Best & Worst Online Businesses to Start in 2025 (for Beginners)

this is a definitive tier list for what business to start if you are a beginner and I know most gurus are telling you to do the whole Sexy passive income thing things like e-commerce Drop Shipping print on demand digital products affiliate marketing but those are honestly the worst types of businesses you can start if you are a beginner so let's not do that I don't want you to waste your time or money starting the wrong type of business if I had no money and no experience these are the types of businesses that I would actually

look to start these businesses don't require much work experience they're not expensive to start they won't take years to make money from they're not high risk and they're actually long-term sustainable AKA you won't hate it in two months how do we know this we put all the business options we could think of into a notion table I added in all of my experience with them my team did a ton of extra research and this is what we came to now you're probably looking at this feeling overwhelmed feeling like there are a thousand different types of

businesses you can start but actually all of these businesses can be boiled down can be grouped into just three big types of overarching businesses so let's go through them so the first type is a product based business so product is really literally anything you can think of you could sell cats that's a product you could sell puzzles you could sell a couch you could sell pillows those are product type businesses right and I already put these in D tier because the reality of product based businesses is they are a great business model only if you

have the actual experience to make them work and the money to invest to get them going because again product businesses require an upfront investment and if you have time to wait for money and results because it will take a while because product based businesses like most businesses are way more complex than gurus will tell beginners they are but they are a terrible business idea if you're inexperienced and you want to make money somehow in the short term because it is so high risk to start a product business there is a very high rate of failure

way more complex than people think and it takes way longer to be profitable than some of the other business models that we'll talk about in the rest of this video now to dive into a little bit more specific there are two types of product based businesses there's number one physical products so this is physical physical products can be sold via like Drop Shipping online store print on demand now there are pros and cons to each of these I want I don't want to be biased so I'm going to tell you all the pros and cons

just super realistically Pros big Financial opportunity if done correctly there are very many million dooll multi-million dollar billion doll product based businesses you have a lot of autonomy as a CEO freedom to do whatever you want it's really your thing it's very scalable once you get hiring and systems in place and the results are pretty detached from your time it's not tied to how many hours you're sitting there and doing the work most of the time now my stomach is also starting to growl I'm always hungry when I record but cons so many cons it

really requires a high level knowledge of most things in business but specifically traffic and marketing and that then requires either money so investing in traffic so paying for ads to your product because you need traffic or an existing audience so if you have 100K people on Instagram that would be interested in your product you need something like that or you need the time and patience to actually build the audience because people will not magically show up to buy your product if you do not have the money to pay for ads or if you do not

have an existing audience so that's just a reality check there it's very hard to start a product based business if you don't have one of those prerequisites it also requires a very high knowledge of product or time for you to figure all of this knowledge about product out so I'm talking like validation how do you actually make sure it's a product that people want and that there is a clear enough USP so that actually it is competitive in the market that you are looking to go into also packaging messaging pricing Logistics I mean I have

never had a physical product business might be the next business that I try to start but I cannot even imagine how complicated it is to figure out things like Logistics suppliers I don't even know the key wordss like that's how unfamiliar I am with this type of business because I think there is just so much to it when you're actually producing a product and then you're trying to figure out how to do all of the shipping and returns and I don't know it just sounds really complicated but potentially my next challenge so all of this

just means that it's very high risk depending on your skill level also tons of hard work upfront before you maybe even make a profit it's not even guaranteed that you'll ever make a profit but there will be tons of work where there might be months where you have zero income coming in so unless you have a supplemental income Source I just wouldn't recommend this basically it also requires initial startup investment you have to invest in like producing the product in setting up website and setting up I don't know traffic sources starting to build an audience

paying for ads whatever that looks like yeah can take a really long time and potentially lower profit margins than the product type I'm about to talk about so just some things to keep in mind now so the second type of product based business so physical is like physical right in my hand a physical thing the second type is digital digital is just something that is not like this good explanation to so when it comes to digital products I'm talking all things templates tools printables workshops online courses events newsletters anything that's like intangible it might be

more knowledge-based products essentially and transmit it over the Internet Pros it is cheaper and faster to make them physical products right it's much cheaper to produce a PDF than to maybe like produce a comb and because it's cheaper and faster to make Than Physical products it is a lower risk type of product to make it is also way more scalable it has much better profit margins Than Physical product because with a digital thing you can duplicate it essentially for free there isn't like cost of whatever it takes the materials to make this comb right if

