Welcome to the ultimate guide to large business ideas. If you want to create or develop a large business, this is the guide for you. It is going to be different from the other guides you find online, because here we don’t just show you a list of ideas. We do much more than that. In this guide, we will see how to think of new large business ideas for yourself.
Before we start, an important note. Nobody truly has the qualification to tell you which large business ideas to pursue. Do you really think Elon Mask decided to create Tesla after reading an online article on how he could create a large electric car manufacturer? Or that Warren Buffet started Berkshire Hathaway after reading the a “100 amazing large business ideas” book in a library? Most likely not.
Even those highly successful individuals would not qualify to tell you which large business ideas are good for you. They have skills, resources, and network that if they conceive a new large idea they can transform it in a reality, and it will probably be successful. You (or us, for the matter) with the same idea won’t be so lucky.
Does this mean it is all lost? Not quite. Anyone can come up with large business ideas. In this guide we will show many examples, and help you develop a framework so that you can recognize which business idea is going to be good for you (and has chances of success).
Here is the table of contents for this guide:
- Defining large business ideas
- How to come up with large business ideas
- Large business ideas examples
- Conclusion
There we go, let’s start to come up with large business ideas.
Defining large business ideas
What is a large business idea?
Before we can even start to discuss large business ideas and how to come up with them, we should spend some time to understand what we mean by that. Different people have different ideas about what counts as a “large” business idea, and it is important to ensure we are on the same page.
Of course, we intuitively know that a large business idea is the opposite of a small business idea, but on what dimensions? Some people consider a large business something that is highly profitable, or something that has high revenues, or even more something that has a lot of property, employees, resources, vehicles, patents, you name it.
Even if we agree that we want to measure our business based on revenue, when do we consider those revenues to be large? Is 100k USD dollars considered “large revenue”? How about $1m, $10m, or even $50b? There is no absolute truth, however most people can grasp when a business becomes large, and when it is just a sound medium-sized operation.
For the purpose of this guide on large business ideas, we can consider a business large when we meet some criteria.
- It has a global market, or at least a regional market (e.g. Europe, Americas, Asia-Pacific – not a single country or a bunch of countries). That is, there are people who need what you are selling all over the world, or at least in your region.
- You have persistent or cyclical demand for your products, you are not a fad of the moment.
- It requires a lot of money to run the business. As of 2024, for a business to be considered relevant in the global stage, we should measure this in billions. Ideally, you want revenue of $10b or more.
If all of this seems exciting and daunting at the same time, it is completely normal. Let’s try to break it down and explain better the components that make a large business idea. If you evaluate your ideas on these dimensions, you will know if the idea you have is large or not.
Market demand
The first dimension to consider when assessing a business idea is market demand. If only your mom and your aunt are going to buy products from you, you probably don’t have a large business idea in your hands.
Market demand is how many people can potentially want your product, whatever it is. There, you have to be realistic. It is easy to be tempted to say “everyone would want one of these”. If what you are creating is something new, then you cannot realistically say in advance how much popular it will be. But most large business ideas are not really about something new, instead they are about perfecting something that already exists.
Think of Tesla, the car manufacturer, as an example. People need cars, and it fundamentally addresses that need by producing and selling cars (electric ones, but it is irrelevant for our discussion). You can know how many cars are bought every year, and you can make an estimate. Potentially, if everyone in the world who wants a car can afford a Tesla and decides that’s the best car for them, Tesla can capture 100% of market demand. That is, 100% of people who need a car will buy a Tesla.
This is the market size: how many people want X. That is what you should consider when assessing the potential of your large business ideas. Even if you can’t sell to all X and will only capture 2% of the total market, you should focus on the entire pie. The reason for this is that you want to enter the competition in a place where the pie is large, and then try to grow your slice. If the whole pie starts small, then you will struggle a lot to conquer all of the pie, but still get limited results.
So, focus on the total market size for your business idea, even if you don’t have a big market share right now. In fact, if you are thinking about starting a new business, you most likely have a 0% market share.
Longevity
The second dimension to consider when assessing large business ideas is longevity. Most business ideas are not a fad, but since some are this is something you want to check. There was a time in 2017 when adding “blockchain” to your company name could boost its value tenfold. But that was a fad, the world was quick to realize it did not really need “blockchain garden decorators”.
