20 FORGOTTEN BUSINESSES That Will Make You Rich in 2026

The businesses that actually make people rich are almost never the ones that people brag about at parties. According to the US Small Business Administration, the typical self-employed family in America has a median net worth of $380,000, over 4 times the $90,000 of a family who only works a regular job. So the boring little business that you'd be too embarrassed to tell your friends about could be the exact thing that changes your entire family tree. So let me tell you about a guy named Nick Huber. Nick went to Cornell, one of the best schools in the country. He could have walked into any shiny tech job job or startup that he wanted, but instead, while he was still in college, he started a business helping students store their stuff over the summer. Not glamorous, just picking up boxes and mini fridges and keeping them safe until fall. That little idea grew into a company called Storage Squad, and in 2020, he sold it for $1.65 million. But this is where it gets really good. He took what he learned and went all in on the most boring business you can imagine: Self-storage units, metal boxes in a parking lot that people rent to hold their junk. And today his company Bolt Storage owns around 1.9 million square feet of storage across 62 locations in 11 states. Nick built a fortune out of the kind of business you'd normally drive past without a glance. And he says it out loud. He started a whole platform called the Sweaty Startup because he believes the Shark Tank and tech world has poisoned people into thinking that you need a genius idea to get rich. You don't. You need a real business that solves a real problem and throws off real cash. The unsexier the better, because nobody wants to compete with you. When everyone else is chasing the same trendy app idea, the field is crowded and it's pretty brutal. But how many of your friends are racing to start a storage facility or a bin cleaning route? None. That empty field, that's where the money is. Your purpose comes to your pain, and Nick's whole message is that the unglamorous grind everyone avoids is exactly where the wealth has been hiding for you the whole time. He could have chased status. He chose cash flow, and cash flow is what ultimately set him free. Now, here's what you might be thinking. Those businesses sound boring, and you didn't dream about cleaning gutters or scooping dog poop when you imagine being successful. And I get it, but that feeling is exactly why these businesses become so profitable. The reason nobody starts them is the reason they pay so well. When a job sounds unglamorous, the competition, it goes away, it vanishes, disappears. The customers can't shop you around, and you get to charge what you're worth. Rich people don't chase what looks impressive. They chase what puts cash in their pocket every single month. And a lot of these you can start for a few hundred dollars on the weekend while you keep your current job, if that's your situation. So let go of the idea that your business has to look cool. It has to work. Let me show you exactly what I mean. If you've been here before, drop a hashtag #believe in the comments below so I can feature you here in the future video. And if you're new, welcome to Believe Nation, the only channel that helps you believe in yourself daily, one video at a time. But leave. The boxes and machines that pay you while you sleep. Start with the businesses that basically run themselves once they're set up. Self-storage, like Nick Huber built, runs at 30 to 45% profit margins with an average occupancy rate of around 92% across the country. People pay every month and mostly forget that they're paying. Then there are laundromats. A guy named Dave Menz bought a beat-up, struggling laundromat on Craigslist for $85,000. Everybody thought he was crazy. Today, his company, Queen City Laundry, runs 4 locations in Cincinnati with 250 machines and brings in well over $1.8 million a year at close to 40% margins. A single machine can make around $90,000 a year. And then there's vending. Adam Hill started Hill Vending by himself with zero experience in 2014. He now runs over 100 machines across more than 40 locations, pulls in about $700,000 a year, and does it working roughly 2 days a week. 2 days a week. ATM routes are another one worth a serious look. Here you place cash machines in busy shops and bars and you collect a small fee on every withdrawal. A single well-placed machine can bring $300 to $500 a month for almost no work. And you can start with just a few machines and grow from there. These businesses share one beautiful trait: the machine does the selling. You're not trading every hour for a dollar. You set it up, you service it, and it keeps