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DEEP DIVE

A five-person team makes eight figures a year valuing people’s Pokémon cards. Here are 11 other hobbies where no one has built the same app.

There is an app that does one thing: it tells you what the cards in your shoebox are worth.

You point your phone at a card. It recognises it, pulls the last few sale prices from eBay and TCGplayer, and adds it to your collection. Then it shows you the total, like a stock portfolio. Up 4% this week. Down 2% last month. Your best-performing card. Your worst.

That’s it. That’s the business.

It’s called Collectr, it’s run by five people out of Toronto, and it now does eight-figure annual recurring revenue.

Over four million people have used it. It tracks more than 600 million cards worth over $1.5 billion in total. And for the first three years, it made five figures a year.

So what changed? One subscription tier, $7.99 a month, launched in late 2024. Within six months revenue had gone up by three orders of magnitude.

They’ve never spent a dollar on advertising. Andreessen Horowitz called. They said no.

Now, your first reaction is probably mine: “That’s a Pokémon fad. The market will crash and so will they.”

Maybe. But look at the hobby underneath it. PSA, the biggest card-grading company, was grading about 15,000 cards a day in 2021. In 2025 it was grading 90,000 a day. Across all the graders, 26.8 million cards were graded last year, up 32% on the year before. On eBay alone, trading card singles did $2.62 billion in sales in 2025. (figures compiled by VoxBooster, with original sources)

These aren’t kids trading at school. These are adults who own thousands of cards, think of them as assets, and have no idea what the pile is worth on any given Tuesday.

That’s the actual product. Not card recognition. Not price data, which is public.

The product is turning a physical hobby into a number that goes up and down, and letting people check it the way they check a stock app.

And once you see it that way, cards are just the first category. People collect watches, whisky, vinyl, Lego, comics, coins, sneakers and vintage guitars with the same intensity, the same shoebox, and the same question. Most of those have nobody doing this properly.

We are going to cover:

• How two founders went from selling a mortgage startup to opening $3 Pokémon packs on their lunch break, and why that pack is the whole origin story.

• The four tests for a “collection portfolio” business. The fourth is what separates a $7.99 subscription from a free price-lookup tool.

• Why they made five figures a year for three years, and the three revenue layers that eventually stacked on top of each other.

• The distribution trick: 5,000 users in 24 hours from forum posts, and why collectors are the easiest audience on the internet to reach for free.

• 11 collectible categories where the same model is open right now, plus 5 where it isn’t.

• Where this breaks, including the one dependency that could wipe out the price data overnight.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

Pharma spends $6,500 to find one patient, and half of all research sites find zero. A boring business opportunity nobody is competing for.

A pharmaceutical company is running a trial for a new eczema drug. They need 200 people with moderate-to-severe eczema, aged 18 to 65, not currently on biologics.

They cannot find them.

Not because those people don’t exist. There are millions. The company just has no way to reach them. So the trial sits at 40% enrolled, month after month, while the patent clock ticks and the burn rate keeps burning.

At that point somebody picks up the phone and pays an outside firm to go find those people.

Here is what that firm actually does: runs Facebook ads.

I want to be careful not to make that sound cuter than it is, because the compliance layer is real and we will get to it in detail. But strip it back and this is a paid media business with a customer who is desperate, price-insensitive, and has a hard deadline.

The numbers that make this worth reading:'

• The average cost to recruit a single trial patient is over $6,500, and roughly $19,000 to replace one who drops out. (R&D Partners)

• Patient recruitment is around 32% of total trial cost, the single largest cost line in the whole thing. (BioPharma Dive)

• 80% of trials miss their enrollment timeline, and delays can cost drug developers as much as $8 million per day. (JMIR / NIH)

• 50% of research sites enroll zero patients. Not “too few.” Zero. (Mordor Intelligence)

• The recruitment and retention services market is around $4.49B in 2026, growing steadily, and the top five players hold only about 35% of it. (The Business Research Company, 24 Life Sciences)

That last stat is the one to sit with. Sixty-five percent of a multi-billion dollar market is not held by the giants. It is spread across specialists, boutiques, and small agencies you have never heard of.

“But surely this is too regulated for me to just do”

That objection is exactly why the opportunity is still sitting there.

Yes, there are rules. Every ad gets approved before it runs, and there is one payment structure you must never use.

But the wall is paperwork, not a licence. No exam, no certification body, no registration. Nobody checks your credentials. You do not need a medical degree or a pharma CV. The rules govern what your ad says and how you get paid, not who you are.

It is about two weeks of reading. And that reading is the whole moat. Every performance marketer who sees “IRB approval required” and closes the tab is a competitor who does not exist.

What this edition covers

This is the full operational breakdown, not a concept piece:

• The exact money math, including what agencies charge, what it actually costs to acquire a patient, and where the margin sits

• The four types of buyer, ranked by how realistically you can reach them in your first year, because the obvious one is the wrong one

• The finder’s fee rule and the precise distinction that decides whether your pricing model is legitimate or unethical. Most people get this backwards

• How to find live trials to pitch, with the specific databases and the filter method that surfaces studies that are visibly struggling

• The cold outreach angle that works on research sites, plus the free audit offer that gets replies

• The campaign build, from IRB submission strategy to prescreener design to the site handoff

• How to structure so you never touch protected health data

• Real numbers from small operators in this space, including one run by a single founder out of India

• A 90-day plan and an honest list of who should not do this

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

A solo founder makes $350K a year from golf tournament software. Here are 12 other sports and hobbies still stuck with software everyone hates.

There is a guy who makes $30,000 to $40,000 a month from golf tournaments.

Not from playing in them, and not from running them. He sells the software that keeps score.

Here’s the whole product.

Golfers at a club tournament scan a QR code on their paper scorecard. They type in their scores. A leaderboard in the clubhouse updates live.

The pro shop prints the cart signs, the tee sheets and the bag tags off the same system. When it’s over, it works out who won the side games and how much everyone gets paid.

That’s it. That’s the business.

His name is Matt Robinson. About 150 golf courses pay him, and the software does roughly $350K a year in recurring revenue. He built it alone. No co-founder, no investors, no ads. For about four years he worked on it from 6 to 9 in the morning and on weekends, then went to his job as an engineer at Meta. In July 2026, a few days after Meta’s latest round of layoffs, he resigned. He wasn’t one of the people cut. The golf software had simply started paying him more than Meta was.