I want to make a duplicate of an online course for another student then the profit margin is super chill there are also so many specific niches you can Target with digital products which I think is super advantageous because that gives you a huge competitive advantage and it can be semi passive so some pros but cons and I cannot stress this enough there are huge Cons with digital products okay and I have made a lot of money from digital products so I want to be the first to say digital products are incredibly hard because they are

so cheap and easy for anyone to make the barrier to entry to make a digital product is very very low and so a lot of people make them and what happens when a lot of people make digital products is there is extremely high competition extremely high competition means that your digital product has to be very Diversified very specific very very unique in some way to actually get a chance to be sold or you have to have a high knowledge of traffic or have things like money to invest in paid ads or an existing audience already

or the time to build an audience of your own to sell your digital products to people will not magically show up to buy an average digital product from you wow that was kind of mean I'm sorry that's I yeah I just wish I could tell more beginners this because I see a lot of beginners be like oh digital products are so easy I'll just make a digital product I'll try to sell it on Etsy but the truth is there's just so much more behind that that I feel like these digital product gurus are not telling

you again it requires a very high knowledge of product or time to figure it all out there is a lot to digital products it's not just you make an online course and people will magically show up and bang down your digital door to try to buy it most of the time it requires things like a product validation first of all ensuring the thing that you're creating people actually want it's actually unique you need to think about things like traffic sources potentially sales funnels if it's a high ticket product to nurture the relationship and build enough

trust that people would actually give you a lot of money for a digital product something that is not physical and yeah customer support product fulfillment ensuring that people are happy optimizing the product there's a lot to it there's really a lot to it and this is coming from somebody who's made hundreds of thousands of dollars with digital products so yeah all that goes to say I think it's very high risk depending on your experience level I don't recommend it to beginners it can take months to to make money and many people never make money of

course you can say de it's faster to make so I might as well try it go ahead try it but I'll just say this is not what I recom recommend to beginners especially not as your first thing you can do this like later on the side of stuff but don't make it your main thing where you're counting on this to make you money to pay rent essentially especially if you don't have a specific skill set or specific experience with something if you're like highly niched expert then digital products might work for you but again this

tier list is for beginners okay I would slot digital products into the C tier because I think it is easier and cheaper Than Physical products to make but I still think it is incredibly misleading in how easy it is to make money I don't think it's easy to make money with a digital product okay so that was the first type of business product based now I want to talk about the next type of business which I think is another one of these sexy options that often are sold as way easier than they are the next

type is a content-based business so I'm talking about all people who make money off of content some way shape or form me filming this YouTube video this YouTube video is content the YouTube pays me a little bit of money depending on how many people see this and watch the ads this is content-based business right so content-based businesses all things YouTubers influencers podcasters bloggers these are all content-based businesses because they create the content whether that is a blog post a video um streamers on Twitch are also creating content in the Stream the stream is the content

Pros it's a gateway to so many income streams right ad Revenue sponsorships digital and physical products you can start a membership you can start a community so many things you can have multiple income streams you can build a community of like-minded people who love what you love so cool f Fortune fun all the things they tell you right Pros very easy Pros but cons and this is coming from someone who's been making YouTube videos for 3 years and making tons of other types of content as well for years and years and years it is extremely

competitive again because I think so many people are sold like oh it's very easy to become a content creator a lot of people try to become content creators and thus the market is very flooded and there is a lot of competition like if you go on Tik Tok the fact that there is so much content you can scroll endlessly which means you need a very strong Competitive Edge to stand out and that means your personality or your Authority or your editing style or your way of conveying information or your lifestyle is really interesting I don't

know you have really cute cats that's what I lean on and of course tons of upfront work creating content for free talk to any content creator and ask them how long did you make free content for and it will probably be months if not years before they ever saw any amount of money it took me nine months to get monetized here on YouTube and after that they were paying me like $20 a month or something it takes time to learn how to be a good content creator to create content to get clarity on what Niche

you're in to get clarity on who you're speaking to to get clarity on what they are liking about your cont even I'm not clear about that sometimes so it takes time to figure all these things out and of course this all means it's very high risk many people do not succeed so I would just recommend if you feel called to create content do it on the side of something else that is bringing you income so that you're not putting all of this pressure on the content to generate income come immediately and of course it could

