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. Just build it! Friends Sai Pogaru, Utkarsh Vijayvargiya, and Sachit Sood spent 20 years sitting on the same question: why was there no ‘globally resonant, contemporary Indian niche perfume house’ – one that told their story without leaning on stereotypes? Eventually they did the obvious thing and they built it themselves. In Jan 2024 the three quit their jobs, spent 11 months training their noses on weekends, and brought on perfumer Kajal Gujar to translate their emotional briefs into scent. Last month, just two years after quitting their 9-5s, Rahasya landed at Selfridges. → Two years. What’s stopping you? 🚀

2. Not your grandpa’s dealership. Over in Brooklyn, meanwhile, Kevin Chen runs a car dealership called Car Part Time – and I promise you, whatever image just flashed into your mind, you’re wayy off. What Kevin’s built is more akin to a members club that just so happens to have insanely cool vintage Japanese and Italian cars sitting around – a spot “built for drivers, collectors and friends.” Anyone want a 1993 Lancia Delta HF Integrale Evoluzione II? 🚘

^{In partnership with Shopify}

3. The 5-to-9 era. You might’ve seen Lazy Jamie’s 5-9 TV Tray Table show up on a design TikTok recently, or in someone’s curated flat. It’s a sculptural, shiny table in Yves Klein blue, it was named “Best in Show” by Architectural Digest.… and it was designed for the exact opposite of high-brow activities: eating takeout pizza on the couch or watching The Bachelorette in the tub.

Jamie McKillop built her brand around what she calls life’s “most in-between moments”, and it took her 3 years to bring the table to market. In the meantime, she built an audience on TikTok, IG, and Substack by being unusually candid about the starter slog – including a full breakdown of why the table costs $500…

→ In Shopify’s new Substack, In Stock, Jamie talks about building an audience before you have a product to sell, and how to design for the way people actually live. Read the interview and subscribe 💫

4. Keep it simple. And to mark its 100-year anniversary, Icelandic outerwear brand 66°North photographed 100 Icelandic locals – one person born each year from 1926 to 2026 – wearing their clothes. So good. Brands can overthink campaigns – too much whiz-bang tech, celebs, trends, thirsting towards the zeitgeist without ever really contributing to it. While here’s a really effective campaign that I’ve been thinking about all week. Just keep it simple. 🌟

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A decade ago, Chaz Hutton was working in an open-plan architecture office in London, replying to his mates’ group chat with hand-drawn Post-it notes instead of typed messages.

His friends told him to start an Instagram – jokingly dubbing it @instachaaz, a placeholder until he came up with something better. He never did.

Chaz posted one Post-it comic a day until BuzzFeed and HuffPost picked him up and took him from 6K to 60K followers in a week. A book deal followed. Ten years on, the Australian illustrator has 260K followers and is back in the UK after years in Berlin. His latest piece – an epic, Artemis mission-inspired, 20-slide IG carousel showing the distance from the Earth to the moon – nearly broke the internet.

→ Below, Chaz shares what a decade in the algorithmic trenches actually looks like, why a sustainable creative business needs a few revenue streams, and what his favourite books all have in common…

💬 Hey Chaz, was being a creative person always in the cards? Or did you study something like biochemical engineering?

I studied architecture! Then I moved from Australia, where I grew up, to London. That’s where I created the Instagram account. I was working in an office and was always trying to text mates about the weekend. But it was an open plan office, so I couldn’t constantly be on my phone. So I’d end up keeping an eye on whatever everyone was texting and I’d draw my responses on Post-it notes. Everyone in the group said I should post them on Instagram. @instachaaz came from them going, “Mate, when’s Insta Chaz gonna start!?” It was just a shorthand for whatever account I’d make. “Of course, you’ll come up with a better name,” they said…

💬 Little did they know, a decade later....

Exactly. I ended up writing a Medium article with a few of the comics and it was wildly successful. I thought, “Oh, okay, maybe there’s something to this.” So I started putting the Post-it notes on IG. My rule was to post one every day, no matter what. And it started to gain traction. It began with curious friends, and then that built up from there.

💬 How many followers do you have now?

