Low Capital Businesses You Can Start Right Out of School

Low Capital Businesses You Can Start Right Out of School

Sean: Hey guys, welcome back to the show. It’s your boy, Sean Si, and this is the Leadership Stack podcast. If you’re tuned in on YouTube, please do hit the subscribe button, the like button, and the bell notification icon, so that you can be alerted whenever we have a new video. And if you’re on Spotify, please do hit the follow button. That helps us out a lot.

Today we are going to be talking about low capital requirement businesses that you can start straight out of school. And I have to give you a heads up because I’m in the digital marketing industry. And I started my business with nothing but PHP1,300. For those few who speak in dollars, that’s somewhere $60.

And that’s all I used to start my business and now it’s a multi-million peso business and it is worldwide in terms of our reach. And the companies that we service, we have served the UK, we’ve served Singapore, China, India, Dubai, US. A lot of countries. We’ve served a lot of countries already.

And some of the things that I’m going to be introducing to you today have to do with digital marketing, because I am very familiar with the digital marketing services industry. So the first business that you can actually start today that would pay well and would give you a good amount of security cashflow coming in is the writing or editing business.

A lot of people, a lot of companies, need content today. You can list yourself as a writer or editor in Fiverr or Upwork and look for projects or gigs there. Or you can have your own website developed for you and feature yourself as a writer and editor and then grow from there to hire other freelancers and build a team.

And so you can be a content farm where you can keep producing content for other companies and other websites out there who will need a very steady stream of content churn. That is a really good business, especially when there’s tons of content being churned out, and ranking in Google is a very, very big deal.

Another low capital requirement business that you could start straight out of college is podcast editing. A lot of podcasts have cropped up during the pandemic. For some reason, a lot of people started podcasting. Leadership Stack, we started July 2019, before the pandemic.

But podcast editing is something that is important to a lot of podcasters because usually podcasters such as myself, we want to focus on producing really good quality content. And for us, editing is not going to be our forte. It is something that we’re going, at most, moderate at.

So we better outsource that to people who really know what they’re doing. So if you are into audio editing and you’re passionate about audio, that may be something that you might want to start.

Another one is vlogging. Today, the vlogging industry has grown and a lot of people have entered the scene, but I would say that not a lot of them know what they’re doing. And so being a really good vlogger that has a good niche and you’re focused in that certain niche and that certain industry and you’re really good and you’re very knowledgeable at that niche, that is going to be a very good business for you.

And all you need to have is a camera, some video editing skills, and that’s it. You can upload the vlog on YouTube or Facebook, and start looking for sponsors or people who might want to be in the show. If your subscriber count is growing, if your viewership is growing, then other companies or organizations might want to sponsor you, especially if their product or service is aligned with your channel’s niche.

At the very beginning, vlogging may not be as lucrative as the other startup ideas that I’m going to be mentioning, but that’s because vlogging is something that you’re going to build as yourself. And when we’re starting out, every start-up, when we’re starting out, our branding is not that powerful. Companies are not very interested in who we are because we don’t have a following yet.

So as you build your following count, your subscriber count, and your viewership count, your revenue also increases. This requires a lot of discipline, a lot of consistency, and a lot of know-how in whatever it is that you’re going to be blogging about.

Next is going to be a suite of different digital marketing startup ideas. The most common of which is social media marketing. If you’re someone who spends a lot of time on social, knows the trends and knows how to reach other people through your Facebook posts, Twitter posts, Instagram posts, maybe being a social media marketer is the thing for you.

Once you have a growing number of companies asking you to help them as a freelance social media marketer, maybe you want to make that more official, hire more people, maybe as a freelancer at first, but also hire them full-time as you go on, as the business grows, and have your own social media marketing company.

That is something that is in-demand today. Maybe most organizations have their own Facebook page, have their own Instagram account, or LinkedIn page already, and they do need social media marketers to handle that for them.

Next is going to be SEO. My favorite. So SEO Hacker, I used SEO to build the company up. We are now a 50 man team. I had no capital and started the company when I was 22 years old. Unofficially, I was doing SEO since I was 21 years old. And I learned the craft, started hiring people just like with what I shared with social media marketing.

That’s what I did with SEO Hacker. I grew the company as a sole proprietor. Projects started coming in. A lot of companies were inquiring for me to do SEO for them and I couldn’t do it myself. So I started hiring freelancers. And then more projects came in so I got my first office.

I made sure that I fully employed some people already for stability and quality of work and it grew and it grew and it grew. And the rest, as they say, is history. And we are a multimillion peso company today with a huge client portfolio to boot.

