Micro businesses

[theanimal]

The purpose of this thread is to discuss all things microbusiness: Ideas, strategies and more. “Micro” refers to a business where the revenue and/or profit goals are on the scale of Jacobs. While there are only a handful of unicorns (billion dollar businesses), there are countless opportunities for the micro entrepreneur. Money is everywhere around us in modern western society.

I think there is a tendency to think of starting a business as a committment akin to marriage, with huge pessimistic focus on 50% failure rate and huge amount of money borrowed or saved needed to get started. If you intend to get your overall spending down to 1-eco Jacob/year anyways, starting a business (or 3) to cover that is really not all that difficult or expensive. For example:

1) Dog Walking Business (start-up expense < $1000): Do it 5 hours/week for $400 month income.
2) Green Garden Care Business (start-up expense < $10,000): Do it 5 hours/week. Pay 2 helpers 10 hrs/week for $800 month income
3) Math is Fun! Workbook Publishing Business (start-up expense < $2000): Do it 2 hours/week. Average $200 month income.

Total = $1400 month/working 12 hours week (earning $20/30/hr give or take for leverage and any applicable S-Curve) at interesting mix of stuff you find enjoyable. 1 eco-Jacob = $1200 month PPP, so you have an extra $2400 each year to start another business when 1 of the original 3 fails or becomes less than enjoyable. And, you only need to plug away full-time at some crappy full-time job flipping corporate burgers for $15/hr. for around 1 year to get started. ($30,000 - $12,000 = $18,000 = more than enough to start 3 micro-niche businesses. I started mine with less than $8000.)

Wash/Rinse/Repeat.

Yes! There are so many micro business options available once you are able to achieve ERE level spending. It is always surprising to me that there are not more examples here. Part of it is that I think there’s the cultural notion of “starting a business” like you say, meaning that it’s something grand and you should have grand ambitions like its some type of tech startup and requires all the hours that go with it. But if you’re the owner you can do whatever you want. Only want to work a few hours a week? Go right ahead! There is a lady who sells tamales near me in an 8x8 hut. She is open for only 4 days a week, four hours each time or until she sells out. She sells out every time. You could do this with any type of food in a stand, a truck, at a farmers market, at parks etc. @mF made the point to me once that you could just take any street business from the third world, spruce it up a bit and likely do very well.

Another thing that I think limits people here is that many possibilities are outside our collective Overton window. The average ERE person is so removed from the mainstream and so unlikely to depend on others that many services and opportunities that exist aren’t known. For example,I discovered a business called"poopie patrol" that goes around and picks up people's dog poop from their yard. They have multiple options but for one dog at 3x a week it's $143 a month! Find 4-5 lawns in your neighborhood and boom. Startup costs? Use a shovel, some rescued plastic bags and your bike.

Prior to hearing about this, the most ridiculous business I’d heard of is one that comes and folds people’s clothes in their house. They do not do their laundry, you still do that yourself. But once it’s done, they come by and fold everything that’s in your dryer. I’m still not sure whether that or poopie patrol is more ridiculous.

Other things I’ve seen:
-Mobile bike repair shop: I’ve seen multiple people operate this business out of a closed trailer. They show up to races, trails, parks and other relevant areas.
-Knife sharpener: In the neighborhood where I grew up, there was a guy that walked through with a cart, ringing a bell to signal his presence. He did this a couple times or so a year. He was known to do a really good job and his service was extremely popular.

[7Wannabe5]

At the small is beautiful* level, Capital can simply be represented as a tool or set of tools and Innovation can simply be represented as a new way of using a tool. So, one way to brainstorm a bajillion micro-businesses is just to think of an old tool and a new way/problem to use it or a new tool and an old way to use it. For example, a new problem is too many old people and an old tool is a screwdriver, so doing simple repairs for old people could be a micro-business. Another example would be that AI is a new tool and growing food is an old problem, so using AI to do vegetable garden design could be a micro-business. A new problem is that people work at home with the old problem of having annoying young children, so you could start a baby-walking service. A new problem is that kids are way behind on math skills due to lock-down, and old tool is flash-cards, and a new tool is smart-phone. etc etc etc

You could also form micro-co-ops, micro-partnerships, or micro-corporations to chip in towards initial tool acquisition and/or shared over-head. For example, the artist space mountainFrugal is developing or Super-Bubble-Machine-Party-Rentals-LLC or Swedish-Death-Cleaning-Junk-Hauling-Monthly-Auction-House-INC. etc etc etc

I think a refrigerator clean-out and food-that-would-be-wasted-rescue service is a very good idea, but I can't figure out an efficient way to implement it, except maybe as inverse/supplement to meal kit delivery service.


