November 23, 2025

Welcome back Income Insider - today we’re looking at Alex Hormozi’s advice for choosing a business when you’re broke, the 9 online businesses you can realistically start right now, and the #1 business model I believe will dominate 2026.

Alex Hormozi breaks down a simple framework to pick your first online business idea, even if you feel stuck, inexperienced, or overwhelmed. His message is blunt: the goal isn’t to choose the perfect idea - it’s to choose something you can test, refine, and improve through real feedback. Action creates clarity.

He explains that every good business starts from one of three sources: Pain you’ve personally solved, Profession (the skills you already get paid for), or Passion - the things you naturally obsess over. You don’t need a huge audience or a flashy idea. You just need to solve one narrow problem for one specific person.

From there, he guides you to define your who: people like you, people you’ve helped, or people you see as underserved. You narrow this even further using age, gender, profession, pains and passions. The more specific the niche, the more you can charge - because specificity signals expertise and reduces competition.

Next comes the how: what good outcomes you’ll help them achieve, and what bad outcomes you’ll help them avoid. This is where your offer takes shape. Hormozi shows how to turn these ingredients into a single sentence that communicates exactly who you help, what you help them get, and what they won’t have to struggle through.

Finally, he gives a simple outreach script to land your first five customers: greet someone, compliment something specific about them, share your one-sentence offer, and ask if they know anyone who’d benefit. Reach out to 100 people. If you do that, you’ll get your first sales.

The best online business to start in 2026 is an email newsletter (like this one). Email beats social media for one simple reason: you actually own the audience. Algorithms can change tomorrow, but an email list is a real asset you control, and you can promote anything you want through it.

You also don’t need to start with a product. The smartest path is to build the audience first, then decide what to offer once you understand what they want. With a newsletter, you can make money through affiliates, sponsorships, courses, coaching, books - anything. That’s why this entire newsletter exists: to help you build an audience that pays you for years.

If you want a clear roadmap about how to do what I recommend, download Income Kickstart. It shows you the same step-by-step system my readers use to build an audience, earn their first commissions, and finally create an online business that actually moves forward: