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

Italian Ice

Ice ice baby… In case you didn’t know it’s hot outside. Like real f🤬cking hot. A great way to cool down is some frozen treats. Ice cream being the typical go to but what about the dairy free alternatives?

No I’m not talking about the soy, vegan, gluten free, fat free, kosher ice cream, I’m talkin Italian Turned Ice.

Summer Nights Italian Ice: “We make our Italian ice with real fruits. It’s much more like ice cream than a snow cone, but lighter, more refreshing, and low fat!”

I chatted with Mark Richardson, who started Summer Nights Italian Ice in Ammon, ID with his family.

So tell me about this hustle:

• We were just selling out of our front yard like a lemonade stand a couple nights a week that first summer.

• Within a couple of weeks the the traffic to our house became a little concerning with people lining up after parking on the side of the street.

• We modified our 1970s horse trailer and we use that for catering weddings and events.

• Our machine cost around $14k, which we covered in the first year

• One of our most lucrative events is our local farmers market that we go to every Saturday.

• One thing that sets us apart is that we try to use real fruit in our product instead of syrups and flavorings.

• This is our third summer & we’ve sold about 8,000 servings.

• Profitability is 45-60% and only run during the summer

Anyone else craving some right now?

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Ice 4 Sale… This is the definition of an MVP.

• Front yard sale ✅ 

• Low cost set up ✅ 

• Running it with your family ✅ 

I love everything about it. This is a reminder to all my side hustlers that you don’t need to have the final product in mind or even built to start your side hustle. This family started with maybe less than $100 and quickly built this up into a $20k SEASONAL biz 🤯 

This is plenty to test your concept and be action driven. Avoid analysis paralysis and just start selling some ice in your front yard. You’d be surprised with the results.

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

The ice farm… Growing a hustle is tough. Growing a food based hustle is tougher. After testing the waters (ice) on their yard, they jumped to the farmers market.

This is huge because it’s abides by one of my side hustle principles, SELL WHERE YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE.

They also did a ton of other stuff right

1. Set up a Google Biz and racked up a ton of 5 star reviews ⭐️

2. Have a clean website for where they will be selling next 💰

3. Have incredible high quality pics of the product 📸 

The only thing missing, is that I don’t have some in my mouth right now. (but we’ll let that slide)

Fun fact: This year they got booked to serve band members and crew behind the stage. By far the easiest and most profitable arrangement 🎸 🤝 🍧 

Viability:

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

The Ice is Right, the food hustles are surprisingly easy to start BUT tough to keep up. This is speaking from experience (I used to own a waffle stand)

I compare selling food to selling hand grenades with the pins pulled. You have a short timeline before your product expires (or explodes).

People are always hungry and looking for the next best thing to put in their mouth. Put what a lot of entrepreneurs getting into the food game aren’t aware of is the daily prep, set up, take down and clean up (in addition to doing actual sales) that can feel like a cheese grater on the soul.

(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 👋