Welcome to The Hustle Stack, your weekly hit of smart marketing plays, simple side hustles to grow your income without eating your time, founder hacks, and much more.
No fluff, no filler, just valuable, actionable insights you can skim, save, or stack into wins.
Let’s dive in. 🚀
This Week’s Hustle Stack:
Marketing Play of the Week: Meta’s AI-Generated Ads
The $2K+ PM Simple Side Hustle Hack: Niche Notion Templates
This Week’s Hustle News: Meta’s Endgame
Tool of the Week: Arc Browser
Time-Saving Hack: “Quiet Hours”
Founder Success Story: Adam Guild - Owner.com
🎯 Marketing Play of the Week
Meta’s AI-Generated Ads + “Exclude Words” Tactic
What’s happening: Meta is ramping up AI ad automation—part of their push to let advertisers offload creative work to ML systems.
They just rolled out a feature that lets you specify words the AI should not use in generated ad copy (you can blacklist terms)
Why it matters: This gives you guardrails. Rather than hoping the AI “gets your voice,” you can prevent it from producing cringe lines or claims that get flagged. Combine “include this” + “exclude that,” and you get more usable output.
How to use it (3 steps):
In Ads Manager, turn on AI copy + creative automation.
In settings, enter a blacklist of words or phrases your brand should never use.
Generate ad copy, review, and pick a few to A/B test. Use the AI as your ideation engine, not final copy.
💵 The $2K+ PM Simple Side Hustle Hack
Niche Notion Templates + Marketplace Aggregator
What it is: Use domain expertise + design to build Notion templates that solve real pain points (startup budget tracker, content launch planner, onboarding flow, etc.). Then distribute via multiple marketplaces (Etsy, Gumroad), and embed in your own site.
Why it works: The Notion template business isn’t saturated — many creators hit recurring sales with minimal upkeep. People love plug-and-play systems. Templates are essentially digital assets.
Also: Notion has a founder / tools template gallery, and they promote standout works.
Roadmap (weekend plan):
Day 1: Sketch the template structure + content
Day 2: Build in Notion, test with a few users
Day 3: Design assets, package, write listing copy
Day 4: Launch on 2 marketplaces + blog / social push
You only need a handful of good templates to drive $2K+/month over time. (Margin: 90+%, zero inventory.)
📰 This Week’s Hustle News
Meta’s Endgame: Fully Automated Ads by 2026
Meta is pushing to let you feed it a product image + budget and generate full-on ads (creative, copy, targeting) via AI by 2026.
If that happens, the game changes: fewer “agencies vs non-agencies,” more “who owns the brand inputs.”
Takeaway: Start practicing with AI-assisted ad automation now—learn what you like, what breaks, and what you need to override. This transition is coming faster than you think.
⚡Tool of the Week
Arc Browser
Arc is a next-gen browser designed for focus and speed. Instead of drowning in endless Chrome tabs, Arc organizes your work into “spaces” (think: one for your startup, one for personal, one for side hustles). It has native split-screen, built-in notes, and even a sidebar command palette so you can search across tabs instantly.
Why it’s great for founders:
Keeps projects neatly separated = less mental clutter
Faster tab switching + built-in productivity tools
Privacy-focused, but still supports Chrome extensions
If your browser feels like chaos, Arc makes it feel like control.
⏳ Time-Saving Hack
“Quiet Hours” Inbox Auto Filters + AI Summary
Set rules in your email that auto-move newsletters, receipts, and internal team mails out of your main view. Then, at the end of the day, run a GPT prompt (or tool) to summarize emails you actually need to read.
(You can use e.g. “Summarize this thread & flag urgent items” style prompts.)
🚀 Founder Success Story
Adam Guild — Owner.com
The backstory: Adam Guild built Owner.com after helping with his mother’s dog-grooming business. He saw firsthand how dependent small service businesses were on high-fee marketplaces and delivery platforms, and the lack of direct control over customer data and margins.
The win: He launched a tech stack that lets restaurants take back control — ordering, marketing, customer retention — while reducing reliance on 3rd-party delivery apps. In 2025, Owner.com raised $120M and hit “unicorn” status (valued at $1B).
Takeaways you can steal:
Start from real pain you see in someone’s business — your own or close to you.
Build something that replaces a recurring cost (high-margin SaaS) rather than something that just adds on.
Data + control = defensibility. The more you own the customer relationship, the more value you capture.
👋 That’s a wrap for this week’s Hustle Stack. 👋
Thanks for reading, your time’s valuable, and we aim to make every issue worth it.
Got a hack, tool, or success story we should feature? Hit reply and share it, we love hearing from readers.
See you next week with more sharp plays, side hustles, and founder wins. 🚀
Stay sharp,
The Hustle Stack Team