My first reaction was probably the same as yours: “There’s already software for this.”

There is. It’s called Golf Genius, it’s been around since 2009, and thousands of clubs use it. So Robinson isn’t building in an empty market. He’s taking customers away from a well-established company, one course at a time.

And here’s the part that made me look twice. He isn’t cheaper.

Golf Genius’s entry plan for tournament management is $1,300 a year plus a $200 setup fee. Robinson’s main plan is $2,700 a year. He’s charging roughly double and winning anyway.

So he isn’t winning on price. He’s winning because golf pros can’t stand the tool they’ve been using, and he built the one they actually want to use on a Saturday morning.

That pattern has nothing to do with golf. It’s sitting in bowling alleys, dance studios, swim meets, fishing tournaments and dog shows. Anywhere a volunteer or a small-business owner has to run an event every weekend on software they quietly hate.

We are going to cover:

• How one complaint from a club pro turned into 150 paying courses with no marketing, and why four years of 6am mornings mattered more than the idea.

• The four tests for a “hated incumbent” business. The fourth is what lets you charge more than the company you’re replacing.

• What the product actually has to do, and the one question that tells you what to build first.

• The pricing logic: why he charges double, and what the $199 single-event plan is really for.

• 12 event-driven niches where the same gap looks open right now, plus 4 that look open but aren’t.

• Where this breaks, including the maths on how hard it is to get from $350K to $1M.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

Three brothers in Poland make $10M a year selling passport photos online. Here are 12 other things a bureaucracy will pay you to get right.

There is a company that makes $10 million a year from passport photos.

Not cameras. Not photo booths, though they started there. Passport photos. The small, boring, unsmiling square you need every ten years and dread every single time.

Here’s the whole product. You open an app. You take a selfie against a wall. Their software finds your face, straightens your head, swaps the background for the exact white your country demands, and crops it to the millimetre. Then a human looks at it, because the software is good but governments are picky. You get a digital file in minutes, or prints in the post.

That’s it. That’s the business.

It’s called PhotoAiD, it’s run by three brothers from Poland, Tomasz, Marcin and Rafał Młodzki, and it did $10 million in revenue in 2023. They say they now take about 11 million passport and visa photos a year, which makes them the biggest passport photo service in the world. They’ve made the Financial Times list of Europe’s fastest-growing companies three years running. About 100 people work there.

Now, I’ll be honest about my first reaction, because you’re probably having it too. “That’s a feature. Any photo app can crop a square.”

Correct. Cropping a square is free. And yet here’s a $10 million business built on exactly that. So the money clearly isn’t in the cropping.

The money is in something much stranger.

There are over 150 countries in the world and almost every one has its own rules for what an acceptable ID photo looks like. Head size, eye position, background shade, file size, whether you can show teeth. The rules are public. They’re also scattered across hundreds of government websites, written in bureaucrat, and enforced by people who will put your application on hold for a shadow under your chin. The US State Department says unacceptable photos are the number one reason passport applications get put on hold.

PhotoAiD didn’t build a better camera. They built the one place that knows all the rules, checks your photo against them, and promises it’ll pass.

That pattern has nothing to do with photos. It’s sitting unexploited in a dozen other corners of every bureaucracy on earth.

We are going to cover:

• Why did a photo booth company become an app company, and what happened when they bought their investor out?

• The four tests for a “bureaucracy gap” business. The fourth one is what separates a $10M company from a free tool.

• How you build the rules database that is the real product, and why AI makes it ten times cheaper than it was in 2020.

• The pricing logic: why they charge per photo, not per month, and what the pharmacy down the street has to do with it.

• 12 bureaucracy gaps where the same model is open right now, plus 4 that look open but aren’t.

• Where this breaks, including the uncomfortable fact that governments are starting to do this themselves.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

A solo developer makes $32K a month from a tool that takes screenshots of websites. Here are 12 boring APIs you could build next, and the one number that decides how big they get.

There’s a business that does exactly one thing. You send it a web address. It sends you back a picture of that web page.

That’s it. That’s the product.

I know. When I first read about it I thought, surely that’s a free feature somewhere. Surely Google does that. Surely you can just press a button on your phone. And you can, if you want one screenshot. But if you’re a company that needs 50,000 screenshots a month, automatically, with the cookie banners removed, the ads blocked, the lazy images loaded and the fonts not broken, it turns out you really, really don’t want to build that yourself.

So you pay ScreenshotOne.

It’s run by one guy. Dmytro Krasun, a server-side engineer who quit his job and launched it solo in May 2022. No funding, no cofounder, no employees. Today it does $32,000 a month across more than 1,000 paying customers, and it’s served over 100 million API requests.

The first month it made $7.

Now here’s why I actually wanted to write this one.

Most business stories stop at the good number. This one doesn’t, because Dmytro did something almost nobody does. Earlier this year he posted publicly that his growth had stalled. Then Jason Cohen, the founder of WP Engine, offered to go through every number in the business live on camera. Dmytro said yes. He opened the dashboard. And Jason told him, pretty much to his face, that the business had hit a ceiling that no amount of hard work would break through.

That hour is the most useful thing I’ve found on the internet about building a boring software business. Not because of the success. Because of the ceiling, and because the reason for the ceiling is something you can check before you build anything.

So this issue is two things. The playbook for the “boring infrastructure API” model, the unglamorous plumbing that other companies pay for so they don’t have to build it. And the one number that decides how big any of these gets, which is the thing most people never think about until it’s too late.

We are going to cover:

• How does a one-person API get 1,000 customers with no sales team and almost no blog? The traffic system is sitting in plain view on his website, and I’ll walk through it page by page.

• The formula that told Dmytro exactly where his business would stop growing, and how to run it on your own idea in five minutes.

• The stickiness test: why the same product can be a $30K business or a $300K business depending on one question.

• 12 boring APIs you could build next, scored on how sticky their customers are, plus 3 I’d avoid.

• The new distribution channel both Dmytro and Jason landed on, which barely existed two years ago.

• Where this model breaks, including the part about not having taken a real vacation in three years.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

A 22-year-old built a search box for airline award seats. It’s now $8M a year, and he still has no employees.

In June 2022, a 22-year-old security researcher got annoyed at how bad airline websites are.

