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Weekly inspiration & advice for starting a small business
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Welcome to Issue #4 👋
Pick a huge, established industry and act like a kid who asks why to everything. “Why are things done this way and not that way?” Then keep asking until you discover 100 inefficiencies, old habits with no logic, and ancient methods (you use fax machines for what?). Guess what you’ve got: 100 business ideas.
This week we’re featuring a deep-dive convo with Sam Kelly, a starter who’s building a modern tattoo company in New York called Tiny Zaps. Sam and his cofounder Bruno are doing some legitimately cool new things in the industry – and I can’t wait for you to read it and let me know what you think.
Tell me your biz ideas, feedback and updates: [email protected]
This week…
INSPO ↣ Dinner parties in Greek marble quarries
TIPS ↣ Disrupting the tattoo industry – one zap at a time
IDEAS ↣ Vending machines & bubble tea
TOOLS ↣ How to make money on the internet
TOWN HALL ↣ Opportunities & wins from FS subscribers
Inspo for starters
↣ People building inspiring businesses
Ken Sakata, the man behind the menswear label slash excellent email newsletter Front Office, just opened a beautiful brick and mortar in Melbourne. In Broadsheet, Ken explains how the whole thing started as a joke:
The doctor-turned-fashion-designer’s creative journey started back in 2022. On April Fool’s Day, he created a fake online persona pretending to be a footballer for the fictitious Queensland Football Club. He began to make merchandise for the made-up club and sold out his first drop in a matter of hours. “Queensland Football Club was my little naughty internet account,” he says. For a couple of years, the business model worked well – until Sakata wanted something more from his sartorial project.
Monocle’s got Kansas City in their sights as a growing entrepreneurial hub. Worth relocating for the BBQ alone…
Check out this cute neighborhood bakery in Mallorca designed by Jasper Morrison. Lots of interesting private-public partnerships at play here:
The project for the bakery emerged as part of Gomila Mallorca – Spanish footwear brand Camper’s regeneration plan for the El Terreno neighbourhood, a once-vibrant nightlife area that had fallen into decline. Following the renovation of apartments with Dutch architects MVRDV, Camper turned its attention to local amenities, opening a café on Plaça Gomila designed by Michel Charlot and commissioning Morrison to design Can Pa. The bakery is run by Esment, a charitable foundation that provides employment and training for individuals with intellectual disabilities.
Meanwhile, there’s a cafe in Paris where you can write a note to your future self while you have a coffee – and they’ll mail it back to you one, five, or twenty (!) years later. A fun marketing hook. (What’s the ROI? Good karma?)
And a Japanese couple in Edinburgh have opened a tiny (like... tiny) and adorable cafe, Kissa Orwell, in an old police box. (Spotted by the eagle-eyed Beau)
In south London, Tanya Grigoroglou and Rupert Worrall have renovated a former shop and turned it into both their home and a gallery space for their company RAW Editions.
And twenty-something architect Charis Tremetousiotis has been throwing word-of-mouth-famous supper clubs and events under the brand tremeEats – including recently in a stunning marble quarry in Athens.
For Starters is a briefing for the next gen of small biz owners. Not a subscriber? Sign up for a free dose of inspo & advice, every Friday.
Tips for starters
↣ Roll up your sleeves
That note above about always asking why? Here’s a prime example. Sam Kelly was working in tech and Bruno Levy was a well-known tattoo artist. Together, they realized that, even though demand for tattoos was rising, the experience of getting a tattoo was pretty intimidating. So they started a company called Tiny Zaps to solve the problem. [Tip ↣ Having an insider’s knowledge PLUS an outsider’s perspective can do wonders.]
Here’s their secret sauce:
customers can browse 1000+ tiny, fun designs online
popups & partnerships with cool brands & artists
easy-to-book appointments at their NYC shop
overall very chill vibes
Read on to see why Sam thinks the industry needed a zap of energy…
Sam Kelly & Bruno Levy, founders of Tiny Zaps
What’s the idea? 💡
“Our big opportunity is to shatter consumers’ perception of everything about the experience of getting a tattoo. We have a digital-first approach leading up to the appointment itself. And on the physical front, we’re taking on the overly masculine, intimidating biker vibes of the incumbent walk-in shops, with something more approachable and whimsical. The shop is bright, warm and welcoming. You walk up to kiosks and browse our design library on a touchscreen that looks like an arcade game. We want customers to walk in and be like, What’s going on in here? One Google review said Tiny Zaps is like a candy shop for adults!
