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Written by | March 12, 2024
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Can there really be that many good business ideas? Yes, there can. This is actually our filtered-down list—you should have seen how many other almost-good ideas nearly made the cut.
Whether you’re an experienced entrepreneur or brand new to the scene, we’ve compiled the best-of-the-best business ideas for you to bring to life in 2024. These range from freelance writing to career coaching to dog walking and everything in between.
Ready to find your next big idea? Keep scrolling.
It’s not always just the idea you need to think about. Sometimes it’s you, the situation, market circumstances, or industry trends.
One business idea can be good today and bad tomorrow. It all depends on various factors (both predictable and unpredictable). Not every good business idea will be right for you, and that’s OK.
Fortunately for you, you don’t need 50 good business ideas—you really just need one. Here’s what to keep in mind when finding the right startup idea:
Once you’ve found the right business idea, don’t quit your day job (yet). Test it first.
We’ve broken down these good business ideas into a few different sections. Here’s how they’re categorized:
Types of Good Business Ideas
Low-Cost Startup Ideas
Online Business Ideas
Remote Business Ideas
Freelance Ideas
Business Ideas for Women
Side Hustle Ideas
Recession-Proof Business Ideas
Don’t Skip: How to Start a Business from Scratch (Step-By-Step Process)
Starting a business can be expensive. Rent, wages, inventory, advertising, web hosting, marketing—it all starts to add up quickly.
Fortunately, not every good business idea costs a fortune. You can find plenty that cost little to no cash to launch. Let’s start with these low-cost startup ideas first:
1. Freelance Writing: Turns words into income as a for-hire freelance writer. Find an industry that interests you and start writing. This could be thought-leadership articles, SEO-driven content, email campaigns, social media posts, or web pages.
2. Consulting: Freelancers tend to provide deliverables, while consultants provide advice, strategy, and expertise. If you’ve been in an industry for quite some time, there’s a good chance businesses will pay for your wisdom as a consultant. Develop expertise in emerging industries, like AI, to be an early adopter in a niche agency.
3. Course Creating: Have lucrative know-how? Bundle it all up into a well-designed online class and sell it as a course creator. We’re all for it—that’s what we do at Foundr.
4. Podcasting: Total podcast listeners are growing 20% each year. Jump in on the action by creating your own audio-based show. Here’s how to make your podcast stand out from the rest.
5. Blogging: Everyone likes blogs—you’re reading one right now. If you like to write, drive traffic to a website with blogging. Once you have an audience, you can monetize your visitors with ads, ecommerce, sponsorships, donations, and affiliate marketing. Speaking of affiliate marketing…
6. Affiliate Marketing: Instead of selling your own products, sell other businesses’ goods. You’ll make a commission every time someone clicks through your links and makes a purchase. Learn how Catena Media’s Erik Bergman used affiliate marketing to launch an IPO (initial public offering) his consultancy firm.
7. Website Building: Over 627,000 new businesses open each year in the US, and every single one of them needs a website. If you have a knack for building them, sell your services as a website builder. Here’s how to build sites quickly.
We won’t pretend starting a business is easy. It comes with a suite of challenges that bring even the best entrepreneurs to despair, headaches, and tears.
However, it’s worth the challenge.
Lucky for you, some business ideas are easier to start than others. If you’ve never dabbled in launching a business, then these online business ideas for beginners are a great place to start.
8. Ecommerce: Ecommerce is just selling stuff on the internet. Find a product, sell it online, and make a killing. That’s easier said than done, but our guide on how to start an ecommerce business will walk you through the entire process.
9. Virtual Assisting: Help businesses, executives, and freelancers schedule appointments, make phone calls, submit invoices, and manage basic finances as a virtual assistant.
10. Social Media Managing: Many businesses don’t have the bandwidth to manage social networks across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok (yes, TikTok). If you’re a savvy social media marketer, you can provide management services across paid and organic channels.
11. Branding: Designing a top-notch logo is hard. Writing a clever tagline is a challenge. Tying it all together into one cohesive brand—that’s the struggle of a branding expert. If you have a talent for it, sell your services in a freelancing or consulting capacity.
12. Domain Flipping: Instead of building websites from scratch, buy existing sites from domain marketplaces. They could be in great, semi-rough, or poor condition—your job is to polish them up and sell them for a profit.
13. Subscription Box Curating: Create a subscription box for a niche in need. There’s a lot of competition in this space, so you’ll need to be clever with your offering and targeting—but Henrik Werdelin built a 9-figure subscription box business just for dogs.
New business ideas have blossomed due to the acceptance of remote work. Give these remote work ideas a try to launch a business and help alleviate unexplored problems.
