Small Business Ideas: Best Ideas to Start Business in 2024

It is a great idea to be your own boss. Once you know what you exactly want, it is easy to start a bu2siness. It just takes one small business idea to get you started. Thus, let’s talk about some great small business ideas to ponder over for a rewarding life. 

Having a vision helps you propel through challenges and establish your business. To help you discover your vision, read this section further.

1. How to bring your Small Business Ideas to Life

Discover your Vision and Plan

Understand and realize your skills. It is time to look back for a while. Reflect on your journey of life till now. What felt easy at school? What did people approach you the most for? What kind of help from you made people very happy?

Note it all down in a book. Maintain this book as your journal. This is very important since it helps you have a record of all the decisions you have made for your business.

Once you have the basic idea, conduct market research. Understand how the leaders in your field of interest have worked. Note down what they have done. Observe if there are any gaps that you can fill in. This is how small business ideas are born.

Talk to your own friends or family. Follow communities and groups online to understand your target audience and build a clear business plan.

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Taking it One Step At a Time

It is not a great idea to go cold turkey and give up on your main job yet. It is very important to handle the pressure while you are starting a new business. So take it easy. It is always good to start your new business as a hobby initially.
This gives you the space to make mistakes.

Remember you learn better by making mistakes. Since you have a backup main source income, your mistakes or pitfalls will not cost you too much, you would be able to recover from it.

You could start with the free evenings and invest some time during the weekends and build your skill and get your business idea into life. It is important to take one step at a time.

Choosing a Business Idea based on Personality

Explore your personality type. Have you always loved spending time with people- talking to them, guiding them through technical problems- or are you someone who has always loved sitting in a quiet place and work on your own without being disturbed-someone like a writer, programmer, etc… Meyer’s Briggs is a test that helps you understand if you are an introvert or an extrovert.

If you are an introvert, choose something that suits this personality, and based on that you could dedicate a small space to your own home and start working from there. If you are an extrovert, start a business that lets you interact with many people.

Whatever small business idea you have or the personality type you are, it is important to have a dedicated office space for you to carry out your business.

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Let your Customers be your Guide

Ultimately all business ideas are about filling in the gap and providing solutions to your customers. It is very important to know the nature of your customers. Have a proper budget plan for your business. To serve your customers, you need money.

Once your business is up and running, to keep it running you need money. Money budgeting is an important factor to keep your small business idea alive. Invest money in great customer relationship management (CRM) software.

With that in mind, let us now look at some of the traits that successful small business owners have which has helped them succeed in their entrepreneurial journey.

2. Traits of Small Business Owners

Internally Driven

You are all by yourself in setting up your business. It is very important to have a great drive to achieve the vision you have for your business.

For instance, if you consider Apple, the brand that most of us love, the founder Steve Jobs was a great visionary. His drive was to challenge the status quo of society.

SMART Goal Oriented

Once you have a strong drive and a vision, it is very important to break it down into chunks. Nothing big is achieved ever in one single night.

Plan your action and break it down into small achievable goals. A goal-oriented vision and drive let you achieve a lot more in a lot less time than the action without any direction.

Being Self Reliant

While you have all the goals set and the drive to achieve them, life can sometimes be uncertain. There would be lots of ups and downs. You may face some setbacks at times and at times getting your customer might be very easy. It is very disheartening to face a setback after all the hard work and effort. Being patient and self-reliant will help you a lot in sailing through these tough times.

All of this is possible if you are truly dedicating yourself to doing what you really love doing. Love towards oneself and love towards one’s work come a long way in supporting us with our journey to set our business rolling.
Encourage Team Work

Although you need to be self-reliant and self-driven, it does not mean that you need to isolate yourself and work on your business idea. Remember, a successful business idea always involves networking.
Build a solid network of people, be a team player. If you help someone achieve their need, you would definitely get someone who would help you achieve your dreams too. Teamwork and effort are vital to growth in business.

Openness and Humility to Learn

One of the great experiences of starting with a small business idea is facing new situations each day. Since every day may be a new experience, it means that there is a lot of opportunities to learn. Being open to learning helps you pick up skills quickly and apply them to your business situation.

An immense amount of learning helps us remain humble as we are aware of the challenges that we would have faced in the past. Additionally, when you come across rookies, your humility will help you win the newbies and add more people to your team.