ringing that register while you're at your kid's soccer game. That's the difference between a job and an asset. And these are the assets you can actually afford to buy. You don't need to invent anything. You just need to own the box, plug it in the spot where people are already spending money, and let it do the work for years. The recurring money routes nobody talks about. The real magic word in business is recurring. That means the customers pay you again and again without you having to sell them again and again. So look for the boring jobs people need done on a schedule forever. Trash bin cleaning is a perfect example. You show up after trash day with a hot water rig and sanitize people's disgusting garbage cans. You can start it for as little as $400 to $800, charge $25 to $35 a month per household, and run 35 to 50% profit margins. An operator running a tight route of 35 stops a day can pull in over $1,000 in a single day. Pet waste removal is the same story, just with dog yards. Startup costs under $2,000 for a solo operator. You charge $85 to $150 a month per yard to scoop. And if you do the work yourself, margins run 70 to 80%. There are companies doing millions a year picking up dog poop. Draft beer line cleaning is another one that could be awesome. Every bar has to clean its beer lines every couple of weeks or the beer tastes terrible. So you show up on a schedule and you charge a flat fee per visit, 35 to 50% margins. Junk removal belongs here too. People always have a garage, a basement, an estate full of stuff they need gone, and they pay $150 to $600 a load to just make it disappear. You can start with a truck and a strong back, right? And scale into multiple crews. Add in pressure washing where you blast the grime off driveways and decks and house sidings for a few hundred dollars a job with margins over 50%. And you've got another simple route business. See the pattern? None of these are one-time jobs. You land the customer once and they pay you month after month, year after year. That's how you build income that shows up even if you don't. Also, if you want to take real action after this video, I made a free worksheet just for you. It covers the top lessons from today, gives you space to write your biggest takeaways, and helps you build a simple action plan. It's 100% free. Just click the link in the description below to go grab it. I'll see you there. The ick factor businesses that print money. So here's a rule that will make you rich. The more disgusting or uncomfortable the job, the fewer people will do it, and the more you get to charge. Grave care is a beautiful example. Families move away and can't tend to their loved ones' headstones, and cemeteries only mow the grass. So you clean and maintain grave sites. You can start for $3,000 to $10,000, charge $100 to $300 per cleaning, and because your material cost is almost nothing, margins run 60 to 80%. Luxury restroom trailers are another one. Nobody wants to rent a nasty plastic porta-potty at a wedding, so high-end mobile bathrooms rent for $1,200 $2,000 per event at 40 to 50% profit margins. A small fleet in a growing city can throw off a quarter million a year in owner's cash flow. Even something as simple as dryer vent cleaning fits here. Clogged dryer vents are a leading cause of house fires, so homeowners and apartment managers pay $100 to $300 for a job that takes under an hour, and margins are north of 60%. Portable toilet rentals for construction sites work the same way. It's not pretty, but every job site needs them. They rent by the month, and one route can throw off serious recurring money. The thing that they all have in common is they make people a little uncomfortable to think about. That discomfort is your profit margin. While everyone else is fighting over the pretty businesses, you get a quiet lane all to yourself where you can charge a premium and barely have any competition. The businesses the law forces customers to buy. Now, this is one of the strongest kind of boring businesses of all, the ones that the law requires. So when a customer is legally required to hire you, you never have to convince them. So take commercial kitchen exhaust hood cleaning. Fire codes force every restaurant, every school, school, every hospital kitchen to deep clean their exhaust systems on a schedule, or they get shut down. So you work overnight when the kitchen is closed, charge $500 to $2,000 a job, run 40 to 60% margins. A solo operator with one helper can bring in $10,000 to $30,000 a month. Chimney sweeping is the same. Safety codes call for annual inspections of anything that burns wood, so it's steady repeat business at $120 to $390 a sweep. And it's so reliable that big investors are now buying up chimney companies.

