25 Ideas for How to Start a Small Business at Home

5. Offer online services

Services are even simpler than products to start selling at home, but the challenge is allocating your limited time. “Time is money” is never truer than when you’re running a service-based business.

Creative professionals, like designers or marketers, might freelance or consult with other companies, juggling multiple clients, often remotely from their own home office with occasional travel. Others might operate based on appointments and bookings to offer their services to individuals directly.

Service-based home business ideas include:

• Freelance writing

• Virtual assistance
• Marketing
• Designing
• SEO consulting

Service-based businesses often require a lot of networking and word-of-mouth referrals to find suitable clients, but satisfied clients will likely retain your services over time.

For this reason, you don’t necessarily need a large number of customers to do well, as you would with a product-based business. Depending on the service you’re offering, a handful of high-quality clients can be enough to support yourself full time while working from home.

6. Teach online classes

Chris Carey, one of the founders of MAPerformance, started his automotive parts and services business from the comfort of home. He began by teaching car maintenance and repair tips to online users in forums. After establishing expertise and trust, people started heading over to his ecommerce site to buy parts.If you have a teachable skill, you not only can share that knowledge in forums to get your name out there, you can also turn it into online courses. There’s an audience for just about any desirable skill, whether it’s English as a second language, advanced marketing, or everyday home maintenance hacks.

If I Made is Emily Newman’s home business teaching classes to creative professionals. When you teach classes online, not only do you have the flexibility to do it from home, you can also choose to offer live or pre-recorded teaching and training. For example, you might offer the live courses at a premium rate, while customers can purchase the recorded sessions at a discounted price.

If you have a teachable skill, you not only can share that knowledge in forums to get your name out there, you can also turn it into online courses. There’s an audience for just about any desirable skill, whether it’s English as a second language, advanced marketing, or everyday home maintenance hacks. 

If I Made is Emily Newman’s home business teaching classes to creative professionals. When you teach classes online, not only do you have the flexibility to do it from home, you can also choose to offer live or pre-recorded teaching and training. For example, you might offer the live courses at a premium rate, while customers can purchase the recorded sessions at a discounted price.

That’s what Yegi Saryan, founder of Yegi Beauty, does with her business. After establishing a successful online beauty brand, she turned her talents into passive income. Now, aspiring entrepreneurs can purchase lash classes to kickstart their skills and add it as a service offering in their business. Classes are available both online and in-person.

You can also choose the class size and length. If you like small groups or even one-on-one, consider tutoring, mentorship, or masterminds. If you like larger groups, do bigger training sessions and courses. Teach a one-time all-day summit, an hour a week, or somewhere in between. 

Not interested in human interaction? Create a fully downloadable course for purchase. All you need is the content, be it a video walkthrough, templates, articles, or how-tos. Use a screen-recording tool like ScreenFlow to capture your screen and voice while you walk students through the material. 

Whichever way you slice it, teaching online is a profitable home business idea because it requires low overhead—just an investment in time.

7. Productize your service or expertise

As we just discussed, one of the biggest downsides of running a service-based business is that you’re paid strictly for your time, skills, and effort. Emily Newman of If I Made productized her classes into digital courses, packaging the recordings from her live sessions and selling them at a lower rate.

“Productizing” your service—creating physical or digital products that package up your expertise and streamline or complement the service you offer—can add additional revenue streams to your business. You can cater to your current customer base or even find a new target customer in the same space.

Gabriella and Andrew Morrison started their home-based business by packaging up their expertise around tiny-home living. They sell courses and plans on Tiny House Build and StrawBale.com—operating everything from the comfort of their cozy, non-traditional house.

And here are some ideas for adding products to your own business:

• Courses
• Designs
• Licensable assets (stock footage, photos, music, etc.)
• Downloadable reports
• Digital templates
• Merchandise
• Ebooks

As you can see, most of these ideas involve digital media packaged as products, which means no inventory to keep around the house. If you’re running your home business on Shopify, you can sell digital products seamlessly using the Digital Downloads or SendOwl apps.

In some cases, though, productizing your expertise is more literal. That’s how Bullet Journal came about. Ryder Carroll created his own methodology to journaling that morphed into a home-based business idea. Now, he sells physical journals on his website.

