Hey, starter! Read on for…

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

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1. Standing room only. In Tokyo’s Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, there’s a tiny new wine bar called Ball. No chairs in sight, just room for about 8 people to stand around a U-shaped wooden counter that wraps around a small open kitchen. You sip natural wine while you watch the owner, Mamoru Akasaka, cook plates like Tulip Fried Chicken and Horse Mackerel Salad. Everything on the menu, food and drink alike, costs ¥500 or ¥1,000 (~$3 or $6).

Akasaka-san runs the place solo and built it that way on purpose – two prices so he can total your bill at a glance, and a counter set high enough that you can watch his hands work. “Dining is the closest thing to theatre,” he says. Indeed. 🎭

→ There’s something oddly appealing about a standing-only spot, no? It’s theoretically less convenient (and sure, some people need to sit), but it’s also less pretentious. No ‘best seats in the house’, no reservations. You drift in, enjoy yourself, and drift out. We all need a place like Ball in our life.

2. Start small. Over in Austin, Justine Boudreault wanted to open a vintage store. So like any good starters, she and husband Nick bought an 80 sq ft Home Depot shed, ripped it up, added a taller roof, and somehow zhuzhed it into a gorgeous little spot called, yes, Shed, in their backyard. Why rent a shop when you can just build one from the hardware store? 🤔

3. Fabric, actually. And while walking around SXSW London this week, I saw a huge billboard for a company called Empee. The tagline: “Make anything. Fabric for every business idea.” I googled it, having never heard of the brand. Surely just another B2B SaaS or agentic AI startup. But I was so pleasantly surprised to find out it was… literally… fabric. 🧵

CEO Robert Wiesenberg’s grandfather started a fabric shop called Empee in the 1940s, just around the corner from Brick Lane. Today it’s a much bigger company with a 25,000 square foot warehouse. But Robert and team have returned to the original Empee shop and wrapped the building with a sign, to show all the wandering creatives from around the world that “we’re still helping creative businesses grow.” Chef’s kiss.

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In 2018, Jenny Gyllander started an Instagram account to post honest reviews of all the shiny new direct-to-consumer brands clogging her feed.

She called it Thingtesting. It was just an evenings-and-weekends thing which she ran on the side of her day job... until it became something much bigger. Her eureka idea: create the DTC brand equivalent of Goodreads or IMDB: an unbiased, third-party review platform. And so, in 2020, thingtesting.com was launched.

Since then, Thingtesting has turned into a real global community of brand-testers, the sort of people who love spotting, using, and rating new beauty, food and fashion products. Jenny’s raised ~$6 million for the biz, which has grown to over 1 million shoppers a month. Then, last year, it was acquired by the affiliate marketing platform ShopMy. And in what is clearly the most significant moment in the company’s journey, they featured For Starters in their newsletter yesterday. 🙂

→ Below, Jenny tells us the moment her hobby turned into a biz, the trends she’s obsessed with, and the ones that are starting to bore her...

💬 Hey Jenny. You ran Thingtesting as a side hustle before going all-in. What was the moment it stopped being just a hobby?

Honestly, when I started Thingtesting I had zero plans for it to become a company. It was just an Instagram account and an outlet to share my thoughts on new brands. But a few things started happening that made me rethink that. The account following was growing, I was starting to make some money from it, and then there was this feeling – hard to describe but very real – of market pull. Like, a lot of people wanted more, something was missing in this space, and I wanted to be the one to build it. Without that last part, I don’t think I would have made the jump.

💬 You sold Thingtesting last year. Was selling always part of the plan or did it sneak up on you? How’d you end up making that call?

Selling was never the destination for me, same as starting the company wasn’t really “planned” either. When you take on VC – which we did, I raised about $6 million total – the goalpost is more about building towards a big vision, hitting milestones, always asking where do we want to be 18 months from now. That’s the mode I was in. Then in the middle of a fundraising sprint, a couple of acquisition offers landed in front of me. That’s when I actually started taking it seriously. With ShopMy it just felt natural – the cultures matched, the founders had a really similar vision to ours, and all those signals added up. 

💬 What are some brands/trends you’re obsessed with at the moment?

Several hundred new brands get added to Thingtesting every week and we look at all of them, so yeah, my baseline for “normal” is pretty skewed at this point, haha. Right now a few things are genuinely exciting me…

💬 How about some you reckon are about to flame out or you’re sick of?

Protein-in-everything. And the endless wave of new drink brands – NA drinks, electrolytes, sodas, you name it. I genuinely thought both trends would have fizzled by now but here we are, still tens of new brands launching in each every single week. There seems to be endless runway which I have a hard time understanding.

💬 Imagine a For Starters reader is launching their brand next month. What’s a subtle detail – whether the idea itself or the packaging, etc – that makes you go, ‘Ah, right, they get it’, versus one you’d scroll right past?

It always comes down to three things: product quality, real care and understanding of your customers, and a strong brand world. None of those are negotiable, but of the three, product quality is the one I come back to most. The brands that get it right are the ones that went through prototype after prototype before launching, that can genuinely stand behind their ingredients and what they’ve made. I’ve never heard a founder say they regret spending too long on that. 

