The lab. Tiny, simple businesses launched openly: small budgets, short deadlines, honest numbers, each one distilled into a playbook anyone can follow. A new project, live at minihustles.com.
The live site, as it looks this week. Numbers move every Sunday.
The Local Business MBA teaches the path. Mini Hustles walks it in public, proving, over and over, that the fundamentals still work, at the smallest possible scale.
Each mini hustle starts with a small budget, a short deadline, and one constraint carried over from everything I’ve built: it has to run without me.
Revenue, costs, hours, mistakes: published as they happen, not curated afterwards. The failures stay in. That’s the point of a lab.
When an experiment ends, it’s written up as a step-by-step playbook: what it cost, what it returned, and exactly how to run it yourself.
Each capped at a thousand dollars and a slice of a twenty-hour week. The ones that die go to a public graveyard, with a post-mortem. The five on the bench right now:
Group coaching calls, playbooks, and peer accountability for local business owners. High-touch enough to charge real money, group-based enough to fit the hour budget.
A done-for-you weekly newsletter for small towns: I write it, local businesses sponsor it, and the town gets news that isn’t on Facebook.
The meta one: the dashboard, the weekly notes, and the guides. The other four experiments make the content; this one publishes the truth.
Workouts earn XP: log sessions, level up, join weekly raid challenges. For the leaderboard, roles, and accountability.
One business book a month, turned into an action plan you actually run. Accountability, not just discussion.
Experiment-by-experiment detail lives on minihustles.com; this page keeps the headline ledger.
“Most business advice is written from memory, years after the fact. A lab publishes its notebook while the experiment is still running.”
The build, the numbers, and the playbooks, live at minihustles.com, with commentary in the letter.