55 Low Investment Business Ideas For Computer Engineers [2023]

Long before I had the idea to start a company, I had a broken keyboard. My background is in IT and I have a group of friends lovingly named “The Nerds” who are my go-to for any questions technical in nature. So I sent an email to the nerds and asked which keyboard should I buy? One of the replies suggested trying a mechanical keyboard. I had some sticker shock spending $70+ on a keyboard, but I use my keyboard day in and day out and always had the mindset to splurge on the items you use most in life.

In the process of doing some research on what was the best product for me, I stumbled onto a community of keyboard enthusiasts at geekhack that were doing some fascinating things. I was drawn in by the visuals of makers creating custom keycaps, custom key layouts, and sharing vintage models. It was on geekhack that I was introduced to the concept of a group buy. Many entrepreneurs come to understand the inherent limitation in the manufacturing process known as the MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) and pricing that is dependent on quantity.

It was just simple inquiries that landed me coverage on Gizmodo, Linus Tech Tips, and Wired.

Tim and I met during an online hackathon. During the hackathon participants were encouraged to meetup for real. We actually got on really well, and stayed friends and kept spitballing ideas for a startup for years.

At this time, I was a design student at Central Saint Martins and I had recently won a competition for Sony Music creating an interactive music video for the band Hurts with my friend Virgil. Then soon after graduation, I started working as a creative technologist in London for a bunch of different advertising & branding agencies and a few startups too.

I've always worked in IT, solving technical problems for small and big companies.

During my 15 years career in network security, I was lucky to help a lot of different types of customers: from small family-owned businesses to multinationals corporations.

It’s all about people. Don't focus on the number of subscribers, followers, opt-in, conversions… when you start is all about building relationships with people.

Our product is a website. The process of designing and developing it was very similar to designing and developing any website or an information system. As both I and the other main founder were software developers, this part was pretty straightforward for us. However, we still did some things pretty right and some things pretty wrong.

The funny part about any SEO-based business is that you can’t really make decent planning. Do you plan to improve some parts of your website and grow? Well, good luck with that, almighty G can have completely different plans for you.

What we made right was a decision to create a system that models all the relations and information about online casinos as structured data. As an example: almost every online casino has a list of countries from which it doesn’t allow residents to play. To capture this information we have created a database table casino_restricted_country and fill it with 1 record for every casino and every country that is on its restricted list.

I’m the son of a therapist and an artist, and both sides of that upbringing prepared me well to manage a creative business! I was always playing with code and design growing up, and was lucky enough to have my dad’s tech hand-me-downs to learn on.

I regret bootstrapping because it forced us into making decisions based on the fear of running out of money, rather than on trying to find long-term value.

I majored in Mathematics at NYU, but while in classes I started to get the itch to design again. I did some portfolio pieces in photoshop but needed a website. I taught myself the basics by spending hours in Barnes & Noble reading every web design and development book I could find (even though I couldn’t afford to take them home) and got hooked.

Before starting 1ON1 SEO Training, I had worked for 15 years in the SEO industry, where I successfully ran my own SEO and digital marketing agency, Design & Promote, for over 10 years. I built that business from the ground up, starting as the sole employee until it became a prominent business in the area with a full staff and multiple offices. Eventually, I got an offer I couldn’t pass up and decided to sell the business.

Sometimes people think that SEO is about broad strokes and taking general actions when in reality the situation needs to be looked at with a microscope to really pay off. Many times it is the smallest details that make the biggest difference.

With that business off my plate, it was time to take on a new project. I realized while running my agency that what I loved to do most about my job was teach others how to do SEO. In the past, I had become known for my “free services”, where I gave free consultations to clients that other companies normally charged for, and my free monthly seminars where other business people were invited to come and gain knowledge about search engine optimization. However, those moments had always been my way of giving back next to my business endeavors.

Ironically, my wife is a French teacher whose business I had helped build through years of SEO work. One day I thought about how she teaches classes from her own, and then the idea occurred to me that I could be doing the same with SEO, which has always been a passion of mine. I also figured that I could address a lot of the problems I ran into in my old business and rework them with my new one to better serve my clients - more about that later. This allowed me to offer a new and improved model for spreading the effectiveness and benefit of SEO to businesses.

Growing up, I’ve always been into technology. I built my first website when I was in first grade, I built my first graphing calculator app when I was in sixth grade, and I used to run the internet’s largest website dedicated to Ralph Wiggum from The Simpsons.

