13 Home Business Ideas That Let You Work From Home

17 Aug 2020
21 minute read

如果you’replanning to start a business, you might start thinking about things like renting commercial real estate, commuting to an office, or managing employees.

But with the rise of home businesses, more and more people are discovering ways to use remote work to pursue entrepreneurship, with their business headquartered at home.

In today’s connected world, where technology affords us more flexibility in how and where we work, home-based businesses come in a variety of forms.

Some require you to convert a spare room into a mini-warehouse for products, while others can be run completely online. But generally, you can start thesetypes of businessesusing your existing space and means. You can also check our guide onhow to make money onlineto explore more options.

Table of Contents

What makes a “home-based” business: the pros and cons

A home-based business is a venture—whether full time or run as a side hustle—that you can start and operate using your own home as your base of operations. A few home-based businesses, especially those that sell online and don’t buy and hold lots of inventory, can even be run on the go, without the need to be bound to your home.

Naturally, there are pros and cons to consider when deciding whether a home-based business is right for you.

Pros:

A low-investment business has fewer overhead costs (such as warehousing fees), plus potential tax deductions you can claim.
The option to sell products or services locally or internationally.
Flexible work-life balance, which is ideal if, for example, you’re a stay-at-home parent or aretiree．
You can create a family business where your relations or your spouse can chip in as needed.

Cons:

You may need to convert space in your home to support the needs of your business (e.g., holding inventory, creating a home office, or storing equipment). The challenge can be doing this without disrupting your life at home.
You still have to comply with any regulations that pertain to the business you want to start (e.g., you may need to rent a commercial kitchen if you plan to sell food products or a license/permit to hold inventory).
Your business may outgrow your home and require you to rent additional space and hire employees.
Working from home offers you a lot of freedom, butit can also be lonely．This might be difficult if you enjoy being around other people.

Free: The Big List of Business Ideas

To help you find the inspiration to start, we compiled a list of 100+ in-demand business ideas, broken down into categories like fitness, apparel, and gaming.

13 home-based business ideas you can start today

While there are plenty of ways to go about starting a home-based business, the following are some of the most approachable paths to creating a home business for yourself:

1. Buy products in bulk and sell them online

Many businesses center on the simple concept of importing products in bulk and selling them individually for a profit.

Maybe you recently traveled abroad and came across unique products that aren’t readily available in your market, but that you sense an appetite for. Or maybe you’ve zeroed in on aniche marketand know the perfect way to serve it.

Either way, if these products are relatively easy to store and ship, you may have some solid home-basedbusiness ideason your hands.

You can even initially use your home as a showroom to sell locally, giving you the option to expand with additional storage space and employees as you validate your idea and sales start to ramp up. This is how Artemis Design Co. got its start.

“I was living in the south end of Boston, and I had my living room just full of these products. I would have people come over if they wanted to look at something or try something on, and that’s how I made my first sale.” Milicent Armstrong, Artemis Design Co.

2. Sell homemade products

如果you’re a maker yourself (or know someone who is), consider turning thathobby into a business．Even if you have to create your products elsewhere—in a studio, commercial kitchen, or workshop—you may be able to store and sell them in your own home.

When you have the ability to control nearly every aspect of the products you sell, you can make them more cost- effective, improve their quality, or cater them to a certain audience by targeting demand in the market.

Josh Pigford already had a thriving home business in a business analytics startup, but wanted to find a way to flex his creative muscles. He startedprinting succulent planters at homewith his 3D printer—and a business was born.Cedar & Sailnow carries planters, coasters, and other small desk tchotchkes.

Whether you choose to start on a marketplace likeEtsyor build your ownbranded storefront, selling your creations is a great way to share your passion with others and make money too. Just be wary of regulations concerning products that customers ingest or put on their skin.

Check out these resources for launching a home-based business selling handmade products:

Best of all, producing your own products doesn’t have to be overwhelming. When you’re ready to scale, you can establish a process and onboard new employees to help with production.

3. Start a dropshipping store

So far, we’ve covered business ideas that require you to hold inventory in your home. But there are a variety ofonline businesses ideasto pursue that don’t involve worrying about inventory and shipping.

These businesses employ adropshipping model, where a third party produces, stores, and ships your products on your behalf, leaving marketing and customer service as your chief responsibilities.

Children’s brandFiner & Dandyis an example of a home-based business that uses a dropshipper. Founder Courtney White started the company in search of a way tomake money onlinewithout spending too much time providing services to customers. That’s when she discovered dropshipping. Now, she wakes up at 4 a.m. every morning to run her dropshipping business before going to her day job.

Your dropshipping supplier can be local or overseas, but you need to ensure you find a supplier you can trust to deliver a consistently great customer experience after the sale. Always do your due diligence or you might put your business’ reputation at risk.

