80 Small-Scale Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2023]

Gikken’s foundation was laid in 2011 or so. I don’t remember the exact year but I was in high school. I was amidst my most active English learning years. I was trying to read as many articles, blogs, essays, etc in English as possible. At some point, an idea that it’d be great to double click on words to get them translated right there struck me. It was the early days of Google Chrome that wasn’t the most popular browser yet. And, I think it already could translate pages entirely, but it was totally useless for me because when I can understand 80% of the text, why would I translate it entirely? It’s also terrible for mastering a language. Guessing the meanings of words from the context works better for memorizing new vocabulary. The more effort your brain takes, the stronger neural connections are.

So, physiology aside, I wanted a fast way to translate single words I didn’t understand or double-check sentences. The previous flow involved copying it, switching to a new tab with Google Translate opened there, translating it, and then switching back. Terribly inefficient and annoying when you have to do it 10 times per article, 100 times per day.

By the time I was obsessed with this idea, I could already easily implement anything I wanted on the web. I started coding at 13, so I had already at least 2 or so years of experience with copycatting news portals, trying to build my social network (who didn’t!), and reinventing a few popular JavaScript libraries. It was the early days of not only Google Chrome but also Chrome Web Store—the extension store. I made an extension that I needed for my own needs, called Instant Translate, and uploaded it to the Chrome Web Store. Uncunningly, the timing was perfect for organic growth through the store as Instant Translate happened to be one of the first extensions there. The 15-year-old me knew something only about building apps but absolutely nothing about turning them into a business. Thus, I relied on "organic growth". In other words, routinely checking analytics and praying that it grew. I did nothing more than that for the first few years.

I originally started MaidThis as a side hustle while I was working at a private equity investment firm. Like many people working the corporate grind, I was fascinated by becoming my own boss.

With any first product or service launch, you’re almost guaranteed to get some aspect of it wrong. You might be priced too low, not be addressing the right target market, or have the package all wrong.

I finally stumbled upon The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, which turns out is basically the Bible for the digital nomad community, and decided I wanted to experience “location freedom”.

Before Cape Whoopies was conceived, I was enjoying being the mom of two kids in high school, the wife to an airline pilot, and an aerobics teacher at my local gym.

When my kids had gone off to college and my husband was in the air, I had much time on my hands. There was only so much time you could spend at the gym, so with the newfound extra time I splurged in one of the things I always loved doing: making delicious baked things for friends.

My husband and I spend time a local restaurant as a hangout when he was home, so we would go to DiMillos and take our server friends whoopie pies. Why whoopie pies? I had tasted the Maine creation and thought, "good idea, not great execution".

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.

In 2011, coming out of college, I miserably tried to start a penny auction website. I studied Political Science at University, which had absolutely no bearing on this idea. I knew I wanted to do something entrepreneurial and was consumed by this auction model. I had my own specific mechanics that I thought would make the game a lot more fair for the average consumer. But alas, 6-8 months later, after burning through thousands of dollars trying to get the technology right, I was absolutely nowhere.

I was resigned to not give up, but the mechanics of the auction are critical to the smooth operation of the website and if you can’t get it right you don’t have a business. So I decided to start taking on some freelance writing work, just to get some cash in.

One thing led to another and I started getting some bigger clients with bigger asks. Eventually, I snowballed hiring some writers and copy editors. Turning this thing into a full-time business operation.

I always wanted to be my own boss. So I landed up doing a secretarial diploma after school, and working as a receptionist, and moving up to sales secretary and wage clerk, before working for a recruitment company. When I started my career the internet wasn’t what it is today. I actually had a vision of my secretarial service being mobile. I daydreamed a truck with someone driving with me sitting in the back in a fully set up office in the van doing the work and delivering it ready to clients having just been done. Virtual before virtual existed. Obviously, it didn’t quite happen like that, but with the advent of ADSL in 2005 in South Africa, I was able to set up a home office and start my own business.

This business idea was born in 2016, but the journey really began in 2014.

After working for a company for 8 years, I hadn’t really gotten far financially and felt stuck. I decided to find a job with better financial prospects and the possibility of advancement. After 6 months of searching, I was hired at a new employer and managed to double my salary in one fell swoop!

