4 Business Ideas You Can Start with $0 in 2025

Welcome to the Kerner office. It's Friday, which means that Nick, my business partner, and I are meeting for Holdco Bros. And if you're new to the pod, Hold Cobros is where we discuss business ideas and what's going on in our companies and really cool things we saw on the Internet that you might be able to learn from. So today we talk about Instagram's Close Friends feature, where there is a way to add all of your friends to Close Friends. So when you post a story, it gets not just shown to everyone, but prioritized to everyone. So there is a business where you can help influencers. There are millions of them. Add all of their tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of friends to Close Friends so they can get a ton more engagement, which makes them a lot more money, which can help make you money. We talk about negative cogs. We've talked about this before, but this is a different angle, as in acquiring products for free or getting paid to acquire products and then selling them. We talk about the lake weed removal business that I just posted about last week and how, why that's such a cool idea. Then we talked about some more home service business ideas and we were just all over the map. We were online business ideas, offline business ideas. But you're going to love it. Please share with a friend and we'll see you next time. This isn't a billion dollar idea, but this is something that someone could start this afternoon. Okay, you ready?

Okay.

On Instagram, they have a feature called Close Friends. Are you familiar with that?

I think so, actually. But yeah, go ahead.

So normally when you post a story, it is for the world to see, but if you add your close friends to the Close Friends folder, so to speak, then when you post a story, it will only show to them. Okay. And when you do post a story into Close Friends, it prioritizes it. Instagram puts it in the beginning of your friends stories and they can see that they're in your Close friends, right? So they feel a little special and they'll see it. So what that means is the views on your story go way, way up. Okay. Okay. Now it was like Rihanna or Kim Kardashian or someone right after this feature came out, they somehow added all of their millions and millions of followers to Close Friends. Somehow, like on accident? No, no. Like they paid someone to do it and their engagement went crazy. And there are a few people anecdotally here and there that do it. And I've read message boards, I've gone Deep. I've looked at forums and your engagement goes up 3 to 6x on your stories. Okay, so here's what that means. So when I post a story with a call to action, let's say like our school scrape, right. We talked about, we scraped Alex Hormozi's list Of the top 1000 school groups s K O O L and I posted a story to Instagram and I said, hey, I scraped this, give it away for free, subscribe to my newsletter to get it. And I got like 23,000 views on that story, which is about 10% of my total followers. And I got like 1500, 2000 email subscribers, which is great. It's a ton. But if I would have been able to add all of those Instagram subscribers to close friends, theoretically it could have been 3-6x that amount, both the views and the subscribers. Okay. Okay. So I went to Upwork and I found people that can do this. There's not a lot, it's really, really hard to find someone that can do this. There's some custom code involved. I But it is possible. I mean people have done it, so of course it's possible to do this. So my idea is to reach out to people that have ten, fifty, a hundred thousand, five hundred thousand million followers and offer to do this for them for a flat fee. Because what I was being charged to do this, I haven't done it yet, but I will is like 30, 40, $50 to build this out for me once. So build, build it once, sell it a thousand times. You could charge 100, 500, a thousand dollars. Because for all the people out there, there are many, many people out there that are monetizing their business on Instagram. You're giving them 3 to 6 x more engagement flat, one time fee.

I get that this would be business for you because like you're already doing it, but like how would somebody listening to this say, oh, I could do that business?

Because they will offer this as a service to people on Instagram that could make a lot more money if they had all of their followers and close friends.

Okay, so it's just to Instagram influencers essentially that are selling a product like that's the target demo, which there are.

Millions of like way more than I ever thought. Right.

I'm just saying they wouldn't be going to like the business down the street.

No.

And offering to do this for them on Instagram, they'd be going to someone who's an influencer that sells a product.

Yeah. I mean they could go to the restaurant that has 30,000 followers that post, you know, appetizer discounts in their story. Theoretically, anyone with a business or a personal brand that monetizes it somehow on Instagram could be a customer of this.

