← The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
11 Business Ideas I’d Start If I Were a Beginner⏐Ep. #272
00:25:33
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Today is idea overload. I have 11 business ideas for you, and I don't think you've heard me talk about any of them unless you've really been stalking me, which is a little weird. All of these ideas will be approachable, affordable to start, and all of them, yes, can scale. Some of these I've touched on very briefly on Twitter or on Instagram, and they're all proven to be popular based on the engagement that I saw on them. But I haven't really gone deep on any of them until now. So let's count down from 11, my least favorite, to number one, my most favorite. But I whittled these down from like 150, so even number 11 is a banger. And don't worry, my audio listeners, this episode is for you. I will be showing short form videos on my screen, but you will hear them and I will describe exactly what's happening in them so you're not going to miss a thing. This episode was made with my audio listeners in mind. I just ask one easy favor of you. Whether you're watching on video or listening on audio, if you hear an idea that kind of remind you of a friend or a family member, share this episode with them and say, hey, listen to number four or number eight. I think you would love this because X, Y and Z, that's all I ask. I'm telling you right now, it's not once a month where someone's in my inbox like this saying, hey, I started printing artwork on walls and I'm making tons of money. You can do residential, you can do commercial. You charge by the square foot and you just show up, you load the design, you load the paint and you make money. Okay, so for my audio listeners, what you missed here is just a time lapse video of this wall printer that sits on tracks, like train tracks alongside a wall and it just goes up and down and prints graphics designs on a wall. Huge walls, big walls, doesn't matter. Now, I love this because this is relatively new technology. The company that makes these wall printers only came out, I think three to five years ago. And these printers were mostly used by businesses to print on their own walls. It wasn't used as a service. Right? And so anytime new technology is developed, new service businesses are developed around that technology. I literally have had six to 10 people in my inbox in my DMs saying, Hey, I started a wall printing business. How would you customers or hey, I started wall printing business. Like I'm doing restaurants. Like, people are doing this and they're finding success. You charge by the square foot or maybe even the square inch. And you know what your paint costs are. That doesn't really vary much. You know what your hard upfront costs are. That's the wall printer. And so it's just a matter of marking up your paint costs and accounting for your time. And the number one reason I love this idea is because of the time lapse effect. I'm going to revisit this a few ideas from now. Ideas that are easily spreadable on vertical short form video with time lapses just naturally do better because it sells itself. It's visually appealing. And so if you lived in a city of fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, and you were the wall printer in the area, you could build a sizable business just within that city. There are about 1.8 million retail businesses in the United States alone. And this isn't limited to just retail businesses. It could go in warehouses, in industrial settings, in office settings. I mean, I can imagine an Amazon warehouse with a break room that has like training guides printed on the walls. You can finance these machines. They come with a warranty, they don't cost all that much. I don't remember the name of the company that prints them, but just Google it, wall printing machines. And you'll see about three or four companies there. Okay, so for idea number 10, this happened about two months ago. It was right around Thanksgiving and I had this John Deere mower that I bought 18 months ago and I wanted to upgrade. It worked great, but I just wanted something bigger. So I put it on Facebook Marketplace listed for 2,500. I agree to sell it for 2,200. The guy says, I'll come pick it up. So he pulls up in like a Ford F250 with a trailer. And the interesting thing is on the back of this trailer there are two nearly identical green and yellow John Deere riding mowers already on it. And so my light bulbs just start going off. I'm like, well, this guy's flipping. This guy's not buying a mower to mow his lawn. He already has two. Like he's running a route. He's probably buying up all the John Deere's he can find on Facebook Marketplace. So he pulls up, he doesn't speak very good English. And honestly I can't place the accent. I can't really tell where he's from. He looks American, does not sound American. His wife gets out, they've got a toddler running around, and then she's holding like a brand New baby. SHE SPEAKS HEAVILY ACCENTED ENGLISH so I get to talking and I'm asking him questions like, what is this for? And he's kind of being ho hum about it, doesn't really want to tell me. I'm like, dude, come