6 Small Business Ideas From Home to Begin With a Lesser Outlay
Devising ridiculously small business ideas from home that aligns with your interests is not easy, however, once you do, establishing a business might become a bit easier.
I have always been of the view that a statutory purpose of a business should not be profit. That is because if it were all about profit, there would exist a fair probability of business irresponsibility. For instance, I had a friend who once found a great small business idea by reading blog posts and surfing the net. And the time she came across it, it appeared easy and quite profitable.
But, there was one problem, she had absolutely no interest in the niche, probably because there was some information gap, or at least that was what she told me when I asked her about how she developed an interest in a niche she never liked before. To that, she replied that the idea appeared quite profitable and that she would learn more about it from YouTube tutorials. With the concept that all young entrepreneurs hold still in their minds: entrepreneurship is all about taking risks, it further aggravated her to proceed with her business idea.
From whatever she told me, the only thing that caught my attention and signaled the red alarm was her overnight interest in a niche that she previously had no interest in. I don’t know the exact reason for that but, it was the very thing that made me realize that it was all about the profitability that she wanted to try out that business idea. And yes, let me tell you; the idea was indeed quite lucrative and thought-provoking.
But then there’s this law of nature that says;
Lack of Passion is Fatal
And as true as it sounds, businesses driven without passion are no doubt headed for a loss. That’s because lack of passion caters to a responsibility lacking business. And when businesses fail at being responsible, they simply can’t be profitable enough.
And then it happened what I feared about! Since my friend lacked the actual passion for the business niche she got an idea about; her business wasn’t successful enough. Initially, it did perform somewhat better when her overnight interest in the field made her go crazy about it — acquiring more information about it, exploring newer techniques, and employing them in her business. But then as hastily as she developed her interest in it, at a doubled pace she lost it because it was something she never had a passion for. And when I asked her what happened, she replied, “all of a sudden it started to get boring”. That’s what made me realize that;
Overnight developed interests are also often short-lived ones.
Building a responsible business requires one to be passionate about every aspect of it. In fact, the statutory purpose of your business should be to become a responsible business; meaning it should provide a value, a service, or a product that people actually need; and to be so good at it that it automatically renders your business profitable.
No passion simply accounts for no long-term success.
Apart from coming up with an idea, one also often gets confined within the capital limits that take the difficulty level to an apotheosis point. No matter how onerous the journey of setting up a new business might seem, if you can plan out each and every stage of business development by-rights, then for sure you and all those who depend on it for their livelihood can reap the benefits of it later.
Here in this article, I’ll share 8 small business ideas from home that you can start with a lesser outlay; say $400 or less. Be careful, however, to ensure that your interests and passion align with the business ideas discussed below.
Affiliate Disclosure: This post contains few affiliate links which means I’ll receive a small amount of commission if you click through the link and make a purchase with absolutely no extra cost to you.
1) Homemade Candles or Soap Bars
You’re probably aware of the need for these two. The trend of scented candles and soap bars never goes out of fashion probably because it is a daily need item. Additionally, customized Scented candles and soap bars make for a perfect gift item. The demand for these items makes them a perfect choice for small business ideas creative.
You can start this business without any large investments by either sourcing the items from third parties, or you can custom make the products at home. If you’re planning on making it at home here’s the list of things that you’ll be needing and the approximate budget. (All these you can find easily on Amazon and a referenced site)
For help on how to craft your own candles or soap bars plus for crafting supplies, kits, and everything that you need to make your own DIY, check out this amazing website. If you are looking for some wholesale custom candle supplier to start a business of your own, you can check out this site that can supply you with the products for your business.
For the soap bars, here goes the budget expense:
Note: The price values are freshly obtained from Amazon and eBay marketplaces and can change without any notice.
Crafting sense appealing fragranced candles and soap bars is both fun and entertaining. And if you’re someone who’s into home designing, you know how DIYs give one a sense of satisfaction and pleasure. However, if you’re a beginner, you can watch YouTube tutorials or can refer to this post that teaches candle and soap making in a fun and amazing way with variant creative procedures.
Once you’re familiar with the process of crafting personalized soaps and candles, you can set up an online website like this one and start digital marketing your products with your friends and other people to get visitors to it.
2) Artificial Jewellery
Jewelry — one of the weaknesses of women and girls — is the fashion accessory that women and girls never lose a taste for. Be it necklaces, bracelets, rings, or anklets, the jewelry is considered to be an important fashion item to spruce up the overall beauty of ladies' outfits. It is even considered a part of the culture for some nations.
The exponential rise in the price range of precious items like gold, silver, and diamonds has increased the demand for artificial jewelry trifold. This accounts for a super bright, green signal opportunity for the artificial jewelry businesses to take the lead in the world of ornamental fashion.
Wearing simple yet elegantly hand-crafted pieces of jewelry never goes out of fashion and that's the very reason why the demand for it is evident in the marketplaces.
