44 Business Ideas For Millennials You Can Start Today [2023]

I've always worked in IT, solving technical problems for small and big companies.

During my 15 years career in network security, I was lucky to help a lot of different types of customers: from small family-owned businesses to multinationals corporations.

It’s all about people. Don't focus on the number of subscribers, followers, opt-in, conversions… when you start is all about building relationships with people.

I was unhappily working in marketing for a Fortune 500 insurance company when I started looking at ways to create a new income stream. I became interested in ecommerce and invested in a course to learn more. I compiled a list of keywords for products that had decent search volume and not terribly competitive to rank for in organic search. I used Long Tail Pro to get ideas--I had so many when I first started!

My business is a small, mostly passive income stream and I’m okay with that. There is so much more I could be doing with my store, but right now I am loving the extra income stream that allows me to work part-time at my day job and spend more time with my infant daughter.

A bunch of keywords in the dollhouse miniatures space fit the bill. I used Long Tail Pro and looked for keywords that were competitive--which on there is a score in the twenties or low thirties. I also wanted them to have at least 2,000 searches per month. This is not a ton, but five keywords with that search volume that are not that competitive can lead to a decent number of organic traffic if you build your site the right way. My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to find a niche with a nice handful of keywords you can rank for with quality content and a nice backlinking strategy. Don’t try to be number one for some saturated keyword that has a million searches a month. Go for keywords where you stand a chance of ranking--this is usually so-called long tail keywords that are really phrases--for example, “wooden dollhouse furniture” instead of just “dollhouse.”

GoEdison was founded because my partner and I saw a major need in the small business realm for better marketing. This was at the time when marketing agencies were popping up everywhere and charging smaller businesses large retainers with getting them very little return.

Too often we want to get a little too creative with our new services. Do what works and do what’s simple when you first start out.

Three years prior I had launched two other smaller agencies get off the ground and make a ton of money. The problem was, I wasn’t truly invested in those companies. I was as a key employee, but nothing more than that. So instead of helping others get rich quickly, we knew we could provide a better service and overall client experience and make it our own thing versus working for someone else.

I have always been an entrepreneur. When I was in high school, I wanted to start my own business, so I took to one thing that I knew how to do- mow lawns.

Afterward, while I was in college, I started a mobile DJ business, which was a great way to earn some extra cash in college. After graduating from NDSU with a degree in Computer Science, I took a full-time job working as a software developer. While working as a developer, I really wanted to start a SaaS Company, which translates to “Software as a Service”, so I did just that. I created Midwest Streams - Simple Funeral Webcasting, which helps funeral directors webcast their funerals.

I ended up spending too many hours working on Midwest Streams while I was at my software developer job, so my employer fired me. (If you are reading this, I really am sorry!) This happened in February of 2014, and Midwest Streams was only making $400 a month. I decided not to go back to work and try my hardest to grow my company. I had some savings, but burnt through it pretty quick, as it’s really hard to survive with only $400 a month.

It was 7:00 pm, about 8 days before Christmas in 2017 when my boss sent me a text message “Can I call?”.

I’d been in the tech industry as a software developer for a while now, so a late-night chat wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary - especially if one of our clients had an unexpected, catastrophic error that couldn’t wait until the morning.

“Of course!” I said.

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 started Live Fit because I felt I was running out of options in the industry I loved so much. Personally, I felt the misses in the personal training industry and wanted to change that. Personal Training, as well as all types of fitness, can be very intimidating to most people. And honestly, the people that are most intimidated by fitness are often the people that need it the most. I set out to create a company that provided the same types of exercises, programming, and results as generally all fitness companies, but I wanted to make it a comfortable experience from the moment a potential client stepped through our doors.

All our processes, our studio layout, our team of trainers we have hired, and our entire mission are based on making clients feel comfortable, appreciated, and valued. We do things differently and over the past 10 years, I have seen other companies in our area follow our lead. Long gone are the days of slamming weights, extremely loud music, and uncomfortable gym environments. People want to go where they feel comfortable and respected.