8. Grow an audience you can monetize

If you’re a content creator, have a sizable online audience already, or have always thought about starting your own blog, YouTube channel, Instagram account, or podcast, then you can potentially grow and monetize your following using any of the previous ideas on this list.

Andrew Finn co-founded Wait But Why, a blog-turned-business. After amassing more than 371,000 subscribers and millions of visits, the brand created digital content products tailored to an already loyal audience. Today, Wait Buy Why is a full-blown ecommerce site with digital and physical goods for sale.

Jordan Ferney, founder of Oh Happy Day Shop!, also built an audience via blogging and later turned it into a full-fledged business from home. She designed her business around her life and being able to spend time with her family and now sells products on her ecommerce site.

Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark used Facebook groups to develop and nurture a community around their podcast, My Favorite Murder. This group of Murderinos, armchair investigators who are true crime fans, grew to more than 200,000 members before the podcast sunset in 2018.

My Favorite Murder then created its own paid community, the Fan Cult forum, charging members an annual fee. Capitalizing even more on its fandom, My Favorite Murder even launched an ecommerce site with branded merchandise (it also sold event tickets there).

You can also explore becoming an affiliate—selling other products or services for a commission—or accepting payment for sponsored posts to give brands a chance to connect with your audience.

Building a loyal audience requires patience, consistency, and focus. This isn’t the easiest way to start a home-based business, especially not in the short-term, but if you’re able to build a following around something you love it can be one of the most fulfilling and enduring, giving you the flexibility to pursue multiple revenue streams at once.

The potential to monetize your audience often depends on the niche you choose to serve. If you’re starting from scratch or are in the midst of growing your own audience, be sure to check out the following guides to learn how to best grow and monetize the most popular channels:

• How to make money on Instagram
• How to make money on YouTube
• How to start a podcast
• How to start a blog
• How to make money as a self-published author

9. Buy an existing ecommerce business

If you’re more interested in investing in a source of income you can maintain while at home or on the go, consider buying an established ecommerce business.

Prices vary greatly based on a variety of factors, including total revenue generated, profit potential, available assets (like an email list or social following), inventory, and more. Some sellers will even onboard you and teach you the ropes of running their store.

Exchange is a marketplace powered by Shopify for buying and selling ecommerce stores. You can browse the listings for great businesses that suit your budget, level of experience, and needs.

Maybe you want to buy a proven business and are willing to invest more money to acquire it. Or perhaps one catches your eye with untapped potential that you’d like to build on.

Just be sure to vet each listing and consider everything that’s included in the sale. Revenue and other data can be verified through Shopify, so you can rest assured those numbers are accurate. If you’d like some more guidance, check out our guide Buy a Shopify Store: A Step-By-Step Guide to Exchange.

10. Start a subscription box business

The online subscription box industry is forecasted to grow at 20% each year from 2021 to 2026. That explosive growth has led to the emergence of new direct-to-consumer brands targeting this niche, as well as the adoption by major brands like Sephora and Walmart.

You can start a subscription business from home. Ashley Reynolds bundled surplus products into subscription boxes to sell via her ecommerce site, Cloth & Paper. If you already run an ecommerce business at home, you could do the same to make use of what would otherwise be dead stock.

Subscription boxes don’t have to necessarily be about selling. Haverdash is a subscription box company that rents clothes. When customers are finished using the items, they send them back—and Haverdash rents them out to another customer to generate even more revenue.

11. Turn your pet into an influencer

Pet influencers are all over social media, promoting brands like BarkBox and inspiring thousands of likes with their cuteness. If you’ve got a pet of your own, you could turn them into a social media influencer and work with brands to promote their products online.

Bodhi the Menswear Dog—a.k.a. the most stylish dog in the world—has made a name for himself on Instagram in particular. Browse his feed and you’ll see collaborations with several brands like Booking.com, Spotify, and Poly & Bark.

No pets at home? Take care of other people’s pets. Apps like Rover opened up the sharing economy to pet sitting and dog walking. The pet care industry was valued at $232 billion in 2020. If you’re looking to make money from home, offer pet owners a place to drop off their animals when they head out of town.