That's not a joke.

There are private equity— firms rolling up chimney sweeps, commercial fire inspection, backflow testing on water systems, dryer vent cleaning in apartment buildings. All of it is driven by rules that never go away. The customer isn't buying because they want to. They're buying because they have to. And that makes your income about as stable as it gets. So you're not at the mercy of trends or the economy or an algorithm or whatever is popular this year. You're riding on a rule that isn't going anywhere. And rules like these usually get stricter over time, not looser. That means your customer list only grows. Once you become the reliable person that building manager can call, you often keep the account for years and they refer you to every other manager that they know if you do a good job. The skilled trades you can run out of a van. You don't need a storefront as well to get rich. Some of the best boring businesses fit in the back of a van and go straight to the customer's driveway. Asphalt seal coating is a great one. So driveways and parking lots need to be resealed every couple of years, and you can start with a basic setup for under $3,300. Pros charge $100 to $250 an hour, run 40 to 60% margins, and a single parking lot can pay for your whole starter kit. Mobile auto glass paired with mobile sensor calibration is another. When someone cracks a windshield today, replacing it and recalibrating the car's cameras runs $800 to $1,500 a job, and one mobile technician can do $150,000 to $200,000 a year. Mobile car detailing is another easy one. You bring the soap, the water, vacuum right to someone's driveway and hand back a car that looks brand new, charging $150, $300 a vehicle with very little overhead. Even mobile bike repair, fixing bikes in people's driveways can hit six figures in year one because you skip the expensive shop rent that everyone else is paying. So notice what all these have in common. The customer stays home, you come to them, and that convenience alone lets you charge more than the guy with the fixed location. So the lesson here is pretty simple. A skill plus a van plus a phone number beats a fancy office every time. Your customers don't care where you're based. They care that you show up. That you did the work and you made their problem go away. Deliver that and you'll never run out of people who are willing to pay you. The businesses you can start from your kitchen table. So not every boring business needs a van or a machine. Some of the best ones you can run from a laptop with almost no money down. Virtual bookkeeping is a quiet giant here. Every business on earth needs clean books. Most owners hate doing the books and good bookkeepers are in short supply. You can learn the software, charge businesses a monthly retainer, and stack up recurring clients from your spare room. Accounting firms are so desperate for reliable help that they'll pay a premium for it. Commercial cleaning is another one that you can start lean. Just you and a vacuum cleaning offices at night when everyone else has gone home. Small operators run at healthy margins doing $50,000 to $60,000 a month before they even hire a team. And here's one that's built for right now: in-home senior tech support. Older people are getting left behind by phones and apps and passwords, and their families live too far away to help. You go to their home, you patiently set things up for them, you answer their questions and teach them, charging around $75 an hour. You can start it for under $1,000. The point is, if you've got a skill and a little bit of patience, you can begin with almost no money at all. The one thing you truly need is just your first customer. Land one, do incredible work, ask them who else they know, and let that snowball effect carry you. How the smart ones turn boring into a future. So here's the final piece, and it's how the truly wealthy play the game. It's not enough to run one boring business. The real money comes from owning them and then and combining them. So a single small business like an accounting firm or a chimney company might sell for around 5 to 7 times its yearly profit. But if you buy up 30 or 40 of them, put them under one name, one back office, one system, the whole bundle can sell for 13 times profit or more. Same businesses, but worth almost double just because you organize them together. Big investors will pay a premium because they'd rather write one big check than chase 40 of these small ones. And that gap, buying at 6 times profit and selling at 13 times, is generational wealth that gets made, and it's happening right now in the most boring industries you can name: plumbing, HVAC, pest control, landscaping, chimney sweeps. So think bigger than a job that you own. Start one boring business, get it running without you, then buy or start another and another. And each one is a building block. Being leads to doing here. So the day you start thinking like an owner instead of an operator is the day that the whole game starts to change for you. You don't have to do doing all of this at once. You just have to start with one, prove that it works, and let it teach you the rest. That's a great start, and it's within reach for you starting this week. Your unfair advantage. So the businesses I just walked you through, they're not going to impress anybody at a dinner party. That's the point. While everyone else is chasing the shiny new idea, you can steadily build real cash flow with your laundromat, your van, or route that nobody else wants. You don't need to be a genius. You just need to be willing to do the boring but valuable work that other people are you're too proud to do. Ready isn't real, so don't wait around to feel ready. Pick one, start small today, and let it grow. And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. Now let me teach you how the stock market works. The stock market isn't a casino, and believing that it is might be the most expensive mistake you ever make.

Stocks are not lottery tickets. There's a company behind every stock. If a company does well, the stock does It's not that complicated.

I have never had less than 80% of my money in American business. You can call them stocks. I don't want to own anything else.

62% of Americans already own stock, according to Gallup in 2025. Yet most of them couldn't explain what they actually own or how it really works.

The single, single most important thing to me in the stock market for anyone is to know what you own. I'm amazed how many people own stocks They would not be able to tell you why they own it. If you can't explain— I'm serious— you can't explain to a 10-year-old in 2 minutes or less why you own a stock, you shouldn't own it.

90% of the people that buy stocks don't think of them the right way. They think about something that they hope goes up next week, and they think about the market as something they hope goes up. And if it's down, they feel worse. I feel better.

So it's not even about stocks at all. It's about whether you spend the next 40 years trading your time for a paycheck, or you finally get your money working harder than you do.

