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The honest FAQ

Why do this in public?

Because every business guru shows you the highlight reel. I'd rather show you the ledger. I'm one person with twenty hours a week, five small bets, and a rule book taped to the wall. When something works, you see what it cost. When something dies, you see the autopsy.

The name says the rest: these are mini hustles — not startups, not empires. Businesses sized to fit around a life. The bet is that five small honest things compound into one meaningful thing.

Guiding principles

Borrowed from movement practice, applied to tiny businesses. They shape how everything here runs.

Beginner's mind (Shoshin)I've done this long enough to know better, so I'm starting from zero on purpose. Every experiment begins as if I know nothing: no audience leverage, no shortcuts, first customer earned by hand.
Containers, then no containersThe five rules are a container: $1,000, twenty shared hours, ninety days. You grow inside a constraint, and when you outgrow it, you discard it. An experiment that outgrows the lab graduates and gives up its slot.
Movement and stillnessShip all week, then stop. Sunday is stillness: the numbers go in, the note gets written, the review happens. The cadence is the practice; frantic hustle is just noise wearing a costume.
All models are wrong, some are usefulThe playbooks worked once, in one town, for one person. They're maps, not territory. Copy the process, not the answers, and expect your numbers to disagree with mine.
Meet Chris (not my first hustle)

I've been side-hustling long enough to end up in Side Hustle School (episode 87), Chris Guillebeau's bestselling 100 Side Hustles book, and on Side Hustle Nation. Those told the story after it worked. This is the other thing: live, from zero, where you watch it work or watch it die. The beginning is the part everyone lies about. This is the honest version.

Before this I spent years in the trenches with small and local business owners — coaching, teaching, and building the marketing systems that actually move the needle for a plumber, a café, or a gym. Thousands of them have used what I teach to win more customers without the guru fluff. The Skool coaching group (EXP-01) is that work distilled into a room and a playbook — which is exactly why it's the flagship.

Away from the lab I'm a husband, a lifter, and a serial starter of things who finally built a system to make the starting honest. The longer backstory — the businesses before this, the ones that worked and the ones that hurt — lives on my personal site.

More about me →
Where the rules came from
Under $1,000 in — because "I need funding" is usually "I need permission." A grand is enough to test whether strangers will pay you, and little enough to lose without lying about it.
Twenty shared hours a week — the constraint that keeps it honest. Every hour one experiment takes is an hour another starves. You can watch that fight on the dashboard.
Profitable in 90 days, reviewed at 30 — long enough for compounding to show up, short enough that hope doesn't become a strategy. Most verdicts come at day 30.
Must be fun — the rule everyone thinks is a joke until it kills a profitable experiment. It has. Misery compounds faster than revenue.
A real path to $10k/mo — "mini" describes the hours, not the ambition. If the ceiling is a hobby, it's a hobby. Nothing wrong with hobbies; they just don't get a slot.
The one promise

Every number on this site is real, posted within a week of happening, and never retroactively edited. If I inflate a number, kill the site. That's the deal — and it's the entire business model, so I'm unusually motivated to keep it.

Watch the numbers move.
The live numbers → The confessions →
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mini hustles · season 01: five little bets tiny but public · audited by nobody