Top 21 Ideas to Start a Business From Home

Finding bright ideas to start a business is a hit-or-miss endeavor. What works for one person doesn’t always work for another because so much of your situation has to be taken into account – is your living situation best suited to renting out storage space or setting up a private office to freelance online?

Not everything works for everybody, so we’ve compiled a broad array of the 20 best ideas for starting a business at home.

1) Freelance Your Top Talent on One of the Internet’s Many Freelance Sights

Becoming a freelancer involves a lot of work upfront, from getting your name out there to establishing trusting relationships with your clients and other freelancers, but after your first few clients are satisfied and your profile grows, freelancing is financially rewarding.

Top freelancing websites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Gun.io match your talent with clients in need.

Building up your profiles on these websites and getting 5-star reviews is the best way to progress as a freelancer using these marketplaces. Building up a good customer base with lots of 5-star reviews will put you ahead of the competition quickly and keep you ahead.

This may require you to drop pricing for the first 20-30 customers until you’re well-established in the marketplace.

2) List Unused Space on Your Property for Storage and Parking

You can use your property to rent on Airbnb for short-term living and rent smaller sections of your property for storage and parking purposes.

PeerStorage provides a safe and easy marketplace for property owners to list their lawns, driveway, unused basements, storage sheds, and other various spaces that are never used.

Private property owners can generate up to $11,294+ of extra cash per month without the hassle of the space they never use.

3) Become a Babysitter

Starting your own baby-sitting business means connecting with your community and earning good money doing a responsible, rewarding job.

This job is definitely not for everybody, but for those who love childcare, getting into the industry is very possible from your home.

Babysitting is also something you can possibly do from the comfort of your own home. Using your house as a daycare will give you the convenience of working from your own home and watching multiple kids at once.

This will allow you to scale your babysitting business to generate more revenue while also taking advantage of the tax incentives while using your home (real estate) as a business.

4) Join the Online Retail Boom

Buying items in bulk and reselling them online to distributors is viable for people willing to put in more than sweat equity.

You need the cash to buy things, to begin with, but if you have good knowledge of a particular niche, this can be a profitable long-term side hustle.

COVID pushed many physical retail stores to move to online sales and distribution. Starting an online retail website and store will increase your revenue, and you can build your online business to scale quickly with little effort after you set everything up.

You can sell your items on your website, Amazon marketplace, Facebook marketplace, or use Shopify to set up your online retail store.

5) Buy and Improve Old Websites

Flipping websites is best done within niches where you’re familiar with the subject matter and know you can improve what somebody else has tried to do half-heartedly. Once you’ve put in the time and effort to improve your website, you make money by reselling it at a profit.

Once you get a good start and formula for how to find, purchase, and update old websites. This can be a very scalable business as you can start to teach others how to do this, and your can scale your business as you increase your team.

There are 1.14 billion websites worldwide, with only 17% being active and 83% being inactive. This means there are infinite possibilities to find and convert a website as a side gig.

 6) Have a Yard Sale

This one-off income boost can be surprisingly lucrative and beneficial to your feng shui…

Not only will you be able to get rid of the stuff you don’t need, you will also be able to generate quick cash in the process. Yard sales are great for the community and will only take around 48 hours of your time to set up and start making money.

7) Sell handmade Arts and Crafts (or Tools and More)

People love art and cool things in general, and everyone knows how to make something cool. Taking your cool hobbies and marketing them for sale can be a way to monetize what you love to do without leaving your home.

The options for distributing your creations include shipping from your house, delivering to local businesses, or bringing your inventory to art fairs.

Now with a marketplace like Etsy, it’s easier than ever to set up your online shop and sell your unique homemade goods online.

8) Writing Resumes and Profiles

Busy professionals don’t want to spend time updating their social media and hire writers to do their dirty work. If you’re a good writer, then chances are somebody will be looking for your help. Resumes are a representation of your work experience and skills.

People want to stand out and have a visually impressive resume to send to potential employers. People will pay anywhere from $100-$700 to get their resume professionally written and developed.

If you learn how to write killer resumes that look great, you can start generating some good money in no time!

9) Car Cleaning Business

This is best suited to rural areas where you won’t compete with a car wash on every corner, but if you advertise your soapy inclinations, your neighbors might be more interested than you expected.

This is also something every car owner needs but doesn’t want to take care of themselves. You can potentially have a good client base that will keep returning to your service all year round.

You can generate good recurring revenue by providing a service the whole neighborhood will enjoy.

 10) Give Music Lessons

Skilled musicians don’t need to be associated with an academy to share their talents and teaching abilities. Several tutoring services offer online connections between students and teachers that let you work out of your home.