You can't wait till you have a ton of money to start investing and think, I'm not an investor. What you got to do is say, rather than my Apple phone, let me own Apple stock. Let me own a piece of all the best companies, not just Apple. I've got to become an owner or I'll always be in scarcity.

Longer term, stock market's been the best place to be last 10 years, last 30 years, last 130 years. But if you need the money in 1 or 2 years, You shouldn't be buying stocks.

The first rule in investment is don't lose, and the second rule of investment is don't forget the first rule. And that's all the rules there are. I mean, that, uh, if you buy things for far below what they're worth and you buy a group of them, you basically don't lose money.

Let me tell you about a man named Ronald Read. He wasn't a tech founder. He didn't invent an app. He wasn't born into money. Ronald pumped gas and fixed cars at a service station in Vermont for 25 years, and then he worked as a janitor at JCPenney store for another 17 years. He wore old flannel shirts and a worn coat he held together with a safety pin. He drove a secondhand car. He gathered fallen branches for his own firewood and ate simple breakfast at the local diner. Everyone in his small town assumed he was just barely getting by. Then in 2014, Ronald passed away at 92 years old, and the entire town was stunned because this quiet janitor left behind an estate worth almost $8 million. He gave $1.2 million to the local library and $4.8 million to the local hospital. People could not believe it. How does a gas station attendant die with $8 million in the bank? He didn't win the lottery. He didn't have some secret inheritance. Here's what he did. He read the Wall Street Journal every single day. He spent far less than he earned, and he quietly invested the difference into blue chip stocks, household names that you already know. Then he reinvested every dividend they paid him, and he waited for decades while his neighbors bought the shiny new cars to look successful to their friends. Ronald was busy actually becoming wealthy. He understood something most people never figure out their entire lives. Looking rich and being rich are two completely different things. And the stock market was the simple tool that turned a janitor's small paycheck into a fortune. Now, maybe you think this only works for other people, right? You might be thinking you don't earn enough to invest or that the market is just way too risky right now and you'll lose whatever you put in because because honestly, it feels like rolling the dice in a casino in a game that you don't understand, right? I hear you. And I think all progress begins with telling the truth. So here's the truth. Ronald Read was never rich when he started. He was pumping gas. He never once earned a big salary in his life. What he had wasn't money. It was understanding. The only reason the market might feel like a casino to you is that nobody ever sat down and explained the rules of the game. And you can't win a game when you don't even know how it's played. So give me the next few minutes. Forget everything that's ever confused you about the stock market, and I'm going to explain the entire stock market to you like you're brand new but very smart. And by the end, you'll see it the exact same way Ronald did. A share of stock is a real piece of a real business. So let's start at the very beginning, because this is where most people get lost. When you buy a share of a stock, you are not buying a lottery ticket or a magic number on some screen. You're buying a tiny piece of an actual company. You become a part owner of that business. If you own one share of Apple, you own a real slice of every iPhone they sell, every store they run, every dollar of profit they make. That's it. That's the whole idea. And it's simpler than anyone makes it sound. Now, here's a quick way to see how big a company really is. You take the price of one share and you multiply it by the total number of shares that exist. That number is called the market market capitalization, and it's just what the public has decided the entire company is worth right now. So when you hear that a company is worth $2 trillion, all that means is it has a lot of shares, each one owned by people just like you. Understand this and everything else starts to click into place. You are not just gambling on numbers. You're