When we talk about assessing the longevity of a business idea, we mean answering this question “is this industry going to stick around?”. If you want large business ideas, you need to ensure they meet this longevity criteria, and so the answer needs to be “yes”.
Here, we have three types of industry to consider: cyclical, non-cyclical, and countercyclical.
A cyclical industry is something where demand happens in cycles. Things like car manufacturers, furniture, constructions, travel and leisure, or luxury goods are in this category. This is because there is a long time between the purchase of such items: you buy a car, then you buy another one 10 years later, and so on. It is not something you buy every month or year. These industries tend to correlate well with the general economy: when the economy is doing good, people buy cyclical goods, when it is doing poorly they do to a much lesser extent. For example, if you lose your job you may want to keep your car one more year instead of buying a new one.
Non-cyclical industries are the opposite of cyclical. Here, demand is consistent and independent of the general economy, or at least less related to that. Food and beverages, utilities, and healthcare are good examples here. Since demand is consistent, it is much more predictable. Here we find all the businesses that sell products you cannot really live without, and you often need to purchase frequently (or even continuously, like electricity).
Finally, we have a third type which is somewhat different: counter-cyclical industries. Those industries act like cyclical industries, but in the opposite direction. That is, they do well when the general economy is doing bad, and vice versa. Here we find things like debt collection agencies, discount retailers, or even post-education training, as people seek to pivot careers during downturns.
You can find longevity in all three types of industries, but not outside of those. The most dangerous thing to look for is a product that you cannot easily place in either category because it has a little bit of all.
Capital-intensity
Another dimension you need to consider is the capital-intensity of your large business ideas. Simply put, if your business idea is truly large then you need a lot of money to make it happen! Or, to say it another word, you can’t create Tesla with $10 and a garage. Amazon was created in a garage, but with $300k and it did not immediately get to the size it is today (which, to be maintained, needs a lot more money and not just a garage).
Capital is not just money, although it is measured by money. It is the collection of all resources your company (or business idea) needs to run. For example, a real estate agency needs money to buy properties, an airline needs planes (which are expensive), and an oil company needs oil rigs (which are even more expensive).
If you don’t see your business as needing a lot of money at least at some point, then it is not a large business idea. An exception may be software companies, where you don’t put a lot of initial investment and do not hold a lot of physical assets. However, this lays in the fact that all the technology and software is hard to convert to financial numbers, but that counts as capital as well.
How to come up with large business ideas
Now that we know what large business ideas are, we can start to define how to come up with them. We will do that first, and then give some examples. We do this because you don’t want to just copy some large business ideas you find online; you want to come up with your own that are unique for you.
Start with scalability
Coming up with business ideas is no different than coming up with “normal” ideas: you start with some brainstorming. The input for your brainstorming should be scalability.
Scalability is how much your idea can grow and eat up more of the market demand. In a sense, we can say that the potential of your idea is the total market demand you have in your market. So, this the first thing to consider when coming up with your idea: how big the market is?
However, considering just the size of the market is not enough to assess scalability. Scalability and size are not the same thing. Scalability is “how much your idea can start small and grow big”. So, you need to have a big size at the end of the spectrum (the total size of the market), but you also want a small size at the beginning. Think about an airline: it has a huge size at the end of the spectrum, but not a small one at the beginning: you need to have at least one plane, and those costs millions of dollars.
On the other hand, software companies may be the most scalable of all. At the beginning you can just have a bunch of developers, few customers, and no capital. At the end, you can have a huge company like Microsoft, Google, or Salesforce. Writing a book is also a good example: the effort to start is relatively small (the work of an individual), but can scale to immense size without additional effort from the author: think about the Harry Potter franchise for example.
Start by listing ideas and defining the resource requirements at the beginning, and the output potential at the end. Once you have a bunch of ideas, you can filter out the ones that don’t match your possibilities and needs. First, you need to discard all ideas that are not large enough at the end: say, all ideas that you think will not yield $1b of revenue a year or more.
Then, you want to consider how small your initial commitment needs to be. If you have saved $10k and cannot access external capital, it is useless to pursue an idea that requires $100m just to start. Once you filter on both sides, you will end up with the list of ideas you can actually pursue, and you can move to the next step.
