🎮 Paid to play

Plus: NYC's impromptu book club, meditation (but it's not chill), and more.  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏  ͏ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­ ­  

You're just 3 referrals away from earning a Hustle Essentials kit. Check out all of our prizes here. Share your link: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Share The Hustle: https://thehustle.co/join?ref=7598767985 Check your referral progress & prizes here 👋  Good morning. Dust off your foam finger and grab a mustard packet: Oscar Mayer's Wienermobiles are coming back to compete in this year's Wienie 500. Six hotdog-shaped vehicles — each repping a different popular topping — will face off this May on Indianapolis Motor Speedway's 2.5-mile track, but only one weenie will emerge victorious. Livestreamed by 8m viewers last year, the race is sure to draw hordes of fans, and a few extremely confused racing purists who find themselves suddenly very hungry. STARTING UP Can you pull gasoline from thin air?     ❌  The problem: Transportation accounted for ~28% of US greenhouse gas emissions in 2022 and the majority of those emissions came from gas-powered cars.  💡  The pitch: New York–based Aircela built a refrigerator-sized machine that pulls carbon dioxide and water vapor from the air and, using electricity, turns them into gasoline and pumps out fuel. Each unit makes about one gallon of gas per day and needs roughly twice that amount of energy to produce it, making the tech best suited for small-scale or remote use. 🚀  The outlook: Aircela's promise sounds magical enough to raise an eyebrow, but the startup won't be replacing the pump anytime soon. It currently has a waitlist for interested customers ready to cement their place as the "eccentric" friend — reports say the machines will cost $15k-$20k — and is entering select US markets this year. NEWS FLASH Name brands? In this economy? Budget-conscious US shoppers spent a record $283B on in-store brands, up 3.3% from 2024, per the Private Label Manufacturers Association.  Short and sweet: Sprout, a 3.5-foot-tall robot with expressive eyebrows, is on the market for $50k. Developed by Fauna Robotics, Sprout can walk, dance, and deliver lightweight objects, and it's programmable for those who like to tinker. It's also cute enough that Disney uses it in some of its theme parks.  Keep posting those videos, kids: TikTok legend Khaby Lame sold his e-commerce live-streaming platform, Step Distinctive Limited, to Hong Kong-based holding company Rich Sparkle in a deal worth $975m. The deal includes the use of Lame's voice and face ID for an AI digital twin.  Rest your weary eyeballs: South Korea's Edenlux develops tech for eye strain (because we all stare at screens too much). Its latest, Eyeary, looks like a pair of glasses but is meant to train the ciliary muscle, which controls the lens. The company plans to launch the device on Indiegogo in late March. SPREADSHEET STARTERS The AI prompt vault: 60 strategic commands   This AI prompt library is designed for the innovators working in sales, marketing, management, and customer service roles.   Open the vault for 60+ commands, including ones built specifically for the HubSpot deep research connector in ChatGPT, that you can use to unlock deeper, faster, more contextual strategic insight. Prospecting: "Analyze which combination of touchpoints (calls, emails, LinkedIn messages) leads to the highest response rates…" Segmenting: "Develop targeted messaging frameworks for our top 3 industry verticals, highlighting…" Customer success: "Identify the personas that converted fastest from lead to customer in the last 90 days…" This resource makes it so very simple — click to copy-paste. Prompts worth copying   THE BIG IDEA Play-to-earn gets back in the game   If you've ever played "Angry Birds" while waiting for the bus and thought, "I should be getting paid for this," boy, do we have news for you.    MoneyTime, creator of a mobile app that "turns play time into pay time," recently closed $3m in seed funding. It's a play-to-earn platform — a term often associated with a controversial business model that peaked in the early 2020s.   What went wrong?    "Axie Infinity," a Pokémon-esque game where players battled cartoon creatures, launched in 2018 — probably the most prominent play-to-earn app.  Players paid hundreds of dollars to access the game and compete for brand-specific cryptocurrency. It spawned an exploitative micro-industry in the Philippines, promising competitive income in the country's pandemic-ravaged economy. Investors fronted access fees for players in exchange for as much as 50% of their earnings.  Several factors, including the model's over-reliance on players' continued investment and a $620m hack, ultimately crashed Axie's tokens over 99%.   What's different now?   MoneyTime doesn't involve cryptocurrency, player buy-in, or quasi-gambling. Dedicated users make $2-$5 per hour at most. It's billed as a paid hobby as opposed to a meaningful income source.    Developers pay to have their games pushed to the platform's users — and a portion of MoneyTime's revenue is distributed to users who play those games on the app. A few other key players are in the space: Mistplay surpassed 10m downloads, offering gift cards in exchange for game time. Swagbucks gives cash rewards for activities beyond gaming, such as taking surveys and watching videos. JustPlay lets you cash out or donate the money you earn from playing games. Of course, any tech promising passive income through a mobile app raises concerns about data privacy and potential scams. And people familiar with stories like Axie Infinity's might have reservations about anything labeled "play-to-earn."   But MoneyTime seems pretty frank about its intentions. It offers developers exposure and gives users a couple of extra bucks here and there — a tough mission for people to exploit. 🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Your childhood is for sale… and it's expensive. Meet the small business building a retro-tech empire on our nostalgia. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Surge in ebook and audio book downloads of Rachel Reid's Heated Rivalry at the New York Public Library, following New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani's recommendation that residents stay home during the storm and read or listen to it.    The surge can't be entirely attributed to Mamdani's rec — he hasn't even read it. The library made an unlimited number of digital copies available for free to cardholders, and Mamdani merely highlighted this fact in a press conference about the impending storm.   The smash success of the TV adaptation, plus the fact that New Yorkers were cooped up at home, provided the perfect opportunity to showcase all the free digital media a library card can offer.   HOW YOU HUSTLE Our readers are always cooking up cool ideas. Here's our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.   Who: Jessica Postiglione What: Bonny The elevator pitch: "We help people poop better… Bonny is a fiber products brand helping people reclaim their bodies and feel good about going to the bathroom again." The origin story: "During COVID, I became more focused on my health and discovered I was severely fiber deficient, just like 95% of Americans. I tried dozens of fiber supplements, but they tasted awful and delivered inconsistent results. I surveyed 50+ people and dove into 100+ Reddit threads and Facebook groups where people shared their digestive issues, and the same complaints about fiber supplements I had kept coming up." One truly innovative thing they're doing: "One truly innovative thing Bonny is doing is using humor to normalize gut health and bathroom talk in a category that's historically clinical, awkward, and ignored. We've taken a taboo topic — pooping — and made it part of a confident, stigma-free conversation." What are you working on? Tell us here. AROUND THE WEB 📆  On this day: In 1958, The Lego Group filed a patent application for its brick design in Denmark.   👀  Join us tomorrow afternoon: We're sitting down with Alex Lieberman, founder of Morning Brew and Tenex, for a free virtual event covering the trends and tactics leaders ought to know in 2026. 🔥  Haha: A parody meditation site for a world impacted by climate change. ☀️  That's interesting: Could you experience a longer sunset by continually driving west? 🐱  Aww: The cutest belly rub. SHOWER THOUGHT It's really unfortunate that our favorite things get worn out faster because we use them most. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs. Editing by: Sara "Don't hate the player, hate the game" Friedman.   Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here. Working on something big? We've got a whole library of business-building resources for you. Subscribe to our other newsletters Stay up-to-date on AI: Mindstream  |  Expert insights: Marketing Against the Grain |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. HubSpot Media, 2 Canal Park, Cambridge, MA, 02141, USA, +1 888.482.7768 Never want to hear from us again? Break our hearts and Unsubscribe.