We ask every one of our interviewees to offer up one large or small business idea that we can give away to our awesome readers (yup, you). Here are 17 small business ideas we think are a) delicious and b) reasonably easy to actually bring to life. Btw, these ideas themselves are stolen from our ebook Someone Needs To which contains over 500 large and small business ideas and can be had for only $4.99.
1. An airport luggage service
I think a service that picks up luggage from your home and brings it to the airport would be useful. It could cut down on the luggage time and costs at the airport and make travel much easier and more enjoyable since you wouldn’t have to carry your luggage around and stand in a line to check it.
Farbood Nivi – Founder of Learnist (@farbood)
2. Sell unneeded tech products
Go out to businesses and offer them to clean (both internally and externally) their unused supply of technical products: computers, phones, printers, keyboards etc. Sell them second hand and share the revenue with the companies. As a corporate client, I can choose to donate my share to charity or keep it in the business.
Louise Eriksson – Founder and CEO of Vint (@joinvint)
3. Permacultural landscaping for edible front and back yards
So many people are into the locavore movement and slow food, but they might not have the time or energy to get into sustainable gardening on their own property. It’d be a high-end service but the 20% of your audience that does want intensive help sustainably growing their own food with no pesticides could generate a nice profit. Plus, it’s a socially responsible business.
Jared Brown – Co- Founder of Hubstaff.com (@HubStaff)
4. A local laundry marketplace
A website that connects people who want to wash and iron clothes for money, with lazy people who want their laundry done.
Brad Dunn – Founder and Executive Director of Nazori (@jesterhoax)
5. Gas delivery
Delivery gas… Think Uber for filling up your car with gas. Everyone hates filing up gas, you always drive home on empty and are so over filling up and then when you wake up in the morning to go to work you are so pissed you didn’t fill up the night before. There is never a good time to fill up gas. Imagine an app where you could order gas to your car. A small gas truck pulls up in the night and fills your car up right in your driveway
Torrey Tayenaka – CEO of Sparkhouse (@tayenaka)
6. Manage people’s digital assets when they die
I think there’s huge potential for managing people’s digital assets when they die. How will they hand down digital pictures to their relatives? What happens to every digital purchase they’ve ever made? There should be some kind of service that will catalog assets and serve as a vault for families.
Mike Spakowski – Founder of Atomicdust (@mspako)
7. Set-up a commercial kitchen for ambitious home cooks
Go into any decent-sized urban area, and rent a large building with a well-equipped kitchen. Allow smaller home cooks who are looking to get their businesses off the ground to rent time slots in the kitchen. This will give them the ability to have a sanitary, state- inspected area to create their product — without having to invest in the massive overhead needed.
Q Manning – CEO of Rocksauce Studios (@qmanning)
8. Car repair as a service
No need to drive your car to the repair shop and spend the day waiting. We pick up your car in the evening, take it to a central location where we streamline the process and bring it back to you before the sun rises. You can schedule a pickup and follow the process through our app.
Saar Yoskovitz – Founder and CEO of Augury Systems (@yosko_s)
9. A peanut butter and jelly food truck on college campuses
Very small number of SKUs, low operating costs, very high margins and an opportunity to make college students very happy.
Aaron Michel – CEO of PathSource (@pathsource)
10. A home maintenance service
Someone should start a business maintaining homes for a monthly fee. It’s kind of a hybrid between renting and owning. The owner has a fixed monthly cost and the business takes responsibility
for all maintenance items. The better the home is maintained, the less chance that something expensive will happen, so the business is incentivized to keep the house in good shape. This model is like health care cooperatives—the better they take care of prevention, the less treatment they have to pay for.
Jeremy Jaech – Co-founder of SNUPI Technologies (@WallyHome)
11. Photo post-processing as a service
With digital cameras, we have a tendency to take hundreds of pictures and then lazily throw them up on Facebook or Dropbox. But professionals take time picking out the few best photos, touching them up, and making them perfect. With this idea, you’d send the service all of your photos from the event. They would choose the best ones, edit them, and give you some real art that will blow everyone away.
Zvi Band – Founder and CEO of Contactually (@Contactually)
12. Help small businesses collect their account receivables
Small- and mid-sized businesses usually have cash flow issues because nobody is assigned to follow up with accounts receivables to get them in sooner. I would pay a fair amount for someone to simply call clients and remind them that their payments are due.
Charles Cantu – Founder of Huddled Masses (@CharlesCantu)
13. Promotional services for ebooks
There is a need for ebook promotional services. A company who focuses on independent authors and does press releases, targeted ads, blogger outreach, and PR.
Alessandra Torre – Author of Blind- folded Innocence (@ReadAlessandra)
14. A trademarking services business
A trademarking services business that can trademark any business for you, acquire domains, and adjacent domain names, as well as petition social networks to get the rights to your specific brand name.
Wesley P. Belden – Founder and CEO of Waffle (@GoWaffleMe)
15. Create and sell affordable video content
With video growing hugely in digital marketing, small businesses are going to desperately need help creating video content at an affordable rate. Custom video creation is expensive and time- intensive. Small businesses won’t be able to take part and will need a solution. Stock video sites may be something small businesses utilize. Similar to photo stock, videos would be customizable and tweakable to make them branded. A framework or template solution would be very attractive to the millions of businesses that will struggle to create video in the next 12 to 24 months.
Tony Rindsberg – Co-founder and CMO of SOCi (@soci_tony)
Please take one of these small business ideas and run with it. Then let us know once you make it big. Or if none of these ideas are quite what you were looking for, then do check out our nifty e-book with 500+ business ideas. It’s less than $5.
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.