I have always loved sports and started at a young age, with my dad as my coach. I continued athletics through high school and went on to run college track where I based my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees entirely on building my career in the fitness industry. The last thing I was willing to do was to throw it all away based on a lack of opportunity, so I created my own with Live Fit. I believe in spirituality and the law of attraction and base my life on those principles. So in early 2011 when I couldn’t focus on my spiritual study and spiritual growth because my mind was consumed with running numbers about opening my own company, I knew that was a sign from God it was time to create something great.

I am a CAPPA trained Doula and I work in Labor and Delivery at a hospital in South Carolina. I put aside my Marketing and Human Resource Management degrees from USC to become a Doula after the birth of my first child in 2013.

I found the subject matter of pregnancy and birth fascinating and loved the doula I had in my birth. I knew this was my calling and immediately jumped into the role. I had to temporarily step away from my hospital position during my twin pregnancy in 2018.

I graduated with a PhD in chemistry in 2005 and after working in academia for a few years as a nanotechnology researcher, I joined a small angel venture investment firm as a technology analyst.

One option was to get a regular job, or… we could start a brewery.

I participated in the founding of a few angel-backed companies and as the venture fund dried up, I joined one of the portfolio companies as Chief Technology Officer. The company, Amicrobe, Inc. is focused on developing biomaterials to address antibiotic resistance.

It hasn't always been easy. I've had many different businesses over my life. I first started purchasing, renovating, and reselling apartment buildings. I started with a 5-unit building in Los Angeles and after selling it successfully, I purchased a completely dilapidated 66-unit building that scared me to death! But I made it through and over those first years made over one million dollars.

I rolled the dice and continued to buy, renovate, and sell until the bottom dropped out of the market. On January 17, 1994, the Northridge Earthquake devastated Southern California. During this period there was a negative migration in Los Angeles and our vacancy rates hit 40%. Being unable to support the mortgages, I lost all of my properties - over 250 units.

From 1994 to 1999, I started a company from scratch that built homes in Mexico. I sold insurance, ran an automatic door company, was the general manager for a bicycle specialty company, and sold copper pipe.

For most of my career, I’ve been a designer. I’ve done website and logo design for some of the best brands in the world. Sony, Samsung, PayPal, Qantas, Nestle, Apple - you name it.

If you’re gonna pour all of your hard-earned cash and time into something make sure it’s not some overnight trend. Make sure it’s a long-term bet.

I’ve always had a real urge to start my own business and live the dream of an entrepreneur.

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.

Ten years ago, my husband and I were working in an office set-up. Due to a mix of struggles experienced, my husband and I decided to quit our job and transition into freelancing. The transition phase was difficult since we didn't have the facilities needed like a computer and internet connection. We worked in an internet cafe for the first month of our freelancing career until we bought our personal computer and had our internet connection.

We had experience downtime in our new career at first, but we grow and learn from our mistakes as we go along. Freelancing changed the quality of our lives, our family, and so with our marriage. We embrace these benefits to realize that if mothers can work at home, they can earn while taking care of their family.

Another thing is the overseas workers. They have been working far from their family to make a living. Those who are exhausted and feel unproductive because of many circumstances like long hours of commute eat a lot of their time, endangering their work-life balance. These are a few of our realizations why we come up with putting Filipino Virtual Assistance. Because we know how difficult it is to work far from our family, we want to empower Filipino families, one freelancer at a time. We want to provide our graduates an avenue to earn dollars at their homes' comfort, without the hassle of traffic, toxicity of the environment, and an excellent opportunity for those who never got the chance to go to College.

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.

So, it all started back in 2011. I had finished my Master's degree in Australia and came back to the US. The Great Recession of 2008 had just ended, but I didn't have a job as the economy was in bad shape, and the market was not good. At the same time, Pete was struggling as well in regards to working two full-time jobs, 16-18 hours a day. Pete was working at SAS and had realized that he wanted to do something bigger, build something of his own.

Pete and I met through one of our mutual friends but little did we know that we will become such great friends and business partners.

