👻 There's only one person doing this

If you’re new here, we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles. Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your (mostly) weekly email

TLDR;

• Super high demand business

• only one person doing this

• anyone can do this

I’m going to start every email with an ad… (please click it to help support this newsletter 😍)

Someone just spent $236,000,000 on a painting. Here’s why it matters for your wallet.

The WSJ just reported the highest price ever paid for modern art at auction.

While equities, gold, bitcoin hover near highs, the art market is showing signs of early recovery after one of the longest downturns since the 1990s.

Here’s where it gets interesting→

Each investing environment is unique, but after the dot com crash, contemporary and post-war art grew ~24% a year for a decade, and after 2008, it grew ~11% annually for 12 years.*

Overall, the segment has outpaced the S&P by 15 percent with near-zero correlation from 1995 to 2025.

Now, Masterworks lets you invest in shares of artworks featuring legends like Banksy, Basquiat, and Picasso. Since 2019, investors have deployed $1.25 billion across 500+ artworks.

Masterworks has sold 25 works with net annualized returns like 14.6%, 17.6%, and 17.8%.

Shares can sell quickly, but my subscribers skip the waitlist:

Skip waitlist

_{*Per Masterworks data. Investing involves risk. Past performance not indicative of future returns. Important Reg A disclosures: masterworks.com/cd}

 🚨 this is that ad to click… remember? You promised! 👆🙏 

I write these newsletters daily on a platform called Beehiiv.

Side note: I’ve made about $1,100 writing the Ghost Business newsletter from referrals (boosts) and ads 👇

Beehiiv is super easy to use if you want to start a newsletter, just use this link for 20% off your first 3 months. Anyways…

I’ve been writing my other newsletter (kidfriendlyseattle.com) and needed a refined design for it. The Beehiiv web builder is pretty new and I was horrible at hacking it together myself.

I looked online to see who would design a Beehiiv site for me. I looked on Reddit, LinkedIn, and other the newsletter owner groups and only one person could share a team that does this: https://meetpixels.com/

Meet Pixels charges $3,000 for their CHEAPEST option 🤯 

So of course this had me thinking, how can we do this ourselves?

Let’s go

The MVP

This is incredibly easy to start and requires $0 upfront cost.

Who you target: People already publishing and trying to look legit. Specifically:

• Beehiiv public newsletter directory

• Substack newsletters with paid tiers turned on

• X posts saying “launched my newsletter” or “issue #1”

• Indie Hackers creators with an email list link

Reach out with: “Saw your newsletter. Content is solid, but your Beehiiv setup is leaving subs on the table. I recorded a 2-min Loom showing what I’d fix. No pitch unless it’s useful.”

If they reply YES then make the Loom:

• A 1-2 minute teardown of their existing Beehiiv or Substack page:

• Show a couple concrete fixes that would increase conversions

• Point to one monetization gap (paid tier, lead magnet, layout)

• End with a single sentence offer, no pitch deck

How this scales to $20k

Once one works, this becomes a system. Start getting reviews to your services by offering something cheap for one. Something like an extra log or fire color packs.

• Price: $1,000 per build

• Time per build once templatized: ~4–6 hours

• Weekly capacity solo: 5 builds

• Monthly capacity solo: ~20 builds

• Gross at full capacity: $20,000

Don’t forget you can also:

• 8 add-ons × $500 average = $4,000

• 10 retainers × $200/month = $2,000

• One premium build × $2,000 = $2,000

Viability:

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

Do this!!

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋 

p.s If you found this insight into the newsletter industry valuable, imagine how helpful it could be to someone else dreaming of starting their own hustle!

Hit the share button below to pass this on to a friend, colleague, or anyone who's ever thought about turning their passion into profit.