62 Advertising Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2023]

We both had previous experience in another start-up called Soul id which was a social media platform for action sports. We ran the marketing and media at that company which was a blast. After we left that company, we split directions. Eli got involved in the eCommerce industry by starting a brand called Winterial which he grew to hundreds of SKUs. Kyle headed in the media direction and started a commercial photography company where he worked with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

At this time Kyle wanted to be able to get back in the start-up world, grow a large brand and a team of like-minded creatives and innovators. So like any entrepreneur, he jumped on Google and started to search for media companies that were also technology-based companies as well. That is where the inspiration of starting a digital agency that solely focused on the media portion for brands and product companies came to life.

Culture is the centerpiece of a successful company. Creating a place for employees to come to work and enjoy what they do, the environment and who they work with will pay long term dividends.

I've always wanted to run my own thing, ever since I was 19 (I'm 25 now). Coming out of school, I didn't have that many opportunities ahead of me: Italy was doing poorly economically, I didn't have any particular skills to offer, and the job market was evolving in a way that I just couldn't understand back then. What I did have was a love of languages, so I decided to travel for ~3 years prior to settling.

Me during a Foodora (food delivery app) shift in Berlin [Dec 2016]

I came up with the idea of Koala Rank after many years of trying (and failing) to get into technology. Some of my earlier mini-projects were all related to web design rather than business, marketing, sales, etc. I knew nothing about these things and couldn't bother learning as I thought my two passions in life were languages and technology.

This whole thing started when I was working as head of marketing at a B2B SaaS business. We started a podcast.

The podcast was focused on the sales operations resource, and was called Sales Ops Demystified. We interviewed sales ops people.

It started to go pretty well, we got social shares, SEO value and even had some sales calls with our guests (we sold sales software). Sales Ops Demystified is now the most downloaded podcast in the world of sales ops.

My intention during and after high school was to move to Europe and play soccer (football) as my career. However, I was persuaded to try my hand at college which eventually took me down the path where I am today.

I grew up in a family full of entrepreneurs, thinkers…people smarter than me so I was definitely lucky to be in the right room.

My first job was selling credit card machines and processing. I was raw in business but determined (or stubborn) to make it alone with the help of no one (NOTE, this was a dumb idea and everyone should get help at every stage of life). When I started, I thought I was in a finance position. It turned out I was in a sales position, responsible for calling businesses to sell them on our services. It was the best thing to ever happen to me at this stage in my young career.

I was forced to talk to people, negotiate, persuade, help strangers over the phone - I learned one of the greatest skills of all time, how to sell over the phone. I had never sold anything, I learned sales in 3 days, then practiced every single day. This position lasted 30 days, but the grass only got greener. I was somehow recruited to a company called Homestore, which owned Realtor.com where I eventually became a top sales account executive managing the East Coast as my territory.

I went from the worst at sales in the company to the top 10 in the company. I took my sales learnings from my first job selling credit card processing to selling to internet advertising to Real Estate Agents, Brokers, Lenders and those involved in the real estate transaction.

After just a few years, I left Realtor.com (for no reason whatsoever, I loved working there) to start my own company. Young, dumb, no plan, no office, no product, no smart idea, but I had one thing to offer… I decided to help realtors manage and promote their listings on the internet.

I found the freelance writing market in 2011 after signing up to sites that offered writing work. It was a fairly new and burgeoning market at the time, even if the rates offered on the platforms I started on were abysmal. Taking a ton of low-paying gigs was how I molded my first online writing skills. As I accumulated work, continually hit my deadlines, and exceeded expectations, the work brought referral work. Within three months of starting my entire freelance writing pursuit, I had more work than I could handle. So, I started a business, created it on the spot, and named it Express Writers.

We got clients on day one and continued to get them because I went and got them. I would get up at 4 a.m. and send out 100 emails a day to new leads.

We’ve never had funding. We’ve never sought it. Everything was a day-by-day, gut-instinct, move-fast process, and we have always had to pivot and learn how to reshape and reapproach when failures happened. I went with it and found joy because I was walking in my passion (writing). What I’ve learned is that this move-fast process is behind some of the most successful businesses in the world. Success loves speed. Failure attaches to slowness. Our quick responses and agile adaptations, or the “hard-knocks life” if you want to describe it more accurately, helped us maintain and grow our place in the market.

