The 41 Best Home-Based Businesses To Start In Maine [2024]

Hello, I’m Marcia Wiggins and the founder of Cape Whoopies. We are small batch whoopie pie bakers who love creativity in the kitchen. Our mission is to share the most delicious Maine whoopie pies made with the highest quality ingredients with people all over the country.

From the moment we tasted our first whoopie pie, we dreamt of endless flavor combinations with unique ingredients in a true gourmet indulgence. We believe in using only the freshest and finest ingredients, remaining chemical and preservative free, and making everything from scratch.

Baking is our passion, and so is sharing our creations. We sell our product on our website capewhoopies.com, Goldbely.com, and Amazon.com if you want to order for friends and have them shipped!

Hi, my name is Jeremy Roberts and I am a co-founder of Tradlands with my wife Sadie Beaudet. We sell ethically-made women’s clothing with a focus on effortless, refined, quality essentials. We began Tradlands in 2012 after reading the Four Hour Work Week with an idea and question - how can we design, manufacture, and sell high quality and great fitting button-up shirts for women? That initial idea sparked our company and we opened our Shopify store and sold our first shirts on February 5th, 2013.

Our customers are women who are looking for ethically made clothing that is created to last for years - clothing they could hand down to their daughters. Clothing that when you wear it makes you feel like yourself.

Currently, the business is generating around $134k a month in revenue. We’ve grown tremendously in the past year and currently have 7 FT and PT employees and recently achieved our first year where we hit $1million in revenue.

My name is Mike Mwenedata. I immigrated to America 6 years ago from Rwanda. I’m the co-founder of Rwanda Bean Coffee Company. We source single origin coffee from Rwanda and roast the beans to perfection here in South Portland, Maine

We package and distribute our coffee to our 3 local retail shops:

• 185 Cottage Road, South Portland
• 463 Stevens Avenue, Portland
• 345 Clarks Pond Parkway, South Portland

My name is Matthew Fiore, a senior in high school and a long-time LEGO lover. I also turned my passion into a business. Three years ago I started Summerfield’s Toys, an online reseller of LEGO sets and individual bricks.

I’ve been building with LEGO since I was 4. I love the feel of the bricks in my hands and the creative process of recreating a model or making my own creation, whether it be spaceships, bases, or cities.

My name is Sam Evans. I am 23 years old and a recent graduate from Penn State Altoona. I am the founder of You Call We Haul Junk Removal, a junk removal company that removes anything from single items to hoarder home cleanouts. We’re located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and have been in business (part-time) since May of 2016.

We service any and everyone who may have unneeded items they are looking to get rid of. People often ask what items we consider junk, to us junk is anything you no longer need or want.

Our main customers are middle-aged and up adults, typically with a higher income that do not want to or are unable to do the work themselves. We complete over 75 jobs per month, bring in about $20,000 in revenue per month profiting about 65% per job.

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.

In the last few years, we have become the thought leader and one of the largest M&A advisory businesses for digital assets in the sub $10 million range. Though, I am pretty certain we will soon be selling businesses above that $10 million mark as well.

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.

My name is Allen Chiang, and I founded Retro Radio Farm, where I repair and restore old radios. I offer Bluetooth MP3 upgrade if the customer wants to play digital music.

I have a busy career as an IT professional. Retro Radio Farm is side business that grew out of a recent hobby of mine.

Right now, I make about $50K a year for the work I put in primarily on weekends. While it’s highly profitable, it has not yet lucrative enough yet for me to quit my day job. Although, the business has been growing 20% every year.

My name is Shuhan He and I’m a doctor and entrepreneur. I am the founder of a Boston-based startup called Maze Engineers. We focus on creating innovative mazes for research, integrating cloud computing technologies, wireless systems, and automated data tracking technologies to assist behavioral research. Our aim is to provide support for researchers to conduct important neurological experiments and create therapies for patients. We were actually featured on Nature.com, where we explored the science behind the mazes.

Aside from being a founder, I am also hands-on in the process of designing and creating the mazes for our clients. I have created numerous mazes for different research and purposes, ranging from mazes created for mice to VR maze intended for humans. Some of our clients are private and public universities, the military, biotech and pharmaceutical companies, and researchers.

