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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! We’re back after a 2-week break. Read on for…
Inspiration ➠ Bangkok dreams
Advice ➠ 10 years of Spiritland
Ideas ➠ 26 concepts for 2026
Resources ➠ Mental health check
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
—Danny (tell me your business dreams)
➠ Get inspired
Luang Prabang, 5.30am | Credit: me
1. Southeast Asian starters. Hello friends. These last few weeks I’ve been rambling around Laos and Thailand. It’s been glorious. I’ve come back to London with some small businesses you should know… 🪷
Ock Pop Tok. In Luang Prabang I visited this social enterprise that works with dozens of local women to produce handmade textiles. Founders Jo and Veo also run the unbelievably beautiful Living Crafts Center, which has a restaurant, runs workshops, and overlooks the Mekong.
Laos Buffalo Dairy. An Australian couple came to Laos to set up a guest house… and ended up establishing the country’s first buffalo dairy farm. These things happen.
Charmkrung. If you’re visiting Bangkok, grab a reservation at this restaurant. You take a lift to the top floor of a nondescript office building and end up having the meal of your week.
Local Boys Coffee Co. And these guys on Song Wat whip up your order – including peanut butter coffee and Thai tea lattes – and serve it in a can.
2. Home sweet home. In Osaka, Japan, a father-daughter duo run a tiny Pakistani and Middle Eastern handwoven rug and lifestyle store called BEIT (from the Arabic ‘home’). Just look at these vibes.
3. Font foundry. And Noah Johnson and Tina Vines, who run California-based chain stitch embroidery brand Stitch-Rite, are big collectors of old lettering books, which they use for reference for design projects. Now they’ve digitized and catalogued their fav alphabets, and drawn some new ones too, which they’re offering in font form for starters – i.e. sign writers, chain stitchers, grocery store artists, leatherworkers, tattooists and graphic designers. Their new outfit is called Practical Lettering.
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➠ Starter wisdom
Listening bars are everywhere these days. A uniquely Japanese creation, they’re cozy spots to meet a friend, grab a stiff drink, and, well, listen – to curated records on high-end speakers into the wee hours of the night.
In London, one of the earliest and most influential spots is Spiritland in King’s Cross, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary. The starter behind the scenes? Paul Noble.
Paul and I have known each other for 15 years. I spent my formative years at Monocle, hosting podcasts and learning the ropes of audio storytelling. Paul was the adult in the room. A production wizard, Paul was brought in to teach us how not to be amateurs.
After that, he opened his magical venue – a restaurant, cafe, and listening bar, where high-quality music was the anchor and the vibes were immaculate. And in the subsequent decade, Paul and his biz partner Sophie Uddin navigated the wild waves of Brexit and Covid, launched a production company, opened a headphone shop in Mayfair and a second Spiritland outpost at Royal Festival Hall, ran experiments in Lisbon, built a gigantic production truck for outside broadcasts, and frankly, done some extremely cool and impressive shit.
→ With a drink in hand and the Beach Boys on the stereo, Paul and I talked about what comes next. Listen up…
Spiritland
Hey Paul, when you swung open the doors to Spiritland a decade ago, did you have a 10, 20 year vision? Or were you taking it year by year?
I had ambitions for it, but I couldn’t predict what those 10 years would bring. We started it as a popup in 2014 at Merchant’s Tavern in Shoreditch, and we opened here in King’s Cross in 2016. So we’re 10 years in this building.
Ten years is a milestone. You guys have done so much here.
Album listening events, supper clubs, talks, parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs. It’s been a complete rollercoaster. Totally crazy. But we’ve always stayed true to the vision. In all honesty, I came into it quite naive. My background was in radio, music production and consultancy, DJing and audio equipment. The mechanics of hospitality, investors, leases, shareholders – I was a total noob to all of that.
So walk us back a decade. Why’d you start a listening bar? What was your eureka moment?
It came about from me going to Japan with Monocle and visiting these places and being absolutely blown away. I’d been dreaming of a listening experience that treats music and the artists with respect and love. I was like, why does this not exist in London? Everyone I know would go! It just wasn’t a concept yet.
Was there a spot where you thought – whoa, this is it?