There are evenShopify apps, such asOberlo, that can connect you with suppliers to import products into your own store while streamlining order fulfillment.

At its core, dropshipping involves becoming a distributor of a third party's products, taking on the costs (both financial and time-based) of marketing to be rewarded with the margins when you make a sale. In many cases, this can make your products a commodity with limited opportunity to brand your customer experience. Luckily, there are a few different ways you can still compete, even when there’s no shortage of your products in the market you’re selling in:

Curate products from different suppliers to create a store that serves a specific niche.
Compete through quality content and customer service, creating value beyond your products.
Target an underserved region of the world. (Be sure to pay attention to your shipping costs.)
Target a new audience with the same products (e.g., LED shoes can be marketed to music festival goers or runners).

如果you’re interested in learning more about starting a dropshipping business, be sure to check outThe Ultimate Guide to Dropshipping．

Free Webinar:

How to Get Started with Dropshipping in 2020

Learn how to find high-margin products, add them into your store, and start selling — fast.

4. Start a print-on-demand business

Using a similar dropshipping model, aprint-on-demand businessdoesn’t require you to hold any inventory or ship anything yourself. Print-on-demand even offers you more flexibility to customize white label products with your own creative designs.

Rebecca Lee Funk launchedThe Outrage, a women’s rights activist apparel brand that sells print-on-demand t-shirt designs from her home. The business donates a portion of profits to Planned Parenthood in Donald Trump’s name. Her launch campaign went viral, and The Outrage turned into a thriving ecommerce business.

There are many other print-on-demand products you can sell: books, hats, backpacks, blankets, pillows, mugs, shoes, hoodies, phone cases, watches, and more, depending on the supplier you choose to work with.

Many print-on-demand businesses focus on serving a specific niche or, better yet, a shared identity. What are people passionate about and proud to share? What about yourself? From pet owners to vegans to gamers, there are plenty of passionate communities you can create products for.

如果你有设计技巧,您可以创建自己的designs. But if not, you can alwayshire the talent you need．

For a full runthrough of how print on demand works and how you can get started, be sure to take ourvideo course inside Shopify Academy．

5. Offer online services

Services are even simpler than products to start selling at home, but the challenge is allocating your limited time. “Time is money” is never truer than when you’re running a service-based business.

Creative professionals, like designers or marketers, might freelance or consult with other companies, juggling multiple clients, often remotely from their own home office with occasional travel. Others might operate based on appointments and bookings to offer their services to individuals directly.

Service-based home business ideas include:

House cleaning
Freelance writing
Personal training
Virtual assistance
Dog walking
Marketing
Designing

Service-based businesses often require a lot of networking and word-of-mouth referrals to find suitable clients, but satisfied clients will likely retain your services over time.

For this reason, you don’t necessarily need a large number of customers to do well, as you would with a product-based business. Depending on the service you’re offering, a handful of high-quality clients can be enough to support yourself full time while working from home.

6. Teach online classes

Chris Carey, one of the founders ofMAPerformance, started his automotive parts and services business from the comfort of home. He began byteaching car maintenance and repair tipsto online users in forums. After establishing expertise and trust, people started heading over to his ecommerce site to buy parts.

如果you have a teachable skill, you not only can share that knowledge in forums to get your name out there, you can also turn it into online classes. There’s an audience for just about any desirable skill, whether it’s English as a second language, advanced marketing, or everyday home maintenance hacks.

如果I Madeis Emily Newman’s home-based business teaching classes to creative professionals. When you teach classes online, not only do you have the flexibility to do it from home, you can also choose to offer live or pre-recorded teaching and training. For example, you might offer the live courses at a premium rate, while customers can purchase the recorded sessions at a discounted price.

That’s what Yegi Saryan, founder ofYegi Beauty, does with her business. After establishing a successful online beauty brand, she turned her talents into passive income. Now, aspiring entrepreneurs can purchase lash classes to kickstart their skills and add it as a service offering in their business. Classes are available both online and in-person.

你也可以选择类大小和长度。如果you like small groups or even one-on-one, consider tutoring, mentorship, or masterminds. If you like larger groups, do bigger training sessions and courses. Teach a one-time all-day summit, an hour a week, or somewhere in between.

Not interested in human interaction? Create a fully downloadable course for purchase. All you need is the content, be it a video walkthrough, templates, articles, or how-tos. Use a screen-recording tool likeScreenFlowto capture your screen and voice while you walk students through the material.

Whichever way you slice it, teaching online is a profitable home business idea because it requires low overhead—just an investment in time.