That’s the whole origin story. Ian Carroll had a pile of points, wanted to fly business class, and discovered that finding a seat meant opening twenty airline websites and checking one route, on one date, in one loyalty program, over and over, for hours.

So he wrote a script that did the checking for him. Then he put a search box in front of it and called it Seats.aero.

Eighteen months later he posted this on LinkedIn: $1.5M in ARR, over a million pageviews a month, entirely bootstrapped, no full-time employees besides himself.

By March 2025 he tweeted the update: $8M ARR, 500,000 monthly active users, still fully bootstrapped, and he was only now thinking he’d have to hire someone. His words: he’d hit the limit of being solo where you start hampering your own progress.

Eight million dollars a year. From a search box.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, because I thought it too. “That’s a travel-hacking tool. I’m not building a travel-hacking tool.”

Correct. You’re not. But look at what he actually sells. It’s not content, and it’s not a database of fixed facts like the tractor specs site we covered last time. It’s something stranger. It’s live availability data that the airlines already have, but only let you see one query at a time. Ian just did the queries for everyone and charged $9.99 a month for the results.

That pattern has almost nothing to do with airlines. And it’s sitting untouched in at least a dozen other places.

We will be covering:

• What exactly did he build, and why do 500,000 people a month keep typing the URL directly instead of Googling it?

• The four tests that decide whether a category can support this model. Most ideas fail two of them.

• How he gets the data when the airlines don’t want him to have it, and what happened when Air Canada sued.

• The pricing ladder: why $9.99 works when the product is worth thousands, and where the real money comes from.

• 12 categories where the same model is open right now, plus 5 that look open but aren’t, and 3 I’d tell you not to touch.

• Where this breaks.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

A one-man website of tractor specs makes $46,000 a month. There are 14 categories where you can build the same thing.

60,000 people a day visit a website that lists the horsepower of tractors.

I know how that sounds. When I say tractor website you’re probably picturing news, reviews, maybe a buying guide. It’s none of that. It’s specs. Just specs. Engine displacement, PTO horsepower, wheelbase, hydraulic flow, what year the thing was made. One row per model. 17,788 models. 173 brands.

That’s the whole site. A giant table.

It’s called TractorData.com, and one guy runs it. Peter Easterlund, out of Prior Lake, Minnesota. You don’t have to take my word for the scale of it either. His own contact page says the site gets over 60,000 visitors on any given day, and right underneath, almost apologetically, that he reads every email himself because “I am one person.”

It pulls around $46,000 a month on 1.2 million monthly visits, nearly all of it display ads. It’s making $500,000 a year with no staff, no inventory, no customer support queue, and a website design that hasn’t meaningfully changed in a decade.

Now here’s the part I actually want you to sit with.

TractorData isn’t a tractor business. It’s a spec database business. Tractors are just the thing Peter happened to grow up around. The model underneath it is sitting wide open in a dozen other categories right now, where people type a model number into Google every single day and land on a forum post from 2011 with three replies and no answer.

This issue is about finding one of those and building the site that owns it.

Below the paywall:

• Why did a site that started as a college fan page in 2000 survive Panda, three core updates, and now AI Overviews, when review blogs with ten times the writing got wiped out?

• What’s the one thing you can see in a search result that tells you a category is still open?

• How do you compile 5,000 to 15,000 rows of spec data in 60 days without turning yourself into a data-entry clerk, and where does the data legally come from?

• Which 14 categories look open right now, and which 6 look open but are already taken?

• What’s Peter leaving on the table, and what’s the revenue stack you’d build instead?

• Where does this thing break?

Read more

Here’s today at a glance -

• Steal this ideas: Duolingo for posture, Credit Karma for AI tools & Etsy for LEGO builds.

• Side hustles & passive income: $5K/weekend slumber parties, $5.7K AI agency & passive shed income.

• Real businesses: $81K/month calorie app, $565K land clearing & $2.3M burrito shed.

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🥷 STEAL THIS BUSINESS IDEA

Steal this business idea: Duolingo for posture

Millions of people sit all day, stare at screens, and slowly destroy their posture without realizing it. “How to fix posture” gets hundreds of thousands of searches every month, but most solutions are either boring YouTube exercises or posture correctors people stop using after three days.

The opportunity?

Build a posture app that quietly runs in the background and gives users a real posture score throughout the day.

AirPods, webcams, phone cameras, and wearables already have enough sensors to detect slouching, head tilt, and movement patterns. The app tracks posture passively while people work, study, or scroll.

The hook is the feedback loop:

• Daily posture score

• Weekly progress trends

• “You slouched 37% less this week”

• Gentle nudges when posture gets bad

• Streaks, levels, and gamification like Duolingo

The paid version could unlock:

• PT-designed stretch programs

• Personalized correction plans based on age, height, and habits

• Desk setup recommendations

• Recovery programs for tech neck and lower back pain

This works because posture problems are emotional as much as physical. People want to look healthier, feel more confident, and avoid pain - especially younger remote workers spending 8-10 hours at desks.

Most health apps focus on workouts. Very few focus on what your body is doing for the other 23 hours of the day. That’s the gap.

Steal this business idea: Credit Karma for AI tools.

People are installing AI browser extensions, inbox assistants, coding agents, and random Chrome plugins faster than they can evaluate them. Most users have no clue what permissions they’re approving - they just keep clicking “Allow.”

That’s a massive trust problem.

The opportunity?

Build a “Credit Karma for AI tools” that scores AI apps before users install them.

The platform analyzes:

• What permissions the tool requests

• Where the data goes

• Whether the developer is verified

• If the privacy policy matches actual behavior

• Safer alternatives with smaller permission footprints

Imagine opening a Chrome extension and seeing:

• Risk score: 8/10

• “Reads all Gmail messages”

• “Developer identity unverified”

• “Sends data to third-party servers”

• “Safer alternative available”

Start with browser extensions and AI plugins, then expand into:

• Cursor/Windsurf plugins

• Gmail agents

• Slack and Notion AI tools

• MCP servers and desktop agents

Free plan could offer limited scans. Paid plan includes unlimited monitoring, installed-tool history, org-wide dashboards, and alerts when permissions change.

The timing is perfect because AI adoption is exploding while trust infrastructure barely exists. Most people can’t tell the difference between a serious company and a random developer shipping from a laptop.