Now with all this in mind, I understand that you are eager to start your own small business and see it grow gradually into a big full-time business.

Given that you have come this far, check out the next few sections to brainstorm a few small business ideas and start working on them right away. All you need is a good internet connection and an open mind to learn. So here goes…

3. Small Business Ideas from Home

Small Business Ideas #1 – Freelance Content Writing

Have you ever experienced visiting a site and finding nothing to read there? Has it ever happened to you? I assume that your answer is a big ‘NO.’ So who takes care of what we read on the websites? Content writers take care of writing content on the websites. It is one of the most convenient small business ideas for people.

If you love writing and have good writing skills, you can become a content writer too. You might be thinking what if you do not have these skills. The good thing is you can always learn about writing. There are great resources available online that will help you pick up the skill in no time.

You could check Coursera, Edx, for some brush-up on writing skills. Check out this post by Lavender Nguyen who taught herself content writing in just about two months.

Once you have the skillset in your bag, start writing, and develop your own portfolio. A writer’s portfolio is a collection of all the written samples of the writer. You could use a WordPress free account to post your portfolio.
Simultaneously, search for some of the content writing communities. Another sure-shot way of starting your content writing career is by actively applying on different job portals like LinkedIn. With time and experience, you would be able to start your own consultancy and get your business running.

Small Business Ideas #2 – Resume Writer

The most important document to get a job is a resume. A great resume grabs hold of the attention of HR. Some consultancies recruit people who can craft a great resume. It is one of the best small business ideas.

The challenge here is to be able to organize the most vital and required skills so that the recruiting manager can make on-the-spot decisions. If you are good at observing these details and crafting a resume according to the job description (JD), then this is the right thing for you to give a try.

Initially, you can start as a freelancer and then eventually grow it into a full-time professional service. You could specialize in a particular job role resume writer such as software and tech or sales and marketing.
In fact, most of the top executives hire expert resume writers to craft their resumes. Crafting resumes for top executives is definitely a high-paying profile.

Small Business Ideas #3 – Web Designing

While content writing is one of the pillars of a website, web designing is another pillar that gives the website a great aesthetic feel.

This is a chance to get your creative juices flowing as it is entirely about designing. The basics of HTML and CSS are enough to get you started. There are great numbers of courses online that teach you this for free.

Even if you are not a programming geek, familiarizing yourself with the functionality of WordPress does the job. Many websites these days run on platforms like WordPress and Wix. A great community of WordPress forums helps you learn the nitty-gritty quickly. Once you are familiar with these aspects, try your luck at UI/UX design. With this, you get an edge to design the user interface and user experience of a website.

Most of the start-ups are in dire need of web designers. Approaching them with your samples will help you kickstart your business.

Professional courses to check out for small business ideas from IIM SKILLS

Technical Writing Course

GST Course

SEO Course

Small Business Ideas #4 –Niche blogging

Niche blogging is one of the simplest small business ideas out there. Back in the early 2000s, the idea of blogging was nascent. Nobody even knew about it. With the booming of the internet and digital technology, blogging is an entirely different ball game now. People like Neil Patel and Darren Rowse are some of the great bloggers who have earned their full-time livelihood out of blogging. The good news is you can be one of them too. You can give this a try right from your house.

Ask yourself what you really love talking about. Maybe you like talking about mobile phones or cars or even real estate and apartments. Once you find what you are really good at, you can start writing about it online. Your interest is called the niche.

You could use platforms like Blogger (rookie), WordPress, or even Medium to begin with.
Once you develop content for your niche and gather an audience consistently, you could monetize your blog. Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest ways of monetizing a blog.

In simple words, you could recommend some of the products to your audience and gain commission when they buy that particular product through your reference.

Many sites have different affiliate programs, one of the popular programs is that of Amazon affiliate marketing. Buy your own domain name through a hosting service that gives you a lot more authenticity. After some time, you could buy and sell domains within the content market.

Small Business Ideas #5 – Editing and Proofreading

Well if blogging and web designing is not your cup of tea, worry not!! There is a dire need for editors and proofreaders.

If you have always been the go-to person for grammatical corrections, sentence structures, and forms; in short, if you are the grammar Nazi among your peers, editing is something that you can give a try. You must ensure that you are comfortable with reading a lot of text and suggest grammatical corrections.