12. Sell unwanted items

As consumers become more environmentally conscious, they’re also looking for ways to adjust their shopping habits to support sustainability. Resale clothing is a $4 billion industry in the US alone.

COAL N TERRY is one successful home-based business that sells vintage finds. And while the business didn’t exactly start from a home—it was a college dorm room—it has since grown into a brand with a loyal following and celebrity fans.

 You can start small with your own home-based business—sites like Poshmark and Mercari are great places to sell your unwanted clothing. You can even use Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.

Unwanted items aren’t limited to previously used clothing. Food waste is an unwanted item that also presents a viable home-based business opportunity. 

13. Play video games

While many may think video games are a waste of time, it’s a hobby that can actually turn a profit. And there’s nothing more home-based than sitting on your couch in front of your TV.

Esports and video game streaming platforms like Twitch have opened the door for gamers to gain notoriety—and eventually money—from their talents. The esports industry alone is worth more than $1.5 billion, and a Twitch streamer can get up to 100,000 viewers at a time.

So how do you monetize this? Sponsorships are one of the best ways to start a home-based competitive gaming business. Companies will pay you to play their games and stream it to your audience.

Video gaming is even known to be a great résumé booster. Note, though, that all of the above requires some level of gaming skill.

Here’s a unique spin: Twitch isn’t limited to just gaming anymore, and Maxx Burman and Banks Boutté used the platform to launch an online festival where they featured 12 top video game art directors.

They repurposed this content for other digital channels like Instagram and YouTube. After building a loyal audience, the two launched KitBash3D, where they sell 3D assets for video games and movies.

14. Sell NFTs

Non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are getting a lot of attention lately as a lucrative creative business you can start from home. If you have artistic skills or know someone that does who you can partner with, creating and selling NFTs can be a great way to generate income from home.

Artists like Fewocious have managed to make money selling their art as NFTs to the tune of millions. While that might be an outlier success story, there are plenty of other artists selling NFTs they create at home. Take the story of Blake Jamieson, a Brooklyn-based artist who made $46,000 selling his own art pieces as NFTs.

To get started, get familiar with the minting process first. You need to have a general idea of how cryptocurrency and blockchain technology work. That way you can confidently create NFTs to sell on marketplaces like OpenSea, SuperRare, HEN, and Foundation.

To make a living selling NFTs, it’s key to stay active on social platforms where NFT communities gather. As you get your name out there with your own social media presence, making connections with like-minded sellers and collectors is key to ongoing success.

15. Become a virtual event planner

With the onset of the pandemic and the shift from in-person to virtual events, there was a boost in need for virtual event planning skills as companies like 6Connex saw a 1,000% increase in demand.

The best part is that you can start with a smartphone, a laptop, and an internet connection while keeping expenses relatively low as you operate from home and find your niche. Virtual event planning spans many different needs, whether that means planning for:

• Corporate conferences
• Work meetings
• Virtual parties
• Fundraisers
• Trade shows
• Webinars
• Educational conferences

Maybe you’re really good with organization and love creating schedules. You might have a natural ability to network, negotiate, and bring people together. If so, these skills are invaluable when you’re trying to market yourself to potential customers.

Getting familiar with virtual event platforms like Hopin, Cvent, or Whova can help arm you with the know-how to successfully win over your first customers. To illustrate the marketing process, businesses like Virtual Events Creator use Instagram to get the word out about what they offer.

As your virtual planning business grows and your skills with it, repackaging your services and selling them as toolkits can add an extra revenue stream for steadier income.

16. Launch a photography business

Consider selling stock photography by either opening your own storefront or selling photos to established stock photo websites like Adobe Stock, iStock, or Shutterstock.

Being able to create a good business from your images takes more than simply knowing how to take a good photo. You also need to know how to market yourself, develop your own brand, and pick a photography niche. Our video goes deeper into the process, including how to create a storefront for your images with plenty of examples.

For inspiration on how you can turn selling photographs into an at-home business, be sure to check out some of our seller stories. This guide also provides in-depth insight on how you can sell photos online regardless of your level of expertise.

17. Start a beauty business 

The pandemic damaged many industries, but the health and beauty industry wasn’t one of them. As an at-home business, you can start selling health and beauty items to customers through dropshipping or white label products.