As more AI tools gain access to sensitive data, someone will build the layer that helps users decide what’s safe to trust.

Steal this business idea: Etsy for custom LEGO builds

LEGO demand is exploding again - not just with kids, but with adults building cars, anime scenes, architecture, gaming setups, and custom art pieces. The problem is most people have ideas for builds but no easy way to turn them into actual sets.

The opportunity? Build a marketplace for custom LEGO creations.

Users upload an image or idea, and your platform generates:

• A LEGO-style version of the design

• The brick list needed to build it

• Step-by-step instructions

• Optional pre-packaged kits people can buy

Monetization is simple:

• Sell downloadable build plans for $4.99–$9.99

• Affiliate links to brick marketplaces and LEGO parts

• Premium “turn my image into a LEGO set” service for $49+

The growth strategy is perfect for short-form content:

• Time-lapse build videos

• “Turning followers into LEGO figures”

• Celebrity/movie/game-inspired sets

• Before vs finished build carousels

SEO alone could drive huge traffic:

• “LEGO Porsche build”

• “Custom LEGO anime set”

• “LEGO wall art ideas”

• “How to build LEGO city”

AI image models make this much easier now. Generate the concept art, refine it into realistic brick layouts, then let users customize and order.

People already spend hours building LEGO for fun. You’re just giving them infinitely more things to build.

🏇 SIDE HUSTLES & PASSIVE INCOME

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DEEP DIVE

He’s making $80K/Month from two boring tools. Here are 3 markets he says still need software (million-dollar opportunity).

Every week another AI tool for content marketers or another Notion competitor shows up on your timeline. Scroll Twitter, scroll the indie hacker forums, and it’s the same six categories over and over. Everyone’s building in the same glittering corner because it’s what’s trending, not because it’s what’s open.

Here’s what building software has actually become: easy. With the AI tools available right now, a non-technical person can go from idea to working product in days.

That part of the problem is basically solved. Which means the thing that actually decides whether your software makes money isn’t how well you build it, it’s whether you picked an industry that still needs the fix.

And there’s a whole category of businesses nobody’s fighting over: boring, unglamorous, essential businesses that are actively underserved by software. Not “could theoretically use a nicer tool.” Actively underserved, meaning the tools that exist are outdated, don’t fit how the business actually runs, or don’t exist at all, and the owner is still doing it by hand or in a spreadsheet because nothing better ever showed up.

I spent time with a founder who’s built two of these tools, both for boring, unglamorous businesses, and combined they’re doing around $80,000 a month. He shared the numbers directly with me and showed me his dashboard, but he asked to stay fully anonymous and untraceable, so can’t reveal the tool. What he was willing to share in full was the strategy: how he picks which boring industry to build for, how he builds it without a big team, how he validates before writing code, how he actually gets his first boring-business customers to say yes and shared the three boring market that still need software support

That’s the whole issue. How to pick the industry, how to build it, how to validate it, how to onboard your first customers, and three specific boring businesses that still need real software help right now.

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DEEP DIVE

What if the next boring business opportunity is helping companies shut down?

Every business guru sells you the same thing: how to start.

Nobody talks about the other end. Which is strange, because the other end is enormous.

Between 700,000 and 1 million companies close in the US every single year. And closing a company properly is not “stop answering emails.” It involves 95+ critical steps. Dissolution filings. Final tax returns. Payroll account closures. Vendor contract exits. State withdrawals. Asset selloffs. Miss one and it follows the owner around for years.

Done the old way, through lawyers and accountants, a proper shutdown can cost up to $75,000 and take nearly a year.

Silicon Valley finally noticed.

A handful of startups quietly launched to automate shutdowns. One crossed $1 million in annualized revenue within months, growing over 50% month over month, and went on to raise a $15 million Series A in 2025. Another posted 9x quarter-over-quarter revenue growth.

So the case is closed, right? Funded players own it, move on?

No. And this is the part that matters.

Every one of those companies is fighting over the same thin slice: venture-backed startups. Delaware C-corps with investors who need a dissolution certificate to write off their loss. That segment is loud, well-networked, and has cash left in the bank to pay for a clean death.

It’s also a tiny fraction of the 1 million yearly closures.

The dead LLC whose owner has been paying registered agent fees and franchise tax for two years on a business that stopped operating in 2023. The retiring couple closing a physical shop with a lease, equipment, and three licenses to unwind. The Amazon seller with $40K of inventory and a seller account they don’t know how to exit. The agency owner who just wants it over.

Millions of them, every year, in every country. Nobody is building for them. LegalZoom will file one form and wish them luck.

The VCs spent $20M+ proving people pay real money to make a company die properly. Then they all aimed at the same 1% of the market.

The full operator playbook:

• The 5 customer segments in the shutdown economy, ranked by how easy they are to reach and what each will pay

• 4 business models you can run here, from a solo service you can start with $0 to the software play

• Exactly where the legal line sits so you never practice law without a license (this is the single rule that keeps you safe, and it’s simpler than you think)

• How to price it: the 3-tier structure and why the middle tier does most of the revenue

• Where dying businesses are already visible in public data, and the one referral channel that hands you clients pre-sold

• The non-tech stack: website, intake, payments, and delivery with no code, under $100/month

• The condensed version of the 95-step shutdown checklist you’ll actually deliver

• Why this works outside the US: the UK, India, Australia and EU angles

• The honest downsides. Two of them are serious.

• Your first 30 days, step by step

Why this business works (the part nobody says out loud)

Four structural reasons, and none of them are going away.

Your customer is desperate and on a deadline.

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Here’s today at a glance -

• Steal this ideas: startups that cut your bills + $1,000s per clinical trial patient

• Real businesses: $240K in 10 days, $185K/month rented websites & $108K solo SaaS

• Side hustles: $231K credit card consulting, $60K/month garage floors & $8K/weekend coffee cart

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🥷 STEAL THIS BUSINESS IDEA

Opportunity: Build startups that make everyday life cheaper.

Andrew Yang thinks one of the next big startup opportunities is surprisingly simple: help people spend less on things they already need.

That creates opportunities in categories like housing, food, healthcare, transportation, education, wireless plans, insurance, and energy.

There are already interesting examples. Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs attacks prescription drug markups, while Yang’s Noble Mobile offers cheaper wireless service and gives customers money back when they use less data.

