10 JOY-Hits to Make Your Business Instantly More “YOU”

You don’t have to burn it all down—just drop these 10 JOY-hits and let the growth + healing begin.

The Hot Dog Cart is a stiff middle finger kinda newsletter about how to put your health + happiness first as a solopreneur + small creator, and thrive in this new YOU-shaped era of life + business. 🦄 100% human. 🌭 97.6% sweary. I double DAWG dare you to get new cart-sized editions sent straight to your inbox:

Buckle up, bitches. It’s horror story time.

A tale so haunting, so deeply unsettling, you’ll be clutching your laptop like a rosary by the end.

A few years ago, I did something unspeakable.

Something so deeply disturbing that if you saw it happening in a movie, you’d scream “DON’T GO IN THERE” at the screen.

😱

I tried to be normal.

I’m talkin’, full-blown Stepford Boss Babe™ vibes, smoothing down my personality like a feral cat that someone dressed in a tiny blazer + jeans and told to “act cool.”

I shame-cleansed my website of all my weird references, cut my most feral opinions out of my emails, and forced myself to write like I was the CEO of Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss, LLC instead of the margarita-guzzling, 4-letter word slangin’, batshit crazy, half-baked lasagna I actually am.

I looked at my quirks… my weird obsessions… my “too much” energy… the fact that I yell about things I love like an unhinged woman possessed by a 1700s sailor, aggressively throwing barrels of rum overboard while ranting about being herself—and I thought…

NO, Dre. Too weird. Too much. They will not get it! This isn’t the way serious people build businesses.

So, like a fucking idiot, I decided to tone it down and became the most forgettable human alive.

I could’ve stood in the middle of Times Square, dressed as an Amazon Prime package, handing out free money, and still—nothing.

Clients? Got the ick.
Subscribers? Ran for the hills.
Sales? What are those?

It was like I lit myself on fire for attention, and the only reaction was, ‘SMORES!’

What no one tells you about trying to be normal: It’ll make you INVISIBLE (if it doesn’t kill you).

It’s a death sentence, killing everything in its wake.

I know we were raised to believe that normal = safe.

Like, if we could just blend in enough, we wouldn’t get left out.

If we could be appealing to enough people, we’d be successful.

If we could just not be too much, everything would work out.

And maybe that works if you’re trying to land a job at Profit Margins + Misery Holdings, where standing out gets you aggressively side-eyed in the break room and passed over for a promotion.

But as a solopreneur?

Normal is the last state you want to fling yourself into.

You’re not Walmart.

You don’t need everyone to like you.

You need the right people to be obsessed with you.

And the only way to do that is to let your “half-baked lasagna” energy out of its fucking cage!

Normal brands got nothin’ on weird brands.

Think about the brands you actually love. The people whose content you binge at 2 AM. The people’s whose mayhem you’d follow anywhere.

Are they the most normal? The most marketable? The ones who sound exactly like everyone else?

HELL NO.

They’re the weird ones. The unhinged ones. The ones with a personality so strong you can get DNA off of their content.

Because the truth is, people prefer to buy from people they’re obsessed with than businesses they’re legally obligated to tolerate.

And people can only get obsessed with you if they can actually SEE YOU.

They told me to tone it down, so I turned it way-the-fuck up.

Listen. I already tried the “respectable expert” experiment, so you don’t have to.

It was horrifying. 0/10 NOT recommended.

You know what actually worked?

🫦 Saying the shit I actually believe

👩🏽‍🎤 Writing how I actually talk

💃🏽 Leaning into my obsessions, my feral rants, my “too much” energy

You know WHY?

Because the right people? The kindreds we actually want as clients, customers, and students…

They’re NOT looking for someone put-together.

They’re waiting for permission to drop the act.

For someone they see themselves in to go full-weird first.

For someone to make them feel less alone in their own weird-ass brain.

You’re not “too much;” you’re the perfect amount of “much.” START BELIEVING THAT!

The feel-good way to be seen + heard (and found by the kindreds you care so much about) is to let your weird out of its sad little box so that shit can BE WILD + RUN FREE.

