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

Stencil 4 cash

WFN aka Work From Neighborhood… I used to live in an HOA neighborhood. It was the worst. If you want to know what it’s like living with an HOA, it’s like paying to live at your parents house without access to the fridge.

Anyways, these neighborhoods are great targets for door to door folks selling services. Here’s a list of some of the flyers I’ve received at this home:

• Garage door maintenance

• Window cleaning

• Solar panel installation

• Cleaning service

• Pool service

• Pest exterminators

• Duct cleaning

• HVAC service

• and finally House Number Reflective Sidewalk Stencils

One of these does not match with the rest.

I like this. This intrigues me. Tell me everything.

Turns out this is really a thing, here’s how it works:

1. Someone drops off a flyer

2. The flyer has an option to complete a form online (with pricing and options) or complete the flyer & stick it on your mailbox

3. Someone acknowledges the completed form/flyer

4. Someone stencils your request on the sidewalk

5. You pay someone money

This checks my boxes in ways you wouldn’t imagine: ✅ kinda weird ✅ low cost start up ✅ can set your own hours ✅ can work from your neighborhood

So of course I had to figure out how much it would cost to start this business and how much could you make doing it.

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Mail man delivers… Door hangers and flyers is by far the best approach for this. Ideally you want to start in a neighborhood that looks like the below. High concentration of houses so you can effectively drop off flyers (and get your steps in for the day)

Make it as easy as possible and provide step by step instructions on how customers can… become customers. Highlight the benefits and make a quick and easy form.

To plan; I would hit up the houses during the week then paint on the weekends.

This will cost:

• $25 for stencils

• $40 for reflective spray paint

• $20 for bulk printing flyers

All in $85

Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Same paint, different hood… Now it turns into a numbers game. You can keep going after work, or hire out folks to drop flyers and door hangers for you.

All you have to do is figure out which neighborhood you want to hit, print flyers, drop them off, and paint on weekends.

So how much could we make doing this?

• Charge $10 per house

• Time about 5 min per house (including commute)

• Work about 10 hours a weekend

• Comes out to about $250 a weekend or $1000 a month

Hot tip: There are also services that will print and drop off flyers for you in specific neighborhoods you choose 😎 

Viability:

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

Painting in the lines… this is so easy to start and takes very little cash. After getting this off the ground, this can turn into a very easy side hustle for anyone looking to cover a few extra bills this month.

(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 👋