7 Best Businesses to Start For Less Than $1000

Codie Sanchez breaks down seven businesses you can start for under $3k using the SELL matrix: window cleaning, real estate video editing, microgreens farming, event rentals, handyman services, virtual assistant arbitrage, and productized subscriptions. Each comes with startup costs, real revenue examples, and a playbook for finding customers.
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What do you do if you want to run your own thing but you're short on dollars? So I did some research and it may surprise you how many things you can make money on without you having to spend money first. But first we need to define what success looks like, or what I call high roi, low cash businesses. We are looking for a very particular type of business, one that cash flows to us, AKA high roi. But we don't have to spend a bunch of money up front, AKA low cash down. Now, ROI means return on income. Or to show you mathematically, ROI equals net income divided by the cost of investment times 100. So if you want to earn 10k and you spend 1000, you've made ROI of 9000. Pretty damn good. But then we add what's called investment length, or how long did it take you to earn on it? These are the metrics today and how you should decide if a business is a good business or not. For every time you hear someone say but I have no money, I want you to come back to this video. We'll talk about the seven businesses to start with less than 1,000, what the real return in time expectations are and who these types of businesses may be good or bad for. Now, how do I know this? We review hundreds of businesses a month in our portfolio. We have invested in five of these types of businesses and three of them we have gone direct to others who have done it because we're not trying to teach theory, we're teaching what actually happens in the world of business. So. So first let's show you why you don't just put that thousand dollars into stocks, crypto or real estate. Or at least why I don't. Stocks. They average 10% per year over any 10 year period. That ROI is then 10%. The time or investment length is one year for you to make a hundred bucks. Not great real estate. Now with real estate, you got a bit less. We're at 9.5% on the high end and single family homes are at 1.32%. So you're making somewhere between 95 to 13 bucks a year on a thousand bucks invested. I own both of these things. They're great, but if I only have $1,000 to work with, I'd be betting on myself and my businesses. You have to earn before you can make real money investing. Here's my business matrix. We'll go over seven of these businesses. The matrix is called sell. Aren't we clever? It stands for the four characteristics we want. Sellable. You can sell a product on day one, you don't have to do this forever. Two, high earning or E, you can make that 100k plus a year in profit. It's not just a side hustle. Three, low cost costs you less than 1k and four is high leverage. AKA you can outsource a lot of the work, you start the business, but you don't have to do it all forever. So let's get into it. But a disclaimer. First you have to do the work. Life hack, always the stairs, never the elevator. You have to do the hard things and then you won't have to worry about the cost of things. That's the trade off. Now I've saved the best for last, so make sure you stay for that and also remember to subscribe. I've been planning an hour long video for like eight months that's dropping in a couple weeks. I'll. I think it's my best video yet and I don't want you guys to miss it. Business number one remote window cleaning company. Let's break down just the bare cost for this business. 40 bucks for accessories, 80 bucks for a ladder, $40 for a hose, $20 for cleaning solution. That probably scales up. So let's add a zero to the 180 bucks and say about 1800 bucks. Now how much money can be made? You can charge around 100 to $500 to clean the windows on a house. With only one or two houses, you've paid for your entire window cleaning business. If you get them up to 500 to 1,000, you need two and then you've paid for that second stage of 1,800. If you add pressure washing, we're talking about thousands of dollars for each endeavor. I just pressure washed my fence around my house and it cost me $2,500. So with one to five clients you are at break even. Everything above that is profit to you. And no, you don't have to be the one doing all the cleaning. Let's break it down. We're actually going to learn this from my buddy Johnny. Johnny. Johnny was only 19 years old and he built a $20,000 a month remote cleaning business. Here was his playbook and my favorite part I think is how simple it was. He goes around to really big houses like this and stores like this and charges them anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to ten thousand dollars to clean all of their windows. The reason why this is interesting is there's a super disaggregated market, meaning there's a bunch of window cleaners all over the place, their pricing is totally differentiated. They but the thing that's hardest for them is getting new clients. Johnny, being young and hungry is actually good at the getting new clients part. Probably not so great at the squeaky clean windows part. And so what does he do? He matches the two. And I'm gonna