Hey guys! My name is Matt Ward and I’m the founder and CEO of The Disruptors, a podcast about the future of all of us where TED level scientists, startup founders and experts join me to discuss the big issues facing humanity and how we can solve them together. I also run The Syndicate, a podcast and investment group focused on early stage startup investing.

I wanted to make a difference in the world and for me, two things drive exponentially better results and impact for all of us, startups solving big problems and innovators tackling epic and existential problems.

I have structured my work and efforts around this to empower others to change the world for the better and have the pleasure of talking to the smartest, most influential folks trying to do the same.

My name is Regina Ye, and I am the founder of ZIRUI.

Our flagship product is a modular magnetic travel toiletry case that is secure, sleek, and simple. ZIRUI is the best way to travel with liquids.

BagsAway Luggage Storage is a marketplace that connects travelers and city locals with convenient, secure, on-demand bag storage locations across key cities. Utilizing the principles of the sharing economy we partner with local shops and businesses that monetize existing free-space by offering hourly/daily storage on location. We keep about 60% of all revenues while the storage partners keep the rest. With BagsAway locations in place, travelers and locals can now win precious hours back by conveniently dropping their bags at a location of their choice around the city, freeing their hands and their time to explore, experience, and sightsee without their bags in the way. Our overarching vision is to change people's relationship with things that weigh them down during travel and on the go.

We have stored over 150,000 bags for travelers thus far and have expanded to over 50+ cities and going strong! Our plan this year is to expand worldwide, with new funding and new members joining our company.

Hi there! We are Kelan and Brittany the founders of The Savvy Couple. We are a personal finance and lifestyle blog with a mission to help families organize and simplify their entire life so they can do more of the things they love.

We do this by providing content on organization, meal planning, budgeting, paying off debt, making money online, marriage, and more.

Some of our top articles include:

I’m Ervin Ruci. Since 2005 I have been interested in the problem of geoparsing and geocoding - a piece of software that analyzes a string of text for geographical locations, then matches them to a database of locations with latitude, longitude values. Geoparsing is the process of extracting and disambiguating location entities from text, and Geocoding is the process of matching them to latitude, longitude values.

As a graduate student, I built geocoder.ca in the summer of 2005 then I went on to build several other businesses that relied on its geocoding API. Many of these businesses are now defunct, but geocoder.ca is still going strong with 2020 being its best year to date - over 90% growth from the year before:

My name is Jesse Hambly, I’m 1 of 3 brothers working at Pressa Inc. Luke and Mason are full-time founders as well. We have a diverse background, Luke manages engineering and manufacturing duties. Mason is in charge of media, content creation and strategy, and I (Jesse) oversee marketing, operations, and customer relations. We’ve been in business since 2015 where we’ve been selling our flagship product, Pressa Bottle. Pressa Bottle is a unique water bottle that allows the user to juice and press real fruit into any beverage.

Our company operates at just over $50k per month and we do this primarily through our .com and Amazon. We do sell in a few retailers which are Saks Fifth Avenue, Dillards and Uncommon Goods. The product lends itself well to the healthy/active crowd but we also sell a lot of units for flavored cocktails.

Hi, my name is Lenny Bron, and I am The Blog Proofreader. I’m the annoying grammar police person you’ve always been tired of hearing from every time you use an ellipses incorrectly in a Facebook post you wrote 3 years ago.

I content edit/copy edit/proofread the work of several clients on a regular basis. Some of this is done as a freelancer for larger companies, some of it is done for startups looking to make sure their content marketing looks clean and presentable, and some of it is done for bloggers or other content creators who want their readers to enjoy the work they put out without stopping to try and process a sentence with a missing word in it.

I’ve been able to build my business from scratch to consistently make ~$2,000 per month with zero experience in the field, no expenses, and barely any upfront costs.

My name is Ross Lohr, and I’m a co-founder of Project Repat. We make it easy and affordable for customers to turn their memorable t-shirts into a one of a kind, custom t-shirt quilt backed with cozy fleece.