The creator economy is just so interesting because there are so many ways to monetize it that have not yet been exploited. Thirty years ago, before we had social media, how were products conveyed to people? They were either in print, in a newspaper, they were either in a magazine, they were in radio, or they were in television. Those are like pretty much the channels, some type of print media, radio, television. And a few companies that had the distribution really controlled what got out there. Not just the pricing of it, but also the supply of what was able to be marketed. And now you've got people who have built micro businesses, they're making a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, and they've got an audience that can sell products to people. So it's like opened up this world of advertising that just didn't exist before. And people are still trying to figure out the best way to do it. And this is an example of that. Or it's like, oh, Instagram just introduced close friends.

Hmm.

I wonder if I could build a business off of this that would improve our advertising metrics. And it turns out you can, because if people are close friends, that you're going to improve the rate at which people subscribe to your newsletter or see the product or purchase the product, etc. That's not really an idea here. I'm just. It's crazy to me that every week there's like a new idea for how to better leverage these platforms for distribution.

I've got another one for you.

Oh, okay.

So kind of along the same vein, I don't know who follows me on Instagram, right? I can click on my followers and swipe and I can see them, but there's 230,000 of them. I don't know who they are. Is there anyone cool or important follows me? I don't know. I'd like to know. Maybe we could do a collaboration somehow. So I paid a virtual assistant on upwork a hundred dollars and they scraped all of my followers into a spreadsheet. And this was actually very hard to do because I never found some. If someone finds this, please let me know. I never found a third party app that will do this for you because of Instagram's API limitations. I found one chrome extension that will do it, but they throttle you and they'll cut you off after like one or two thousand scraped and you've got 230,000. Yeah, I found a guy, he charged 100 bucks. It took him two days, and he got every single one of my followers in a spreadsheet. Now, here's why that's valuable, nick. Because about 10% of my followers list their phone number and or their email address in their profile. So really, I've got 20,000 emails now that I could email. I'm not going to add them to my newsletter because they haven't opted in, but I could send them a cold email and say, hey, I don't know if you know who I am, but you follow me on Instagram. I know this is random, but I send out a free business idea every week. Would you like to opt into my newsletter? Right? So they'll say, I convert 10 to 20% of those and boom, with a few clicks, I get two or three thousand more email subscribers. So that's cool. Or I could go to all the people that have over a hundred thousand followers and say, hey, let's do a collaboration somehow. Like, you're in business, I'm in business, we're both on Instagram. Maybe there's some way we could work together. So my whole thesis is it is really valuable for people that are on Instagram as a business owner to know who follows them, because it's not who you know, it's who knows you. So if you are reaching out to influencers with this pitch about adding people to close friends, this is another pitch. It's just, hey, do you mind if I send you a spreadsheet of all of your followers?

It's just a spreadsheet. It's not a spreadsheet with, like, analysis, because how would you identify who the who the value.

They have Google Sheet extensions, where you can integrate OpenAI into your Google Sheet into a new cell and you can say, hey, this is what I do. I sell cookies to wedding planners. I want you to tell me if any of my followers are interesting or could collaborate with me somehow so you could send it to them, like, with that already done. Because most people won't have ideas. They won't know what to do with them. So part of the pitch has to be implanting an idea in them.

And is the scraping just the 10% that have the phone number and email, or is it everyone? It's everybody.

So. So first name, last name, username, URL, if they follow you or not, if their profile is verified or not, phone number, email address, location if it's listed, website if it's listed. So you could say, hey, for 300 bucks, I'm going to add all your followers to close friends. For 500 bucks, I'm going to do that and send you a scrape of all of your followers and then you pay. You just outsource all of it.