break that down exactly. Let's talk first about how he gets new clients. And second, let's talk about how he actually does none of the work in the service business by using what's called employee arbitrage. First, let's start with getting customers. What do you do? Three things. Most customers for window cleaning comes from where? Google Ads. Just think about what you do. If you have dirty windows, you need cleaning or you need a housekeeper, you go to Google and you type in cleaners. So what Johnny Robinson did was get really good at ads. You could watch a couple courses or YouTube videos on this and be better than 97% of 65 year olds who actually own these businesses. You make your ads look like this, a little sexy. Most of their ads look like this. Step two is he actually used TikTok and Instagram because check this out, TikTok and Instagram Reels as well as YouTube shorts basically are searchable. So now these are videos that are Google SEO. So he did really straightforward videos like this that again, a 65 year old would never do, but he did. And then finally he got really good at local SEO to basically be the number one item that shows up when you're searching for cleaning in Orange county, which is the name of his company. Those three things drive 95% of his customers to his local window cleaning business. Now the second part, if you're thinking, well, I don't want to run a cleaning business because I don't want to clean anybody's windows, not even my own. The beautiful part about this is he actually doesn't do any of the cleaning he uses. Employee arbitrage, or the fancy word for it is called subcontractors. So remember when I told you that most people who own these small businesses don't know how to get leads? What if all you did was provide the leads for those small business owners? That's what Johnny does. He uses his three funnels to draw in a bunch of customers. And then he calls up a bunch of his competitors and says, hey, I'd love to do a deal with you. I have too many leads. I can't service them all. If we did a deal where I get a percentage of everybody, I subcontract out to you to do the actual cleaning. Would you be interested in that? You're a small business owner. Think about it. Of course you're going to take free leads. So now we have a business where Johnny started off with basically zero dollars. His original startup costs were something like 1,000 bucks, then 3,000 bucks. He got it to $20,000 in revenue and now that business is doing a million to 2 million plus and he sold it. That's why I love this idea of window cleaning. What do I really mean? I mean subcontracting and lead gen for service businesses. How do you find subcontractors? Three ways. I liked it. One, you go to Google and you look for all your competitors and you start reaching out to them asking for the owner. Two, you go to local Facebook groups, these could be neighborhood groups, mom groups. And ask for referrals to their professional cleaners. And three, you go to local trade groups, Google right now in your area, Window cleaning association, cleaning association, small business cleaning association. And you're going to find a bunch of your target audience. How do you tell if your subcontractors are good or not? You see how many jobs they currently do in a week. You see how many reviews they have. You ask them how much they would price these services for how long they've been cleaning and you get a referral or two from the answers to those three questions. You negotiate that split I talked to you about for every lead you send them. And after each clean you set up through that booking koala a quality assurance text to see how the clean went and build relationships with the customers. This is so tiny and yet nobody does it. Now let's break this down. Does this business fit our model? One, high ROI. Johnny makes 20k a month, so that fits the 10k a month demand. Two is low. Cash down. He started with less than a grand and scaled up to three grand that he needed. So low cash business. And three, how long does it take to hit that first 10k? It took Johnny 90 dance. So we're inside of the six month window. Check, check, check, check. Why else do I love this business? Low failure risk. Your only real cost is your labor cost. If you decide to scale up this business, you don't have to have a bunch of inventory. You don't have to have a warehouse, no shipping expectations. So the cost to the business owner you is less and bankruptcy risk is less. I'd add a B2B component to this. You have your houses. Those are going to be easier to close. Smaller dollar amounts, you add commercial, they pay you I don't know, 5k every month up front in a contract that's reoccurring. You keep their sidewalks clean, their windows clean, their parking spaces clean. The last reason I like this is the beginner friendly nature of this business. You don't have to be licensed, you don't have to have a complex business model. You live next to most of your neighbors, they need this service. Did you know 35% of small business owners bought an existing business? As a matter of fact, I just bought my 27th. And the first thing I'm going to do is set up payroll. Roll by ADP makes it easy, fast, pain free. When I bought my first business, I had to pay thousands in lawyers, accountants, et cetera. A lot of moving parts. But