People buy quilts from Project Repat because we have the most affordable price, which is due to us fine tuning the production process by making more than 250,000 t-shirt quilts over the past 6 years. While traditional quilts can be very expensive, we’ve found a way to make them at a much more affordable price.

We currently make 2,000 custom t-shirt quilts per week at 2 production facilities in the United States. In 2018, we will make 90,000 t-shirt quilts and do $10MM in sales per year.

I am Andrew Tarvin and I am the world’s first humor engineer (at least according to all the Google searches that I’ve done).

I run Humor That Works, a training company focused on human effectiveness. Our primary goal is to deliver programs that help people get better results while having more fun in the workplace.

We’ve worked with thousands of people at more than 250 organizations, including Microsoft, the FBI, and the International Association of Canine Professionals.

Hello, my name is Andrew Hoffman. I am the founder of My Franchise Partners.

My Franchise Partners is a $15-20K/month consulting agency focused on helping people understand the franchise industry before they take the plunge and invest in a franchise.

I help people find the best franchise for them through in-depth research, analysis, and due diligence. The best choice is always an informed choice.

My name is Daniel Doubrovkine, and I go by “dB.” I was born in Moscow, Russia, and my family emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland in 1990. That’s where I got my first computer (a Commodore-64, from a relative who upgraded to an Amiga 2000), and started programming by copying some x86 assembly code from SVM Magazine and trying to run tasm.exe. There was no Internet, then.

By the time I enrolled in C.S. at the University of Geneva, I had been selling shareware to users in 42 countries. That business was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands (I was not old enough to incorporate in Switzerland) and was called Vestris, after a sunken Spanish ship in the 1400s. I made tens of thousands of dollars selling Windows shareware between 97 and 99, including XReplace-32 and Expression Calculator (sold as Global Calculator on a CDROM in Germany). I then made hundreds of thousands with a very popular Alkaline Search Engine, which powered some of the biggest websites in the late 90s, ranging from bbc.co.uk to warez.com. If you’re old enough to remember, you may have used the aGNeS forum, too. That was ad-sponsored - ads which I may or may not have been clicking on in my sleep.

I also tried to co-start another company, Xo3, but that didn’t quite pan out. So In 1999 I decided to get serious with starting a programming career, and moved to Seattle to work for Microsoft. I completely shut down my old company around 2003, and in 2004 came to New York after getting my Green Card. I held engineering jobs at various startups and spent 8 years as CTO of the fine arts marketplace artsy.net. I am currently a Principal Engineer at AWS Data Exchange.

Hi I’m Jamie Clawson, and I run Jamie Clawson - a small business designing and producing leather products and accessories. I do everything from designing, testing, manufacturing, shipping etc. All operations are done in house.

My main product line is leather skins for Apple products - iPhone, MacBook, iPad, etc. My premium leather accessories mediate between technology and a way of life that champions quality, craft, and traditional aesthetics.

My products reintroduce an enduring look and feel to the devices you use most and love best. I source the finest grade leathers from respected New York City-based purveyors. The pressure-sensitive adhesive, custom ordered from 3M, simplifies the process of application and respects your device, leaving no residue upon removal. Each product can be applied and reapplied multiple times to the same or similar devices.

Hi, I’m Andrei Calinescu and I am the Founder and CEO of One Life Meals.

One Life Meals is a healthy meal delivery service located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We handle the complete process from ingredient sourcing, cooking and delivery. We also work with our clients on a one-on-one basis to understand their requirements and help them select the right plan.

We cook and deliver twice per week to keep the meals fresh. The plan is for 6 days per week, with Sunday as a day off or a “cheat day”.

Hey there! My name is Dan Pepin and I co-founded Bonify five years ago with my business partner, John Carbone. Bonify started out in life as a small web development agency focused on building amazing websites for clients. However, for the past three years, we’ve been slowly transitioning the business from client services to paid online app subscriptions, which has been no easy feat!

Our current major endeavor is growing our portfolio of Shopify apps and increasing customer acquisition. We currently have three apps in the Shopify app store and we’re quite happy that the apps are bringing in $15,000/mo, but our goal is to nearly double our app revenue by the end of this year.

