9 business ideas you can start this weekend (drunk edition)

Why does it matter? The next viral brand is probably hiding in the butter aisle

Shaan keeps a Slack channel tagged "drunk idea." The rule: pitch the half-baked concept under the guise of alcohol so you can blame the booze when everyone thinks you're an idiot. Except a handful of these aren't idiotic at all — they're pointing at real money in boring places most entrepreneurs walk right past.

• Changing a product's delivery format — not the product itself — is the most underused brand-building move in CPG right now, with real companies doing millions on it
• A 5–8x ROI is sitting in direct mail that almost nobody touches because it feels like 1998
• A calisthenics battle scene with UFC walkouts, trash talk, and betting is already running underground with no promoter and no name
• "Follow your passion" is worse than useless advice before you've seen what's possible

The butter aisle hasn't changed since sliced bread — 2.8 million likes just proved someone could fix that

2.8 million likes. 27,000 comments. On a video of someone rolling butter like a deodorant stick onto a hot pan. No company, no product — just a raw demand signal sitting on TikTok with zero competition.

"The butter aisle is pretty stale," Shaan says. "We got salted and unsalted. That's pretty much all we have." His sentiment analysis — he scrolled the comments — turned up a nonzero cohort already doing this at home with empty deodorant containers. Happy path confirmed.

Row Row Nutrition does "millions and millions of dollars in revenue" just by reformatting vitamins as cold fridge liquid. Vacation sunscreen goes viral every time it shows up on a feed because it shoots out of a whipped cream can. The Grüns founder essentially took Athletic Greens and put it in a gummy — he wouldn't say that on the record, but Shaan and Sam said it for him.

"Form factor changes underrated." That's the whole thesis. Before building something new, scan the stale CPG aisles for products where the ingredient is commoditized and the container hasn't changed in thirty years. That gap is yours.

There's an Ironman for fitness obsessives and nothing for locking in professionally — that gap is a business

There's no word for what you're doing when you grind harder than normal for a week. Vacation has a word. The opposite doesn't.

Shaan's pitch: a reverse vacation. A productivity penitentiary. You check in, get an Adidas tracksuit, cold showers, slop food, Goggins on the ambient sound. Pull-up bars in random places. No cabana. You leave a little unwell, with your goal done.

Sam gave it a 9 out of 10 — specifically for the status mechanic. "You know what's the first thing people do when they sign up for an Iron Man? Is it train? No, it's tell friends." The reverse vacation needs that same brag upfront. "There's no way to tell people you're being hardcore about your projects right now," Shaan says. "And I think we need the reverse vacation."

Hyrox exists. Iron Man exists. HOKA runs exist. For locking in on work? Nothing. The product isn't just the penitentiary — it's engineering the announcement moment, the identity costume, the shareable hard outcome. The status signal has to come before anyone buys the experience.

Physical direct mail gets 5–8x returns and most brands haven't run a single test

Sam's PostPilot re-engagement campaigns returned 5 to 8x on investment. Postcards to lapsed customers. "Kind of a no-brainer to do. It's just unsexy."

World 50 is a private community for Fortune 500 executives doing hundreds of millions in annual revenue. Their website is basically a login screen. The way they close a large percentage of customers: "sending mail, like really cool letters, to executives." That's it.

At Hampton, Sam's team paid $100 per lead and sent hyper-personalized packages — artisanal honey for a bookkeeping company called Honey Bookkeeping, a vintage band tee for someone who'd tweeted about their favorite act — paired with handwritten letters. Seven months to get the ROI data. "Really, really, very very good."

"People are sleeping on mail, man." The reason nobody tests it isn't evidence the channel is dead. It's evidence people self-select out based on vibes. "There's a reason it's being sent to you because people are still getting a return. They would not be spending the money to send this to you if there was no return." That's the arbitrage.

Calisthenics battle royale already has UFC walkouts and betting — it just needs one promoter

Extra Money vs. Calisthenics the Prince. 150 people crowded around a pull-up bar. Walkout music. A mask. A chain. The main event battle set: 100 burpees, 50 muscle-ups, 75 dips, 75 squats with a 65-pound dumbbell. People hooting, throwing money, betting on the outcome.

