21 Business Ideas for 2025 (Part 1/4)

Welcome to the Kerner office. I wanted to do something a little different today. I have a spreadsheet or a Google sheet that is entitled Every business I've ever started. And I had not added to this for 612 months. And last night I couldn't sleep and so I started adding to it. And I was at 40 when I started and I finished at 70. And so I have started over 70 businesses because I know there's a handful more that I haven't remembered. But here's what I qualify as a business. I'm going to read every single one of these and give you just a quick primer on what it was and the background. So I count something as a business if I thought it would generate revenue and I spent hours on it, maybe I filed an LLC and then spent some time on it. Maybe it was a full fledged business with employees, revenue raised money or maybe there was never an llc, it never generated revenue, but it was a test, right? I'm counting tests as businesses because every business I start starts as a test. And so I just thought this was really interesting to look at because I get comments on Twitter all the time that says, wow, how do you have all these stories like, sounds like you've lived two lifetimes in 30 something years. And I think that's because I, I've started 70 businesses and I've had 10, 15, 20. I know I've said different numbers of how many business partners I've had. That's because I can't count them differently. So it's kind of not a solid target. But I've always had a few tests, few businesses, few companies going at the same time. Which means that I have a ton of experience in the 0 to 1 phase and I love it and it's absolutely my passion, if you can't tell by now. So without further ado, let's get started on these businesses and I will tell you either the market cap or the revenue or some sort of a metric that lets you understand your how big all of these businesses are or were. And most of them had $0 in revenue because I abandoned them. And I'll also tell you the outcome of all of them. So my first business was selling used golf balls as a nine year old in Logan, Utah. I lived across the street from the Logan River Golf course and I was kind of poor, not really poor, but we just didn't have a lot of money and I wanted to buy candy at the grocery store down the street, Macy's. And so I would buy, go looking in the ditch across the street, Park Avenue. I think I lived at Park Avenue. And I'd look for golf balls and I'd wash them and I had a red Rider wagon and I would wash them with laundry detergent, make them sparkly and white. And I put up a huge 4 by 8 foot plywood sign. I leaned it against my mailbox. It was a really busy road, got a lot of traffic and it just said use golf balls. Three for a dollar. And then these guys in polo shirts would pull into my driveway and give me a few bucks for a few golf balls. A few golf balls. And it was really fun. That was my first taste of entrepreneurship then. So I'm going to jump around. I don't have these in sequential order. When I was in college, I started a business called Textbook Crook. Textbook Crook was a marketplace for college students to buy and sell textbooks to each other. Because I thought it was ridiculous that I'd spend $130 on a textbook and then four months later at the end of the semester the bookstore would give me three $15 for it. But I knew that another student about to take that same class would give me $70 for it. So some people did it on Craigslist. At the time there was no Facebook Marketplace. This was 2000. So I thought there should be a marketplace for this. And so I found some template online. It was really ugly. You can go to web archive and look up textbook.com and you'll see it. It was a really, really ugly website. Terribly ugly logo made in Ms. Paint, literally. But I paid $500 for this template. It was a marketplace template and people could list their textbooks for sale for $1 and that's it. I just made a dollar per listing. And I advertised by getting postcards printed, full color, two sided postcards. And me and my buddies that I worked with at a Thai restaurant waiting tables. After our shift ended at 2 o', clock, we'd go to the community college, Shelton State, and we'd go to the University of Alabama where we were, and we'd put these postcards under the windshield wipers of all the cars. And that got us our first customers. And then one day serendipity happened and I got an email from the university, some random notification and they did not BCC me. They emailed all 28,000 students just on Gmail. It was right there, I had everyone's email. And so I slowly hit reply all and shamelessly said textbook.com we're textbook crook because we steal the competition. And I hit reply all And I emailed every single student at the University of Alabama because I could. And it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And that drove a bunch of traffic to my website. And the IT department reached out and they said, you can't do that. You should never do that again. And I said, oops, okay, sorry. And you can't unring a bell. What's done was done and that was really good for my business. But then a few months later, I had my first son and the business wasn't showing a lot of traction and so I abandoned it. That's what happened with textbook crook. Then I had a business that lasted all of an afternoon called Clean Cuts. And this was like I was 21 years old. I was straight out of my mission and I wanted to mow lawns to make some money in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And so I printed up some flyers, Clean Cuts, lawn care. And I went to a