Due to COVID bringing everything online, you can think about teaching multiple people on a single zoom call which means you can generate income from multiple customers while not spending a lot of time.

If music is something that you love, this is a great way to start a business you will love!

11) Open a Catering Company

The best chef’s all started somewhere, and for many, that was in their own kitchen. The examples of home chefs moving into professional catering businesses are many.

The work involved will be intensive, but apparently, chefs don’t like to do anything but work anyway. Once you get a solid customer base, you can meal prep seven days’ worth of meals for all your customers.

This means you will only need to cook for one day for all your customers as you’re cooking them the same meals. Your customers will love your healthy food while you generate extra income without having to spend a great deal of time cooking.

12) Become a Personal Shopper

Whole Foods and other major grocers now offer in-store shopping and home delivery, which makes this option increasingly untenable, but for the moment, there is still a market for personal shoppers not affiliated with a big company and an opportunity for a private upstart.

This is particularly good for the older generation or mothers who don’t have enough time to go shopping with their kids.

The older generation doesn’t want to spend time shopping or may be unable to go shopping based on their health. This would be an excellent service with potential recurring customers familiar with your service.

13) Photographer

After investing in a camera and editing equipment, the work of a private photographer can be lucrative, from weddings to parties and more. Even with the use of camera phones, a professional photographer will always be needed for any event.

14) Landscaping

The Landscaping industry is crowded, but if you offer something unique to your customers and have the capital to buy machines, then there’s every reason a hard worker can succeed in starting a landscaping business from your garage.

You can post your business on Angi or UpWork to get your first few clients. These marketplaces are very good for these types of companies. All you need to do is satisfy your first couple of customers and get good reviews, and you will be on your way!

15) Power Washing Business

For handy people who don’t want to bother with a full-scale landscaping business, buying a power washer and storing it in your garage is a great alternative.

Someone with a power washer is often in high demand: businesses need graffiti sprayed away, homeowners want their pools and driveways cleaned, and there’s even a hot market for power washing YouTube videos if you’re handy with tools and a camera.

16) Freelance Computer Geek

The capacity for lay people to mess up their computers is endless. For the technically inclined, there is a broad market of the inept waiting for your business to start.

17) Developing the App You’ve Always Thought About

Another one for the technologically inclined: finally, starting work on your dream app. Although this is harder said than done, you can quickly learn to code and create your own app.

Check out this article on how you can quickly get started. All you need is a unique idea that will make people’s lives easier and save them time and energy.

Business ideas solve problems for people, and with technology, there are endless solutions to endless problems.

18) Get into Dropshipping

The main benefit of dropshipping is that you don’t have to hold inventory in your home but still fulfill orders from your computer. Dropshipping has been very beneficial for a lot of people and businesses.

Basically, you act as the marketer for products that you sell on your website. Companies can take much money trying to market to customers, so all you need to do is set up a website, find a supplier, market the product, and let the supplier/manufacturer fulfill the order from the production to the shipment.

19) Online Teaching

Online teaching is offered through various platforms that cater to everything from chess, music, history, and philosophy at all levels. Depending on your experience, teaching everything from an introductory to a college course is possible without leaving your house.

20) Take the influencer’s Leap

You never know if your Instagram is going to take off until you try. If you believe in yourself and think you can make it to the top of this greasy pole, the top influencers make a killing.

Influencers make money by gathering many followers on Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok. Once they get followers, they can market to their followers, which is lucrative for businesses as they can pay the influencers to sell their products directly.

All you need to do is go viral once, and you will have yourself a business!

21) Become a Pet-sitter

Pet setting, like babysitting, takes a certain type of person to succeed, but for those who love it and are good at it, there is a constant market for pet care. People love their pets, but unfortunately, people aren’t always home to take care of them.

You can add your services on Rover, a marketplace to find dog walkers and pet sitters. This is excellent recurring revenue as people will always have pets and other priorities that take them away from caring for their pets 24/7.

Conclusion

The most successful home-built businesses are all the same: monetization of your top talent. Many people are surprised that there is a market for that thing they love to do, but it’s absolutely possible to start making money doing what you do best without leaving your house.  

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• Why PeerStorage is the service you’ve been waiting for!
• How to Winterize Your RV – The Ultimate Guide
• How to Create Passive Income from Your Home – The Ultimate Guide
• Guide: How to make $1,000 in 5 minutes
• Car Storage Near Me: The Ultimate Guide on How To Find it
• Store with a Neighbor – How Airbnb for Storage Works!
• What is Self-Storage – Why You Need It
• 11 Passive Income Ideas in 2022 – The Ultimate Guide
• A Guide to Climate-Controlled Storage
• Car Storage: Everything it Takes to Store Your Car
• How a Carbon-Negative Future Will Change the Storage Industry