Just start! That little voice inside your head giving you doubts will always be there. Push through that voice and keep going until you reach a point where you’re lost.

For as long as I can remember I have always been attracted to the idea of being a business owner. I’ve tried many businesses starting with my own DJ company. I got some business cards, printed them at Staples, passed them out, and waited for the calls.

It took a bit of time, but eventually, the calls started to come in and bookings started to happen. I did that for a couple of years until one of the DJ gigs some gangsters got into it and I was almost in the middle of a gang fight. Thank GOD things calmed down, but after that, I started looking for another business!

During this same time, the whole tech bubble was growing and I wanted a part of it. I took some coding classes in college and started using HTML to code my website from scratch. I kind of borrowed a lot of ideas from Yahoo but it was going to be mainly focused on my local city. I visited some businesses and got some of them to advertise. Things seemed to be going well when the bubble burst and I was once more left to venture out and look for something else.

We’ve been friends for awhile - we met right out of college in New York and stayed close even though we took fairly different professional paths.

Saara worked in the corporate world for a number of years before moving to Mexico where she launched a jewelry business aimed at rehabilitating sex trafficking survivors. Stephanie was a business consultant before going to law school and becoming a corporate lawyer; along the way, she launched an argan oil company that empowers women in Morocco.

I came up with TeamFFLEX seeing the massive trend of everything turning online and want to help as many people as possible achieve results. In a traditional gym format trainers job, there are only so many hours you can work in a day and a limit on clients you can actually work with. For example, if a client does a 60-minute session and you work an 8 hour day you can see 8 clients within that day. There are also of course training teams, and classes as well as small groups but still even if I could have worked with 100 people a day in a gym it would not have been enough.

I wanted to find a way to help people all around the world. The people that couldn’t get to the gym or didn’t have the money to hire an expensive trainer. I wanted to make sure that no matter where people were at the gym or at home they had the ability to take action on their health and fitness and get results.

Seeing in today's world how basically kids are born with an iPhone in hand it all just made perfect sense. Take personal training online and help people all around the world. The thing about today's society is that we want it now. We don't want to wait. We don't want to go into a building, meet with some trainer, get sold on all the different expensive packages and then pay basically to have a really expensive cheerleader. I honestly believe that within the next 10 years we won’t see trainers in gyms anymore. The quality of training in gyms continues to drop due to the fact that not enough people get training and also that trainers can’t even make enough money to sustain a living. I knew that if I could go online with everything not only would I be able to impact people to a much larger degree, I would also be able to live a life on my terms.

At 10-years-old I saw a bicycle in a neighbor’s trash can and asked if I could have it. I ended up with two broken bikes and combined them to make one, which I rode and eventually sold.

In junior high school, I took woodshop and fell in love with woodworking. Evenings, my father, the school superintendent who had started out as a shop teacher, would take me to the school’s woodshop and we’d build furniture and Christmas presents and fix things.

Today, my career is based around restoring old bicycles, pedal cars, Coke machines as well as other items. I previously worked at Beech Grove schools doing education technology, but began to get burned out and wanted to do something that I really enjoyed. Around that same time a TV show called “American Restoration” was on the History Channel, and it inspired me. I thought, ‘Wow, that guy [on TV] is making a living at restorations, maybe I can do the same”. So I just kind of blindly cashed in my 401k and jumped into it not knowing what to do or how to run a business or anything like that. I started in my mom’s garage, and I put up a website right away.

We started the food truck business in 2012.

We kept finding it very difficult to find locations to operate. We had a booker that we used to find our locations but fell short and we let her go. I took over our booking and found that most people did not want to book just one truck, not only that they were upset that most of the time the trucks didn’t show up or were late.

We learned the real need was not only helping the trucks but providing a turnkey service for the corporations. This was a game-changer for us, we were really struggling financially.

I’m from a very small town in the Appalachians called Sylva, North Carolina. If you’re not familiar with that region, it’s a very diverse area. Sylva is in the north end of Jackson County, and Cashiers (and neighboring Highlands) are in the south end. Sylva is blue-collar, and a factory-type (now tourist) town and Cashiers/Highlands is a spot where some of the wealthiest people in the world have vacation homes and are all members of one of the ultra-exclusive private clubs.

