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- A gut feeling
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 ➠ Just like honey
Advice ➠ ChatGPT was my cofounder
Ideas ➠ You’re eating too much ube
Resources ➠ Interactive decks
Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts
👋 For Starters is read by thousands of biz-builders, including new subscriber Alexandra, who’s building Canada-based F&B biz The Sarjesa Group. Welcome!
➠ Get inspired
The thick stuff | Credit
1. Thick Honey. Creative director Noah Phillips is the son of a beekeeper and a lifelong honey lover. But, when he realized honey hadn’t changed much for a few thousand years, he decided to create a thicker and creamier-looking version (seriously, check out these images), packed it in a tube, and launched a new brand called Honey Department. Carry it around in your tote bag. Just don’t mistake it for the hand lotion. 🐝
2. Meanwhile, for creatives in NYC… Studiolo is a giant art studio that calls itself NYC’s “first invite-only creative studio where artists who are accepted don't pay for anything.” They’re looking for creatives working in painting, yoga, metalsmithing, sewing, glass, music, breathwork, upholstery, woodworking, photography, candle making, food, videography, tattooing and furniture-makers. Is that you? 👀
3. The shopkeeper’s determination. And on a cobblestoned street in the delightfully picturesque city of Bath, here in the UK, there’s a new children’s shop called The River Mouse. Owner Lucy only decided to open a shop this past October, before quitting her freelance job and then swinging open the doors in November! Talk about being decisive... 🐭
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➠ Starter wisdom
Puerto Rico-based starter Anabel González is the brains behind new biz Good Bacteria, which wants to “rewild” your gut.
Back in 2022, Anabel gave birth to her son and went through a severe experience of postpartum depression – including gaining 80 lbs and suffering night sweats and insomnia. As she explored treatments, she learned about the role of the gut microbiome and just how important diversity is for gut health.
From that personal health crisis came the eureka idea for Good Bacteria, which now sells a range of 28 sachets containing a blend of prebiotics, probiotics and postbiotics, which you mix into water or a smoothie.
→ With zero business experience and no CPG network, Anabel used a combo of determination, cold outreach and ChatGPT (!) to will her biz into being and raise $3.2m in investment. Wanna find out how she did it? Keep reading…
💬 Hey Anabel, what’s your story?
I’m originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico, and I’m here again today. My background is in integrated design – that’s what I studied at college, in New York, and that’s where I got wired to solve problems with design thinking. After New York, I wanted to work in the film industry. So like everyone with big film dreams, I went to work in Hollywood. Very quickly I realized that wasn’t the scene I was looking for!
Along the way I had my son, who’s now three and a half, and I ended up having a severe, intense experience with postpartum depression – night sweats, gaining 80 lbs, all sorts of problems. I did psychedelic therapy recommended by my OB-GYN to get my brain to baseline, and it was miraculous what that did for my postpartum depression.
After that experience, I went looking for purpose. I found a program at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, I got certified as a health coach, and I learned that diversity is the strongest indicator of a healthy gut. When you consume the same strain of bacteria over and over, you’re creating monoculture and dysbiosis in your gut. Just like we need diversity in plants and crops, our gut microbes need different bacteria, too.
💬 So that was your eureka moment?
Yes – I realized there was a gap in the market. Clinicians would say rotate your probiotics, switch it up, take breaks. I learned that fermented foods are so amazing for you because you're getting a variety of naturally occurring microbes, and they're always different. So I was fermenting my own foods and decided that I wanted to create a product targeting diversity in the gut – basically food for your microbes.
The first iteration of Good Bacteria was a fermented gut shot. I had big ideas for this tiny glass bottle that was acidic and had a three-week shelf life. I had no idea what I was doing. Clearly not a scalable product or business model!
💬 Lemme stop you right there. At this point did you want to develop a proper biz or were you just doing this as a personal side quest?
I did it for my own personal health, but I’d seen my partner jump into all these different industries and build startups in things like tech and sports. I thought… if he can do it, so can I. It’s just basically a lot of door-knocking! So let me start knocking on doors…
I found Dr Leigh Frame on LinkedIn. I’d seen a YouTube video of her speaking about the gut microbiome, and I was like, That’s my partner, that’s who I want to work with. She was the first scientist I reached out to and I got lucky because she said yes, she’d work with me, and she had good gut feeling.
💬 I mean, no pun intended.
Haha, literally. She’s a Johns Hopkins doctor, but also a yogi. And so we started working together…
💬 What did your message to her say? “I stumbled on a market gap, can you help me turn it into reality?”
When I look at my emails that I was sending two and a half years ago, they’re so cringe. I had no idea what I was doing.
Here’s my first email:
And she was like… okay!
This was right around the time that ChatGPT was emerging. I joke that AI was Good Bacteria’s cofounder. I had no idea how to create a product. Who’s going to help me formulate it? How do I source the ingredients? I truly didn’t know. But it was a gift that AI was starting to emerge because I was able to ask ChatGPT all of these questions and learn at turbo speed.
There are a bajillion things that need to happen to go from ideation to a product in a consumer's hand. It took us two years. It was pretty intense.
💬 You’ve built your network almost entirely by cold outreach. Any tricks?