Although editing and proofreading go hand in hand, proofreading is a tad bit different from editing. Proofreading is the final process of reading, just before the work is being published. As a proofreader, you will have to check for the organization of the text, the tone and use of language, and the correctness of facts.

To start with you can always try freelancing as an editor and a proofreader. Publishing houses are a great place to start. The only drawback with this work is being able to stick to short and tight deadlines.

Small Business Ideas #6 – Translation

Did you get an INFP in your Meyer’s Brigg’s test? If you haven’t tried the test, do check it right away. If you are an INFP, chances are that you are fluent in more than one language. Okay does that sound like someone like you? If yes, translation is the job for you.

There are a lot of texts that need translation for the important information or the literary value they contain. Imagine if nobody translated Russian to English, we would not have had Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. If you love a foreign language, you could always take up a course and learn these languages and start your work as a translator.

There is a high demand for vernacular translations. In fact, the best translators are awarded annually. Translators are also crucial in legal professions. If you are someone who loves working virtually, ensure that you develop translation samples.

You could start by translating short stories and develop a portfolio. Once you have a portfolio, you could start applying as a freelancer on different online portals. As your reputation grows in these portals – through great testimonials and work samples – you can start charging higher for your service.

Small Business Ideas #7 – Social Media Marketing

Are you someone who spends a lot of time on social media? Well, you know what, the mindless scrolling could be put to good use. Of course, not just by mind-numbing scrolling.

All the major companies know that their customers spend considerable time on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The companies thus, spend a lot of their money on social media marketing. If you are really good at handling and engaging with social media spaces you should definitely give this a try.

Of course, starting with big companies can be daunting. You could take small steps. It is after all about starting as a small business. Reach out to your friends, relatives, or acquaintances and check with their company and product. If they are inactive on social media, this is your great opportunity.

Start following some of the companies that are doing great in social media spaces. You could check Mad Over Marketing or Zomato. See what works best for you and the company you market for. Know the trending hashtags and the tone of the language used and start promoting your products. It is very important to be regular and consistent in your posts. Start using social media post schedulers to help you with it. If you find it too hectic to learn all by yourself, you could always enroll for a course online, which familiarizes you with the idea of social media marketing.

Small Business Ideas #8 – Home-Made Soap

Most people do not prefer mass-produced soaps for their harmful effects. Instead, they prefer homemade soaps. If you love involving yourself with great attention to your work and enjoy different aromas, homemade soaps are just the right small business idea for you.

With a little capital, you can buy the raw materials such as soap base, fragrance, or essential oil which is required to prepare the soap. You could add the fragrance of your choice and mold it into the shape you desire. Some of the popular fragrances are Papaya, Chia Butter, Cocoa, and Neem.

The advantage of this business is that you do not need to produce the soaps in bulk, you can simply work based on the order. Homemade soaps are a great choice as gifts. You could use Instagram to promote your product. Check out some interesting pages here. With some safety precautions, you must be good to go with this business idea.

Small Business Ideas #9 – Home-Made Chocolates

I am sure most of you reading this would have visited Ooty once in your life. The most memorable part of Ooty is its homemade chocolates.

If you enjoy working hands-on, then this is another great small business idea apart from homemade soaps. You require a few simple ingredients such as cocoa seeds and other flavors you wish to add. If you feel like trying new shapes and types of chocolate, do check it out here.

It would be a great opportunity to sell these chocolates locally or online during festivals like Christmas and Diwali.
All these business ideas are indeed great, but with the change in the global situation- you know what I am talking about – there are specific small business ideas that can yield more. With the slow unwinding, check out these great business ideas.

4. Small Business Ideas 

Tailoring

We indeed witnessed a lot of industries and businesses collapsing due to the global pandemic situation. However, the fashion industry is something that never dies.

With the unlocking, now is the best time for you to get your designer self out and display your costumes to your customers. You could start a small Boutique or even post your latest collection online for your customers to choose from.

With the pandemic still active, you could try working on different designs and textures for the face mask that suits casual and formal wear. You could even work on tailoring fancy food delivery bags for virtual marriages. More on event planning coming up.

Podcast

Stories are one of the best ways to connect to people. The interesting part is when the stories are real, it is a very powerful medium to connect to people. In your spare time, you could record yourself and go live on a podcast.
Well, you feel, you might not have great stories to share. That is not true. You have lots that you can share. You could talk about your experience in your field of career. This might help a lot of new people in your industry.