Growing up, I worked at my family’s convenience store. I saw a lot of the folks headed through to Cashiers and Highlands up from Atlanta for the weekend, and a big portion of them seemed to be making their money in real estate. Some were making money buying the mountain land around my town at a low price from local farmers who had no use for the steep mountains, developing a portion of the top, and then selling it off for astronomical amounts of money to other rich people. I was amazed by that. And I couldn’t understand why no one locally had tried this himself.

I come from a fairly long line of entrepreneurs on both sides of my parent’s families. My great-grandfather on my dad’s side quit school after the fifth grade, and then he went on and started a convenience store business that I still help operate 85 years later as it has passed down to my grandfather, my dad, and now myself and my brother. And my grandfather on my mom’s side owned a heavy civil construction company building large-scale projects like interstates throughout the mid-1900s. My uncles and cousins still operate a part of that business, too.

I’ve always been interested in animal welfare, and grew up with at least one or two dogs in the house at all times. During middle school and high school, I volunteered at my local animal shelter in Shreveport, Louisiana. I also became a vegetarian and then a vegan during those years. (I chose the vegan lifestyle primarily out of compassion for animals. Later I learned that it is also beneficial to the environment and one’s health as well.)

My love for chocolate didn’t happen until my mid 20s, after I had moved to New York. I enjoyed visiting the artisan chocolatiers in the city and sampling exotic varieties. For a short time, I worked at a raw vegan chocolate factory in Queens where I developed a best-selling flavor.

Then I adopted a homeless pit bull.

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.

We both had previous experience in another start-up called Soul id which was a social media platform for action sports. We ran the marketing and media at that company which was a blast. After we left that company, we split directions. Eli got involved in the eCommerce industry by starting a brand called Winterial which he grew to hundreds of SKUs. Kyle headed in the media direction and started a commercial photography company where he worked with Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.

At this time Kyle wanted to be able to get back in the start-up world, grow a large brand and a team of like-minded creatives and innovators. So like any entrepreneur, he jumped on Google and started to search for media companies that were also technology-based companies as well. That is where the inspiration of starting a digital agency that solely focused on the media portion for brands and product companies came to life.

Culture is the centerpiece of a successful company. Creating a place for employees to come to work and enjoy what they do, the environment and who they work with will pay long term dividends.

When I tell my story I like to get into the details of how I landed where I currently am and where I am going. I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico. I ended up in the United States after my father got a job offer for a marketing position at a semiconductor company, this was when I was only 10 years old. To be honest, the move definitely had an effect on me. When I lived in Mexico I was a fairly outgoing kid and (I believe) the move caused a shift that made me more of an introvert so you could say that was a bit against me, since I didn’t necessarily enjoy being the center of attention or being “noticed” too much for much of my upbringing. I finished high school and went to Arizona State University where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Marketing alongside a certificate in entrepreneurship.

Right around the time of graduation from high school and the start of college I started a clothing line. I believe I was only 19 at the time and I didn’t have a budget to promote the new clothing line, so I turned to social media as my route to promote and sell the new products. I had to learn everything from Photoshop to constructing a website, content, photography, content distribution, supplier relationships, and many other skills. After seeing success marketing on social media, I quickly found that I was passionate about digital marketing. I then realized that there was a place where I could polish up my digital marketing skills, an agency, which to my surprise were not as concerned with academics as they were with real-world experience.

I went on to work for a marketing agency, after finally finding one was willing to overlook my lack of agency experience and realized that my entrepreneurial spirit and persistence would outweigh the need for the experience all the agencies were looking for. I was hungry. At this agency, I got hired on as a content writer (which I didn’t necessarily enjoy the most, but I knew I had to do it if I wanted to eventually lead the paid advertising department which was my goal). I was able to do just that within a year. I studied the ins and outs of the agency, how it operated, how it dealt with clients, how it made mistakes, and most importantly what helped it scale.

I have always had an eye for fashion as well as the ability to put styles together in such a way that others would not have normally done. Overall, I carry myself as a very classy woman with sex appeal. Therefore, my style reflects just that: an unapologetic woman who is not ashamed of the curves God has given her. However, I would often find myself struggling to balance between, “Is this too sexy or too conservative?”