You can keep trying not to be “too much” and reduce yourself to being “not enough” for literally anyone to give a shit.

OR. (I’m biased, but this is the one I want for YOU!)

You can go full weird, stop giving a shit about being “marketable,” and finally attract the real ones—the kindred spirits who’ll ride or die for your ass because YOU actually make them feel like they can be their fully, wildly, unapologetically real selves—and it’ll be ok.

10/10 highly recommend.

If that’s where you’re trust falling, I got you, Boo!

I smuggled 10 YOU-shaped ideas out of my speakeasy like bootlegged bottles of absinthe.

These 10 ideas were pulled straight out of Brandishing YOU, the solopreneur speakeasy where I’ve been stockpiling every feral, rule-breaking, delightfully unhinged way to build a business that actually feels like YOU.

If you’ve been looking for a support system that’ll help you stop filtering yourself out like a Stepford Wife on Xanax, consider this it.

OBSESSED? Yeah. That’s what we’re turning ourselves into here.

Pull up a barstool, and we’ll fill you in on everything!

Here are 10 Wildly Fun JOY-Hits to Make Your Business Instantly More “YOU”

Snack on this tasting platter and see for yourself—what happens when you stop asking, “Is this marketable?” and start asking, “Is this ME?”

1. Write a Post/Note in the Style of a Craigslist Ad for Your Kindreds (And Don’t Stop Sharing It)

Instructions: Craigslist ads have a distinct energy. A mix of serial killer vibes, desperation, and unnecessarily specific details. Write your next post in the exact "I’m selling a lightly used couch" tone and watch your kindreds FLOCK to you.

Examples:

💥 WANTED: Highly opinionated, mildly exhausted, wildly creative weirdos who are DONE with fake urgency, dumb bro-marketing tactics, and the entrepreneurial hamster wheel. Must enjoy laughing inappropriately, breaking rules, and making business up as we go. No normal people, please.

💥 FOR SALE: One (1) completely depleted supply of fucks. In return, I will personally walk you through how to build a business that doesn’t make you want to ghost your entire online footprint like a bad Tinder date and start over. DM me for details (or just validation).

💥 WANTED: A gym buddy who will drag me out of my house and force me to participate in the ancient ritual of lifting heavy objects + putting them down again. Must accept my tendency to narrate my workout like I’m in a Rocky montage. Bonus points if you bring post-workout snacks.

💥 FOR SALE: An aggressively large collection of unexecuted ideas that are either brilliant or complete nonsense. You decide. Comes with one (1) hyperfixation, three (3) unfinished notebooks, and an unsettling amount of enthusiasm. Serious inquiries only—no lowball offers; I know what I have.

💥 WANTED: A community of highly talented weirdos who refuse to water themselves down for the algorithm. Benefits include: total creative freedom, occasional existential screaming, and making money in a way that feels like a full-body YES.

Why it works: Because people’s brains are drawn to things that don’t look like everything else. Marketing is an art of welcomed interruption + weird wins. This format is an interruption. It makes people pause. And in a world where attention is currency? Pausing is priceless.

2. Make a Business Disclaimer That’s Intentionally Unhinged

Instructions: You know those overly serious disclaimers that say "Results not typical, consult a professional, this is not financial advice," yadda, yadda, yadda? Yeah. Instead, write yourself a warning label that reads like you escaped a secret underground experiment and are running a renegade operation out of a treehouse.

Examples:

🚨 Warning: Side effects of interacting with this content may include an overwhelming urge to delete your sales funnel + run your business like a 90s punk rock band instead.

🚨 By continuing to read this, you accept that I have no idea what I’m doing, yet somehow, I always figure out how to make it work.

🚨 If anything I say changes your life, that’s on you. I was just here for the drama.

🚨 This email is 90% intuition, 10% spite, and 0% respect for industry norms. Proceed accordingly.

🚨 I make no promises, except that I will absolutely take you down a rabbit hole you weren’t expecting.

Why it works: Because your kindreds will instantly recognize this + start nodding like you just read their birth chart out loud. And in that moment, they won’t care about your sales page, your credentials, or your “marketability.” They’ll just know they belong here.