Identify market gaps
At this point, you will have a bunch of large business ideas, but needs to consider what is really feasible. The advice here is to consider gaps in the markets: pockets of customers that are not well served by existing products. If you can’t offer something better than the existing players do, then you won’t have much luck in the market.
Even if you do have a better product, people may not feel compelled to switch unless they think the new advantage is a must have, something that makes the product they have look incomplete. This is not easy, but you are trying to build the next $1b company, who said it is going to be easy?
In case you don’t think to have an advantage that is big enough, think about a niche, a small subset of the main market that is not well served. You can start to target them. For example, you may create accounting software, but realize healthcare professionals have a desperate pain point that normal accounting software does not address. You can make average accounting software, or even inferior to some of your competitors, but nail down what those people need. They will love this product, and they will switch to it because you resolve an important pain for them. You are filling a market gap here.
Eventually, you also improve your product, and those healthcare professionals start to talk outside of their industry “You know, product X solved my problems really well”. People outside of the healthcare niche will see people are using and loving your product, and they may switch to it at some point. Gradually, you can overtake the entire market if you have a better product.
Define the MVP
Once you are clear about what are the gaps in the market you need to address, you can move your large business ideas to the MVP stage. MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product, and it is the definition of the product you need to enter the market. What are the minimum features you need to have so that you can address the market gap?
Defining an MVP can be challenging, because you are tempted to overload it with more features than is actually needed, in particular if you are pursuing large business ideas (which often require lots of features). I have some advice on how to define the MVP that is derived by the software industry.
First, start with user roles. Think what all the roles involved around your product are. That is, the list of types of people that interact with your product, one way or another. If you want to create the next Uber, for example, you will have drivers, customers, and support staff from Uber. But those roles are too generic, you want to be specific. You can break-down “customers” with enterprise customers, business professionals, tourists, and occasional customers. You can break-down “drivers” with professional drivers and people who look for a secondary source of income. Think of every role and how it is involved in interacting with your app, including people from inside your company.
Once you have the roles cleared out, you can start to write about user stories. User stories are small sentences that tells a feature a customer want, and explain why it is important for them. They have the following format:
As a <role>, I want <thing> so that <outcome>
For example:
As an enterprise, I want to see all the invoices for my employees that travel with Uber in one place, so that I can meet my accounting compliance requirements.
Write as many user stories come to your mind, don’t think which ones are important for the MVP in the first phase. If you have a team, this is also a great opportunity to do brainstorming. Once you have many ideas, ideally more than 20 or 50, you should rank them in order, so place them in a tool where you can easily move them around: things like Trello or even sticky notes on a dashboard can be a good option.
Then, defining the MVP is just a matter of drawing a line. You need to define which stories can go above the line, and are thus needed for the MVP, and which ones can be done after the MVP is released. As soon as you have the MVP, you can estimate what resources you need to accomplish it. This is important for the next phase.
Consider how to get resources
Once you have a clear path of what you want in terms of MVP, you need to consider how to get it. Large business ideas will remain just ideas if you don’t have the resources to make them a reality. So, you need to consider how to acquire resources.
Mainly, we have four types of resources:
- Money
- Property – a building or a piece of land
- Equipment – special tools or machinery
- Staff and skillset
Not all business ideas need all four, and not all four to the same extent. But you need to consider what you need. Furthermore, money can often be translated into property and equipment, and you can use it to hire valuable professionals, but is hard to translate in actual skills.
There are two main sources of resources you can tap into: your reserve, and your network.
By “your reserve”, I mean how much cash you have to spare in the bank. You can use that cash to buy property and equipment. That is relatively easy, unlike hiring talent. Even if you have the money to hire talent, you don’t necessarily have talent at hand.
So, you need to tap into your network as well to get resources. Your “network” is just a fancy way to define the group of people you know. You may know a friend who knows a friend who had an ex-colleague which knows how to do the specific thing you are looking for. The network is the predominant way you can get all the resources you need. In fact, if you hare creating large business ideas, you are unlikely to be able to do everything alone, specifically because they are “large”.
You should leverage your network not only to find talent to hire, but most importantly to find partners/cofounders and investors. If you partner up with someone, and have strong financial backing, all your large business ideas are much better off and have higher chances of success. This also means you need to face the reality of the quality of your network.