I wonder if you could also do that. Like, let's say there's somebody who's trying to grow a business and they have a business that cells, I don't know, healthy water. No, that's a stupid one. Healthy protein shakes. Healthy protein shakes. However you define healthy protein shakes and you want to qualify which influencer you think is going to be the best for your brand. Could you do some analysis of their followers? Or this could be for the influencer, right? Like, if you're a podcaster, like we are, and somebody wants to come and buy ad time, they're going to ask you for your download information, right? They want to know how many people are actually downloading and listening to your episodes. So this could be something where you provide it for Instagram influencers to say. Like, this will give you the profile of your followers that you can then give to people who are asking you for information about marketing with you.

Like a media kit.

Yeah, it's like a media kit, but it's like an audience profile kit. Yeah, that would be interesting.

Or it could automatically make a media kit for you based on everything it learns from your follower base. Like, all right, you can charge this much per reel. This is the average age of your follower and all that.

Yeah, I like that. There's like, applications that I. You can't even think of all the applications. That was a really stupid thing to say. I'm so dumb.

You can't even, like, think of all the ideas. There's so many of the ideas Sound.

Like Kamala Harris, dude. Yesterday was today. Yesterday. And tomorrow will be today. Yesterday's tomorrow. I got one for you.

You ready?

Yeah, I got this text this week. Hey, Nick, I'm a Dallas. I'm Dallas based, too. People always think I'm Dallas based, which is funny.

Makes sense.

Anyways, I work in the pallet recycling and waste industry. I was listening to your podcast and we think the same way about B2B. I'd love to buy you lunch sometime. So I was like, ah, what? I'm not in Dallas. I can't buy you lunch. I was like, but what are you thinking? It's like, well, one of my customers throws away thousands of tons of good but not possible to sell vegetables. It's all going to the landfill. So I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, they tried to sell them, but nobody can take them all. So they just have all this excess inventory of vegetables. And so I was like, what made you reach out? He's like, well, the way that they dispose of these is they've got to put them on pallets and then ship them out.

Right.

I want you to guess. This guy's their vendor. He does their pallets. How much does this company spend on pallets a month?

Well, I was in this business a little bit with Send eats because we used to have to buy pallets. That's the whole industry. Pallet recycling, pallet repair, new pallet construction, sales. Oh, geez, I don't know. I have no idea. But I know they're like five to thirty dollars a piece, depending on the quality.

This company apparently spends $35,000 a week in pallets.

It's crazy.

$30,000 a week. So $120,000 a month. And it got me thinking about the reason he reached out was because of the episode where we were talking about negative cogs, where it's like, hey, you know, you're obsessed with a business that could be negative cogs. So I wanted to bring this up. What kind of a business could we do with thousands of pounds a month of vegetables that they're literally just throwing away into the landfill?

It's easy. Eco scraps. I tweeted about this a month or two ago. Those guys in Provo that started Eco Scraps, they took. They got paid by grocery stores to take produce that was old, and then they took it to a warehouse, and they mixed in some sawdust and they mix it all up. They put it in a shredder, and they let it sit for three months. Turned into organic compost. They bagged it up, sold it to Home Depot for $5 a bag. The major billion dollar company bought them out, like, 10 years ago.

What? Really?

Yeah. What's the name of them?

So, like, I know it's. It's kind of negative cogs, but you'd still need to pay for the shipping out.

Right. Basically, their pitch was they went to a grocery store and said, hey, how much do you spend on your trash disposal? $2,000 a month. Okay, can we do it for 1500? Done. So they were still profitable on the transportation, but they got paid to take this stuff for free.

They got paid to take this stuff for freaking free. That's.

Yeah.

Well, and this supposedly is thousands of pounds. Should we do it?

Should I Reach out.

Should I reach out to him?

Is he in Dallas?

He's in Dallas, yeah. I don't want to give his name because he hasn't given me permission.

So I don't know what else you could use that for.

If there's a listener who's in Dallas that thinks that they could capitalize on this, reach out to us.

