If you’re looking to start your first business, you’re going to want to be pretty careful. Times are tough right now, and you don’t want to get caught at the bottom. If you’re from a rich family, things are a bit different. You can take risks and apply yourself at different skills, especially when you’re young. But if you’re normal or poor, you’re going to want to do something that is guaranteed to make money, or at least very likely to make money. To maximize your chances of making money, you should start a generic business. This piece of advice is contradictory to a lot of popular wisdom. Most people think that you need to be innovative to be an entrepreneur. You don’t. You just need to execute on a
What is a generic business?
This is the definition of the word generic, according to Google:

For the purposes of this article, a generic business means a business that deals in a product that is commonplace and standard, for which there is known demand. You want people to be able to use your product a lot, and for your work to be re-brandable.
Generic = guaranteed demand
This is really the key. You want to know that there’s a demand for your product. There’s always demand for Almonds. There’s always demand for legal services. There’s always demand for online entertainment. You need something that people are always consuming. This makes it likely that you can make a lot of money, while also giving you a lot of competitors to learn from and study.
What are good examples of generic businesses?
Unless you’re an innovator, most businesses are generic. Being an innovator is what allows you to break into new markets, and it can make you very rich. But generic businesses work. Good examples of generic businesses include farming businesses (both the farmers in charge of agriculture and those wholesaling food), cologne brands and bottlers, and laundromats. Things that everyday people use without thinking.
How do I find a good generic business to start?
This is where you’re going to want to do a few things. The first, is evaluate how much capital and backup you have. Do you have lots of money? Can you get a loan from friends or family? Can you sleep over at their houses while you get work done? Some businesses are very capital intensive. Generally speaking, you’re going to want to look at EBITDA multiples when deciding which businesses to start. The higher the EBITDA multiple, the harder it is to make money in that industry. You’re either going to need more capital than most, or more skill than most. On the other hand, businesses with lower EBITDA multiples are riskier. It’s all a balance, because you also want to do what you’re most skilled at. Generally speaking, you want to increase your odds of making money.
More skills = more money
This will either come in the form of higher valuations for your business, or in the form of higher hourly wages. But generally speaking, the more you know, the better you’ll do. You just need to apply your skills properly and do the right things. This means that if you want to make money when you’re young, you’re going to want to pick up some skills. You can learn skills in school, or out in real life. Right now, a lot of people are struggling because the skills they learned in school aren’t super valuable. This doesn’t mean that all forms of education are bad. It just means you need to be careful what you go study. The general exception to this is if you grew up in a poor country. Then you’ll want the degree as a result of scarcity.
Study the incumbents
If you copy the other people in your industry, you should experience success. If you’re as skilled as everyone else, that is. To use the example of this blog, I built it based on what I saw on Flippa.com available for sale. I noticed that in order to start a blog that gets a lot of traffic, you needed to write a decent number of articles. The successful websites I noticed all had between 250 and 1500 articles. They were worth thousands of dollars, and probably extremely worthwhile endeavors for their owners. I did the math, and realized it was possible to produce the required number of articles in the required amount of time. I’m a little more than a quarter of the way through my journey, although I’m not sure how large I’m going to scale this project. So far, things have been going according to plan. The amount of traffic my website gets roughly lines up with industry figures, considering I have a new domain. I may take a hiatus, but I will definitely dedicate a lot more time towards building this site over the coming years. It’s incredible how much content you can create if you have a year of consistency. It all came from studying the incumbents. Studying the incumbents is an essential part of winning at any “game” or industry, because you need to know when to quit. Remember that when you’re starting a business. You can’t get your time back. Knowing when to stop is essential.
Downside: you need capital or leverage
If you’re going into business, you’re going to want and need capital. Shocks happen all the time, and they tend to change the financial landscape when they occur. Don’t go into business if you don’t have capital or people who can provide it for you. Without capital, running your business is impossible. The way you get around this is by getting a low-cost education. When you get a low-cost education, your skills become worth more, and you can work for yourself. If you can get a lot of clients working for yourself, you can start a firm. The key to making it work is getting a low-cost education in the right skills. Your education doesn’t need to be formal, but it needs to involve practice. This is tricky for a lot of people to figure out. A bachelor’s degree in English doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve mastered the skill of writing, for example. Spamming TikTok doesn’t qualify as having learned the skill of internet marketing, unless you’ve found some lightning-fast way of creating content. Find a skill that can be translated to a job found on the website of the United States Bureau of Labour Statistics.
When you’re starting a business, don’t reinvent the wheel. Life is too short for that, unless you have some weird life mission. Entrepreneurship isn’t about following your passions though. It’s about making money and building the lifestyle you want while also making yourself useful to society. Overall, it’s a tough balance to strike, but once you find your generic niche you should be happy as any aspire entrepreneur can be. It’s not easy, but it ends up being simple once you figure it out. Good luck.
Thanks for paying attention.