Everyone's making it up

Start the business of your dreams.

I can’t stand those cringey “5 habits of successful founders” listicles. As if waking up at 4am and doing cold plunges is all it takes to buy an island.

After interviewing literally thousands of entrepreneurs in my career (I hosted a podcast with that name, after all…), here’s what I’ve learned: they’re all winging it. Seriously. I promise you, the richest, most wildly “successful” people I know are literally making it up as they go along, building the plane mid-air, figuring it out one messy step at a time.

Take advice, read case studies, absorb tips, and learn from the best — I’m all for that. But the only legit rule? Start, then adjust.

P.S. There are lots of new subscribers. Welcome! It’s so good to have you here.

—Danny

For Starters Issue #17:

• Inspo ➠ Made in the big 🍎 

• Advice ➠ Futsol’s founder ⚽

• Ideas ➠ Funeral innovation ⚰️

• Resources ➠ $50K a month 💰️ 

• Town Hall ➠ Slime lessons 🤪

👋 Did a smart friend send this to you? For Starters is the essential weekly briefing for the next-gen of small biz owners. It’s written by Danny Giacopelli, former editor of Courier magazine and host of Monocle’s The Entrepreneurs podcast.

📥️ Get small biz inspo & advice, every Friday → Subscribe for free

📬️ Building your dream biz? How can I help? → [email protected]

1. I went to London Coffee Festival and all I discovered are these cool ☕️ brands…

• Amsterdam-based couple Marin and Joshua Takashi are Japanese graphic designers who run a matcha brand called MATSU-CHA. I was floored by the attention to detail in their packaging (above).

• I’m writing this while drinking a delicious cup (ground at home, made with my Aeropress – is there any other way?) from Indian roaster Subko.

• Nindo Coffee is a coffee shop from Tibet – their stand was super popular. I also really enjoyed talking with the team from Athens-based KUDU Coffee.

• A nonprofit with a 🤌 name: Fair Shot is a cafe in London that empowers adults with learning disabilities.

• And Bustle is one to watch: an all-in-one POS and hospitality management system for indie operators. Originally from New Zealand, now in the UK.

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2. Made in NYC. Caroline Weaver runs The Locavore Guide, a delightful digital directory of 14,000 local, indie-owned small businesses in NYC. A year ago, Caroline, who used to run CW Pencil Enterprise, also opened the Locavore Variety Store, a physical shop that sells 700 products from 130 makers, all sourced within 100 miles of the city 🗽 → Since I’m in London, I’ll have to be content with grabbing her 302-page print guide so I can window shop from 3,500 miles away (and yes, it’s printed in NYC).

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3. Felicia Neuhof spent years as an art director working for big brands, frustrated with all the plastic and unsustainable materials in the industry. After moving to Rhode Island for a master’s, she started eating lots of shellfish (as one does) and wondered what happens to all those discarded shells. (You can probably guess where this is going…) After salvaging shells tossed into dumpsters behind restaurants, she started turning them into building materials – and she now runs a business called Shellf Life 🐚 → Classic pain point + insight + eureka moment

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London-based lifestyle brand Futsol is inspired by the art and soul of football (⚽ not 🏈). Below, founder Nico Willson shares his advice on building a product-based biz.

Hey Nico! What’s the big idea behind Futsol?

I was living in New York around 2016, working in marketing and branding, and playing a lot of football down on the Lower East Side. I noticed that, even though I’m a massive football fan — I watch twice a week, I play twice a week — I wasn't wearing jerseys. My football friends weren’t either. They were wearing plain black Nike shirts and Lululemon shorts. I realized there wasn’t really a brand that owned the lifestyle space in football culture. 

I thought of what cycling brand Rapha did. They proved you could have a product, a community, and a physical space all in one. The fact that we've seen quite a few successful brands in the running space, too, shows there’s an opportunity for more grassroots, human, community-based brands in other sports. I felt there was an opportunity to create something similar in football.

How did you approach the brand from a creative perspective?

I wanted Futsol to be the football brand from an elevated consumer point of view. I think the football fan has long been misrepresented. They’re still seen as low-brow and unsophisticated. But you can like art, culture, music, restaurants and also football – and that wasn’t really visible from a creative side of things in the market at the time.

There’s also a travel aspect to the sport. You can take a ball to a beach in Kenya and within five minutes you’re kicking with someone you can’t even communicate with. You’re laughing and smiling through a connection with this ball.

The product came as an extension to all of these ideas. We brought on the creative agency Outsiders to help nail the brand early on, and the Toms [founders Tom Rogers and Tom Lovell] have been with me ever since.

What parts of the biz have been harder than you thought?

Supplier contracts, minimums, downside protection, late deliveries – these are super important things that no one talks about. I had no idea what I was doing.

Perfect, let’s talk about it.

Direct-to-consumer is manageable if something is sent late. But as soon as you’ve got wholesale partners and stuff comes late, you’ve got people chasing you for delivery and you’re missing a quarter of a sales season, then you’re under the knife and need to deal with it. So establishing contracts early is key. Some suppliers don’t want to do it, especially if you’re doing lower volume orders. But it shows that you’re a professional. Quality control is important, too. We produce everything in Portugal and we can get out there in an afternoon and come up with solutions if we need to.

