🏃‍♀️ The PE pivot

Plus: Retail's rough year, Mars robots, 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. Thank you so much for starting every day with The Hustle. While we spend a lot of time stringing these silly little words together in a way we think you'll like, there's always room for improvement. If you have a moment, let us know what we're doing wrong — or right! — in this quick survey. Our writers are emotionally resilient enough to take it. Promise.  STARTING UP You can finally leave your landlord that bad review  ❌  The problem: In New York City, many renters don't know whether their apartment is rent-stabilized or what their rent should legally be, adding confusion to an already stressful process.  💡  The pitch: Brooklyn-based Openigloo helps renters do their due diligence. The platform lets users find open rentals — both rent-stabilized and not — and acts as a "Yelp for renters" with reviews on buildings and landlords, safety violation history, and more. 🚀  The outlook: While New York's Rent Transparency Act takes effect this year, requiring buildings with rent-stabilized units to post notices, Openigloo aims to fill the gaps the law doesn't address. The platform launched the first public map of rent-stabilized apartments and has already been used by 3m+ renters. NEWS FLASH   Bot brain: Lyte, a startup founded by three former Apple employees who worked on Face ID, came out of stealth this week. Its LyteVision uses three sensor types to help robots see and navigate the physical world. That's a lot of nuggets: Seattle startup Rebellyous Foods' new Mock 3 production system can produce 5k+ pounds of plant-based "chicken" per hour — a key step toward profitability for the company, which serves hospitals, restaurants, and the US's National School Lunch Program. Vampires are gonna hate this: California startup Reflect Orbital wants to launch ~4k mirror satellites into low Earth orbit by 2030 to create what it calls "sunlight on demand," which it would sell to solar farms and other clients. Astronomers are, perhaps obviously, not on board with this plan. Then who's flying the plane? Boston's Merlin Labs is preparing to go public via SPAC. It's developing an AI copilot that allows military planes to take off, fly, and land themselves. It won't replace human pilots, but may reduce how many crew or relief pilots are required on missions. PROMPT PERFECT Shining examples of skillful commands  If you keep feeding AI questions and it keeps churning out crud, then you probably need to up the specificity.  See our AI Prompt Engineering QuickStart Guide with Tina Huang for concrete samples of bad, passable, and excellent directions, like:  Weak: "Help me learn Python." Mid: "Teach me Python data structures." Golden: "You're a senior Python instructor. Create a step-by-step learning plan for data structures, including…"  Get the guide on getting to the point. Perfect your prompts   THE BIG IDEA Duck! This company brings dodgeball digital    Hardly any of us have fond memories of PE. Just rope-climbing burns and bruised egos.     Physical education is a stressful, necessary staple of American public schools — but replicating it proved tricky when the pandemic shifted education online.     That's where Hiveclass came in. Founded by parents, the web-based platform replicates PE coursework with a library of 2k+ short-form videos.    How it works: Schools and libraries partner with Hiveclass to offer students access to free, standards-aligned PE lessons online.  Educators can structure a video-based curriculum that includes quizzes with written responses, keeping students engaged and verifying completion. The platform also offers resources on social and emotional learning, fitness concepts, and mindfulness. The company closed a $1.3m seed round in 2025, has generated $2m+ in revenue, and serves 13k+ teachers and students through 80+ educational institutions.    The pandemic is over — why's it still growing?    Because children are like Jack Russell Terriers.   Without exercise, they can have behavioral issues, develop long-term health complications, and rip your house to shreds while you're in the shower.   However, traditional avenues for keeping kids active can be problematic.  Overcompetitiveness and bullying can lead to disengagement from PE — a major problem in school districts where it's required for graduation. The rising costs of organized sports can be prohibitively expensive for many families. Hiveclass aims to cover those bases by offering a discreet, cost-effective, non-judgmental alternative to conventional physical education.    And while other remote training resources — Peloton, TrainingPeaks — exist, Hiveclass differentiates itself with its business model.    It prioritizes kids and targets schools instead of consumers — making it a compelling case study in identifying an underserved market with a dated process in need of a modern approach.   🔗 HIGHLY RECOMMENDED   Cattle keep breaking loose? Meet the on-call cowboy who's always on the clock. NEWSWORTHY NUMBER Number of US retail store closures in 2025, up ~12% compared to 2024, per Coresight Research data via CNN. It was a rough year for US retailers, including longstanding ones like Forever 21, Joann, Rite Aid, and Party City, which all shuttered their brick-and-mortar locations for good, as high inflation and operating costs bit into profits and consumers stayed shopping from the comfort of their homes.  Sadly for brands, The Daily Upside predicts the retail landscape won't be any friendlier in 2026 — though bankruptcy lawyers might just be in for another banner year. HOW YOU HUSTLE Let's check in on what you're building. Here's our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.   Who: Diana Tan What: Brief The elevator pitch: "Brief is calm, honest software for messy document realities, designed to reduce cognitive load, not add to it. We're the GitHub of documents. Documents are chaotic. Brief makes them behave." The problem they're solving: "Today, everyone treats their document folder like a trashcan and then adds appendages like approvals and signatures. We're a self-organizing platform for all your messy documents." Origin story: "We're neurodivergent founders with ADHD and all of our documents sit in an internet trashcan of Google Drive. My co-founder and I have been friends for over 20 years, starting our first company when we were 19." One truly innovative thing they're doing: "We're treating documents like a library of you. We index documents like the Dewey Decimal System, where every document is auto-tagged to be easily found." Biggest win of the last year: "We were selected out of thousands to spend the week at Seth Godin's studio and get his advice on startups and marketing." What are you working on? Tell us here.   AROUND THE WEB 📆  On this day: In 1896, Fannie Merritt Farmer's cookbook, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, was published. It was one of the first to include standardized measurements as opposed to ambiguous dashes and pinches. 🤖  That's cool: The robots and satellites on Mars. 🗞️  Newsletter: Subscribe to The Follow Up for sales tactics, wild stories, and actionable hacks. 🧩  Game: A short daily word game. 🐱  Aww: Making it work. SHOWER THOUGHT Given how frequently we use our phones, it's now kind of an achievement to forget it at home before heading out. SOURCE Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Singdhi Sokpo, and Jay Fuchs. Editing by: Sara "Gym class dropout" 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: Masters in Marketing  |  Sell better: The Science of Scaling Follow The Hustle on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 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