The most popular app we have is the first one we launched about three years ago called Custom Fields. The app allows store owners to add extra structured data to anything in Shopify, which enhances a lot of the flexibility of what you can do with store customizations. We very recently launched Mr. Arigato - Task Automator, which we are very proud of! It’s a very sophisticated app which allows store owners and developers to automate their store tasks, such as subscribing users to their mailing list, adding data to Google Sheets, sending emails and text messages to customers, and a whole lot more.

Hi there! My name is Fitz Nowlan and I am one of two co-founders of Reflect. Reflect creates and manages automated web regression tests to verify a web application's appearance and functionality. Using Reflect, you can create automated web tests that replicate how a user actually uses your web application---all without writing a line of code. The benefits are two-pronged: 1) creating a Reflect test is faster than using a code-based automation tool, and 2) anyone in your organization can create a test because it requires no programming. Thus, businesses improve the quality of their web applications while simultaneously saving time and allowing anyone to contribute to their testing efforts.

Our customers are technology companies who sell either B2B, or B2C, and deliver their services or products through their web application. Therefore, they have a critical dependency on their web application behaving as expected in order for them to make money. They’ll usually have employees test (i.e., use) their web application to ensure it’s working, but the testers can range from technical folks like web developers and testing engineers, to non-technical folks like marketing and SEO specialists. As a result of the varied technical skills of application testers, we decided to make Reflect zero-code and zero-installation. This means anyone can use Reflect without coding or downloading anything, and create a test with nothing more than a URL!

Our customers access Reflect through a monthly, pay-as-you-go subscription that includes creating, executing and managing their suite of web tests. Reflect has been publicly available since November 2019 and generates around $3K in monthly recurring revenue. The cost of a subscription scales based on the number of test executions and the month-to-month plans range from ~$100/mo to $1,000/mo or more for our Enterprise customers. Our most exciting statistic is that we have not lost a customer yet!

My name is Ben Goldberg and, along with my wife, Jennifer Goldberg, we founded and run the New York Food Truck Association (NYFTA) and Food Truck Promotions. We focus on mobile culinary solutions for private and large events (everything from weddings to Comic Con), as well as experiential marketing for top brands such as Ralph Lauren, Chanel, Califia Farms, Match Group, Google, Viacom, and Twitter.

Our association is composed of 50+ NYC local food truck vendors, which are mostly small, family-owned businesses. Through our events and promotions, we can provide our members with an additional (high margin) revenue stream. In markets outside of NYC, we operate under our sister company, Food Truck Promotions, where we tap into local food trucks in cities all around the country.

Within our first year of business (2016-2017), we did >$1M in revenue with consistent and every year we have had 50%+ YoY growth.

Oh My Balm was founded two years ago and we make kitchen-crafted all-natural body products. Our tagline is “Two Mom’s Making it Real.”

Those two moms are us: Meredith Moseley-Bennett and Yolanda Grbic, and this is our side hustle. Meredith has worked for a non-profit in the entertainment business and before that was a costume designer for theatre, film, and television. Yolanda has been a middle school teacher for 19 years and going in Jersey City school system. Between us, we have 3 kids (12, 10 & 7), two dogs, two cats, 3 guppies, 5 goldfish and a parakeet. The kids tag along with us to craft fairs, sort containers and stick on labels; the 12-year-old is great at recon at craft fairs and the 10-year-old is already a pro at merchandise display. The first-grader gets extra math lessons by helping on inventory day and loves to count drops as they go into what we create. For a video about our crew, check out TEAMOMB.

Hi! I’m Tobias Young, IFBB Pro, Online Fitness Coach, and Nutrition Expert with 21 years of fitness industry experience.

How did I get started? Growing up without a father, my mother decided to get me a big brother from the Big Brother’s Program.

Hey! My name is Donald and I run Fraternityk9 dog training. In this business, I specialize in dog obedience and behavior modification. Most people that enter our program are dog owners who either need or want their dog to listen whether the dog is displaying dog aggression or just pulling the owner down the street.

Monthly on average, we are making $5,000.

We’re Davis Harari and James Reina and we’re the co-founders of The Nut Button.

So, what is The Nut Button?