The startup opportunity isn’t necessarily inventing something new. Look at industries where consumers have been paying roughly the same companies for decades and ask: why is this still so expensive?

The playbook could be simple:

• Find a large unavoidable household expense,

• Identify where unnecessary margin or middlemen sit,

• Then rebuild the experience with a lower-cost structure.

Healthcare bills. Car insurance. Internet. Childcare. Utilities. Groceries. Home maintenance. Education.

These aren’t exciting new categories. That’s exactly what makes them interesting.

If you can consistently save a household $50-$200 every month, you don’t need to convince people they have a problem. They already see it every time the bill arrives.

The next great consumer startup might not help people spend more. It might help them keep more of what they already earn.

Steal this business idea: Patient recruitment agency for clinical trials.

This is one of those businesses that sounds complicated until you look at what the customer is actually paying for.

Clinical trials constantly struggle to find enough eligible patients. Pharma companies and research sites can spend thousands to recruit a single participant, and many trials still miss enrollment targets.

The opportunity is to become the specialist who helps them find those patients.

A research site might need 200 people with a specific condition, age range, medication history, and location. Your job is to build compliant ad campaigns, run them on channels like Facebook and Google, pre-screen interested people, and send qualified candidates to the site.

At its core, it is a very specialized performance marketing agency.

The difference is the economics.

A normal client might complain about paying $100 for a lead. A clinical research site can justify spending far more because one successfully enrolled patient may be worth thousands of dollars, while delayed enrollment can cost the sponsor much more.

The simplest way to start is with individual research sites rather than giant pharma companies.

• Pick one area such as dermatology, diabetes, or women’s health,

• Learn the advertising and IRB rules properly, and

• Become known for recruiting patients in that niche.

You could charge a monthly management fee plus ad spend at first. Once you have your own data on what it costs to recruit patients for specific conditions, you can move toward performance-based pricing.

Finding prospects is surprisingly straightforward too. Recruiting studies are publicly listed on ClinicalTrials.gov with conditions, locations, enrollment goals, and contact information. Older studies that are still recruiting are an obvious place to start.

The moat isn’t some complicated technology.

It’s knowing how to run paid acquisition in a market where compliance scares most marketers away.

If you can learn the rules, consistently deliver qualified patients, and prove that you help sites fill trials faster, this can become a very profitable niche agency.

FROM OUR PARTNER - KRISP

🤝 Your 45-minute meeting shouldn’t create another 30 minutes of work

Client calls are already part of running a business. Writing notes, pulling out action items, and figuring out what needs to happen next shouldn’t be.

Krisp handles that work for you.

It removes background noise and echo during the call, then automatically captures the conversation, creates notes and summaries, and pulls out the next steps afterward.

So you can actually focus on the person you’re talking to instead of taking notes and finish the meeting without creating another task for yourself.

And if you’re a founder managing client calls across a small team, the time saved across everyone’s meetings adds up fast.

See what Krisp can take off your plate →

🗃️ REAL BORING BUSINESSES

$240K in 10 days from a website built in about an hour (and existing opportunity for you).

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DEEP DIVE

These 5 boring websites generating $500K+ a year.

Most people building online businesses are chasing the wrong thing.

They want the next SaaS with a cool landing page. A creator brand. An AI wrapper with a waitlist. Something they can post about on X and get 800 replies saying “huge.”

Meanwhile, a certain type of founder is quietly doing something completely different. Just a simple tool, a growing pile of organic traffic, and a bank account that doesn’t care what anyone thinks of the product.

I spent the last few days going down a rabbit hole that I can’t stop thinking about. Five websites - and I mean websites, not apps, not platforms, not ecosystems - that are boring by every normal standard. Ugly, in some cases. One-trick ponies, in all cases.

And they’re printing money.

Just the fact that talented people look at the opportunity and say really? That? and walk away.

Here’s what I found and more importantly, what you can actually do with each one.

Before We Get Into It

Quick note on how to read this. I’m not just going to describe these businesses and move on. For each one, I’ll break down:

• What it actually does

• Why it works (the real reason, not the obvious one)

• The numbers (traffic, revenue, whatever’s verifiable)

• Your entry point - how you could build something similar, or adjacent, without starting from scratch

Here’s a quick preview of what’s inside:

Business #1 - A one-page site built in 2006. The founder works 30 min/month on it. Still pulls 2M monthly visitors and sits in a $375M market nobody talks about.

Business #2 - One founder. $500/month costs. $192K ARR. The idea is so boring most people would laugh, which is exactly why it works.

Business #3 - A website that gets 15,000 daily visitors. Thousands pay for it voluntarily and making thousands in a month.

Business #4 - One job. Unchanged since 2008. 8.2M monthly visitors. $250K/year from ads alone. The #1 keyword gets 788K searches a month.

Business #5 - The most unglamorous tool you’ve ever seen. 2 million users. $40K MRR. Near-zero churn. Grew silently with zero hype.

Let’s go.

Business #1: The Temporary Inbox

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

The $70 billion business built on dead people’s forgotten money.

There is $70 billion sitting in US government vaults right now that belongs to regular families. And it is not just the US. Every country has its own version of this pile.

Not tax money but forgotten bank accounts. Uncashed paychecks. Life insurance payouts that never found their beneficiary. Stock certificates from a grandfather who died in 2004.

States are holding over $70 billion in unclaimed property owed to roughly 33 million Americans. That is one in seven people. And only about 5% of it gets claimed each year.

Why does so much money just sit there?

Because most of it belongs to dead people. And their families have no idea it exists.

Here is what actually happens when someone dies.

The funeral gets handled. Everyone knows funerals are a business. But after the funeral comes the part nobody talks about: 40 to 80 accounts to close, transfer, or claim. Banks. Insurance. Pensions. Subscriptions. Utilities. Social media. Property papers. Tax filings.

Research from Empathy, the biggest startup in this space, found that the average family spends $12,616 and takes 13 to 15 months to finish the admin after a death. Some families burn up to 500 hours on paperwork. While grieving.

Multiple businesses, actually. VCs have noticed: Empathy has raised $162 million to attack this in the US. But here is the part that matters for you: the models underneath are simple, capital-light, and copyable by one person.

We spent this week reverse-engineering how the real operators in this space run their businesses. Empathy in the US. Settld in the UK. Plus the small independent operators making a living from state unclaimed property databases.