buying ownership in real businesses that make real things and earn real money. And as those businesses grow over the years, the value of your little piece price grows right alongside them. That's the entire engine of building wealth in the stock market. How a company even gets on the market. So how does a company's stock end up sitting in your app available to buy? It goes through something called an IPO, which stands for initial public offering. That's the day a private company decides to sell pieces of itself to the public for the very first time. And to pull it off, the company hires an investment banker that studies the business. They set a starting price and then they offer those shares to investors. It's not quick and it's not cheap. A typical IPO takes 6 to 9 months from start to finish, and it can cost the company around 10% of all the money it raises just in legal, accounting, and banking fees. That's how big a deal going public really is. And once the company is public, its stock trades on a stock exchange. An exchange is just a giant, heavily regulated marketplace that connects people people who want to buy with people who want to sell. So in the US, two giants run the show. It's the New York Stock Exchange, was founded all the way back in 1792 and has more than 2,800 mostly large established blue chip companies. And then the NASDAQ came along in 1971 as the world's first fully electronic market and lists over 3,300 companies packed with tech names like Apple and Microsoft. So when you tap that buy button, your order shoots over to one of these exchanges and gets matched with a seller in a fraction of a second. You don't need to yell on a trading floor to buy it. What actually makes a price go up and down? So here's the part that confuses almost everyone. So stay with me. A stock's price is not set by some boss sitting in a backroom deciding what it should be. It's set by supply and demand, by real people deciding to buy and sell the share. Every exchange keeps a running list called an order book, The highest price a buyer is willing to pay is called the bid, and the lowest price a seller is willing to accept is called the ask. When more people want to buy than sell, those eager buyers snap up the available shares and have to offer a little more to win them. So the price goes up. When more people want to sell, sellers start accepting lower and lower offers just to get out and the price slides down. That's it. That's the whole machine. So what gets people excited to buy or scared to sell? Well, news and numbers. Strong company earnings, good economic reports, and exciting new products— those bring buyers running in. A weak quarter, scary headlines, bad economy— those send people rushing for the exits. You'll hear 3 nicknames for this mood. A bull market is when prices keep rising and everyone feels optimistic. A bear market is when prices keep falling and fear takes over. And a flat or sideways market market is when price just drifts and nothing dramatic happens. But here is the one sentence that you can tattoo on your brain: in the short term, prices swing on emotion, but in the long term, prices follow how much money the business actually earns. Remember that and you'll stay calm when everyone else is panicking. Investing is not the same as gambling. So let me clear up the biggest myth of all, because it's the one that keeps a lot of people stuck on the sidelines. There is a huge difference between investing and gambling, even though they can look similar when you look at it from the outside. Gambling is betting on a quick outcome that you can't control, like a coin flip or a hot tip that your cousin swears by. The day trader glued to his screen, buying and selling in minutes, trying to guess what the next little bit of wiggle room is— that person is much closer to a gambler. And the research shows the vast majority of them actually lose money over time. Investing is the complete opposite. Investing is buying real ownership in great businesses and then giving them years to grow. One is a sprint based on luck. The other is a marathon based on patience. Ronald Read never day traded a single time in his life. He bought, he held, and he let the years do the heavy lifting. So the next time someone tells you the market is just gambling, now you know the real truth. It's only gambling if you choose to treat it that way.