Today at tattoo parlors, you flip through books. It’s old-school. We thought we’d build an ecommerce store experience instead. We started with 800 designs my business partner Bruno drew – he’s an incredible tattoo artist in New York. Uploading 800 product SKUs online was time-consuming, but when we launched we realized this was actually an industry-first thing. We’re not building anything groundbreaking or AI-powered, but it’s still an immediate 10x improvement to the customer experience.”
185 Mulberry Street, New York, New York
Partnerships are key 📈
“We launched just over a year ago with popup events – low-cost, high-margin activations – before we pulled the trigger on our permanent location in New York. Besides our shop, we’ve got events and partnerships. We get hired by brands to do popup tattoos at private parties, brand launches and music festivals like Stagecoach. We’ve done stuff with Urban Outfitters. The running brand On hired us to go to their store during the New York Marathon, and we drew designs like a pigeon with running sneakers. We also tattooed marathon times!
We don’t anticipate Tiny Zaps having 200 doors across the country. We’d like to have a lighter retail footprint of amazing store experiences in certain markets, and then hundreds of small embedded studios at locations like music venues and hotels. We’ve actually got a hotel partnership kicking off in April in five markets, the goal being to create small, embedded studios there.
On the music front, our dream is for small tattoos to become the next iteration of the concert tee and tour merch. A musician can doodle a design, and you can only get it at their shows at a Tiny Zaps studio. For instance, the musician Jack Kays has been an awesome partner to us. Jack had an album release show in DC and Tiny Zaps had a popup booth at the venue. Jack drew tattoo designs specifically for the album, and he and his bandmates got little tattoos at the booth with all the fans around them. It was very intimate and cool. We also have featured artist collections online. A famous tattooer in Australia or a musician who likes to doodle can draw designs, we’ll add them to our collections, and they’ll get royalties whenever those designs are purchased.”
On ruffling feathers 🪶
“I have so much respect for the craft of tattoo artists. Our approach is not to dilute that. There will always be private studios with artists who have long waitlists, and people getting big, custom pieces. We don’t even see ourselves as being competitive with them. Bruno even owns his own tattoo studio, Bandit, in Brooklyn. These artists are incredible and they’re not going away.
There’s just some gatekeeping and resistance to change that comes with the craft. Tattoo artists don’t necessarily respond well to a startup guy being, like, Hey, I’ve got this innovative new concept. We saw this in our IG comments when we launched. One shop owner said, This is the worst thing that I’ve ever seen. Part of me thought, if we’re getting people this upset, we must be doing something right!
Other incumbents say, You guys are just doing Pinterest tattoos, which we don't think is true, because our design library is high-quality. They’re just smaller. The thing is, this is actually what a massive part of the market wants: small, high-quality, quick and easy tattoos. As a consumer of tattoos, I love both sides. I love getting a tattoo at Bandit, and then if I’ve got a smaller area, there’s Tiny Zaps. Our customers are also 75% female, so we’re leaning into that more. Some of our customers get brunch with their friends on Saturday afternoon, and then they’re like, Let’s get some tattoos together. We can serve both of these customers.”
For Starters tattoos soon? 👀
We’re not in Kansas anymore 🫠
“We have cash flow coming in, which is great. But building a store in downtown New York is really expensive and can be a bit scary. Coming from the software side as a product and design guy, you could build something with a few engineers and get it into people’s hands quickly. Moving into this world, labor is a big part, you need a physical space, furniture, supplies, everything needs to look nice. My apartment was Tiny Zaps storage for a long time. In the early days of this journey, I didn’t think I would miss software and engineers so much!
Tattoos from friends 🤝
When someone comes in for their first tattoo – and we do a lot of these – we make it fun. They get a little trophy, our Tiny Zaps Award of Bravery. We’ve also got a punch card where if you get five tattoos, the sixth is free. Whether it’s their first or 50th tattoo, we want our customers to think not just I love my tattoo but That experience was amazing. This is an insight from Bruno. When we think about our favorite tattoos, they’re not the piece we waited a year and a half for. Instead, they’re the ones where we think: I had such an awesome time with that artist, they gave me all of their attention, they really heard me, and we’re still friends to this day. People love the tattoos they get from their friends.”
