Covid...blah, blah blah!!!
Many people have lost their jobs and revenue streams. People are becoming reliant on government assistance in order to make it. I am not one of those people. I learned long ago to diversify my revenue so that I wouldn't be dependant on a singular source or company in order to take care of my family. Yeah of course theres up's and downs when providiong for yourself.... ramen noodles bad times and steaks in good times. So I know the feast or famine mindset!
Anyways, after all of the lockdowns began happening and businesses started shuttering I had lots of friends that became unemployed and not able to take care of themselves financially. Many of them turned to me for help. I believe in the give them the fishing pole rather than the give them the fish type of mentality when it comes to helping people and of course these were my own personal friends so I deceided to lend a hand. I began researching micro business ideas and started drafting a plan to create a way for my friends to generate some income and help them put some food on the table and pay their bills. The cavaete, however, was that I wanted to create streams of income that allowed my friends to spend as little time actually working so that they could spend more valuable time with their families.
After some deep digging into various ideas I came up with a list of 5 micro businesses that I would focus my attention on. Each one of these businesses allowed for my friends to make their own schedules for work and paid out an average of $65 dollars per hour worked. Now I am not going to give up my whole list in this thread because I have plans to scale a few of these ideas to a larger market, but I will tell you guys about one of these businesses and I think if there is any hungry people out there this may give you a little inspiration and a legitimate way to make some money.
Now this niche may be more difficult in larger metropolitan areas as there may be more competition than in smaller rural areas- I haven't tested this in larger areas so it could be a better market as well. Anywho.... One of the micro businesses was a process serving company. For those that do not know, process service delivers legal and other official documents to individuals or businesses as a third party, usually in legal disputes. The communities I focused on had populations of 100,000 to 150,000.
What I did:
Researched requirements for registering as a process server- $10 fee in the regions my friends were in.
Purchased a domain- brand name $8
Threw it up on my server- Free If you don't have a server could pick up cheap hosting for $5 a month.
Put up a simple one page landing page with a contact form.
Set up a stripe account to receive payments- FREE
Registered the business with google-Verified it and received the free $100 ad coupon.
Registered a google voice number for the business-FREE
Set up an ad campaign.
Started making money.
The second day after the ad was running in the local area there were four customers. Each customer paid $75. I was pretty stoked the first day this business made $300 - the $18 dollars of cost to get it up and going. After 30 days of running the ad campaign the CTR was 3.64% with around a 50% conversion ratio. The average cost per customer aquisition was around $10. After all was said and done the first month the business brought in about $1500.
I was hopeful that this could actually be something for my friends over time. After a few months the site was bringing in around $2,500 a month and at six months it's averaging $3,000 a month per area it displays in. I have thought about expanding and testing this model in larger metro areas but just don't have any friends in large cities that want a job they have to drive around doing. I can't blame them. I wouldn't want to drive around big cities either.
I decided to expose this niche because this requires people to be local, have a car and willing to drive around to deliver documents. I realize it's not for everyone. But if you need some way to pay the bills, put food on the table and add a little extra cash to the bank account and something you can make your own schedule around this may be the perfect opportunity for you.
If you executed a good marketing strategy you could even make more in similar sized areas. For example, I have been thinking about firing up my contact form submitter and messaging law offices and mortgage companies and offering them services instead of just relying on the ad in google. Companies like these use process servers all the time and if you can get your foot in the door with just a handful of these companies you could build yourself a nice clientele of businesses that use your service all of the time. It really depends on how much you want to work and make and how much effort you put into it.