Way.

Treat it like ownership, give it time, and the odds swing massively in your favor. Why you keep hearing about the S&P 500. Now, there are thousands of stocks out there, and trying to watch every single one would drive anybody absolutely crazy. So years ago, smart people built indexes, which are really just scoreboards that track a big group of stocks all at once. The most famous one in the world is the S&P 500. 500. It follows 500 of the largest companies in America, and it's weighted by size, which means the bigger the company, the more it pushes the score up or down. In fact, just the 10 biggest companies now make up about 38% of the entire S&P 500. So when a news anchor says the market was up today, they almost always mean this one index moved up. You probably also heard of the Dow Jones. It tracks just 30 big blue-chip companies And it's older and a little quirky because it's weighted by share price instead of company size. But here is why indexes matter so much to you personally. And this might be the most important point in this entire video. Instead of trying to guess which single company is going to win, you can simply own a tiny piece of all of them at the same time. When the American economy grows over the years, and historically it has, you grow right along with it. You stop betting on one horse and you start owning the whole race. When you understand it that way, it changes everything you think about investing. Getting paid just for holding. Now, here's a simple piece that almost nobody explains to beginners, and it's, I think, genuinely beautiful. Some companies will actually pay you just for owning their stock. When a strong, mature company makes more cash than it needs to keep growing, its board of directors can send that extra money straight back to you, the shareholder. $1,000. That payment is called a dividend, and it lands in your bank account whether the stock went up that day or not. There's a number called the dividend yield, which is just the yearly dividend divided by the share price, and it tells you how much you're going to get paid just to hold the stock. That's exactly how Ronald Read, the quiet janitor, built his $8 million fortune. He bought companies that paid dividends, and instead of spending that money, he used it to buy even more shares. Those new shares then paid him even more dividends, which bought him even more shares. Again, that snowball effect is called compounding, and it's the closest thing to magic that money has ever offered. A small snowball pushed down a long enough hill becomes an avalanche. You do not need to be a genius to use it. You just need to be patient and let time do the heavy lifting for you. That's a great start for anyone, no matter how small that very first dollar feels. Why the market keeps climbing over the years. Now, you might be wondering, if prices bounce around on emotion every single day, how does anybody actually make money? So here's an honest answer that hopefully changes everything. Zoom out far enough and the stock market has marched steadily upward for its entire history. Over the long run, the S&P 500 has returned about 10 10% per year on average. Not every year. Some years are scary and deep in the red, but on average, decade after decade after decade. Now think about what that really means. There's been a Great Depression, there's been two world wars, there's been oil shocks, the dot-com crash, the 2008 financial meltdown, global pandemics. And through every single one of those disasters, the market eventually climbed all the way back to brand new highs. Every crash in history so far has turned out to be temporary. Every new high has turned out to be permanent. Why? Because the whole thing is powered by human beings waking up every morning trying to build, create, sell, and grow. As long as people keep innovating, the businesses you own keep getting more valuable. So when you own a piece of the entire market, you are betting that humanity keeps moving forward. And I think that's the safest bet I know of, and it's paid off well for over 100 years. The simplest way to actually start today. Okay, now you know all this. What do you do with it without having a finance degree? It comes down to 3 simple steps, and they're easier today than they've ever been in history. Step 1 is you open a brokerage account. So think of it like a bank account, except this one is built for buying investments. And most of them now charge you $0 in trading fees with no minimum balance to begin. You can open one right now on your phone in about 10 minutes. Step 2: Do not try to pick the next hot stock. Instead, buy a simple index fund or ETF that holds the entire S&P 500. With one single purchase, you instantly own a little piece of the 500 biggest companies in America. If one of them stumbles, the other 499 carry you forward. That's real diversification with one click, and it's exactly what protects regular people from disaster. And step 3: Use something called dollar cost cost averaging. That fancy term just means you invest the same set amount on a regular schedule, like $100 every month, no matter what the market is doing that week. When prices are high, your $100 buys a little less. When prices drop, your $100 automatically buys more shares when they're on sale. You stop trying to perfectly time the market, which nobody on earth can do anyway, and you simply start owning more of it every single month. And here's the part that I hopefully will get you fired up If you invested just $200 a month for the next 30 years at the market's long-term average, you could end up with more than $400,000, even though you only put up around $72,000 of your own money. The rest is the market doing the heavy lifting while you sleep. So don't wait until you feel ready. Now's the time to learn. You already know when the best time to start is right now. How about right now? The one thing that separates winners from quitters Twitters. This last one has nothing to do with numbers. The number one reason people lose money in the stock market isn't a bad pick or bad luck. It's their own emotions. They get greedy and buy when everyone's excited and prices are sky high. Then they get scared and sell when prices drop and the headlines turn all ugly. They do the exact opposite of what builds wealth over and over again. There's an image I love. A bird sitting on a branch is never afraid of the branch breaking because her trust isn't in the branch. The trust is in