ReferralHero is my 3rd company but when I launched it I actually didn’t think it’d be a company one day. The back story is actually kinda funny; I was working in London at my previous startup called EventNinja, an analytics tool for Eventbrite (today you’d call it “Baremetrics for Eventbrite”).

One day, one of our customers (and friend) suggested we could do something to help him get more attendees to his event. Around the same time, a startup in a pre-launch phase called Monzo, a “challenger” bank in the UK, was making headlines for their hyper-viral waiting list; in short, people could sign up and get in the queue but they could also “jump” the queue by inviting their friends. The more people they invited, the higher up they’d get in the queue and the sooner they’d get their invitation to download the app.

However, at the time we brushed off the suggestion since it wasn’t relevant for EventNinja and I wasn’t exactly sure how it’d work, especially inside a product like EventNinja. A couple of months later, exactly on Boxing Day’s morning, I woke up with the idea I had been waiting for months. Instead of adding this feature to EventNinja, I made it a stand-alone widget that could be added to any website in minutes. I jumped straight into building the same day and the MVP was completed four days later.

I was born and raised in Italy where, since I basically got out of school, I’ve been working as an electrical engineer for 9 years at an industrial automation company. During that time I was also playing in a punk rock band (name is “NeverAlone”, look it up, it’s great) and felt constricted in that job (that I also quite disliked).

The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll learn from your mistakes (‘cause there will be many of those). Learn from others who have done what you want to do and take massive action.

My academic background has always been focused on management and strategy, I did economics, a PGDip in European Companies Management, and an MBA in England. Once I finished these studies, I started to work in Barcelona as a product manager for a couple of large companies. These were very well-known and large companies and, although I was in my twenties and I had achieved a relevant position in both companies but, for me, it was a waste of time.

At that time you could not expect to have a minimum influence in companies where all marketing decisions are always made in central offices, always abroad. Unfortunately, Spanish companies produced few goods and they merely buy and sell products manufactured in other countries.

I wanted to see all processes and, above all, feel that my efforts were worth something real and touchable. That’s why I decided that if I wanted to put into action everything I had learned, I should build my own company.

I am a licensed attorney in India and right after my master’s in law, I started working with a leading company as a lawyer. I worked there for about two years before I quit my job to become more location independent.

Choose a niche in whatever you start. It is critical for streamlining your efforts and make money.

My job paid me well but I worked 12 hours a day, I was exhausted by the end of each day, spent my weekends sleeping and I almost quit the things I liked to do - for example, sketching, yoga, traveling, etc.

Our product is a website. The process of designing and developing it was very similar to designing and developing any website or an information system. As both I and the other main founder were software developers, this part was pretty straightforward for us. However, we still did some things pretty right and some things pretty wrong.

The funny part about any SEO-based business is that you can’t really make decent planning. Do you plan to improve some parts of your website and grow? Well, good luck with that, almighty G can have completely different plans for you.

What we made right was a decision to create a system that models all the relations and information about online casinos as structured data. As an example: almost every online casino has a list of countries from which it doesn’t allow residents to play. To capture this information we have created a database table casino_restricted_country and fill it with 1 record for every casino and every country that is on its restricted list.

I started my business with affiliate marketing, which I was doing for nearly 10 years. In the beginning, I was doing SMS marketing, but since it was already the 2010s, the golden age of email marketing had passed. But with the introduction of smartphones, other marketing channels such as WhatsApp and Viber messages, as well as SMS marketing were born.

SMS turned out to be a very successful marketing channel, mostly because it didn’t have such a negative reaction to marketing as email has today. The click rate was over 10% on completely non-targeted lists, which is amazing. It was also very easy to get phone numbers. With emails, there's an endless amount of possible emails, but with phone numbers, there are typically 100 million available numbers for a country with a 10 million population. Therefore it was relatively easy to clean them. We simply ran WhatsApp software to check all those numbers in bulk and got a database of real people who use smartphones.

With this method during the few years, I managed to get a database of 80 million high-quality mobile phone numbers. Soon after I started doing this other people discovered my success and started to do the same. At this point, the industry became so competitive that it was not profitable to continue anymore. ROI on a typical campaign dropped from 100-200% to only 30% and on many campaigns, it was hard to make any profit at all.