Roll has simplified all of that. First, they created a step by step setup to get businesses up and running in minutes. They help owners like us understand what's required when setting up payroll. Like employee onboarding, acquiring the necessary tax IDs, boring things where all the money's made. Second, they put all of that into an easy to access app. I can check at any time. It's like payroll in your pocket. And the best part, no hidden fees, no long term contracts, no hassles. Adding employees, creating compensation details and setting up a pay schedule is now a breeze. Start your free trial today. Get 3 months free by using the link in the description. With Roll, I can buy businesses 28, 29, 30, 31. And now back to the video. All right, let's go to business number two. Real estate listing video editor. Okay, I love this because actually one of my employees, Sam did this before I hired him. I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm not a video editor and I get you. I thought the same thing. What's fascinating is that you don't actually need to be. This is so simple. It's really just a process game. Most people think that they can't edit and so they would never try to start this business. It's a good moat, but all you have to do is put in a couple of hours of work and you can see how high the demand is and how easy actually the fulfillment or delivery of it. I spent literally five minutes with Sam earlier pulling some clips together. And now as someone that's never edited a video before, I could make videos like this. Not Spielberg. But just watch any of these videos and you'll probably be better than me in half a day. Two to three hours of your time for a hundred thousand a year business, which is exactly what Sam made. And to prove my point even further, I hired Sam full time. He couldn't run his real estate business anymore. And so now this person, which is his fiance, is the one running it. She used to work in mortgages. She had no idea how to edit a video and now she's running this business for him. Here's why I love this business. It's a huge need. Real estate agents. They get 403% more interest in their listings if they have video on them. Scroll through Redfin and Zillow and you'll see what I see, which is that none of these guys have video on there. It's all images, some of them really bad images. This business would be very easy to start. You reach out to these real estate agents by clicking on their links on Zillow and Redfin. All of them have their contact information. In front of a few, you give them a few sample videos of videos that you've clipped together from other people's work. You send it to them and you say, hey, I charge 50 bucks per video and 100 bucks if I need to shoot the video. And you don't shoot the video yourself. For $150 you could close a transaction 403% faster. Does that sound interesting to you? I know firsthand how hard it is to hire video editors. My suggestion, you start with real estate and then you go up. Why? I like this business. Very low startup costs, sticky clients. When real estate agents start seeing that huge conversion number. Such a simple business model. If you can't understand pulling a few clips together, you probably shouldn't look at other businesses. Relatively recession proof. Even when the market goes down, Realtors are going to want to sell houses even more. Okay, so here's how I would start a video editor business. Spend a week a learning how to clip videos together. Make a demo of videos like this one. Go to Zillow and Redfin and start emailing all those real estate agents. Don't send generic messages to thousands of them. Instead, take the extra minute to show you care by writing a specific email to them. With your example clips. You get 20 clients paying you 5k a month and you could very easily be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Or at least what Samuel did, which is 100k. Does this hit our metrics? Three things. High ROI. Yes, we've pretty quickly seen that Samuel made the demanded $100,000 at least a year or 10k a month. 2 low cash down. All you need is a camera. Actually, you might not even need that. You could use this $0.99 editing software and just not do the filming yourself. Third is length of investment. How long would it take before you could hit that 10k a month? I think you could do it easily within six, six months. If it was me and aggressive, I'd probably have pre orders on this business done inside of 30 days for 10k. So we got higher. I, we got low cash, we got low time of investment. Now we've got microgreens. This is a weird business, but I kind of love it. And we're basing it off of Jonah's business. This guy, he started with less than $700. Exactly. And started cash flowing with microgreens, aka gardening. I mean, that's what us millennials are into anyway. He basically tried a bunch of different things. He tried basil, tried kale, tried lettuce, and then realized that growing microgreens is where the most cash was. Why, they're one of the most profitable crop varieties and one of the easiest to grow. The numbers back that up. So Jonah now made 60k within his first year. Not bad for starting with less than $1,000. So let's break down how he did it and how you could do it too. You need a six foot plant rack. For every six foot plant rack you have, you're gonna