Side Hustle Nation

Buy it once, get paid for it over and over again — that's a business model I never stop loving. Tayo Lanlehin couldn't find kid-sized tables and chairs for her son's first birthday. So she ordered four styles from overseas, stashed them in her basement, and started an Instagram page(opens in new tab). Four years later, BayAreaKidsRentals.com(opens in new tab) is a $295,000 business(opens in new tab) with ball pits, bounce houses, plushie-making stations, two 16-foot trucks, and a 3,500 square foot warehouse — and she still works a full-time job. Here's how she built it.

Want to start a mobile coffee business without the overhead of a brick-and-mortar café? Vlad Priadko didn't want to sign a lease, hire a staff, or take on the overhead of a coffee shop. He wanted the margins on coffee without the building. So he built a coffee bike instead — an espresso setup mounted on an electric-assist cargo trike — and started riding it to the people. Eight years later, Coffee Bike has sold more than 1 million cups of coffee and generated over $3 million in revenue. Vlad has also built and sold 42 units to other entrepreneurs, and pitched the concept on Dragon's Den.

I love a good rental business: buy something once and get paid for it over and over again. It’s a cool model, and this week’s guest found a creative approach to it in the mobility scooter niche.

What if a spare closet could turn into a farm, a warehouse, and 70 acres of land? That's roughly the path Kyle Beaver took. Kyle runs Ten Mile Mushrooms in rural Pennsylvania, along with Pro Grow Club, and he grows gourmet and medicinal mushrooms like oyster, lion's mane, and reishi. Before mushrooms, Kyle spent two years working state fairs in Pennsylvania, selling stuffed pretzels out of a food truck. Watching people drive 3 hours for a pretzel taught him what he wanted in his own business: something niche, something nobody nearby was doing, and something he could run in a very small space. A Google search for businesses you can run in a small space led him to a mushroom growing page from the UK. Almost 10 years later, that search has turned into a multi-six-figure operation.