Talk about your own hobbies and interest every week. Maybe you could throw some light on the progress you have made thus far. If you really run out of ideas, read a lot of books and review them in your podcasts. Give your audience a further book read suggestion.

If you are not a book person do not worry, follow some of the discussion forums and comment sections, look at what people are discussing there, see if you can answer their questions. This would bring you a lot of audiences and help you grow your digital presence.

A podcast is easy to start. Initially, you could use your phone to record your audio and upload it into Sound Cloud. If you are wondering how to create a Sound Cloud account, here it is.

Social Media Influencer

From classrooms to office meetings to family functions all going online, it is a great opportunity for you to grow your social media presence. All you need is an Instagram account.

On Insta, you could make live videos or even short videos about the products or even the places you like. Remember the main idea is to grab as much audience as possible.

Becoming a social media influencer is a slow process, but with consistent efforts, you can slowly but surely reach the goal of getting tons of followers.

Do basic research to understand what kind of audience you want to reach. Understand the language that they resonate with. Become friends with hashtags. Once you can gather a customer base you can gradually start promoting sponsored products.

In fact, if you garner millions of followers, some of the brands approach you themselves with an exciting commission for featuring their product on your Insta page.

With these many benefits, I know that you are excited to know more about monetizing your Instagram account… Please check here.

Wedding, and Event Planner

The previous years have been difficult and challenging for all of us. Due to the pandemic, a lot of public events and even marriages had to be canceled. But the times are slowly changing. With everything slowly opening up, public events, and especially marriages are the most happening thing of the time.

It is really a great business season for wedding and event planners. If you love weddings and have a flare to get small events organized, what are you waiting for? Pick your phone and contact the florists, decorators, and food contractors, and the wedding bells tolling.

India has the highest record for spending money on weddings. With a little experience and time, you could become a successful small-scale wedding planner.

Airbnb Host

Own a farmhouse or an apartment that’s vacant? Then there is a great small business idea that you can roll out of it. Yes, you heard it right!! With people unfurling gradually for vacations and traveling, now is the best time to be an Airbnb host. Let me explain what that fancy term means.

Airbnb is a company that provides great homestay for its clients. And where do they get these cool home stays? It is from people like you. You can register your extra apartment or farmhouse with Airbnb and let it out to tourists when they require it. This way you get to make money from your vacant property.

Just make sure that you take care of a few things link the rate at which you rent the house and other locality guidelines and you must be good to go. Arrange for delicious food or even a vehicle to travel around for your customers and charge them for it accordingly.

If you are a homemaker and have other interesting skills, that is covered in this article as well. Read ahead to know more!!

5. Small Business Ideas for Housewives

Food Blogging

The best way to win anybody’s friendship is through food. If you really love cooking and have cooked yummy dishes for your family members, you can work on monetizing the same skill.

One of the simplest steps towards this is to note down recipes of your favorite and most in-demand food and post them on a blog. If you are even more enthusiastic, you could even stretch it a bit further and start a YouTube channel.

Think of some interesting names for your channel and start posting videos of cooking delicious recipes regularly, maybe once a week. All you need is a simple smartphone camera, to begin with.
With consistent long-term efforts, your audience base would organically grow increasing your channel subscription.

Tutoring and Coaching Services

Tutoring kids is an evergreen small business. There are many parents in search of home tuitions that help kids cope with their academic curriculum.

You can start with students as young as 9 or 10 years old. The only thing you need to take care of is in familiarizing yourself with the basic concepts of all the subjects.

To win more students, help your current students perform better in their tests and exams. With improved student performance, your service would spread through word of mouth bringing in some more students.

Sparing 2 hours in the evening is more than enough. With a simple certification from platforms like CueMath, specifically designed for homemakers, you can start your own small business of online tutoring.

DayCare

If you love spending time with kids, then starting a daycare is the perfect small business idea for you. Indeed spending considerable time with infants and kids is definitely relaxing.

There are a lot of working parents who are in search of daycare. Opening a daycare would be a boon to these parents. Setup some activities to engage the kids actively so that they end up learning certain basics like numbers and alphabets.

Spare some time for fun-filled activities. Initially, you can start this business right at your home, and later as you grow, search for spaces closer to the working hotspots and get more clients.

