Life to New York’s Underground. Byline
Is your Instagram engagement stuck? Link In Bio
🧠 Findings
90% → The proportion of professional chefs in Japan who buy their knives in one spot: the city of Sakai: “TikTok users are spreading the word, and demand is skyrocketing, as international tourists want in on the action.”
70-79 → According to the WSJ (and the US Census Bureau), a growing area of entrepreneurial activity is emerging via starters in the 70-79 year old age range:
“With their children grown, they may feel free to address what has long bothered them, like clutter and costly in-home care. Or, in the case of the founders of Judson Squared, dull trial lawyers. ‘They’re boring as hell,’ says Judson Vaughn, 71, an actor and filmmaker. He partnered with attorney Judson Graves, 77, known for his persuasive court performance, to create online courses to teach lawyers how to be entertaining as well as effective.”
🙃 Fun
European city maps made by locals, for young travellers.
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➠ Town Hall
Here in London, For Starters subscriber Viya Nsumbu has launched a boutique strategic comms agency called POLELE.
A reputation expert who’s worked at Sky, Edelman, the British Library, and with brands/orgs like IKEA and the Ford Foundation, Viya wants POLELE to “give mission-driven leaders a voice in the age of AI.” Sounds cool to me.
Viya explains more…
“Too often, mission-driven organisations are drowned out by those with bigger budgets or louder platforms. Generative AI is now another gatekeeper. Leaders across industries can already see that this shift demands more sophisticated communications strategies. If large language models are trained on sources that overlook authentic purpose-led voices, then those shaping real solutions today risk being absent from tomorrow’s conversations.”
POLELE will help close the gap with services like media engagement, narrative development, executive positioning and influence-mapping. Congrats! 🎉
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