In this edition:

1. How big this market really is (US, UK, Europe, India)

2. The four business models, ranked by how fast you can start

3. The money model: what operators actually charge

4. How to validate demand before building anything

5. How to pick your lane and get your first 5 clients

6. What it costs to run (tools, hiring, time)

7. The honest downsides nobody mentions

8. Your first 90 days

Let’s get into it.

Read more

Here’s today at a glance -

• Steal this ideas: Duolingo for skilled trades, Trustpilot for AI agents & clinical trial recruitment.

• Real businesses: $6M website, $400K/month AI app & $1.5M per year video library business.

• Side hustles & passive income: $400/hour reviewing AI, $150K/year coaching & $7K/month food tours.

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🥷 STEAL THIS BUSINESS IDEA

Steal this business idea: Duolingo for learning skilled trades

Trade schools aren’t accessible to everyone. They can be expensive, far away, or difficult to fit around a full-time job. At the same time, skilled trades like electrical work, HVAC, welding, plumbing, and construction still need more workers.

That creates an interesting opportunity:

Build a consumer-first learning app for people who want to explore or start learning a trade from home.

Think Duolingo, but instead of learning Spanish, you’re learning how an electrical panel works, how to read wiring diagrams, how HVAC systems are diagnosed, or the fundamentals of welding.

Lessons could be short and visual, with quizzes, simulations, troubleshooting scenarios, progress streaks, and eventually hands-on projects users complete at home. AI could act like a tutor when someone doesn’t understand a concept.

The important part is not pretending an app can replace the supervised, hands-on training or licensing required for many trades. It can become the layer before and alongside that training: helping people discover which trade fits them, learn the fundamentals, prepare for apprenticeships or exams, and continue practicing theory outside the job site.

Start with one trade and one clear outcome. Build the best beginner learning experience for aspiring electricians, for example, before expanding into HVAC, plumbing, welding, automotive repair, and other skilled careers.

Most education startups have spent years fighting over coding, languages, and white-collar skills.

Skilled trades still feel surprisingly underserved by great consumer software.

Steal this business idea: Trustpilot for AI agents

As AI agents start doing real work, we’re going to run into a surprisingly basic problem: how do you know which agents you can actually trust?

When you hire a person, you have a resume, previous employers, references, reviews, and a work history. An AI agent can show up with almost none of that.

Build a reputation layer that follows agents across platforms and gives each one a persistent track record.

Instead of relying only on star ratings, the profile could show what the agent has actually done: tasks completed, success and failure rates, how long it has operated, permissions requested, complaints, security incidents, verified developers, and feedback from previous users.

That becomes particularly useful when agents start transacting or collaborating with other agents. Before giving an unfamiliar agent access to your inbox, codebase, money, or customer data, your system could check its reputation first.

Start as a simple directory and verification service. Eventually, the bigger opportunity is becoming infrastructure: an API that marketplaces, companies, and other agents query before deciding whether another agent should be trusted.

We spent decades building reputation systems for humans and businesses.

AI agents are going to need one too.

Steal this business idea: Patient recruitment agency for clinical trials.

Pharma companies can spend thousands of dollars just to find a single eligible patient for a clinical trial. Yet many trials still struggle to enroll enough people, and some research sites end up recruiting nobody.

That’s where a surprisingly boring agency business exists.

Instead of selling marketing services to another SaaS company, specialize in helping clinical research sites find eligible patients.

Say a site needs adults aged 18-65 with moderate-to-severe eczema who aren’t currently taking a certain type of medication. Your agency builds compliant ads around that study, runs targeted campaigns on channels like Facebook and Google, sends interested people through a pre-screening process, and passes potentially eligible candidates to the research site.

The customer isn’t really buying Facebook ads. They’re buying faster enrollment.

And the economics can be attractive because delays are extremely expensive for drug developers. Clinical-trial marketing engagements can run from several thousand dollars to tens of thousands per month depending on the scope.

The obvious barrier is regulation. Patient recruitment advertising generally needs study-specific review and approval, privacy needs to be handled carefully, and compensation structures can raise ethical and compliance issues. But that’s also part of the opportunity: most generalist performance marketers don’t want to learn the clinical-trial workflow.

Start by becoming extremely good at one therapeutic area and selling to individual research sites rather than trying to land a giant pharmaceutical company immediately. Build repeatable campaigns, prescreening funnels, reporting, and compliance workflows around that niche.

It’s essentially a specialized lead-generation agency.

Except one qualified lead can be worth thousands of dollars to the customer. (More Here)

🫸 DON'T MISS THIS

🗃️ REAL BORING BUSINESSES

$6M/year from a website that just unscrambles words.

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

The $762,596-a-year business cleaning up crime scenes - and the playbook to copy it.

A guy in his early 20s walked into a dead man’s house to help clean up after a suicide because his church minister asked him to. There was no company. No training. Just him, some trash bags, and a widow who had nowhere else to turn.

That guy is Nick-Anthony Zamucen. Twelve years later he’d built the first crime and trauma scene cleanup franchise in the country. Today it runs 137 locations across most of the US, and the top quarter of its franchisees average $762,596 a year in revenue, with some locations clearing over $1.3 million.

The business is called Bio-One. And almost nobody thinks of it as a business at all until they need it.

The job nobody wants, priced like nobody else can compete

Here’s the part that makes this interesting: crime scene and biohazard cleanup isn’t crowded. It’s the opposite.

Most people never consider it as a career, let alone a company to build, because the work itself, unattended deaths, suicides, homicides, hoarding situations, is something almost everyone instinctively looks away from.

That’s exactly why it prices the way it does. A single biohazard job for a Bio-One franchisee averages $4,456. Hoarding cleanups average $4,322. And because the vast majority of these jobs get paid through homeowners or commercial insurance, not out of the client’s own pocket, customers aren’t shopping around on price the way they would for a plumber or a painter. They’re calling whoever the police officer or funeral director on scene hands them a card for.

Average adjusted EBITDA margin across the system: 18.69% of revenue. For context, that’s healthier than most restaurant franchises and comparable to well-run home services businesses, in an industry where a single owner-operator with a van and the right certifications can be fully profitable within about a year and a half of opening.

None of this required Zamucen to invent anything. He just showed up where everyone else refused to.