You may not know any venture capitalist or angel investor, you may not know skilled people, or people willing to be partner with you. That is normal if you never invested in building your network. If that’s your case, do it now, because when it is time to use it will be too late. To build your network, you need to go to events, talk to people, interact with friends-of-friends, and in general be a good and active member in all the communities you participate in.
Once you have the resources you are all set to start with your large business ideas, good luck! And, in case you still don’t know which ones to pursue, here we have a few good examples to spark your creativity.
Large business ideas examples
Low-cost airline
A low-cost airline is a great large business idea because it can scale to huge sizes (think of Southwest in the US, or Ryanair in Europe, as both dominate the sky). To execute on this business idea, you need to have knowledge about the airline industry, and enough money to lend a plane and pay staff.
Finding investors for an airline is relatively easy. This is because the main cost is the plane – whether you buy or enter in a lease contract for a specified time. However, the value of the plane is well known, and if you go bust it is relatively easy to sell to other airlines. So, investors can be happy to put a lot of money because they know they will not go down the drain, they are invested in an asset which can be sold if things go south.
This means if you have a strong knowledge about the airline industry, people may be willing to give you the money without many problems.
We chose low-cost airline here because it is much easier to start than a traditional airline. Traditional airlines target more lucrative routes with more competition, and require busy schedules, with multiple planes serving the same route even multiple times a day. To achieve the same level of convenience to compete with them, you need to use a lot more planes, and even implement your hub-and-spoke setup, with a main airport serving many destinations. But gates in airports are limited, so even if you have all the money in the world, you may not be able to do so, as other airlines have already contracted for all the gates.
Instead, a low-cost airline serves routes between secondary airports at odd times. Traditional airlines are unwilling to serve them because they are outside of their hub-and-spoke model and less lucrative, but tourists will buy the tickets because they are less sensitive to time than business travelers. Business travelers buy the tickets based on the day they need to travel; leisure travelers plan their vacations based on the day when the flight is available.
You can start a low-cost airline with few planes and still gain some competitive advantage against established players from day one. Even with a few planes, this kind of business is large because planes are expensive, in the $100m ballpark, and even if you lease them, you will pay millions.
With just one plane, you could start to serve many routes. For example, you could start Monday by doing Denver to Salt Lake City, then Salt Lake City to Spokane, then back Spokane to Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake City to Denver. You close for the day with one last flight: Denver to Sioux Falls. Tuesday you are in Sioux Falls and you have already served two routes both ways (Denver-Salt Lake City, Salt Lake City-Spokane). You can do something similar around Sioux Falls, and so on.
Real Estate Agency
We could not come up with a list of large business ideas without mentioning real estate. This is probably the easiest large business idea to start. With limited training and capital, anyone can potentially start a real estate agency. To be clear, we are referring to an agency that buys and sells residential and commercial property, as well as land. You could do all three, or limit yourself to one or those, such as residential property.
Additionally, you can negotiate on behalf of others, for example selling houses that you do not own. In this case, you get a commission on the sale as a percentage of the sale price. Commission structure can vary, and you are free to set up your own commission scheme. Here, you can get a base commission for completing the sale, plus a bonus for each $1000 over the initial price. In this case, your commission can be a high percentage point over the extra, instead of a low percentage point over the total.
To make an example, imagine the market value of a house is around $400k. You could agree to sell for 1% commission. Alternatively, you can say you demand a $4k commission provided you can sell it for at least $400k, and 10% of any profit beyond that. Say you manage to sell it for $450k, you will get $4.5k as commission if you are on the first model. Instead, in the second model you will get $9k ($4k as base + 10% of $50k = $5k). You are much more motivated in the second model, and you will get a higher sale price for the owner, so it is a win-win scenario.
Your commission scheme can even be more complex than that, for example your commission may increase if you manage to sell the house beyond a certain value (i.e., you can say 20% for any profit beyond $50k over the starting price).
Starting to sell houses on behalf of others is really quick and cheap, it requires no capital and the skills needed are easy to acquire, you just need to study a little of the local property law. However, as soon as you are in the business, you can upgrade to buying properties, and then re-selling them. Potentially, you can do improvements on the property and sell them at a higher price, this is called house flipping (when done with residential properties).
