Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

👋 Thousands of business-builders around the world read For Starters every Friday. Thanks for being one of them. Learn more.

1. Grandpa’s Shirts. London-based Gaby Owens runs the lovely slow fashion company Grandpa’s Shirts, which she originally started by upcycling her late grandfather’s shirt collection into new pieces for her and her sister. Now, it’s a full blown brand. Yesterday, in Lisbon, she launched a new collection – a collab with Luena Gama made from upcycled garments – and it’s looking 🔥.

2. A stylist starts over. After years dressing Beyoncé for tours, shoots and red carpets, KJ Moody woke up one day wanting a new passion. So, he toured the Culinary School of Fort Worth and enrolled on the spot. Now, fresh out of class, he’s a 32-year-old intern at Ateliê in Dallas – chopping onions and washing dishes. “I feel like I’m back in my element,” KJ says. “I’m watching, I’m learning, and that’s the fun part... Starting at the bottom is fun because I can shoot up.” Now that’s a starter.

3. Handmade future. Check out this beautiful film that follows artisans in six countries – Morocco, India, Kenya, the US, Mexico, and England – who are “protecting heritage, confronting complex middlemen, advancing responsible trade, and pushing back against fast, cheap production to quietly restore a frayed world through beauty and human connection.”

4. Starters can buy a biz too, edition #438. Not all businesses last. Some fail quickly, some die natural deaths, and sometimes the business is doing great – the owner just decides it’s time to move on. I love highlighting opportunities like these (businesses for sale), because often it’s the quickest way someone can get on the ladder of business ownership. I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it again: starters don’t need to literally start a company themselves.

Here’s an example: over on Australia’s sunny Gold Coast, Morgan and Blake have for the last five years run Lazarus Lab, an analogue film company. Now they’re looking for someone else to take the reins. Is that person you? Get in touch.

5. Also in Australia… The utter confidence to name your cafe Bobby Stop Stealing Our Camping Chairs. More weird names, please! 👏

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New York-based Elliot Aronow has had a wonderfully eclectic career: editor, ‘gourmet doorman’, hardcore band scene participant, TV host, necktie designer, GQ columnist, music startup co-founder, and now the founder of minor genius.

A ‘minor genius’ is, according to Elliot, someone who gets paid to be themselves. Through print projects, apparel, events, and a discreet 1:1 private studio, Elliot builds “physical and cultural containers for people with strong taste and strange gifts to find one another” – and put out work designed to outlive the algorithm. 

→ Below, Elliot talks about creating physical artifacts and why starters should build a scene rather than an audience.

💬 Hey Elliot, tell us about minor genius.

minor genius is organized a little like Polo, not just because I’m a huge Ralph nerd, but because that’s the level I’m interested in operating at. A world with a coherent point of view, expressed across different mediums.

On the public-facing side, there’s an imprint: magazines, parties, collaborations, products, and releases. That’s the door anyone can walk through. Then there’s a more discreet one-on-one studio – think Ralph Purple Label – where I work with founders, artists, writers, and public-facing people to give a project, business, or body of work its proper shape in the world. Sometimes that means the language, sometimes it’s the visual frame, sometimes it’s the artifact or release strategy. The job is always the same: make the thing feel as strong in public as it does in the person’s head.

💬 You’ve got a very unique lens on the world. What can starters take away from it?

When you’re starting a business, there’s so much pressure to explain yourself and make yourself legible to the market in an immediate way. That’s not the best way to go about things. What’s more important is finding your taste and exploring all the tensions and hidden engines underneath what you do. You should let that be the spine of the business.

I love thinking about the mysterious and strange ways that ideas move through culture. A strategy deck on a piece of paper is one thing. But of all the things that have shaped my life – the Beastie Boys and Polo and early DFA and being a face in the downtown scene – none of them evolved from strategy decks. They evolved from the messiness and voltage of human contact. When you’re starting a business, that’s actually the quicker way to grow, rather than trying to execute on something that’s laboratory-concocted.

💬 Right – in the AI era, lots of us are turning to LLMs to build a business, which has pros and cons. Pro: speed and efficiency. Con: letting the AI tell you what to build, rather than basing it on your interests or culture. Do you agree?

A lot of people who are pearl-clutching about AI underestimate how much an individual with a real point of view and a taste level can use those tools to make interesting things. Most of the things that people worry about vis-a-vis AI are downstream of much bigger issues. 

Think of it this way: if you’re not in touch with your intuition as a business owner or artist, that’s a wayyy bigger problem than, “I listen to my AI too much.” If AI just hands you something back and you’re like, “Okay, fine,” then you need to be a better editor or have a stronger point of view. You should say: “No, that doesn’t live in the universe I’m creating. I need this instead.”