And then we do have web development and design. A lot of people do web development and design already so the market is actually saturated with web developers and designers. But there’s still wiggle room for you to come in, especially if that’s your thing. 

You like programming websites.You like building them. You like designing them. You feel a lot of fulfillment when you actually produce a website that’s easy-to-use both on desktop and mobile, and you feel good about it being your handiwork. That is going to be the business for you.

And a lot of companies are still trying to catch-up. They still don’t have a really good website. Their website is pretty badly designed. You can come in and help them. There’s still a lot of companies like that and there is still a market for web designers and developers today.

Next would be online group buying, or in Tagalog, we call this ‘pabili’. You can actually create a group. Or you, yourself, if you have a scooter, a motorcycle, or a car, you can actually go to a certain grocery and post in a Facebook group that you’re going there, and a lot of people could ask you to buy stuff for them and you will deliver it to them for a certain fee. Of course, your fee has to be lower than the other grocery delivery providers out there

We also have drop shipping. That’s another business that you can start. If you don’t have the money to buy a product that you could sell in ecommerce stores because you have to have a minimum order quantity or an MOQ of that product, and that could cost you millions of pesos, then you could do drop shipping.

If you’re wondering, do we have a drop shipping company here in the Philippines? Yes, we do. You could check out Dropify. That’s owned by a good friend of mine, Charles Sy. He has actually been in the Leadership Stack Podcast as a guest. You could search it in Google, Dropify Philippines, you’d be able to find his website. Sign up there and you could start drop shipping.

He will be the ones actually buying the products for you and all you need to do is sell it in Lazada, in Shopee, or in your own website, and you get an affiliate cut whenever you sell anything. So that’s the beauty of drop shipping. You actually make money selling products online without you having to pony up the capital to buy those products yourself.

Next is VA or being a virtual assistant. A lot of people and executives today and even start-up business owners need a virtual assistant. And these VAs or virtual assistants will be the ones to schedule meetings for them.

Scheduling meetings could take a long time for each. Scheduling a meeting could take a lot of back and forth. Some people really don’t have a lot of time to do that, especially if they’re setting the meeting via email. It takes a long time, it takes forever, so they do need a VA for that.

And if you are willing to help someone else out as their VA, you’re kind of like a glorified virtual secretary. That’s really what it is. But a lot of individuals, especially abroad, like in the US, in the UK, would pay really well for a really good VA who can help them out and support their work.

Next is packed food. If you love cooking, if that’s your thing, if you love making food that other people love to eat, then maybe you could get into the packed food industry. All you need to do is cook. Make sure that it’s going to be shippable. It’s going to be able to arrive in a fresh condition to whoever will order it.

Maybe you want to sell via Shopify, maybe you want to sell your own WooCommerce website. Anything will work so long as the food is good and you’re able to deliver on time. And when the food arrives, it’s still fresh.

A lot of people during the pandemic started food businesses as restaurants were closing down. And a lot of food businesses that were made at home, packed and shipped to their customers actually thrive during this time.

And we’re down to our last two, one of which is voice acting. A lot of people do need voice overs today, especially with all the videos coming out that are animated without any actors in there, voice acting is the thing. They need people who can actually fit the bill on the voice of their brand or on the voice of their product or service that they’re offering to the market.

Now, companies are looking for different voices. Some of them are looking for more feminine voices. Some of them are looking for masculine voices. Some of them are looking for gruff voices. Some of them are looking for high-pitched voices. It’s different and if you fit the bill of being a good voice actor, you could get a lot of gigs and that could grow into a business as well.

If you want to own a voice acting company, that is certainly something you can do today, which ties us up to our last low capital business that you could start straight out of college, which is video editing.

If you’re someone who likes tinkering with applications like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro, or DaVinci Resolve, this might be something you want to look into. A lot of people do need video editors today because, like the written word content, video content is also flooding the market.

And if you do want to be found in YouTube, if you want to be found even in Google, you might want to have really good video content in your website or in the YouTube platform itself. And for that, you’re going to need a really good video, which means you’re going to need video editors. And that is why video editing would be one of the low capital requirement businesses that you can get into straight out of school.

Now all of these things are only as good as the work ethic that you put in it and the skill that you put in it. If you become better at what you do, just like how I honed my skill in SEO and how I improved my work ethic as an SEO specialist, and as a CEO and founder during the time when I was starting up, then your business will grow and grow.

But if you throw in the towel, if somewhere along the way you lose your fuel, your passion for the craft and for the industry, you’re not going to be able to make it big and sustainable, and it will just be a really good side gig for you until you find what it is that you really want to do long term.

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