- For Starters
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- You can reinvent yourself
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 ➠ Buy this record shop
Advice ➠ The art of career reinvention
Ideas ➠ Welcome to my living room
Resources ➠ The state of small biz
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
👋 For Starters is read by thousands of business-builders, including new subscribers Danielle from Edinburgh-based Studio Lutalica, and Tony, a San Francisco-based photographer and filmmaker. Welcome!
➠ Get inspired
Cucu | Credit
1. Offline, by design. In 2023, Rosanna Irwin was burnt out (for the fourth time) – so she quit her job, packed up her life in London, moved in with her parents in Ireland at 28, and dreamed up the idea for an off-grid cabin company called Samsú. Inspired by a digital detox on the Danish island of Samsø, Rosanna wanted to bottle that feeling of being disconnected in nature and make it available to more people. Two months ago she and the team unveiled Cucu, their third and latest cabin in the Irish countryside. Such a good story here and a masterclass at building a legit cool company. 🏕️
2. Buy this business. The oldest, most iconic record store in the Pacific Northwest is searching for a new owner. 70 year-old Terry Currier, proprietor of Music Millennium, is stepping down and looking for a starter to fill his legendary shoes. Is that person you? 🎶
I’m as excited about Music Millennium today as I was the day I stepped into the store. However, it’s time to find a successor to keep Music Millennium going for many years to come. Perhaps you have an interest in taking Music Millennium into the future or know of someone that may be interested. Rest assured, I’m good with working with the future owner during a transitional period, educating them on just how we make Music Millennium tick. If you have an interest or know someone that does, you can email me at [email protected]
3. And this one, too! Red Hook Stationery Store, an adorable little shop in the adorable little upstate New York town of Red Hook (pop. 1,956), is up for sale.
Cofounder Marie:
“While the shop is doing quite well, it requires more time and energy than I’m able to give… the store is at a pivotal point now where it has clear growth potential, I just don’t have the bandwidth to be the one to take it there.”
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➠ Starter wisdom
“I used to make bikes. Now I work with mold-sniffing dogs.”
Adam McDermott has spent the last 18 years building Venice, California-based Linus into a quietly iconic bike brand. But after years running a complex business – supply chains, inventory, staff, brick-and-mortar shop, tariffs, you name it – Adam recently found himself at a familiar starter crossroads: what happens when the thing you’ve done your entire adult life no longer works the way it used to?
His answer is reinvention, in the shape of… mold-sniffing dogs. Adam’s new venture, The Mold Scout, pairs him with a highly trained Springer Spaniel to help homeowners detect hidden mold without tearing their houses apart. It’s a biz born from personal crisis, deep curiosity, and a willingness to start again at 50.
→ Below, Adam talks about his pivot, the challenges and opportunities that come with it, and the freedom of being responsible for nothing but yourself and a (frankly very cute) dog named Kirby.
Adam & Kirby
Adam, you’re best known for the bike brand Linus. How's that business going?
With Linus, it’s all about constantly adapting to a changing world. We’ve been around for so long, we have good brand recognition, and organic traffic. We’re not paying for customers. But there are challenges in the bike industry.
What sorts of challenges?
I don’t know if people are distracted, or it’s due to evolving tech like Waymo, but the culture is changing around how people think about transportation. And at Linus we’re definitely on the transportation end of the bike spectrum. All bikes are somewhat recreational, but Linus has always been about replacing car trips under three miles.
Yet in LA, you still largely exist in your own little epicenter and if you want to explore other parts of town, you drive. Most of your functional day-to-day life exists within your area, which could theoretically be navigated by bike, because it’s flat and the weather’s perfect, but there’s local resistance to fully embracing the idea. The city would need to create an environment that enables that.
Have you been impacted by supply chain issues too?
Tariffs have been very difficult. As soon as you think your supply chain is worked out, you’ve gotta shift again. How much should you invest in a new factory when it could change next week – or in the next election cycle? Either way, you're investing in something that may not be permanent and may cost you more in the long run. But Linus is still going. It’s just going to evolve. We’ll adapt and figure out the next step.
Okay, so tell me how you came up with your new business idea.
I’ve had my own business for 18 years, which makes me kind of weirdly unemployable. Here I am at 50 with a family and a mortgage and it’s like… I’ve gotta think of something new to do, because what I did for the last 20 years is no longer working in a way that can sustain us. So what else can I do?
Mold-sniffing dogs!
Yup. So around eight years ago we built an ADU for my mother. It had a ton of problems, partly because of new construction, and partly because in California they don’t really know how to deal with rain and moisture. She developed a lot of mold problems in that space which took us a long time to figure out. She also got really sick from it. One doctor said, “You can’t start healing and go through the process of flushing your system until your environment is totally clean.”
This put me on a path of learning more about how to resolve mold problems. One big problem is that most mold isn’t visible. It’s inside wall cavities, under flooring, and behind cabinetry. It's really hard to locate it without destroying your property. And that led me to dog detection.
How does that process work?
It’s the same principle as narcotics or explosives. The dog can smell mold odor through wall cavities and behind cabinetry. Think of it like an MRI as opposed to a biopsy. I just started learning more about it, then did scent training with my own dog, before eventually developing a truly professional working dog that came from a breeder.
It’s an ongoing process of refining his detection work, teaching him how to map environments, understanding how he sees the world in scent, using his natural drives for hunting, food or play and connecting that to searching for an odor.
Were you deepening your knowledge because you were curious – or you wanted to start a business?
