6 Scalable Startup Ideas (You Can Start Tomorrow)

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
You're a side hustle away from changing your life. In this episode, I brought on Chris Koerner, who gave me his best ideas for side hustles that not only don't take a lot of money to start, but they can actually scale to be really big businesses. A side hustle could turn into a real company, and a real company can change your life. So in this episode, it's all about ideas that could generate cash flow, that can turn into real businesses, anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars a year to fifty million dollar a year businesses. Enjoy the episode. Welcoming my brother from Another Mother, Chris Koerner, on the show Startup Ideas Podcast. He's back, I think, for the third time. Chris, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

**Chris Koerner** (0:54)
They are going to learn that they should not stay seated in their seat. They need to, this episode is successful if they pause and go out and do something, and then come back days later and finish it.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:04)
And will you give people specific ideas and sauce to get them out of their seats?

**Chris Koerner** (1:11)
Greg, my name is Christopher Sauce Koerner. Like, that's the whole brand. What are we talking about here? Of course.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:18)
Okay, so as long as you can commit to the sauce, and that, I mean, people do need to move their own legs, but at least, right?

**Chris Koerner** (1:26)
Yeah.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:27)
But you're gonna get them pretty close.

**Chris Koerner** (1:29)
This will be saucy. There's gonna be like four linguini noodles in there, and it's just gonna be drowning in arrabbiata sauce.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:36)
Okay, and what, and before we get in, what type of categories of ideas are we talking about?

**Chris Koerner** (1:41)
So we're gonna go approachable, low startup cost, low friction to start, affordable. But like, I, in my opinion, everything is scalable, right? So the question, I just hate it when people say like, is that even scalable? Like, yes, it's scalable. The right question is how hard would it be to scale to that, to whatever number? Because for some, $100,000 a year is scale. To some, $100 million, right? So these are all scalable.

**Greg Isenberg** (2:12)
So these are ideas that can be anywhere from $10,000 a month, all the way up to?

**Chris Koerner** (2:18)
Shoot, I mean, eight figures a year, $10 million a year in revenue with double digit profit margins.

**Greg Isenberg** (2:25)
Okay. You have my attention.

**Chris Koerner** (2:27)
Okay. I'm going to read some stats to you. You ready?

**Greg Isenberg** (2:30)
Yeah.

**Chris Koerner** (2:32)
Facebook Marketplace. We talked about Facebook last year on maybe the last time I was on this. Facebook Marketplace. Facebook has over three billion monthly active users. Sixteen percent of those are monthly active users for Facebook Marketplace. Half a billion people use Facebook Marketplace. Sixteen percent of active users log into Facebook for the sole purpose of shopping on Facebook Marketplace. Facebook knew what they were doing. They saw that the wall wasn't very popular anymore, so they started adding groups. They know what they're doing. They're smart, right? That's why we invest in Mark Zuckerberg. Fifty-one percent of all recent social media purchases, so like not Amazon, social media purposes, all happened on Facebook Marketplace.
My point, Facebook Marketplace is massive. It's huge. There are countless people that solely rely on Facebook Marketplace for their living. I've got a bunch of ideas around this. A lot of them like hands-on, dirty, sweaty. But the first one is, why is no one building third-party apps for Facebook Marketplace? Apps that scan items for you, apps that give you price alerts, apps where you can use the API in a compliant way to scrape and to find alpha and to see, oh, this dresser over here is listed for this, but it's actually worth this on eBay, like Arbitrage apps. I've already looked into it. Don't tell me the API permissions don't allow for it, because they do. People are not building apps on top of Facebook Marketplace, and I don't know why.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:06)
That's crazy, dude.

**Chris Koerner** (4:08)
Half a billion users.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:10)
I was almost 100% convinced that it just was impossible. Right. Yeah.

**Chris Koerner** (4:16)
Like, I vibe-coded one that like scanned items, it would reach out to people. Like, I'm not an expert. I don't even know how to code. I vibe-coded it, and it worked for my use case. I didn't like scale it, I didn't sell it, but like, it is possible. The API allows for it. People would pay for it. They make their living from Facebook Marketplace. If they could have an edge, they would pay for it. No one's doing it. eBay has thousands of apps built on top of it, right? Some of those apps got acquired by eBay for hundreds of millions of dollars. Like, there's something here.