make about $2,000. In the beginning, your margins are gonna be high, like 85% because you're gonna be doing everything. So for every plant rack you have, you'll keep about $1,700 in profit, which means you need five or six of these to get to that 10k number. That's probably about the size of a square bedroom, maybe half of a square bedroom. You could put all of these plant racks in there. If you get to big scale, like past that couple hundred thousand dollars in revenue, your margin is going to drop. You're going to be like Jonah, where he made 700k in 2021 with about 40% margins. The cool thing about this business though, is you can start small and scale really easily. You could have racks that are two feet and put it in your cupboard and put it in your laundry room because you actually have internal pieces. Pink light that grows these bad boys. Let's break down exactly how I would start this business. Here's Jonah's playbook. Step one, find your space, Grab your equipment. We talked about the six foot indoor space to get started. Window light not required because of those pink lights. Offices, spare bedrooms, cupboard under the stairs. You could have a few different varietals. Step two, you Got to buy your seeds. Basically very standard seeds, dirt, light and the infrastructure to build it. It takes about three weeks for you to get your first seed started. If a green thumb just isn't your best quality, you can leverage a software called Vertigrow which will create a daily checklist for you to manage your plant rotation and watering schedules. That's what I do. Step three, finding your customers. When you're first starting out, you're most likely going to operate direct to consumer. I would use something like Facebook Marketplace. This is what he does. Or going to a farmer's market, which a lot of people do. In fact, that's how my friend Kat started her business. Mush. That led to a $50 million business. Then I would want to create a subscription model and schedule deliveries continuously to keep that profit growing. I love this business because it's non traditional. It's not an Internet business, it's not a boring business. It's for those of you out there that want to do something with a green thumb, make some income, play with plants, but also not spend a ton of money. Let's see if it hits our three things. High ROI. Well, yeah, Jonah's doing 700k a year with this business and we've sort of calculated you can get to 10k having five of these six foot racks. Step two, low cash down those racks and the seeds all cost you less than $1,000 to start. I think if you want to scale up to 120k a year, you're going to have to spend a couple thousand dollars in seeds, et cetera. But you're not going to do it all at once. You'll do it over the course of three to six months. And step three, how long until your investment returns? Well, the seeds take 30 days, so within 30 days you can sell your first crop. I would actually do pre orders if I could, selling to friends, family, farmers markets. So I would try to get my cash up front, which means we are well within the six month window. That's microgreens, renting, wedding arches or really any wedding decoration. I love this business because have you seen what people spend on weddings? Astronomical. It's just like any idea to financial awareness goes out the window. Now you could say that this could cost more than $1,000 to start, but I think there's a few ways to hack this and it just might be one of the simplest businesses out there. So let's check it out. Average revenue per job, 521 time commitment. Let's call it one to three hours. Per job. Here's the story. Jimmy basically noticed that less than 22% of weddings take place indoors. That meant there was a market for mobile marriage supplies. So Jimmy started looking at the numbers. $2,200 to purchase the tents. Gigs were $500 and could be paid back after four installations or four gigs. The tents would last roughly five to 10 years. And he realized if I could just spend a couple K up front, up front, I could make all of my money back with basically five to ten jobs. Let's do the cost breakdown. About 1100 bucks for the arches and some of the accessories that go on them. Let's call it another 1200 bucks for the additional accessories that he could upsell people to. So we're in for what, 3,300 bucks? Okay, a little bit more than a grand, but not much. But then look at this. Let's say that we do 60 different, different activations throughout the year. Basically just wedding season with a couple weddings a day. And we charge on average $1500 for the arch plus the upsells, we're making $90,000. Then if we add tents and accessories, we're making another 90 to $100,000. So we're sitting at 180 to $190,000 a year. If you think from a time perspective, you're going to expect to be at each location for about an hour to set up and an hour to take down. So two hours during your weekend, you could do two or three or four weddings a day basically. And then finally the materials last you anywhere from two to, they say 10 years, I don't know, but let's call it two to five years. So with that first amount of investment, 3,300 bucks, you can basically run your operations for two years. I think what you're going to quickly find is the fancier stuff that you can have. The more add ons you can add, the more