Our core product is a push button toy based off of the popular “NUT” meme. Our success is largely due to the inherently viral nature of the product - when people see a funny meme, they want to share it with their friends.

My name is Roberta Perry and I am the founder of ScrubzBody Skin Care Products. I started the business in June of 2006 with my late sister Michelle after she insisted the scrub I was making for myself deserved to be used and sold to others.

Our sugar scrub is most definitely the main product and we have about 20 different scents at any given time. We will customize a special scent for our customers as well. We started making creams and lotions and other variations of the scrub.

We now have 12 other products that are all wrapped around our botanical oil blend. Our customers love coming to our shop in Farmingdale, NY as well as shopping online. We like to think of ourselves as a customer experience company that happens to sell great products.

I’m Tim Talley and I am the founder and CEO of U-Lace No-Tie Sneaker Laces. U-Lace is the originator of the modular No-Tie Sneaker Lace. Our product is a stretchy woven lace segment that is designed to span just a single set of sneaker eyelets at a time. A couple of packs of U-Laces transforms most pairs of lace-up sneakers into slip-on that never need to be tied or untied.

Our consumers are kids and adults; convenience seekers; parents looking for a way to get kids out of the door and on the way to school without lace-tying hassle; frequent fliers and people who lack the ability or dexterity to tie and untie standard shoelaces; and those seeking to add a bit of fashion pop to their sneakers.

Our customers are retailers such as Learning Express, Pigtails, and Crewcuts, Once Upon a Child and Global distributors covering the UK & EU, Israel, Asia, Canada and a few other regions of the world. We sell about $1.5MM worth of U-Lace’s every year. While lots of copy-cats have come into the market we boast the largest color range of about 60 colors which shows our total commitment to this business and product category

Alexandra:

I am not someone who always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. However, over the last 6-7 years, what became clear to me was my deep passion for health and well-being, which has been informed by my personal journey dealing with health challenges and delving into self-discovery. Over the years, I have developed a deep belief we can change the world through what we put in our bodies from a multitude of perspectives. The more passionate I became about that, the more clear it became to me that I wanted to find something I could do that would give me as much congruity as possible between my values and the work I do in the world. It wasn’t until the last few years when I truly started contemplating going down the entrepreneurial path in some capacity. Coincidentally, I have spent the bulk of my career working across the food and beverage industry in marketing, and when Isabelle and I met each other, it was so clear that the work we want to do in the world is incredibly aligned and we would be able to bring our complementary skills together to build Lupii.

Perfection doesn’t exist, and moving quickly and learning from the market holds a great amount of value as well.

My name is Sharon Koifman, and I am the president of DistantJob. DistantJob is a unique recruitment agency that specializes in finding remote employees. That means we go all over the world to find outstanding talent who works remotely for our clients.

To make a clear distinction - because confusion often arises on this point - this is not outsourced talent, they are not freelancers, they are not people who fly from across the world to move into the client’s office. These are full-time, permanent employees who would work directly for our client companies, focusing on their processes and culture.

The next big question is: why remote? Well, when you work with remote, it gives you access to the world and with that comes a much bigger pool of talent. This means you get to find much better people faster, and you also get the benefit of working with countries where the cost of living is lower. On top of it there is a huge body of research showing that remote people are happier and more independent, and that reflects on their productivity.

My name is Angela Carillo. I’ve been a soap maker since 2000, and in 2009 I started Alegna Soap®. In case you haven’t figured it out yet, Alegna is Angela backward. Hey, if it worked for Oprah...

In addition to selling soap online, at fairs and events across Long Island, I produce custom private label soaps for other Bath and Beauty companies. I also teach soap making classes and speak at soap conferences all over the country.

My name is Billy Ash and I’m the Co-Founder and Chief Digital Officer of Today’s Business. We are a full-service digital marketing agency. We are one of the only full service digital and affiliate marketing agencies in the world.

