Best Beginner Businesses to Start in 2025
I always get asked how I was able to go from dirt poor making $7 an hour working at Noodles company. To making over $100,000 a month, from my laptop at age 25.
So today I'm going to break down how much money I made at each stage of my journey. I'll talk about how long it took me to go through each stage, the businesses that I've tried, and the lessons that I learned along the way that made everything actually work so that you can do the same.
Now, I'm not making this article to sound like I'm bragging. I just do think it's relevant that, you know, I've been some level of successful since this is a article about making money. I know how hard it can be in the beginning when your friends and your family don't believe in you, or maybe you don't even believe in yourself. That's why I want to make articles like this one, because it's what got me through and got me started.
So let's start at the beginning with stage number one, which is probably the most underrated and underappreciated periods which taught me the most. And that was getting my first job at Noodles & Company. The week I turned 16, I applied to almost every single local business that I could find, and I put in around 30 applications. And a restaurant called Noodles & Company was the first one to call me and schedule an interview.
Plus, it was close enough to my house so that I could walk there if I needed to since I didn't have a car. I felt super lucky when I was hired on the spot as a dish or a busboy. So my job was just to go through the dining room and collect all the dirty dishes and bring them into the back where I could wash them. I'd have to scrape out all the old food into the trash can and then let them soak in this huge sink that was full of dirty dishwater, before I could run the dishes through the dishwasher. I remember I'd have to stick my my entire arm down to the bottom of that sink through all the food sludge to unclog the food that was stuck in the bottom of the drain each night. But it didn't matter because I was making money. And at this time I was making $7 an hour, which means each day I was taking home around $50, around $1,200 a month. For a 16 year old, that wasn't too bad because I had never made money before.
But I quickly realized how little that actually was. So I Started grinding out the promotions and became the manager. Eventually I was able to do things like buy myself a car. And after about four years of working there full time, I was able to save up around $6,000. Working this job taught me that it doesn't really matter how hard you work? How consistent you are? or how good of a job you do? If the opportunity itself can't get you to where you want to be. No matter how hard I worked at this job, I was never going to get where I wanted to be because I was always just getting paid directly for my time.
This job taught me how to show up and that I could do hard or even gross work consistently. But it also taught me that I Needed to own a business. I wasn't even thinking about making millions and millions of dollars yet. I just wanted to make enough to be able to cover my bills and quit the job that had me working late into the night every single weekend, missing holidays with my family that I just overall disliked. I just wanted freedom and I knew that owning a business was the best way to get there.
So I took that $6,000 that I had saved up over the last four years. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough for my next step. I tried what almost every teenager does and I started a business model called dropshipping, where you basically advertise products on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok. And when one of those products sells, you order the product directly from the manufacturer or the warehouse and get it shipped directly to the customer so that you don't have to buy and hold any inventory yourself or even fulfill the orders yourself. If you sell a product for $40, but it only costs you $15 to fulfill, you keep the difference as your profit.
The idea is that you find a winning or trending product, make some kind of ads for it, and then try and sell that product while it's still hot. The problem is that these ads can get pretty expensive. And I had no previous experience to know what kind of ads would turn random viewers online into buying customers. And I didn't know how to build out a website that would convert or even how to pick the right product. I tried selling all kinds of stuff like ultra sticky double sided tape. I tried selling plastic shoe covers, ice scrapers, and just all kinds of junk. And in hindsight, it makes sense that none of these products ever sold.
The problem was, at the time, I didn't know why the products I chose never sold. I didn't know why the website didn't convert, and I just didn't know what I didn't know. Now, eventually I did make my first sale for a clear milk box style water bottle. But after all of the ad costs and the website expenses, it was still for a severe loss. I hit failure after failure for months and then to make things worse, I ended up spending almost all of my savings on it.
But that investment taught me something important, which is that failure is an attitude. See, if I just gave up on dropshipping right away, I'd be the same person I was before, just also a failed dropshipper. I'd still be broke, except I'd also now be a Failure. Instead, I could change my attitude and instead of thinking all these negative thoughts about how I wasn't going to make it, I could decide to think differently. I could change my attitude towards all of these failures and look at it as an investment towards getting better instead of a waste of time and money.
During this stage, I had gone from my $6,000 savings that had taken me years to save up. All the way down to around 3 to 5 hundred dollars. I had lost almost all my savings, this was really one of the most mentally challenging points of my life because I had already left my restaurant job. So it was really do or die. I was going to have to get another job that I hated or make something work quickly. This is when I decided to take one last shot at making a business work with the last little bit of money that I had to my name. So I decided to invest it all into a new strategy.
