I’ve been researching business startup concepts and options, and working with business startups for more than 12 years. And just when I think I’ve seen it all, something else pops into view, and shows me that there is a market for things you’d never think there as a market for! So I’ll share some of those things with you.

No, I’m not going to hand you some stupid business system. If you want one of those, what you really want is to get scammed. I’ve got something better in mind. But it assumes that you have some drive, creativity, and the ability to get online and research how to do things, and then SIMPLIFY the instructions on how to do things.

These overviews do not include things like business license, ink and paper for printing your business cards, or the cost of having someone else build a website for you. I’m going to assume that if you are really on a shoestring budget, that you are going to have to do those things yourself, and use existing supplies – and I’m going to assume you do have some simple tools and a few things lurking around that you can repurpose – most people do.

Most of these are probably things you’ve never thought of… and a few are probably things you’ve heard of, but have not thought about in the way that really works for a shoestring startup.

1. Butterflies and Moths. Yup. there’s a market for butterflies and moths. There are increasing regulations about importing them, and shipping them across state lines if they are alive, but it is still a fairly easy proposition. You can get cocoons, or eggs. You can even capture live specimens and start that way, as long as you make sure it is legal where you are capturing them. You can raise them in containers – plastic storage containers or glass jars – indoors, or in remay sleeves on trees out of doors. Products range from eggs and cocoons, to instructions, to supplies, to mounted specimens, or crafts made with specimens.
2. Snails. Now, personally, I find snails to be rather repugnant. Like slugs, only in a cuter box. Still not my thing, and I can’t imagine actually eating one! Nonetheless, snails are a booming business in many cities, and there is usually insufficient local supply to meet the need. With snails, you MUST think local – and you have to buy or gather starter snails that are known edible, and that are legal in your area. Forget shipping them across state lines – there’s a huge regulatory burden. But growing them and delivering them locally is pretty simple, and it does not take much to get started – initial containment and starter stock is fairly inexpensive. Really, all you need are two snails in the right mood… they can be very prolific!
3. Mushrooms. Not THAT kind of mushrooms! Gourmet, edible, medicinal. THOSE mushrooms! Nothing illegal, doing illegal things in your business is never a good idea! So… what kinds of mushrooms? Do some research. See which ones are selling for good prices. You can get started with a few bins, some compost, (alternately, use a kit), and a spot where you can keep temperatures within a warm or cool range. Growing mushrooms is not actually as complicated as it sounds, a sterile environment is not even needed, if you are just smart about keeping things tidy. Just don’t expect to make a fortune growing Shiitake or Portobello mushrooms! The markets are saturated, don’t bother. Grow something that has a solid demand, but which is underproduced, and you’ll do much better. You can sell fresh mushrooms (farmer’s markets, or shipped), dried mushrooms, gourmet mushroom products, pickled mushrooms, mushroom grow-kits, mushroom spawn, mushroom growing instructions, etc.
4. Food Molds. Oh, NOT the fuzzy kind… the SHAPED kind. Like people use for chocolate, or marzipan. This takes some talent… Buy a block of paraffin. Carve a 3-D design in it. Something that would look good as a cookie, a chocolate, or a cake decoration. Buy some food grade silicone mold putty. Use that to create the mold. Sell the molds. Make more. Costs about $10 for enough paraffin (or other carvable wax) to make 6-10 mold designs. Costs about $40 for a mold maker’s starter kit, or about $15 for enough putty to make 20-30 molds of about 1″x2″x1/2″ in size. Larger molds, fewer of them, but higher price. Look at what people WANT to shape things like, that you can’t buy at Wal-Mart (seriously, go into the party and bridal area, where they keep the cake decorating stuff – if you can buy the molds in a plastic sheet of a dozen molds, don’t bother!). Do unique and trendy stuff. If you have a flair for carving, and a flair for style, this can be very lucrative.
5. eBaying Junk. Ok, not junk, precisely, but garage sale and salvage items. You have to have a bit of talent for knowing what people really want here, but I’ve seen this work for many people. I’ve seen a LOT of people FAIL with eBay also. Because they don’t understand that eBay is a BUYER’S market for common things, and a SELLER’S market for rare and desirable things. Your first step is to search on eBay, in the Completed Auctions (under Advanced Search), to see what the things you’d be interested in selling, are actually selling for! A lot of them aren’t going to be selling at all – dozens of auctions, no buyers. Scratch those items. Look for the ones that EVERY listing sells, for a price from which you know you can profit. Go with your interests – you’ll keep the information in your head better that you need to keep there. Then go salvaging and yard saling, and digging through the second hand shops, for stuff that is underpriced, and salable. The potentials are really good IF you can find a type of product that you have access to, which sells well. What NEVER works with eBay, is those “drop ship companies” that tell you that you can sell their overpriced oh-so-common product, which you will pay more for than you’d pay for something better at Wal-Mart, and which no customer in their right mind is going to pay you a reasonable mark-up to take off your hands. That never works. eBay depends upon uniqueness, and desirability. If you can get that, you’ll have a moneymaker on your hands.