I waited in line for the iPhone the day it launched in 2007, and I was instantly hooked. I knew I had to learn how to build software for this device. Eventually, I learned how to jailbreak my device which allowed me to run custom apps on it (this being before the launch of the App Store).

Even though I had a passion for technology, I never really wanted a career in it. My dream job was to work as a technical director for live television broadcasts, and the only class that was close to that at my school was the capstone course for the Professional Journalism program. I ended up switching my major from Computer Engineering to that and abandoned any dreams of professionally writing software.

Ten years ago, my husband and I were working in an office set-up. Due to a mix of struggles experienced, my husband and I decided to quit our job and transition into freelancing. The transition phase was difficult since we didn't have the facilities needed like a computer and internet connection. We worked in an internet cafe for the first month of our freelancing career until we bought our personal computer and had our internet connection.

We had experience downtime in our new career at first, but we grow and learn from our mistakes as we go along. Freelancing changed the quality of our lives, our family, and so with our marriage. We embrace these benefits to realize that if mothers can work at home, they can earn while taking care of their family.

Another thing is the overseas workers. They have been working far from their family to make a living. Those who are exhausted and feel unproductive because of many circumstances like long hours of commute eat a lot of their time, endangering their work-life balance. These are a few of our realizations why we come up with putting Filipino Virtual Assistance. Because we know how difficult it is to work far from our family, we want to empower Filipino families, one freelancer at a time. We want to provide our graduates an avenue to earn dollars at their homes' comfort, without the hassle of traffic, toxicity of the environment, and an excellent opportunity for those who never got the chance to go to College.

In 2014, I was one-half of a partnership working primarily in advertising and marketing. At that time, my partner and I were successful and wanted to explore other verticals. We began working with a client who had a product that we believed was singular and unique throughout the world, and we put forward a significant amount of capital out of our own pockets to try and develop that product, only to reach a point where the deal went south and litigation ensued.

Make plans to do things as a family, and do your best not to let work interfere with those moments, but know that there are going to be times when you will have to sacrifice an outing, a dinner date, a holiday weekend.

In trying to think outside the box and figure out a way to create a similar product, I found myself for the first time in an innovation lab in Tampa, Florida, where I saw a 3D printer in operation for the first time. I couldn’t look away. I realized immediately that 3D printing had the potential to change the world as it became more integrated into daily business activities such as manufacturing. That’s when I decided to leap of faith.

Unlike other entrepreneurs, my entrepreneur story started unconventionally. Growing up in America, my household was filled with interesting electrical trinkets brought home from my parent’s profession as electrical engineers. This gave me a sense of curiosity for taking apart electronics and putting them back together.

Know your customers. Know your customers like they were family, be aware of what they like outside of your product. Be the ear that listens to their problem and natural marketing will come.

As I progressed into my professional career, I discovered my passion for entrepreneurship and building great products. This allowed me to take on different roles where I was allowed to scale small businesses with big ideas. Eventually, I recognized that this kind of innovation can bring value to the Electrical engineering industry, which was my first step towards the creation of Gerber Labs.

In 2012 I was working for a small company as an IT Director, and they tasked me with rebuilding their eCommerce website. As I started looking at available platforms, I found an article by Justin comparing WooCommerce to another platform. He seemed really knowledgeable, so I reached out to him to ask some questions and I ended up bringing him on as a consultant for the project.

We worked really well together and the project had a very successful outcome, so we stayed in touch. A couple of months later we had a chance to work together on a joint consulting project, which led to more consulting for companies that needed help with their eCommerce stores.

You rarely get it right the first time. You make decisions based on the best available information, then you learn from the results and iterate.

Hi, I’m Laurids the founder of Indiebrands. I’m 25 years old and live in the beautiful city of Vienna, Austria.

My name is Abhishek Ghosh and I am the founder of the blog called The Customize Windows. Presently, the blog provides information to help the readers around software and electronics-related How-to guides and Do it Yourself projects.

The websites have been in existence for over a decade now and currently make 30 thousand dollars per year.

I'm Vaibhav Kishnani, an engineer but a passionate writer by profession. I established Content-Whale in 2017 when I was in my third year of engineering. Going by the maxim that quality writing is everything, Content-Whale caters to 42 different content types that form the backstory of every company’s digital presence and marketing efforts.