neighborhood. I still remember the neighborhood. I took my kids there last time we were in town for an Alabama game and I started passing out flyers and I got a job. And then an hour into it I was like, this sucks. I just remembered I hate mowing the lawn. I have always hated mowing the lawn. What am I doing? There's better ways to make money. And so yeah, I'm calling that a business, but really it was an experiment that lasted an afternoon. My next business was CK Properties and that was me buying rental homes. And, and I started by buying my first home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It was a tiny 900 square foot, three bedroom, one bath, 50 year old home and we paid $90,000 for it. And then at the time, President Obama was giving $8,000 tax credits to first time home buyers to help spark the economy out of a recession. And so once I got that $8,000 check, I promptly put it into a rental home five minutes down the road from me in a rough part of town. It was a four bedroom, two bath. I paid about $56,000 for it. And CK Properties was born. I was a landlord at age 22. And then I bought a few more. One in Huntsville, another one in Huntsville. And I own those homes for three to six years. I started selling them off in the mid-20s and it was just too hard to manage single family homes from a few states away because I had moved to Texas in 2014. Then I had a business. I consider this like my first real business. It was Phone Restauran Store and Phone Restore was a chain of iPhone repair shops. In my first Location and I'll talk about a lot of these in more depth on future episodes, but I just want to touch on these quickly. Phone restore started when it was 2010 and guy in one of my classes gave me a free iPhone because it was broken and it's sitting in his drawer. And I had a palm phone with a physical keyboard. And then I saw a Flyer that said iFix iPhones $60. And the guy's name was Samir, I think. And he lived in the Houndstooth apartments right on 15th Street. And I called him up and I said, I have this iPhone and the screen won't turn on. He said, bring it over to my, to my dorm room. So I went over there and he had already ordered the LCD screen from ebay and I sat there in his dorm room and watched him fixed it and then I went to ebay and saw that part was only $15 and he charged me 60 and it took him 10 minutes. And I thought, that's a good business. That's going to be my first business. If he can do it, I can do it. Started doing some research and learned that there was a business in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Another sec school town called myphonemd. Used to be called iphonemd, but Apple threatened to take them out. Sorry, I just got an interruption. If we could edit that out. They were called myphonemd and they used to be called iphonemd. But Apple said, hey, you can't use the word iPhone in your business name. And they were just bragging they had a location and doing 20, 30, 40 grand a month fixing iPhones. So I thought, man, if they can do it there, I can do this here. So I did a bunch of research and learned that Tuscaloosa could support at least one store. So I signed a lease on one of the best retail spots in town. I put a personal guarantee on it. 2,500 bucks a month right in between a subway and a batteries plus. And I was off to the races and a tornado hit me and I opened a second location in Birmingham and then I graduated and then I opened a third location in Huntsville and then we moved to Huntsville and then I opened a fourth location in Huntsville and then two years later I sold the business and then I had a dispute with my business partners that lasted a couple years and was very stressful and we ended up settling and, and I got a check, I got a sizable check at the mail for selling that business. It was a lot of money for a 20 something year old. Not enough to retire, but enough to feel pretty Rich. And that was my first real, real business. And it was a lot of fun. So then I started LCD cycle, which I started literally the day after I sold phone restore. And LCD cycle was born when I got a call one day. I was sitting in the store fixing an iPhone, hating my life working in retail, which is the worst thing ever. And I got a call that said, hey, I want to buy your iPhone screens. And I said, why would you want to buy those? Well, we can recycle them. We send them to China. And I hung up and immediately thought, I want to do that. I want to be on the other end of that transaction. And so I started reaching out to vendors through alibaba, dming iPhone screen vendors and saying, copy paste, copy paste. The same message saying, I want to buy iPhone screens and I want to recycle iPhone screens. Can you help me? And about 1 in 10 would say, yes, I can help you with both. And everyone else said, I can only sell you screens. I can't help you recycle screens. So then I just started sending them my company's iPhone screens to see what would happen. And I had to learn how to import, how to export, how to label your boxes to not get confiscated in customs, how to go through Hong Kong, how to do all this stuff to get them there. And then I had a business. And so I had set the groundwork for this before I ever sold phone restore. And so when I sold phone restore, I thought, man, this will be a lot better. I like this a lot more. I don't want to deal with customers face to face. I would rather sell them stuff on the Internet. So that's what LCD cycle was. And it blew up. It was product market fit. It was right place, right time, and it was a lot of cold calls. And I will have a whole episode dedicated