A few years ago, 2017 to be exact, I went out almost every weekend to nightclubs primarily because my ex-husband at the time was a club promoter. Therefore, I needed to look my best being by his side. So every weekend, I spent the day shopping for my “nightlife” outfit. Week by week, I brought home a new look that was not previously in my closet. However, once I got to the club, I noticed other women wearing either the same outfit as me or something I had seen in the store while shopping earlier that day. It frustrated me; I certainly did not want to look similar to anyone else especially considering I had put so much effort into my look (I take fashion seriously). This same disappointment went on for a few consecutive weeks: I would buy something, then that night another woman would be wearing it.

One afternoon, God placed the word “boutique” on my heart. Let me say this: I did not expect operating a business let alone a boutique! So I just casually googled how to start a boutique out of curiosity. I came across an article similar to this one here. To my surprise, the steps were simple! I was so amazed at how easy it appeared to be that I made the decision that day to take it seriously and go about starting one with unique styles you would not find anywhere else! I figured if I’m going to continuously buy clothes to go out every weekend, why can’t it be my items? So by following along those steps paired with research, Jess Mi Boutique was born.

I was blessed to grow up in a two-parent household with a loving and caring set of parents. My father was in the military and because of that, I was born in California in ‘94. I’m a Georgia Peach all the way, but I was born in California. Unfortunately, in September of 2018, my life shifted when my father passed from cancer. It was pretty quick. In July, he was diagnosed and in September, he took his last breath. I was a Daddy’s girl to the FULLEST, so you can imagine the pain I went through - and still going through.

Do research before starting. If you want to start a business - research before you pay anything.

Fortunately, he was there to see me graduate from Valdosta State University in 2016. I majored in Mass Media with a Speech Communication Minor. Growing up, I loved to be in front of the camera (my father was a photographer) and I would record the video announcements at my church, as young as 11 years old. I also recorded the announcements in elementary school. I just knew Broadcast Journalism was something I was interested in.

• Joshua Haupt is the founder and CEO of the cannabis consultancy firm, Medicine Man Technologies.

• Joshua Haupt is a self-made millionaire, entrepreneur, author, and cannabis grower.

• Since 2014, Medicine Man Technologies' cannabis consulting business has supported clients all over the world in making informed decisions regarding cannabis consumption.

• According to the medical cannabis hub RXLeaf, Haupt has earned the moniker "Steve Jobs of cannabis" due to his significant influence on cannabis cultivation and the cannabis industry.

Read the full story on cnbc.com ➜

Hey everyone! I am Chris and in March 2011 I started Live Fit. Live Fit is a personal training company that was created to change the standards in the personal training industry. Early on I focused on building a company that is not only based on results, as most fitness companies are, but that is also focused very heavily on relationships. Relationships create trust, trust creates buy-in, and buy-in leads to the accountability and dedication it takes to get results.

Hey there! I’m Jeremy Enns, the founder and Storyteller In Chief at Counterweight Creative, a podcast production and strategy agency.

I started the company 3 years ago, in 2016 with one client, making $15/hour and have grown into a team of 10 contractors producing more than 30 shows per week with revenue of over $10K/mo.

I'm Bryan Clayton CEO of GreenPal which is best described as Uber for Lawn Care.

Good thing early investors told us no because with their capital they would have owned and controlled 30% of our business.e are self-funded and my cofounders and I own it all.

Hi, I’m Theresa the owner of the blog DIY Lifestyle. On my blog, I share dozens of gluten-free, vegan, paleo, raw vegan and healthy recipes, fun crafts & DIYs, helpful life hacks, and travel tips. I started my blog because I was looking for a place to write down useful information to share with people all around the world but it quickly turned into something more.

Bonjour! My name is Anthony Rosemond. I'm a Parisian chef & founder of Pastreez, an online French bakery.

We’ve sold over 1 million macarons to this date, with only a team of two.

My name is Dmitriy Peregudov, and I run Giftsenda - the SaaS gifting platform for Sales & Marketing teams.