There was another business that went around to like all the cold press juice shops and took. So when you juice a freaking carrot, right, you've got all the juice and you've got all the pulp and they just throw that pulp away. So there was another company that would just take all the pulp for free and make like fertilizer out of it. The hard part with both of these is you've got to like shred it up in like this huge industrial food shredder. I almost started this business in Tuscaloosa. Those things are a lot of money because if you don't shred it up, it's going to sit. It has to sit for three years instead of three months. What? So you need a truck, you need a warehouse, you need a food shredder. And then you need to buy sawdust and mix it in Chemlan. Kemlon, that was the company that bought out Eco Scraps.

Cool. Come on.

Trugreen. Trugreen. Yeah. True Green by Kemlon. Vice versa.

Well, I thought you'd like that story because it was somebody reach out to me about the negative cogs business.

That is a good story. All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube and if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkopod.com also. My newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter. Chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. So I'm on Instagram. Okay. You with me?

Okay, yeah, I'm here.

Hey. Hey, Nick, I'm up here. Okay, sorry. I find these guys on Instagram. 19 year old college students from Chicago. One is a student at University of Nebraska, one is a student University of Missouri. And they grew up together. They were best friends in high school and they went home for the summer. Chicago suburbs. And here's what they did. You ready? You with me? I'm here. I'm here. One of their neighbors, they live near or on a lake, and one of their neighbors says, hey, guys, are you home for the summer? Yeah, I'm installing a dock. My lake. Can you help me do that? I'll give you 25 bucks an hour. Sure. So they help them install a dock, and then the other neighbor is like, hey, can you install my dock? And they're like, yeah, sure. And then another neighbor sees him, and they ask something different. They say, hey, what do you do about all these weeds that keep floating up towards the dock? Because it's really gross. My grandkids want to swim off the dock, but it's just algae and seaweed everywhere. What do you do with that? And they're just like hustlers just trying to make money. Like, we could try to clean it. I. I don't know. I don't know what anyone does here. And so they get these rakes, like, literally a leaf rake. And they stand in the water waist deep, and they just rake up this seaweed. Because it's stuck on the floor of the lake. Yeah. And it's, like, very hard work. Just. I mean, the seaweed is waterlogged, and they're lifting it onto the dock. They're lifting it onto the backyard. Take some hours, and they charge, like, 500 bucks. And they're like, huh? And it's such a visual thing, Nick, like you were just talking about it is. All the neighbors come out, and they're like, hey, can you do mine? Can you do mine? They keep raising their prices. No one says no. 500 bucks for a morning worth of work. 700 bucks for a morning worth of work. Now, this is hard work. Like, there. There's no chemicals. There's no automation. There's no machines. They literally have rakes in their hands, and they're standing in this water for hours at a time, but they're making really good money. So they do this a year or two ago. Then they come back home, and they're like, no more dock insulation. Let's only clean ponds and lakes. And there are companies that do this, but they all spray chemicals. And it doesn't get rid of the actual weeds. It just kills them. And so the lake is still ugly. The weeds just don't spread as much. And so literally, the only way to do this without chemicals is the hard way. So then. Oh, such a good. What?

Raking? That's the hard way?

Yes. So then they start posting videos on Instagram and TikTok, and they get 10, 20, 30,000 subscribers. And it's very visual. They put a camera up and some of their videos hit a million or 2 million views. And this guy in Chicago, worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, that owns this massive boomer, like a forklift business or something, but with like nationwide presence. He sees them on TikTok, the 63 year old, and he's like, I like you guys, you remind me of me when I was young. I want to help you out. And they're like, okay. He's like, have you ever seen this? He sends them a link to like this boat that does what they're doing. It helps clean out weeds from lakes. And they're like, I didn't know this exists. It's a hundred thousand dollar boat. And these guys are broke college students. And he says, let me tell you what, how about I buy this boat and I'll insure it and I'll rent it out to you. And they're like, yes, please. So he puts a hundred grand down, pays cash for it, rents it out to them for very, very fair rate. And now they have a boat. Now they're posting videos of them on their boat cleaning weeds. And they're a lot more efficient. They have more business than they can handle. And dang, I followed them on Instagram and they saw that I followed them and then they DM me like, oh my gosh, thanks for following me, bro. And it's like, thank you for DMing me. You guys are awesome. You want to talk?