It is called flipping because you hold the property for a short period of time and then resell it. If you have been in the business for long enough, you know which property is underselling, and which property can become much more appealing with just minor renovations. For this, you don’t even need to save a lot of money, you can borrow from banks fairly easily. This is because, just like in the case of low-cost airlines, the value of a property is quite tangible, so the bank has something that can easily recover if you go bust.
Typically, a bank will want you to pay at least 30% of the purchase price of a property with your own money (you can get to less than 30% if you buy your own house, but if you are a real estate agency this is what you get). So, say you want to buy a property worth $500k, you need to put down $150k and borrow the remaining $350k. The bank will lend you at a rate higher than a standard homeowner, as you are running a business and thus carrying more risk, so say 10%. This means you pay $35k a year in interest every year.
Now, say for the $500k property you need to spend $10k in transaction costs, plus $50k for renovation, but then you can sell it for $600k. You buy it for $500k, then have to subtract the $10k and then the $50k, so the total cost for you for this property is $560k, and then you sell it at $600k, making a $40k net profit. If it takes you two months to do so, you can do the same trick for 6 properties in a year, netting $240k. You pay your interest expense of $35k, and you are left with $205k of pure profit.
To pull this off, you need the initial deposit of $150k plus the cost to refurbish the first house of $60k, a total of $210k. Yet, in a single year you almost recovered your entire investment, and if you were to sell all the houses and recover your deposit you would still have it back immediately.
This schema carries risk, of course. If you are unable to sell a property you are stuck with it and may have to sell it at a loss. If the house prices drop, you also may have to sell a property as a loss, and not be able to recover enough to pay interest expenses. You can limit this risk by flipping houses fast enough, but that is not always possible.
Shipping company
Think about shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, or even Maersk. They own huge fleets of vehicles (or huge ships, in case of Maersk), large distribution centers and carry goods all over the world. They are definitely large business ideas, and they benefit from economies of scale more than other industries. You can start your own shipping company if you want.
Now, if you go with the container ship route, the same logic we have seen for airlines and real estate applies. You need to buy just a few extremely expensive items, ships in this case (like planes or houses), that retain their value regardless of what you do. So, banks will be more at ease lending you money to do so. That is not the case for road vehicles, which are more perishable and of lower value. However, even if you buy ships with borrowed money, you are unlikely to buy just enough to be competitive with the giants in this industry.
So, what you can do here is to replicate the low-cost airline model, but with shipping. Serve routes that other companies are unwilling to serve and do that with less frequency than a normal route would. You should focus on those niche markets. The good news is that you can decide what is the niche market you target: you may target rural regions, remote islands, sub-artic locations, oil rigs in the middle of the ocean, and so on.
Taking this “niche” approach means you will need to use niche tools and vehicles. The brown vans UPS uses to deliver to your house won’t be suitable for delivering to an oil rig. Instead, you will need a medium-sized ship to reach the rig, and a helicopter on-board to deliver the goods. The brown van without the driver’s door won’t make it to Alaska in the winter, you will probably need some special truck that can go on ice. You get the point.
But the concept is the same as for low-cost airlines. Focus on a niche where there is not a lot of competition and where you can excel. Then, scale from that.
Venture capital
We could not do an article on large business ideas without talking about venture capital. A venture capital is an investment firm that specializes in funding startups, more specifically investing a little bit in many small companies, with the expectation that at least some of those will turn big and make up for all the losses on the ones that have failed.
Among the large business ideas, this is probably that requires more skill. Or, to be more precise, the more skilled you are at identifying great companies being born, the less capital you will need. If you are not that skilled at this game, you can still play it successfully, but it will require more capital (and you will rely more on statistics).
The pivotal idea of a venture capital is that you inject some money into a startup, wait some time and if it is growing as expected you can inject more, or let it die otherwise. Of course, there are different flavors of this: some venture capital funds (VCs) specialize in early stage, and they sell their stake to other VCs later on if a company is doing good. Others focus on sticking with a growing startup all the way to maturity.