on. Like, come on. And so finally they're like, well, we're shipping these to Bolivia. That's where we're from. Hence the reason I couldn't place the accent. And if you're geographically challenged, that's in South America. So they said that these mowers sell for 6 to 7,000 in Bolivia specifically. Like, Bolivia is not like a super advanced, wealthy country, but it's also not like a third world country. And so that really, really surprised me. But I talked to ChatGPT, I started looking it up, I looked in some forums and it's a thing. And it's not just Bolivia, it's not just riding mowers, but this is just import export we're talking about here. It's an arbitrage opportunity. These John Deere riding mowers are hard to find there. And Americans don't really see John Deere as like the best quality anymore like we used to. At least that's the perception I have. But in Bolivia, John Deere is like the gold standard. Like, that's the American brand that's super well built and it sells for a premium there. So what these guys do is they buy these mowers, it has to be a John Deere, and they put them in crates so they can stack easier, and they ship them to Lubbock, Texas, which is like a very, very popular shipping lane in West Texas. And then they get on another truck and go all the way down south through Mexico, through Central America to Bolivia, and they sell, and I think they said they pay like one to two dollars a pound for shipping. So call it like five to seven hundred dollars for shipping. 2,200. So let's say he's $3,000 in this and he can sell it for six. And he has a dad that lives in Bolivia, so that's kind of his business partner, and that's the whole business. And he had a nice expensive truck, a big trailer. I assume he did well. But wait, there's more. There's two other parts to this business idea number 10. Well, really one part, and that's lawnmower flipping again in a different way. So then I'm on YouTube and I come across this video here, which I'll link in the show notes. I really want you to watch it. It's one of the best YouTube videos I've seen all year. Right here. The title is Flipping Lawnmowers Until I Can Afford My Dream Car. Episode one. This guy's name is Noah. N o w a h. He lives in Minnesota or something. He's like 16 or 17 years old. He only has 17,000 subscribers. This video has over 300,000 views. And I was enthralled the entire time I watched the whole thing. He's trying to save up to buy a car. So coincidentally, he has a green and yellow John Deere mower. And he goes through the process of ordering parts and fixing it and the fuel pump and the fuel filter. And he doesn't know what he's doing. He's asking Chad gbt and he ended up making like a thousand bucks. Okay, so then I connected this data point to another data point. I was actually on Facebook marketplace because I was looking at interesting listings that I could make content about. I want to make a video where I buy food from people on Facebook marketplace and ask them about their business and how much money they're making. So I was doing that, and I see this guy listing a riding mower. And then I click on his profile and he's got a ton of listings for riding mowers. Like 30, 40 listings just in Dallas Fort Worth area. And so I DM'd him. And I'm like, what are you doing, man? You got this, like, this riding mower business. And he was very ho hum about it. And it seemed to me that he was just buying broken riding mowers on Facebook marketplace, fixing them up and selling them in mass on Facebook marketplace. So I'm like, that's interesting. If you have this many listings, you're probably doing very well. And then the third or fourth data point, I lose track. By this point I saw was also on YouTube. I came across another video right here by this guy named Matt Howe. He has 761 subscribers. That's 761, not thousand. This video has 41,000 views. And it's called How I Made $51,000 in One Month on Facebook Marketplace flipping lawnmowers. Okay, so here's all my data points. The guy in my own front yard who I sold my actual lawnmower to, the guy on Facebook Marketplace with a ton of listings, the kid on Facebook up in Minnesota flipping lawnmowers for profit. And then this other guy on YouTube who made $50,000 supposedly flipping lawnmowers, by the way, I'm going to have him on the pod. He's meeting with my team right now, so there'll be more info on that later. But I start going down this rabbit hole of riding lawnmower on Facebook Marketplace and flipping them, and people are making a lot of money doing it. And the thing is, is most of these things are about the same. When I had my riding mower, the freaking belt kept breaking even though it was brand new. And I had to learn how to fix a few things, and I'm not mechanically inclined or handy whatsoever. But then it got pretty easy because I knew what I was doing. And that's, you know, how anything in life goes. So idea number 10 is flip lawnmowers on Facebook Marketplace, either by selling them to another country or fixing them up and reselling them. You could buy one for under a thousand bucks. You could fix it for, who knows, 50 to 500 bucks. In parts, it might take you many hours, right? It will not