Jonathan Solomon, 34

In Proleve, the CBD company he founded in 2018, Jonathan Solomon has finally found his niche. Over the past 13 years, he’s been a seller or distributor of a wide variety of products, everything from houses to teddy bears to stem-cell supplements. He even did a brisk business selling — wait for it — starfish, or, as he calls them, “nautical home accessories,” on eBay and Amazon. 

Solomon says he would decorate the starfish and also had an Etsy shop for his custom designs. But many of the starfish he sourced were deformed and unsuitable for custom decoration, so he started to sell them in bulk. 

“We became the biggest distributor on Amazon of nautical life,” he says. “We would sell around 60,000 starfish per month. We also had sand dollars, shells. … It was just the most random thing.”