Everyone looking to start a business is looking for a business that potentially succeeds. Starting a business today doesn’t necessarily require a hefty investment. With the right idea, strategy, and determination, many have launched successful ventures with minimal capital. If you’re thinking – What are some of the top 10 most successful businesses to start, this article throws the light on some of the least capital intensive but potentially successful ones to consider.

What Makes a Business Successful?

Success in business isn’t solely about the amount of capital invested. There are important factors, asides funding, that contribute to making a business successful. These include:

• Market Demand: Are the products or services you intend to offer fulfilling a genuine need/demand?

• Scalability: Is it possible to grow the business without a proportional increase in costs making profitability difficult?

• Unique Value Proposition: What differentiates your business from competitors.

• Effective Marketing: Have you figured out effective and low cost ways to reach and capture your target audience?

• Adaptability: How will you respond to market changes and feedback from clients/customers

Understanding the above can guide aspiring entrepreneurs toward ventures with higher success potential.

For anyone with limited funds, lots of time and enough skills these are 10 of the most successful businesses you can start with minimal capital.

1. Freelance Writing and Content Creation

The global gig economy is flourishing, with businesses constantly seeking specialized skills such as content writing/creation without the overhead of full-time staff. If you have decent content writing skills you can start a business with little or no initial costs.

Choose Focus Areas: Do you want to be a generalist writer or choose specific areas to focus on. The more you focus and horn your skills the better your chances of landing higher paying writing gigs from businesses and publications. For eg if you focus on writing on business and technology, marketing, cryptocurrency.

Curate a compelling portfolio: Showcase your best work through case studies or samples. Create online portfolio urls you can easily share to showcase useful work you have done. When making pitches to prospect clients this can be very handy.

Determine competitive rates: Research what others in your field are charging.

Actively market yourself: Utilize platforms like Upwork, Fiverr; Use social media like LinkedIn, Twitter etc to show snippets of your content, build an audience and attract inbound offers; Actively network within your target industries.

2. Offer Digital Marketing Services

In the current digital age, every business, regardless of size, needs a robust online presence. A lot of businesses need help with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, content strategy, email campaigns, and paid advertising. Digital Marketing is one of the top 10 most successful businesses to start, if you have the skills.

Acquire these skills, if you don’t have them, by taking high quality online courses, Build your portfolio by offering cheap or free services to small businesses. Focus on one or two specific aspects of digital marketing to improve and become very good.

3. Online Tutoring/Coaching

If you possess deep knowledge in an academic subject, a specific skill (e.g., musical instrument, coding), fitness, accounting or even life/business strategy, you can teach what you know to hundreds or even thousands of people.

Define your area of expertise: What subjects or skills can you effectively teach or coach?

Develop your methodology: Create a structured curriculum or coaching framework for your sessions.

Select appropriate platforms and tools to use: Utilize video conferencing tools (Zoom, Google Meet) and specialized online learning or coaching platforms.

Market your services: Promote yourself through social media, educational forums, and your personal and professional networks.

4. Cleaning Services (Residential/Commercial)

This is a perennially in-demand business that offers consistent opportunities. You can begin by serving residential clients and gradually expand into more lucrative commercial contracts.

Acquire essential cleaning supplies: Start with high-quality, efficient tools.

Market locally: Distribute flyers, engage in local community groups online, and actively seek referrals from satisfied clients.

Cultivate an impeccable reputation by delivering consistently excellent service is key to retaining clients and attracting new ones.

Minimal Capital will be required for initial cleaning supplies, reliable transportation, and basic business insurance

5. Social Media Management

Businesses often need help with managing, growing and turning their social media handles into good awareness or prospect channels for their business.

If you know your way around content creation and growing social media pages you can turn it into a lucrative business.

Low startup costs knowledge of platforms and content creation tools.

Getting Started: Offer services to local businesses, create content calendars, and manage engagement.

6. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing involves promoting products or services to earn a commission for every sale made through your referral.

Startup costs are minimal: You may require just your computer, and a platform to produce content and promote products (eg A blog, Youtube channel, social media page etc)

You can join affiliate programs like Amazon Affiliates, etc. Check out guide on how to start affiliate marketing.

7. Virtual Assistant Services

Virtual Assistants help businesses or busy professionals manage several aspects of their work such as organising their calendar, handling administrative tasks or even handling customer/client support tasks. 

To startup you’ll need just a computer and access to internet as well as skills like email management, data entry, customer service, content creation etc.

As a virtual assistant you can support a few clients on monthly retainers

Check out this guide on how to become a virtual assistant

8. Podcast Show

With more and more people beginning to listen to podcasts and online talk shows, it is a viable low cost business to start.

You’ll have to have the knack for interviewing people and having interesting conversations. 

Startup costs are typically low. You’ll need just quality microphone, editing software, headphones and a good/quiet location to host your podcast.

9. Start a Consultancy

If you have knowledge in anything people can benefit from and demand solutions for, you can start making money providing solutions to those things. From event planning to interior decoration, building a website, digital marketing etc. 

Create content answering questions to challenges people face in that particular niche. Grow your social media presence, engage with relevant questions and always display how people can reach you for consulting.

You can price your consulting per session or based on periodic retainers.

10. Newsletter Business

If you have sufficient knowledge, curiosity in any niche/field or broad topic you can start a newsletter, publish quality email articles/content, grow your subscribers.

This particularly may not cost you anything aside your time to start. You can take advantage of free newsletter platforms like Substack to create your first newsletter.

Ideally you should start a weekly newsletter where you publish/send out a newsletter on a particular day weekly.

To grow subscribers you can start sharing snippets of your work on social media, guest post on relevant blogs etc.

Monetisation: When you reach a few thousand subscribers there are several ways you can monetise your newsletter. These include; setting up a premium subscriber plan (these paid subscribers get more detailed content, indepth analysis or access to more quality resources), paid sponsorships from other businesses, brands etc.