For the jewelry business, it is preferred that you chose to DIY the pieces rather than sourcing them from third-party suppliers because then you can save on costly shipping charges. Additionally, you can not know the quality of the products of third-party suppliers unless and until you order for yourself or any of your customers leaves a review.
Even though most entrepreneurs are running a wholesale jewelry business, but they report that for such a business model in the field, the investment required is significant as you’ll need to maintain a cumbersome inventory for it. Therefore, DIY is the best way to start with this business especially with numerous YouTube tutorials out there which give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to craft a particular accessory piece.
If you opt to DIY the jewelry pieces for your jewelry business, then the expense required varies depending on the type of jewelry you’d like to craft. The types of jewelry include but are not limited to resin jewelry, beads jewelry, crystal jewelry, etc. Resin jewelry is today’s famous and on trending category.
Note: The price values are freshly obtained from Amazon and eBay marketplaces and can change without any notice.
You can save even more if you buy starter kits for DIY jewelry making that include the necessary tools and jewelry findings of different materials. There are tons of them listed on both eBay and Amazon. Also note that, for different jewelry types, the tools required may vary. The expense sheet above only enlists the basic jewelry-making supplies. You can check out the complete list of required tools for jewelry making in this post.
Similarly, if you’re interested in crafting today’s famous resin jewelry, you can opt for starter kits, test out and learn how to craft one piece.
To learn how to get going with crafting jewelry ornaments, you can check out Youtube tutorials. Once you get a grip on crafting beautifully designed jewelry, you can create your online store or website and make your business go online. For the ultimate guide on how to build your online jewelry business, refer to this post.
3) Home Bakery Products
Food and drink is the need of everyone. For some of us, however, gluten products or simply bakery products have a special place in our hearts. Everyone loves the buttery aroma of bakery-baked products in the morning.
If you’re someone who loves baking and the kind of person who is experienced at it, you can transform your interest into a small business. For instance, start with your own relatives or friends in the town who have had tasted your hand-baked products and loved them.
If you’re already into baking at home and have a recipe or two that your friends or families love, why not turn it into a business? Being already into baking can even shorter your expense sheet when you won’t have to invest in all the pieces of equipment(you might be having almost all of them in your comestible). All that you’ll be needing to get started with processing your first order would be the ingredient goods required for your recipe.
However, if you're not into baking yet, but do have the courage, motivation, and desire to pursue it anytime soon, you’ll need to invest in various pieces of equipment to make your life much easier. Do keep in mind however that it doesn’t have to be all fancy kitchen appliance gear that’ll make your home bakery business grow. You’ll also need to research what bakery products are liked in your region the most. For instance, for the year 2020, fresh bread and rolls were the most in-demand bakery products across the USA.
Once you find what’s in demand, find the recipe on Youtube and start experimenting with the recipe to refine it. Once you feel satisfactory about the results of your recipe, you can ask your friends or relatives to try it out and give their feedback on it. Once approved and loved by them, the product would be out of your pipeline and ready to be enlisted on your ‘in menu’ catalog.
Here’s the expense sheet for the pieces of equipment and tools that’ll come in handy for your baking business. Remember: This is a generalized sheet and you might want to update it depending on what baked products you process for your customers.
This $350 is a very rough expense estimation. Assuming that your comestible might already be equipped with most of these types of equipment, this rough estimation can easily go down to around half of its current value — $175 which is fairly a lower outlay for starting a business.
Here’s the best part, once your recipe starts giving you good customer feedback and traction, you can level up the game by either starting an online blog site to educate others on how to bake or you can start giving lessons to young baking enthusiasts. Take for instance the example of Aurelia, who’s a self-taught baker and bakery owner with this lovely website. You might, however, need to ponder on this one question before you go with either of the ways — Would you like to disclose your experimented and refined recipe to others?
4) Disposable Plates and Glasses
Yet another important need of our communities is disposable crockery. That’s right! The demand for disposable or disposal products has increased so much over the past years that this business can never go obsolete whatsoever. Be it a party event at your house or a picnic party on the beach, disposable crockery and bags are sure to follow along. In fact, they have become a necessity for such events and get-togethers.
With their humongous demand, why not utilize the fact and use it to your benefit in starting a small-scale business for yourself?
While there are numerous types of disposable products depending upon their base construction material, you’ll need to analyze the marketplace for what material disposal products does your society loves to use, or simply start with the material that you specifically like to use.
For this type of business, a dropshipping business model is preferred when you are starting because the investment cost on manufacturing plants for disposal products is humongous. In a dropshipping business model, you’ll be fulfilling your customer’s orders by sourcing the products from a wholesale supplier.
Even though it’s completely up to you whether you like to maintain the inventory or ship the products from a third party directly to your customer’s doorstep; I however prefer that you maintain the inventory. That’s because most(not all) people buy these products when they find an immediate need for them and when it so happens, delivery times are not feasible.