I started this content agency with a mere sum of Rs. 2,500. Today, we have drawn a revenue turnover of Rs. 4 Crores! In my opinion, it is not individual progress. Instead, a start-up is about connecting with the right individuals at the right time, who keep the show running ahead with their strife for perfection.

My name is Lawrence O'Connor, aka 'OWC Larry.' I am the founder and CEO of OWC (Other World Computing, Inc.).

Our CAGR over the past 33yrs is 43.78% (average growth rate since inception). It was 18.4% in the most recently completed year 2019 vs 2020 with just over 148 million revenue in 2020.

Hi guys my name is Spiro (Ros) Kontoprias, I am from Greece and I’m the co-founder of PriceWell. PriceWell came to life in November 2020 to simplify billing for everyone starting a subscription business.

Hello, my name is Emmanuel Iroanya, aka "Mannie". I’m the Managing Member & Founder of theta, a civic & government focused digital & management firm based in Baltimore, MD, working to create a world where tech works for everybody.

In the seven years since starting theta., we’ve had the opportunity to serve more government agencies and work on important missions that impact our daily lives as members of this country than we ever could have imagined. Some of those agencies include the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the US Department of Education (ED), the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

Hello, my name is Jay and I am the CEO of JDAQA, a quality assurance testing powerhouse. We’re a lean, scalable team of senior QA engineers and we work almost exclusively with startups.

Our mission is to ensure that builders can get back to the building, while we handle the bugs. In fact, we’re so passionate about “bugs”, that we donate a percentage of our margin to protecting bugs out in nature.

My name is Lawrence O'Connor, aka 'OWC Larry.' I am the founder and CEO of OWC (Other World Computing, Inc.).

Our CAGR over the past 33yrs is 43.78% (average growth rate since inception). It was 18.4% in the most recently completed year 2019 vs 2020 with just over 148 million revenue in 2020.

My name is Courtenay and I run a backup business called Backrightup. Backrightup makes it easy to backup and restore your Azure DevOps instance. We backup repositories, wikis, and all the pipelines that go with managing your code and associated DevOps.

We’ve grown to just over 50 customers in just 8 months, having only launched an MVP in January 2021. Azure DevOps backup was the third most highly voted for the idea in Microsoft’s user feedback tool so our product validation was done for us!

My name is Lawrence O'Connor, aka 'OWC Larry.' I am the founder and CEO of OWC (Other World Computing, Inc.).

Our CAGR over the past 33yrs is 43.78% (average growth rate since inception). It was 18.4% in the most recently completed year 2019 vs 2020 with just over 148 million revenue in 2020.

I'm Vaibhav Kishnani, an engineer but a passionate writer by profession. I established Content-Whale in 2017 when I was in my third year of engineering. Going by the maxim that quality writing is everything, Content-Whale caters to 42 different content types that form the backstory of every company’s digital presence and marketing efforts.

I started this content agency with a mere sum of Rs. 2,500. Today, we have drawn a revenue turnover of Rs. 4 Crores! In my opinion, it is not individual progress. Instead, a start-up is about connecting with the right individuals at the right time, who keep the show running ahead with their strife for perfection.

My name is Rahul, I'm the co-founder at Flamon cloudtech. Which is the parent company that owns our primary product TeleCRM. Taking a step back and looking at the big picture of what we are trying to achieve with TeleCRM - What if there was a way to bring software, automation, and intelligence together in a way that salespeople would only have to do the human part? Instead of spending countless hours every week entering data into specific formats and then more hours crunching that data to figure out who are the leads that they need to focus on, the system that collects all the data do the crunching and return a simple list of people who have already been warmed and just need that human touch.

Hutch, founded by Fearless in 2019, is an intensive 24‑month program located in Baltimore, MD that provides minority and women entrepreneurs with a blueprint for building successful and impactful government digital services firms. The program equips businesses with the tools, mentorship, and peer-to-peer support they need to thrive in the world of government contracting.

To date, Hutch has 9 graduates, 11 company founders in our current 2 cohorts, and 20 companies total within our portfolio. Hutch is the only company of its kind led by industry experts with years of experience in digital transformation and government services.

My name is Lawrence O'Connor, aka 'OWC Larry.' I am the founder and CEO of OWC (Other World Computing, Inc.).

Our CAGR over the past 33yrs is 43.78% (average growth rate since inception). It was 18.4% in the most recently completed year 2019 vs 2020 with just over 148 million revenue in 2020.