What’s actually behind this one:

• How does a biohazard job actually get priced, and why does insurance pay without the fight you’d expect?

• What does it actually cost to start this without buying a $130K+ franchise?

• Which three relationships determine whether your phone ever rings again?

• How to build this in your country, starting from zero

• What’s the realistic first-year income for someone starting from zero, and what does month one actually look like?

Read more

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DEEP DIVE

The $400/hour AI side hustle most professionals don’t know exists.

Most people chasing a second income start with dropshipping, surveys, reselling on Etsy, whatever’s trending in a reel. A few of those worked years ago. Today the competition caught up to the payout, and most people walk away with a few hundred dollars and a lot of wasted evenings. What they skip over is the one thing they actually have that most people don’t: years of judgment in a specific field.

That’s now rentable by the hour, and it pays better than anything else on that list.

$4,000,000 a day. That’s what one AI company alone pays freelancers just to check whether a chatbot’s answer holds up, per a mid-2026 New York Times investigation into Mercor, which was in funding talks at a $20B valuation around the same time.

• $400/hour is the reported ceiling for a radiologist reviewing an AI’s scan reads.

• A senior software engineer can land $150-210/hour.

• A tax attorney, a structural engineer, a CPA who made partner: all of it has a price right now, and most of them have no idea.

30,000 contractors are already on the roster at that one company, mostly people working it on the side of a normal job, a degree, or a company they’re building.

A working professional in medicine, law, finance, accounting, or engineering: this is probably the best hourly rate available to you outside your job, with zero client acquisition. A student in nursing, CS, pre-med, or applied math: paid for judgment you already have, before you’re credentialed enough to bill for it anywhere else. A founder with real scars, fundraising, P&L, enterprise sales: there are tracks built around business judgment, not just technical credentials.

It takes about ninety minutes to apply properly. Knowing which door to walk through is the part nobody explains.

Sommer Wall, a lawyer who took contracts on Mercor, told she slept in snatches on her couch to survive three-day sprints on the platform’s toughest deadlines.

A software engineer on Blind said he’d cleared over $40,000 in three months on fully async Mercor contracts, $150 to $210 an hour, zero required meetings. Same platform, same underlying task, wildly different experience: sitting with an AI’s answer in your domain and deciding whether a real expert would sign off on it.

This isn’t a download-an-app side hustle. It’s a real budget line every major AI lab is spending against right now, because the labs ran out of internet text worth training on, and the only way left to keep models improving is paying real professionals, by the hour, to manufacture the next layer of judgment by hand.

Most people who hear about this never actually get in, not because the opportunity isn’t real, but because nobody tells them which platform fits their background, how to apply so they land in the right pay tier, or what to do in the first 90 days. That’s what this edition is for. Follow it as written and this becomes a genuine second income channel, not another tab you open once and forget about.

Here’s what we’re covering below:

• How much does your specific field actually pay? Radiology, law, senior engineering, generalist work, the real rate table, so you know exactly where you land before you waste an application.

• Who’s really writing the checks, and why do they need thousands of doctors, lawyers, and engineers instead of just more software engineers?

• Which platform is actually right for you?

• What’s the one mistake that keeps most qualified people stuck in the $15/hour queue while everyone else gets matched into the $100+/hour tier?

• Why is the headline rate almost never what lands in your account? And what’s the specific trap that put the lawyer above on her couch for three days straight?

• What does day 1 through day 90 actually look like? The exact plan to go from zero to a stable second income stream without touching your day job.

Let’s get into it.

Read more

👋 Hi and welcome to today’s premium edition of Venture Radar - where we uncover real businesses making real money, explore passive income opportunities, and break down ideas worth building.

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DEEP DIVE

5 service businesses still running on WhatsApp that could become $10K-$100K/month SaaS ideas.

There’s a guy named Dave who runs a pest control company in Ohio. Five trucks. Eleven years in business. Last year he made $600,000 in revenue.

He was also running everything - job scheduling, invoices, customer follow-ups, route planning - out of a WhatsApp group and a spiral notebook.

Not because he’s bad at business. Because nobody built him something better. Or rather, nobody built him something simple enough that he’d actually use it.

That’s the gap this edition is about.

Trades businesses - pest control, pool cleaning, HVAC, mobile detailing, lawn care - are doing serious money. The US home services market is worth over $600 billion. These are not small operators. But the software they use is either way too expensive and complex (ServiceTitan starts at $400–$700/month), too generic (Jobber and ServiceM8 work fine but aren’t built for one trade), or nonexistent.

And that’s exactly where indie founders are stepping in. Building dead-simple tools for one trade, selling them for $49–$149/month, and growing entirely through word of mouth in trade Facebook groups and Reddit threads. No ads. No sales team. No VC.

This is that playbook - broken down practically enough that you could start validating one this week.

What We’re Covering

• The pest control tool doing $880K/year with 3,100 customers, bootstrapped by a guy who just knew one industry cold.

• Five trades right now with zero dedicated software, even though operators are billing $5K-$20K a month.

• The exact question that gets 30-80 honest answers from a Facebook group in 24 hours, before you write a line of code.

• How to go from idea to paying customers in 30 days without touching code and without spending a dollar on ads.

• The one pricing decision that keeps trades operators paying for years, and the math that turns this into a $1M+ exit.

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Pharma spends $6,500 to find one patient, and half of all research sites find zero. A boring business opportunity nobody is competing for.

A pharmaceutical company is running a trial for a new eczema drug. They need 200 people with moderate-to-severe eczema, aged 18 to 65, not currently on biologics.

They cannot find them.

Not because those people don’t exist. There are millions. The company just has no way to reach them. So the trial sits at 40% enrolled, month after month, while the patent clock ticks and the burn rate keeps burning.

At that point somebody picks up the phone and pays an outside firm to go find those people.

Here is what that firm actually does: runs Facebook ads.

I want to be careful not to make that sound cuter than it is, because the compliance layer is real and we will get to it in detail. But strip it back and this is a paid media business with a customer who is desperate, price-insensitive, and has a hard deadline.

