46 Ways To Start A Business With No Money

In: Business Ideas| Education| How To By: Brian Armstrong

16 May 2008

Most people who want to start their own business don’t have a ton of money laying around and it’s probably one the most common questions I get emailed about: How can I get started without a lot of cash?

Well I’ve put together a list below of the best ideas I’ve heard and personally used. I hope you find it useful!

The three basic strategies to starting a business without much money are:

Delay the normal “business starting” activities like incorporating, hiring, renting office or retail space, etc until AFTER your business has started earning money. This is known as bootstrapping.
Doing everything yourself and spending your personal time instead of hiring an expert. (Takes longer but costs less.)
Using some neat tricks and little known deals below.

Start With The Easy Stuff: Eliminate Expenses

1. Don’t rent an office! – work from home. Or better yet work from the best free office with locations everywhere: Starbucks. If you need to meet with a client and are worried about seeming small time without an office, don’t be. Just meet them at a restaurant for a lunch meeting. This is what people with the nicest offices do anyway.

2. Don’t hire any employees! – do it all yourself until you have some $ coming in the door.

3. Don’t hire lawyers, technical people, graphic designers, or assistants (see below)

Legal Stuff and Incorporating

4. Get a free lawyer and legal advice from the mentors at Score.org

5. Find a website with a similar legal document and modify it to your needs

6. An LLC is probably the best business structure, but don’t worry about incorporating until you’re earning money, just do a sole proprietorship, you can always incorporate later (you can get it setup with the IRS in just a few minutes by calling them at 800-829-4933)

7. Learn how to do your own financial statements for your business in Excel instead of hiring a CPA or bookkeeper (again you can do this after you’re making money)

8. Take a Quickbooks class at your local community college

Make a website for your business

9. Don’t pay a premium for a top end domain name, there are plenty of good ones left

10. Test out your ideas by writing to a blog, you’ll get feedback on what people like and don’t like

11. Get a free business website at www.wordpress.com. It won’t be your own domain (it will be something like yourbusiness.wordpress.com) but…

12. When you’re ready to have your own domain, get a hosting plan (new domain included) at 1and1 for $4.99/month, and install wordpress on your own server (instructions)

13. Get a professional website design for free with a wordpress theme that you can install with a few clicks (no programming knowledge needed)

Getting a Logo

14. Don’t hire a fancy graphic designer. At least not yet. Use LogoYes to create your own logo (or at least get ideas that you can recreate on your own for free)

Accepting Credit Cards

15. Don’t bother with a full merchant account to start off with, they are complicated, come with monthly feeds, and require programming expertise. Instead try a simpler (and much cheaper) solution like Google Checkout or Paypal

16. For a more professional look and a complete shopping cart for only $5/month use E-Junkie, its great and I use it on this site

17. If you have lots of physical products, try a Yahoo Store

Starting a service business where you consult, coach, teach, etc

18. Create several pages on your wordpress site: one for your experience, testimonials, rates, availability, etc

19. Pick a domain name with your #1 keyword in it! (Assuming it isn’t a very competitive keyword you’ll rank on the first page of google within a month or two for that keyword which means customers!) here’s some more info and an example

Creating Info Products

20. Use an ebook template like these from Eben Pagan

21. For print books, self publish it at www.lulu.com and use print on demand (they don’t print a single book until someone buys it which means you have zero up front cost for inventory!)

22. Use a $20 webcam or digital camera to create educational video products

23. Use camtasia ( $200 for PC) or iShowU ($20 for Mac) to record your screen and make great videos like this one. Or record powerpoints and do the voiceover to make great educational products. Update: even cheaper use ScreenToaster.

24. Use a mac to edit your videos (iMovie is free) and you can even produce DVD’s

Before investing in a retail location…

25. Go to a local fair or festival and rent a booth to see if anyone buys your product. Talk to potential customers and get feedback.