💬 I run a reader survey of For Starters subscribers and one of the most requested topics people want to learn about is building a community or audience. You must have deep insights on audience-building.

As a business owner, I’ve embraced the idea that I’m not trying to build an audience. I’m trying to create a scene that people can enter.

💬 That’s interesting! Tell us more. 

When I think of an audience, I think of people who clap and move on to the next thing, or anxious people on their phones by themselves. Whereas when you enter into a scene, it’s a place in which your work makes contact with other people. It has an opportunity to be misunderstood, but also smuggled into all these different spaces. There’s personality and texture and an exchange of ideas that really can’t be replicated in a one-to-many model.

💬 Can a starter build a scene? Or do they just contribute to one in their own way?

Everyone gets to decide what their role is in a scene, which is why I’ve always been attracted to them. When I came up in the American hardcore scene, if you weren’t in a band, maybe you were a photographer. Or you booked shows. Or maybe you published a zine. And if you didn’t do that, maybe you drove people from state to state because you were the sober person! 

It’s up to an individual business owner to figure out what role they can play. For example, if you have a restaurant, maybe you’re feeding the scene. And if you’re running a small media startup, maybe you’re the documentarian of the scene.

For what we’ve been doing here in New York, where we’re throwing parties and releasing zines, it’s almost self-selecting – if it’s for you, you’ll come. But we’re not trying to rearrange the furniture in the room so that any one person feels more comfortable. And in a world where a lot of people feel pandered to, they appreciate that. 

For a business this matters, because a scene does things an audience doesn’t: it creates referrals, language, context, collaborators, and a sense that something is happening without you having to explain it to death.

💬 So if I’m a new business owner, how can I apply this idea in my zero-to-one phase? Is it a matter of tapping into some sort of zeitgeist?

Anything that comes from you and has one-of-one energy will always be the most fertile grounds for launching a business. If you’re interested in creating things that people can wear, eat, listen to, or enter, then the best business owners all have their mini-universes that they’ve carved out of reality. 

Think of the Beastie Boys – they weren’t just words you heard in the songs. It was the music videos with Spike Jonze, the X-Large clothing store which was one of the first streetwear stores in LA, it was their recording studio that they built from scratch where they would host parties. You’re able to touch people in lots of different ways without diluting your core sauce.

For me, minor genius has been an anti-loneliness machine, so I could meet more people, my friends could meet more people, and there would be more cross-pollination between all the various photographers, chefs, designers, writers, founders, that I know. 

💬 What are these ‘artifacts’ you help create?

I’m a big believer in physicality and producing things that can be mailed and kicked and cut up and reassembled. Many people have an almost psychotic obsession with growing online. Artifacts, such as zines, are a great way to stop the scroll. You’re literally pulling someone out of a screen and into your world. Artifacts accrue weight over time – when you assemble five or seven of them you suddenly have a body of work, unlike feeding the algorithm, which feels like paying a parking meter. 

That body of work becomes proof. It gives people something to forward, remember, hold onto, and use when they’re trying to explain you to somebody else. I also like the quiet confidence that comes from doing something physical. If someone went out of their way to make and print something, they must really believe in it. It’s not low commitment social media chum. It has gravitas.

💬 Physical things also tend to have more friction in the making / distributing / selling process. At least compared to software. Are you friction-maxxing, Elliot?

Well, there’s an ongoing VC logic of removing friction from life, which has had terrible downstream consequences for business owners! They start to think, “If I don’t make this incredibly easy and immediate, I'm doing it wrong.”

But I've noticed that products, businesses and brands that have real longevity actually ask something of the participants. Like, you have to actually leave the house to experience this and check it out. That creates much more of a real scene, and a more invested customer base, than simply saying, “I want to get the most eyeballs on the dumbest thing possible as quickly as possible.”

People are looking for things that demand more of them. No one’s going to write a book about the world’s most comfortable business owner!

💬 True. I often think there are two types of biz owners: one who tries to shave off a fraction of a millisecond on their site load speed, and another who doesn’t even have an online shop and who you’ve gotta call to get on a physical mailing list. To each their own!

Look, any business is subject to the law of supply and demand. When I view it from a cultural content perspective, I’ll ask: “What do we have a lot of? What’s in big supply?” There’s fast-talking, dopamine-fueled, sharply cut, loud, explainer content. There’s soothing wellness content. What’s missing are things that let you fill in the gaps yourself – not pre-chewed for you to consume in one second. The tension of not resolving it in the moment is what gives a brand a lot more power.

