I love entrepreneurs. Having the passion, vision, skill, and willingness to take a chance on a bold new idea is no small thing. Personally, I have started four businesses (three of which have been successful).
Now, this is the point in the article where I am supposed to tell you that I learned the most from the business that failed, right? Sorry, no can do.
Sure, I did in fact learn a lot, and one of the lessons is incorporated below, but I learned a ton more from running my successful website for a decade and selling it to Mark Cuban than I ever did by running a second law office for one crummy year.
So yes, entrepreneurs are a different breed. If that describes you and you want to start a business, below are four of the best ones you can get into right now.
You may be thinking, “What makes them the best?” Good question. My criteria are:
- Need: There has to be a market demand for what you plan on selling
- Low cost to start: Dumping a ton of money into a new venture — online or off — is risky. And given the state of online and digital businesses today, the good news is that you don’t have to take that risk. High-payoff, affordable online startups are not hard to find or create.
- Scalable: You want a business that can grow, period.
OK, with those criteria in mind, here are four business start-up ideas for entrepreneurs, ranked, right now.
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No. 4: Pressure washer
Huh? What is an old-school idea like this doing here? Well, while the rest of the list is populated with digital ideas, we start here because not everybody wants to be an e-entrepreneur, and this is actually an amazing opportunity.
Have you ever heard of Codie Sanchez? If you are reading this and you haven’t, Google her after you’re done. She’s an amazing entrepreneur and teaches people how to buy “boring” businesses. Why boring? Because they are not trendy (so they withstood the test of time), are needed (that’s why they are still around), and are valuable (they are for sale, after all).
Pressure washing is one such business. With a very low cost of entry, you can create a business that fits both the residential and commercial market. It also can be very profitable. And finally, pressure washing is an easy business to scale since paying help is affordable and thus each employee is a new profit center.
No. 3: Newsletter operator
Again, this may seem like an old-school idea. While the idea of e-newsletters have been around for ages, they are having a resurgence and have become both very hot, and potentially really quite lucrative. Consider:
- The Milk Road, a newsletter about cryptocurrency, was started and sold for eight figures a mere eight months later.
- HubSpot bought the newsletter The Hustle for $27 million.
- Codie Sanchez (yes, the same one) started a newsletter in 2020 called Contrarian Thinking. She recently said it is on the verge of becoming a nine-figure business.
What’s also great about this business model is that starting a newsletter is very affordable. At most, it costs a couple of hundred dollars. They can be created around any niche you and others find interesting, and once you build up a list of 10,000 or so subscribers, selling advertising to your audience is quite possible.
No. 2: User-generated content (UGC) creator
UGC is all the rage on social media. It is content, typically videos, made by, well, the users of a product. Those users make short, snappy videos of them trying and using something and then sell that video to the brand. The brand then places that content on their social sites, websites, and so on.
Brands love UGC because in this social media era, it smacks of authenticity, and that’s what sells. For you, the UGC creator, the business is, again, easy and affordable to start, and potentially very profitable.
Even better: You don’t have to be a social media influencer with millions of followers to become a successful UGC creator because the brand isn’t buying your audience, it’s buying the video of a regular person enjoying their product.
No. 1: TikTok shop proprietor
If you spend time on TikTok, you know that you can’t spend even, say, five minutes on the app without being told what an incredible opportunity TikTok shops are. Well, they are. TikTok shops are today’s equivalent of Google’s Adsense at the beginning of the millennium, when website owners were making a fortune by allowing Google ads on their site.
TikTok is that popular, and the potential is that big. But not everyone can do it. The criteria are:
- Have at least 1,000 TikTok followers
- Post regularly
- Get enough views of your videos
- Be at least 18
If you meet those, you can create a store within TikTok to sell your own goods, or affiliate goods. According to Fit Small Business, “In the U.S., 55.5 million TikTok users have bought either via links on the app or directly through the platform in 2023.”
The TikTok gold rush is under way. You might not want to miss out.
So there you have it — four easy, very good, and potentially very profitable businesses you can start today, and watch your bank account balance grow. Good luck!
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