During the winter holiday season of 2021, our team processed and delivered over 40,000 gift orders in 200+ countries worldwide.

Hello! My name is Stephen Layton and I am one of the founding members of The Good Scoop located in the greater Sacramento region. We make all of our own ice cream in house using fresh local and all-natural ingredients.

Some of our best selling and most popular flavors include our banana, rosewater, lavender, and salted cookies and cream. We use fresh seasonally available ingredients, so we use peaches in the summertime and apples in the fall. Some of our more interesting flavors include horchata, honey wasabi, peppermint bark, and olive oil.

The Complete Service is the opposite of The Essential Service, it costs more but we handle the entire process for the couple!

We have gone from doing 5 to 10 weddings a month to 80 to 100 weddings a month in 4 years.

I started my career at the world-famous Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles Apprenticing under Certified Master Chef Raimund Hofmeister.

Food Fleet’s growth Year after year has been at an at over 30 %. From 2017-2018 we had an unprecedented 160% growth spurt. With a team of 6, including my partner and I, we managed over 20 million in sales for our clients. As an example. We took over a convention center 3 years ago managing their food truck business. For their largest event of the year, we were up 53% over the previous year. I honestly would have to equate some of that success to the under-reporting of sales by the previous operator. But the following year we were up 19% from that figure and again close to that this year. That is due in large part to our understanding of transaction times, menu mix, the equipment in each truck or pop up and other factors.

• Nate Dodson, is an urban farmer and the man behind MicroGreens Farmer. His objectives are to combat Crohn's disease and exert more control over the diet.
• Since the business was founded in 2016, they have assisted individuals in starting their own microgreens-related businesses.
• He initially only intended to grow for his own consumption, but soon realized that he could produce more than he could consume. As a result, he began to sell his produce, particularly microgreens, and thus his business got started.

Read the full story on sidehustlenation.com ➜

• Benny Lewis is a famous Irish polyglot and the creator of the language learning website Fluent in 3 Months.
• He has appeared in numerous national media outlets, such as The New York Times, Business Insider, Forbes, LifeHacker, National Geographic, and the BBC.
• This language learning website receives over 2 million visits monthly.
• Benny is fluent in seven different languages. He shares the experiences of real people who struggle and succeed in learning foreign languages, including his own.

Listen to the full podcast on podcasts.apple.com ➜

Hello, I am Akshay Patel from Albuquerque, NM the land of enchantment. I started an event rental and decor company that led me to an event venue. The View Event Center is a lavish space that is an indoor and outdoor event venue with panoramic city views. Our high-end venue with experienced staff will assist from venue decor to the smallest details entailed in making memories of a lifetime. Simply Decor, Tents, and Events ensures exclusive decor and thrives to bring your event to life through customized, elegant decor for all of their clients.

The full-service company will individually work with every client to design their event that will intrigue every eye in the room. Our company is broad that we get many different types of customers and we make many great connections with them as well. The company was making upwards of $380,000 a year.

I’m from a small country called Lithuania. I run an open Source live support application. My main customers are everybody who wants to host live support applications on their stack. Clients vary from small companies to large ones - which have hundreds of operators.

My biggest accomplishment is returning clients and how I keep relationships with them for years. It means I do something right. Not to mention the project in GitHub now has over 1.5K stars.

I’m Fabien from FAB FRENCH INSURANCE. I run an insurance brokerage agency in the South West region of France. We sell insurance for the English-speaking community living in France, mostly insurance for VISAS (or residency applications) and also provide car insurance, as well as home and content policies. Basically, we smooth out the administrative challenges of living the French dream. Although we’re based in France we provide a 100% English service.

As with any start-up, you have to be “the squid of all trades” (I just made this one up but let’s pretend it’s a French saying), and be prepared to put in the hours!

My name Warnisha Foster I am the CEO of Kiss My Crown Essentials. I founded Kiss My Crown Essentials in March of 2020 and I started offering my products a few at a time to see how they would go over with the public. My first product was Strawberry Rose’ Champagne Soap. The idea for this soap came from looking at my life as a single mom of four I started to feel burned out. I needed something to make me feel feminine, Make me feel like a woman, Grown and sexy. This did the trick.