Our flagship services are search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), website development & maintenance, affiliate marketing program management, social media marketing, creative design, athlete/influencer marketing, and email marketing. Our customers span across a variety of industries but a few of the most prominent include:

• Physician groups & hospitals
• Multi-Specialty
• Orthopedics
• Physical Therapy
• Dental
• Women’s Health
• Real-Estate
• E-commerce & direct to consumer brands
• Apparel/Fashion
• Food & Beverage
• Supplements
• Tech & SaaS
• Consumer Packaged Goods

My name is Drew Williams and I run and operate a digital lifestyle magazine for men called SWAGGER Magazine. SWAGGER Magazine is one of the first products created under our parent company, Swagger Publications Inc.

Our product is simple. It is targeted to the affluent males that aspire to have great things in life, and are on the path to building themselves to be powerful and successful people in all aspects of life - no matter what their interests are. We focus on Lifestyle, Fashion, Gear, Food, Dating, and Business and Careers.

The mission statement for Swagger is to take the average man from nothing to something, by featuring successful individuals in every domain and outlining what steps they took to get there and how anyone else can follow in their footsteps.

My name is Darren Magarro and I am the Founder and President of DSM. DSM is a full-service marketing agency based in Mahwah, NJ. We’ll be 14 years old in February 2021 and I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything in the world.

We’re labeled a marketing agency, in reality, we’re a “results agency”. It’s pretty simple and definitely not rocket science. Our core competencies are digital marketing, creative, traditional marketing, and without a doubt really good account management. Without good (truly passionate and empathetic) humans managing our client’s portfolios, we’re nothing. Over the course of the last 7 years, we’ve almost tripled in size because of our team and a straightforward love of what we do. In that time, I would say our main services have really shifted into the digital space with regards to our marketing tactics. The transparency and accountability it provides our clients and our staff to “fail fast and learn quickly” has been paramount to our success. Our motto at DSM is “stop selling and start helping”, and it permeates everything we do on our own behalf as well as our clients’ efforts. 2020 was a difficult year for everyone, and we’re proud to say that we were down just a few percent on the top line to 2019 (which was our best year in the company’s history). We really focused internally on creating more efficiencies and providing a better process for our clients, and our own employees. We’re extremely data-driven and this was definitely the theme for 2020 as we realized we weren’t going to grow. We’re currently doing over $500K/month and our mid and bottom line have never been in better shape. The members of the team at DSM get all the credit here. They worked very hard this year to make sure we’re leaving 2020 in better shape than when we entered it. Our goal in 2021 is to provide more education, growth opportunities and really allow our team to continue to push the envelope. At DSM, we constantly say, “best idea wins” and it’s creating a culture that is pretty amazing from top to bottom.

Hello everyone! My name’s Pat Stedman and I’m the founder of The Dynamic Man, LLC. I started the company in 2015 when I decided to officially break into Dating and Relationship Coaching.

My main services are, as you might expect, coaching services. All my work at this point is done over the phone. Depending on the coaching package and needs of the client, I might be working with men for as little as 3 months to a year or longer. Very often I’ll work intensively with a client for 6 months or so, and then once they’re on a good trajectory, we’ll adapt to a more flexible relationship.

I’m Sarah Gross Feoli, the founder and owner of Rescue Chocolate. While our products are only for humans to enjoy, we donate all profits to various animal rescue organizations. I began the company in January 2010, and in the past 8 years have partnered with hundreds of different rescue groups on fundraising.

All of our chocolate bars and truffles are vegan, fairly traded, organic, handcrafted in small batches in Brooklyn NY, and delicious. Each flavor highlights a different issue important in the realm of animal rescue. For example, Peanut Butter Pit Bull calls attention to the fallacies of breed-specific legislation. The Fix urges people to spay and neuter their dogs and cats as the most important step in reducing the numbers of homeless animals. There are links on our website where our customers can get more information about these issues.

I am Anthony Tumbiolo, the founder of Jakt–a digital product and innovation studio based in NYC.

So, what exactly does this mean we do?

Companies come to us when they want help designing and building a custom piece of software to solve a problem.

Hi - my name is Alanna Banks and I’m the owner of Fridays Off Fabric Shop. Fridays Off is an online fabric store based in Toronto, Canada that supplies fabric enthusiasts, quilters and makers with beautifully curated modern fabrics.

In addition to that, we operate a monthly fabric subscription club where subscribers receive one-of-a-kind bundles of fabric every month.