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 ➠ Candy shop dreams

• Advice ➠ How I started a magazine

• Ideas ➠ The rise of micro-restaurants

• Resources ➠ How to research trends

• Town Hall ➠ Community shoutouts

—Danny (say hi via email, LinkedIn or IG).

P.S. Some links weren’t working in last week’s edition. Sorry. That’s what I get for editing late at night...

👋 For Starters is read by 10,000+ business-builders around the world, from cheesemongers in Lyon to UX designers in Singapore. Welcome!

➠ Get inspired

1. Main Street magic. A former film and TV producer is building a candy shop in Sleepy Hollow, New York… and using incredibly nostalgic Nora Ephron-esque narrative storytelling on IG in the lead-up. I’m extremely invested in the story and fate of The Village Confectionery. I mean, just look at how well done this is. Doors open in June. (Thanks to FS subscriber Katharina Hahn for sending my way)

2. World champs. Close your eyes and think of where the world's best coffee shop might be. Melbourne? Tokyo? How about Rogers, Arkansas? Onyx Coffee Lab, founded by husband-and-wife team Andrea and Jon Allen in 2012, just topped The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops list – the first American cafe to take the top spot, beating out 15,000 nominees. The Allens started out as baristas who bought a roasting machine they barely knew how to use, and built from there.

Today they’ve got 8 spots across Arkansas – no investors, no franchises – with a flagship that houses a roastery, bakery, taqueria, mezcal bar, tasting restaurant and barista training school under one roof. They publish all their trade data online (what they paid each farmer, the commodity price, import costs, etc). Beautiful.

3. Tinker tailor. In December I wrote about Cat Goetze – aka digital creator CatGPT – who built a bluetooth landline phone brand called Physical Phones. Now, Cat’s launched a wildly ambitious project called Cat Labs:

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➠ Starter wisdom

Josh Lachkovic has started (at least) six things. 

A digital magazine, a vinyl subscription, a wine DTC startup, an ads inspiration SaaS, a consulting business, and then Ballpoint, the creative-performance agency he founded in 2023 that became, by some distance, the most successful thing he’s ever built. 

Noix, the newish menswear magazine he co-founded and co-edits with his buddy Cesare Attuoni, is technically number seven.

→ Whether it joins the win column is beside the point. Below, Josh makes it clear he’d be doing it either way… 

💬 Josh, you’ve started and built a lot of things, from Wine List to Ballpoint. Noix is just another notch in your starter belt…

I’ve been playing around with ideas since I was young. I blogged when I was a teenager and built music websites. I’ve always been tinkering. Some of those things are just a page of a plan in a Dropbox. And some of them are fully-fledged businesses which I built and ran for a while. I’ve definitely got dozens of notebooks full of random business ideas which, if I sit and flick through them all, I’ll be like, oh that’s cool, maybe I should try that this year! Before realizing I don’t have the time.

💬 We’re the same. So many Notion pages, Google Docs and Moleskine notebooks, filled with random ideas, 0.1% of which see the light of day.

I’ve probably got like 40 domains in my GoDaddy account and I use two or three of them!

💬 So how’d you decide to start a print magazine?

I’ve always loved print. My parents ran a newsagent so I grew up looking at magazines. I’d read everything that would come through the shop. I’ve got like 10 half-started magazines scattered around somewhere – it’s always been back-of-mind as something to do.

Fast forward to now. Me and my friend Cesare would always WhatsApp each other about brands we’d discover and what it means to be into clothes as a guy. We’d talk about how menswear is so often about function and utility, whereas we believe you should wear something for beauty’s sake. Noix came out of those WhatsApp conversations.

💬 What’s your angle on the menswear mag space?

I’ve got loads of old 1960s and 70s Esquires and I love how literary it was back in the day. So many modern menswear magazines don’t really speak to me. They’re ultra high luxury – go and have a yacht, get your private jet, wear a Rolex, which are things I don’t particularly aspire to. It felt like there was an opening. Noix came from that. This will be fun, I thought, and I’m sure we’ll maybe one day make some money out of it. Only one of those things is true so far… 

💬 Lots of the legacy mass market men’s-focused mags have editorial and commercial sort of blended – you don’t know who’s making money, if it’s pay-for-play, etc.

I work in marketing as my day job and my co-editor works in social media, so we’re both very aware of that whole world, and obviously it’s a legit business model, but we have the luxury of being fully independent and writing about what we want to write about. I’m enjoying that independence at the moment.

💬 You’re launching this at a time when print is “coming back”. I’d argue it never died, but now launching a print mag is really a zeitgeisty thing to do. Print plays into the whole revenge of the analog and anti-algorithm thing.

Like you, print has never gone away for me. I’ve been a magCulture customer for 10 years. It’s been fortunate and dangerous that it’s always been near my office. I think I do hear more people talking about print outside of the nerdy bubble that I’m in.

💬 I’m loving the yin and yang of your career now. By day you’re stuck in growth algorithms and Meta ad spreadsheets and by night you’re writing about beautiful socks.

It’s definitely that to a large degree. I’ve spent these last two weeks in my day job doing AI things, which is fine, I do enjoy that, but I’m also looking forward to not doing that and being completely switched off from it and taking the twelve magazines I’ve not yet read, but which have been sitting on my table forever, to go and read offline. There’s definitely a yin and yang thing between the magazine and my day job, which was by design. We’re not making a digital media publication supported by print. It’s a print magazine. 

💬 Any early stumbles in getting the project off the ground?

