I Ranked the Best & WORST Businesses to Start Before 2026 | Andrew Wilkinson

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
We have 65 million of ARR. We do over $40 million of EBITDA. We also manage a $200 million fund. So we're over $300 million in revenue across 30 businesses. And all the businesses in the fund are profitable as well. I don't know, I'm kind of like, if that's failing, like sign me up, right?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:17)
You've owned a number of agencies. How much revenue lifetime has MetaLab generated for you?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:22)
The hundreds of millions of dollars of profits, not revenue. I don't know that I would still rank it very highly though.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:28)
SaaS, where are you putting SaaS?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:30)
I would say it's a b****.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:31)
What do you think about marketplaces?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:32)
Well, I would say it comes down to scale. A good marketplace like Airbnb, I'd say an A. I'd rank marketplaces in general as b****.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:39)
That's the one I would disagree with you with. I feel like I got to ask you this because I think you get a lot of s**t nowadays. I think a lot of people go look at the tiny stock and then they click like max, and basically you see it's just a downward trend. A lot of people I see on Twitter want to kind of look at that and say, oh, this guy calls himself the Warren Buffett of the Internet, and he says he buys his great businesses, but what's going on?
What's up? Andrew is here. Andrew is one of the most visited guests on the pod. Always good to have you, man. I wanted to play a game with you. You've done many types of businesses. You've done agencies and private equity, and you've started e-commerce companies. You've done a huge number of companies in the last 20 years. So I want to do a game where we rank the different types of businesses that you could start. We could work out this criteria together, but I think the idea should be, we're not looking at the outlier scenarios. So in every industry, the world's best plumber makes a fantastic living. That may not mean that plumbing is the best trade to go into. No offense to the plumbers out there listening, but we're not looking at just the extreme outliers. So I think that here's my criteria for a great business, Andrew. It's going to be the median successful outcome. So the normal case, if you can make it work.
That's the first criteria. The second thing is we're taking into account both the lifestyle as well as the result, the upside. So if one thing just makes you miserable or overworks you like crazy, then that would be obviously worse than a business that lets you have a great flexible schedule and flexible location, for example. So lifestyle matters, upside matters, and we're looking for kind of the median success case. But in some of these, it's going to be like, dude, it's median success. I mean, only the top 0.1% make it. So you have to factor that in. The likelihood of success matters in these scenarios. If you're listening on audio, it's going to be a little more fun if you go to YouTube or go to Spotify, and actually you can see on screen the stuff that we're sharing. All right. So here we go.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:51)
Here's the tier list.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:52)
If you've never seen a tier list before, they're ranked as you would expect, sort of A, B, C, D, E, F, A being better than F. But there is, of course, S tier. I don't even really know what S tier stands for. I think it's like from the gaming world, but it's basically like S tier is sort of like God tier. It's the best of the best. Okay. So we're going to start with a little layup here. For each, Andrew, I want you to give me your almost like rapid fire take on like kind of what this business is, why it's either great or why it sucks. Okay. So the first one we're going to do easy, an MLM, which is actually a surprisingly common business that people get into. If you just look at the raw numbers of people who take part in MLMs. So MLM, where are you ranking it?

**SPEAKER_1** (3:33)
I mean, I would rank an MLM as an F. It's a fundamentally unsustainable business that breaks. I mean, the problem with an MLM is it's reliant on recruiting other people, and it doesn't actually make money based on selling services. It basically makes money by finding the next sucker. And if the person that starts the MLM finds a lot of suckers, they can make a lot of money. Yeah. And the first couple layers can make a ton of money, but then it always explodes or they get indicted or something like that.