Last summer, Dominic, a 13-year-old in Alpharetta, Georgia, spent most of his time on Fortnite. But this year, he’s rebranding. He’ll repaint your mailbox, add new flags, and replace your faded street number with vinyl lettering. 

Earlier this week, we asked how students were finding work this summer — and Dominic (via his Hustle-reading dad) was one of many creative upstarts to respond.

Talk about bootstrapping

Dominic doesn’t have a Facebook page of his own, so he uses his parents’ accounts to advertise his services. So far this summer, he’s earned about $600. 

Another reader — Angus Timoney, a 17-year-old in Gold Coast, Australia — has made $10k/month reselling sneakers. 

He buys about 50 new pairs every month, usually within seconds of an online release. He keeps the excess kicks in his house until their value goes up. 

It’s especially profitable in Australia, Timoney says, where there’s less inventory. (Here’s a road map on how to get your start in the biz.)

A few other impressive hustles

• Madelyn Cohen, a 14-year-old in New York, set up a business — called Sag Harbor Nite-Nite Cookies — where she delivers bedtime cookies and storybooks to young kids in the Hamptons.
• Phoebe, a 12-year-old in Perth, Australia, designed a deck of 54 cards with ideas for how kids can spend their time in quarantine. 
• Nygel Jones, a 22-year-old from New York City, is beta testing his startup RE:Locate, which helps college graduates tap into new professional networks when they move. 
• 14-year-old Liam, based in Tennessee, started asking local businesses if they had old computer parts they needed to recycle. He’s selling the diamonds in the rough — like a vintage Apple IIe computer — on eBay. He’s made $500 so far.

We asked our Trends subscribers about the summer jobs that inspired them. We heard about some classic gigs (lawn care, car washes) and some weird ones — like one aspiring entrepreneur who sold ripped CDs of animal sounds to hunters. 

Wanna take a walk down memory lane? Read their stories to start your stroll.

Life is full of complicated decisions… so it’s no surprise to learn that death is, too.

Burial or cremation? If the latter, what to do with your ashes? Scatter ‘em? Smoosh ‘em into diamonds? Perhaps you’d like to be a tree.

Startups founded to help people “navigate mortality” have been gaining traction, and they’ve taken off in popularity during the pandemic.

Death, be not proud… or too expensive

Death and money are both taboo topics. Maybe that’s why we don’t discuss the fact that the average funeral cost $7,640 last year.

But Cake and Lantern are free services that help establish end-of-life wishes like who’ll be your designated decision maker, how your possessions will be divided up, and even what you’d like to be your final tweet. 

Cake balances the macabre with mirth — we dig the tombstone generator. 

Meanwhile, Trust and Will calls itself the TurboTax of estate planning. New Narrative, a funeral event planner, partnered with the online memorial scrapbook company LifeWeb 360 to offer virtual celebrations of life. 

All together now

During the pandemic, younger people have opened up their feelings around death. Lantern’s user base has grown by 123%.

Many industry leaders still keep trade secrets close to vest, but there’s a ~70-member-strong Slack channel for end-of-life service providers called Death & Co. 

On Wednesday night, verified Twitter was in the throes of a crisis. 

After the Great Hack of 2020 made it look like Joe Biden and Elon Musk tweeted out extremely sketchy bitcoin donation links, Twitter blocked many verified accounts from tweeting.

For a few hours, all of your A-to-D-list celebrity faves couldn’t post — but they could retweet. 

To communicate from beyond the virtual grave, they turned to the account @everyword. 

Flashback to the days of the @everyword empire

If you’d heard of the account before this week, you’ve been on the internet longer than me. 

@Everyword launched in 2007 with the goal of tweeting all of the words in the English dictionary, one at a time. 

The account was so popular that The Atlantic and The Washington Post covered its final tweets in 2014. The New York Review of Bots (not a typo) called it “the best” bot on the internet. 

But on Wednesday, the account re-entered the mainstream — blue-check users started retweeting old @everyword posts, one at a time, to talk to their followers.

What were their all-important messages?

• The Ringer writer Shea Serrano used @everyword to spell out “I will not be silenced.” 
• Video game developer Rami Ismail wrote “let me tweet again.”
• Nate Silver stuck with “poll shows democrat leading.”

The whole mess felt a lot like that scene from Arrival, where Amy Adams tries to communicate with an alien species using a sign that says “Human.”

Do you have a favorite weird or essential Twitter account you follow? Hit us up @TheHustle and we’ll make a list of ‘em.

Scrabble got a digital makeover, but the results ain’t pretty. 

8.1k+ people have signed a petition begging the brains behind the new “Scrabble Go” app to abandon the sickening color schemes and annoying nudges and bring back the old version. 

Says one veteran Scrabbler of the new app: “It’s like being inside the small intestine of a unicorn that just ate a bunch of rainbow Skittles.”

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

A company called Retail Ecommerce Ventures is buying the online assets and IP of Pier 1 Imports, which filed for bankruptcy protection in February, for a cool $31m. 

Sooo… who is REV, anyway?

As our own Sam Parr pointed out to our Trends group: Two of the brains behind Retail Ecommerce Ventures are serial entrepreneurs, and one of them’s controversial.

Tai Lopez is an investor and social-media influencer (with 2.9m Instagram followers and 1.3m+ YouTube subscribers). You might know him better as the “here in my garage” advice guy — Vice once called him “the internet’s most hated self-help guru.”

Alex Mehr is a former NASA scientist who sold the online-dating platform Zoosk in a deal valued at $250m+.

REV’s MO?

Take failing retail chains and spin them into ecommerce success stories. 

Dressbarn, another troubled chain, went out of business and closed all 544 of its stores last year. A subsidiary of REV bought Dressbarn’s IP and kept the brand alive through an ecommerce business.

Lopez is courting partners on his Instagram account. All you need? $400k.

We asked our Hustle insiders for their takes on REV’s move.

From Joe Speiser, founder of Brax.io:

“I thought the allure of Dressbarn was sifting through the bins to find the hidden gems (hard to do online). Pier 1 was also a very hands-on store, all knick knacks you wouldn’t necessarily specifically look for on your own unless you were in-store. Curious how well this will translate to online-only.”