Cesare and I are both writers. I’ve blogged pretty much once a week since I was 15. He’s a social media copywriter by day. Our comfort zone is writing. We did a lot of the writing first. We probably got half it written before we thought about design or what it should look like. Fortunately, Cesare’s brother is a graphic designer, so he’s taken on all the art direction. After that, it’s just been Googling things like, “Do I need a barcode on a magazine?” (It turns out, as long as you’re an independent, no is the answer.) Then finding a distributor and working out how to get it into people’s hands has been a process of learning as we go. I knew more about how the Shopify and business side of things works. But design and print and paper has been a learning exercise.

💬 What’s your goal with Noix? Make something big and profitable? Have fun? Stimulate your mind?

Even if Noix had no readers, we’d be doing it anyway. It feels incredibly satisfying to put the magazine together and then have the physical thing at the end. We just love doing it. I would like it to be bigger. There’s a world where this could become a monthly or quarterly thing, if I had enough subscribers and distribution and time. What happens if we get to 5,000 or 10,000 copies distributed a month? Our interim goal is: Can the magazine pay for itself? We’ve got a lot more writers in issue two and we’d love to continue to expand our pool of writers and photographers. But at the end of the day, we make it for ourselves as a starting point, which is a nice position to be in.

💬 You’re two issues in. Learned any tips or lessons for starters?

Set deadlines! Our first issue took a year to put together and the first six months were a bit loose. Six months in we were like, okay let’s actually properly put this together. And more or less the same happened with issue two. This is also one of the first projects I’ve had someone else to do it with. In my day job, I’m a solo founder, which has its ups and its downs. It’s so nice to have somebody else to share frustrations and joyous moments and celebrate together. ☼

→ MagCulture, where Josh buys his mags, is holding the 8th edition of The Flatplan this weekend. Eight indie magazine-makers and experts teach you how to get started (also featuring my talented wife Kim Darragon). Grab a ticket.

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➠ Good ideas

Analog newsletters 💌 → For $11/month, Cody Cook Parrott sends you a snail mail letter with a list of writing prompts. Lovely. Similar vibes to the fantasy story mail club I wrote about in FS #50.

Yoghurt delivery women 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 → Can Yakult Ladies make Japanese people less lonely?

Listening bars 🎶 → And can listening bars do that loneliness-busting job in America?

Lesbian bars 🍺 → A few years ago it seemed lesbian bars were dying in the US (there were reportedly ~15 left). Can sports revive them?

Sugar war 🍭 → One casualty of the Strait of Hormuz being blocked: the candy industry.

Syrup sachets ☕️ → For Starters subscriber Sarah Drumm asks: are they the next cult product?

Micro-restaurants 👋 → ‘The chef is a metre away from you’

Vital force 🏃‍♀️ → In Ubuntu philosophy, the idea of ‘vital force’ says stagnation is a harm you inflict on yourself. What’s that mean for starters? Don’t stop.

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➠ Toolbox

🛠️ Resources

Alembic – an aesthetic thinking tool with some cool use cases

How To Research Trends – a book by Netherlands-based For Starters subscriber Els Dragt

Protocol Cards – evidence-backed practices for acute stress, winding down, focus, recovery, and processing emotion

📚️ Reads

The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life (book pre-order). Ian Bogost

Why this writer opened a brick-and-mortar bookstore in the age of Amazon. Revenue Rulebreaker (via the publication of FS subscriber and legend Lex Roman)

What happens when you build a $700 million coffee empire and then walk away from it all? Life & Thyme

She quit her private equity job to start a yogurt company. Brand Baby

The Scottish island that bought itself. Elysian

Software bonkers: the year is 2026 and I can't stop building. Craig Mod

How Fishwife builds momentum through newness. Link in Bio

A bakery owner who wakes up at 12:48 am to start prepping croissants says her success comes from social capital and ‘radical hospitality’. Insider

Shopify says purchases are coming ‘inside ChatGPT’ through agentic storefronts. Modern Retail

🧠 Findings 

71% → The slice of people Highsnobiety surveyed who said groceries are a new form of lifestyle expression or cultural capital.

🙃 Fun

Got $6 million laying around? Why not buy this 40-acre village in Maine and turn it into the HQ of a rustic homeware brand – or cult? (Tbh it does look like the beautiful, unsettling location of an A24 horror film…)

Other fun stuff to buy: Birdie and La Machine

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➠ Town Hall

Some quickfire news about For Starters subscribers…

• Ben da Costa, co-founder of Oat Cult, has been building a model to work with a small number of founder-led brands as a fractional creative lead. He’s on the hunt for 2-3 brands that are doing well but feel they’ve outgrown their current creative output. → Get in touch 👋 

• Jane Gleeson runs two things: a marketing and comms consultancy for hospitality clients, and Guzzle, a print publication exploring how we make, eat and share food. Issue three’s out now with the topic exploring the meaning of ‘home’. Jane’s got launch events in London (this weekend!), Belfast, and Dublin to mark it. → Follow along 📚️ 

• Elsewhere in print, James McPherson, publisher of excellent mag (and 3.2 million subscriber YouTube channel) Never Too Small got featured in NYT’s recent piece, ‘Why Interior Design Magazines Are Booming’. Congrats! 🎉 

• On the hunt for a gig? Arjun Narayen, founder of Raazi Tea (his FS interview here), is hiring for a few roles in NYC, while Cain Fleming from noissue is doing the same in Auckland. Tell ‘em we sent you. 🤝 

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See you next Friday 😎

💌 If you enjoyed this edition, I’d absolutely love if you forwarded it to a friend or starter who might enjoy it.

🙏 “One of the best and most inspiring letters in the game!” —Abena Anim-Somuah, subscriber

🗣️ Take our reader survey

📬️ What are your biz dreams? → [email protected]