6. Hatching Eggs. Ok, so the startup cost for this is debatable – depends on how you get the chickens, and whether you already have containment for them or materials to build containment. But you may have enough resources to be able to do this. If you already have chickens, you can generally just add a good rooster – hatching eggs are far more lucrative than eggs for eating. You can sell edible eggs for around $2-3 per dozen, depending on quality. Hatching eggs go for $1-2 EACH. Heck, they even sell for $1 apiece on eBay! You just need to make sure that you either have breeds segregated so they do not cross-breed, or list them as crossbred chickens. Keep good chickens also, and get the marginal ones out of the breeding pool so you can say with assurance that you are selling good quality stock. If you are planning on getting chickens with the hope for earning a little cash on the side, it is worth knowing that hatching eggs sell for more.
7. Meal Planning. There are a number of ways to do this. Weekly menus and shopping lists, or “Prepare Ahead” Recipe and instruction booklets. For Prepare Ahead meals, a recipe book, in PDF downloadable form, for a specific number of meals which can be prepared ahead, and frozen for on-demand quick-fix the following week. Combine ingredient prep – for example, if four of six meals take sauteed onions, combine all into a single chop and cook operation. Shopping lists are also a matter of combining things. An Excel spreadsheet makes a nice way to track the shopping, and estimate costs – you can create a self-calculating spreadsheet, with places to put in the number of items, the average cost of the item, which calculates the total for that item, and then adds up the total for all items. Take pictures of the prepared food (in the freezer containers, and again fully cooked and on the plate), write down all the recipes and combination preparation instructions, the shopping list, and average prep time. If you can keep the prep time to half a day or less, and the meals tasty, healthy, and not too costly, people will be interested. Works best to target a special needs segment – people most likely to do this are those who cannot eat supermarket prepared foods. For weekly menus, meal prep times of 30 minutes or less sell best.
8. Auto Detailing. No need for a brick and mortar shop. Operate a mobile business – carry your vacuum cleaner, rags and polish with you, and make house and office calls. Busy people love it when the service comes to them. Now, auto-detailing is one of those things that attracts a lot of fly-by-nighters who think it is an easy way to make a buck. It isn’t. You have to do a good job and go the extra mile to keep paying people coming back (or asking you to come back!). So learn to do a good job, and KEEP doing a good job.  At $100 a pop, the potentials are good for a great income.
9. Oddball Themed Online Store. There are tons of oddball and quirky things that you can assemble together in an online store. Look through eBay again. Only this time, look for what ISN’T selling well on eBay, but which WOULD sell if you had a bunch of items of that same kind together. You aren’t looking for really common stuff. You’re looking for stuff that a LOT of people have extra laying around, but which a lot of OTHER people really don’t think to go to eBay to get, or don’t know what it might be called on eBay. Your store can become the place to find it all. This will work best if there aren’t a ton of other stores specializing in the niche you discover.
10. Printable Posters. This is one I’d have NEVER thought would sell, but it does. Pictures, borders, nice fonts, and motivational or humorous quotes, in PDF format for self-printing. Remember when you make these that most printers have a 1/2″ margin that won’t get printed around the edge. Also, the key to reading text over a photo is contrast – bold text often reads better, and putting a drop shadow behind white text, or a glow behind black text can make it stand out and improve readability when you have an image with a lot of distraction behind the text. Also, putting the text in a box, or with an opacity layer behind it can look classy and make the text readable. Elegant embellishments are easy to do using decoration fonts. Images for this kind of thing can be purchased through places like Big Stock Photo, or through clipart or photo collections from Dover Books. There are other places that sell licensed images also. You’ll need a photo editing program, like PhotoShop Elements, and you’ll need to make sure you use high resolution images (look it up if you don’t know what it means). Holiday quotes, seasonal thoughts, learning tools, classic political quotes, or scriptures. Watch what trends on FaceBook, and sell things with a similar mood. Make it look good enough that people want to pay for it. Sell with instant download for $1-2 each.