I think it’s up to… 250K now, maybe? [DG: reader, it’s 260K]

💬 With an account like yours, you must have a spidey-sense for algorithmic changes and what content moves the needle.

Ohhh yeah. I’ve felt those algorithmic changes. Maybe it was the pivot to video and Reels, or maybe I haven’t been posting good enough stuff the last few years! But there was a point from 2018 to 2020 where everything I posted would get 10,000 likes, minimum, and recently it’s been more 1,000 to 2,000.

💬 Damn the algorithm.

A lot of people just watch Reels now. They’re not flicking through static image posts the way they used to. But with some of the biggest work I’ve done, once it passes a certain level, then it really goes. If you look at a breakdown of my posts, a whole bunch of stuff is below 10,000, and then there’s some stuff above 100,000, and very little in-between.

💬 So what happened next in your journey?

So the Post-it note comics grew and grew. Then an Irish newspaper and a Russian blog found my stuff and wrote stories on me, which bounced me up to 6,000 followers. Then BuzzFeed and HuffPost wrote about me literally within hours of each other. I went from 6,000 to 60,000 followers in a week.

💬 Holy crap. Were you at home refreshing like a maniac?

It was mad! Not too long after that, book deal offers started floating in.

💬 Did you quit your architect job by that point?

No, I was still there. But when the book deal came through – and this says more about the lack of pay in architecture than the size of book deals – it was significantly larger than what I was being paid per year for architecture. So I was like… fuck it. I quit and just focused the next three months on getting the book done. That book deal money actually kept me going for about two years.

💬 Incredible.

They wanted the book really early, so I set myself a goal of creating four comics a day. I had a running tally so I could see how far behind or ahead I was. It was brutal. I’d think I was doing so well and then I’d miss a day or two and suddenly I’m eight behind.

💬 Did you feel real pressure to come up with good ideas?

That was actually fine because I knew we were going to scrap two thirds of them. With anything creative, sometimes you have to go through a bunch of shit stuff to find the door to something good. I always felt it was worth churning out trash if it meant I’d eventually find something half-decent. The brutal thing is that half of the time I have no idea what the audience wants. I actually haven’t spent much time trying to guess, because the stuff that always does well is the stuff I personally think is funny, no matter how niche.

💬 If you laugh, someone else will laugh!

Yeah, then again, I’m thinking about that ‘Map of every city’ piece I made early on. I remember showing it to a mate: “What do you think of this?” He says, “Too many words, no one’s going to like that!” But it became one of my first really big, viral posts. It’s the same with this ‘Earth to the moon’ piece I recently created…

💬 Let’s talk about that moon piece. When I first saw it, I was absolutely delighted. How’d it come about?

I decided to do a 20-slide comic based around the Artemis mission to the moon. I was so glad the mission got delayed by a month! I had a really busy week and thought, “I’ve gotta draw this thing before it launches.” Then they delayed it – I’m like yes!

💬 So you saw this momentous event and you knew you had to draw something?

A lot of people know how small the moon is compared to Earth, but few people are aware of how far apart they truly are. I wanted to show that in a drawing, to scale. My old architectural skills came into force to make sure I got it correct. I used a version of the architectural software program Rhino to build an exact model in millimeters – each millimeter was a kilometer – and then I built the scale model and divided it into 20 Instagram-sized sheets, and put it all together.

💬 Jesus.

I’d done something similar before with my comic ‘Everyone at the dinner party’, but that was eight frames long, instead of twenty.

💬 You posted a photo of yourself holding the moon comic [at top]. Is that going in a gallery? Are you selling copies?

I posted it on IG and people were saying, “I’d love to get a copy of it!” I’m like, are you insane? How do I ship that? It’s massive!

💬 I think you underestimate people’s willingness to buy cool shit...

I think I underestimated what printers can do! I found a printer that can print 1.2 meters high and 20 meters long. These poor bastards – I’m measuring out the thing and it’s 0.2 meters high by 2.9 meters long. But I got everyone who expressed an interest to send me their emails, then I got a bunch printed and sold them. I couldn’t believe it. That money got me through last month!

