Solopreneur Business Ideas You Can Start With No Time and Money

Tips

May 1

The Problem With Most Solopreneur Business Ideas

Chances are this isn’t the first time you’ve looked for business ideas you can start as a solopreneur. I’m going to guess, in the past you came across some blog posts that listed ideas like freelance writing, being a virtual assistant, being an online coach etc.

These ideas can work if you’re looking to trade your time directly for money and work around the clock. But what if you could stop trading your time for money and could have your earnings grow month after month practically on auto-pilot?

Thousands of “average” people have created online businesses that do exactly this and what’s even more amazing is that the vast majority of them started part-time, by themselves, without any world-class skills or talents, and with hardly any money invested!

Yes, many of them did it while working a full-time job, as a stay-at-home parent, or as a student. Heck, maybe you are even in one of those situations right now!

At the same time, what’s also true is a lot of people trying to build a business part-time, burnt out and quit. They just never made enough money to justify all the time and effort they put in!

So why do some succeed and some fail? Well, it all comes down to the approach you’re taking!

3 Things You Need to Get Right to Succeed

If you have limited time and money choosing the right online business model IS CRITICAL for your success.

Many “smart people” fail despite their best efforts because they pick a model that is not suited for their limited-resource situation. That’s why you need to automate your income generation as much as possible as a solopreneur! This means you need a business model that:

1. Allows you to focus PRIMARILY on marketing and sales

You have limited time and money so if you have to work on sales, marketing, serving customers 1 on 1, logistics, operations etc. AND you only have maybe 5-15 hours a week to work on this, you’re not going to get very far.

You’re much better off finding a business model where you can dedicate most, if not all of your time, to the direct revenue drivers i.e. marketing and sales while having the value you’re providing be delivered automatically.

2. Does not require a huge upfront investment

All business ideas are experiments when they start and success is never guaranteed. So what you don’t want is to spend several hundred or thousands on inventory, technology, licenses, or infrastructure just to get started.

To use a poker analogy, winning players don’t “go all-in” betting all their money on the initial “flop” of their first hand and rather increase their bets (time and money in our case) incrementally as the odds of success turn in their favor.

So even if you have a little money to invest, you’re much better off focusing those resources on quickly finding the right business approach and then growing your sales with the support of a few smart growth hacking and automation tools!

3. Is infinitely scalable

Another problem with many Solopreneur business ideas is that they are not infinitely scalable and are constrained by your time or operational and production capacity.

For example, suppose you’re selling physical products on an e-commerce store and tomorrow you end up on the front page of Reddit (by some miracle), and a hundred thousand people want to buy your product. In that case, you could probably only sell to a tiny fraction of them due to inventory and shipping constraints.

Yup, that would be a 7-figure loss in potential revenue. Ouch!

The good news is this is a really easy pitfall to avoid with the right business model.

The 3 Best Solopreneur Business Ideas

This isn’t an exam so I’m just going to give you the answers!

Here are the ONLY 3 BUSINESS MODELS you should use to create the passive income lifestyle you want that works within your time and money constraints:

1. Create Your Own Digital Products

How do you make e-commerce infinitely scalable with practically no investment upfront and logistical issues? Create and sell digital products, that’s how!

Specifics will vary by industry and niche, but examples of digital products include Courses, e-books, templates, software, membership sites, graphics, themes, webinars, audiobooks, stock photography, licensable music and so much more!

The beauty here is you only have to create the product once and then you can sell it to an unlimited number of people without having to worry about manufacturing, inventory, shipping, returns, lost and damaged goods, or any of those kinds of issues!

While I just listed a few different types of digital products, online courses are one type that can make you a truly insane amount of money when done correctly.

I'm dead serious. People desperately want what’s in your head and are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to get it. Many on-demand online courses made up of just text and videos sell for as much as $1,000!

So If you know a little bit about a certain niche, you can absolutely sell access to this information in an online course.

An online course could be anything from a structured workout program to teaching people how to make pottery. There is a demand for online courses for practically every subject you can imagine!

You can sell this course as a one-time payment OR you can create a subscription service or member portal where YOUR REGISTRANTS PAY EVERY MONTH TO GET AND MAINTAIN THEIR ACCESS!

This latter approach is good if you periodically keep adding value and new resources to keep your audience invested. Heck, this is what Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Apple, and others do and you can clearly see how successful they are.

2. Create an Email Newsletter

The chances are that you’re already subscribed to at least one newsletter!

Newsletters like the Morning Brew, James Clear’s 3-2-1, and TL:DR have millions of subscribers!

The reason why they’re able to grow so quickly is because most newsletters are FREE for people to subscribe to. So the people reading the newsletter get a ton of value from every edition for absolutely free!

So then that begs the question, how do you make money?

Well, the way you make money is SPONSORSHIPS. Basically, once you build up a niche audience, then companies will want to get access to that audience and pay you for a shout-out.

As example, the TL:DR newsletter charges $18,000 for a logo insertion in a single email (and they send emails like this every day!).

Look, I’m not saying you’ll grow to a million subscribers overnight and be able to charge rates like that right away but the point is, email newsletters are one of the easiest businesses to start and run hands down!

Essentially, all you’re doing is creating a dedicated, high-quality email that serves a niche audience that you publish on a regular cadence. So maybe that’s a daily news round-up in your niche or something a little more thought out once a week.