to LCD cycle and how we grew fast in the future. But the long and short of it is we did 28 grand the first month exactly twice, 56 grand the second month in February 2013. And then we did a grand, 140, something like that, the third month. And we closed out the year over $2 million. And then we doubled every year for a while. And it was a big business and that was a lot of fun. And it lasted seven years, give or take. And then I had a business. So forget the timelines from here on out. Cause they're all murky. I was doing a bunch of things at the same time and I can't even remember the years. So forget the timelines. I'll Tell you if I remember, but I had a business called Presto Cars with Nick Hulaski, my current business partner. It was a concierge car buying service. And we. I mean, shoot, we sold a bunch of cars, so revenues were in the six figures. But it was a terrible business. I don't like cars. I don't care about them. I don't like breaking down on the side of the road in an old Mazda Miata. It was not fun. And during this time, I was still doing LCD Cycle, which was doing great. And so I was just thinking, like, what are you doing, Chris? Like, why are you. Why are you selling these used cars when you could just be doing LCD cycle? So the whole model was. You tell us what car you want, we become a licensed dealer. So we can see what is coming up at all the auctions. Mannheim and Odessa, those are the two big ones. And then we would go to the auction and buy your car for you. So for 600ft, so you pay basically dealer rates. You pay wholesale fee plus like a finder's fee to us. And the whole model was to, you know, go to one auction for six hours and buy cars for 10 to 20 people and make six to 12 grand in a day gross profit. But it didn't work out like that. You know, people would back out, the car would break down, something would be missed in the inspection. We couldn't get it at their target price. There was a million things that could go wrong in that business, and they did. And I probably ended up putting breaking even, maybe losing a couple grand on like, let's see, 20, 30, maybe 150 grand in revenue over the course of a few months. Yeah, decent business. Not for me. Then I had a business called no BS Crypto. And this is the one that I started with McAfee, that I dedicated a whole episode to about a month ago. You can go. I think it was after episode five of the Kerner Office. It's called what Happened When I showed up on John McAfee's door. That was 20 to 20, 20 or so, give or take. That was a wild ride. We had a. Our token had a market cap in the tens of millions. But that doesn't mean it's real money. It's just funny money, crypto money. But we had tens of thousands of customers, token holders, whatever you want to call them. We also had a community with like 5,000 in monthly revenue. Something not super sizable, but that was a. That was a very fun story, if nothing else. Then I had a business called Repeat leads where I would do lead generation for anyone that wanted to buy and scrape leads. And I'm actually going to reboot this at some point in the future because it's good business. I had a company called ReadyMLS where we would send bulk marketing to people that had a home listed for sale, I'm trying to remember this correctly. To people that had a home listed for sale to encourage them to basically circumvent a real estate agent and list directly on the MLS for a flat $100 fee. I think that's what it was. It was fully automated, so you. That's what it was. People would list their home on Zillow or wherever as a for sale by owner. And we would say, hey, you get a lot more eyeballs if this is listed by an agent. I understand you don't want to pay an agent 3 or 6%, so give us 99 bucks and we'll list it for you. And it was fully automated, so they pay the money, they upload pictures, upload a description, and then it would go to the MLS under our brokerage license there. That business could still be very viable today. I don't even remember why we abandoned it. It was me and a partner at the time. Then I had a random business called All Green Shades which was like oh geez 20 where I bought an Instagram account that had thousands of followers. I don't know, 20, 30, 40,000 followers. And the whole theme of the account was just posting green things. All Green Shades. That was the name of the account. I don't even know if it's still around anymore. I don't pay that much for it. Maybe 500,000, 2,000 bucks. And I was going to see if I could start an e commerce website selling or drop shipping All Green Things to the Instagram followers. And in looking back, it was actually a pretty stupid idea and I didn't get very far with it. I think I posted like I tried to grow it half heartedly for a month or two, maybe resold the account, maybe abandoned it. I might still own it, I don't know. I had a. On the topic of green, I had another business with two good friends and partners, Grant and Max, called Mellow Migraine. And Grant is a good friend and he's very smart. He's an engineer and he always has brilliant product ideas. And he said, chris, I suffer from migraines and I recently learned that wearing like green tinted glasses will block out the light that causes migraines. So what if we sell green tinted glasses as a cure or a remedy for migraines. I love it. So we ordered a bunch from China. We imported them. I think I still have some behind me in one of these drawers. And we started selling them via Facebook ads. And we sold some and they worked, and then we abandoned it. And I don't know why. That's going to be a story that you hear a lot. Same.