potentially be hard for your mental health to feel like you are the product because essentially when you are content based when you're personality based when you're brand-based business you are the thing that you are selling so that means potentially if you ever don't want to show up and be the face of your business anymore your business will suffer because so much relies on the trust and relationship you have with the audience essentially so that's why I would slot all of these into B tier especially for beginners I think it's a good option I would do

it on the side and the reason that I have it above the products is because I think at least with creating content you are understanding how to get attention you are understanding potentially more about how to drive traffic you are potentially building an audience which is really important if you want to start a product-based business right when you start making content you get that like communication back and forth with your audience you start learning what they need what their problems are what Solutions you could potentially propose to them how you can make that solution really

good fit for them you learn messaging around how to communicate in a way that they will understand you that is all Superior knowledge if you ever want to start a product business which is why I put it above the products okay so the third type of business this is what we've been hyping up to this is what I've been building you up to I think this is the best option for beginners and that is a service-based business so a service-based business there are two types of service-based business the first type is a solo service typed

business which you might know better as freelancing freelancing is when you do a service for somebody like copywriting you make a graphic and canva you help them manage a project and they pay you for the time that you do doing that for them the time you do doing that for them the time you spend doing that for them now I separated freelancing into two separate things one is Junior freelancing and one is mid to senior freelancing so Junior freelancing roles are roles I consider you don't need a lot of experience to start you can just

get started with it with a bit of Googling with a bit of figuring out with a bit of log common sense and good soft skills essentially Pros here yeah sell your time if you are worried that you don't have experience business owners will pay for your time business owners are very busy they don't have time you can just sell them your time to figure things out to figure out how canva Works to make a graphic for them to I don't know go figure out how zapier works and set up a Zap for them there are

so many things that business owners will pay for and time is a huge component of that so if you have time and you don't have experience sell the time get paid to learn on the job this is and I know this doesn't sound like it but this is the biggest of all time this is so so so important that this is a massive learning opportunity I cannot overstate how insanely impactful this backstage pass is I worked as a freelancer full-time for years and years and years I was a business manager so a mid to senior

level freelancer for my clients I eventually like was their fractional coo I got to see exactly how all these businesses ran behind the scenes like six and seven figure businesses I knew exactly what types of products they created why they created them them how they fulfilled them how they got customers traffic sources they use pros and cons of different traffic sources Marketing sales everything this is priceless information and I was behind the scenes of 40 plus freelance businesses so I got to see so many different types of things so many different mistakes failures successes what

works well in different types of Industries invaluable experience if you ever want to start any type of other business that is what you will use to make tons more money in the future because it's an investment in the biggest asset you of course it's fun if you work with clients in a nich you're interested in and of course backstage pass so important okay cons unlike a typical job you're only paid for billable hours so the hours you spend working for a client it of course takes a little bit of time to get going with it

right to make a decent income maybe income insecurity in the beginning when you're just trying to like find your footing and everything good thing I have over 100 plus videos here on YouTube about freelancing and how to get started on the right foot and everything I learned over 5 years and becoming a sixf figure freelancer so go and do that so you don't have to stumble too much in the beginning you might have to spend lots of time with client acquisition especially in the beginning but once you've signed a few clients I think it gets

easier and easier and of course like any other business that you might start there is no traditional safety net like health insurance or pension plan you would have to set that up yourself it's not that complicated but just something to keep in mind one more con is I think it will take a lot of proactivity taking a lot of initiative and learning on the job and you kind of have to just accept that that is how it will will be everybody who starts their first work experience with zero work experience spends time learning on the

job and freelancing is no different when you start you're like I have no clue what I'm doing I hope nobody realizes that you just spend your time Googling that's exactly what I did when I started freelancing with no work experience I was Googling every single thing that came out of my clients's mouths that's normal that is how you learn so do not shy away from that and next up is freelancing on a mid to senior level because yeah I wanted to separate them because I think not freelancing roles were made equal so so mid to

senior roles are things that require a little bit more of a specialized skill set so I'm talking graphic design copywriting digital business management uh web developer photographer things where you can't just like start day one and be like I'm a copywriter like it requires a little bit of studying or work experience or something to get going with it it's it's harder to figure out via Google quickly is what I mean so pros and cons here very similar to Junior but Pros here is mid to senior roles obviously get paid better so you'll make more money