money you can make. But I really like this rental equipment business. It looks like it hits all of our parameters. So what would I do to make sure that I had a ton of clients now that I know that the cost and the revenue is sufficient? One, I would go straight to the source. Wedding planners, they're always looking for new vendors. I would create a nice but not fancy website. I would start a social media account with a bunch of cool arches. They don't even have to be yours. They could just be inspo. And I would create a little one page email that I send people showing what my actual arches look like. And pricing. I would reach out to these wedding planners individually. And I would also probably go to a couple wedding events. I would also identify some common niche themes. So this one in particular, maybe an Indian wedding. So you have something exactly that would be to the specifications of one target customer. Once you get one person and they love it, guess what's going to happen? So they're going to talk and that wedding planner is going to use your stuff again and again. But tweaked because you can have customization, you can certainly do search ads and dominate, let's say remote suburbs where this isn't really something that's provided. But I think I would go straight to wedding planners before anything else. And with that and a little bit of social media, you're going to be able to grow yourself a business that could do $180,000 a year. All right, let's break down. If it hits our three components, high roi, well, we've just shown that Jimmy makes tens of thousands of dollars a year. We've just shown that we can make $180,000 a year. So I think it hits that low. Cash down. Well, we think it's probably more like 1 to 3k, not a thousand bucks. But it's such an interesting model, I figured I'd throw it out there for you anyway. Also during non wedding season, I guess you could do baby showers, you could do anniversaries, you could do engagements. Looks like you're gonna be able to buy the GOODS and within 30 days, I would assume, put them together and get your first couple of customers. If your average cost is only 1 to 3k, you only need to do 2 to 5 again of these weddings in order for you to cash flow. What you need. Handyman business. You know, all those odd jobs that you've been putting off for months, doorknob that's been broken, the paint that's falling off the wall, or that light bulb that's been flickering. Well, it's not just you. It turns out most of us have have these tiny jobs that we don't know how to do and we're willing to pay a lot for someone else to do these tasks. This guy, Caleb ingram and his two handyman businesses that he created each make 250k a year from changing doorknobs, painting, anchoring a TV. The actual demand he has is so high that he can't keep up with it. The cool part about this business too is apart from a couple tools that are probably in your garage or at a garage, so the costs are really low. And now he charges anywhere from $100 to $200 an hour, plus material costs to total an average of 500 to 1,500 per house he serves. And he services them seven days a week. He's making about 800 to $1,000 himself and per employee every single day. That's not bad, right? But if you're thinking I'm not handy, remember Johnny and the playbook of outsourcing to subcontractors? I love this business. For this, you, if you're watching YouTube, are way more technical than people in the trades. So if you like this business model, think, how can I apply 21st century technology to a 20th century business? Now here's how Caleb started. Step one. Niche down to a neighborhood. Caleb chose northern Seattle because it meant he lived there. No traveling costs. Plus it was a small location, so he could rank on the first page of Google. Step two, he obsessed on reviews. These are the fuel that turn your tiny business into a profitable business. Google is where it's at. It's digital real estate for your business. So you obsess over every customer you get, leaving your review pro tip that I do for all of my businesses. I use this company called Jobber that has an entire review system integrated into it. But you don't have to be fancy like me. You can just every single time one of your people goes out, give them a small bonus in the beginning if they get somebody to write a review. Be like, I'll give you an extra five bucks if you get that person to write us a review. You will be amazed how quickly your subcontractors do it for you simultaneously. If it was me, I just send a text message with a funny meme like this. And I'd be like, how's that door looking now, motherfucker? And inside that, I'd ask them, can you please write me a review? Maybe leave out the cuss words of how probably doesn't help you. Step three. Up until this point, you're going to have run this business yourself or with one person. But if you want to get it to six and seven figures, you got to add some contractors. It's really necessary for you to leverage your time. Otherwise you don't have a business. You have a job. If you want to hit 250k a year in revenue, you need to have other people doing the work while you focus on the business, not in the business. Does this business hit our 3 needs? 