Ways to make money from home

My aim is to produce products that can be totally automated that help a new class of digitally savvy business owners who are not technical to get their business to their first 100k. There are hundreds of types of markets and personas that might fit into this broad category, but I think it’s an exciting space, that’s why I am choosing to focus on it. That being said, I want to be more pragmatic about how I select a specific niche and a problem to work on.

A quick brainstorm has produced the following list of ways that people can make money from home / online.

  • Matched betting
  • Selling information products (live classes, on demand courses & ebooks)
  • Consulting
  • Done for you services (marketing, accounting, copy writing, remote assistant, coding, sales development)
  • Content Creator (Blogger, YouTuber, Social media influencer)
  • Selling templates (WordPress, PowerPoints, Bootstrap, Calculators / Spreadsheets)
  • Lending money (Lending circle, Zopa)
  • eCommerce Arbitrage (eBay, Shopify, Dropshipping)
  • Micro SaaS
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Renting (Spare room, valuable goods)
  • Selling your own / branded products
  • Rent to Rent
  • Mailing List (Jacks Flight Club, “Things to do in London”)
  • Online Gambling
  • Selling gaming assets (Hard to get; resources, skills or characters)
  • Tutoring
  • Camming
  • Content Curator (aggregating different content from different places, forums)
  • Pateron
  • Selling subscriptions to premium content or access
  • Audience builder(?)

 

I am thinking about these markets in different ways;

  1. What are the barriers to entry and how easy are they to access?
  2. How accessible are the people who are in this market?
  3. Are these markets big and growing?
  4. Do these markets have participants with a significant amount of capital?
  5. What phase do I want to interrupt? (It’s often much easier to convert a sale if there is a grounding of the need in a transition – getting married, switching from validating to growth stage, starting a business from home)
  6. Is there a cheap way to get to the first batch of customers?

My Validation Checklist

I’ve decided to share this tool early on in this journey because it’s a crucial step in venturing out on a new project as a bootstrapper / Indie Hacker. It’s probably the most important step in building your business.

By leveraging a Validation Checklist in line with your goals, you’ll save weeks, months or maybe even years of wasted time. It also helps you prioritise between all of the ideas you might have.

In the video below, I take you through all of the questions I ask myself before kicking off a project AND I share why they are important. Watching it will help you understand:

  • Why some projects do better than others
  • What you should build next
  • Is your idea any good?
  • Will people care about your idea

Obviously, you’ll want to customise this for your own use, but copy and pasting most of the points I have and understanding the implications of them will be a game changer for you.

If you have a project already, this could help you answer questions like:

  • Why haven’t you made any sales?
  • Where can you find customers?
  • Is there a market for your product?
  • Do people care about your product?

Detailed walkthrough the checklist

Investing this time up front, could save you months of frustration and get you on track for building your ideal business, so I highly recommend that you digest my list and build your won as soon as possible.

During the video above, I mentioned one of my ‘tricks’ for finding your target market online, if you’re interested, you can watch that video here. For more content like this, make sure you subscribe via email on the right, checkout my YouTube channel and follow me on twitter.

 

Download My Current Validation Checklist

You can download the latest version of my checklist here – remember that you’ll need to customise it for your goals and objectives.

 

Download Validation Checklist