Hey, I'm Ed

Entrepreneur, movie buff, fitness freak, kook

My journey so far:
Fort Lauderdale → NYC → Hong Kong → Bali → NYC

Ed Michaelson

I validate businesses with <$15K in 6 months or less and write about what works and what bombs.

Join 1,113 entrepreneurs riding shotgun with me.

My entrepreneurial journey

2021

Partyfunhouse.com

  • Fell for the dropshipping hype and starting running Halloween costumes into Hong Kong from China
  • Got lucky with the popularity of Squid Game, and sold $10K of Squid Game costumes in 2 weeks
  • Too much effort for not enough margin, but it was a fun little hustle
Shopify dashboard on watch
Ungodly dopamine hit
2022

Chowtime!

  • Launched a dine-in mobile ordering and payments platform for restaurants and bars in Asia
  • Brought a fully POS-integrated product to market, generating $250K of transaction volume within 6 months of launch
  • Deep postmortem here
Chowtime QR code setup
Gearing up to launch at our first customer
2024

Early stage fundraising services

  • I was surfing every day in Bali, and return to real life was looming on the horizon
  • Asked myself: "what's the single fastest path to cash flow?"
  • So I spun up an offer to help early stage founders raise pre-seed capital (had the track record to back it up)
  • 100+ LinkedIn posts, 16,000 cold emails, and a couple thousand bucks in ad spend later, I found myself at $15K / month
  • Wound down customer acquisition, but I still take on select inbound clients
2026

Building "The Stack"

  • Speed validating services businesses with <$15K in 6 months or less
  • Follow along here

Some cool things about me

Some not so cool things about me

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