I spent the majority of my upbringing in the SF Bay Area a few towns over from Palo Alto. It was an exciting time to live in Silicon Valley-- I distinctly remember the line of people camping out for the release of the very first iPhone as Steve Wozniak rolled up on his Segway to say hi. With an adversarial stubbornness unique to teenagers, I set my sights on the furthest thing I could think of from Silicon Valley and startup culture; working in the music industry.

I spent the first half of my twenties vying for a job in music, and the second half living out my aspirations, spearheading marketing efforts for indie and major labels. Working in music certainly delivered on my original plan to avoid innovation and technology at all costs. Eventually, the limitations of such an environment caught up with me and after two years at Sony Music, I was deeply frustrated by the company’s inflexible and outdated culture.

In an effort to feel professionally fulfilled, I was desperately seeking new challenges outside of work. Around the same time within Sony, we were starting to heavily utilize influencers to market our artists. Through this direct exposure, I was introduced to the world of influencer marketing. At the time, it was late 2015 and I was overcome with excitement for the potential of this new type of marketing. It had all the makings of the perfect storm of opportunity-- no clear best practices, few regulations, & little to no standardization.

Outsource everything. The classic entrepreneur’s mistake is to try and do everything yourself. When I look back on it I definitely had the funds to outsource more and bootstrap less.

If it wasn't for that struggle I would have never made it to where I am today. I was forced into entrepreneurship because I was not someone people could hire. I always got along with people at interviews and people liked me but I was not hireable due to the mistakes I made in the past surrounding my issues with drugs and alcohol as a teenager.

Embrace the struggle. Good times can make you soft. I appreciate my life now and keep an attitude of gratitude but I never forget where I came from. I never forget not knowing where my next meal would come from or not knowing where I was going to sleep at night. Believe it or not, I have had worse times and been worse places than being homeless but I won't go there here

I got my GED at 16 so I didn’t even finish high school, before starting my business I did take some college classes at a local community college. I wanted to become a Doctor of Naturopathic Medicine and attend Bastyr University.

I loved learning things but always struggled with the long road of school which held no guarantee of success, just a guarantee of debt.

My journey into entrepreneurship started as an early teenager hustling here and there just to put food in my mouth and fuel in the gas tank. My first real business was a landscaping business I started with a friend that didn't work out. We thought it would be a good idea because he had the work and I had the business mindset of growing and scaling. The opportunity was there but we did not collaborate well. Even with my guidance he did not want to change his habits. This led to us butting heads, ending our business, tainting our friendship, and me $20,000 in debt. After that had failed me I came across a program that taught people how to dropship on eBay for $20 a month. I really liked the idea of this as it gave me the opportunity to work from anywhere and be my own boss which are two things I really wanted. After a few months of hard work, things went well and I paid $500 for the selling on Amazon training. I literally had no idea what I was doing when my Amazon business took off. In a sense, Amazon was my crash course in business. It taught me how to hire and manage employees, how to set up payroll, how to outsource, how to do accounting, how to leverage credit and financing, how to market, how to do advertising. It taught me everything I know about business in the harshest way possible lol

When I tell my story I like to get into the details of how I landed where I currently am and where I am going. I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. I ended up in the United States after my father got a job offer for a marketing position at a semiconductor company, this was when I was only 10 years old. To be honest, the move definitely had an effect on me. When I lived in Mexico I was a fairly outgoing kid and (I believe) the move caused a shift that made me more of an introvert so you could say that was a bit against me, since I didn’t necessarily enjoy being the center of attention or being “noticed” too much for much of my upbringing. I finished high school and went to Arizona State University where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Marketing alongside a certificate in entrepreneurship.

Right around the time of graduation from high school and the start of college I started a clothing line. I believe I was only 19 at the time and I didn’t have a budget to promote the new clothing line, so I turned to social media as my route to promote and sell the new products. I had to learn everything from Photoshop to constructing a website, content, photography, content distribution, supplier relationships, and many other skills. After seeing success marketing on social media, I quickly found that I was passionate about digital marketing. I then realized that there was a place where I could polish up my digital marketing skills, an agency, which to my surprise were not as concerned with academics as they were with real-world experience.

