The 38 Best Home-Based Businesses To Start In Ohio [2024]

My name is Ethan Holmes. I’m from Shaker Heights, Ohio and I am the 25-year-old founder and CEO of Holmes Mouthwatering Applesauce.

Holmes is an all natural applesauce product I created at the age of 15 and have since grown to hundreds of grocery stores throughout the Midwest.

My name is Mike Luongo and I am the Managing Member of Total Home Supply in Fairfield, NJ. Total Home Supply was founded in 2010 by a group of disgruntled people working for other Internet companies. We were not happy with the direction of these companies so we got together under a common concept of creating a company that would treat our customers the way we would like to be treated.

Since we sell heating and cooling products that can be purchased elsewhere, we knew we needed to find a compelling reason for customers to choose us. We also knew that just selling cheap was not the answer so we became the leader in customer service, both before and after the sale.

The above is why we have double-digit growth while our competitors struggle to maintain the volume from previous years.

My name is Travis Hancock and I’m the founder of Facade Games. We have published 3 board games, each disguised in book boxes.

Each of the games focuses on a city and year from history, and has some kind of lying/backstabbing involved in the gameplay. We’re currently working on game number 4 for our current series of games, as well as a new party game line.

Our games have raised over $1 million on Kickstarter, and we’ve sold about 80,000 copies of our games around the world. I work full time from home with my wife Holly. We love inventing and publishing games!

I’m Ajay! I created GMass, a platform to send cold emails and email marketing campaigns with Gmail. It works as a Chrome extension. Most of our customers are entrepreneurs and salespeople, but our customers really run the gamut from super small to the biggest tech companies in the world. Almost every major tech company you can think of uses GMass in some way, including Uber, Lyft, LinkedIn, Twitter, Indeed, Google, Salesforce.com, and Snapchat. Since I launched GMass in 2015, we’ve had over 500,000 user signups.

My name is Christine Moore and I’m the owner of Lil Buff Protein, where you can eat cake & get buff!

We create and manufacture a cake mix that boasts 26g of protein per serving while being gluten free and microwaveable. These cakes are great if you crave sweets but also want to live a healthy lifestyle without sacrificing taste.

We serve a huge demographic of individuals ranging from body builders, weight watchers, gastric bypass patients, diabetes patients, gluten free/celiac diseases, and those just looking to stay healthy and fit.

My name is Evan Delahanty and I’m the Founder & CEO of Peaceful Fruits. Peaceful Fruits makes healthy, delicious, rainforest friendly fruit snacks.

Imagine a fruit roll-up made from nothing but real fruit, produced in a way you can be proud of, and you’ve got Peaceful Fruits. As an award-winning for-profit social enterprise, our specific goal is to give people access to snacks that fit their values - health, sustainability, community - without sacrificing price, convenience, or flavor. Generally, our goal is to make mission-based business (social enterprise) part of mainstream capitalism. We’ve been featured by the National Peace Corps Association and ABC’s Shark Tank - and we think those two groups should spend more time together.

Thank you for taking the time to tell our story. My name is Adam Dwidari, and I am the founder of Scarpetta Shoes. We sell designer women’s shoes at deeply discounted prices.

I started this business back in 2009 with $2,000 out of a small space and have since expanded to a 50,000 square foot warehouse. In 2019, we employ 30+ people between our Columbus warehouse and pop-up shops and are continuing that growth into 2020.

Scarpetta Shoes has hit huge milestones in 2018-2019 and saw an overall sales increase of over 200%, reaching $3.6 million in annual revenue. We have expanded our international sales by 400%, currently ship to 60 countries and have an inventory of over 40,000 pairs of shoes.

My name is Jodi Carlson, I am a professional web designer, wife, and mom. I also run a successful profitable blog that all started from a hobby that started when I was 6 years old and said yes I want to join Girl Scouts.

I am currently making $5,000 – 8,000 a month from activity booklet sales which are 10 to 25-page printable booklets with activities for girls to do to learn about a specific topic. It could be games, activities, and crafts.

I also make some of my income from ad revenue and affiliate marketing. The big range difference is because this is a very specific niche, which also means, there are times of year when things are not in high demand.

I'm Brandon Bayer, a 27-year-old developer, designer, and pilot.

Martin Holsinger (my co-founder) and I built Storeo, an iOS app for making Instagram Stories longer than 15 seconds. It's the first side project I've launched to the world.

The core function is very simple. It takes a video, splits it into 15-second segments, and finally saves it to your camera roll. After uploading each slice to Instagram, people who watch your Story will see it seamlessly transition from one to the next without any jarring transitions or cut off words.

My name is Michael Maher and I run a service agency that helps brands to grow their businesses on Amazon. Our entire business is managing the entire Amazon channel for brands so they can focus on growing the brand as a whole.

Managing this channel requires several different skill sets from copywriting to advertising so this informed how we set up our business, including the structure and who becomes a part of our team.