Portugal has some of the best factories in the world, right?

Yeah, and the country has a football background. They’ve been very good for us. It can sometimes be difficult, though, because they take holiday every other week!

What else has surprised you?

Customer acquisition. Pushing it, marketing it and the content flywheel is a whole new ball game. I thought the first step would be to build the brand, then the product, then get it out there and see what happens. But that’s a naive approach, because there’s so much that goes on post-product. Product is the easy part. It’s then a constant content cycle, learning what works and what doesn’t. 

So manufacturing is easier than selling?

Yes. Manufacturing is in your control, somewhat. You know what you want. But on the other side, one spontaneous piece of behind-the-scenes ad content shot on iPhone might outperform everything else, and you’re like, Damn, we’ve gotta rethink our whole strategy! It happens in wholesale all the time, too. Certain stores pick up Futsol and you think maybe the brand is actually geared towards this sort of place rather than what we had in mind. But there’s a balance of playing to what works while also keeping what you want as a brand and where you see the direction going.

Do you want to continue bootstrapping?

We’ll probably need to raise some sort of external funding soon, to put the pedal on the gas. Likely not institutional or VC. There are so many people who are passionate about this sport, who feel the same pain-point, who can get behind the brand and see the vision, whether it’s footballers, artists, actors. An ambassador-investor type would be the ideal target.

You want to open Futsol clubhouses. What’s the vision?

Playing football is still very WhatsApp-based. Unless I’m already in a group or league, I can’t just turn up and play a game on a Wednesday night. It’s not like a yoga studio. I’d have to hang around waiting for someone to drop out of a game on Pier 40 when I’m in NYC for work.

So I’d love to have weekly football games organized well through our brand, and then a physical place where you can go after the game to hang out, have a bite to eat, have a drink, and watch a game. We’re still self-funded, so we’re going through the steps: the brand, getting the right metrics, proving we can acquire customers, proving there’s loyalty, and then fundraising and moving into the direction of the clubhouse model. That’s the dream.

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Funeral home innovation. The NYT published a piece on it and this is a direct quote, presented without comment 💀 

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🛠️ Tools

Internet Phone Book. Pretty cool: “An annual publication for exploring the vast poetic web, featuring essays, musings and a directory with the personal websites of hundreds of designers, developers, writers, curators, and educators.”

📚️ Reads

The Status Sweatshirts Making College Girls Crash Out. Chelsea Kramer’s fast-growing brand, Parke, made her an influencer. Can she keep up the hype? New York Magazine

Corners, the coolest design shop in the Catskills. How a concrete box became a mecca for art books, rare prints – and the world’s best pens. FT (I also interviewed Corners’ owner David, two years ago, right here)

Monocle’s rundown of five grocery stores reinventing food retail. From a Danish supermarket brand encouraging healthier eating habits to a taste of luxury in Ho Chi Minh City, grocery shops are focusing on enhancing customers’ experience. Monocle

Inside the Austin Club Offering Raw Milk, Cold Plunges, and Alpaca Raves. At the Sapien Center, those dabbling in the Make America Healthy Again movement can find connection, community, and unpasteurized dairy products. Texas Monthly

Crazy Side Hustle Culture Is Burning Everyone Out. Vice

Houston bootmaker offers $5,000 cowboy boot and gator hunt adventure. CultureMap Houston (h/t Ben Dietz)

Making leather goods in America. A conversation with MAKR's Jason Gregory. Sprezza

This 54-year-old's juicy side hustle pulls up to $50,000 a month and was profitable within 1 week. Shannon Houchin and her son Finn Canard own and operate Roadside Republic, a seven-figure business selling peaches on the side of the road. Entrepreneur

🧠 Findings 

38% → The percentage of US small businesses that say they’re actively using AI across multiple biz functions (data analysis, marketing, customer service, etc). That’s from the new Small Business Survey 2025. Meanwhile there’s a new UK-specific report on this topic from Small Business Britain.

17% → The share of British travellers who went on holiday by themselves in 2024 – a figure that’s tripled since 2011 (6%). Solo trips are in.

🙃 Fun

The 2D restaurant: Shirokuro, a new omakase in NYC.

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Lots of you wrote in saying how much you loved last week’s slime biz, so I got in touch with the OG Slimes founders and asked for some tips for starters. Here’s what they said:

Christine: “You don’t need to have it all figured out to start. I dropped out of college with zero business experience and started OG Slimes from my bedroom. I struggled with impostor syndrome constantly. But I learned by making mistakes, improving along the way, and staying curious. Most of the people that you think have it all together are just figuring things out as they go. You just have to keep showing, even if it’s not constant, and learning that mistakes are human and completely okay.”

Olivya: “Movement creates momentum. Even when you’re unsure, just try, fail, adjust, and try again. The ability to pivot and make decisions is what builds real progress. Each decision, whether right or wrong, creates the momentum that gets you closer to breakthrough.”

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Thanks for reading!

🙏 “This is always packed with so much great stuff I usually have to read it 3x to make sure I've soaked everything in.” –Reilly Brennan

📬️ Share your updates & feedback: [email protected]

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