25 Fundraising Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2022]

I am a licensed attorney in India and right after my master’s in law, I started working with a leading company as a lawyer. I worked there for about two years before I quit my job to become more location independent.

Choose a niche in whatever you start. It is critical for streamlining your efforts and make money.

My job paid me well but I worked 12 hours a day, I was exhausted by the end of each day, spent my weekends sleeping and I almost quit the things I liked to do - for example, sketching, yoga, traveling, etc.

Over my career, I’ve started and run multiple companies. Before ConnectionPoint, together with a business partner, I created a company and a product in the document automation space called ReFORM. We merged that company into Optio Software of Atlanta, GA in the early ’90s. As CTO and part of the leadership team for Optio, we took it to a NASDAQ IPO in December 1999. In that year, according to Business Week, we were the 78th fastest growing small business in the US and one of the hottest IPOs of the year.

Post-Y2K, the company struggled as our customers slowed their investments in upgrading their ERP systems. We dug in deeply, pulled the company back from the brink, and reinforced our value proposition by reinventing the product line. This enabled us to sell at a decent multiple to our largest competitor in 2008.

After the transition, I decided to take the opportunity to leave. At the time, Facebook and other social networks were emerging as disrupters of the way we communicate. I was coaching my son’s lacrosse team and was struggling to get my players to attend practice. I emailed them and no-one would show up. I was also experimenting with social media and decided to test inviting them to practice using Facebook. To my surprise, most of them showed up.

We originally started out as an outsourcing company in the Philippines that helped businesses in the USA with various administrative tasks, but when we lost one of our main clients we had to find a way to fill our team’s hours.

If you are committed to systems and process, then failure holds no meaning because it’s simply you learning the systems and processes better.

So, we heard about this whole niche site thing and had our staff start creating micro niche sites monetized with Adsense. If you’re not familiar with the term, niche sites are usually just small sites that are talking about a specific thing. Usually, they’re heavily informational based (Ex: How do you stop snoring?) but can also include product reviews. Most of them are monetized either through Google Adsense or Amazon’s affiliate program, or a mixture of both. We blogged about the whole journey and soon started selling the sites we made.

I have a biology teacher degree, but I started my first business already while at university. My company was a digital marketing agency that delivered creative solutions for 10 years and started the first gamification-based projects in 2006.

In a market that expressed huge interest in gamification, but had lots of questions and uncertainties, with our credibility we managed to convince clients rather quickly, while many competitors had rather vague propositions to offer.

By 2012, the agency overcame the economic crisis, which was an extremely stressful period. I was completely burned out of my job as the company manager and owner, and I was thinking about what kind of professional work I would like to do in which I could find my motivation again. I was looking at the projects of the marketing agency and realized that it was the gamification-based solutions that really interested me.

My personal background is in B2B enterprise sales, and at my previous employer, things were going great for the first 2.5 years that I was an employee there. I moved up quickly, was promoted twice, and actually had the opportunity to build out a team. Unfortunately, one day that all changed and I realized that I was deeply unhappy, and after years of trying and failing to start businesses online I thought that maybe it was time for one more go.

Your pot of gold and freedom is out there somewhere, but you will never find it until you start looking for it.

The company I was working for announced that it was being acquired, so I decided to give my old friend Derek a call. Initially, I pitched him on starting a recruitment agency together (both of us had started our careers at an executive search office together). He said that he would think about it, and actually came to me with the idea for an SMMA (Social Media Marketing Agency).

After the second video game company I founded, Acclaim Games, was acquired by Walt Disney (Playdom was the original buyer), I wanted to take a break from the entrepreneurial side of the business and become an investor. I set a personal goal for myself to invest in 60 companies, and since I was living in LA, I decided to invest in startups in LA too.

Where do you start with that goal? How do you find entrepreneurs to support? As I started this journey, I realized that an accelerator model was quite effective for my purposes, and so StartEngine, the accelerator, was born.

We offered companies $20,000 for a 10% stake in the company and 90 days of mentorship. Given we were one of the first accelerators in LA, we had a lot of interest. Ultimately, we accepted around 5% of applicants and had 60 companies participate in the StartEngine accelerator in total.

Ed started edlatimore.com, a site focused on self-improvement. It has reached $25k MRR and wants to double it and get 100k visits/mo from organic traffic.

I spent 25 years as an environmental and sustainability expert running consulting services for the federal government and solving environmental problems as an environmental professional. And one of the problems that plague compliance with environmental laws and regulations is getting people to complete simple tasks and to know that they’ve done so. This was a constant failure in the industry. So I came up with an invention called the I Swear To God Button that could be put in an email. We would program the servers to blast out these emails with these buttons in them and all people would have to do to verify that they had completed a task was complete a two-click process right from their email. It was very popular and it took off with the Army and the Air Force. We called it Auto Pilot.

One day my business partner and I were sitting around and realized that if we can get people to do these tasks, follow up and follow through with our button, maybe we can do the same thing and get a whole lot more donations generated for nonprofits. We were hesitant about it because we were environmental consultants at the time, and this would be a different sector. But we launched and we are super excited that we did. We love our product and we love the technology that we built. Over the last eight years, I’ve learned so much about the industry and overcoming donor abandonment. Helping nonprofits raise more money has been very gratifying.

Hi, I’m Jerry Low, and I’ve been in the Affiliate Marketing and SEO consultancy business since 2004. I own and operate several websites with a small team, including WebHostingSecretRevealed, HostScore, and HideandSeek. Together, they attract over 700,000 visitors each month.

One of our sites gets close to 4 million sessions and 6 million pageviews in 1H 2021

My name is Gregory Elfrink and I’m the director of marketing with Empire Flippers. We’re a three-time winner of the INC 5,000 award for being one of the fastest growing companies in America and we help people buy and sell online businesses.

We have brokered over $50 million worth of deals, and since we’re a big believer in transparency we also created a scoreboard that details most of our stats - from the hundreds of thousands of website visitors we get to our pool of potential buyers that grow by the hundreds every month.