What's the best way to start making beats as a beginner?

What I would say to someone who's starting out 

1- Find a genre of music that you relate too

2- Have a basic understanding of music theory

3- Find a DAW that's easy to you 

4- Try to remake songs by artist you love from the genre you relate to

5- Keep on practicing 

Grab some drum samples from Splice (not loops!)

Grab some individual notes for an instrument from Splice (not loops!)

Find some creative effects plugins, (for example a good starting plugin would be something like Soundtoys Effects Rack)

Notice how I said NOT LOOPS twice. Using loops, is the number 1 way of killing your growth and creativity as a producer. Don't use other people's loops. Make your own. Otherwise you will never learn how to create an emotional colour with sound. Each loop we make, is the element whichcarries the primary emotion of a song. Much like the color palette of a painting. If you are not able to make a loop yourself, then you will never be unique.

Some advice I could give you is:
1. Use the DAW that is most comfortable for you to work a beat (If I had to recommend you some it would be Ableton Live or FL Studio).
2. Practice recreating the instrumental of some songs that interest you, this helps you to understand how its structure is made.
3. Having a basic knowledge of music theory and understanding between major and minor scales helps a lot to be able to create instrumentals.

No idea is a bad idea, in practice you will always improve to create better beats.

I would say, start by recreating beats of artists that you love. This is a great way to start since the you can learn a lot of great music productions plus it's fun because you already love the artists.

There's a couple things you want to figure out:
- What kind of samples are used? Use splice to search for similar sounding samples
- What is the structure of the song? E.g.: Intro, verse 1, chorus 1, verse 2 etc.
- What chords are used? Are you not able to figure this out on your own you can use tools like: Chordify
- What instruments are used? If they use syths, a great start is to use Serum and to load presets that you can also find on Splice that sound similar to the ones you're hearing.

The best advice I can give is to use acapella vocal tracks that are recorded in an exact BPM or time and then you will have a structure which you can reharmonize from scratch and you can create in your musical imagination whatever you have in mind. Try to capture what you have in mind in your music program and from there, a lot of practice.

It's never too late!

In my opinion, there are 3 things to start from in order to improve:

1: Learn to use the DAW
2. Try to recreate the songs you like, even just a part of them. In the beginning you can start with not too complicated songs, just the chorus or verse, then start recreatubg whole songs (which also gives you an idea of how the structure of a song works). 
3. More a piece of advice than something to start with, focus on the core of the song, don't get to the point where you have one idea with tons of sounds but no clue where it's going. It's better to have a rough structure with maybe 3-4 tracks that works from start to finish and then try to make it more solid and dynamic than a single 4-8 beat thing with tons of elements but no structure.