14. Wellness Programming: Remote work isn’t great for everyone—some folks struggle with stress and isolation. As a wellness programmer, you can provide ways to relax, decompress, and focus on mental and emotional wellbeing. This could be in the form of yoga, meditation, stretching, training, or just healthy habits.
15. Remote Work Services: Provide remote-empowering solutions to businesses in need. While it feels like remote started decades ago, some companies are still learning to adapt and cope. Offer services to boost collaboration or fill holes left open by work-from-home policies.
16. Virtual Fitness Training: Peloton doesn’t have a monopoly on online fitness—some people want other forms of exercise, and others prefer a more local community feel. Become a hyper-specialized fitness trainer in specific niches, such as ultramarathon training, rowing, ski mountaineering, or rock climbing.
17. Content Marketing: Upstart brands and corporations alike are looking for help to churn out content for their organic channels. As a content marketer, you can offer to create pieces like newsletters, website articles, social media copy, or short-form videos, all from the comfort of a home office.
Freelancing has been on the up and up in recent years, and the pandemic has only been a catalyst for the movement. Especially with the Great Resignation upon us, companies need freelancers to step up to the plate and take over heaps of work.
If you have the right skill set, you can fulfill that need with one of these freelance job ideas.
18. Video Shooting and Editing: Video content is all the rage, but it’s not easy for busy businesses to produce. If you know your way around a camera and video editing software, you can find plenty of work as a freelance video specialist.
19. Career Coaching: Help clients find their way through their dream careers. You might guide them towards a more appropriate, fulfilling job, or you could give them the tools they need to negotiate their next big promotion.
20. Public Relations: Help businesses land press coverage with media kits, networking, press releases, and storytelling. It’s a demanding job, but it’s right if you like working in a non-stop, fast-paced environment.
21. Marketing: Use content marketing, email, social media, and advertising to market your clients’ products and services. Marketing is all-encompassing, and you’ll likely choose to niche down to a specific channel or strategy down the road.
22. App Developing: Apps are becoming a must-have part of most businesses’ products and services. However, finding an available engineer to build an app is near impossible. If you know your way around Java, Swift, or Kotlin, you’ll be in high demand for mobile app development.
23. Integrating: Some leaders inspire, others innovate, and a few dream. Integrators get things done. They take dreams and aspirations and turn them into reality. It’s a hands-on job, but it’s high-visibility and high-reward.
24. AI Consultant: With so many AI tools available, businesses are struggling to know how to implement them. Be someone’s go-to for AI implementation and consulting.
There are 114% more women entrepreneurs now than 20 years ago. Women are looking for more autonomy, work-life balance, and financial freedom—and they’re finding it on their own rather than waiting for the corporate world to change.
If you’re looking for a good business idea that promises location flexibility and work schedule independence, we have a few thoughts. Plus, these business ideas for women entrepreneurs are typically in women-dominated industries—helping you escape the gender discrimination more prevalent in male-dominated sectors.
25. Etsy Shop: Esty is the go-to marketplace for creative entrepreneurs. Want to make one-of-a-kind products? This is where to go to sell them.
26. Interior Designing: Have an eye for design? Become a residential or commercial interior designer. Ergonomic setups and feng shui (arranging furniture for balance) are becoming more of a priority in the business world, meaning more opportunities for you.
27. Graphic Designing: Logos, landing pages, websites, hero images, email campaigns—anything with pixels needs a graphic designer’s touch. While tools like Canva are growing in popularity, they’ll never replace a need for graphic design experts.
28. Dropshipping: Sell products without storing them in your home or a warehouse. It’s the perfect anti-Lula Roe way to sell goods without risking inventory issues.
29. Life Coaching: Coaching isn’t just for career advice. Sometimes, people need life advice. It’s less therapy and more guidance.
30. Tutoring: Online course instructing is when you want to teach the masses—tutoring is for more private 1:1 teaching. Have an in-demand skill? There’s a good chance someone will pay you to teach it to them.
31. Real Estate: Purchase investment properties, find a tenant to pay rent (hopefully covering the monthly mortgage), and sell the property after it appreciates substantially. That’s real estate for you.
32. Wedding Planning: A wedding is the most important day of two partners’ lives. If you can navigate all the moving parts and piece together something beautiful, you’ll be on everyone’s contact list come springtime.
33. Personal Chef: You don’t need to own a restaurant to be a chef. More individuals and families are hiring personal chefs to cook in private settings.
34: Event Planning: Conferences, parties, meetings, conventions, trade shows—they need talented event planners to come together. If that sounds like you, you’ll always have a job in event planning.