The prize for your first ink
Are you bringing Tiny Zaps energy to another industry? Let us know: [email protected]
Ideas for starters
↣ Market gaps & biz ideas
Vending machines. Is it just me, or are cool, indie, creative, small biz-focused vending machines taking over the world? The excellent Good Things Vending has been around for years in Chicago, and Japan of course excels at the vending game, but I’ve been seeing more and more of this lately. Why not open a vending machine in your neighborhood and stock it with local products?
SME buying spree. In Singapore, MBAs are increasingly steering clear of starting new tech companies and are instead snapping up small businesses…
Small business owners
The bubble tea economy. The Economist reports on a new economic indicator: wherever you see bubble tea (i.e. boba) shops in UK towns, it means there’s probably a high level of international students.
Our robot overlords. Good to know: “The US Copyright Office says that AI art can be copyrighted only if there’s human input involved in the making.”
You don’t learn, then start. You start, then learn.
Tools for starters
🛠️ Resources
Check out newly relaunched Creative Lives in Progress – a platform to help creative talent access, understand and connect with the industry. It's UK-focused, but they’ve got US expansion in the works this year.
Related: Seasoned is a fun new hub for new creatives and students looking to get a foot in the door. It was designed by the brand-builders at Koto to resemble the vibe of cookbooks from the 70s and 80s.
How to actually get your products onto store shelves.
Peter Buchanan-Smith, the founder of Best Made (who I interviewed last year here), is building The Repair & Restoration Directory: “A growing directory of services and supplies for the repair and restoration of apparel, footwear, and gear: things that are often difficult to maintain.”
Here are dozens of stories of companies making (lots of) money on the internet. An incredibly useful resource and list.
321 real-world gen AI use cases, from Google. This isn’t small biz focused, but you can 100% take lessons from here and apply them to something as small as a side hustle. AI might kill us all one day (🤖😬) but in the near term it’s also the great equalizer, giving small biz the power of the big boys for (almost) free.
📚️ Reads
“Alanna Kieffer just wants you to love seaweed” ↣ Read / Portland Monthly
“A New Jersey veteran started mushroom farming. He went from taking lives to ‘just being around life.’” ↣ Read / CBS
“The Moped King: How an ex-delivery worker upended the streets of New York City, for better and for worse.” ↣ Read / Curbed
“To combat shoplifters, retailers are hiring them to steal” ↣ Read / Bloomberg
“Japanese winemakers have a long history in California wine. Now, they’re redefining its future.” ↣ Read / Food & Wine
🙃 For fun
The limited edition performative objects of Nik Bentel Studio. Happy shopping.
Meanwhile, according to Modern Retail, MSCHF, the stunty art collective that sells wacky stuff, is maybe kinda sorta creating a magazine… printed on soap bottles.
✱ Town hall
↣ Shoutouts, wins & opportunities from For Starters subscribers
↣ For those who enjoy the art of packing a neat suitcase, FS subscriber Aja has launched a new packing cube brand with personality called Cram (great name). It’s giving new BAGGU vibes. Check it out 🧳
↣ In the UK, Abby Munro is the owner of Paper + Word, which sells book sleeves and book-related items from small businesses across the world. And now she’s in the midst of opening the UK's first independent fantasy exclusive bookshop and has launched a Kickstarter campaign (only 2 weeks to go! You know what to do…) to bring it to life 🧙
“As well as the space itself being magical, the shop is literally shaped like an open book. I’m aiming to bring something truly unique to the book selling world.” – Abby
↣ Lena Tavitian writes in from Los Angeles to share the social impact venture she’s been working on with her cofounder Melvin Dilanchian: a career accelerator for Gen Z Armenians called Project Yeraz (”Project Dream”). The goal, Lena says, is to empower them with resources and guidance, but also to make them feel good about career discovery, a process that’s often overwhelming 💻
“After a pilot event in 2023, we raised funding and just launched a longer term mentorship program for our inaugural cohort. 40% are immigrants and 30% are first-generation college students.” – Lena
↣ And in Nairobi, Alexander Valeton tells us about his companies Yielder, which develops online trainings for farmers in East Africa, and Media HQ, a multimedia production company. Alexander says Yielder’s so far trained more than 280,000 farmers on sustainable farming practices 🧑🌾
“I’m always learning about the needs of farmers and how we can support them to grow, so now I want to learn about AI and its possibilities: how can it benefit food production in East Africa and re-risk farmers? I need more entrepreneurial skills to create more confidence in building partnerships and personally I want to learn to become more patient and more focused.” – Alexander
📩 Share your news & updates: [email protected]
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