26. Try selling it on ebay

Always be learning about business

27. Go to a meetup.com groups in your city related to business/entrepreneurship

28. Read all the best business books by getting them from the library

29. Get 3 of the top 10 books on building wealth for free in PDF

30. Make friends with other entrepreneurs and share material

31. Install the stumble upon toolbar and choose business/entrepreneurship as one of your interests to find all the best videos and talks out there (this is literally like going to a free semester of business school, you get to see all the best speakers and thinkers of our time, and those of the past)

32. Read blogs like this one in google reader

Marketing, free website traffic, and getting your first customer

33. Get 250 full-color business cards for free to hand out to people you meet

34. Post an offer on craigslist

35. Post videos on youtube with links to your website

36. Post the same video to all video sharing sites (Google Video, Yahoo Video, MySpace, Revver, etc) at once with TubeMogul (this is some of the best free marketing you can do)

37. Generate leads by offering an incentive on your website for people to give you their contact info (some incentives that work well: Top 10 reports like the top 10 myths about…the top 10 thing you should know before…etc, videos, audio interviews, one page cheat sheets, free ebooks)

38. Write a good article and send it to more popular websites (include your byline at the bottom). This is also known as doing guest posts and is the #1 thing I used to grow this blog when it first started out.

39. Learn how to use google adwords and spend $10 and see if it brings in at least $10 (if so keep going!)

40. If you can’t afford to get links from expensive directories like Yahoo ($299) use Directory Submitter to get links from hundreds of smaller directories for free

41. Pick a good domain name with your keywords in the domain (use hyphens if necessary). This will help you rank in Google for that keyword and get visitors to your website.

42. Do some basic on page SEO

43. Research what keywords will bring you the most traffic (and are least competitive) with keyword discovery, Wordtracker’s Free Service, and (probably the best option) WordTrackers free trial of their full service (just have to remember to cancel within 7 days to not get charged!)

44. See which keywords are likely to bring buyers (instead of tire kickers)

45. Get more incoming links to your site by creating a Squidoo page (these rank very high in the search engines for some reason!)

46. Send an email to everyone in your email program’s contact list with a short friendly note letting them know you are starting a business and ask if they could forward it to just one or two people who might be interested. Offer something free for the first 10 people. This has an exponential effect because it not only reaches who you know, but everyone who knows who you know (an order of magnitude bigger group of people.)

What did I miss? Please make a comment below.

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Best of luck!
Brian Armstrong

115 Responses

Tasha

January 24th, 2010 at 3:14 am

Whats up Brian,
I found your advice very helpful. I have a ton of ideas for businesses but I have NO money. How should I start? By the way how old do you need to be to start a business?
Thanks,
Natasha

sathish

January 28th, 2010 at 6:05 am

I want idea to start a business. Please help me.

Thanks
Sathish

u.n.panda

February 4th, 2010 at 8:23 am

the best way start a business is to plan it very carefully. how would you plan will definitely depend on what kind of business you want to start? if you want to start a perticular business make sure you have a very strong resone to start, what other don’t have. i.e. why you think the business will be more successfull and that others don’t think even if they have a lot of money. stick to that reason utill the business doesn’t touch your expection. remeber that,”YOUR THOUGHT PROCESS FOR A BUSINESS WILL HELP YOU ACHIVE AN UNIQUE POSITION IN THAT FIELD.” More ever how you think and what you think about a business and whether you know the execution of ur own ideas will pull you upward in business. look your business need a lot of hard work and an honest support of yours.

hemant raj patel

February 20th, 2010 at 11:00 am

hi,
i agree with u, without money u cant start any business.
even though if have a good knowledge of particular subject, u need some money to start an conculatancy. in todays scenario without publicity u cant get sucess, for that u need money.
i my life i ahve seen people have good knowledge of like, how to survive our climate if a any great idea, then u can make money.
knowledge is always the great way of earn wealth, how to get knowledge.
by exeperince and smart thinking.

Julie

March 10th, 2010 at 6:50 am

How old? … Check out http://www.BizKids.com … they put us all to shame, no matter how young we are! :)

dipali pathak

January 28th, 2010 at 6:59 am

want to start a handloom textile related business,eduction business.what are the procedure to start of the with very low investment.

Mitchell Gail

January 28th, 2010 at 7:54 am

I want to star a business but i dnt know how to start?? What business i should do and i dnt have enough money.

thank you.

nik

January 31st, 2010 at 4:44 am

hi,
i want to know that in this time which business should i do in very low investment?
waiting for your response.

thanking you.

