- For Starters
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- Just a little side hustle... till it's not
Just a little side hustle... till it's not
This is For Starters Issue #5
Daniel Giacopelli
February 21, 2025
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Welcome to Issue #5 👋
Want to see a quintessential starter? Check out Gloria Allorbi. I first met Gloria a few years ago when she was a cosmetic chemist by day, but bootstrapping her own food brand on the side. It was centered on shito – an umami-ish chili oil and Ghana’s national condiment. Her vision was huge and the product was delicious, so it’s no surprise Gloria's Shito is now stocked at retailers like Erewhon and TJ Maxx. Keep reading for Gloria’s advice for you.
We also catch up with Ravneet Gill, who’s building a new restaurant along with a newsletter to bring people on the journey, and Palermo / NYC-based Naomi Accardi, who’s building three businesses at once. Love it.
In housekeeping notes: This community keeps growing. We’ve got the founders of some of the buzziest businesses on the planet, students shopping for ideas, mid-career creatives looking for an edge, investors hunting for the next big (small?) thing, and everyone in-between. Thank you for subscribing. And as ever, lemme know what you think: [email protected]
–Danny
In this week’s issue…
INSPO ↣ Restaurant ride-alongs
TIPS ↣ Start small & slow
IDEAS ↣ Straps: next big thing?
TOOLS ↣ Resources & reads
TOWN HALL ↣ FS shoutouts
Ravneet Gill – author, pastry chef, TV presenter – is opening (and bootstrapping!) a restaurant this year with her husband Mattie Taiano. It’s called Gina. She’s also launching a Substack for people to follow her progress: “No sugarcoating, just the real, raw reality.” Subscribers get a bunch of goodies, including: “Our black book of contacts, a running order of steps you will need to take if you’re thinking of opening a brick and mortar space, business plan, financial models & real costs.”
I caught up with Ravneet for the inside scoop… 👀
Why open a restaurant?
“One is that we want our life to change. We’ve had a baby and we want to live and work locally. Matt’s been a private chef the last couple of years and runs around London all week. I run around London all week. And we just want to live a life where we can walk to the forest in the morning, and then go to work. Not run around like headless chickens. We know it’s not going to be an immediate moneymaker or make us millionaires (the dream!) but we’ve opened restaurants for so many other people, and now we want to do it for ourselves. If we fail, we fail. But hopefully we won’t!”
“We’re also obsessed with Chingford. I moved here 3 or 4 years ago. When I was younger it was the popping place to be and the high street was thriving. Since I’ve moved here a lot of the businesses have shut. But it’s beautiful. I say hello to so many people on the high street in the morning. Everyone waves. The forest is beautiful and so underrated. Yet there’s nothing really bringing the community together, for the newer generation. We wanted to do something that serves the local community. When this site came up, we knew we had to go for it. It was now or never.”
Time to prove them wrong
What are you most excited about?
“Creating a place we’d love to go and eat in, one that’s fun and interesting and delicious. The restaurant was owned by a husband and wife before us, and I think before them too, so we’re happy to step in and be the new family. We want our son to grow up in a restaurant. We think it’ll be really fun (we say that now…). I also want to get my hands dirty again. I’ve really missed baking, cooking and making fresh bread.”
…and nervous?
“The bills, budgeting and projections are the scariest part. I’m looking at the spreadsheet every day, and every day a cost goes up. I’ve underestimated costs before, which is why I’m writing the newsletter; I don’t want people to waste money. You can get bamboozled. Someone tells you, ‘You need X, Y and Z’ and then you get flustered and pay for things you don’t need to pay, or services you don’t need or could have done yourself. But we’re also not taking investment, so we won’t owe anybody money. And we’re being practical and safe when it comes to the numbers; keeping an eye on what we spend so we don’t go too over the top and making sure the menu is priced in a way that’s fair.”
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Meanwhile in Chicago, the South Shore Country Club, founded in 1916, once followed a horrific rule: “No Blacks, no Jews”. Today, gloriously, it's a Black-owned restaurant called NAFSI, the Swahili word for soul. On the menu: “a luxurious spin on classic soul food dishes such as shrimp and grits, fried green tomatoes, surf and turf, beignets, chicken and waffles.”
In build-a-business-in-paradise news… A 10-acre Scottish island in the middle of nowhere (’one of the least explored areas of the west coast’) is on the market for only £125,000 and I’m doing everything in my power not to draw up plans for a little hotel. (I’m writing this on a train from Glasgow to London; Scotland’s on the mind).
BUT… if crippling isolation isn’t your thing, the slightly less remote Spanish mountain town of Ponga, surrounded by river valleys, is currently offering €2,971 for anyone willing to move there. Sounds like the plot of a Netflix movie where Zac Efron falls in love with the beautiful local restaurant owner. Someone wanna go halfsies on building an artist retreat there? 🎨
Speaking of plots, Shaun Tookey has got a side hustle cleaning graves. The 31 year-old, who runs the TikTok @thegravecleaner, tackles up to four graves a day and charges between $187 for a deep clean to $562 for the full package (repainting letters, etc). He's earned enough to buy a house. 🪦
Look at this cool hand-shaped surfboard business, research lab and ‘curatorial platform’, run by Texas-based surfer and artist Gregory Ruppe. It started as a pandemic project. Also relevant because two weeks from today, The Texas Surf Museum officially opens in Galveston. 🏄♀️
I’m a big sake fan, so I was psyched to read about a new brand popping up from starters Adam Levene, Matt Brunault and Hector Butler. Matt and Hector previously created sake spritz brand Shima, while Adam is an entrepreneur and investor in brands like Surreal, DIRTEA and All Things Butter. Their new brand DREAMSAKE is made in Hyōgo Japan. Popped open a bottle last week and it’s the real deal.
When LA was hit by the wildfires, everyone downloaded an app called Watch Duty. It was created by a software engineer and entrepreneur named John Mills, who gets a new Wired profile here.
And a bit further north in Santa Barbara, Byron and Robyn Beck run Campo Vans, which kits out vans for adventures. They also teach other people how to convert vans via a course on their site. 🚚
Speaking of vans, in Manchester, photographer and barista Kai Giraulo operates SWIG, in which he brews delicious coffee out of a kitted-out van… that is, until this week, because he’s just opened a brick and mortar. Congrats!
Congrats, Kai! (Credit: IG: @swigcoffeee)