Yeah, it was one night at a place called Bar Martha in Ebisu, which is a very... how do I put this… refined and disciplined listening bar. You get told the rules at the door: no, or very quiet, talking. It’s a beautiful room with a huge record collection. In Japan, the listening bars are arranged by genre. There’s a blues bar, an electronica bar, a tango bar, classical ones like Meikyukafé Lion, which is a hundred years old. Martha is more AOR, soft rock. They were playing James Taylor and Carly Simon, but then some Beastie Boys and Beatles. I was completely losing my mind over this. One night there changed the trajectory of my life.
It’s funny how you can look back and pinpoint these critical moments.
I went back a year ago and met the owner, Wataru Fukuyama. I tried to tell him via an interpreter that I love the place, I love what he’s doing, that coming here set me off on this big life journey. I don't know if the full message got through. I’ll always love that place. It’s musical heaven. And my first stop when I go to Japan.
Do these Japanese bars generally remain single locations?
Martha has a few other bars, all doing something similar. But usually it’s one person and their record collection and they’re there every night making drinks, while their wife or another family member makes snacks. Very small. Some have six seats, some 20. The mind blowing thing is their huge, extensive record collections. A place called DownBeat in Yokohama has every jazz album you could ever imagine.
Crispy
So back then, you were totally new to this whole ‘start a business’ thing?
I’d never started a business, no. I’d never worked in hospitality, I’d never had a bar job. But I came back from Japan enchanted by this idea. I needed to do this. And I knew it needed to be called Spiritland.
Such a solid name.
It’s evocative of what we’re doing: when the music and the service and the drinks and the lighting and everything comes together, you’re transported.
Spiritland’s now got multiple revenue streams. You serve food and drink, host events, but you’ve also got a whole production side.
Yeah, we’ve got a production company, which is a separate business and team. It’s B2B basically. So if you’re making a podcast and you need a studio, we’ve got you. We also create our own original content for the BBC and others. We’ve got a large outside broadcast vehicle, which is very, very highly specked. We can go and record an orchestra at Royal Albert Hall or the O2. The level of execution is world-class. And then of course we’ve got the hospitality element – this place is a cafe during the day and a bar at night, with our programming and an incredible sound system, which we had custom built.
There are so many listening bars in Europe and the US now. What do they get right or wrong? What makes one good or bad?
The listening part of a listening bar is really difficult to do in London. In Japan, the society it exists in is so organized and disciplined that people can happily sit there in silence. In London, if you put people and alcohol and music in a room… it’s only gonna go in one direction! And that doesn’t lend itself to deep listening.
You can't have a ‘no talking’ sign like Martha?
I mean it just wouldn’t work. In Japan, it’s totally normal to go sit on your own, drink, smoke, and hang out till five in the morning. I’ve been to ones which are rigorous with completely no talking – that can be magical, but it can also be quite joyless. Spiritland is somewhere in between. We’ve had deep listening events. It’s a cruel irony that the more popular and successful you become, the less the listening part happens! But we’ve still got an amazing sound system, and a really deep programming that can go off in all these different directions and tap into all these different worlds. For me and Sophie, it’s a canvas to explore our musical interests.
So the owner needs to be a true connoisseur. No moonlighting private equity guys.
I mean, best of luck to anyone opening any kind of hospitality venture in 2026. And anyone who is in pursuit of good sound is a fellow traveler. But… yeah, you can spot some fakes. Usually the giveaway is the speaker positioning. I’ve been to places where one speaker’s in front of you and one’s wayyyy over there on the side and I’m like, okay, you’ve just bought some speakers, didn’t you? For us, the sound stage is really important, to sit here in the middle – you hear the trumpets, the timpani…
When you walk in this place, you can just tell these speakers are crisp.
This system brings it all to life.
Has it become harder to run a brick and mortar biz since you started Spiritland? Lots of places are really struggling.
The current climate in this country, with this government, is very difficult. Everyone’s feeling it. And sure, there are some very high end places in Mayfair who are killing it and chucking out money. Then there’s the chains who’ve got full-on backing. That’s not our territory. For indie operators like us, it’s a little bit more difficult.
Come home to music
Let’s talk Lisbon. You made some Spiritland moves there – why?
Lisbon is such an exciting, appealing city. We did a consultancy job there with a hotel. We worked on six bars concepts. Two were listening bars and the other four were different types of drinks bars – a martini bar, a wine bar, etc. That’s all done now. We’re still looking at doing our own thing there. It might be more temporary, it might be further out of town. Probably next year we’ll do some festivals and pop-up stuff. Lisbon is changing rapidly and we’re sort of rolling with it as it changes.
How about America? Interested in bringing Spiritland to the US?