Designer Saree

Most women love wearing sarees. Think of how you spend your evenings every day. Are you someone who spends a lot of time with the women in the neighborhood? Do you talk a lot about traditional parties and the sarees or dresses worn at those parties?

If this is you, then this is the right small business idea to work on. Here’s what you can do. Approach a wholesaler to buy good designer sarees. Sell it to the people in your neighborhood.

As you already know, sarees are great for weddings and are always in demand even for other traditional Indian festivals like Diwali and Onam

Mehndi Artist

Do your cousins and nieces come to you for a great Mehendi design? Have many people appreciated you for your quick and creative design? What are you waiting for then? Start earning money from this skill.
Get your creative juices flowing. There is a great demand for Mehendi designs in India for festivals and marriages. One of the quickest ways of winning customers is through word of mouth and building your digital presence. Okay, don’t get bogged down by the word “digital.”

Trust me it is quite simple. All you got to do is open an Instagram account and upload your designs there and a method to contact you. This will simply increase your customer base.

You can easily charge somewhere between 100 bucks for a simple design to about 500 bucks for a complex trendy one.

Pickles and other Spice Powder

Who doesn’t like achaar and other flavors of pickle? If preparing pickles comes easy to you, this is something you could give this small business a shot.

Once you find a reliable customer base, maybe your immediate relatives or neighbors, to begin with, you can slowly start expanding your network.

After you earn some profits from the pickles, try your luck with spice powders, essential for cooking delicious food. When it comes to food and culinary skills, the sky is the limit.

Handbags, and Wallets

Have you ever gone out without a handbag or even a wallet? Take your time, think about it. Well seldom have you forgotten either of the two rights?? Okay, so that’s how essential handbags and wallets are.

With a few contacts, you could give this small business idea a shot. Start selling handbags and wallets at low-cost prices. Better still, if you’re creative you could make better quality paper or cardboard bags and sell them too. Once you start earning profits, you could eventually market good-quality leather bags and wallets.

I know I know!! with so many great small business ideas, the only thing that might be stopping you from starting bringing your idea to life is your financial situation.

Well, the article has that covered as well. I appreciate your enthusiasm to take action. Let us now look at some simple methods of procuring money to start your business.

Money From Small Business Ideas

The first step is very simple. I’m sure even you know it. Use your own savings. Most of the small business ideas mentioned here can be funded by the savings you have. In case if you need some more money, reach out to your immediate family members or friends.

Bank Loans

Maybe sometimes they may refuse to lend money, but that is completely okay. Do not lose your hopes. Do not give up. The bank and the government have a great scheme for hustlers like you. You could always reach out to the bank for loans.

Ensure that you have a clear business idea so that you win the trust of the bank. Have a record that reflects your timely payment of income tax and clearance of your loans. These factors help the bank evaluate your genuine and lend loans to you.

MUDRA Scheme The Government has some good schemes like the MUDRA(Micro Units Development and Refinance Agency) which supports small vendor shops, and other small businesses in rural areas.

The MUDRA has three different loan schemes Shishu, offering loans up to 50,0000; Kishor, offering loans from 50,000 to 5,00,000; and Tarun offering loans from 5,00,000 to 10,00,000.

PMRY Prime Minister Rozgar Yojana (PMRY) is another helpful scheme by the government. It was launched in 1993 to help unemployed youth start their own business.

PMRY has interesting offers for women. It provides loans of up to 2,00,000 to women for their marriage and other personal use. Additionally, a loan of 5,00,000 is offered to women interested in starting their own business.

The eligibility criteria are as follows:

1. Aged between 18 and 35
2. Relaxation for women up to age 45

Investors

If you are into web development or starting a tech company, you have the advantage of approaching a venture capitalist (VC) or an Angel Investor.

Once you convince your investors, they would be ready to invest in your small business idea, which would then have a great potential to grow into a big business.

If you are good at using internet resources, try out crowdfunding. Remember the main idea here is to convince your investors. A clear and concise business idea would definitely let you achieve that.

Conclusion

If you have read until this point, it simply reflects your seriousness in working on your small business idea and making it big. You might be someone who has already started your business or someone who is yet to start but waiting for the right time.

No matter wherever you are, everything starts by taking steps towards action and taking them now. Please feel free to share your experience as a business person with other fellow readers.