One day Pete called me very randomly and asked if I want to start a company. "Wait. What?" I was both excited and confused. I always had a dream of starting my own business and put my marketing knowledge to work. But, both of us didn't have any experience in building a business initially.

Growing up, I went to private school and was very blessed that my parents cared about my education. Somewhere around 9th grade, my perspective on the education system changed. I realized through books and YouTube videos that the life trajectory of a lot of the people I looked up to, was not aligned with what I wanted in life.

I was never a fan of what was taught in schools. Instead of religiously following what was being taught in high school, I self-educated in business, personal development, and leadership. When I was fifteen, I tried out various online businesses. I failed miserably at first. At this time I was very much into Fitness and I tried to sell training and diet plans. I managed to sell a few plans to my classmates for like $50, but it never really amounted to anything and most importantly it wasn't scalable.

After that, I tried stock trading and the likes. That too didn’t really work for me. One day I stumbled across SMMA. I was so intrigued by the concept, so I went ALL IN. I didn’t care what people thought. I was going to make it big here. I needed some proof of concept, so I convinced my dad to make me run his restaurant's Facebook Ads. I watched 100’s of videos and read tons of blogs, to know how to run successful ads and we were both pretty stoked about the results.

I knew it was the right business for me, but it was not all gold and green forests. In fact, at the start of my “agency journey,” it was so hard getting my feet on the ground and getting my first few clients after my dad.

I’m a filmmaker and that’s where my passion is. I’m an artist from my balls to my heart and I only became a producer and use my head because I also hate working 9-5s and I wasn’t interested in moving to LA. So I realized pretty quickly if I wanted to be free doing something I loved I would have to learn the business side.. which was really hard for me in the beginning.

I made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of hard lessons because as an artist you don’t care about a lot of things that corporations care about (namely learning to look at a project as a product for capitalistic needs over self-expression) and also have to add a lot of components to your knowledge like branding, marketing, etc.

Luckily the fear of letting the corporate machine suck my soul out forever (I used to be in banking) outweighed my cynicism, so I sucked it up and made a business for myself.

But actually, the moment that really changed my perception of reality was when I accidentally started one of the world’s top modern art sites (at the time) with a group of friends way back in 2005 or so.

We were originally going to make a collaborative portfolio site to try and get clients for our businesses (filmmakers, photographers, graphic designers, etc.) and I was trying to solve the problem of how to get someone to come back to our website once they’ve visited it once.

So I had this hypothesis that if instead of making a simple portfolio site, if we actually made a blog and just shared dope art we love with the world, it might give people a reason to come back.

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.

I come from an entrepreneurial family. My father works for himself and my maternal grandfather started a clothing factory. Working for myself has always been encouraged by my family, but before I could get started, I needed to learn a skill. At Georgetown, I study international politics and business. Most students with these backgrounds go on to work at prestigious firms like J.P. Morgan. I really didn’t know what kind of business I could start, and frankly, planned to work as a (boring) data analyst after graduation.

If you have an idea but don’t have the knowledge to execute, use that idea as motivation and go learn how to turn your vision into reality.

Tutoring first came to mind because I had spent significant time working for other tutoring companies and cutting my teeth/learning how the industry works during my teen years. I first started tutoring when I was 15. I was hired by College Experts, a local test prep center in Davie, Florida. My first student was three years older than me, and I spent our first session teaching him how to use his calculator rather than trying to explain any complicated formulas. Being a student myself, I was able to bring a student’s perspective to tutoring. I worked for College Experts until my senior year of high school when I began tutoring on my own and finding clients on Craigslist.

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.

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.

It’s been an incredibly hard journey that’s come with many challenges, including leaving behind a comfortable salary with benefits. But it’s also been undeniably one of the most rewarding experiences for the both of us as it’s given us so much more time to spend with our family. And that means more to us than anything.

We are Eugenio Ferrante and Ahmed Nizar, co-founders of Casa Mia Coliving.