Are you gonna get them on?

Hear me out. I was like, you want to talk? And you know, coming from me to like, want to hop on a call. Oh yeah, that doesn't happen. That didn't happen. So we talked yesterday and I heard that, you know, 15 minutes of their story and I'm like, you're coming on the pod and like, this is an amazing business because no one's doing it. And it reminds me of the quote from like 1, 800 got junk and he said, as long as pianos weigh 800 pounds, there's always going to be a business for starting a moving business that's always going to be around, right? Because pianos are heavy and it sucks and it's a crappy business, so we'll always stay in business basically as long as pianos are £800. So it's like this is like the sweatiest, ugliest, most manual startup in the world, which means it's an amazing opportunity for anyone and will be for quite some time. What do we think?

Dude, that's awesome. I love it.

Isn't that cool? It's somewhat seasonal, depending on where you live, and it's somewhat geographical, depending on what type of seaweed grows in these ponds and lakes. But they said it's pretty much works anywhere in some places just better than others. So I'm like, guys, you need to like, franchise. Like, you already have a social media presence. Like, you could use that to sell franchises. Like, put all your sops in a Google Drive. It doesn't need to be franchise. It could be licensing or whatever, or sell a course or whatever. But I just, I think these guys are freaking awesome.

That's right. I love it.

All right, you ready? Yes.

I want to go through with you. We talked about a similar idea to this a couple of months ago, but the top 10 media accelerated home services businesses. Are you ready?

Mm. All right.

The thesis that we had a couple of months ago was that you could use YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, to make videos that people would then click into to promote your services. Now we were talking about it from like an influencer standpoint, because this one guy, he goes around, he cleans up people's yards that are just a total mess. And he subscribed, he's gotten millions of subscribers, he makes a lot of money. Cause it's really cool to see that time lapse. But then we started talking about, like, what are some other industries or businesses that you could do this with? Well, I started thinking about if you were the side hustle type and you wanted to start a business and you didn't have money for marketing and you didn't really know what else to do. What are the top 10 home services businesses that would work really, really well on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook? By posting time lapse videos of your projects. So that's the thesis here, okay? Numero uno. Pressure washing. Like, dude, I don't know if you resonate with this. I think every man will. I could watch a 30 minute video of somebody pressure washing. Either, like a really dirty surface, a carpet. Have you ever seen the carpet pressure washing video?

The rock ones, the rugs.

Oh my gosh, it's amazing. And like, we all do the same thing. We're like, okay, now I'm gonna do a square and I'm gonna clean inside the square.

Like, it's actually super embarrassing. Jesse caught me in the middle of the night watching one of those. I just really. I'm just kidding. We're struggling through it.

It's like eight years ago when I went to go visit Chris.

Yes.

And I was staying at his house.

Never forget this.

I was downstairs on the couch. I had my laptop up and open and I was watching a movie.

Keep this in Mohammed.

And Chris, Chris was like coming down the stairs. He's like, oh my gosh, it's midnight. Nick's watching something.

What if I could see like the glow around the corner? And I'm like, I thought he was asleep. And I'm like, oh, this guy. I'm about to. Okay, what's he looking like?

What if he's watching porn? Oh, my. Chris turns the corner and there I am, 32 year old, father of a few children, and I was watching the Ice Age on Netflix and laughing my head off.

Yeah. In the middle of the night in my living room.

What can I say? All right, so pressure washing, I think is number one. You ready for number two? This one surprised me, but I went and looked. Pool cleaning. Dude, those videos.