Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your Tuesday & Friday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

Renting the Internet

Connecting… One of my favorite things in the world is to get DMs for Ghost Biz recommendations. This one came in from Twitter, shout out to my guy @bryantferate.

The short of the long; there’s a guy renting Starlink terminals (satellite internet) to folks camping in his area. This checked a few boxes for me:

• Side hustle ✅ 

• Never heard of it ✅ 

• Buying something once, selling it twice ✅ 

Turns out, a few folks are already doing this. Utah based, Borrow Starlink has business ($55/day) and personal ($30/day) internet service options as well as solar and battery packs. You can find this offer on FB marketplace as well.

The market has spoken, Starlink rental internet is valued at $30/day (makes my job easy)

So naturally I had to dive into this one to break it down and see what it would take for me to reproduce this and how I would scale it.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

🦖… Starting this out seems pretty straight forward, but pricey. Starlinks can go for $600 for the equipment and $120/mo for the service. If we’re renting these out for $30/day, we’ll need to book 24 days to break even (($600+$120) / $30) 🥵

THEN we’ll need to book it out 4 days a month, to break even from regular the monthly service fee 🥵🥵

So do this I would:

1. Research how to rent out a starlink portal (equipment, shipping, login issues, etc)

2. Post a rental in my nearby; camping, beach, lake, festival town

3. Get an interested party

4. Purchase a starlink portal and plan (with expedited delivery)

How much can we make doing this?

• Rent for $30/day

• Book ~75% of the month (23 days) during high season = $690

• Book ~25% of the month (8 days) during low season = $240

• Monthly expenses = $120

• Income ranges from $120 to $570 per month

Not bad! 📡 

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

More sats… Scaling your satellite game should be easy. You just… buy more Starlinks… 📡 

Of course you’ll be learning about new expenses, broken equipment, shipping delays, etc but those are fairly standard things to learn in the rental game.

So to get our next 100 customers I would:

• Create a landing page with some sweet SEO

• Create a Google biz for people to find me

• Post on FB marketplaces in other camping/beach town areas

• Scale up my ad campaigns during music festival (music festival camping is notorious for having poor cell service) and camping seasons

The End Goal

Surfing and browsing… continuing down this side hustle path can really only mean one thing. Many, MANY satellites… You would be in multiple camping/beach/festival areas targeting customers. You would have at least 100 Starlink rentals going, making at most $3,000 per day (about ~$1m a year)

Other ways you can make more cash in this hustle:

• Setting up booths at festivals with camp sites

• Providing an “internet” option for remote AirBnbs

• Being a “partner” with RV rental companies to be an internet provider option

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Internet is pricey, getting this going is no easy ghost. There’s a decent up front cost but worst case scenario, you don’t get any customers and you have awesome internet.

The trick here is to learn troubleshooting issues early; customer issues, equipment malfunctions, shipping delays, etc.

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea 😉)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