💬 Okay yeah, let’s talk about money. You’ve had this amazing decade-long journey. What’s the shape of your creative business look like?

I hate to say it’s taken me a lot longer to work this out, but it’s about having a diversity of revenue streams. It sounds so ugly and business-y. I do work for brands, which I actually quite like doing. It’s always a challenge too, especially if a bank comes to me and says, “Can you do a funny joke about compound interest?” I recently finally got my shit together and put together a website. The fact that I got as far as I did without having any online portfolio other than my Instagram...

💬 What other ways are you making money?

Beyond the brand work is poster sales via my shop. Usually one of those revenue streams is getting me through a month when the other one isn’t. I’ve also got plans to do another book. It’s a massive amount of work though. I just need to put together some chapters with a solid idea and send it to agents – hopefully something sticks and comes back.

💬 What are you reading, watching or listening to these days?

My girlfriend George and I have an ongoing joke where we’ve worked out my favorite kind of book: it’s a history of a single object. She got me two recently. One is called Walls and the other one’s called Brick.

💬 That’s hilarious. Salt!

Yes, exactly! Salt. There’s another called Clay. That’s my jam. And another good one is The Golden Thread, about fabric. I’ve literally got another that’s just called Fabric, now that I think of it. It covers everything from Egyptian cotton through to space suits. I’m into any book that takes one thing and uses it as a vehicle to explore other things. God, that’s such a 42 year-old man kind of book to read, isn’t it? ☼

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Tactical chic 🪖 → If you want to get a certain type of guy to buy a product, just throw the word ‘tactical’ in front of it.

Culture is your moat 🧠 → Ana Andjelic in The Sociology of Business: “We believe that the old rules of business, like scale, price, mass advertising, distribution, etc. no longer determine who wins. The new competitive advantage is rooted in cultural fluency, defined as the ability to generate meaning, build worlds, earn fan obsession, and circulate value through communities rather than just transactions.”

Gluten-free hotels 🥐 → In Louisiana (!) is the first full-service hotel in the US that’s certified 100% gluten-free.

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10 new project and startup ideas — Business ideas for the taking.

The Fold — Apron, the small biz payments company, has got a great print newspaper. I interviewed their founder Bogdan Uzbekov in the latest. Grab a free copy.

Claude for Small Business — Launched this week 👀

The art of brand positioning — From the always insightful JA Westenberg.

Be niche! — If you’ve ever talked yourself out of a biz idea for being too niche or weird, new data says you’re looking at it wrong. Categories outside the top 100 – i.e. the long tail – now drive 55% of all sales on Shopify. Products like screenless phones for kids, horse hay nets and metal pill cases are actually now growing faster than mainstream categories. Find out why. ✨

The internet has no benches. Elysian

Gen Zers are making thousands of dollars a month running snail-mail subscription clubs. Make It

The creative industries are about to split in two. It’s Nice That

The busiest place you’ve never seen. NPR

29 May 2026 → Also known as Release Day, in which For Starters subscriber Sam Furness, founder of Creative Quests, is motivating people to release their creative projects on the same day.

Grandma stand

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For Starters subscriber Elliot Wilson says he’s been peddling booze, in one way or another, since he was about 13 and working behind the bar at his father’s pub. “It was the 1980s, that’s just how we rolled in the old days,” he tells us.

Now the founder of The Cabinet, a drinks-focused brand design agency, Elliot recently launched his own drinks brand – a natural English rhubarb liqueur called Auberon.

“As it happens I’m Scottish, but my partner’s English. So what’s quintessentially English? We all love rhubarb!” In England there’s a rhubarb season, he explains – “people make rhubarb and custard, there’s rhubarb crumble, and once upon a time kids even used to pick rhubarb and dip it in bags of sugar. There’s a real heritage and nostalgia to rhubarb.”

Auberon uses rhubarb from Yorkshire’s ‘Rhubarb Triangle’, a protected region where the rhubarb is considered among the best.

“Building drinks brands is a very slow process,” Elliot says. “They say an overnight success takes about 10 years.” ☼

→ If you want to try it yourself, Elliot has graciously given For Starters subscribers a special 15% off code to use on Auberon’s shop: FORSTARTERS

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