Top Small Business Ideas in 2024: Entrepreneur With 7-Figure Sales
When Karthik Shanadi pitched the idea of producing custom fraternity and sorority T-shirts to one of his college friends, he was a third-year student at the University of Florida with barely any savings.
His fraternity brother and now business partner, Luke McGurrin, jumped at the opportunity. The young entrepreneurs started “brokering deals through text messages,” Shanadi told Business Insider.
Their first order came from a sorority that needed custom shirts for an upcoming social. It was a $3,000 order, which they technically couldn’t afford, but Shanadi worked out net terms with a local vendor, meaning they could “buy now” and “pay later.”
It allowed them to start their brand, Greek House, with their limited savings. Shanadi estimates they spent $500 upfront to incorporate, launch a website, and save some cash in the bank.
The friends graduated in 2014, took full-time jobs, and continued building their brand on the side until 2016, when they both quit to go all-in on Greek House.
Their fraternity house project has evolved into four apparel brands — Greek House, College Thread, Threadly, and Athlete’s Thread — that did seven figures in revenue in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Business Insider verified their revenue through the company’s third-party accountant.
Shanadi, who grew up surrounded by entrepreneurship in the form of family-owned restaurants in Bangalore, credits much of their success to investing in technology early on.
“We realized quickly that we have to invest in technology to support the growth of this business,” he said. “And so we ended up investing in a website — that was our first investment — and then we ended up investing in an order management system and technology that essentially let us digitize all these text messages onto our platform.”
Optimizing their business through technology helped them eventually scale to four brands but also set them apart in a highly competitive apparel industry, he said: “A lot of the old school companies in the industry were either manual or slow. We were able to automate and do it with speed, so we were really able to disrupt the market with the tech.”
If he lost everything and had to start a business from scratch in 2024, he’d think about other industries that are underserved with regard to tech.
“I’d look for an industry that would essentially let me leverage existing tech, and find a very big market where tech is not serving that market base,” he said.
To narrow it further, he’d ask himself four questions, he said: “What am I passionate about? What is a big market? What is the problem? How am I going to solve it?”
That would lead him to the sports industry, which he genuinely enjoys and sees opportunity in: “Sports as a whole is just gaining a ton of popularity across the world and across the US, so I think figuring out a way to really insert myself into that space would be key.”
More specifically, there’s a massive opportunity in college sports now that student-athletes can monetize their name, image, and likeness (NIL) after a 2021 Supreme Court ruling.
“A lot of people are trying to figure out how to support all 450,000 athletes,” said Shanadi, whose newest brand, Athlete’s Thread, emerged in response to the NIL ruling and has already surpassed his other three brands in terms of revenue. Even more specifically, “I don’t think there’s enough of an emphasis on Division 2 and Division 3 athletes, and women’s sports as a whole is highly underserved,” he added.
As for how to best understand and solve problems within a space, talk to industry experts and ask about the challenges they’re facing. The more people you talk to, the better you’ll understand if it’s a common industry problem, he noted. If it is, you can start coming up with a solution, but you want to make sure pain points exist before you try to solve anything.
Continue the validation process once you come up with a solution by asking those same people if your solution would be of value.
“I think the first thing I would do is really just validate the idea before going all in,” Shanadi emphasized, adding: “There’s a lot of tools and resources nowadays that can help you validate those ideas before diving all in.”
That said, you eventually have to jump in. “If I had to do it all over again, I’d pick a problem and do a lot of research on that problem,” he said. “But not so much research that it hinders me from going forward.”
