5 Simple Business Ideas for Students in 2021
Entrepreneurship
3 min readFeb 7, 2021
- Buy use and resale used devices in online marketplaces.
Not many people know how to shop for the lowest prices on the internet. This a skill that can be monetized when dealing with most quick selling items, like electronics on the internet. It is possible to acquire devices such as mobile phones at costs significantly lower than the prevailing market price if you dig deep enough in sites like Facebook markets and OLX. Once you find such you can buy it and repost it right back into the online marketplace with a price markup. If played right you will usually have buyer offers within a few hours to a few days of posting. The caveat in this one is that you need to be both tech-savvy and street smart to sidestep conmen and potential fraudsters. - Air BnB
This one is being experimented with by a friend of mine as we speak. It involves renting out a two-bedroom flat at a relatively affordable cost and in a very safe neighbourhood. This “affordable” figure will vary depending on the location of course. The idea is that you live in one room while selling the space in the other one as an Air BnB with rates per night. With this model it is even possible to make more from the extra room than you are spending on the rent itself, hence profiting from your rental flat. The downside is the fact that you will have to trust random strangers to share your space, which may present security issues. - Helping people sell their unwanted stuff online
Nowadays creating a basic website is almost as simple as creating an email account, almost. That said, most of us have items we are holding on to not necessarily because we want to but rather because we do not have the time or the means to get rid of them. This is where you come in. You can create a website, or even a Facebook page really, on which you will post unwanted items ranging from books to household items within your locality which the owners would wish to sell. For this, you will need high-quality photos of the said items and a profit-sharing agreement and voila! You are in business. - Influencer Marketing
This one is for those capable of creating personality cults and/or hype around themselves or a brand enough to earn a loyal “large enough” social media following. By attracting a specific kind of users, companies will be willing to pay you for access to your audience. This can be in the form of posting adverts on your page or you endorsing the said company’s products. Either way, this capitalises on your social media celebrity status to help you make that extra buck. - Podcast editing
The podcast is a fast growing corner of the internet. The world just hit the first million podcasts in 2020, if you compare this with youtube over 40 million channels you can see that podcasting is an industry that is still in its infancy. As more and more people are starting up their podcasts, more and more people are needing some help with editing their shows. Value creation in this model is in the form of you being able to edit out the mistakes in somebody’s audio recordings. You can learn more about podcast editing by following this link.