If you start a shoestring business, you’ll expect the first revenue that you get to go back into the business, and the next dribbles to put a hefty percentage of the profit back into the business, for quite a while. But all of these options allow you to start on a shoestring, and get to the point of profit much sooner than you would if you went into debt to start up.

No business is FAST to start, but with these ideas, you can be profiting within months instead of years, and possibly even sooner than that. Go out there and look for the unusual, and think about how you can simplify it enough to get in the door for under $100. You’ll be surprised at what is possible.

UPDATE: Our book Starting a Mushroom Growing Business on a Shoestring is now available from Amazon for Kindle, and in PDF format through our Firelight Heritage Farm Books website.

Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting and can help you develop a plan for a successful business on a shoestring.

Finding a profitable niche is even more important when you are starting a business or new product line on a shoestring. You haven’t got time or money to waste, so you need to be able to determine in advance when you’ve got a hot item that will sell itself if people know about it.

It is not difficult to find suppliers who will give you a reasonable price on hundreds of an item at a time. It is much more difficult to find suppliers who will sell you two or ten at a time. Or one. At least, who will do so at a price you can afford to pay and still have room to make a profit. Expect to purchase for 50-75% of the resale price if you want to make a profit without running yourself into the ground. For many product types, that can be hard to find. For many of the product types that you can find at those prices, nobody wants them because they are saturated markets.

So how do you find products you can sell at a profit, that people actually want to buy? Well, there isn’t a simple answer, because each market area varies, but there are some ideas that can help you find what works within your arena.