be an efficient use of your time to start, but over time it will be. And especially if you live in an area, a Metroplex, with over 500,000 people, you can scale this business. Throw a hitch on your car, get a trailer, rent a trailer from U Haul friggin mih. Make it happen. All right, idea number nine. Today's edition of Only in Germany. This guy takes simple driftwood, simple LED lights from Amazon, a couple tools, some spray paint, and he makes this awesome decor that he sells for 300 to $1,200 US and it's in Germany. So if you're in Germany, compete with him. If you're not, own the market. He started on Etsy, now he has his own website and he's doing six figures a year. Okay, so this guy gets branches, pieces of wood, deadwood, driftwood, etc. He gets a router. I think that's what it's called. Woodworking tool that cuts out notches in the wood. And he gets these LED light strips that you can buy on Amazon for like 15 bucks. And he lines it down the driftwood, he sands the driftwood, he stains it, he puts mounts on it, and it's wall art. And it's lit from behind its backlit, and it looks awesome. A lot of the commenters were saying this is AI. It's not AI. This guy's real. Went to his website, I did my research, and he's got a thriving business. So what's the idea? Copy him, sell that. If you like working with your hands, if you like building woodworking, do this. How do you find customers? Organic, vertical, short form video just like this one. By the way, all of these videos will be linked in the show notes. Okay, idea number eight, I posted about on Twitter just a few days ago. This idea blew my mind. I was on a call with this woman named Christie. Shout out Christie. We just met on this call, and she is a mortgage broker. And her kids were talking about, you know, you should use these AI tools to make AI generated videos to grow your business. And she's like, I don't know what that means. How do I do that? So she used this tool called hey Gen. And she took a headshot of herself. That's it, Just a headshot. She uploaded it and she said, you know, make a video about home equity lines of credit, like an instructional video of 60 seconds. Make it look like I'm sitting in a nice office talking. So here's the video. I won't play all of it. Hi, I'm Christy Olson. I'm a mortgage loan officer and real estate agent, and I help people build wealth through real estate by using strategies real homeowners are actually using. Okay, so you get the idea. The crazy, crazy, crazy part about this story is that she only had 480 followers on her Instagram page. This is her personal Instagram, okay? And she posted about 10 of these videos, and they got between 200 and 500 views each. Okay? So we're talking 3 to 5,000 views total in aggregate. And it looks pretty real, kind of, but then you look a little longer and it's like the mouth movement's weird. And, you know, if you know what you're looking at, then you'll know this is AI. But here's the crazy part. She got 10 new loan originations from these videos. Now, net to her, each loan origination is thousands of dollars or at least $10,000. So this is very real money that she made with a $50 a month tool. And this isn't about the tool. This is not sponsored. This is about making AI generated video content at scale using AI tools like these. I don't care if it's cringeworthy. I don't care if you're afraid that people think it's AI, it works. And if you don't want to do it yourself, then offer this as a service to people like Christie, to people that want to grow their business on social media, to people that have a headshot that they could send you, that you could simply upload to this $50 a month tool and charge $1,500 a month for 10 videos or whatever it Is it can be that simple. I promise you there are people making a lot more money doing things that are a lot more simple than this. All right, idea number seven. I'm amazed at how much she's charging to clean car seats in the middle of nowhere. Derby, Kansas, population 26,000 people. Here's how she's doing it and how you can do it too. She find customers. She simply videos herself doing her job and posts it to her Instagram page. She only has 2,600 followers and she is swamped with demand. And she cleaned the things. She follows the manufacturer instructions. She picks them up in bulk. She cleans them all at the same time. She drops them off at the same time. She gets paid in advance and leaves them on the doorstep. This minimizes the interaction time, therefore maximizes your profit. Specialized equipment, materials, chemicals, none of that. We're talking a simple vacuum and cleaning supplies from Dollar General. You can basically guarantee that you'll never have competition in this business because people aren't willing to work in ways like this to make money. 