2019 was a very difficult and challenging year for our business. We stayed level on revenue but profitability was way down and we lost money. We were forced to take a long hard look at our business and what we were doing. As we realized our service was much more valuable than we were giving it credit, we made some big changes in our pricing.

Hello, my name is Michael Reznik and I am the Co-Founder and CEO of TriFold LLC, the company that invented the UpCart ® line of products. We are dedicated to revolutionizing mobility with innovative products that give people the freedom to do what they love by enhancing their mobility. When people have greater mobility, they can do more and be more productive.

Let’s be real, carrying stuff up & down stairs is the worst. The UpCart ® line of products solve this problem with a unique line of all-terrain folding carts and hand trucks that have been engineered to reduce effort while going up and down stairs and over irregular terrain. Our patented technology also allows all of our products to fold completely flat for easy storage or transportation.

My name is Eric Ray, the CEO, and Founder of Easy Auto Ship LLC, a nationwide vehicle shipping brokerage located in Youngstown, Ohio. About 80% of our business is shipping POV (privately owned vehicles) for the end consumer, and the rest is for dealerships and relocation companies.

Our job is to find out the requirements and details of why and when someone needs to ship a vehicle and then locate a qualified carrier to do that job. For these services, we charge a broker fee of generally around 200 dollars. Most of the time, the carrier is paid COD (cash on delivery) by the customer when the vehicle is delivered and the inspection report is signed off on by both parties.

We average around $250,000 a month in brokerage fees with a net profit of $100,000 a month. We are ranked as the Best Overall Car Shipping Company of 2020 on Move.org, as well as Movebuddha.com, with over 1,500 reviews on Google and a 4.6 rating! We will do about $18 million this year in sales, but it was not an easy road getting here.

Hey there! I’m Shannon Mattern and I’ve helped over 15,000 new online business owners learn how to build their websites and market themselves online (even if they’re not a techie and are starting from zero).

Five years ago I created an online video tutorial series called the Free 5 Day Website Challenge which walks new entrepreneurs step by step through building a website for their online business with WordPress.

The Free 5 Day Website Challenge is unlike any other WordPress training or tutorial online because it shows the exact step-by-step process I used to design and build websites for my 1:1 clients. No other free training out there is as comprehensive as what I created for my community to help them get their businesses up and running online!

My name is Chris Casseday, and I am the founder of 513 Kicks, an online sneaker shop that offers collectible athletic shoes at unrivaled prices. I founded 513 Kicks in 2017, but I have been selling sneakers online for over 21 years. The type of sneakers that are featured in the shop are ones that are in high demand, vintage, or bring feelings of nostalgia to my customers. In other words, these are not sneakers that you’ll find at your local brick and mortar retail store today.

Our typical customers are people that truly love sneakers. They place an emphasis on strategically adding new pairs to their collection, even though they probably have enough sneakers to last them their entire lifetime already. While sneaker collecting is not a new thing, within recent years it has become more mainstream, with athletes, celebrities, and Fortune 500 companies jumping on board. Of course, social media is a huge amplifying factor as well.

Prior to launching 513 Kicks, selling sneakers online would bring in some money for me on a sporadic basis - $100 one month, $500 the next. Now, after almost two years, the average profit per month is around $2,000. The biggest shift came through branding my selling efforts as “513 Kicks” as opposed to just another guy that loves sneakers, and sells them occasionally. This added a layer of credibility that has resulted in me making new connections, easily obtaining new inventory with large profit potential, and much more.

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 Karl, and I’m the founder of Draft. After almost a decade leading engineering teams at venture-funded startups, I decided it was time to leap into entrepreneurship. Draft is a productized service that provides technical content to software engineering blogs on a subscription basis.

August is my third month running the business and first month full-time, and I’m on track to bring in $10,000 in (mostly) recurring revenue this month. The business isn’t going to replace my salary as a CTO right away, but the freedom of running my own business has given me a lot of freedom to stretch my creative muscles and spend time with my family.

My son Joe and dog Chili. We get to hang out together every day now!

My full-time job is in advertising. (Think Don Draper with less Brylcreem,) And from 2005 to 2012, I worked at JWT, the United States Marine Corps’ longtime ad agency. As the Creative Director, I was in charge of recruitment advertising - writing the television commercials, print ads, billboards, etc - for the Marines during two of the most unpopular wars in our nation’s history.

Every time I’d go to a Marine base to film a commercial, I’d bring my then 5-year-old daughter back a small gift from the Marine Exchange. At the time, she was having trouble sleeping - bad dreams, fear of the dark, monsters under the bed - the usual fears of a young kid.

So I bought her a teddy bear and told her a story.

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.

I’m Nick Bey and I run Bey Moss, an e-commerce platform that sells products infused with Chondrus Crispus or, better known as, sea moss. Our flagship product started with sea moss gel, which was used as a food additive. Our customers are men and women concerned about their health and using beauty products that are safe for your skin.