7. Productize your service or expertise

As we just discussed, one of the biggest downsides of running a service-based business is that you’re paid strictly for your time, skills, and effort. Emily Newman of If I Madeproductized her classesinto digital courses, packaging the recordings from her live sessions and selling them at a lower rate.

“Productizing” your service—creating physical ordigital productsthat package up your expertise and streamline or complement the service you offer—can add additional revenue streams to your business. You can cater to your current customer base or even find a new target customer in the same space.

Gabriella and Andrew Morrisonstarted their home-based businessby packaging up their expertise around tiny-home living. They sell courses and plans onTiny House BuildandStrawBale.com—operating everything from the comfort of their cozy, non-traditional house.

And here are some ideas for adding products to your service-based business:

Courses
Designs
Selling photos online
Downloadable reports
Digital templates
Merchandise
eBooks

As you can see, most of these ideas involve digital media packaged as products, which means no inventory to keep around the house. If you’re running your home business on Shopify, you can sell digital products seamlessly using theDigital DownloadsorSendOwlapp.

In some cases, though, productizing your expertise is more literal. That’s how Bullet Journal came about. Ryder Carroll created his own methodology to journaling that morphed into a home-based business idea. Now, he sells physical journals on his website.

Learn more:Shopify lets you sell wherever your customers are. Visitwww.theturtleeffect.com/sell．

8. Grow an audience you can monetize

如果you’re a content creator, have a sizable online audience already, or have always thought about starting your own blog,YouTube channel,Instagram account, or podcast, then you can potentially grow and monetize your following using any of the previous ideas on this list.

Andrew Finn co-foundedWait But Why, a blog-turned-business. After amassing more than 371,000 subscribers and millions of visits,they created digital content productstailored to an already loyal audience. Today, Wait Buy Why is a full-blown ecommerce site with digital and physical goods for sale.

Jordan Ferney, founder ofOh Happy Day Shop!, also built an audience via blogging and later turned it into a full-fledged home-based business. She designed her business around her life and being able to spend time with her family and now sells products on her ecommerce site.

Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark used Facebook groups to develop and nurture a community around their podcast,My Favorite Murder．This group of Murderinos, armchair investigators who are true crime fans, grew to more than 200,000 members before the podcast sunset in 2018.My Favorite Murderthen created its own paid community, the Fan Cult forum, charging members an annual fee. Capitalizing even more on its fandom,My Favorite Murderalso launched an ecommerce site with branded merchandise (it also sold event tickets there).

You can also explore becoming anaffiliate—selling other productsor services for a commission—or accepting payment for sponsored posts to give brands a chance to connect with your audience.

Building a loyal audience requires patience, consistency, and focus. This isn’t the easiest way to start a home-based business, especially not in the short-term, but if you’re able to build a following around something you love it can be one of the most fulfilling and enduring, giving you the flexibility to pursue multiple revenue streams at once.

The potential to monetize your audience often depends on the niche you choose to serve. If you’re starting from scratch or are in the midst of growing your own audience, be sure to check out the following guides to learn how to best grow and monetize the most popular channels:

9. Buy an existing ecommerce business

如果you’re more interested in investing in a source of income you can maintain while at home or on the go, consider buying an established ecommerce business.

Prices vary greatly based on a variety of factors, including total revenue generated, profit potential, available assets (like an email list or social following), inventory, and more. Some sellers will even onboard you and teach you the ropes of running their store.

Exchangeis a marketplace powered by Shopify for buying and selling ecommerce stores. You can browse the listings for businesses that suit your budget, level of experience, and needs. Maybe you want to buy a proven business and are willing to invest more money to acquire it. Or perhaps one catches your eye with untapped potential that you’d like to build on.

Standing Healthis one example of an online storeavailable for purchase on Exchange．公司目前每月1246美元的牧师enue with a 15% profit margin.

Just be sure to vet each listing and consider everything that’s included in the sale. Revenue and other data can be verified through Shopify, so you can rest assured those numbers are accurate. If you’d like some more guidance, check out our guideHow to Buy a Business on Exchange．

10. Start a subscription box business

The online subscription box industrygrew 100%over the course of just five years. That explosive growth has led to the emergence of new direct-to-consumer brands targeting this niche, as well as the adoption by major brands like Sephora and Walmart.

You canstart a subscription businessfrom home, using the help of Shopify'ssubscription managementtools. Sylvia Song, co-founder ofMISHIBOX,确实是那样。她开始进OB欧宝娱乐APP口受欢迎Korean beauty products and selling them to a global customer base—all from the comfort of her home in Virginia. Now, the thriving ecommerce brand is moving headquarters to New York.