💬 The media landscape in particular has been dumbed down by the ‘five bullet points’ model, akin to a Gemini summary: “Here’s all you need to know – boom boom boom.”

Yeah, and that’s not to poo-poo any of that, you just have to be aware of what you want to build as a business owner. If you’re trying to do something that gets inside people’s bones, something they tell their friends about, that takes on a natural life of its own, then the five bullet point summary – or whatever the equivalent might be in your industry – might not be the best business strategy.

💬 What practical advice do you have for starters?

Tap into your own contradictions and voltage first, and then build from that place. Most people say find a market gap, but if you’re going to be in this for the long haul, it needs to come from your obsessions, tastes, reference points, and lived experience. That’s where the sauce is. And when that’s legit, other people pick up on it and want to support you. It helps you find your first thousand fans. It’s always better to start a business from an abundance of enthusiasm rather than a risk-reducing spreadsheet.

💬 I love that.

Ultimately, there won’t always be a one-to-one relationship between what you do everyday and your business’s revenue. Things move in much more strange ways. But I’ve always found that the businesses that travel have an aftertaste people can’t shake. If you can create that early, before the brand gets over-explained, over-optimized, or sanded down, the rest of the business has something real to organize around. ☼

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Taste washing 🧼 → A phrase by the New Yorker’s Kyle Chayka, in which “tasteful styles and symbols are being deployed to give an aura of quality to products whose mechanisms and values are extremely abstract and incomprehensible.” (See: spy software company Palantir’s new chore coat)

GLP-1 waivers for brides 👰 → With weight loss drugs increasingly common, bridal shops are facing “a new reality of last-minute fittings, strained inventory, and dresses that no longer fit.”

Gourmet dog food drizzle 🐶 → For fancy dogs who can’t yet afford an Erewhon smoothie.

Startup graveyard shenanigans 🪦 → Shuttered startups are selling their old Slack chats and emails to AI companies. Wait, whaa?

Cosmicomic perspective 💫 → When things feel too serious, look at a picture of the Milky Way.

“It’s not just X, it’s Y” 🫠 → It’s not just lazy, it’s offensive. (I swear to god if I see this ChatGPT-ism one more time…)

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Best content formats on social platforms in 2026 — Buffer analyzed 45 million posts on the top platforms and discovered which formats perform best. The winner? LinkedIn carousels 🤷

10 newsletters for small business owners, freelancers and self-employed folks — From For Starters subscriber Lucy Werner, featuring lots of great resources.

17 ways to keep your creativity alive – …while your full-time job tries to kill it.

I did no work for a year and no one noticed. A Day Well Spent

The $1 visionary. RTBC

An interview with Sari Azout, founder of Sublime. The Subtext

Inside the company building America’s first mail-order servant robot. Dezeen (my god, these photos…)

Why I chose to close my thriving business. Broadsheet

Inside Lenny Rachitsky’s demandingly chill life. First Round Review

How 300+ people are making money after losing their jobs. Laid Off

Consumers outnumber producers. Seth Godin

How to future-proof your career in the age of AI. Noema

How constraints led to two Michelin stars. Range Widely

20% → The sales growth of cottage cheese in America last year. After a decline as people moved to yoghurt, cottage cheese is officially back.

£5.1 billion → The value that refugee entrepreneurs could add to the UK economy – up from £520 million today – if given access to the right financial and coaching support.

60% → The proportion of all new golfers since 2019 who are women, who now make up nearly 30% of all players. Brands like Cherry Golf Club are serving this audience with community, events and products.

Future Me lets you write a letter to your future self, and it’ll send it to you (up to 10 years from now!)

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For Starters subscriber Alex Daly thinks the agency world has a problem: “The all-in-one agency model is kind of…breaking,” she says. “Not because agencies aren’t good (I own one, after all 🙂), but because the world they were built for doesn’t really exist anymore.”

Media is fragmented, influence is scattered across newsletters, podcasts, creators, etc, and brands don’t want to be everywhere – they just wanna “show up in the right places, with the right people, with actual taste and credibility.”

The current solution is to either hire a big comms agency, or stitch together an ad hoc team of experts yourself. So Alex – the founder of PR firm Daly – is building a third way. She’s teaming up with Emilie Gerber (Six Eastern), Sue S. Chan (Care of Chan) and Ally Bruschi to build Plenty&Co: a collective of indie agencies that come together “when the work calls for more.”

→ I’m seeing a lot more of these collective-esque on-demand studios pop up. Seems like an interesting idea! 👏

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