50 bucks per car seat. I went through a bunch of the comments. People would pay up to $200 for this. And competitors are charging 75 to 125. She spends a little less than to clean each one. Which means that your profit could be between 80 and $120 an hour. Which at a 40 hour job, that hourly wage would be $200,000 a year. Okay, so I know what you're thinking. I don't want to clean car seats. No one wants to clean car seats. That's why if you have small kids, your car seats are disgusting. That's the opportunity. So the question is, do you want to start a business more than you want to avoid cleaning car seats? If not, then fine. Find a different business, right? Find a sexier business. But if so, then this is a great business for you because there's a need for it. I don't think people are going to start caring about being clean less. Like Jeff Bezos said, right? Like people aren't going to suddenly want to pay more for things or to get them shipped slower. His whole thesis about Amazon was that we always need to make things cheaper and faster because people will always want both of those things. People are going to continue to want things to be clean and tidy and germ free. That is a true principle. This rides that wave. It's a relatively new industry, so keyword difficulty is not that high. Competition is basically non existent. You can grow it with content and don't charge 50 bucks a car seat like that's nothing. Charge 150 bucks. People would pay that. All right, time for idea number six. Love good business ideas that have a good way of marketing them. And this one has maybe the best guerrilla marketing strategy I've ever seen. Here's what you're going to do. Go to the neighborhood. Go find out when the trash day is in any given neighborhood. And the day of or the day before trash day, you're going to get big shiny flyers printed. You're going slap them on these garbage bins with your ad, your QR code, etc, and that evening when the kids are outside, the parents are getting home from work, you're going to drive around the same neighborhood blasting, ain't nobody. Don't buzz me. I'm just so fresh, so clean. With a big magnet on the side of your vehicle advertising your bin. Cleaning services don't wrap your vehicle because that's thousands of dollars. You're just trying to test the concept before going all in. At this point, you charge 25 bucks per bin. Takes you five minutes with a pressure washer. You do 20 in a day, that's 500 bucks in a day. Your startup costs are less than $1,000. I just spent an hour talking to a guy making six figures doing just this. Okay, so way back in October 2024, I interviewed a guy who makes six figures doing this. He quit his six figure job to do this up in Pennsylvania or New Jersey, I think, and he's doing great. Now there are some downsides of this business. It's dirty, it's unsexy, it's hard to scale. I said $25 in that video. I don't know how realistic that is. I think it's going to be closer to 15. I can't remember exactly what he said in the episode. We'll link to that episode in the show notes. But just like car seat cleaning, right, People are going to suddenly want their garbage bins to be even dirtier. This is also a relatively new industry and you can start it very cheaply because good pressure washer. And I say good, I don't mean one that you could like use commercially thousands of times. But like a solid pressure washer, you can buy for hundreds of dollars. So you're in business. All right, number five, this is a two parter. These are both food ideas. Pablo Picasso say good artist copy. Great artists steal. This candy company admits that this is their best selling product. What the freak is stopping you from buying one of those chocolate fountains for a few Hundred bucks on Amazon. Posting up at your local farmer's market, buying some lay's potato chips. Your chocolate fountain will draw the eye of the passersby. You say, hey, do you want some of this? Yeah, I'd love some. Cool. Let me make it in front of you. Pour out the fresh melted chocolate on top of the chips. They're watching their own product be made, which means you can sell it for more. You crush it down, you bring a fan to cool off the chocolate more quickly. They pay 20 bucks. You bag it up five minutes later when it's cooled, and you're in business for what, 500 bucks? Or you could sit around and think of 100 reasons why this won't work. Or you could just go test it. All right, so this one kind of speaks for itself. If you didn't catch it from the video. We're talking about a chocolate fountain with lay's potato chips pouring the chocolate over the lays, letting them dry out, cutting up into bars and selling it. So you do that at the farmer's market while everyone's watching you. It's visually appealing. You make good money, you learn a bunch of skills, and you parlay those earnings into something else. Maybe something that you enjoy more or might be more profitable, etc. Now, along with that idea, there's another sweets idea for all you Utah people. Let's go ahead and check this one out. What in the Utah sugar capital of the world am I looking at here? Let me explain. This is happening in India. What is it? It's hot chocolate. Better presentation. They get the marshmallow fluff, they put it around the rim, they burn it an extra two minutes of labor. Bring your six dollar hot chocolate to nine dollar hot chocolate. Last I checked, it's pretty dang cold outside. Why aren't you posted up with a freaking six foot plastic folding table from Costco? Slaying this hot chocolate with this design and presentation. Your