Our mission here a KMCE is to let mothers like myself know that we are seen, we are beautiful and we are a necessity.

Hi! My name is Larry McGee, and I own a company called Aquatic Designs, Inc. I design, sell, install, and maintain fish aquariums in restaurants, hospitals, medical offices, and any other business imaginable. I service aquariums in the central Arkansas area and travel the state doing aquarium system repair at big box pet stores.

Triple 200 Gallon Aquariums in a Restaurant/See behind the wall of these tanks

Hello, my name is Harris Derner and I am the co-founder of Brine Brothers, an All-Natural Premium Brine company. I started Brine Brothers in 2016 with my friend of 25+ years, Michael Belicose. Our current products are all-natural, drinkable pickle brines; ‘Darn Good Dill’ - the classic for pickle lovers and ‘Chili Cherry Fire’ - for those who like it hot. Pickle ‘brine’ (also referred to as pickle ‘juice’) is the liquid solution that transforms cucumbers into pickles.

My name is Kevin Gillespie, and along with Garrett Le’ Tourneau, we created Wax & Wick, the 100% soy candles with wood wicks.

Some notable differentiation between Wax & Wick and traditional candles is that our branding is simple, the style of the candle will fit with any decor, and we use only 100% soy wax and Fsc-Certified wood wicks. Our impact on the environment is intentionally small.

Turning a passion into a 6-figure business is the goal of many entrepreneurs, and Jennifer Sobel has made that happen.

She has taken her long-term passion for belly dancing and used her three years of knowledge in digital marketing to build a successful belly dancing coaching business online.

Her company is called TheBellyDanceSolution.com and she inspires hundreds of women to attain their positive body goals with the help of belly dancing.

Jennifer uses belly dancing as a tool to live a healthy and happy life and helps her clients live a stress-free life while guiding them to regain their confidence & self-esteem.

Listen to the full podcast on sidehustleschool.com➜

Hi, I’m Mike Moloney, the founder of FilterGrade. FilterGrade is a marketplace for creators where you can find digital assets such as presets, LUTs, video templates, and much more.

Today thousands of creators from all around the world buy and sell digital products on FilterGrade and more than 450,000 users visit the site every month.

My name is Jay Fuller, I’m one of three co-founders of athlo agncy. – a personal branding startup for the anonymous college athlete navigating NIL (Name, Image, and Likeness). Our flagship product is a personal branding workshop, pre-recorded in a MasterClass-like format. Facilitated by my other two co-founders – Aly and Isaac Nauta (brother and sister).

We’ve been able to add athlo ambassadors, participate in an event with UGA baseball and a sports accelerator, and have two on-campus workshops scheduled this summer with two different universities.

Shaan Patel is the founder and CEO of Prep Expert, a test preparation platform that provides online SAT and ACT prep courses.

He founded the firm from his dorm room eight years ago with just $900 left over from his undergraduate scholarships.

His SAT and ACT prep classes, books, and licensed items have already brought more than $20 million in sales. In 2016, he pitched Prep Expert on ABC's "Shark Tank" and secured an investment from billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban.

He spent no money on marketing during the first five years of starting Prep Expert. Despite this, the company's sales doubled yearly based on word-of-mouth marketing.

The SAT prep classes offered by Prep Expert increased the students' SAT scores by hundreds of points. As a result, parents would refer it to other parents, enabling this company to grow quickly and for free.

When he first founded Prep Expert, Patel approached the local TV station about doing a piece on SAT preparation suggestions for parents and kids. He moved from having no clients to having several when the television interview aired.

Patel attributes his entrepreneurial success to self-control and never giving up.

Hi! I’m Jacques Hopkins, creator of Piano In 21 Days. My online piano course helps adults of all ages learn to play piano as fast as possible. Most of my students are people who never had the time or failed piano lessons before. Some are retirees who are excited about a new hobby but don’t want to wait years for results. Others are busy parents or professionals who need a low-pressure, flexible learning schedule.

My business brings in five figures every month, and I built everything from the ground up. I knew I had a unique take on piano lessons, but I had to learn everything about digital entrepreneurship and marketing in real time. It took a lot of effort, but it worked: I quit my engineering job and have been supporting my family this way for over eight years now.