Sure, we’ve always been interested in the US. For Spiritland to exist in a city, it needs to be a place of musical culture. So London is where we're from and where we’re totally embedded, with this amazing musical legacy. We’ve looked at and been offered stuff in New York and LA.
I imagine New York’s a bit saturated.
New York is incredibly competitive. And there’s some great places there. LA is just a bit too spread out. We need to be in a city which is a bit more condensed and also kind of hedonistic. LA is very healthy!
I dunno! I could see you killing it in LA, actually.
I know there’s another side to it. Maybe Highland Park? Silver Lake?
Maybe Eagle Rock or Los Feliz.
But for those reasons and others, Spiritland wouldn't work in a place like Dubai. But Austin, Nashville, Chicago, Atlanta – these are some cities I could see us in. We're also interested in Asia – maybe Bangkok or Seoul.
Who would you love to connect with in the For Starters community?
We’re doing more consultancy outside of Spiritland now, combining music, drink and design, so always happy to connect with like-minded people in that space. With Spiritland, we’ve built up this brand over 10 years. We’ve got an incredible reputation, credibility and authenticity in this space. We’ve got one site in London and I’d like to open five more in the next five years around the world. So we’re looking for the right partner to come on the journey with us. That’s the challenge at the moment.
The opportunity, you mean!
Exactly, the opportunity. It’s interesting because Spiritland is a music and culture brand. So someone might look at it and say, You should do a streaming service, a magazine, a nightclub, a whiskey, a series of speakers, or a book series. There are so many potential directions. Our challenge is to stay focused and pick the right one.
I find that interesting too. How do you pick the right path? Is it what makes you money in the short term? What preserves your brand in the long term? What makes you the least stressed?
Or what’s the best for your soul?
I don’t have the answers.
Some are just vanity plays too, and that’s not the way forward, right?
Slow, compounding growth? Big swings? I’m always interested in this topic, because all starters face these decisions. Even me – this could be a magazine, a consultancy, a podcast. How do you choose?
You just gotta stay up all night chewing it over!
Do you think knowing when to say yes and no is a key skill that you develop? If you say yes to everything, you can dilute your brand.
What I don’t want to do is spin out 20 Spiritlands up and down the country. That’s not us. But there’s opportunity everywhere. It’s just about picking the right lane to go down. We’ve had all sorts of approaches from people who want a Spiritland or want to partner with us – coworking spaces, hotels, etc. It’s very easy to become smitten. I can walk into a place and get completely googly-eyed and say, We've gotta make this happen! But you need to do the forensic work about the area, who goes there, what do they want, what are their patterns of behavior. We kiss a lot of frogs, we do lots of meetings, and we’ve turned down quite a lot of approaches. Every so often, the right thing falls into place.
I love it.
At the heart of it is the music and our relationship with the artists and labels. Our guests absolutely love what we do, the level we do it at, and how deeply we go into all these different worlds. Film directors are music nuts. Fashion is powered by music. Advertising, the tech world, it's everywhere. So how can we best collaborate authentically with all those people? That’s the million dollar question: what fun and interesting things can we do now?
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➠ Good ideas
26 useful concepts for 2026 💡 → Including the shower test.
No-shoes offices 🦶 → Would you expose your toes to Bob in accounting?
A flagsheep store 🐑 → The first retail outpost for Sheep, Inc.
Hemorrhoid cream 🤔 → Can it be cool? Let’s find out together, friends.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
A freshly published annual report on mental health in freelancing during 2025
📚️ Reads
97 ways the world got better in 2025. Reasons to be Cheerful
I opened a bookshop. It was the best, worst thing I’ve ever done. HTSI
Twins Brothers Are The Founders Behind Japan's First Majority-Black-Owned Animation Studio. AfroTech
The vanishing professions: a catalog of jobs that no longer make sense. Selavy
Big Fashion Copies Small Vintage Shops. Here's What Happened When One Shop Fought Back. Pre-Loved
🧠 Findings
36.3% → For the first time, solo founders now start more than one-third of all new startups.
🙃 Fun
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➠ Town Hall
And congrats to UK-based For Starters subscriber Emily Rogers, who just launched her business Unloved Ones, a curated collection of pre-loved jewellery. It’s a family operation: Emily tracks down ‘forgotten, broken, or unfairly overlooked gold and silver jewellery’, before her mom Faith, a jeweller, restores them to their former glory. 💍💍💍
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