Starter Story - 6 easy ways to make money this summer

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This is Pat, founder of Starter Story - every week I write this email to share the lessons we learned after talking to successful founders around the world. If you're not interested, you can unsubscribe here.

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6 easy ways to make money this summer

#1. Take the lemonade stand to the next level ($8K - $54K/month)

There are many neighborhood-friendly classic businesses that you can scale and put your own twist on. For example, dog walking, HVAC, moving services, and hundreds more.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science, just think of the many “silly” businesses and jobs little kids create for themselves during the summer and then apply a grown-up approach.

To make money fast: Leverage your already existing relationships in your community to get your first customer. If you can find one customer, then you can find another. Then, scale, hire, automate, and delegate.

Real-world examples: 

• Make as much as $54K per month walking and sitting pets

• This ‘Uber for lawn care’ grew into a $30M/year business

• A drinks truck reached $360K/year (you don’t actually need a truck, your car and a table will do)

#2. Help people learn a skill ($1K - $150K/month)

People are done paying thousands of $$ for traditional education. 

To learn something, they now just go to YouTube, Tiktok, Reddit, or to Udemy / Coursera if it’s something more complicated.

To make money fast: Put your knowledge to work. 

Don’t think you have anything worth teaching? You’d be surprised how niche you can go.

This guy created a $60K/month course (and only spent 10h/week on it). Plus, he did it on top of a full-time job! Imagine what you can do if you completely focus on it for a couple of weeks.

More examples: 

• This girl got fired, created a course,  and now makes $300K/year

• Check out this course that makes $1.2M/year

• Personal finance course doing $1.8M/year!

#3. Start a newsletter (on the side) ($2K - $120K/month)

There are over 1M paying subscribers to Substack newsletters alone. A 10x vs previous year!

Newsletters are hot. And there are many ways to make money with them: ads, subscriptions, referrals, etc.

Besides joining a growing trend, other pros are: 

• It costs virtually $0 to launch a newsletter.
• You don’t need to spend much time working on it. This creator spends only ~5 hours working on his $420K/year newsletter.

You can write your newsletter about your passion: e.g. sports ($200K/year), sneakers ($48K/year),...

#4. Create a virtual community ($3K - $40K/month)

Guess what? Not everyone is outdoorsy and likes to get out to hang around with others and make plans.

There are millions that love to stay at home because that’s where they can enjoy their hobbies. And they hang out with others… online.

So you can have an idea, a total of 6+ billion hours of content were watched on Twitch just in the first quarter of 2022. That’s how much people like to stay at home and spend time on online communities.

You can create a virtual community in 20 minutes with free platforms such as Discord, Slack, PHP forum, Telegram, etc.

But which one to choose is not important. The important thing is that you learn how to bring people together, keep them engaged and make a profit thanks to that.

See some successful examples: 

• People learning  to code -> $180K/year

• Fight fake news -> $168K/year

• Self-improvment community -> 1.4M/year

#5. Dropship this Summer’s hottest products ($6K - $3M/month)

Not sure about the benefits of dropshipping? My favourite reasons to pick this idea: The manufacturer will handle the stock, the logistics, etc. Therefore your risk and initial investment are minimal.

Find a good supplier and set up a simple ecommerce store.

Some of the trending items this summer are: 

• Affordable jewelry
• Water bottles
• Summer-related products, of course (swimsuits, towels, beach toys)
• Cork products 

Pro tip: Almost all dropshipping marketplaces (Aliexpress too) have a page where you can check their most popular products.

Once you got that, just focus on the sales and customer service.

The trend’s popularity might have faded out a bit, but there are lots of people making money with this model:

• $3M/month selling window blinds

• $12K/month side hustle selling miniatures

• $6K/month southeast Asia fashion ecommerce

#6. Capitalize on the latest summer trend ($25K - $400K/month)

Is there a better time to host a party than in the summer? 

Buying drinks, getting food, picking a theme, putting up some decoration… it takes time and effort to organize one though!

But don’t just offer to get the groceries, Instacart can do that. Put together a few themes and offer a turnkey service for people who want to organize a party at home. You can even include a cleaning service as the cherry on top.

Here are some fun ideas: 

• BBQ party
• Pool party
• Wine tasting party

Make it more social by letting people have fun creating their food and drinks:

• Tacos party
• Ice cream and toppings party

Want to make a baller move and include games, too? Go ahead! These are super cheap:

• Bean bag toss
• Watermelon carving contest
• Water balloon dodgeball

Read this party-related case studies to dig deeper into this trend’s opportunities:

• Event decoration -> $35K/month

• Party supplies store -> $400K/month

• Party games -> $25K/month

• After-party cleaning -> $3K/month

Together with Semrush

This website went from side project to 5M visits and $200K/year

How? With these overlooked strategies:

#1. Ran a Semrush Backlink Audit and removed links from spammy websites. 

#2. Targeted low-competition keywords to quickly grow traffic and build site authority. 

#3. Optimized content using Semrush’s SEO Writing Assistant and achieved a 2.5X increase in page views. 

>> Try these Semrush tools FREE for 14 days and start growing your website.

Knowledge is power. And money.

Starting a business that makes money is all about providing value. When you’re able to create a collection of organised information that can easily be accessed, managed, and updated. That has a lot of value.

There are huge companies built on this principle, such as Wikipedia, Yelp, etc.

Their databases were mostly crowdsourced, meaning built by their users.

But there are businesses doing some great stuff in this field. Like this founder, who built a database with information from 1.6 million ingredients. And it’s making a killing in the beauty industry.

It’s a type of business that has been around for ages. Remember the Yellow Pages? That’s an old-school database.

This popular app that tells the ingredients of food and personal care products has been downloaded 30M+ times and generates $360K/year.

In a world with so much information, being able to sort it out is very valuable and can become a very lucrative business:

• This chef’s resources website generates $720K/year of extra income

• This guy makes $600K/year gathering information about franchises

• This bootstrapped data scrapping API makes $264K/year

Quick hitters

(1) This business grew to $864K/year thanks to joining an incubator. Is joining an incubator worth it? We get that question a lot, and here’s an example of a business that saw crazy growth after joining one.

These startups also got a boost from an incubator: $300K/month pie maker, $600K/month fulfillment business.

(2) These sisters doubled revenue by starting a subscription box. Are subscription boxes still a thing? That the media attention shifted away doesn’t mean it stopped being a good business.

In fact, this guy makes $51K/month reviewing subscription boxes. That should tell you something.

Do you want to start your own? Here are 15 subscription box business ideas you can start today.

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