"It's exactly like a rap battle meets a UFC fight," Sam says. "100% this could become a thing and be all over the country. This is the coolest thing I've seen this week."

The founder apparently went to prison, got into calisthenics, came out, and built the competition format from scratch. Rolling Stone wrote about it. Nobody picked it up. The community runs in cities on street poles and whatever surface they can find, under names like Spec Nasty and Extra Money, entirely self-organized.

"It's kind of made for content. I'm surprised this video is not more popular." The undercard, the walkouts, the nicknames, the trash talk — it's all there. This is the Kimbo Slice backyard era of calisthenics. One person still needs to show up and be the UFC.

Smart, hardworking people stay stuck because nobody showed them what was on the menu

Shaan is blunter than most career advisors about this: "There are smart, hardworking people that just never find their thing." Not lazy. Not dumb. Just unexposed.

"There's no food courts for your career. There's not great ways to go even find out what are my options, what's on the menu, what's possible."

His own path was pure luck — right person, right conversation, right timing, completely by accident. "I only got there through happenstance, through luck. I stumbled into it." The formal idea is Take Your Roommate to Work Day, but the actual insight is this: asking people to follow their passion before they've seen options is like asking a four-year-old who's only eaten cheese pizza what their favorite food is.

Shaan got his kid to try salmon recently. He loves salmon now. He just didn't know it existed.

The product gap is structured exposure before commitment — Airbnb experiences for careers, job-shadow marketplaces, anything that lets people taste a lane before they're told to find their passion in it. Broaden the menu first. Then ask for the order.

AI SDRs are about to flood every inbox — the only real defense is an AI that wastes their AI's time

If you run a business, the spam problem is about to get much worse. AI is making mass personalized outreach nearly free — scraped contacts, convincing first lines, automated follow-up sequences that look human. One guy on Twitter built the obvious countermove. Shaan calls it Slopstopper.

"He basically created the defense. He was like, I'll catch the slop."

The mechanic: your AI engages theirs. Asks research-heavy questions. Books a call. An AI shows up to the call, asks more questions, demands case studies and follow-up materials, asks for the contract, then sends back absurd redlines — forcing them to pay actual lawyer time to respond. Then ghosts entirely.

The escalating commitment loop is the mechanism. Most AI SDR systems optimize for volume, not sunk cost per prospect. A defense that forces each attacker to invest real time and money at every step breaks that unit economics entirely.

"If you're any kind of business owner, you're just going to get bombarded from all directions." The time to build the defense layer is before it becomes unmanageable.

Screen-free kids devices are already past $100M — and the free-range backlash is just getting started

Yoto — a screen-free music box with physical song cards — is north of $100 million in revenue. Tin Can Kids, a WiFi landline for children, raised $15.5 million and sells hundreds of thousands of units. A school in Kansas distributed them free to 200-plus families.

"I think there's going to be a backlash," Shaan says. "Free range — more independence, unreachable but still reachable." The stat that anchors it: 60% of parents won't let their kid walk to the next grocery store aisle. The overcorrection is documented, and the counter-movement is building.

Ari's beeper concept won the group vote — Sam and Shaan both picked it. The pitch: a clip-on device kids can carry that lets them buzz friends and page parents, with no browser, no scroll trap, no app store. Shaan pointed out his kids carry everything — Pokemon binders to swim meets, backpacks of junk to doctor checkups. "The profits would never stop," Ari added.

The gap isn't another surveillance product. It's the cool, limited-connectivity version — one elegant device away from a category.

The next wave of consumer products might mostly be better boxes

The thread running through every idea here is the same: the core product already exists. Butter is butter. Mail is mail. Calisthenics is ancient. What keeps shifting is container, format, and the social context around adoption.

As AI makes novelty easier to copy overnight, the durable advantage keeps looking less like invention and more like distribution and the brag-worthy moment. The entrepreneurs running $100 million on a cardboard box with song cards figured that out before most of the VC world did.

The boring aisles are where the money is hiding.

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Topics: business ideas, entrepreneurship, product innovation, form factor, direct mail marketing, career development, fitness competition, kids tech, anti-smartphone, AI spam defense, brainstorming, CPG, content business