I went on to work for a marketing agency, after finally finding one was willing to overlook my lack of agency experience and realized that my entrepreneurial spirit and persistence would outweigh the need for the experience all the agencies were looking for. I was hungry. At this agency, I got hired on as a content writer (which I didn’t necessarily enjoy the most, but I knew I had to do it if I wanted to eventually lead the paid advertising department which was my goal). I was able to do just that within a year. I studied the ins and outs of the agency, how it operated, how it dealt with clients, how it made mistakes, and most importantly what helped it scale.

There’s a song on repeat in my world and whenever I play it, it reminds me of the time I started my own business and finally left my corporate job.

“I spend too much time thinking about who I'm supposed to be I play by everybody's rules that don't seem right to me

Should I even care? They're all sitting there and everyone's staring at me If I step out in the spotlight maybe I'll be set free

I’m Kelsey Chance and I run Good Chance Creative, a creative agency specializing in social media content creation! I work with companies to manage their social media pages, take and post custom lifestyle imagery of their products and services, and strategize creative ways to keep their social media posts, reels, stories, and videos on-trend and successful!

Behind the scenes - shooting a tabletop recipe video for a client’s social media page

Hello! My name is Yosef Adest and I am the founder of 52Frames, an online community that helps people to engage in creative play and personal growth through a weekly photo challenge.

When my phone stopped ringing in clients during Covid, I doubled down on monetizing 52Frames and, in 2021, launched a premium membership that was successful enough to quit my freelance job to focus on it full time.

Hi! My name is Dean Bokhari, and I’m the founder of DeanBokhari.com - a membership platform focused on inspiring people to improve their lives and achieve their goals.

These days, about half a million people read or listen to my work every month. It’s both fun and fulfilling to help others grow. And it’s financially rewarding, too—our revenues are over $100,000 per month.

Hi there! My name is Vivek Bhaskaran the Founder of QuestionPro. The most robust survey software you are going to find on the market along with Customer Experience, Employee Experience, and a Research platform that will give your company every advantage. We focus on not only providing the tools for creation, distribution, and analysis of surveys, but also provide the platforms for polling, tablet-based mobile research, and data visualization.

I am Chhavi, the founder and owner of the blog and YouTube channel Mrs Daaku Studio along with my husband Amit.

Our blog, YouTube channel, and products are designed to help you achieve what we have (...and, more).

Hi! I’m Jordhy Ledesma, founder, and CEO of Bitfari. We are creating the largest advertising network in the world and have bootstrapped the business to a 70M fully diluted market cap valuation in less than six months using the latest technologies, crowdfunding, and cryptocurrencies.

Our customers are advertisers, billboard operators, and mall shoppers. We provide something of value for each. In most cases, this is saving and for this purpose, we cut out multiple middlemen and keep no commissions on most transactions.

Hi there, my name is Robb Fahrion and I am the Co-Founder and Partner of Flying V Group, a digital marketing and advertising company located. We service clients all across the globe and help them grow their business through the power of the internet. My passion is for business and there is nothing more rewarding than helping others grow their businesses and share in their successes.

Today, Flying V Group employs 12 people, has worked with over 300 clients, operates internationally, and is on pace to double revenue for the second year in a row. Crazy to think about being here when my brother and I both got up and quit our corporate jobs and put $5k into the project to get us started!

Thanks for giving me this lovely opportunity, I’m Arpit Aryan Gupta and I’m currently running a garment export unit called NG Apparels that is based in Ludhiana, catering to all clothing segments across the globe.

My father lost a lot of money in the 2008 crash in the US market which pushed us out of the market and my father had to shut down his fabric trading business but I established the garment manufacturing business back in 2012 and with God’s grace the business has grown exponentially. I have a turnover of 12cr($1,581,547) without any loan or CC limit requirements.

Hey! My name is Dylan Ogline and I am the founder of Ogline Digital. I run a digital marketing agency that is focused on helping companies scale and grow with proven direct response marketing strategies.

Hi there, my name is Dayana Doncheva and I am the founder of EcardForest. We create greeting cards that can be signed by multiple people and sent online. The product is quite straightforward - it’s a digital greeting card that a person buys and shares with others so that everyone can enter their wishes.

It looks like our efforts pay out well, as we already count more than $15K in monthly revenue.