her own wings, the market will shake. It always has and always will. But if your trust is in your own understanding and your long-term plan, those scary drops stop frightening you and start looking like a sale. While everyone else runs for the door, the calm owner quietly buys more. Being the kind of investor who stays steady is what leads to actually doing the steady things that make you rich. So stop chasing, stop panicking, and start owning. You now have the ability to understand this. And if you can, then you must put it to work. You already understand more than most investors alive. Here's what I really need you to hear before you go. In just a few minutes, you learn what keeps most people scared, confused, and broke their entire lives. You are not behind. You're early. And a quiet janitor from Vermont already proved that an ordinary paycheck plus patience can quietly beat almost anyone. Now let me teach you how business works quickly. Business is not complicated. It's just solving a problem for someone else. Most people fail because they overthink the plan instead of falling in love with the person that they are serving. If you don't shift your focus from your fears to who you can serve, you'll stay stuck in analysis paralysis forever. Elon Musk didn't build SpaceX by looking at what NASA was doing. He looked at the physics. When he wanted to go to Mars, people said rockets were too expensive. They said a single rocket cost $65 million. That was the industry standard. But Musk didn't accept that. He asked, what is a rocket made of? He broke it down to aerospace-grade aluminum, titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. Then he asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turns out the materials were only 2% of the typical price. The rest was inefficiency. By refusing to copy others and reasoning from the ground up, he cut the cost of space travel by a factor of 10. Now I know this feeling because I lived it. When I was 19, I had a clear path to a safe, high-paying job at a bank. It was secure, it's what I thought I wanted, is what society said was success. But I also had this crazy idea to join a biotech software company. Everyone told me I was insane to turn down the bank job. I didn't have experience, I didn't have funding, but I used what Jeff Bezos calls the regret minimization framework. I projected myself forward to age 80 I asked, will I regret trying this and failing? No. Will I regret never trying at all? Absolutely, yes. I didn't want to be an old man wondering what if. So I turned down the bank, went to join the company, and we eventually grew to customers in 30 countries and got acquired. But you might be thinking, okay, Evan, I don't have a genius idea like Elon Musk, and I don't have the tech skills that you might have had at 19. But the truth is, you don't need to be a genius, and you don't need to have degree or tons of experience. You just need to stop letting your lack of belief hold you back from seeing the simple truth of how business actually works. Part 1: The Foundation. First principles thinking. The biggest mistake you're making is reasoning by analogy. Reasoning by analogy means you look at what your competitors are doing and you try to do it slightly better. You see a coffee shop, so you open up a coffee shop. You see a YouTuber, so you copy their thumbnails. This can be a trap. When you copy, you are copying their inefficiencies, their fears, and their mistakes. You need to use first principles thinking. This is the physics way of looking at the world and what Elon Musk did. You boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say, what are we sure is true? And then reason up from there. So if you're starting a business, don't ask, how do I make a product like Apple? Ask, what is the fundamental problem that my customer has? So Maybe the problem is that they're tired. The analogy solution is coffee. The first principle solution might be a nap pod, a nutritional supplement, or a better mattress. When Elon Musk looked at battery packs, people said they would always be expensive because they cost $600 per kilowatt-hour in the past. He broke it down to the molecular level: cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon. He realized if you bought those on the London Metal Exchange, it was only $80 per kilowatt-hour. The gap between 600 and 80 is where the opportunity lives. Stop looking at your competition. Look at the truth. Part 2: The 5 Elements of Every Business. You don't need an MBA. In fact, most MBAs teach you how to be an employee, not an entrepreneur. According to Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, every business in the world, from a lemonade stand to Google, is just 5 things. If you are missing one of these, you don't have a business, you have a hobby. So let's go through the 5. Number 1 is value creation. You must discover what people need or want and then create it. This isn't about what you want to make alone. It's about what they need. It needs to satisfy a core human drive, the drive to acquire, to bond, to learn, defend, or feel. If your product doesn't solve a real problem, nothing else matters. Number 2, marketing. If you build it, they will not come. Marketing is the art of changing beliefs. It is attracting attention and building demand for what you have created. You need to move people from unaware to problem aware to solution aware. Number 3, sales. Marketing attracts them. Sales gets them to commit. This is the process of turning a prospective customer into a paying customer. Sales is not about tricking people. It's about trust. It's about helping your prospect understand why your offer is worth paying for. Number 4, value delivery. You have to actually give them what you promise. This is where your reputation is built. If you sell a dream and deliver a nightmare, you're done. You need to exceed expectations. And number 5 is finance. You need to bring in enough money to keep going and make it worthwhile. You don't need to be an accountant, but you need to understand that if more money goes out than comes in, you are out of business. That's it. If you're struggling, one of these 5 things is broken. Diagnose it, fix it, move on. Part 3: Strategy. The 7 Powers. So once you have the basics, you need a strategy. Hard work is not enough. If you work 100 hours a week on a bad strategy, you will still lose to someone working 20 hours a week on a great strategy. Strategy is about power. Power