Then over time, as you create content to promote your newsletter on various social channels or through blogging, and word gets around about it, you’ll start to build up an audience.

Unless you’re throwing ads into it, this is likely a long-term play but when you consider that this will literally take you just a couple of hours a week, it’s definitely one you can easily sustain for the long run.

But getting paid through sponsors isn’t the only benefit of newsletters.

An email Newsletter is one of the most valuable assets you can own as an entrepreneur. Recognize that even if you have a huge following on TikTok, or Instagram or Youtube, you’re only borrowing this audience!

What I mean is at any time one of these platforms could ban you or they could change the algorithm so that you don’t get the same reach you used to and now the audience you worked so hard to build is gone or diminished.

In fact, this actually happened to me and I lost a 100k subscriber Sub-Reddit! Here’s the video if you want to hear the full story.

So if I had built my email list, I could have taken that audience with me to serve them on another platform!

One other cool thing is, if you build a big enough list that’s super engaged, you could even sell your newsletter for insane sums of money like Morning Brew which sold for $75 million.

Again, I’m not saying you’re going to cash out that big but the point is you’re building something that has REAL value, which is highly leveraged work.

And lastly, newsletters also are the perfect complement to your digital product business because you can once in a while promote your products to increase your sales.

To give you a personal example, I just launched my Profit Shortcuts Newsletter where every Friday I share 3 actionable tips that show Solopreneurs how to make more, spend less, and work less.

Here’s the link if you want to check it out, it’s completely free.

And if you’re curious, I create and send my newsletter through Kartra but there are dozens of email solutions out there.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Saved this one for last as this is one of the most popular online business models right now!

Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing where businesses pay you a commission for bringing in customers for them (or another qualified action).

You sign-up with a company as an affiliate partner and they give you a special link that you can use to promote their products or services. So typically you’ll be creating content showing someone how to solve a problem they have or achieve a certain goal, and you may suggest a product that can help. Then when someone clicks on your link and buys (or does the defined qualified action), you get a commission.

You can sign-up as an affiliate and sell everything from dog toys to specialized software. There’s pretty much an affiliate product you can promote for every niche in existence!

Some of the best affiliate programs pay a recurring commission for the customer's lifetime or give you a commission for everything that the customer buys forever!

These are most common with software as a service companies and these products are often the types I promote. Typically, I can get 20-40% each month for promoting these products. The best part is that it doesn’t cost my audience a dollar more. All of that commission comes out of the company's margins and often I get exclusive discounts and offers for my audience working directly with these companies.

Also, affiliate marketing is one of the most powerful passive income streams because you don’t have to invest anything in CREATING PRODUCTS, DELIVERING THEM, OR EVEN SUPPORTING CUSTOMERS AFTER THEIR PURCHASE — all of these parts are handled by the company!

Now you might be thinking that Affiliate marketing is clearly the best option and why you should even bother creating your own products.

Well, let me highlight a few pitfalls to watch out for.

With affiliate marketing, you run the risk of building up an audience and income stream for years only to have it all disappear in one Thanos snap as YOU DO NOT OWN THE PRODUCT.

Companies can choose to end the program, slash your commissions, or tweak the program at any time thereby severely crippling or even eliminating an entire revenue stream of yours.

This is why choosing a reputable partner is extremely important. You want to do your due diligence before choosing a partner. There are numerous fly-by-night, shady affiliate companies that pop up and disappear at a moment's notice.

Also, some of these shady companies may not pay you fairly and skim off the top as you ultimately don’t have direct access to the sales figures. Yes, you will usually have a dashboard but it's provided by them and could easily be manipulated.

Another thing to note is that the customers you fought hard to acquire belong to the company and you may not have a relationship with them.

That’s why smart affiliate marketers know how to bridge the gap between them and the product or service they’re promoting.

They know how to build and maintain a list of customers that they can market to within their niche regardless of what happens with any particular affiliate product.

The last thing you want is to lose access and influence on a massive audience you painstakingly built...

(...here's that story again about the booming Amazon Affiliate business I had with 100k subscribers on Reddit and what happened to it the very next day after I had just bought a Mercedes with all cash!)

Another way to use affiliate marketing is to plug it into a product you’ve already created and offer these additional products or services as supplementary tools, resources, aids etc. that can help your customers achieve their goals easier or faster.

For example, if you teach people how to do their taxes, maybe you have an affiliate link for accounting software you can promote.

Or if you help people get into shape, then you might suggest a high-quality protein powder that you get an affiliate commission on.

This is a great way to increase the lifetime value of your customers without having to create additional products to sell them yourself.

Read My Full Free Passive Income Shortcuts Guide

What you just read is just 1 chapter from my completely free Passive Income Shortcuts Guide. Click here to grab your free copy right now!

This 40-Page expert guide shows you everything else you need to learn to earn a full-time income online.

This Guide Will Teach You:

The ONLY 3 BUSINESS MODELS you should use if you want infinite earning potential
How to choose a niche and the 3 THAT PERFORM THE BEST consistently
How to get customers with free and paid channels and WHEN TO USE WHICH
How to create and optimize a "PASSIVE INCOME MACHINE" to grow your earnings
EVERYTHING ABOUT SALES FUNNELS, why you need them, and how to create one
The exact tools you need to grow your business and AUTOMATE EVERYTHING
How to put it all together and ACCELERATE YOUR RESULTS