Americas Hot Sauce Billionaire, Flipping Pallets, Profitable Job Boards

designed to be skimmed

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor. I'll send you a weekly email covering ideas to help start or grow your business.

You probably get a lot of emails already. So, these emails are designed to be skimmed. No need to read the whole thing, just find 1 cool thing you enjoyed. 🧠 ☕️

Today's Outline:

  • Flipping Pallets

  • Story of Siracha

  • Job Board Boards Printing Cash

  • Who just bought P*rnhub?

  • Thoughts on Indiehackers

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🌴 Flipping Pallets

☝️ quick math:

Over 500 million pallets are manufactured in the U.S. every year (90% from wood)

There are an estimated 2B pallets in circulation in the U.S. alone.

Estimates have it as a $13.4B industry in 2023

Business ideas for getting started here:

  1. Pallet Repair service (these are made from cheap wood that break) – offer repair services for companies to save them money.

  2. Build a D2C pallet marketplace – This is a massive industry with a lot of brokers and middleman. Find a big industrial market like DFW or Chicago and make that your first target.

🌶 The Story of Siracha

David Tran founded the iconic Siracha company in 1980.

But his origin story is epic. Tran named the company, Huy Fong, after the cargo ship he immigrated to the US on back in 1979. He immigrated over here with $20,000 worth of gold stuffed in condensed milk cans (his entire life savings).

Once he arrived, he began producing the famous chili paste we all know today.

Fun facts:

1️⃣ Huy Fong has never had to advertise its products. They grew entirely from word of mouth and early days selling to restaurants out of Tran's Van.

2️⃣ They are the #3 most consumed hot sauce behind Franks & Tobasco.

3️⃣ The wholesale price of Sriracha hasn't changed since the early 1980s

🐦 Profitable Job Boards

The unbundling of job boards is nothing new.

Marketers have been taking billion dollar companies like LinkedIn (14.5 B 2022 sales), Indeed (3.2B in 2022 sales) Glassdoor (320M 2022 sales) and building profitable million dollar companies in their niche.

Here are a few to put on your radar:

1️⃣ Remote OK – $1,600,000 / yr

They caught on to the remote job trend extremely early in Covid and now have huge companies like Stripe, Shopify & Amazon sharing their Remote jobs on the platform

2️⃣ Ranch Work – $88,000/yr

This is the definition of niche.

But a great example of how you can make nearly six figures/year just from the right market.

3️⃣ Hospital Careers

I'm not sure how much Hospital Careers does annually but they do an estimated 850,000 hits to their website every year.

Compare that to the numbers of Remote OK or Ranch Work, and it's probably a $150,000+ business/year.

I think you could make a great earning from doing this is other niches with high-turnover and high earning potential.

I think one targeted towards SaaS Sales Reps would crush 🔥 my next backup would be some form of Niche Consulting or Travel Nurses

🧴 Who Just Bought P*rnhub?

I can't make this up.

A group called Ethical Capital Partners just bought every teenage boys favorite website.

The hub has over 76 million monthly active registered members and over 130 million adults visit the site daily

I thought this was a really interesting take on the business:

You can't borrow capital against the business. There's huge regulatory + legal risk that could shut the company down overnight. Not to mention reputational risk.

Most are estimating it sold between 1-2x revenue.

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📚 IndieHackers

Interesting take on the popular indiehacking trend that has gone on for the last 5-10 years

For those unfamiliar, indiehacking is essentially trying to build a product (usually software) to a Ramen-level of profitability and using that to sustain lifestyle without many employees or growth ambitions.

See you next week ✌️

-Connor

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