only competitors are your doubts and fears. All right, that's it. If you didn't see the video, it's just you got like marshmallow fluff around the rim of your standard, like, hot chocolate cup. And you get one of the little torches that you get on Amazon or whatever, and you burn it and make it look nice. You put some Oreo crumbles on top, pour hot chocolate in there. It costs a tiny bit more, but you can charge a lot more. Same thing, farmer's market. All right, idea number four. This freaking mom right here is making six figures a year, turning kids trash into parents. Treasure. How it works is very simple. You take all your kids artwork, ship it to this lady and she arranges it on this big canvas and she's got an eye for it and, and then she sells it back to you for hundreds or thousands of dollars. As long as there are parents who love their children, this will be a viable business idea. Okay, so you're taking your kids artwork, you're putting on a canvas that you buy from Hobby Lobby. You arrange it in a nice eye pleasing way and you put some resin over it or whatever and you turn a bunch of little pieces of artwork into one giant piece of artwork that you sell back to the parents who sent you the artwork. So if you saw how many tens of millions of views this stuff gets, there's a market for this. You're selling nostalgia, you're selling a parent's love for their children. And I think this is very approach that's very cheap to start. And you know what you could do? You could even lay out all the artwork, take a picture of it, upload a chatgpt and say, hey, how should I arrange this? I don't have an eye for this stuff. I'm not very artistic. How can I arrange it? And it will tell you based on first principles of design. Oh, and remember at the beginning when I asked you if you think of any ideas of any friends, family that might like these, please send it to them. I just wanted to quickly remind you of that. And if someone sent this to you because they had you in mind, please subscribe to this. I think you'll like this channel. And idea number three. Well, you guys probably already know this idea because I covered it like a week ago. So I'm only going to touch on it for like 30 seconds. But it's wholesale distribution, gas stations, convenience stores, gift shops, whatever it is. I just can't get this business idea out of my head. And people don't really like it because it's, it's unsexy. You think you have to have sales skills, but you don't. You just need to be willing to talk to people. In case you missed the episode, it was only posted like a week ago. Episode 270 this business idea makes vending machines look dumb. And it does. It really does. You don't need a vending machine to sell jerky or candy or chips or sodas or whatever. So I'm going to revisit that idea because I love it so much. Number two, I covered this one like a year and a half ago very briefly, but I Want to go a little deeper on it? You've probably seen this guy. His name's Spencer and his channel is called SB Mowing. And I'm just going to show a short clip from it. I was doing some work today in the area and I drove by and I saw your lawn was getting a little bit long. I was wondering if I could cut it and clean it up. Completely free for you. Really? Yeah, I'll do it for free. Okay. So there needs to be a name for this. I'm going to call it Goodwill Time Lapse Videos because it is one of the most brilliant uses of the Internet that I've ever seen. You're doing good and you're making money at the same time. You go around, you knock on people's doors, you say, hey, you need a new roof. You need pressure washing. You need landscaping, fencing, fence washing, house painting, whatever. I will do it for free. The only thing I ask is that I'm able to video it and post it on the Internet. That's like a whole industry. And I talked about this a year, year and a half ago on the podcast, saying, like, more people need to do this. Why? Because SB Mowing, slash SB Pressure Washing, has 50 million subscribers across platforms. That was a year ago. Probably 60, 70 million at this point. That's a lot of money. If you monetize that, right, that could be over $10 million a year of net profit with a very small team. You just got to have some tripods, some GoPros, some iPhones, some editors in the Philippines. And you've gotta be willing to copy the format of this guy or other people like him shout out to you, Cole Simpson, my friend who's in Columbia, South Carolina, doing this exact thing. He didn't get the idea from me. He thought of it himself. And he has an eye for YouTube and he's crushing it. His videos are getting millions of views and he's making six figures a year on YouTube right now, and he's only been doing it for a matter of months. Next year, he'll probably make seven figures on YouTube. That's just from YouTube. That doesn't include sponsorships, merch memberships or anything. There are thousands of home service ideas. So use ChatGPT to come up with ideas that are more time lapse friendly, more visually appealing. You don't need to say, oh, SB Mowing already does mowing and pressure washing. So I got to think of something different or new. No, you just