There were so many people I knew who had mold problems. I went through it myself, and the resolution was so impractical. There are inconclusive air tests that tell you nothing about what’s happening inside the walls. There are damaging material tests where they’re taking chunks of building material and testing it. Or they’re opening up wall cavities – basically destroying your home. There’s no way to scan a house. There’s no tech for that! You have to return to nature to find it.
So I knew I could build a business around this. But it’s totally different to what I’ve done in the past, designing and manufacturing bikes. With this, you’re going into someone’s home and they're in distress. A lot of them have health problems. There’s the financial pressure of it – their primary investment is making them sick. So it’s weirdly intimate. I’ve never experienced that before. Kind of like what a doctor or therapist would encounter.
Employee of the month
Tell us more about Roger and Kirby, your dogs.
Roger was our first dog. He’s a rescue, a terrier. Roger’s great, but he’s more of a pet. Our next dog was Kirby (above), a Springer Spaniel. He comes from a breeder and from a line of working dogs. What makes a great working dog is a sort of obsessive compulsiveness. They get fixated on something and can’t let it go. And they have a ton of energy.
Lots of dogs track by ground, by looking for disturbances in the soil and the grass. They can smell when a foot has made impact on the soil – the grass gets crushed or the soil gets impacted and it releases bacteria and VOCs. The dog can smell how long ago that footstep happened and track that way.
Kirby tracks by picking up air scents, which is better for mold. And by design, a hunting dog works in collaboration with humans. They’re like, “I’ll find it, you get it.” He alerts me to where it is. That’s how they’re bred.
Is Kirby the star, or do you want to hire and grow and scale?
This isn’t such a scalable business. The work and the relationship with the dog is so personal. You really have to live with the dog and know them. Kirby is proving to be so good at the work that I don't know if Roger will continue. He might retire to the couch! But it’s just me and the dog. That’s the beauty of it.
Shifting to an industry in another universe like this must be so interesting.
Linus is all about maintaining inventory and parts, working with multiple manufacturers and 20 vendors to produce a single bike, going through the assembly process, quality control, shipping, distribution. There are so many pieces to it and so many people. It's really refreshing to be able to say, “I’m just responsible for me and my dog.” I’m enjoying that freedom.
Reinvention is fascinating.
It’s always amazed me how a business starts from an idea and then becomes a reality. But there were definitely moments of paralysis: Can I do this? All I knew was bicycles. I’d been doing this for two decades. How could I ever do anything else? And then you start to realize that you can. Now I’ve got a calendar filled with home inspections for the next few weeks.
There’s a day of imposter syndrome and then you’re like, Right, let’s get on with it.
The hardest part is not knowing where to put your energy. At least for me. It was all the what-ifs: What am I going to do next? What if it doesn’t work? But then once you settle on something, a lot of the anxiety and stress melts away. You realize you can transform into something entirely different. People identify me as the guy who founded Linus, but now I have another story.
People aren’t one-dimensional. Ten years from now, maybe you’ll open a food truck. That’s what makes life interesting.
If you embrace it, yes, that’s what makes it interesting. Launching a new business in mid-life is undoubtedly challenging, but the good thing is having been through it before, you definitely make less stupid mistakes. And once you get over the stress of reinventing yourself, you feel absolutely charged and energized to be learning and building again.
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➠ Good ideas
AQ 🧠 → First there was IQ (smarty-pants), then EQ (I feel you), and now? It's all about agility quotient — your ability to handle change.
Are You Dead? 🤨 → An app for, uh, keeping tabs on loved ones who live alone.
Library of things 🔨 → Rent household objects instead of buying new ones.
The newest ‘third spaces’ 🏡 → Restaurants that feel like living rooms. (And speaking of, these starters turned their ACTUAL living room into a cafe).
Old rice 🍚 → Can it be used as a building material?
The ‘forgotten’ 5th pillar of health 🎨 → Diet, sleep, exercise, nature, and…. art: “Research suggests that experiencing art and creativity, even for a few minutes a day, has tangible effects on our mental and physical health”
Leaving bad reviews 😱 → On the nature of trashing small businesses online.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
Business ownership in 2026, a big new report from QuickBooks.
📚️ Reads
They're building an anti-Amazon in Echo Park. KCRW
What Is Well-Made Furniture Actually Worth? Untapped
Tool Shaped Objects. Will Manidis
How to avoid getting laid off from your digital media job. By someone who just got laid off from his digital media job. Harry Cheadle
Japan has a new bar just for people thinking about quitting their jobs. Japan Today
The deaf-run cafe where hearing people sign to order. Guardian
How 3 grocers source small and local brands. Grocery Dive
The Health Food Store That Raised a Generation of Angelenos. T Mag
This 19-year-old CEO just raised $1.2m to automate one of farming’s toughest jobs. Forbes Australia
How a small shop in Kyoto connects mastery with meditation. Big Think
🧠 Findings
2% → The slice of all venture capital funding last year that went to female founders.
🙃 Fun
Former NBA legend Derrick Rose has opened up a family-owned floral biz called Rose's Flower Shop. Sometimes you just gotta let your name guide you… 🌹
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➠ Town Hall
1. Here in London, FS subscriber Andra Speer swung open the doors to London Atelier Byproduct (LAB), a brick-and-mortar store in lovely Richmond. Andra initially started LAB as an online shop around 3 years ago. The new IRL shop sells LAB’s own brand and more than a dozen other British brands across two floors, from women’s clothing and homeware to gifts. Congrats! 🛍️
2. And subscriber George Milton, co-founder of Austin’s very own Yellowbird hot sauce brand, is on the hunt for 9,000 pounds of fresh organic habanero peppers. Anyone wanna help a brother out? 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
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