*As opposed to the much-too-large is terrible and indicative of almost everything that is wrong with our world level.

[Henry]

Snow plowing
Food shopping and delivery
House Sitting
Handyman
Uber
Murder For hire
Farm animal care
Poker nights where you supply food, table, chips cards, protection but charge an entrance fee and take percentage of winnings;

Target old people. They are awful but can't do shit. Probably bilk a few along the way.

[chenda]

Masseuse.
Ironing shirts.
Alternative therapies practitioner.
Selling food and festivals (seasonal work)
Cat sitting.
Dog grooming.
Clairvoyant.
House sitting.
Niche you tube channel like ASMR, white noise etc

Here's my favourite idea; books of fine art photography, disassemble them and sell each page as an individual print. I once bought a second hand book of nudes for about £40 and sold each double sided page for £10 each.

[basuragomi]

- Free walking tours. Get paid via tips to exercise and meet new people. There is competition for this though, professional tour guides often run these tours and will even pay tourism websites for referrals. The ERE advantage here is being able to offer more niche stuff like bike, geology or wildlife tours, or simply being more flexible and operating off-peak.
- Geologist assistant. Get paid to hike in the wilderness, get fed and transported on the company dime as well. Up to a 6 week prospecting campaign. Many of these companies are very small so hiring a contractor is preferable to them. One stint will cover your whole year's expenses.
- Grocery delivery. Yeah, there are apps for this, but they're expensive, unreliable and all the margin gets sucked up by the company. Get two or three neighbours as reliable clients, charge a few bucks and deposit for delivery. The key is to keep marginal cost/effort to you very low by bundling up demand with your own shopping or use it as paid exercise. You can parlay this into general handyman work too.
- Children's party entertainment. When I do giant bubbles it triggers some sort of prey drive in children and they go ballistic. To me it's annoying, but I can see the business opportunity. There's at least one professional bubbler in this city. Balloon animals are also super easy to learn.
- Flipping. Bikes and firearms have good margin per unit volume, and perfectly good ones often end up in the hands of people who just want them gone.
- Literally picking up money off the ground. I found that car drop-off zones around daycares tend to have a lot of change, for whatever reason. With a magnet on a stick you can do it without even getting off your bike.
- Tutoring.
- D&D paid GM, @Victor K does this, at least before his journal got nuked(?)
- Housesitter, @unemployable does this.
- Queue placeholder.
- Mineral claims speculator. Surprisingly cheap to get into and maintain claims.
- Tax preparation, the busy season coincides with the height of winter.

[chenda]

With a magnet on a stick you can do it without even getting off your bike.

Sadly coins are not magnetic.

[zbigi]

- Used clothes flipper. Scan used clothes shop for expensive brands, buy them and sell online at 10-50x profit. A friend is literally making a living out of this.

[7Wannabe5]

I once had the idea for a design that was a metal-detector, umbrella, walking stick/weapon, and folding chair in one device. You could potentially survive forever just traveling about with it and occasionally visiting a library.

[basuragomi]

@chenda, it depends on the currency and coin. In Canada, all coins are magnetic as they're either plated steel or nickel. Although after looking up US currency composition, my US pennies are probably worth more in melt value!

[chenda]

@7w5 - That's a great idea. A traditional Basque walking stick is made of wood with a mental spike at the base and I would like one. It would be nice to be able to impale any pervert one might happen across in the hills.

@basuragomi - ah that's interesting. I vaguely remember a cartoon I saw as a child where someone had become a millionaire by that very method but I was disappointed to find it didn't work with my magnet set.

[ffj]

People picker-upper

A buddy of mine has a house in a 55 and older community in Florida. At 61 he's a young kid compared to everybody else. When an old person falls (without injury) and their spouse can't pick them up they call 911 for the fire dept to send a truck out and put Grandpa back in his chair or bed. Every time he visits his vacation home the word goes out he's available and he'll get calls for everything from picking people up to toilet repairs to moving stuff.

I could easily see making some quick cash doing basic things that older people can't do anymore next to such a concentrated community.

Second: YouTube. Get a Go-Pro and start posting. Currently making $130/month or more and my channel is tiny. That's groceries each month.