need to think, that guy has 60 million followers. I could do the same thing and just start siphoning off some of those. Or I could do the same thing and make it a little different and start siphoning off of some of those. But I would also test 10 different concepts. Soft Washington fence, restoration, fence painting, house painting, Indoor outdoor roof washing. It's funny because I just had a conversation with Colt about this today and he's doing roofing, which is very, very expensive. But that also sells because people generally know that a roof is expensive and so that converts to more clicks because the effort is conveyed from the video to the viewer, which helps increase retention, which helps increase the reach that YouTube gives your videos. Right. But it doesn't have to be an expensive service because SP mowing does mowing and pressure washing and has tens of million millions of subscribers. That's why this is idea number two. And it was almost idea number one. But idea number one just has that cool factor. And there's just no replacing an idea with an awesome coolness factor, testosterone factor. So Here we go. 30 mile per hour jet boat that costs about 80% less than a jet ski. How do you monetize that? Number one, go to Alibaba, buy one of these from China. Sell that sucker on Facebook Marketplace. Be sure to put the word jet ski in the description because then it will appear to people searching for jet ski and when they see how much cheaper it is than an actual jet ski, they're going to buy, I guarantee you you can make $1,000 profit per unit. Number two, if Jet Ski rental is a business, why can't jet boat rental be a business? You charge 20% less because it's not as fast as a jet ski, but you pay 80% less for the unit. So you come out way ahead. Okay, so what you're looking at in this video is a jet boat, which basically it's like a jet ski but a little uglier. And they're shipped directly from China in a crate. And I think they cost like mid hundreds of dollars, high hundreds of dollars as opposed to a, that's, you know, many thousands of dollars. Guys, I've done this. I've imported a dozen different things from China. High ticket, low ticket, $5 things, $5,000 things. Electronics, non electronics. You go to Alibaba, you go to AliExpress, Dhgate, Temu and you just start DMing manufacturers and asking for samples and just talking to them. Hopping on WhatsApp late at night because there's a 13 hour time difference. Take a flyer on an order or two, make sure they have good reviews. You can if you go through Alibaba, you can do like the Alibaba assurance thing where they will make sure that your purchase is insured so you don't get scammed. Go to Alibaba and start looking for things that look really interesting and copy and paste those pictures over to Facebook Marketplace at varying price points and see what kind of interest you get. You don't need to spend a dime before you know which one of these are sellers. Like they've got mini Jeeps on there, jet boats, they've got golf carts for 1500 bucks. Like start importing crap. But before you import it, list it on Facebook Marketplace to see which ones get the most clicks, the most messages, the most impressions. Keep track of all of it in a Google sheet and even pre sell it. Like take a 50 deposit, a 500 deposit, meet with a guy and tell them exactly what you're doing. It's no secret these are coming from China. Most people just don't want to take the risk. They don't want to wire money to China. They would rather pay a surplus for that same item. So you can risk your money and wire it to China. That's the whole reason I was in business for 15 years importing and exporting to and from China. Because people don't want to take the risk. The word middleman should not be a pejorative. It is a beautiful thing to be a middleman. All right, that's it. Those are my 11 favorite business ideas of Q1 2026. These are all beginner friendly, approachable, affordable to start. They can all scale and I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't give a couple shout outs right now. I have to read this paper that my beautiful 13 year old daughter gave me. And now for my favorite daughter, shout outs. Shout out to senor. I will say my daughter's Spanish teacher, she loves you. She thinks you're awesome. She mentions you almost every day. So thank you for being an awesome teacher to my daughter. Senor. She wanted me to tell you that my second daughter Elise does not hate you and would like me to advise a seating chart where Weston and Riley are moved across. I'm just reading this for the first time. Are moved across the room and she stays with Sloan and Ella also for first period. I really think that Avery and Addie should sit by each other, which is my opinion. I'm glad you like my content. Look at this freaking senor right here. Shout out to Addie. Don't get Maddie. Addie. Shout out to Navis. Shout out to Nola, my biggest fan. Also, one last thing for Senor Avery does not appreciate having the worst seat ever in history and needs to be moved for medical reasons. I promised my daughter I would. I would give some shout outs. Thanks for hanging out in the Kerner office. Love you all.