718-400-WOLF was available.
This was enough reason to start doing paperwork.
The Wolf of Williamsburg already existed as a drawing: a gray wolf in a white shirt and black tie, holding a cup of coffee and looking slightly tired of everybody. I had made a little site for him years earlier. The idea was an obvious Wolf of Wall Street joke for somebody who was not very interested in finance but was always interested in startups, real estate, and questionable small commercial ideas.
Williamsburg was the right address for the joke. I had spent most of my New York years there, building companies, buying things I probably did not need, making side projects, and turning random conversations into small business ideas.
The Wolf was not a finance guy. He was a startup guy with coffee.
Now I had a phone number.
I moved it onto its own account and attached it to a dedicated Wolf email address. The support person helping with the transfer called it “a cool vanity number,” which felt like enough outside validation for the day.
Then the rest of the tiny business stack appeared. I changed the Shopify account over to the Wolf email. I connected Printful. I made a Drive folder called T-SHIRTS!!!! because apparently four exclamation points were required before a shirt could exist.
This is one of my favorite stages of a project. Nothing is important yet. The name is free. The customer count is zero. Every decision can be made in an afternoon because there is almost nothing to break.
You can also waste an impressive amount of time choosing where an email should go.
There was no polished launch plan behind any of this. The character was old. The phone number was new. Shopify could make a store and Printful could put the wolf on something. I wanted to see what happened if I connected the pieces.
The stack was hilariously complete for a business with no actual business. Dedicated email. Store. Print-on-demand fulfillment. Vanity phone number. Artwork. A T-shirt folder with enough exclamation points to suggest serious demand.
All that remained was deciding what the Wolf sold, why anybody wanted it, and whether I planned to spend more than one evening working on it.
Minor details.
That is how a lot of my side projects start. A domain, a name, a drawing, a product, or one piece of infrastructure becomes real before the larger idea does. Then I start attaching things to it until it either turns into a business or becomes another funny folder I find later.
I like the small commitment. Buying a domain is easy. Making the email real is slightly harder. Connecting the store means the joke can technically take money. Giving it a phone number means a stranger can technically ask a question.
Each step makes the idea a little less imaginary without requiring a slide deck about its total addressable market.
The phone number made me happiest because it was both useful and completely unnecessary. A store needs an email. Fulfillment needs an account. Nobody had asked for a Wolf hotline.
But 718-400-WOLF was too good to leave sitting there.
It also made the joke legible without an explanation. You could see the number and understand that somebody had committed to the bit. Maybe not committed enough to know what the company did, but committed enough to make the phone ring.
That is a meaningful line for a side project. Before the number, I could quietly abandon the whole thing. After the number, there was at least a chance I would need to answer another person.
The first message I sent through the number was Test 2.
The first real incoming text after the transfer was better:
“Yo man how it goes”
Perfect customer discovery.
The Wolf had a store, a shirt folder, and a working phone. Close enough to open for business.
What business?
We would figure that out later.