[loutfard]

Arbitrage. Exploit my intimate knowledge of both a HCOL old EU country and a LCOL new EU one:
- intra-EU grey imports: identical products/EAN codes, significant price delta
- labour intensive products and services
- postal rate delta
- ...

[Henry]

I could easily see making some quick cash doing basic things that older people can't do anymore next to such a concentrated community.

Older people can't do shit. Older widows can't do less than shit. When my father died, my mother didn't know she needed to replace her HVAC air filter let alone not know how to replace her HVAC air filter.

HOA's, especially 55 year and older, are great opportunities because there are mandatory requirements placed upon the residents that need to be documented with management. For instance, dryer vent cleaning needs to be done every year or two years. We use an active police officer who does it as a side hustle. Just brings in a vacuum and then blows it out.

Also, driveway top coating needs to be done every two years. As does exterior deck painting.

As old people can't keep their big oatmeal splattered mouths shut for a minute on end, do a good job and within 15 minutes the whole fucking neighborhood will know your name.

[Stahlmann]

- Used clothes flipper. Scan used clothes shop for expensive brands, buy them and sell online at 10-50x profit. A friend is literally making a living out of this.

I doubt this. Aren't best pieces in the second hands taken by their workers?

[Ego]

Here's my favourite idea; books of fine art photography, disassemble them and sell each page as an individual print. I once bought a second hand book of nudes for about £40 and sold each double sided page for £10 each.

Yes! Decomposer Arbitrage. Identify and exploit extreme mismatches in the value of sums vs parts.

Today, there is a glut of things. Many contain parts that are far more valuable individually than the whole. Estates, buildings, houses, cars, bicycles, broken electronics, broken musical instruments, old tools collections, vinyl record collections, art collections, coin collections, old clothing collections, old sewing machine parts (thank you @Sclass!), old jewelry boxes full of precious metals tangled together with non-precious metals... really old collections of any kind.

The trick is to access the most valuable parts, while funneling the less valuable leftover pieces to someone else who can extract additional value.

[jacob]

I doubt this. Aren't best pieces in the second hands taken by workers?

It really depends on where in the world you are. In the US, thrift stores have wisened up to the online market to the point where the "good stuff" is not just flipped by customers or employees but by the store itself. There are literal hangars with mountains full of the "bad stuff". A good way is to think of it as slide, where "shit flows downhill". Some slides are taller than others. If you're near the top at a tall one, it's still possible. For example, @Ego sits near the top of a tall slide, picking up discarded products that people haven't even bothered to take out of the box. Whereas where I live, scavenging is so common and formalized that there's a specific business license for that purpose.

[zbigi]

I doubt this. Aren't best pieces in the second hands taken by their workers?

Possibly, but he specializes in luxury brands that aren't even present in Poland. So, your average store worker might pick out your run-of-the-mill Tommy Hilfigers or Armanis, but not the highly esoteric brands, that almost no one in Poland, except for people who are explicitly interested in fashion, has even heard of. He also flips clothes from standard consumer brands (e.g. Nike), but belonging to some short, limited series, and hence having collector value. They're often ugly, so again the store employees might not think there's a lot of value in them

[Stahlmann]

I think most of the business is taken here by site named vinted(.pl). It has even American .com version. Let's wait for zbigi's answer.

Edit:
Oops. Answer appeared.

[7Wannabe5]

There are also many ways to recycle the contents of older in-the-public-domain books. For instance, my sister and I made t-shirts for our business by printing cool old book illustrations with associated captions on used thrift t-shirts. It doesn't necessarily take a ton of effort or talent to transform some stuff from the $1 Goodwill table and/or some stuff from nature into some kind of art/style/fashion.For my white elephant Xmas exchange gift this year, I am making a shrunken apple head doll of a certain well known political figure using Goodwill scraps and wire hanger for body, apple (obviously) for head, little beads for eyes, plastic scraps for teeth, and some of my own orangey-blonde hair I trimmed off for his bouffant.

[AxelHeyst]

Some categories of microbusinesses:
.Is this the sort of thing where revenue is roughly linear with hours spent? (eg mowing lawns, massaging necks...)
.Or stepwise with the creation of discrete non-replicable artifacts? (eg building furniture, physical art, renovating kitchens, building vans...)
.Or does it potentially generate passive income (build a thing once, sell it as many times as people want to buy eg books, online courses, yt videos, software).
.If the latter, how evergreen is it / what's the decay function? (e.g. a course on how to use chatgpt5 might make money now, but likely won't in a year or two. But a good novel or nonfic might sell steadily or even increasing copies over time).