1 high ROI check? Yes, 250k a year in revenue. Plus Google search your local area Right now you're going to find a ton of demand for handymen all over the place. Step two, do you need a lot of cash? No, it turns out Caleb started with less than a grand. I think you can start with a couple hundred bucks and even borrowed tools. Look, you can rent them right here on Home Depot if you need to. Step three, six months or less to get our money back for our investment length. I think that's true. We said that the average job, you pay $100 to $200 an hour. At $500 to $1,000 for one house serviced. That means that you're starting to make money in the black within your first job. And if you do 10 jobs a month at a thousand bucks, you've hit your $10,000 limit. If you hire a few people underneath you, I can see where this business scales easily. Virtual assistant company. I know this business can make millions because I have three friends running VA firms that do millions to tens of millions a year. One of them is called you. Assist me. And these two guys out of Costa Rica hang out on the beach while making some cash. Another one, Support Ninja and Support Shepherd. I use a lot myself and they publicly list how much money they make. The fascinating part is all of these businesses were started with very little capital because you don't need money to outsource talent. This is very simple. We're gonna do international arbitrage, which basically means you're gonna make yourself the middleman between a company and an assistant to do whatever task a client wants. Any company always has low lift tasks that they need help with. And rather than going through the difficulty of hiring and the expense of hiring in the US you're the person to help them find that help you in another company. To do that. You can charge them anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 a month or three to $5,000 just to find one person for them. The main reason I like this business is because it's a good business for a beginner. You don't need a bunch of prior skills or upfront costs because you're not actually the one doing the tasks. And you get paid at the start of the month by the client and you pay the contractor at the end of the month. So you have something that's called float, which is room to breathe. I think these three steps could take you from 0 to 100k a year, depending on how much work you want to put in. Okay, here's how I do this business. Three steps. Step one is going to be Find clients. You're going to reach out to both individuals. You know who you think could use a VA and companies that are talking about hiring on social media and Twitter. Twitter I think is the go to place for this. You want people that make at least 100k a year and then you want to just send them this article from Tim Ferriss that basically says if you make 100k a year, you should definitely have a VA. It's the highest accelerator to your business. Once you have a few clients lined up, you're going to tell them I find people VA's so you don't have to. It usually takes us four weeks to find you a perfect client. I might even steal the copy from a website like this, this business. Then you're going to have your first few clients, they're gonna pay you upfront. Then you're going to go on upwork and fiverr where you find international virtual assistants. You're going to screen them and then you're going to provide the service of getting them in front of those people who are looking to hire. If you're good at sales, if you're good at hiring, if you're good at figuring out processes to pull in new talent, this business will will be really interesting for you. Let's talk about how much you can charge. I want you to charge somewhere between 2 and $5,000 a month for the virtual assistant. They typically get paid somewhere between 800 and $1,500 a month. And I want to make sure that you have a 40% margin which will allow you to cover the rest of your costs to make sure that the person's good or not. Have them do a project first, maybe pay them something small, 10 bucks an hour to figure out one individual product. That is how you go from taking the hiring process to being miserable and expensive to being low cost and easy. And all you are is the middleman. Last thing I'll tell you about this business is if you figure out how to find international talent, you will never go hungry again. Because the ability for you to charge X and hire at Y translates every business you could imagine. Alright, does this business hit our three steps? I think it does. Step one, high roi. Well, support shepherd and you assist me. Make tens of millions of dollars a year. So I think that's doable for you guys. Look how many clients you need to have to get this rolling. And for you to hit your 10k a month number, you basically need somewhere between 2 and 10 clients. The second, how much it costs you to start the Only thing this business actually costs you is your time. Maybe a small amount of money for a website that you create yourself, for an email, and for you to ping some resources to people telling them how great you are in this business. And third, your roi. How soon can you get money? Well, you have to actually first find clients and then find the talent. So I would say this business, you're probably not going to make any cash in your first month. This business is going to take you at least two months to start cash flowing and certainly within, within