Today, we have 150 bedrooms in central Singapore across popular neighborhoods such as River Valley, Tiong Bahru, and Orchard. We have reached an annualized revenue of $2.5M, and we’re growing fast!

Hi, I’m Jess. I’m 34 years old from Tasmania, Australia. I started Chasing Planner Peace back in 2015 when I was pregnant with my third child. Originally we were based on Etsy and only sold planner inserts, however, we’ve now turned into a one-stop planner shop that caters to seasoned “planner addicts” who want to add to their planners, and also planner newbies who love the fact our shop is the only store in Australia you can custom build your own ring planner style planner.

Over the past few years, we’ve really expanded our range to not only offer planners and inserts, but also planner dashboards (beautiful cover pages), dividers, notepads, stationery items and more. We also recently started our subscription box service where every two months customers can receive a “Planner Peace Box” which is full of planner and self-care goodies. We have so many more plans for new products in 2020.

Hi, I am Alex Dumitru and I am a co-founder at Designious. Designious is a graphic design library that provides extra tools like an online designer app and an API that helps both graphic designers and print-on-demand entrepreneurs. At the moment we make around $12-13k per month.

My background is in IT and business development, but I’ve worn many hats along the way, from sales to customer support.

Hi, my name is Boris and I am the founder and CEO of the software development company TRIARE based in Ukraine. We help businesses and startups to transform their ideas into accomplished digital solutions.

I want to share how personal and collective responsibility paired with patience and consistency can help you build a profitable, respected business. It’s not easy, but it shouldn’t be painful. Here’s my story.

My name is David Tile. I own and operate a Content Writing Service, under the banner Article-Writing.co.

We don’t consider ourselves a content marketing firm. But a firm dedicated to the business of writing. Project management offers most often attached to marketing agencies. We work against marketing briefs delivering content on time and under budget.

Hi! I am Nan and I am the founder of No Code Map App - a no code builder for creating custom interactive maps with dynamic filters. It is designed for businesses to build an agency-quality interactive map without coding.

We launched 3 months ago and started monetizing at the end of March. April was our first full month of taking payments and we made >$400.

I am David Buchanan, a professional chef, and owner of Chefs-Resources.com, a website geared towards providing professional chefs with free detailed culinary info (seasonality, flavor profiles, etc.) about fresh fish, oysters, and cuts of meat, as well as tons of free kitchen management articles. Paid subscribers get access to our premium kitchen management resources such as Excel sheets (prep sheets, recipe templates, ordering guides, etc.), video tutorials, and kitchen management articles.

The site is not about recipes, but I am a Chef, so here is one of my favorite personal creations...seared scallops, spring pea puree, lemon beurre blanc, fingerling potatoes, golden beets, asparagus, corn kernels.

My name is Daryl Hatton. I am a founder, CEO, and lead investor of a team that created ConnectionPoint in 2009 as an early entrant and innovative pioneer in the crowdfunding industry.

To date, we have helped almost 200,000 projects in 40+ countries raise over $200 million using our platform.

Sustain Academy is an online sustainability academy for professionals wishing to enhance their sustainability journey. We offer a 10-week LIVE online sustainability course followed by 1:1 mentorship, taught by the world’s best field experts.

So far, more than 100 companies from more than 10 different countries have trained their employees with us.

My name is Abhishek Ghosh and I am the founder of the blog called The Customize Windows. Presently, the blog provides information to help the readers around software and electronics-related How-to guides and Do it Yourself projects.

The websites have been in existence for over a decade now and currently make 30 thousand dollars per year.

I'm Vaibhav Kishnani, an engineer but a passionate writer by profession. I established Content-Whale in 2017 when I was in my third year of engineering. Going by the maxim that quality writing is everything, Content-Whale caters to 42 different content types that form the backstory of every company’s digital presence and marketing efforts.

I started this content agency with a mere sum of Rs. 2,500. Today, we have drawn a revenue turnover of Rs. 4 Crores! In my opinion, it is not individual progress. Instead, a start-up is about connecting with the right individuals at the right time, who keep the show running ahead with their strife for perfection.