1. Make do. When you are looking for a new product, you probably won’t be able to go out and find a manufacturer to make something just for you. Find something that can be used in the same manner, and sell that instead, or something that you can easily modify. If you are smart about it, you can get by until you can afford to have something custom made. If there is competition in the market, you’ll have to offer a significantly lower price if yours has a built in inconvenience or detraction, but if you can still come out at a profit, there is a market niche for that.
2. Simplify. Look for the simpler ways of doing things, not the complicated ways. If you make a thing, make sure you can do it fast enough to profit from it at the price you can sell it for. Make sure you can repeatedly get low cost materials to make it so the cost of production does not eat up your profits. Keep things as simple as you possibly can to start with. If something is too complex, brainstorm easier ways to do it. This is how inventions come about!
3. Get creative. Don’t just look at what a product was designed to do. Look at how it can be used and niched to fill a need. There are actually a lot of raw products out there which can be adapted to various uses, and just by changing the label, you have a salable product without having to significantly remake the item. If you know a particular item might sell, think about how you can make it using existing low cost supplies. When searching for supplies, get creative in how you search, as well. Many supply items go by many names, and are classed under multiple categories. A polished round wooden piece with a hole in the middle may be classed as a “wooden wheel”, a “wood donut bead”, a “wooden circle”, or a “wood round”. It might be found on jewelry sites, toy making sites, craft sites, woodworking sites, or wholesale import parts supply sites.
4. Dropship. Drop shipping means that the supplier ships it direct from their warehouse to your customer. Blind drop shipping means they put YOU as the reseller, not themselves. Either way can work, though if it is NOT blind drop shipped, you will need to note on your sales page that the item is “shipped direct from the manufacturer”. Finding drop shipping companies is NOT simple. People think they can source them by searching for “dropship merchandise” or something like that. Nope! That gets you a bunch of scam companies that have no unique product, who overcharge you, and who could care less about the success of your business. The best way to find drop ship companies is to go find a product you really like, or have a use for and know you can sell, and see if they drop ship. Many do that do not publish that fact. Many mom and pop companies will drop ship if you explain what you want, and many will go out of their way to blind drop ship for you as well. The rule is, find a drop shipper based on the PRODUCT search, not based on a search for drop shippers, if you want to find a good one. Remember, when you choose to drop ship, you lower your operational costs, you do not have to worry about carrying inventory, and you spend only a few minutes processing an order to make your profit. But you rely on the supply company for YOUR reputation. You also have to make sure you pass on accurate shipping costs, which can be difficult if you carry items from more than one supplier. It can be a good place to start when you are needing to get product moving on a shoestring.
5. Be flexible. Many people get an idea in their heads, and if it does not work exactly how they wanted it to, they bail. So maybe you decide to sell 3 armed widgets, and all you get are requests for 4 armed widgets. If you can supply 4 armed widgets, and that is where the demand is, by all means, adjust your dream and go with what is needed! Don’t get so stuck on doing what you want that you forget to pay attention to what the customer wants. Most new businesses start out with different concepts than they end up with – because certain things you do not know until you try them, and when you do, it is only smart to learn and adapt, even if it doesn’t seem to be quite what you thought it would be. Follow the opportunities, and don’t get discouraged over the seeming failures – they aren’t failures, they are learning experiences.
6. Try a new angle. There are more saturated markets out there than you can shake a stick at. Often the difference between being another of the numbers, and a wild success is the way in which you approach the product and marketing. Come at it from a fresh angle. Put a spin on it that makes it more desirable – most saturated markets are saturated because the item IS popular, there are just more people trying to capitalize on it than there are customers who want to buy from a new source. Humor, kindness, color, decoration, attitude. All of those things make the product YOU sell more desirable than the product someone else sells, even if it is functionally identical.
7. Level the competitive field. When you are a small business trying to compete against a big business, you need to offer something desirable that they CANNOT offer. Look at the business model of the competitor. Find the weakness. Maybe they don’t have an easy way to contact a real person. Maybe they cater to a 20 something crowd, and ignore the older customers. Maybe they offer automated product delivery that could be personalized. Look for a thing that they can’t change without losing what makes them distinctive. Offer THAT along with the product. Your competition can’t touch that – and even if your store is not as professional looking as theirs, and even if your product is a little more inconvenient to get, if it meets the needs of people who are NOT being served by the big competitor(s), you’ve got a chance to grow around them.
8. Add value. Sometimes if you can’t find a product to resell that you can get at a true wholesale price, you may be able to add value to it. It isn’t really that hard, it can be very simple. Sell it in a bundle, sell it with a decoration added, sell it with better instructions or personally accessible help. Add value somewhere that makes it worth paying more for, or which makes it a separate product type.
9. Brainstorm. Get together in a group of business people – I don’t mean the ones that wear suits and think the only way to do business is according to the SBA. I mean other small business owners who have done similar shoestring startups. Make sure they are people who are following their dream – then you don’t have to worry about them sealing YOUR dream (you won’t want your competition in the brain trust, as a general rule). Discuss ways to improve value, niche a product, and source a wholesale product or drop-ship product. Often the synergy of two, three, or four people is enough to spark some ideas. Generally, they won’t tell you the thing you need to do to make your business work – but something they say will spark your creativity and help you get past a hurdle. There is great power in brainstorming.

You absolutely need to avoid selling products which are carried by every discount department store in the country. Nobody wants to buy those for the price you’d have to charge, plus shipping.

You’ve got to do better than that! And you can!

Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting to help you get started right.

You’ve got an idea, and you want to know if it will fly. Or you have heard that you can make money doing something, and you want to find out whether you actually CAN make money at it. This is the quick and dirty method of researching a market to find out of people are buying at a price from which you can make a profit.

1. Go to eBay, and do a search for your product. IMPORTANT… search Completed Auctions (under Advanced Search). That way you know what SOLD, not what people were dreaming it would sell for (either high, or low!). This tells you when a thing is so hot people want it at any price, and when a market is so overloaded that 90% of the auctions are unsold, and the other 10% are selling well below cost. eBay won’t work for everything – it is a flop for services so you can’t research them that way. They also forbid the sale of many things, so you’ll have to look elsewhere if they forbid the sale of the thing you need to research.