As an ecommerce home business, the more shipping options you can offer to accommodate customer demand and the more variety of items you can offer, the better. Some beauty items with the highest demand as of late have been:

• At-home spa rituals
• Personal care items
• Beauty technology (think massage guns and smart mirrors)

As you dive in and think about the best products to list in your storefront, consider convenience as part of your seller strategy. Consumer trends research shows customers are keener to buy from businesses that offer convenience in the form of multiple purchasing and delivering options like subscriptions.

Besides a beauty product, what are you providing that makes for an experience that keeps your customers coming back? Keep in mind that customer loyalty, as well as customer retention, are a key part of maintaining recurring revenue.

18. Start an affiliate marketing business

Affiliate marketing is a profitable and unique business idea when you have digital marketing skills. Product affiliates can make money on all sorts of platforms that allow partner links. Affiliate portals like ShareASale, RewardsStyle, or LikeToKnowIt are only a few out of many places you can find products to be an affiliate for.

Deciding on an affiliate strategy is where you’ll want to get creative. For example, some businesses choose to share their affiliates through their Instagram Stories while others choose to create a website with valuable content that contains affiliate links to partner products.

Your Social Team has a highlight reel on Instagram where it shares its best affiliates with its existing customers. It’s a great way to generate passive income as your target audience visits your profile.

Affiliate pins on Pinterest are yet another possible route. The more people repin your affiliate pin once you create and pin them to your boards, the higher the chances that you’ll be able to add up commissions.

The affiliate industry does come with its own set of regulations. So if you’re looking to make money through affiliate links it’s important to publicly disclose that you’re a partner with that brand. FTC regulations surrounding affiliates are mandatory. So don’t gloss over those as you begin to establish an affiliate online presence.

19. Start a day care

Reliable day care will never not be in demand. If you’re good with children, consider opening a day care business. The day care market is currently valued at over $50 billion and is only expected to grow over the next coming years.

Opening a day care does take some upfront startup cost, even if you’re starting it from home. There’s equipment to think about and paperwork to file. Yet, consider how extremely expensive child care can be. Offering a more affordable yet quality alternative to local parents can prove to be a steady source of income as you win your first few recurring customers.

It’s important to ask: How do you get started opening a day care that’s compliant with your local regulations? You’ll need to check out child care licensing requirements as well as mandatory background checks and health and safety training.

A quick Google search should fill you in on your local state requirements on offering day care services so you can avoid getting shut down and stay compliant. FreshBooks provides a helpful guide on how to get started opening a day care from home, including legal implications, and the startup process.

20. Sell stuff on marketplaces

Amazon, eBay, Etsy, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace, and Bonanza are all viable platforms where you can turn a profit selling stuff. By “stuff” we mean anything in demand that customers are actively looking for that has the potential to bring in revenue.

As an at-home business, flipping items on online marketplaces is one of the easiest businesses to start. Once you open an account and figure out how to list your prices and upload images, you can be well on your way to selling your first item. No large inventory or costly overhead is necessary.

Take the story of Dallas Wolford, a med school student who started making money online with platforms like Mercari by listing smaller items she wasn’t using. Anything from shoes to jewelry helped her make her first couple thousand dollars within the first four months.

As you get started, get familiar with seller regulations on each platform so your seller account stays in good standing. As your business grows, you can recruit contractors and send them to scout garage sales and thrift stores to source higher-value items worth listing.

21. Become a social media manager

Social media platforms gave birth to a completely new job title: the social media manager. The good news is you don’t have to work for an agency to dive into this line of work.

You can start your own social media management business from home with a laptop, social media management tools like Sprout Social, Hootsuite, or Buffer, an internet connection, and your own social media presence.

Take it from Rachel Pedersen. With a TikTok following of one million and a strong presence on Instagram and YouTube, she was able to quit her job as a hairdresser and start her social media business from home.

The hardest first step in a service-based business is landing your first customer. Leverage your network to let them know you offer social media services. Use social platforms like YouTube and Instagram to show your expertise and draw in customers.

The average salary of a social media manager hovers around the $70,000 mark. As your own boss, earning potential can surpass that.