I literally just started cold DMing people on LinkedIn. I didn't even know what I wanted to talk to them about. But through the subsequent conversations, I started to learn about this industry. That set the foundation for the network that I now have, because I didn't have a network at all. Zero. And the CPG industry is a really tight-knit world.
I learned so much from those conversations. I’d talk to anyone back then. And typically one conversation would open the door to the next. I still operate that way. Obviously now I need to choose them a little bit more selectively. But I learn so much from every call I get on.
💬 Starting a business is hard. What was harder than you thought it would be?
There were a lot of hard things, but I expected most of them. The one I maybe didn't expect was that there are a lot of different ways to build a powerful growth engine – but how do we figure out the best one for us? How do we stay lean from a team standpoint, but also scale quickly? How do we make sure all of our channels work cohesively? How are we able to balance the world of organic community building with the paid media landscape – and have all the right partners in place to do so?
There was the fundraising process too which involved knocking on so many doors. I literally had an Excel sheet with 200+ investors that I cold reached out to, which led me to our first investor. You have countless doors slammed in your face. But I just knew that was going to happen – I expected it. If I hadn’t expected that, it would have shocked me and probably deterred me. But every time I got a door slammed in my face, I would just make a little note to myself: “No worries, I’ll add them to the list and they’ll get a postcard one day!”
💬 Love that. Last one, spotted any market gaps that a smart starter could take advantage of lately?
Honestly, if I weren't building Good Bacteria in the gut health space right now, I’d be building in the psychedelic space. Once I have a bit more bandwidth, I’d love to start a nonprofit for moms who can benefit from infusion psychedelic treatments. My treatment didn’t just cure me from postpartum, it cured me from a long lifetime battle with depression. I just so deeply believe in the power of that treatment. There’s a massive opportunity across the board for it. ☼
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➠ Good ideas
DVDs and Blu-rays 📀 → They’re being embraced by (you guessed it) Gen Z: “Physical media sales declined just 9% in 2025, compared to drops of over 20% in 2023 and 2024, marking a dramatic shift in a shrinking market.” At this rate the Gen Z-er starter pack will be a gramophone and an abacus…
Smell this 👃 → The new ‘it’ candle of NYC restaurant bathrooms.
Kodawari ✨ → Does perfection in your craft give life meaning? Is this why Perfect Days is one of my favourite films?
Ube 💜 → The booming global popularity of the delicious purple yam is straining supply chains in the Philippines. Matcha mania deja vu.
London 🇬🇧 → One of the best places in the world to start a company.
Furniture brands 🪑 → It’s a tough time to be one in the US right now, due to ‘existential’ tariffs.
Sleep-friendly ice cream 🍦 → 60% of ice cream is eaten after 6pm. New brand Snooz spotted a gap.
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➠ Toolbox
🛠️ Resources
New app Faces helps you make interactive presentations/decks. You can check out some live examples on their Twitter.
📚️ Reads
What Brands Should Build Next. Dot Dot Dot
The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead. Joan Westenberg
The Unlikely Success of a Strange Alabama Bookstore. New Yorker
The Nue Co. Defied Investor Advice And Transformed Its Business. Beauty Independent
Celebrating Black history, joy, and creativity through the art of flowers. Design Observer
The hardest school to get into is Rolex University. GQ
Your Favorite Restaurant’s Playlist Was Probably Made By This Chicago Company. Block Club Chicago
A 67-year-old nudist colony is on the market in Florida for $2.5 million. NYT
An interview with David McKendrick, founder of Paperboy. Drakes
A barista turns tragedy into a coffee shop where customers can caffeinate and cry. LAT
Typography might be the last thing AI can't fake. Creative Boom
How to write a coaching/learning prompt. Seth Goden
🧠 Findings
$428 million → The drop in US wine exports last year, driven by a 76% drop in exports to Canada. Canadians, pissed at Trump’s ‘51st state’ talk, have been organizing a ‘buy local’ movement.
$27.50 per hour → Everyone at this company, including the owner, earns the same base wage: “Tenure will be rewarded by allotting net profits according to workers’ cumulative share of hours worked, what he calls a ‘sweatquity’ percentage. The living wage model means higher menu prices, tempered by a no-tips policy.”
🙃 Fun
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➠ Town Hall
For Starters has gotta have the most creative, entrepreneurial community of readers in the entire newsletter kingdom. Y’all are busy plotting, launching and building some awesome stuff lately. Some examples this week… 👀
☼ Subscriber Naomi Accardi has just launched a print mag called NONSENSE, all about a topic near and dear to our hearts: ‘the local heroes that keep their community alive and the neighborhood thriving’. Issue 1 explores what it means to be an artisan in 2026. Looks beautiful – congrats! Grab a copy.
☼ Over in New York, subscriber Dana Mauriello, who by day is an entrepreneurship professor at NYU Stern (!), writes a newsletter and hosts a podcast called This is a Thing, which features all sorts of starter-friendly pursuits and unusual businesses like treehouse building and treasure hunting. Check it out.
☼ And visual artist Kim Wyatt is building a project called Art Supply Tracker, a studio assistant that helps artists track supplies and inventory, manage projects, and protect their art. Super cool!
What are you working on? I’d love to hear about it: [email protected]
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