2. If you hit on a winner, where things are either selling well, or at least not selling badly, then do some more research. Go to Google, and find out what people are selling it for off eBay. eBay typically offers a skewed vision of the marketplace – ultra low prices for saturated markets, ultra high prices for hard to get items. Neither is a good guideline for how YOU should price your items. So find out the range that real people are selling the item for. This will also tell you how saturated the ordinary marketplace happens to be – if you have tons of shops out there, and the first page is littered with Amazon.com ads, then the item is well supplied online – which means you’ll have a lot of competition (not a reason not to dive in, but it will be potentially more difficult to get rolling). Get a good idea of the price range, and aim somewhere for the middle, or high middle – but make sure you can justify your price! If you charge high, make sure you’ve got a selling point that is wanted so bad that people feel it is worth the extra money.

Now, once you’ve done that, you have some numbers to work with. You have some important data that you can take to the calculator.

Figure the cost of materials or wholesale cost of the item.

Estimate or average the time it takes for you to produce an item you make yourself.

Do some math to figure profit per item, and see whether you can make enough to justify the time you put in.

Do two sets of calculations: One for eBay “liquidations” (to move product fast if you get in a situation where you need to move some out), and one for regular every day sales from a non-auction online presence. It is important that you do both of these, so you know whether you can move surplus through eBay or not, and how much it will cost you if you do. Remember that eBay does have some fees involved, so don’t forget to estimate that as well.

For some types of businesses, you need a customer when the product is ready. This is true of many perishable or live items. eBay may be a way to move some of them when you don’t have an established customer base, but you’ll usually get a lower price (often 50% or less).

If you are examining ways to make money, a little research before you dive in can tell you whether you are getting good info from someone who genuinely knows their stuff and really wants to help people earn, or whether you are just hearing hype and empty get rich quick promises from someone who is either unethical or ignorant (and the marketplace is DEFINITELY saturated with both of those!).

A little bit of homework can save you a lot of grief.

Best wishes as you venture forth!

Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, and a variety of market and marketing assessment services.

When we talk to a client about branding, the response we get is often “Oh, I have a logo.” But a logo isn’t branding. It really isn’t even the START of branding.

Branding is far more comprehensive. It is as much an emotional thing as a visual one. It includes all of these things, and probably a few more that I haven’t thought how to articulate yet:

1. The logo – yes, this is part of it. A very small part.
2. The business name. More about HOW you do what you do, than WHAT you do.
3. The business slogan. It sets a mood, and sends a message. It may not say anything about the product. Think about top brand slogans. Coke’s slogan isn’t “brown fizzy sweet drink”. And Nike never says “shoes we’d like you to think are really cool”. And McDonalds would never say “assembly line hamburgers”. Their branding is the attitude. Our logo is “Come in from the cold”. Not a thing about web design… but a message about how our customers feel.
4. The way you write your content for your ads and website. The very style of writing – is it formal, casual, humorous, warm, professional, etc?
5. The way your website or ads are laid out and organized. Again, all of this sends a message which should be consistent with your branding.
6. The names you choose for your website links, your products, the variations for your products, etc. Are you going to call them “small, medium, large”, or are you going to call them “teeny, well fed, enormo”.
7. The way that you market, and where you market. It should be consistent with the branding and primary message you are trying to send.
8. The packaging and presentation of the product. More than just slapping a label with your logo on the package, the entire package should echo the branding mood, including the wrapping, label layout, and other materials.
9. The way in which you interact with the customer, from how you answer emails, to your signature line, to the way you answer the phone or the way you dress when you meet them in person. All of this is part of your branding.

So in order to create good branding, you really need to know what the primary message IS. Is it a sense of fun, a sense of helpfulness, a sense of comfortable conformity, or a sense of being on the edge of losing control? All are appropriate for various products and target markets, and you want to be sure that YOUR message fits yours. Then EVERYTHING you do in relation to presenting your product becomes an extension of that message.

Branding is, in a sense, defining a personality for the business. When it is a likable and consistent personality, people respond. When things are disjointed and don’t quite coordinate, they feel like they are in the presence of someone who is either deceptive or who has a mental illness – neither impression is a good one for persuading customers to trust you with their money.

