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: 🔍 The “Micro-Offer + Micro-Upsell” Funnel Hack
The $2K+ PM Simple Side Hustle Hack: “Consult-to-Template”
This Week’s Hustle News: Salesforce’s AI bet + Opera’s new browser coup
Tool of the Week: Lumio AI
Time-Saving Hack: Automate your content calendar in 5 mins
Founder Success Story: Jon Yongfook (Bannerbear)
🎯 Marketing Play of the Week
🔍 The “Micro-Offer + Micro-Upsell” Funnel Hack
What it is
You create a low-ticket, hyper-focused “micro-offer” (think $9–$49), deliver immediate value, then upsell to a higher ticket offer or core product.
Why it works
It lowers friction (people hate giving you money out of trust) and lets you validate promise → delivery → upsell mechanics. Many founders skip the micro tier and either beg for big sales or give away too much free value.
How to use it
Pick a narrow, urgent, painful sub-problem your audience has (not “marketing” — “niche ad creative critique”).
Build a micro-offer: video + worksheet + 1 call (could be pre-recorded + templated).
Promote it with direct modules (email, social, cold DMs).
After they buy, offer upsell: 1:1 coaching, full course, done-for-you.
Use feedback + data to refine — your micro-offer price will self-optimize.
💡 Pro tip: run 10 ads at $5/day to test the micro-offer before scaling.
💵 The $2K+ PM Simple Side Hustle Hack
“Consult-to-Template”: Package a small consulting job + templated deliverable
The Build
Time: ~10–20 hours to build a deliverable template (dashboard, audit report, content calendar)
Cost: your time + tool subscriptions (Figma, Notion, etc.)
Skills: domain knowledge + ability to build a clean template
The Math
Sell 5 “micro consults + template bundle” at $500 → $2,500
Your margin is near 100% on time (after the first few)
Upsell: ongoing support, customizations, coaching
Example Case
One founder built a “Social Ad Audit + Fix Plan” template. First week: sold 6 at $450. Then offered 3 “fix it for you” packages at $1,200 — doubling revenue from same base asset.
📰 This Week’s Hustle News
Salesforce launches Agentforce 360 to automate workflows.
Slack is also being folded in so you can get tasks, data, and outputs right in chat.Takeaway: The “work in chat” model is accelerating — invest (or at least map) where your next deliverables live (Slack, Notion, webhooks).
Opera drops “Neon,” an AI browser that can act on pages.
It can click, scroll, extract, and route tasks — locally.
Takeaway: The browser is becoming an active agent, not just a passive shell. Watch what your users will expect browsers to do, not just display.
⚡Tool of the Week
Lumio AI — the multi-LLM interface you didn’t know you needed
Lumio just launched in 2025. It wraps ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — all in one workspace.
Mini case
Copywriter uses Lumio to draft in one LLM, fact-check in another, and rewrite in a third — all side-by-side. Saves time toggling tabs + keeps costs optimized.
💡 Use it for content, prompts experiment tracking, or A/Bing same prompt across models.
⏳ Time-Saving Hack
Texting you: “Use a Zap to auto-share your new blog posts to Slack + your social queue. Then delete the Slack part when traffic kicks in.”
How:
Trigger: RSS or “new row in content calendar”
Action 1: Post in Slack channel (for team)
Action 2: Draft post in Buffer/Buffer queue
Bonus: Use AI in between to auto-generate teaser captions
Boom — content sharing almost zero work afterward.
🚀 Founder Success Story
Jon Yongfook (Bannerbear) — Bootstrapped to ~$50K/month SaaS
This is the real deal. One founder. Real numbers. No fluff. The Startupgenic recently published how Jon grew Bannerbear to $50K/month revenue.
Quick backstory
Jon started as a designer + dev hybrid
He launched Bannerbear, an API + automation tool for generating visuals (banners, social posts, etc)
No external funding — built on his own
Grew revenue steadily to $50K/month before scaling further
What you can steal (yes, steal it):
Start with a narrow vertical pain — He didn’t try to solve “all design problems.” He targeted repetitive visual generation.
Build for automation from day one — The core product is an automated API, not custom work. That means margin scales.
Use your early consult/custom work to validate and fuel development — He likely did custom jobs early, learned the constraints, then built a productized engine.
👋 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