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

Flipped Off

Commonly uncommon… People love making some side cash. That’s probably why you’re here. In case you haven’t noticed, I also love some sweet side cash (who doesn’t). So today, I’m going to (virtually) flip some stuff to see how much money we can make.

So let’s set some ground rules:

• Can’t be something specialized (like antique tool sets)

• Can’t cost more than $100 to start

• Set a goal of making $1,000/mo

• Don’t want it to take more than 5 hours a week

Okay, how would I get started?

I would go to the free and for sale pages on Facebook marketplace and Offerup. But why?

I’d do this because I want to buy (or get free) used things and sell them for a mark up. Immediately, I found an easy category: Plant Pots & Vases.

I like these for the below data. Searches for house plants are on a steady rise and they always need a home aka plant pots.

I like them other reasons: they are small, can be delivered/picked up in a regular car, can be shipped easily, and can be found free relatively easily.

Okay but how much would it cost to start this plant pot hustle?

1. Get a handful of plant pots ~$20

2. Create the shortest list ever ✅ 

Total: $20

Not bad! We can find a bunch of FREE pots on Facebook like the below:

Keep in mind, these are all 100% free and we haven’t spent $1 yet 😎 

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Re-pot… This might be the easiest way yet. Group your pots into 3 sizes; small $5, medium $10, large $20+. Now group them by material; plastic +$0, metal +$3, ceramic +$5, terracotta +$8 (something like that)

Congrats, you now have an easy pricing guide 🪴 

Now post high quality photos of your inventory. Hot tip: use the same blank background and add something (like a banana or ruler) for scale so people know how big the pot is.

Use your standard pricing guide we just created and post these high quality photos on OfferUp, FB Marketplace, and your neighborhood plant groups.

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

More inventory, more problems… Now it will be difficult to build up into your month goal, but not impossible.

After selling for a few weeks you’ll learn:

1. which pots are the easiest to find for free

2. which pots have the best mark ups

3. which pots are in the highest demand

THEN you’ll use that data to buy more used pots because now you understand the resale value. This will also allow you to start buying wholesale bulk to add to the inventory based on demand.

Many of these pots (below) on OfferUp in my area go for $20+

If you could estimate making around $10 profit/ per pot, you would only need to sell 100 per month to make that $1k/mo target.

This comes out to about 25 sales / week and has all of the fixings to be a solid side hustle with little to no upfront investment 👍

Viability:

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

Roses are red… violets are blue, they both live in pots, so sell pots. Okay my poetic rhythm needs some work but this side hustle idea is solid (and easy).

Final pro-tip: When looking for things to flip, use the search term “divorce” or “moving”. These are often folks looking to offload all of the stuff in a hurry, which means deals on deals. (sorry if that offends anyone, I just like deals 😬)

(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 👋