MBA1385 Q&A Wednesday: What businesses can I start without funding?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster, their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales, and the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform. Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, the business podcast that powers your day every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And today's episode is a Q and a Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of our listeners. That's you. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net. Today's question is from Manny and Manny asks what businesses can I start without funding? Manny's looking for options for businesses he could start with zero capital. Well, I'm going to start by saying we're going to go on the premise that you can save or make a hundred dollars. Somehow with a hundred dollars you can get started somewhere and I'll show you those options where you can start a business, start building your own brand and become your own boss with no outside funding or savings. With a hundred dollars or less, you can really hit the ground running with these business models. At the end of the day, a business is offering value. That's what we're gonna do here. We're gonna try to find what ways we can offer value without having to get funding. So a business offers value in exchange for money and takes that money reinvests in the business. This is the basics of a business. So which businesses can we create value where we can offer for money without costing us money? That's what we get into in today's episode. Money is just one asset that we can use. There's effort, there's time, there's experience. There's a whole bunch of other things we can use at our disposal to generate value. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So many ask on Q and A Wednesday. Which business can you start with without any funding? Let's just begin with the fact that it's just easier to start a business with no money or minimal money online. An online business can get you going. Now, when I say online business, it just means that transactions are happening online. You could still be working with physical goods or working with time or expertise. So let's start with the first business model, and that's services. Any kind of services. Whether you're a voiceover actor, whether you're a designer, you're a developer, you can do sort of administrative, creative tasks for people. You're great with Excel, whatever it is, you're offering a service. And in exchange you're gonna get some money, right? So in order to have some sort of service business, you have to need a website. This is quite inexpensive. There are so many options out there to start a website for 10 or $15 a month, whether it's squarespace or weebly, or if you use something like WordPress and use some hosting from somewhere like WP Engine, you could check out our resource page over at 1000mba.net resources to learn more about those. But the point is, you can build your own website on your own. This is just gonna take some time. And on your website, you can advertise or you can talk about the services you offer. You design graphic tees, you have experience and some expertise in writing, whether it's blog posts or speeches, you can offer a service. If you're wondering what kind of service you can offer, look at your professional experience. What have you been working on the last few years? Where are some areas that you're really particularly strong at at work? How can you offer that as a service? This could be consulting. This could be reviewing proposals. Whatever it is, you could start a business with your time. Now you're exchanging time for money, and you could start with your time, but later on you can hire other people to do these services. So a Service business is definitely one you can do with very low capital. You're not building a product. You're not building any kind of software. You're not building any kind of proprietary physical product. There's no inventory. There's none of that stuff. You're just exchanging time for money. The second business model you can use is arbitrage. And arbitrage can be in the services or it can be in the products. It could be in physical products. Arbitrage is basically you are the middle person. So you say, hey, I want to sell you a product X or service X. And instead of you doing that service or supplying that product, you buy that service or product somewhere else for a lower price and then deliver it to your customer. For example, you could say, hey, I want to offer custom branding and design work. You're going to be doing business cards and logos, letterheads, things like that. Now you might be saying, I don't have the time nor the expertise to do this. That's okay. You don't have to. You can hire somebody just like you would hire an employee, except you're just hiring somebody to do this service. Many people do this as one of their first businesses. So in this example with the branding and the logos and all that stuff, they would go to upwork or they would go to free fiverr.com and buy that service for a lower price than they would charge. Now, why would somebody go to you and not Fiverr? Well, because your service is better. You're going to be able to walk them through the hand, your communication style. You're going to give them more recommendations, you're going to give them options, whatever it is. But this is what arbitrage is. You're gonna be charging, you know, more money than what you actually pay for that service to get done. Same thing goes with products. One of my first businesses was arbitrage and products. I used to sell a rare Air Jordans sneakers to people that wanted Jordans. So I didn't have these Jordans on hand, but I would find them from ebay, from a seller that was selling it. And I would make sure that I would, you know, sell the Air Jordans that I was offering at a higher price than what I was buying it for. So I became kind of like a broker, and I'm making a profit off the difference. Now, my advice when it comes to this business is make sure the margins are high enough for the effort. So most people try to make 50 to 60 to 100% on profit, sometimes even more with the services. There's a lot more wiggle room on services. They outsource their work to overseas, where the dollar goes a whole lot longer, and they can charge, you know, western prices. The third option is affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has really boomed in the last five, six years, where people will blog, they'll be a tastemaker, they'll grow their audience on a topic, whether it's health and fitness, whether it's business, whether it's software. And then they would sell somebody else's product as an affiliate to that audience. Many companies will give 20%, 30%, 40% as an affiliate commission. And many times it's reoccurring. Like for example, if you're interested in becoming an affiliate of our product, webinar Ninja, you'd get 30% reoccurring commission. So every time a customer of ours that you referred gets charged for their monthly fee, for webinar ninja, you would get a monthly affiliate commission. So affiliate marketing can be quite lucrative. But it's all about building a strong audience base. And you obviously can't pitch this audience constantly, so you gotta be selective about what you endorse and what you review. Many people grow YouTube channels and big blogs, and they review products and they put their affiliate link on those videos or in those show notes, and it becomes quite an interesting business model. The challenge here is that you're constantly building content, so you're really sacrificing a lot of your time. But a lot of people do very well as an affiliate business. A fourth option is doing some sort of content that generates an audience, and then you make money off ads. A good example of this is a YouTuber. A YouTuber that has a million subscribers can make a pretty good living off adsense, off, you know, private sponsor deals, off their own merchandise at their merchandise store on their website. It's getting more and more competitive these days, but it's still an avenue. Many people do do this still. They build an audience, they sell a product, they sell a service. It's getting very crowded, competitive, but people still do this, and it's still quite lucrative. If you can build the audience, if you can really, really find a niche that is looking for what you have to say. Or it could be entertaining, it could be entertainment. One of the channels I watch is H3, H3 Productions. Not all their videos are great, but most of them are pretty funny. And, you know, they're making very, very good money through the YouTube channel as well as their own products. They sell their own t shirts and beanies. They have a product line called Teddy Fresh. So building an audience and then selling advertising spots is another option. And finally, number five, your fifth option is to sell information. Whether that's coaching, whether that's a course, these are options. You can build a course and sell it online. You might have noticed one of our sponsors, Podia. And if you go to podia.com mba and get a free trial, it's a course platform so you can run your whole business off Podia. It's very, very affordable. Under 50 bucks a month, you can start your own online course business. You can have multiple courses on a storefront and everything like that. And you're spending time building valuable content in your area of expertise and selling that over and over. You build that content and you sell it over and over. You can do the same thing with coaching or group coaching. People are willing to pay more money for that kind of one on one or that one to many interaction where they can ask questions. You can do a combination of courses and Q and A and coaching if you like. But information is valuable. People want to learn something, gain a skill with a reasonable amount of brevity, you know, in a short amount of time. And the knowledge space online is just growing and growing. So that's another option to get started with very minimal money, with practically, you know, no funding, You've made it on.