35. Makeup Artist: Makeup isn’t as easy as it looks in the commercials, and that’s why makeup artists are killing it on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok showing people how it’s done.
36. Cleaning Business: Everyone needs cleaning: commercial and residential. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty (or managing the business), you’ll find plenty of messy people begging for your help.
Some ideas start better as a side hustle until they bloom to maturity. Side hustles (for better or worse) are less committing than full-time ventures. You can often grow them on the side while maintaining your 9-to-5 until the timing is right.
You also have the option to keep them as a side hustle. Not everyone wants to quit their full-time job and become an all-in entrepreneur, and that’s OK. These are the perfect side hustle jobs for pursuing a passion, making an extra buck, or laying the roots for your next business.
37. Ghostwriting: If you don’t mind trading credit for income, ghostwriting can be a lucrative business idea.
38. Podcast Editing: Some people thrive doing podcast interviews, but they can’t navigate the editing process. That’s where you come in.
39. Influencer Marketing Specialist: Most businesses are hesitant to start with influencer marketing simply because they don’t know how. Tell them what they need to know and hold their hand through the process.
40. Lead Generation Consulting: Sales aren’t always the root of the problem—sometimes, it’s lead generation. Guide a client through how they can build and optimize their lead funnel.
41. Browser Extension Developing: Mobile apps are nice, but sometimes a built-in browser extension is more appropriate.
42. Data Scientist: Know your way around numbers? Businesses have more data than they know what to do with. Help them understand the stories behind the numbers.
43. Quality Assurance Testing: There’s a lot of pressure for apps to be built quickly, but that doesn’t mean quality assurance isn’t a priority. Your job is to break apps so that developers can fix them before they go public.
44. Public Speaking Coaching: Public speaking will likely always be a struggle for a large number of individuals. If you can help executives and would-be presenters overcome their fears and step up to the stage, you’ll have a job in public speaking coaching.
45. Media Training: Don’t put an executive in front of a microphone until they’ve been trained on what to do (and more importantly: what not to do). It’s your job to make sure they don’t screw up.
46. Contract Writing: Know your way around legalese? Help businesses write up contracts.
47. Translating: If you’re bilingual, there’s a good chance you can find gigs for translating the two languages.
48 Dog Walking: Just because more people are working from home doesn’t mean they don’t want a dog walker. Sometimes, they don’t want to leave the house, and other times they can’t with illness or kiddos.
49. Pet Sitting: People want to travel and see the world, but they can’t always bring their furry friend. Keep them company for payment.
50. Travel and Experience Host: If you live in a major metropolitan city or somewhere that’s a destination for travelers, it’s easy to take advantage of platforms like Airbnb to host guests in your home or plan custom experiences that only a local can provide. Whether it’s a food tour in your neighborhood or a guided historical hike, travelers will fork out cash to experience your home like you do.
Sketchy economic times require backup plans. With 9 to 5 jobs in flux, starting a business during a recession is a secure way to make side income and take advantage of shifts in the market.
51. Finance Coach: With a tightening economy comes tightening budgets. As a finance coach, you can help families objectively adjust their monthly budgets and offer suggestions on cutting costs to free up cash.
52. Content Creator: Making entertaining and engaging content for platforms like TikTok, Twitch, or YouTube doesn’t seem like a stable idea, but it meets two criteria of a recession-proof business. First, it’s low-cost to start. All you need is a phone, ideas, and your personality. Second, it meets consumers’ demands during tight economic conditions—escapism and low-cost entertainment.
53. Home Repair: No matter what’s happening with S&P 500, pipes will burst, lights will flicker, and furnaces wig out. Starting a home repair business will keep you in demand no matter the economic climate because what can go wrong will go wrong with a house.
54. Cleaning Services: Almost half the families in America have both parents employed, meaning there’s not much time to make the house squeaky clean for a hosting. It doesn’t matter if the economy is up or down; people are willing to pay for a cleaning service on the regular or in a pinch before their in-laws come from the weekend.
Keep Learning: How to Start an Online Business
Once you’ve zeroed in on your good business idea, it’s time to make it a reality. However, you need more than just an idea—you need skills and know-how.
That’s where we can help.
Sign up foundr+ for $1, and we’ll help you every step of the way along your business journey.
Building a Business
About Jesse Sumrak
Jesse Sumrak is a writing zealot focused on creating killer content. He’s spent almost a decade writing about startup, marketing, and entrepreneurship topics, having built and sold his own post-apocalyptic fitness bootstrapped business. A writer by day and a peak bagger by night (and early early morning), you can usually find Jesse preparing for the apocalypse on a precipitous peak somewhere in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
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