Think of it this way, if someone in your neighborhood finds an immediate need of buying disposable products and you are having the stocks in your inventory, then they’ll definitely buy from you rather than going out to distant shopping malls or ordering online.
To start with, you’ll need to find a local disposable product wholesale supplier that has reasonably good rates. It would be better if you find more than one supplier as it’ll help you fulfill orders of products from the other supplier when the stock of the other runs out. Then you can either start with selling those in your community or create a website and target even other cities where the items are in demand but available in sparse or limited quantity.
Check out this article for help on starting your disposable crockery business.
5) Handcrafted Buttons and Pompoms
These are again related to the worldly fashion of apparel. While the idea might seem outdated, it is not in the real world. If you don’t believe it, open your wardrobe and count how many of these are present there on your entire clothing range. Will you be able to count them all?
Self-making buttons and pompoms is a great activity. With a lot of pompom products listed on Etsy, it makes sense that the demand for these in the marketplace is large. True that starting a professional grade button business requires some modest investment but, do you know there are other ways you can craft lovely buttons and pompoms at your home? And once you understand the science of DIYing those buttons and pompoms, why not take the game to a small business level?
The technique I was referring to for DIY buttons is the Resin art technique which you might have heard of previously. It is a lovely technique in which you craft custom buttons using resin just like resin jewelry. Also, the tools and equipment required for it are completely budget-friendly.
The resin artwork for button making makes it a unique and inexpensive idea for a small home-based business opportunity. Also, the field has somewhat little competition compared to other high-ticket small business ideas.
Buttons can in fact be crafted from any material from wood, seashells, glass, crystals, or even metals but, the ones made from the resin are the most feasible for the sake of a small business idea. That’s because buttons made from material other than resin require special machines and tools to shape them in the desired way.
Here’s the expense sheet for crafting buttons using resin as a base material.
That’s right! For under 100 dollars you can start this small home business. Now decorative items are where you can really get creative in this field. With unique color combos and decorative items, you can craft cute buttons that your customers will love. For that matter, you can even discuss with your customers what shape and color buttons they require and then craft them accordingly.
Once you start seeing some progress and gain some hands-on experience with crafting your own buttons, you can set up your store on Etsy and take the game of DIY button making to the next level by selling your items to a wider audience.
6) Personalized Spice Blends, Sauces, and Pickles
Who doesn’t like to add a twist of spice blends and sauces to their meals?
If you are someone who loves cooking and has the sense of combining an ingredient or two that makes for a lovely appetizing combination to go with select meals or all meals, why not turn it into a small business idea? See that’s how the famous chicken tikka masala became popular and is now celebrated in nearly every hemisphere of the globe with great delight.
The truth is that the entire world loves ethnic food ideas that can be made in advance and which can be reserved in stock such that their flavors enhance as they age. Chicken tikka masala itself is basically a spice blend in which chicken is marinated for few hours before it is cooked. It is a spice blend that is aromatic on the grill and looks ravishingly delicious on the platter.
Now, this chicken tikka masala is not a spice blend for grilled chicken alone. It can be added for flavor in any other savory dish. I, for instance, add the same spice blend in my Pasta curries too and believe me it turns out more than delicious! The same goes for sauces and pickles.
Sauces also have a huge demand in the marketplace. Be it a pizza you are making or bbq platter you want to serve, the temptation for sauce complements seems so crucial that without them our dishes never get the final touch.
As for pickles, they too are served more as a side dish, again complementing the tastes of our meals. The hype of pickles with some meals like the famous Indian dish: 'Daal Chawal' which is boiled rice with pulses curry, is no doubt undeniable.
If you have a secret family recipe for any of these, the one that your friends love, create your own brand for it and start marketing. The expense you’ll have to consider would be the packaging costs with your brand label and logo imprinted on and of course the ingredients that go into the recipe. You won’t have to disclose your secret recipe to anyone, it’d just be the taste of your recipe that’d keep your customers enticed into coming back for more!
Generally, it is the small ideas that transform into large businesses. It’s just a matter of time when a certain idea, trick, or a thing comes to your mind and it clicks in your mind the thought of transforming it into business. Even absurdist ideas can sometimes have a complete treasure hidden in them.
The most crucial step to your business success involves how you present your business to people, otherwise termed as 'marketing’. If your marketing isn’t good, no matter how hard you try to invest time and energy into your business’s success, it won’t prove successful enough.
However, if your marketing is good enough, your products appear ravishingly captivating and problem resolving to your customers, the higher would be the climax point achieved by your business success.
Did you find any of the above small business ideas worth a try? Or do you have any of the similar small businesses running already as a side hustle? I’d love to know! (:
Read more of my story content and lots of other unlimited fun articles on Medium written by outstanding authors. Get Medium’s Monthly Subscription for $5 only and get instant access to unlimited fun content on the platform.
Note: The above link is a membership link, meaning if you join the medium platform as a reader or maybe as a writer via this link, I’ll earn a small amount of commission with absolutely no extra cost to you.
