Hustles, Hobbies & Hardos

Trust Fun is brought to you by Redo

I’ve always had a lot of shit going on. I am one of 5 kids. I played every sports & instrument under the son.

Now? I write this newsletter. I have a comedy group. I work full-time at Mugsy. I make random internet content. I play too much golf. And because apparently I looked at my calendar and thought, “Wow, there’s way too much white space here,” I’m producing a feature film this fall.

Very normal 30 year old behavior.

For a long time, I think the conventional wisdom around work was that this was bad. If somebody had too many side projects, hobbies or little businesses outside their full-time job, there was this assumption that they couldn’t possibly be giving 100% to their actual job.

They’re distracted. They’re not committed. Their head is somewhere else.

I think the exact opposite is usually true.

Obviously there are limits. If your “side hustle” involves ignoring your actual job while taking Zoom calls for your candle company, congratulations, you have discovered being a shitty employee.

But the existence of interests, projects and businesses outside of your job?

I think that’s usually a massive positive.

The word is literally side hustle. Hustle.

And people who hustle tend to… hustle.

I see this at Mugsy all the time too. Some of the most valuable things we’ve worked on weren’t born out of someone saying, “This falls neatly inside my job description.” They started because somebody saw something weird, got curious and decided to dig into it.

A good example is returns.

Historically, Mugsy offered free returns. Great for customers. Less great when you start realizing how expensive that becomes at scale.

We started wondering whether every straightforward cash return really needed to be free forever.

Instead of debating it endlessly, we worked with Redo to turn the question into a real A/B test. Their team helped us structure the experiment, define the KPIs, decide what a win actually looked like and execute the whole thing.

That’s why I like Redo so much.

They don’t really feel like “returns software” to us. They feel like another ecommerce operator sitting at the table asking, “Why are we doing it this way?”

More on that in a second.

Welcome back to Trust Fun.

Run Through First Base

I think this mentality shows up way before anyone has a LinkedIn account.

You know the kid in Little League who hits a routine ground ball to shortstop and still runs as hard as humanly possible through first base?

You know that kid. On paper sounds like a hardo but actually people get it. They respect how hard he’s trying.

The odds of beating it out are basically zero. Doesn’t matter. He’s sprinting. Usually smiling. Then practice ends and half the team immediately starts looking for orange slices while that kid wants ten more ground balls.

There’s always a type of person wired like this. A little leaguer. A high schooler. An employee. A founder.

I was never some academic weapon growing up, but I loved getting better at things I cared about. Sports. Dancing. Making little movies. Building websites. Video games. Learning Photoshop. Creating dumb stuff on the internet.

None of those things felt like distractions from one another, except probably Pokémon on the Gameboy. They were additive.

If anything, having a lot going on forced me to become more efficient.

I wanted to play sports, have friends, make stuff, do cool things and somehow pass history class.

You figure it out.

That mentality doesn’t really leave. The stakes just change.

Let People Tinker

Beehiiv founder @Tyler Denk (newsletter GOAT) wrote something recently that really resonated with me.

His argument was basically that founders should have passion projects outside their companies. As a company gets bigger, you don’t necessarily get as many chances to build something from scratch anymore.

So he went and helped launch a wellness club with some friends, built the website himself, started messing around with AI and learned how to vibecode.

Then all the stuff he learned while “distracting himself” started making him better at running beehiiv.

He built internal tools. Prototyped ideas. Created dashboards. Started attacking problems differently.

The side project became professional development.

This happens to me constantly.

Trust Fun has made me better at marketing because every week I’m forced to think about hooks, storytelling, distribution and what actually gets someone to keep reading.

Comedy has made me better at creative because you learn very quickly when an idea is too complicated, not funny, or needs to die.

Producing a movie is teaching me about budgets, schedules, logistics, negotiation, talent and aligning a ton of people behind one vision.

And all of that comes back to Mugsy.

Then Mugsy makes me better at all those other things.

It’s a feedback loop. I genuinely believe I’m better at my job because I do stuff outside my job.

Do More Than Your Job

There’s also something I’ve noticed about the best people I’ve ever worked with.

They rarely say, “That’s not my job” or “I don’t have time.”

A+ players have a very hard time seeing a problem and just walking past it.

They’re curious. They like busting through walls. They like the credit. They want to know how the thing works. They’ll open software they’ve never used before and start clicking around. They don’t really care whose department something technically belongs to.

That’s how a lot of my job at Mugsy works.

I’m technically VP of Growth. Whatever the heck that means.

But I’ve worked on websites, product development, creative, merchandising, Amazon, retail, customer research, partnerships, technology and analytics.

That doesn’t mean I’m world-class at all of them.

It means I’m curious enough to wander into places where I probably don’t belong.

And sometimes you find something.

The $7 Question Answered By Redo

Remember the returns test I mentioned earlier?

Here’s what actually happened.

We obviously never wanted to charge someone because we screwed something up. Damaged product? Wrong item? That’s on us. Exchanges should stay free too. If someone loves the product and just needs another size, we want to make that easy.

But for a straightforward cash return, we wanted to know if it really needed to be free forever.

You can sit in a conference room for three hours and debate that.

Or you can test it.

So we tested a small $7 return fee with Redo.

Their team helped us structure the test, decide which KPIs actually mattered and define what a win or loss would look like before we started.

And the result?

Customers basically didn’t care.

Nobody is throwing a parade because they get to pay seven dollars to return pants, but it didn’t meaningfully damage the customer experience either.

Instead, we got data.

Beautiful, wonderful, argument-ending data.

Now we can protect margin while still giving customers a great experience.

And that’s the part I like most about working with Redo. They’re not just helping us process returns after the fact. They’re helping us think through how returns should actually work for the business.

The whole thing started because someone was willing to ask a question that probably technically sat somewhere between finance, customer service, ecommerce, growth and operations.

Who owns that?

Who cares.

Figure it out. That’s the job.

Hire The Kid With Something Going On

I understand why employers get nervous about side hustles.

You’re paying someone a salary. You want their focus. Fair.

But personally, if I’m hiring someone and they tell me they work their job, go home and do absolutely nothing else ever… I’m probably less excited.

Give me the person making short films on weekends. Give me the person building an app nobody uses. Give me the person writing a newsletter for 43 subscribers. Give me the person training for a marathon, selling vintage T-shirts, producing comedy shows or learning how to code.

I like people who are into stuff.

Because being into shit requires curiosity. And curiosity compounds.

The employee who learns Photoshop for their comedy show suddenly knows Photoshop when your designer is out.

The marketer building a Shopify store on the side suddenly understands customers better.

The engineer writing a newsletter learns how to communicate technical ideas to normal people.

Obviously, the main job has to get done. Do it well. Be accountable. Don’t use “I’m an entrepreneur” as an excuse for missing deadlines.

But once that standard is met? Let people do their thing & go buck wild.

The kid sprinting through first base probably isn’t going to suddenly stop running hard because you gave him another game to play. He’ll just figure out how to play both.

Thanks for reading.

I’ve gotta go work on stretchy jeans, write a movie, prepare for a comedy show and figure out what the hell I’m writing about next week.

Efficiency.