💬 What are you reading, watching and listening to lately?

Like a lot of people right now I’m craving real world, tactile things. I don’t know if it’s an anti-AI reaction or what, but that’s where my head is at. I also have small kids so my time is pretty limited, and combining kid-friendly with physical experiences is actually not that hard – it’s a lot of nature, being outside (thank god for SF), gardening, cooking, physical books. I’ve also gotten really into photography lately. When I am listening to something it’s usually an audiobook while cooking, or Fashion Neurosis with Bella Freud – a great podcast while doing things with your hands.

💬 What’s a product or brand you’ve personally rebought the most times?

This probably isn’t a surprise but I almost always want to test something new over repurchasing something I already know. There’s always this feeling that something better is out there to try. Subscribing or repurchasing is genuinely rare for me, and most of my personal spend goes to thrifting sites like The RealReal or ThredUp anyway. 

But if I really have to answer – a few things I keep coming back to: Bawi’s passion fruit soda, TruFru’s chocolate desserts, Crown Affair’s dry shampoo, and Saie’s beauty products. All reviewed on Thingtesting or can be found on my ShopMy. ☼

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Mango parties 🥭 → “What began as a casual meeting of eight friends sharing a box of mangoes in 2023 has ballooned into an hours-long extravaganza backed by silent sponsors, who help cover the cost.” I tip my hat to you, silent mango sponsors.

Shrinkflation 🤏 → Is it illegal now in Europe?

Patinamaxxing 🫡 → I’ve now read two recent articles on patina; just one more and I’m calling it a thing.

People aren’t thinking about you as much as you think about yourself 🥸 → Thus: “If you launch and no one notices, launch again,” said Airbnb founder Brian Chesky in 2013. “We launched 3 times.”

Museum gift shops 🧑‍🎨 → “Curated edits mean people are now beginning to treat them as a stand-alone shopping destination.”

From potatoes to padel 🥔 → Farmers are repurposing old potato barns into padel courts to diversify revenue. A new FT piece about it here (£), and an interview with farmer Callum Stark from last year here.

Bro-less tech 🙇‍♂ → “A growing cohort of queers and femmes are building tech on their own terms.”

Pothole vigilantes ⛏ → Crap roads from Manchester to Manhattan have caused ordinary citizens to become starters…. in a different way: “One day I thought, that’s enough.”

Vibecoding CEOs 😡 → The words sending a shudder down the back of employees everywhere: “The boss built a thing and he wants you to take a look.”

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What can a person learn in 10 minutes that will be useful for life? — A list.

Certified Human — A simple way to let the world know that you are a writer, not a prompter. (It records keystroke timing and produces a badge that shows that a piece was composed by a human during that session.)

Brik — A creative coding tool for motion design.

A complete guide to the creator economy — By Hyper’s Oren John.

Worth paying for — Fly By Jing’s premium chili crisp requires 18 ingredients in order to create the complex flavor founder Jing Gao grew up with in Chengdu. So she priced her product 3 to 4 times higher than mass-market varieties from the start, then spent years convincing Americans that a Chinese pantry staple was worth it. The early days were rough – her first Kickstarter-funded shipment arrived for some customers as shattered glass and chili oil in a manila envelope. But Fly By Jing is now in 12,000 stores, including Walmart, and even had a cameo on Netflix. The story of how she did it is on Shopify’s newsletter In Stock. Tons of valuable lessons here for starters → Get the playbook ✨

The 250-year-old company that survived by refusing to lay people off. Big Think

Early June’s Camille Machet on running Paris’s beloved chef-residency restaurant. Service95

We ask industry mentors the practical questions young designers are often left to figure out alone. 1Granary

This bookstore gets good mileage. NYT

I talk to dozens of outdoor founders every year. I back two, maybe three. Here’s what separates them. Notes from the Boat

What will be scarce? Ghosts of Electricity

After a high school student asked if I’d followed my dream, I realized I needed to quit teaching. This year my business is on track to make $200K. Entrepreneur

How I built a $2.8 million a year ice cream company. Make It

100% → The year-on-year jump in medjool date sales at Ocado, with searches for date butter and chocolate dates up 458% and 135%. Meanwhile at the annual emerging snacks/food trade show Expo West in March, there were 250 date-based products.

Avian visitors

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1. A massive pistachio-filled congrats to longtime For Starters subscriber Roy Donk (above), founder of New York’s very own Good Baklava, who just got profiled in the New York Times. Doesn’t get much bigger than that. Also that photo is pretty epic. Article here + IG post here 👏

2. And lotssss of you were interested in last week’s story about Everlane founder Michael Preysman’s new project. If you haven’t signed up to his newsletter, he sent out his first dispatch the other day: “I launched Still Radical not just because Everlane was sold to Shein, but because it’s time to rethink how we buy again. Retail is a mess, and much of what I love is missing: quality, consideration, even curation,” he wrote. “Everything is faster, cheaper, and more disposable every day. AI and TikTok are making this worse. It’s too much. I am desperate for countermeasures. You may be too.”

→ He says Still Radical won’t be the actual brand name, that they’ll never take venture capital, and that they won’t have any social media (!) 👀

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