The numbers that make this worth reading:'

• The average cost to recruit a single trial patient is over $6,500, and roughly $19,000 to replace one who drops out. (R&D Partners)

• Patient recruitment is around 32% of total trial cost, the single largest cost line in the whole thing. (BioPharma Dive)

• 80% of trials miss their enrollment timeline, and delays can cost drug developers as much as $8 million per day. (JMIR / NIH)

• 50% of research sites enroll zero patients. Not “too few.” Zero. (Mordor Intelligence)

• The recruitment and retention services market is around $4.49B in 2026, growing steadily, and the top five players hold only about 35% of it. (The Business Research Company, 24 Life Sciences)

That last stat is the one to sit with. Sixty-five percent of a multi-billion dollar market is not held by the giants. It is spread across specialists, boutiques, and small agencies you have never heard of.

“But surely this is too regulated for me to just do”

That objection is exactly why the opportunity is still sitting there.

Yes, there are rules. Every ad gets approved before it runs, and there is one payment structure you must never use.

But the wall is paperwork, not a licence. No exam, no certification body, no registration. Nobody checks your credentials. You do not need a medical degree or a pharma CV. The rules govern what your ad says and how you get paid, not who you are.

It is about two weeks of reading. And that reading is the whole moat. Every performance marketer who sees “IRB approval required” and closes the tab is a competitor who does not exist.

What this edition covers

This is the full operational breakdown, not a concept piece:

• The exact money math, including what agencies charge, what it actually costs to acquire a patient, and where the margin sits

• The four types of buyer, ranked by how realistically you can reach them in your first year, because the obvious one is the wrong one

• The finder’s fee rule and the precise distinction that decides whether your pricing model is legitimate or unethical. Most people get this backwards

• How to find live trials to pitch, with the specific databases and the filter method that surfaces studies that are visibly struggling

• The cold outreach angle that works on research sites, plus the free audit offer that gets replies

• The campaign build, from IRB submission strategy to prescreener design to the site handoff

• How to structure so you never touch protected health data

• Real numbers from small operators in this space, including one run by a single founder out of India

• A 90-day plan and an honest list of who should not do this

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A founder making ~$1M from boring businesses shows you how to buy and build boring business for little money.

“I own 8 boring businesses. They paid me $900K last year. Here are 50+ lame but lucrative businesses you can buy right now that print cash.” Then a giant list. Plumbing, laundromats, pest control, car washes, ATM routes, funeral homes. The reply guys lose their minds.

“This is the way.” Screenshots everywhere.

And here’s the thing. They’re not wrong. People really are buying car washes and pest control routes and quietly clearing six figures while everyone else fights over the next AI wrapper.

But every one of those threads stops in the same spot. It shows you the destination. The $900K. The freedom. The eight businesses. It never shows you the road.

It never tells you how you finance one of these when you don’t have $500K sitting around. How you tell a goldmine from a business that’s quietly dying. Which kind someone like you should actually buy. Or what happens when the “experienced manager” you inherited turns out to have lied about his entire résumé.

That last one is a real story. We’ll get to it.

So we did the boring thing the threads skip. We went and mapped exactly how the people who actually own these businesses buy them. We spoke with a guy who’s built and bought boring businesses and is already clearing close to a million a year, and turned it into the playbook below: how they find them, finance them, check them, pick the right one and if not money - how to build it.

By the end you’ll know whether this is for you, how the money really works, and what your first move is, whether you’ve got cash to buy or you’re starting from zero.

Whether you’re a working professional with some capital looking to buy/build yourself a side business, or a student or founder starting with little to no money, there’s a path here for you.

• Why is now the best time in history to buy one of these? The clock that’s running on this whole opportunity.

• Which boring business should you actually pick? The full menu, sorted by how much of your life each one eats.

• What does a laundromat really make after the bills? One example worked all the way out, so “cash flow” stops being a buzzword.

• How do you buy a $500K business with only ~$50K? The financing mechanic nobody in the threads explains.

• Where are these even listed, and how do you spot a good one? The real platforms, plus how to find deals before everyone else.

• How do you tell a goldmine from a money pit? The checklist, plus the guy who skipped it and called his business a “nightmare.”

• Which one is right for you? A quick filter for your money, time, and the headache you can live with.

• No money to buy yet? The build-instead path, three ways in with little to no cash.

• What’s the catch? The honest downsides, because this isn’t passive income.

Let’s go.

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5 boring internet businesses generating $500K+ a year.

Most people building online businesses are chasing the wrong thing.

They want the next SaaS with a cool landing page. A creator brand. An AI wrapper with a waitlist. Something they can post about on X and get 800 replies saying “huge.”

Meanwhile, a certain type of founder is quietly doing something completely different. Just a simple tool, a growing pile of organic traffic, and a bank account that doesn’t care what anyone thinks of the product.

I spent the last few days going down a rabbit hole that I can’t stop thinking about. Five websites - and I mean websites, not apps, not platforms, not ecosystems - that are boring by every normal standard. Ugly, in some cases. One-trick ponies, in all cases.

And they’re printing money.

Just the fact that talented people look at the opportunity and say really? That? and walk away.

Here’s what I found and more importantly, what you can actually do with each one.

Before We Get Into It

Quick note on how to read this. I’m not just going to describe these businesses and move on. For each one, I’ll break down:

• What it actually does

• Why it works (the real reason, not the obvious one)

• The numbers (traffic, revenue, whatever’s verifiable)

• Your entry point - how you could build something similar, or adjacent, without starting from scratch

Here’s a quick preview of what’s inside:

• Business #1 - A one-page site built in 2006. The founder works 30 min/month on it. Still pulls 2M monthly visitors and sits in a $375M market nobody talks about.

  Business #2 - One founder. $500/month costs. $192K ARR. The idea is so boring most people would laugh, which is exactly why it works.

  Business #3 - A website that gets 15,000 daily visitors. Thousands pay for it voluntarily and making thousands in a month.

  Business #4 - One job. Unchanged since 2008. 8.2M monthly visitors. $250K/year from ads alone. The #1 keyword gets 788K searches a month.

  Business #5 - The most unglamorous tool you’ve ever seen. 2 million users. $40K MRR. Near-zero churn. Grew silently with zero hype.

Let’s go.

Business #1: The Temporary Inbox

Every day, millions of people want to sign up for something without giving away their real email. They know what follows: a newsletter they’ll never read, promotional emails every Tuesday, the dreaded “we’ve updated our privacy policy” chain.

So they need a throwaway address. Something that works for few minutes, catches the verification email, and disappears.

One website built exactly that called

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