In general, the idea is to assess the potential business value of a company and its likelihood of success. For example, if you have a company that you think has potential to become a $10b business, but a 0.000001% of doing so, you think it is worth $10k. If you invest those $10k and you then see it makes progress to reduce uncertainty, and it is now 0.0001% likely of succeeding, then your stake is now worth $1m. You can either invest $990k more or sell your stake to another VC for $1m.
The good news is that you need only $10k to do this trick. The bad news is that you need to pick a company that then succeeds. Even companies with all the good potential occasionally fail, despite all the best intentions, great efforts, and proper resources. So, you should be prepared to make multiple of those bets on multiple companies. In general, it is advisable to start a VC business if you have enough capital to fund tens of startups at least, and stick with an industry where you are an expert.
How much to fund each individual startup is really up to you. It can be $1k, $10k, $1m, or whatever. But you need to stick with an amount that allows you to invest in multiple companies at the same time, and that can make a difference for the company in reducing risk (that is, finding if the probability of success is increasing). A $1k investment in a company like Walmart won’t make a dent, in a scrappy startup that has just started would.
Writing a book
You may be surprise to see “writing a book” in the list of large business ideas, but don’t be. In fact, this is the most scalable, low-capital and low-risk large business idea you can find. And it is also quite accessible.
The concept behind this idea is simple: you write the book only once, regardless if you sell 1 copy or 10m copies. The potential for impact and revenue is unlimited, the effort you need to put in it remains constant. This is not to say it is an easy endeavor, quite the opposite. It is to say this is an idea that can scale beyond imagination.
Of course, writing bestsellers is almost a game of luck. It requires skills and creativity, but there is no recipe. Even the most successful authors will not be able to tell you a “10 step guide to write the next bestseller”. For some reason, they can write one, but I cannot. Still, if writing is your passion and you have something to write about, you should give this idea a shot.
Focus on books to the general public, a detailed explanation of subatomic mechanics won’t be a bestseller most likely. And, of course, you need to have something to write about. You can’t force yourself to write a bestseller.
Software company
To complete the list of large business ideas, we had to add a software company. This is because many huge companies today make a lot of money with software: think about Microsoft, Google, Netflix, and so on. In the end, creating software is similar to writing a book: you write software once, and then that can scale to 1 or 10 million customers.
Of course, not every software company can be listed among our large business ideas. To do so, the company needs to scale. In other words, you must not be commissioned to write software by our customers. If you have the kind of software company where the customer asks you to create an app that does X and Y and you do so, that won’t scale. You create software for your customers, you can’t legally re-use it for other customers, and even if you could the app is going to be so specific that it won’t fit another customer. This is no different than ghostwriting.
No, what you want to do is create an app that people can use. It can either be an app for end-user usage, like Netflix or AutoCAD, or a Software-as-a-Service product, like QuickBooks or Salesforce. You write the software once, and you position it in such a way that additional customers can use it.
Of course, to pull this off you need good software development skills. On top of this, writing software is not really like a book that you write once. You will discover bugs you have to fix, and you will have pressure from competitors who are introducing more and better features in similar products. So, you will have to continuously expand your software (or “code base”, to say it in a more nerdy way).
Yet, even as you do so, consider that you are still scaling. You are improving your product over and over, not keeping up with customer demand. A bug fix is a bug fix, regardless if the app is used by one or thousands of users. So, your efforts do not have to scale with your audience, and this is why software companies deserve a place among the large business ideas.
Conclusion
Additional resources
If you are interested in large business ideas, this article is just a starting point. Here are some additional resources you can check to develop your ideas, and find new ones.
- Forbes Business
- HBR – Ideas
- Entrepreneur – Business Ideas
- Inc. – Business Ideas
- Crunchbase
- AngelList
- TED Talks – Business
- MIT Sloan – Ideas Made to Matter
- Develop an effective business plan
We would like this to be the ultimate guide on large business ideas you find online. So, if there is a resource you think it will be valuable, or if you have a killer idea you want to share, please reach out (see below) so that we can add it to this guide!
Connect and get help
If you liked this article, if you have questions, or if you want to discuss business ideas, please reach out to me on LinkedIn (see my profile here). Just add a note saying you want to connect because you read the article on large business ideas. I will accept request from everyone, but only if you take the time to write the note (this is to avoid spam).
I would love to hear your opinions about large business ideas. What do you think it is a must-add to this guide?
