<p>I REALLY want to start my own business! I plan to pursue a career in business and apply to undergrad business schools. I want to start a business to show colleges what I am capable of. If anyone has any ideas that would either make me stand out or just general business ideas that'd be so helpful!</p>
<p>I definitely want to sell some kind of product. The whole lawn-mowing, computer fixing, website-making etc. business are not for me. I want to sell some sort of merchandise. Start up money is no issue because I made a little over $5K by buying and re-selling online products. </p>
<p>Anyone have any good ideas or remember what other people you know did? It doesn't have to be ground-breaking or innovative, just something that can get my own business rolling. Thanks so much for the help, so appreciated!</p>
<p>This isn’t how starting a business works. You don’t decide you want to start a business and then try to figure out what your idea is; you have a cool idea and decide to start a business around it.</p>
<p>Ok I am aware but I am not thinking of anything innovative or “new”. I am not trying to come up with a million dollar idea. For example, my friend designed sweatshirts and then sold them. I would do something like but I am not creative. Just looking for general known ideas that maybe people have seen others do.</p>
<p>Again, it doesn’t work that way. Starting a new business is about using the skills you do have to create a product people will pay for. If you just want to start A Business but have no vision for what it ought to be, you will fail.</p>
<p>^$5k is actually perfectly fine, given a thing called the Internet.</p>
<p>However, what everyone is saying is accurate. This is really not how you got about starting a business. You don’t go out in search of other people’s ideas.</p>
<p>Think about something you need and would pay for, but which you can’t find, or for which it is too much of a hassle for you to find. That’s one way to find ideas.</p>
<p>$5K is not a lot of money. Not saying its not doable, just saying that you run through $5K pretty quickly while trying to live and start a business.</p>
<p>If the OP made $5K doing something, maybe s/he should keep doing that and grow that activity.</p>
<p>I will disagree and say that for an online or small local business, and for the OP’s specific situation, $5k is more than enough to get you off the ground. We’re not talking about a full-out brick-and-mortar store, or a restaurant, etc. It obviously depends on what the OP would do.</p>
<p>For an online-business, it’s $9 per year for a domain, and the OP will probably not need to spend any more than $120 a year for servers/hosting. An online business would also be able to keep inventories low, and in certain circumstances would be able to keep inventories at 0. You can also easily find high-quality, free software packages for setting up an e-commerce website (through a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal, for example) that do not require any programming/coding (only technical savvy).</p>
<p>Furthermore, OP is living at home and doesn’t have to worry about rent/food/utilities/computer/internet.</p>
<p>For a local business, things would depend and it is much harder to predict.</p>
<p>Stick with how you made your 5k and expand on it. Look into wholesaling to increase your quantity and margins. That is far more impressive than trying to “start a business”.</p>
<p>I think you’re missing the point here. You don’t find an idea for the sake of starting a business, you start a business for the sake of fulfilling an already thoughtout idea.</p>