Mini Hustles is where I test small business ideas with a fixed budget, a limited number of hours, and no permission to hide an inconvenient result. The answer lives in the ledger, not the launch announcement. Live at minihustles.com.
The live ledger and the week-by-week notes are at minihustles.com.
It is easy to keep a weak idea alive because you have already named it, announced it, or spent six months building it. I prefer a smaller agreement: put a defined amount at risk, give the idea a fair test, count the hours, and continue only when the evidence earns another round.
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.
Cash collected, costs, and owner hours, published as they happen, not curated afterwards. The failures stay in. That’s the point of a lab.
When an experiment has produced enough evidence to teach responsibly, it becomes a step-by-step guide: what it cost, what it returned, and what I would do differently.
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.
These experiments begin at zero revenue, not zero experience. I bring an audience, operating history, and distribution, and those advantages are disclosed because they affect the result.
“Most business advice is written from memory, years after the fact. A lab publishes its notebook while the experiment is still running.”
The live numbers, weekly field notes, and final verdicts, at minihustles.com, with commentary in the letter.