When we work with small businesses that have a single owner operator, we find that the business owner is the single most important influence on branding. The personality of the owner is what will determine, to a large extent, the messages that are being sent, and to whom. Usually a business owner can’t even articulate these things. But if a professional service provider pays attention to the business owner, they can quickly determine what those messages are, and how to best present them. Because with a very small business, the owner IS the business, so you are really trying, in a way, to capture the brand of the OWNER.

If you are a small business owner, make sure that your branding carries through your entire business, through everything you present to the customer and all of your interactions with the customer.

But most of all, have some fun with it! Branding, done well, is great fun, and a terrific creative project where you get to think about appropriate and enjoyable ways to include your messages in everything you do.

Check out our new Cottage Industry Consulting and Development services at CottageIndustrialRevolution.com.

Automation is the bane of our existence. We ask for help from any company out there and we have to ramble our way through phone menus that drive us nuts, or support menus on the internet that have everything but the option that we need.

Gotta love those menus that pre-determine your needs: Would you like to make a payment? Would you like to check your balance? Would you like to speak to a sales representative? No option for talking to a real person.

No, I want to speak to a human being because your system screwed up my account and I want it fixed.

But they didn’t give you that option, so you are effectively shut out.

Automation gone bad. Big companies can sometimes get away with it, because they are the 800 lb gorilla, which is gonna be there even if you don’t like the way they automate parts of their business.

For a small business, that would kill you! People expect a person to answer the phone – or at least an answering machine with a real person promising to call back. Small businesses are EXPECTED to be personal.

Making the leap from “I do it all myself” to intelligent automation as a business grows can be tough. There’s a single rule though, that can make it far more effective, and help you avoid the pitfalls before you even reach them.

I say it a lot – so you may have heard it before. But I’ll repeat it anyway for anyone who may have missed it:

Automate the NON-PERSONAL aspects of your business. Keep the PERSONAL stuff PERSONAL.

Smart automation is a win-win, because it automates repetitive tasks which SHOULD be automated, saving you time so that you now have the ability to DO the personal stuff yourself. Plus it makes the results MORE CONSISTENT, and your product or service becomes more predictable. Higher quality results, not lower quality.

If you get it backward though, and just try to automate the thing you feel is taking up the most time (which it actually may not be), and it happens to be a thing that requires personal attention, your whole business appeal gets messed up, and you degrade the quality of service to the point of disaster.

Another important point, one that I have not said much before, is that when you do automate, especially if that automation involves customer interaction with the automation, make sure there is a REAL PERSON who is still accessible.

I don’t mean a support que or online chat. I mean that if they want to pick up the phone and call, or email you, that someone on the other end answers who is familiar with your product or service, and who KNOWS THE CUSTOMER. When a small business tries to behave like a big business, customers leave. The one major selling point with small businesses is that people really LIKE it when they feel like the business owner knows them. So having access to a friendly and helpful person who has a vested interest in the business, available on the other end of the phone or email is essential.

The last point is one of economics. Weigh the cost-benefit of every investment in automation. There is no point in investing hundreds, or thousands of dollars to automate a task that is not a money maker. I don’t mean that every task needs to generate revenue directly, rather, that if you have TIME, and no SALES, then investing in something to speed up operations is dumb. Increasing the efficiency of production only helps if you are making sales.

When you get to the point where investing in automation IS smart, because you could EARN more if you had the time to do so, And then you want to look at your operations and see where a smart investment would increase revenue enough to pay for itself and then some. Some types of automation never will pay for themselves for small businesses, other types are a no-brainer when you reach a certain sales volume – and those are the ones you want to implement at the right time.

Don’t get caught up in hype, or think that just because everyone else has it you have to have it too. A local NRCS office with a staff of four people, charged with managment and disbursment of grants in the amount of $50,000 per year, with a fairly low volume of traffic in the office or on the phone, spent $164,000 to install an automated phone system. This, when they had a receptionist, and KEPT the receptionist on the payroll once the system was installed. Bad move. They feel they can do that because it isn’t their money, and they don’t have to show a profit, or even any kind of justification for the expense. You can’t afford such stupidity – you haven’t got other people to suck it off of to pay for it.

Automate smart, and it will pay you back, and your customers will continue to feel they are getting what they need. Do it wrong, and they’ll wander off to someone who understood better than you how to do it intelligently.

Our company is now offering Cottage Industry Consulting, and can assist you in making good automation choices for your small business.