I want to tell you a story that perfectly illustrates how simple, and profitable, a business idea can be if you just open your eyes to the world around you. It’s a story about a bag of sugar, a Twitter troll, and a guy who decided to turn a cynical comment into a real-world experiment.
It all started for him with a simple text message from his mom. She sent a photo of her kitchen counter, which had a bag of sugar, a pot of water, and a hummingbird feeder. Her message proudly announced, “It’s hummingbird season! I’m making homemade hummingbird nectar.”
His first thought was probably the same as yours: I’d just buy that on Amazon.
That single, almost throwaway, thought sent him down a rabbit hole. He jumped on Amazon and searched for “hummingbird food.” What he found was astonishing. The top product, which is essentially just pre-mixed sugar water, had over 24,000 reviews.
Let that sink in for a moment. In the world of e-commerce, we know that only about 1% of customers ever bother to leave a review. A quick bit of napkin math told him that this one product had likely made around 2.4 million sales. At
11each,that’sover∗∗11each,that’sover∗∗26 million in revenue.**
From selling sugar water.
Excited by this incredible, yet simple, business model, he shared his discovery on Twitter. And, as the internet often does, a cynical, anonymous account immediately shut it down. “It’s not that easy,” the troll wrote, listing all the reasons why it would fail.
Instead of getting discouraged, he got inspired. That comment became the chip on his shoulder he needed to take action. He decided to prove that it was that easy.
How He Launched a Business in an Afternoon
The very next morning, he set out to build the business. His goal wasn’t to create a massive empire overnight, but to prove the concept with the least amount of time, money, and effort possible. He wanted to show that “getting started” is much simpler than the naysayers want you to believe.
Here’s the exact playbook he followed:
- The Product: He didn’t want to deal with the logistical nightmare of shipping liquid, so he decided to sell a pre-portioned nectar mix. It’s literally just sugar, but branded and packaged for convenience. He drove to the store, bought a 50-pound bag of sugar, and that was his initial inventory.
- The Branding: Using AI, he designed a modern, attractive pouch for his “hummingbird food mix.”
- The Store: He used a tool called Solo.io to build a clean, functional, one-page e-commerce store in about 12 minutes.
- The Marketing: He again turned to AI, generating a variety of ad images—a woman holding the product, the pouch on a kitchen counter—and launched them on Facebook and Instagram, letting their powerful algorithm find his customers.
The entire operation was run out of his garage with a food scooper and a $20 heat sealer from Amazon. It was scrappy, fast, and real.
The results? In the first two and a half weeks, his simple little store did over $5,000 in sales.
The Deeper Lessons for All of Us
Now, this story isn’t just about selling sugar. It’s about demonstrating two fundamental business lessons that we can all learn from and apply to our own ideas.
Lesson #1: The Power of the Upsell
His cost for the sugar and the custom bag was about $3.50 per unit. He was selling each two-pound bag for $18, an incredible 80% gross margin. But he knew he could make the economics even better.
To increase his Average Order Value (AOV), he created a digital upsell. Using ChatGPT, he wrote a short e-book called Hummingbird Attraction 101 and offered it as a $14 add-on at checkout. Since it’s a digital product, the cost of goods is zero. Every sale was pure profit that helped offset his ad spend and made his business profitable from day one.
Lesson #2: Validate the Offer, Not the Vehicle
This is the most important takeaway from his story. So many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck trying to build the perfect vehicle—the complex software, the flawless physical product, the polished app—before they even know if anyone actually wants the offer.
The offer is the core promise you’re making to a customer. In this case, it’s “attract beautiful hummingbirds to your yard with zero hassle.”
The vehicle is simply how you deliver that promise. It could be:
- A physical product (the nectar mix)
- A digital product (the e-book)
- A service (a “done-for-you” hummingbird feeder setup and cleaning service)
- A software (an app that tracks hummingbird sightings)
The mistake is starting with the hardest vehicle. The smart move is to start with the easiest one to validate that the offer is something people will pay for. He didn’t try to build a complex subscription box or a sophisticated app; he started with a bag of sugar.
Once you prove people will pay for the solution, you have the cash flow and the customer feedback to invest in building a more complex vehicle. Every successful software product I’ve ever seen started as a high-touch service first. The founders sold the solution, learned from their customers, and then built the technology to automate it.
Don’t build it and hope they will come. Sell it first, and you’ll know they’re coming before you invest all your time and money.
Opportunity is everywhere. It’s in sugar water for hummingbirds. It’s in specialized serums for eyebrows. It’s in a simple necklace that helps with breathing. Look around you, find a problem, and stop letting the “it’s not that easy” crowd win. Find the simplest, fastest way to test your idea, just like this guy did.
What’s your “sugar water” idea?
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