Time for the McDonald's breakfast menu. You think to yourself, finally, I can start my day. But what if breakfast could be even more perfect with the hot honey sausage egg biscuit? It finally is. Go to McDonald' and get it while you can.

ClickUp just solved AI's biggest problem, and it's saving 4 million teams from productivity loss every day. Unlike ChatGPT and other AI tools, ClickUp converges all your work into one platform. So your AI super agents have full context to prioritize tasks, execute workflows and draft documents instantly. Teams using ClickUp finish work 30% faster and cut meetings in half. Try ClickUp for free today and get 15% off AI upgrades@ClickUp.com podcast. That's C-L-C-K-U P.com podcast.

To wrap up today's Q and A, Wednesday's question from Manny. Which businesses can I start with? No funding? Well, there you have it. Today I gave you five options. All of these, you really just need an online presence, a website, some grit, some hustle, some time and some dedication. A lot of these things you have to build the asset or build the relationships at the start, and then it starts the snowball. The interesting thing is that all of these I have done in my career and none of them are are just super easy at the gate. You got to build an audience, you got to build a client base, you got to build that relationship for the arbitrage, all that kind of stuff. It takes some grinding at the start, but it's definitely possible and I'm living proof. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you have a question you want to ask on Q and A Wednesday, make sure you ask it. Just email me over at omar@100mba.net and I'll answer it right here on the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's never, ever been easier to start a business. It's actually quite incredible how many tools we have at our disposal. The Internet has changed the game in a lot of ways. It's leveled the playing field to some degree. It's all about how much time and effort can you commit to it so you can get that momentum, so you can get started? And guess what? You might start something, start making some money, start having some clients. And it's good and all, but you might change gears. You might realize it's not really what you love or what you like or where your strengths are. And that's okay. You're still learning how to be an entrepreneur and what kind of entrepreneur you want to become. And these reps are not wasted. You're going to take lessons from these experiences and use them in the future. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care. Foreign.

USA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%. Tap the banner to learn more and get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply.