Please stop asking “what business should I start?”

It's a dumb question. You're not dumb (maybe uninformed, which I will rectify shortly), but you're not dumb. But the question is very, very dumb.

First off, people who ask "what business should I start?" are really asking "how can I make a lot of money?"

Straight up, starting a business is a crappy way to make a lot of money. Statistically most people lose money. You're probably going to lose money. So, if you want to make a lot of money, get into management consulting or ibanking, which generally means getting an MBA. Have fun with that.

Secondly, people who ask "what business should I start?" generally think that businesses are fungible, which means they're a commodity or easily swapped out with one another. This, btw, is why most businesses fail. Because people think that businesses are just this thing that you start and money comes out the other end.

If I said a great business is rolling up a bunch of dentist practices, would you know what to do with that? Like, do you have dentistry experience? Do you have PE experience rolling up companies? If the answer is no to both, don't fucking roll up a bunch of dentist practices. It requires skills you don't have.

If I said, "ooh! ooh! ooh! AI, baby! AI is gonna change everything," are you especially good at AI? If you're not, then one school of thought would say that AI is a growing market, so you should learn AI and sell those services to other people. There's another school of thought that says every fucking person and their grandmother is learning AI right now so they can sell services to other people and I really wonder what you are going to discover about AI that's going to make you better than my grandma.

Lastly, markets aren't interchangeable either.

I spent nearly 30 years starting tech companies. Had a few successes and a bunch of failures. Now, I'm a world-class startup coach. I do that job exceptionally well, I have great word of mouth, make a lot of money. And when I started, I knew A LOT of people in several startup ecosystems. My access to that market helped me get off the ground and eventually scale this business.

If I decided to start a company selling shit to celebrities, I would fail. I would 100% fail. Why? I don't know any celebrities. I don't have access to that market and I'd probably run out of money and time before I figured out how to get celebrities' attention.

Stop asking what business you should start. They aren't lego bricks.

Here's a much better question to ask yourself: what do I love to do?

Find something you love to do. Get good at it. Prove that you're good at it by selling your services to other people, either as an employee or a contractor. Get promoted and get a great title. Or become a consultant, which is just a contractor who charges a shit ton of money.

Get so good at what you love that you know things about your job and market that no one else knows about. Understand secrets about your industry that give you a fundamentally unfair advantage over everyone else. Even my grandmother.

Then go start a business using that knowledge. That's the business you should start.

EDIT: random spelling and grammatical errors. I type for shit.