For Song, starting a home business was about seeing a gap and finding a way to fill it. This is the secret to success for many top subscription box businesses.Birchbox, for example, saw that there was no way for consumers to test multiple beauty products without spending a fortune. So it filled that gap with affordable curated boxes of smaller sample-sized products.

Ashley Reynolds bundled surplus products into subscription boxes to sell via her ecommerce site,Cloth & Paper．如果you already run an ecommerce business at home, you could do the same to make use of what would otherwise be dead stock.

Subscription boxes don’t have to necessarily be about selling. Haverdash is a subscription box company that rents clothes. When customers are finished using the items, they send them back—andHaverdashrents them out to another customer to generate even more revenue.

11. Get involved with pets

Pet influencers are all over social media, promoting brands like BarkBox and inspiring thousands of likes with their cuteness. If you’ve got a pet of your own, you could turn them into a social media influencer and work with brands to promote their products online.

Bodhi the Menswear Dog—a.k.a. the most stylish dog in the world—has made a name for himself on Instagram in particular. Browse his feed and you’ll see collaborations with several brands like Booking.com, Spotify, andPoly & Bark．

No pets at home? Take care of other people’s pets. Apps like Rover opened up the sharing economy to pet sitting and dog walking. Dog hotels were a $6 billion industry in 2016. If you’re looking to make money from home, offer pet owners a place to drop off their animals while they head out of town.

12. Sell unwanted items

As consumers become more environmentally conscious, they’re also looking for ways to adjust their shopping habits to support sustainability. The resale clothing industry is a$4 billion industry in the U.S.alone

COAL N TERRYis one successful home-based business thatsells vintage finds．And while the business didn’texactlystart from a home—it was a college dorm room—it has since grown into a brand with a loyal following and celebrity fans.

You can start small with your own home-based business—sites like Poshmark and Mercari are great places to sell your unwanted clothing. You can even use Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace.

Unwanted items aren’t limited to previously used clothing. Food waste is an unwanted item that also presents a viable home-based business opportunity.

13. Play video games

While many may think video games are a waste of time, it’s a hobby that can actually turn a profit. And there’s nothing more home-based than sitting on your couch in front of your TV.

Esports and video game streaming platforms like Twitch have opened the door for gamers to gain notoriety—and eventually money—from their talents. The esports industry alone is worth more than $1.5 billion, and a Twitch streamer can get up to 100,000 viewers at a time.

那么如何赚钱呢?赞助是一个啊f the best ways to start a home-based competitive gaming business. Companies will pay you to play their games and stream it to your audience.

Video gaming is evenknown to be a great résumé-booster．Note, though, that all of the above requires some level of gaming skill.

Here’s a unique spin: Twitch isn’t limited to just gaming anymore, andMaxx Burman and Banks Boutté used the platformto launch an online festival where they featured 12 top video game art directors. They repurposed this content for other digital channels like Instagram and YouTube. After building a loyal audience, the two launchedKitBash3d, where they sell 3D assets for video games and movies.

Find a home business idea that works best for you

The best home business really depends on your goals. Do you want a strong work-life balance as astay-at-home mom, or do you want to hustle to achieve success quickly? How much capital do you have to start up? What skills are already in your arsenal that you can tap into?

A home-based business in today’s world is simply a remote-friendly business where technology can close the gap between you, your suppliers, your employees, and your customers. Altogether, this is a home business opportunity to start small, grow nimbly, and invest conservatively—especially when you can cut out the costs of renting an office.

As you would when starting any type of business, think carefully about your goals, what motivates you, and what you enjoy working on in order to create a home business that works for you.

Illustration by Till Lauer

Frequently Asked Questions about home business ideas

What is the best home business to start?

There are a number of businesses you can start to earn money from home. Some popular ones are starting an online store, selling homemade goods, selling online courses, freelance writing services, becoming a virtual assistant, starting a dropshipping store, offering hourly services (marketing, designing, etc.,), selling custom printed products, starting a print on demand business and more.

What are the best businesses for stay at home moms?

Stay at home moms have a lot to handle, but they can still follow their passion and start an online business. Here are some ideas to consider: go freelance with your professional services (marketing, designing, development, etc) on an hourly basis, start an online store to sell custom print products, sell handmade goods, start a dropshipping store of products you’re passionate about curating, offer online consultation in your area of expertise.

What can I make and sell from home?

There are a number of things that you can make at home and sell online, such as: Bath bombs and soaps, T-shirts and printed merchandise, jewelry, curated gift and subscription boxes, candles, sweets, art and prints, and more.

How to start working from home?

When you start working from home, it takes time to get used to your new schedule. Try following the steps listed here: Have a dedicated workspace, plan your day, limit the number of times you check email, your phone, and social media, brush up on your computer and communication skills, set office hours for yourself.

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