is the set of conditions that create the potential for persistent differential results. So what does that mean? Power is what stops your competitors from stealing your profits. Hamilton Helmer identified 7 powers that build an enduring business. You don't need all of them, but you need at least one. So number one is scale economies. This is where you get cheaper as you get bigger. So think about Netflix. When they started making original content like House of Cards, they spent $100 million. That sounds like a gamble, but because they had millions of subscribers, the cost per subscriber was pretty tiny. A smaller competitor could not afford to spend $100 million on one show. Their size became their shield. Number two, network economies. Economies. The value of the product goes up as more people use it. So think about Facebook or LinkedIn. If you leave Facebook, you lose your connection to some of your friends. If you start a new social network, it has zero value because there's no one there. This is why it's so hard to kill a network once it takes off. Number 3, counter positioning. This is my favorite for new entrepreneurs. This is where you adopt a new business model that your competitor cannot copy because it would hurt their existing business. So example, you can look at Kodak, right? They invented the digital camera in 1975. They knew it was the future, but they made all their money selling film. If they pushed digital, they would kill their own film profits. They were stuck. They couldn't move. Or you can look at Vanguard. They introduced low-cost index funds. The big banks couldn't copy them because the banks made their money on high fees. If the banks lowered their fees to match Vanguard, card, they would lose all their revenue. So find a way to do business that makes your competitor afraid to copy you. Number 4, switching costs. Make it painful for your customer to leave, not by trapping them, but by integrating so deeply into their life that leaving is a hassle. So think about Apple. Once you have an iPhone, a Mac, iPad, iCloud, switching to Android becomes a nightmare. You stay because staying is easier. Number 5, branding. Branding is not just a logo. It is the attribution of higher value to an objectively identical offer. So, example: Good Morning America did a test. They bought a diamond ring from Costco for $6,600 and a similar ring from Tiffany for $16,600. An expert appraiser actually said the Costco diamond was better quality, but people still pay $10,000 more for the Tiffany blue box. Why? Because the brand reduces uncertainty. You trust Tiffany. You don't trust Costco for romance. That trust is power. Number 6 is a cornered resource. This is having something no one else can get. It could be a patent, a location, or a team. Pixar had a brain trust of the best storytellers and animators in the world. Disney couldn't replicate it, so they had to buy them. If you have the best of something, you've cornered a resource. And number 7, process power. This is doing something so efficiently that no one can match you. So Toyota developed the Toyota Production System. They were so confident in it that they actually gave tours to their competitors. They showed GM exactly how they built cars, and GM still couldn't copy them. Why? Because the process was embedded in the culture master, not just the machines. It was learned by osmosis over decades. Part 4: The psychology, belief, and the who. You can have the first principles, you can know the 5 parts, you now have the 7 powers, but if you don't believe in yourself, none of it matters. Belief is the world's biggest problem. I believe everyone has Michael Jordan level genius at something, but we don't do it because we're afraid. We're afraid to fail, we're afraid of judgment, we're afraid to be seen starting small, starting over. You have to realize that your purpose comes from your pain. Whatever you struggled with the most is what you are best equipped to help others with right now. I make videos for entrepreneurs because I was the struggling 19-year-old entrepreneur who needed help. I'm serving my younger self. When you focus on serving, the fear goes away. You stop worrying about how you look and you start worrying about how you can help. And stop obsessing about the how— how do I build the website, How do I get the funding? The how will always change. The how is flexible. You need to be stubborn on the why and the who. Who are you serving? Why does it matter? If you know who you're serving and why it matters, the how will present itself. You will figure it out. You will learn. You will partner. And money— money is a tool. It's important. You need oxygen to breathe, but you don't live to breathe. You need money to run your business, but you don't live for money. If money is your number one goal, goal, you will quit when it gets hard, and it will get hard. If your goal is service, you'll keep going. You will find a way. Part 5: Execution. Getting started. So where do you start? You start by doing. You start by failing. You have to give yourself permission to produce garbage. My first videos were terrible. I was shy, I was sweating, I looked nervous, but I posted them anyway. If I waited until I was perfect perfect, I would never have started. People say that good is the enemy of great. So if you stay in your comfort zone doing what you're good at, you will never find what you could be great at. You don't need to quit your job today. You don't need to mortgage your house. You can start with 30 minutes a day. You can start by solving one problem for one person. Start small, but start. The only difference between you and the people you look up to is that they started and they kept going when everyone else Quit. You have a genius inside of you. You have a problem that you can solve for the world. Don't let the how stop you. Don't let the fear stop you. Use the principles. Build the 5 parts. Find your power. And most importantly, believe. If you're feeling bold, if you're feeling powerful right now, that's a signal. Follow that feeling. Take the next step. To learn how investing works in 55 minutes, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there. You don't need a lot of money or finance degree to become a millionaire. 99% of small businesses you can start with next to no capital. It's more about effort.

To get rich in America, I do not need a college degree. I think earning money is one of the simplest things I ever learned.