Hello, my name is Chase Dimond and I am the Co-Founder of Boundless Labs. We are an email marketing agency that specializes in working with eCommerce brands. We currently work with 30 eCommerce brands that do anywhere from 6 to 8 figures in annual revenue.

We ended up bringing on our first full-time employee in Q3 of 2019 and started onboarding clients again. For the second half of 2019, our business grew by ~$12K per month and we’re now making ~$90K per month. We just recently hired our second full-time employee and anticipate we’ll be at $100K per month in revenue by the end of January 2020.

Hello, my name is Marco, founder of MazingXR (alongside my two co-founders). I’m 27 years old, born and raised in Austria – no kangaroos – it is a small country in the center of Europe. You might know Arnold Schwarzenegger, he is Austrian.

Everyday I pinch myself and still can't believe this is my life. It wasn’t always this way. I grew up with a single waitress mom living very poor. I worked incredibly hard since age 16 using my first Taco Bell paycheck from my first job as capital to build upon. Somehow with lots of hard work and a pinch of luck, I began living my dream and building my vision.

I usually start the day at my home office in Malibu with a solid dose of espresso and then halfway through the day I walk a mile to our corporate offices. I walk into my office and have the best view of the Malibu Pier anyone could ever ask for. I can see the surf, see lots of people, and dream big here. It’s real and I worked my a$$ off for it and will never stop. I've been thrilled living my wildest dreams every day of my life since age 16 and that is the ultimate measure of success for me.

• Colton Bollinger founded Jumper Media in 2016, and it now assists over 3000 small businesses in using social media to tell their stories.
• He established this business to assist companies in using Instagram to build brand awareness.
• After working with more than 15,000 brands, influencers, and small businesses, he modified the brand strategy in 2020.
• The founder established a team in the Philippines to boost audience reach, engagement, and sales for more than 1600 businesses on Instagram in less than six months.
• Colton has received recognition for his Instagram-focused marketing strategies in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Yahoo.

Listen to the full podcast on podcasts.apple.com ➜

Hi, I’m Mike Moloney, the founder of FilterGrade. FilterGrade is a marketplace for creators where you can find digital assets such as presets, LUTs, video templates, and much more.

Today thousands of creators from all around the world buy and sell digital products on FilterGrade and more than 450,000 users visit the site every month.

My name is Vladimir Gendelman, and I am the Founder and CEO of Company Folders, Inc. We are the ultimate boutique presentation folder company. I founded the company in 2003, and since then, we have won multiple awards, including making Inc.’s list of 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America for three consecutive years. We have the largest selection of folders available anywhere, and we serve everyone from the travel agent working at home to schools and universities, government organizations, and large companies such as Google, Chick-fil-A, Sony, MGM, and the NFL.

Our main product lines are presentation folders, 3-ring bindersand envelopes. And our flagship product is a two-pocket presentation folder. We have printed over 20 million products for over 5,000 loyal clients. Our blog and design gallery have seen more than 5.5 million readers. We have hundreds of Google reviews with an average rating of 5 stars, and we’ve been featured in over 500 publications, including Forbes and Time.

I’m Natasha Miller- raised in Des Moines, Iowa but high-tailed it out of there as soon as I could at the age of 23. I thought I’d be a performer only - a classical violinist and jazz vocalist, but as it turns out those careers might have been the catalyst for where I am today.

• Inc. 5,000 Fastest Growing Companies in America
• Entrepreneur Magazine 360 List “Best Entrepreneurial Companies in America”
• San Francisco Business Times Fast 100 “Fastest Growing Companies in the San Francisco Bay Area”
• Special Event Top 50 Event Planners in the World

Hello, my name is Emmanuel Iroanya, aka "Mannie". I’m the Managing Member & Founder of theta, a civic & government focused digital & management firm based in Baltimore, MD, working to create a world where tech works for everybody.

In the seven years since starting theta., we’ve had the opportunity to serve more government agencies and work on important missions that impact our daily lives as members of this country than we ever could have imagined. Some of those agencies include the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the US Department of Education (ED), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

My name is Janina Moza, and I’m the Chief marketing officer of Flipsnack. I’ve joined the team a year after launching Flipsnack and I’ve been part of this project for almost 10 years now.

We’ve been on the market for over 10 years now and over the past few years, we’ve increased our business revenue by over 50% year over year.