22. Become a virtual personal trainer

Personal training is estimated to be a $12.9 billion industry that’s seen increasing demand because of rising obesity trends. With an increase in disposable income as the world moves past the pandemic, consider creating a virtual personal training business.

Once connected with knowledge or certification in the industry, you’ll be well equipped to offer virtual personal training classes. There are plenty of ways to get personal trainer certification, like courses offered by established providers. With some certification to back up your services, it’s a matter of marketing your service packages to an audience interested in getting fit from home.

Take heed from businesses like Loisa Kurang on Instagram or Triumph With Vin to learn about ways to market yourself on social media. Then be sure to check out 25 lost-cost alternatives to running paid ads to draw out a marketing strategy and promote your virtual services.

23. Offer bookkeeping services

If you’re good with numbers, an at-home bookkeeping business can be the way to go. There are plenty of free resources, like this YouTube guide from a bookkeeper who successfully started her business from home, that can teach you how to land your first customer.

Setting up a home bookkeeping business can be broken down into three general steps:

Registering your LLC (See our state specific guides for California LLC, Texas LLC and Florida LLC)
Marketing your services
Generating return customers
The average bookkeeper’s salary is around $45,000 in the US. But as a freelance bookkeeper, you stand to earn more as you increase your rates and build your customer base. To do this though, you first need to file paperwork to establish a limited liability company or LLC.

Be sure to bookmark our in-depth guide on how to start an LLC so you don’t miss any steps along the process. Our small-business accounting guide can shine a light on the creation and maintenance of small business books if you’re just diving into the world of bookkeeping.

As far as marketing your services, social media can be a great place to start. Businesses like Zeal Bookkeeping and Good Cents Bookkeeping are great examples of how to leverage platforms like Instagram to reel in a customer base.

As you win more clients, it’s important not to get too caught up in the creation of a brand or an overly complex website. In the beginning stages of any business, what matters is what revenue you can generate to fuel your growth.

24. Design websites

It’s easier now than ever to create websites if you like graphic design. The problem is, many people don’t want to put in the time to learn how to use website builders like WordPress to do it themselves. If you’re savvy with technology, try operating a web design service from home.

Platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, and Dribbble are solid starting points for getting out there and landing customers to showcase your design skills. As you get traction with testimonials and samples, it becomes easier to land a steady stream of customers over time.

Courses like Shopify’s How to Design Your Online Store (with Zero Design Experience) can be a good place to start to brush up on design skills. Though the Shopify platform isn’t the only one you can have success with. There’s also demand for creating websites through WordPress or Squarespace.

Shopify Experts, a digital service marketplace, is also a place where you can list your design skills for hire. Though applications are closed for now, there’s a waitlist you can sign up for to hear when they open their vetting process in the future.

25. Start a dog grooming business

Try offering dog grooming services if you have space in your home to set up a grooming station. It’s an in-demand service with a market size of over $10 billion that busy pet owners will always need.

Now, you can choose to either go the retail route and sell dog grooming items with a store or go the service route and do the grooming yourself. Businesses like Paw La La offer plenty of pet services that go beyond grooming that you can draw inspiration from. The Pupper Club offers an array of spa services worth looking into.

The beauty of a dog grooming business is that you don’t have to start big. And you can leverage your network to find your first handful of customers. Chances are you know a pet owner or two who could benefit from the services you offer.

To onboard your first few customers, consider offering your services at a lower rate in exchange for testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing.

Be sure to check out these in-depth pet resources to learn more and get some inspiration:

• How to Start a Pet Business (Plus Ideas and Examples from Top Brands)

Find a home-based small business idea that works best

How to start a small business at home really depends on your goals. Do you want a part-time gig as a stay-at-home mom or do you want to become a full-time business owner? How much capital do you have to start up? What skills are already in your arsenal that you can tap into?

A home-based business in today’s world is simply a remote-friendly business where technology can close the gap between you, your suppliers, your employees, and your customers. Altogether, this is a home business opportunity to start small, grow nimbly, and invest conservatively—especially when you can cut out the costs of renting an office.

As you would when starting any type of business, think carefully about your goals and what you enjoy working on to create a new at-home business that works for you.

Home business ideas FAQ