See, what really took me out the first time with dropshipping was all of the ad costs and the website hosting fees. Because I was spending hundreds of dollars a month running unprofitable ads and building new websites for each product that I was trying to sell. I needed a place to sell my products where I wouldn't have to run ads or host a website. This is when I found the platform that changed my life "Etsy". Etsy lets you sell products on their platform without having to host or build websites. And since they drive hundreds of millions of shoppers to their website every single month, you get sales simply by posting your products on their platform, without ever needing to run paid ads. This meant that that $300 I had left would go a lot further than before.
The thing about Etsy is it's a marketplace and all the sales data is public. And you can use research tools like Listing View to see how other shops are performing over time and what their best selling products are. This makes it so you can see what's working right now today, instead of just guessing on what you think would sell. And that's exactly what I did, I picked a product that I wanted to sell, like T shirts, and then I'd look at what other successful shops were doing to get all of their sales. I'd look at their best selling products and see if I couldn't create my own variations of those products for those niches.
Now to be clear, Etsy doesn't let you dropship cheap products from China like the ones that I had tried selling before. But they do allow you to dropship products using a business model called Print on Demand. It's just like normal dropshipping, except you're selling blank products like T shirts, mugs or posters with designs printed on them.
Your job is to come up with a unique design to put on the product so the customers want to buy it. Then the print company you decide to work with, such as Printify, will handle all of the printing and fulfilling all the orders that you get so that you don't have to buy any inventory upfront. Since Printify integrates directly with Etsy as well, all you really have to do is figure out what type of designs people want to buy and then make that design for them posted on the product and list it for sale in your Etsy shop.
When I figured out I could do this, it was game over, I knew I had won. I went crazy uploading as many products as I could to flood the algorithm and catch as many of those shoppers as I could. I figured if I could make enough products, some of them would have to be good enough to sell. And eventually that was true, I got my first sale within a week of opening my shop. And then as I continued to post hundreds of products each month, it almost grew exponentially. Within a couple years, I hit my first seven figures with this business model.
Now, it definitely wasn't easy, but it worked. And that investment of 300 doll into starting this business was the best decision that I ever made. I turned $300 into 1.2 million within just a couple years of taking serious action. What this taught me was that no amount of persistence or motivation or determination means anything without patience. Now, you still need those things, but I didn't know exactly how long it was going to take. I just started to believe in myself the more I focused on just putting in the work. Patience allowed me to keep working even when I wasn't seeing the direct result. Business owners just don't see the paycheck right like employees do when you're working at a restaurant or the 9 to 5. But when those paychecks finally do come, they're a lot bigger.
Now, I've kept running these Etsy shops since they're still making money to this day, which is why I don't share the specific names of them in articles. But this is why I think it's such an amazing opportunity, because it removes all the hurdles that make starting a business hard. Like building out a website and running complex ads or sourcing inventory and it lets you just focus on making quality products for interested customers.
And again, even if you're not trying to make millions and millions of dollars just yet, a few thousand dollars can still change your life and put you one step closer. Now, I made a completely free Quickstart guide, which you can download down below if you're interested in starting this business for yourself. It's free and it takes you like 10 minutes to go through.
Now, that isn't where my journey ends because over the last two years, I've made some pretty big moves. I've kept running my Etsy shops and I've been making multiple six figures every single year from them. Now, if you've read one of my recent articles, I discussed something called opportunity stacking which is all about taking your primary money making skill in stacking new opportunities on top of it. I took my primary Etsy Dropshipping skill and stacked making YouTube content on top of it. Which unlocked the ability for me to promote affiliate products and make money directly on YouTube and build software and even sell a course.
The issue is that a lot of people just want to jump to this stage without putting in the work to build up the primary money making skill. Since I built a seven figer Etsy Dropshipping business, I was able to do a lot better here on YouTube. adding these other income streams in while continuing to grow my Etsy stores is how I've been able to make several more millions in the past couple years.
I think the main lesson here is that if you can Master one thing, then you can Master many and having a track record of success helps future success become even easier because you have that believe in yourself that you can go and do it. And if there's anything that I hope to leave you with it's that I believe in you and I know you can do it too, whatever it is that you want to do even though we've probably never met just know that I'm rooting for you and I wish you the best of luck.