Bey Moss started on January 1, 2020, and has made over $800,000 to-date with less than $10,000 overall in ads. Our customers realize that they are investing in their health when they consume our products.

Hey, I’m Jordyn and I’m the owner of Jordyn Alison Designs. My intentions with my products are to bring joy to your daily life as well as help connect you with others.

For a couple of years, the only thing I sold in my shop was greeting cards. But in March of 2018, I started selling vinyl stickers, which proved to be successful. I now have greeting cards, stickers, notepads, apparel and more in my shop.

Part of what I think makes my business unique is that I have a pretty strong digital side to my business as well. For that side, I work on making SVG cut files and hand-lettered fonts. As someone who can’t sit still and do the same thing every day, it’s really nice to have two distinct sides to my business that I can switch back and forth from.

I’m Stacey, founder and President of Liberated Specialty Foods, based in the quiet town of Madison, Alabama. We run a food manufacturing business making a full line of baked food (made mainly from nut flours) like almond flour pizza crust, cashew bread, and coconut flour donuts, along with additive-free sauces like ketchup and pizza sauce; with the specific mission to help those suffering from autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s and Colitis, that ALSO fill the niche of Keto, Paleo, Atkins, and other trending diets.

We sell online and to retailers. We went from about 100 retailers with our products in 2016 to over 1,000 today, including major chains from Whole Foods and Sprouts to Wal-Mart -- and we hope to keep adding more!

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.

Hello! My name is D’Shawn Russell and I am the founder and CEO of Southern Elegance Candle Company. I started the company 4 years ago as a side hustle to make some extra money on the weekends and to get me out of the house. But it quickly grew to much more than I expected.

Southern Elegance Candle Company is all about loving and living in the South. We created home fragrance products that all have a southern theme to them and all of our fragrances are based on Southern agriculture. Apple? Check! Pine? Check! Cotton (or course) Check! Missing the Southern Sunshine? We got a fragrance for you. Our core group of customers are women that live in the South or people that appreciate Southern culture.

Our flagship products at the moment are our candles. We offer three different sizes; travel tin, mason jar and large tumbler. We also have wax melts and room spray. But, we will be slowly rolling out new products over the next year to include an apparel line.

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.

Hi, my name is Todd and I’m a serial entrepreneur. After a long history of building various businesses, I created ByteStand, a friendly software development company run by ecommerce nerds who get excited about weird things like “cross-platform integrations” and “fulfillment networks” and “coffee”.

We design Shopify apps, with three apps currently in the app store and over 2,000 shops using our software. Our two main apps are ByteStand and FBA Shipping, which were designed to help Amazon sellers diversify and generate more revenue by importing their Amazon inventory to Shopify and exporting their Shopify orders to Amazon for fulfillment.

We also created FreshCredit, Shopify's first true store credit app. Between all three apps, we generate about $17,000/month in revenue.

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.

My name is Paul Sciortino, I am the founder of Ayo Supplements and we sell Matcha Boost, the best matcha tea supplement you will find on the market. It’s a simple

product; organic, ceremonial grade Japanese matcha powder combined with vitamin B-12 to support natural energy.

Matcha’s renowned health benefits are widely recognized and it is one of the healthiest substances in the world. It’s an acquired taste, however, and prep time can make it difficult to fit into a daily routine. I thought that if I created a quality product in a convenient “take with you anywhere” capsule, people couldn’t afford not to take it.

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:

I’m Doug Geiger, founder of Can You Handlebar, a men’s grooming product company. We’re one of those low-key-high-quality brands.

We are best known for beard oils and balms, moustache wax and inventing the first application brush for beard products, the Can You Handlebar Beard Oil Brush®. We are carefully and consistently extending our product line and distribution.

In our first three years our production grew from a kitchen countertop with a crockpot I stole from my wife to “making a million bucks” and a 10,000 square foot building with a whole fleet of crockpots. Meanwhile, our retail presence -- which began on the counter of a gracious proprietor of the corner gas station -- has grown to our own network of barbers and salons across the US, international distribution and most visibly, the shelves of every Art of Shaving.

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.

Hi everyone, my name is Mitchell and I’m one of the three founders of Patriot Chimney. We sweep, repair, and build chimneys and also service and repair dryer vents around the Roanoke Valley in Virginia.

We created the company in order to provide really, really awesome, transparent, and trustworthy chimney and dryer vent services in our region. You see, chimney companies don’t typically receive a positive reputation and we’re out to change that. In fact, we’ve been fortunate enough to provide our services to more than 350 homes in an area that spans from Lynchburg, VA all the way down to Blacksburg, VA. What’s more is that we’ve also been able to generate more than $212,000 in revenue during our first year, with 8% of that being net profit.

I studied marketing in college, but my experience in the past few years has been a mix between marketing and sales, so my focus is primarily around building the sales and marketing strategy for us. My brother (Matt) and a friend of his (Billy) focus on the operations, actually getting on the roof and doing some real dirty work.

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.