Denise Williams

February 1st, 2010 at 10:55 am

I have an amazing idea for a business, however, I do not have any money for start up costs and the business i plan to run does need a stable location to run it from. Can you get a small business loan without good personal credit and/or established business credit? If so can you please advise how. Thanks Denise

Yele Dada

February 1st, 2010 at 11:08 pm

Hi,
I have always been good at cleaning and organizing but I have also been good at planning events and I wanted to know if combining the two would be a good dea? I was thinking like after planning the events and setting it up, when the event was over, i’d come in and clean up. Another question is if it were to be a good idea, where exactly do I start?

Rivera-Cruz

February 7th, 2010 at 1:04 am

maybe a wedding planner would be a great idea for you, there are always bridal shows where every and anyone involved in the wedding process is there you could net work, any get geat ideas….at the very least it will help you understand the componants of bringing it all together.

Vachan

February 2nd, 2010 at 1:08 pm

Hi,

this article is very help ful. i need a good business idea with low investment and yield good returns.

onthatile fologang

February 2nd, 2010 at 2:56 pm

i am in tertiary school and i have a business plan i made and grew up with,i dont have money to start it even though it requires much capital to start it.i want my business to be in full operation by the year 2018,how should i start and plan for my business?

Muzamil

February 11th, 2010 at 8:08 am

Buddies Brian has given you the advice to start a business with low investment he is not consulting everybody in helping to start business,,so use your own mind and use tips in this article and start your business

Brian Armstrong

March 14th, 2010 at 1:45 am

Well said! I think many of these comments are spam…going to clean them up.

Ashley

February 12th, 2010 at 1:07 pm

They give you ideas, why are you people asking for ideas when there’s plenty listed ?

Joe

February 12th, 2010 at 8:01 pm

Thanks for the free footing to start a business. Its always nice when someone tries to help others and you have some great ideas. Fun read

Soniya

February 20th, 2010 at 10:15 am

Hi
I would like to start a boutique but have no money so plz guide me howcan i start it.

Radson

February 24th, 2010 at 12:13 pm

I am an employee of a financial institution with the aim of setting my own business but i do not know what kind of business to do. Can you please advice me Brian.

rahul pandey

March 2nd, 2010 at 8:36 am

i want to know how to start with money

Mark

March 2nd, 2010 at 2:03 pm

what kind of business are interested in???

If you have no ideia, but have money
I have ideias, but no money

wen2962

March 2nd, 2010 at 4:32 pm

Dear sir,

Lately I’ve seriously think about starting a business in supplying raw materials for construction. I’ve conduct survey and do some research on the current market demand. The result seems quite positive, and I’ve gone through the guidance from your post. It seems like can help me and bring me one more step forward to my dream. Same as others, I’ve low budget to start my business and i need your guidance to start it perfectly.

Hope to hear from you soon.

Thanks.

Meg

March 4th, 2010 at 3:30 am

I want to set up a business within the next 7 years. I am very young, but I have an idea. I want to set up an organic coffee shop/cafe with a handmade jewelery and textiles store within the cafe. How would I do this?

Mar

March 7th, 2010 at 4:00 pm

Hi Meg, admirable stuffs you’ve got planned, and you’ll be needing plenty of capital for that kind of business. Some of the things you’ll have to consider, and not limited to, includes venue and accesibility, inventories, furnitures, employees, renovation and decorations, suppliers, and etc.

What you could do is to have a case study on a few similar cafes that are like your ideas, and study them for a month or two and ask yourself if there’s a way that you can do things better than them. If you can, then it means there’s a good chance your business might take off and your investments will be recouped. Good luck.

Pourya

March 4th, 2010 at 11:59 am

Very usefull information.

Thank you

Maurice

March 4th, 2010 at 4:10 pm

This was valuable info. Thanks

kwesi

March 7th, 2010 at 9:35 pm

i am a young guy who does not want my kids to suffer in life.my parents are working out all their energy to pay bills and my sister may not even go to school becaue of that.please help me so that i can help my parents

Ravi boodher

March 9th, 2010 at 9:34 am

I have only 50000 Rupees, can you please help me how to start Coffee bar business in the bangalore

Keisha

March 10th, 2010 at 12:03 am

I just started my business with very little money. It’s nothing new however it is bringing me some profit. It’s called Chic Crochet and I opened online shophanmade.com/Store/Chic. Please visit and if you have any request that is not there, just let me know.

Thank you!

Keisha

March 10th, 2010 at 12:04 am

Also mention this post and you’ll receive 10% off your order :)

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