Ideas Are Nothing.
Just Do It
Helpful Resources/Ideas to Get You Started
Here's a list of useful information or ideas that you can leverage to start your own business.
Fiverr
For Selling:
Great for serviced based businesses, access a large platform of potential customers, have all the payments and currency trade handled for you and grow your business. Be mindful that they take 20% of all your earnings and don't offer the best support options for either you or your customers.
For Using:
If you have a great business idea that needs something done for it, firstly I strongly encourage you to learn the skills and do it yourself because they will come in handy down the track and it will make it easier to make the final product align with your vision for it. However, if you really dont have the time to learn the skillset, marketplaces like Fiverr, Upwork and 99Designs can be great places to get people to help you. Tips: Look for local sellers, find or ask to see a portfolio of work, message the seller and discuss all the details before ordering to ensure there is a mutual understanding.
If you would like to use my services on Fiverr, please contact us on Fiverr and cite the code "UTSsummit" for 30% off [subject to availability]
Book Dropshipping
Amazon offer a book print on demand service, where essentially if you make a book, you can upload a PDF, set the price, and whenever it sells amazon will print it for you in full quality, ship it to the customer, and send you the remaining profit. Its quick, simple and easy as long as you can get good traffic to your book, and, its free to use without any recurring expense.
Print On Demand
If you are a great artist, you can create designs and then create products like t-shirts, bags and water bottles, create a store to sell them, and then every time a product sells, the Print On Demand company will take the money directly from your customer, make the product, and send you the remaining profit. Also quick, easy and without recurring expenses.
Reselling
Another great way to start a business is to buy products in bulk for cheap on websites such as Alibaba and Aliexpress, and then resell them on platforms such as eBay, Amazon and Facebook Marketplace for a profit. It requires an upfront spend and a little more work, but once going it provides super consistent revenue. You can also outsource the distribution of the product to a warehouse company so that you dont have top worry about packing and shipping products. Avoid dropshipping as it's hard and requires lots of effort, and I would avoid places like Temu for products due to the ethical concerns regarding products being manufactured with slavery on the website.
Manufacturing
One of the easiest things to set up. If for example you are really good at making things like bracelets, you can make loads of custom ones and sell them to places like Etsy, amazon and eBay, and given they are unique you stand out more and can start selling more easily, disadvantages are that its time consuming. Also, a really cool thing you can do is sell it back on wholesale marketplaces, specifically ones that shops use to source their own products on, so its a really cool way to get your product into some stores.
What's the best online tool to build my business on?
From my personal experience;
Wix is my favourite as it balances powerful features, reasonable pricing, expandability and ease of creating a great design. I use it for all of my projects. You can also now turn your websites into app's and put them on the app store or play store.
Shopify advertises a lot but from my experience it is relatively non-customisable and expensive ecommerce software, and requires alot of 3rd party plugins to bring it industry standard features. The only real advantage is that it gets your products onto the widely used shop app.
Squarespace I find is also not great, it's expensive, lacks good customisability and also requires a few 3-rd party integrations.
Weebly is an old favourite, not too common in recent years and lacking a few of the modern features found on other platforms, its not the best, however, it is by far one of the cheapest so if you value money then its worth looking into. Also its owned by square, so if you do in-person POS, then it is a seamless integration.
For unlimited customisability and expandability, look into Webflow or EditorX (By Wix), they are harder to learn but offer near to no limitations whatsoever.
Jemi.so is a budding, cheap and simple website designer currently on ProductHunt worth looking into
If you custom develop a website from scratch, I generally find it best to use Amazon AWS, and for domains (like .com, .net, .au etc) I would strongly reccomend Google Domains as it's cheap and really good.
Questions?
If you have any questions or want to run an idea by me for feedback, I'd be more than happy to help If I have the time, consider sending me a quick email.