per hour or you can start doing things like retainers or packages where your time isn't directly correlated with your income like for me as a business manager I was doing deliverable based retainers and so I wasn't being paid for every single hour that I was sitting it was more what I was producing for clients you can also then start thinking about like profit share and stuff like that where you really benefit from helping a client's business grow really big hate to learn on the job it's fun if you work with clients you really like it's

a backstage pass most importantly to all of these types of businesses that you're going to be working with yeah and of course freelancing is super flexible so you can do your work on your own time you have a lot of location Independence I got to travel the world while I was freelancing full-time it was super chill I had a great time I love freelancing I recommend it to everybody I don't know if you can tell yet I'm obsessed with it I highly recommend it and then the cons for these quite similar to the junior ones

of course everything has pros and cons so it really comes down to you and how badly you want something if you are willing to handle the cons by the way all the cons that I've mentioned are problems that you can solve you can solve it via Google you can solve it asking questions you can solve almost all of these problems it's just how much time they take to solve so you kind of have to figure out what you're comfortable with the other type of service-based business is businesses that are bigger than one person AK and

agency so I'm talking about like copyrighting agencies graphic design agencies web development agencies so Pros here very scalable lucrative if done correctly you can take on bigger clients when you have a team to fulfill on lots of different things you don't have to take on as many hats as a solo freelancer might right because you can hire different things you could hire business manager for your agency you could hire somebody to help you with sales and higher profit margins than solo potentially because you have a bigger team bigger clients cons this is not as beginner

friendly as freelancing I really think this is only for experienced Freelancers ideally you have been a successful freelancer and then you start to get even more demand from businesses and then you start an agency that's normally how I would recommend the flow it of course requires more responsibility and time managing people and knowing how to hire and manage your projects which again you could hire business manager to manage your agency easily also requires a higher level of skill and you have to have a really good lead and sales pipeline to ensure people are flowing in

to so that there's enough work for your agency and all the people you hired so this is kind of how I would separate out the roles we just talked about into the tier list I would put agency and mid to senior freelancing roles in a tier and I would put Junior freelancing roles into s tier so Junior freelancing roles are the best businesses to start for beginners it doesn't require much work experience it's not very high risk you don't have to invest a lot of money to start you can figure out a lot of it

on the job and you can learn on the job and then you can use that learning then to become a mid to senior freelancer if you want you could start an agency if you want you can use that knowledge to start I don't know creating content about it you could start making digital products around your specialized skill set once you've learned more and I don't know if you've noticed but you could use this as a pipeline like an a road map for what type of business to start at what time you could start as a

junior freelancer and this is essentially the road map I did as well I started as a junior freelancer I learned a lot I became a mid to senior freelancer and from there I was like let me start creating content about the things that I'm learning and that I enjoy started creating content and I also started making digital products around what I learned as a freelancer as a business manager I started teaching project team and systems management created lots of products out of that and now the only one that's left to conquer is a physical product

business as a special thank you to everyone who stayed this long watched the video this long did wonders for my retention first of all big hug big big hug that was kind of awkward but it was cute if you want a copy of this notion table that we made which actually is super intense business idea business type barrier to entry so low is like low barrier to entry it's like pretty fast to get started short-term income potential so like how realistic it is to make money let's say within the next 3 to six months long-term

potential so if you stick with it for years how po how much potential is there to make money risk so how how risky is this how many people actually like succeed with this and then I also wanted to include a category like a little tick box for whether having a big audience or add money is actually required to succeed with this because I think that's something that gurus don't often mention is that yeah some of these things you actually do need an audience to sell your thing to and if you don't have that you need

to pay money to like meta or YouTube to place ads for people to actually see your product because people are not just going to magically show up on your website right shout out to Kiren on my team Kirsten actually went and looked up salary ranges for all of these different types of roles and tons of research to figure out what the salary potentials are and she included them in here for you guys so big shout out to Kirsten everyone say thanks Kirsten thanks Kiren and we put in all the pros and cons here and then

of course the tier as well so if you want to grab a copy of that I will link it down below now if you're thinking about starting as a junior freelancer I actually have a video on the best and worst freelancing niches I will link that here if you want to go give that a gander I don't just say the role I also tell you how I would get started with it if I were you and I picked that role so I'll put that here and we can spend more time together yay that was cheesy

all right so that's it for today thank you so much for watching and I really hope to see you in the next one okay bye