The Blueprint to Financial Freedom: How to Launch 80 Businesses with Little Money
- Oscar Uribe
- Dec 8, 2025
- 4 min read
We’re diving deep into the mindset of a serial entrepreneur often called "the king of side hustles," Chris Kerner, as featured on "The Diary Of A CEO." If you’ve ever felt stuck in your financial situation and looked at side hustles as the impossible "silver bullet" solution, you need to hear this. Chris Kerner, who has launched over 80 businesses and generated millions in profit, argues that starting a business is more approachable now than ever before.
For Chris, business was an essential outlet for taking control of his life after growing up relatively poor. He discovered this path early, at age nine, by selling retrieved golf balls from the local course to buy a bike his parents couldn’t afford. That first success taught him a crucial lesson: business is approachable. Today, launching an idea is incredibly accessible, with 90% of the ideas he discusses requiring $500 or less to start, and they can be executed on nights and weekends.
Why Aren’t You Starting Already? (Hint: It’s Not Money)
If starting a profitable venture is so easy, what stops most people? According to Kerner, the biggest hurdle is psychological: fear of what others think. We worry about random high school contacts seeing our new venture on Facebook and passing judgment, which is "really silly" but incredibly common. Kerner advises that the pain of your financial problem must become greater than how much you care about what people think. Once you flip that switch off, “the world is our oyster”.
Another common trap entrepreneurs fall into is focusing too early on their passion. While passion eventually plays a role, Chris’s core advice is sharp: "ignore passion, follow the profit until you can afford to follow your passion". You should aim to fall in love with commerce itself—the process of turning one dollar into two—and then apply that love to various ventures.
The Secret Weapon: Copying and Low-Friction Testing
Many aspiring founders waste years trying to innovate or reinvent the wheel, believing they must be different. Kerner, however, offers a liberating perspective: don't try to do it better or differently; just do the same thing that is already working. If a competitor exists, they’ve already validated the idea for you.
He suggests using tools like the Web Archive and Similar Web to reverse-engineer successful businesses—seeing how their websites evolved or tracking their traffic changes after a redesign. For instance, Chris made millions by copying the business model of an unsolicited cold caller who wanted to buy his broken iPhone screens—a move he says most people would miss due to their "ego" or "pride". When tackling "old problems" in business (like hiring or pricing), it’s often wiser to copy the blueprint of established competitors than to experiment for years.
When it comes to validating a new concept quickly, Chris highlights a tool one in four humans use every day: Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp). Instead of spending months building an elaborate product, he suggests a "very low friction" approach.
Take, for example, validating a new creatine gummy product for women:
1. Use AI image generators to mock up the product.
2. Post the photos and pitch (with different variables like price or headline) on Facebook Marketplace.
3. Track clicks, views, and messages in a simple Google sheet.
4. Boost posts with $10 to get further data.
5. Concurrently scrape Facebook groups for insights.
This process takes a couple of hours and generates data points to inform your next steps, quickly giving you momentum.
Business Ideas that Require Minimal Capital
To prove the accessibility of starting, Chris offers several concrete ideas for low investment:
• **With 500:∗∗FocusonimplementingAIforsmallbusinesses.Using"vibecoding"tools(non−technicallanguageprompts),youcanbuildcustomizedAIsolutionsforlocalbusinesses(likevoiceagentsforansweringafter−hourscallsforaguttercleaner).Youchargeanupfrontimplementationfee(500–$5,000) plus an ongoing maintenance fee.
• With $500 (Physical): Try drop servicing, where you create a professional website for a home service (like garage repair) and generate leads using Facebook or Google ads. Instead of doing the physical work, you subcontract the customer to a local business, taking a sizable margin for providing the better user experience and convenience.
• With $1,000: Start a local email newsletter. Spend the $1,000 on Meta ads to acquire 1,000 subscribers in a defined local area (at about $1 per subscriber). Since about 10% of subscribers are business owners, you can quickly source sponsors and charge about $500 per send, recouping your investment within two months.
Ultimately, the goal is not total, unrealistic freedom, but to test the waters and build your “bias for action muscle”. Entrepreneurship involves massive trade-offs—trading stability and predictability for volatility—and the only way to know if that trade-off is worth it for you is to try.
What low-friction experiment could you run this week to validate one of your long-standing business ideas?
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Source: Excerpts from the transcript of the video "Passive Income Expert: How To Make 10k Per Month In 90 Days!" uploaded on the YouTube channel "The Diary Of A CEO"
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