three to six months, I think you could hit that 10k number. So check, check, check. Productized service. This is actually my favorite pick for many of them. Learn a digital skill and scale it into a multimillion dollar machine. Meet Brett Williams, a graphic designer who now does $120,000 in monthly revenue reoccurring, adding up to 1.3 million in reoccurring annual revenue. Not bad. Especially when you find out his business design Joy was built in a day for $29. So what's the genius idea? Design as a subscription. Think of it kind of like Netflix. You pay a subscription fee, but instead of unlimited movies, you get to make unlimited graphic design requests. The keyword unlimited. Whether you make five requests or 50, the price stays the same. The caveat? You can only make one request at a time. Why does this work? Because the business model hits the sweet spot of clients. Graphic design needs immediately. And it costs way too much to hire employees in graphic design. Salaries, compensation for most people up front, but you're actually controlling the unlimited with only one at a time to make it even easier for your buyers. An important key to the business model is this. Even if clients don't have enough work to fill an entire month, Brett allows them to pause their subscription indefinitely. When they do have more work for him, they can unpause and continue wherever they left off in the cycle. Here's why I love this business. One, it's a one man army at 1.3 million ARR. Brett is the only employee at DesignJoy. There are no other graphic designers. No closers, not even a VA for admin. He just uses outsourced contractors for graphic design. Two, no client meetings. He sometimes allows for people to take an optional 15 minute discussion discovery call before taking the leap. But that's it. Once you become a design joint client, you never see Brett's face again. It's all async. His onboarding process is also brilliant. You go from first time visitor to paying client in 30 seconds. No meetings, no contracts. No bullshit. Cancel at any time. Next is simplicity. If you're wondering how many clients this one man show can handle. A lot. Brett services 20 clients every month at 5k per month. So Design Joy does 120k a month on average, with a few contractors adding up to that 1.3 mil. Compare that against what he'd be making in an average 9 to 5.49k as a designer. So instead of Brett making $49,000, which is what an average graphic designer makes, Brett actually makes $1.3 million a year by outsourcing to other designers and using the subscription model. Let's break down the expenses. DesignJoy really has four main ones. Figma. Let's call it 15 to 50 bucks a month. Webflow at 30 to 50, Shutterstock at 99, Adobe Creative at 29 to maybe 60, and All Other Tools 0. So that's somewhere between 176 and about $350 in total expenses to make $120,000 in monthly revenue. That math checks out. The cool part about this model too is I would do this for everything. A video editing subscription, a podcast editing subscription, a no code is a subscription. SEO is a subscription. Any service that you can do, you productize it and turn it into a subscription model. Now, how would I get started on getting clients for this? Super easy. I'd do two things. I would set myself up on upwork as a free freelancer or a fiverr. And I would start getting normal clients. Then I would ask them if they want to convert to this service. Easy. Step two, I'd get all over Twitter explaining this model just like he did. I would actually steal a bunch of his tweets and threads and make them my own and duplicate them to get more users in the door. Does this hit our three steps high ROI? Well, Brett makes 1.3 million a year, so yes. If we break down the exact cost for this business and you charge people, people somewhere between 2 to 5k a month, you basically need anywhere from 5 to 2 clients to hit that 10k a month number. Does it cost a lot of money? What's the cash down in this business? Now it looks like with this business, besides your time, you're only spending a couple hundred bucks, not thousands. What's the length of investment? He launched his business and had it cash flowing in the first 30 days. Let's be generous. I think you can cash flow to 10k within 3 to 6 months. Months easily. Love this business model. You want to see this whole business model? Hit this newsletter link. It's free. We broke down the entire thing for you to copy. So there you have it seven businesses that you could legitimately start tomorrow with less than a grand or 3k. I think all of these businesses hit our specific parameters for having a high roi, low cash down low length of investment business. It's really up to you guys. You could build your own castle or somebody else's. You could look back on this video in one year's time and your life could be very different. In fact you could probably look back on your life in three or six months and it could be very different. I believe that the world is getting harder there's no doubt about it and things are going to continue that way but it doesn't have to be harder for all of us if you are an owner instead of owned. So comment below if there's a different business you want me to cover. Let's see if it hits that three part metric we got.
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