We decided to create a list of 11 lucrative low cost startup businesses in 2016 to help people who are planning to ditch their 9 to 5 corporate jobs and become entrepreneurs. This list will sum up the previous year and offer an insight into the most profitable industries and the businesses you can start without huge investments.
Paul Graham, one of the most famous business writers, and a highly successful entrepreneur has defined the term ‘startup’ as a company which is designed to grow fast. Most people think that only tech companies can be called startups. Although many business schemes in the IT field are designed to grow fast, this term doesn’t only apply to them.
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Any business, from software development to barber shop can be called startup, if it’s featuring exponential growth, especially in the first phases of its development. Still, the problem with barber shops and other similar small and medium-sized enterprises is that they aren’t designed to grow fast, but to provide sustainable income to their owners, on a monthly basis. On the other hand, software and internet businesses, like social networks or cloud storages, are defined by their growth. If they don’t grow as fast as predicted, they won’t provide sustainable investment returns, and they will eventually fail. That is what makes tech companies, so successful. Their founders have only two options, to grow their business fast or to fail miserably.
Now after we have defined the term startup, we should pay attention to the word, ‘low cost’ in our headline. It’s hard to define low cost, especially in the digital era, when many people start home businesses, with almost no investments at all. If you want to read more about this subject, we recommend you the Insider Monkey’s 11 Most Profitable Home Businesses with Low Startup Cost article. We have used the Entrepreneur’s list of 101 Businesses you can start with less than $100, as the basis of our research. In our opinion, starting a business with $100 is a great deal, and it is definitely a low cost investment.
The next step was to combine the businesses on Entrepreneur’s list, with the results we have found in Forbes’ “Most Profitable Industries in 2016” article. Some of the industries from this list require huge investments, like dentistry, health care, warehousing, and construction. That is why we needed to use another source that will help us to find more startup ideas that are both low cost and possibly lucrative. After several hours of searching for the right source, we have found the Business News Daily’s 20 Fastest Growing Industries article.
Although this article is primarily written for people who are looking for a job, we can effectively use it in our survey, because business growth is often closely connected with the employment growth and major industry trends.
Industries from Forbes’ list have received 2 points for each ranking place on our list of lucrative low cost startup businesses in 2016, from the last to the first entry, while the industries from the Business News Daily’s list have received the number of points that is reversely proportional to their ranking. We have reviewed every business idea and described one or a few possible growth scenarios, for each entry. This way, our list of 11 lucrative low cost startup businesses in 2016 will help readers to find great business ideas and develop their growth plan at the very beginning.
