U.S. Startup Applications Top 3 Million in First Half of 2026

Americans filed more than 3 million applications to start businesses in the first six months of 2026, a 16.5% jump from a year earlier, according to US Census Bureau data. The surge is feeding an entrepreneurship rush that AI tools, volatile corporate hiring, and recurring layoffs have accelerated, said Deepali Vyas, CEO and founder of Vyas Media.

"Twenty years ago, you probably needed employees and designers and marketers," Vyas said. "Today, AI can do much of that first draft work."

Business Insider gathered five founders behind Jones Road Beauty, PopSockets, Olipop, Open Farm, and Preply to extract their rules of the road.

What did Bobbi Brown learn the second time around?

Bobbi Brown launched Jones Road Beauty in 2020, four years after leaving the cosmetics empire that still bears her name. She spent the interim experimenting with a supplement company and a Lord & Taylor concept store. The clean-makeup line now rests on the same philosophy that built her first company: simple, natural products.

"I don't want to be like other makeup brands. I never did," Brown said.

Brown pointed to customer feedback as the engine of her second act. Jones Road expanded its bestselling Miracle Balm line after hearing from shoppers in stores, via email, and in direct messages. She warned against obsessing over rivals.

"My advice, and what I do, is put my head down, not try to look what everyone else is doing, and just do what I think is right for Jones Road," Brown said.

How big can a glued button get?

David Barnett solved his own frustration. While teaching philosophy at the University of Colorado, he glued buttons from his shirt to the back of a phone so he could wrap a tangled headset around it. He tinkered for two years, then launched PopSockets from his Boulder, Colorado, garage in 2014.

The brand has since sold more than 300 million phone grips across 200 countries and stretched into cases, wallets, and chargers. Barnett credited his success to "a lot of trial and error, and a lot of luck."

• Solve small problems, not billion-dollar ones.
• Prototype cheaply and seek early feedback.
• Kill ideas that fail to gain traction.
• Keep the day job until the venture is funded.

"Don't think you're Elon Musk," Barnett said. "Life is full of these daily pain points that are opportunities for inventions or services." He added: "Start working on ideas at night and weekends, unless you're independently funded."

How do you turn a flop into a category leader?

Ben Goodwin launched an early probiotic soda in his 20s that fizzled. He refused to write off the idea. He relaunched as Olipop in 2018 and positioned it as a soda first, not a niche health drink. The target buyer sits squarely in middle America.

"My straw man for our product is somebody who shops at Walmart in Ohio," Goodwin said.

The earlier failure, he said, paid for itself in research. "The work the first time around was really helpful," Goodwin said. "It allowed us to be bolder and more disciplined and more clear."

Goodwin recently stepped down as CEO. His playbook for founders:

• Treat early failures as paid research.
• Act with integrity so people back your next venture.
• Delegate as the company scales.
• Adjust your identity from operator to leader.

Why does mission matter for a pet food company?

Jacqueline Prehogan and her husband Isaac Langleben launched Open Farm in 2014 after struggling to find ethically sourced food for their own pets. The company built its supply chain around the values it wanted to project.

"We were so clear on who we were from the beginning," Prehogan said. "We built the entire business around that."

She urged founders to find what they genuinely care about and resist premature scale.

"Find your passion and what you genuinely care about, because that's what you're going to go out and kill it in," she said.

How do you build a unicorn while cold-calling customers?

Preply cofounder and CEO Kirill Bigai grew up in Kyiv and started the language-learning platform with cofounder Dmytro Voloshyn in 2012. The company reached a $1.2 billion valuation in January and now offers more than 150,000 tutors in over 90 languages. Bigai insists the right partner outweighs even the product idea.

"It's the most important decision you'll make," he said. "It's a long journey, and it can be a lonely journey if you're alone."

Bigai's early customer research was direct to the point of exhaustion. He and his cofounder started with a landing page asking users to leave a phone number. He then called "every single phone number" to learn what learners needed and manually matched them with tutors. That hands-on loop, he said, taught the founders both sides of the marketplace.

The CEO framed entrepreneurship as a "marathon of sprints" and warned founders to pace themselves.

"It's important to take care of yourself, but also be ready," Bigai said.

The five founders share a common thread: customer obsession, patience, and the willingness to fail cheaply before scaling. With Census Bureau filings climbing 16.5% through mid-2026, that playbook now shapes the decisions of millions of would-be operators weighing a leap of their own.