The online nature of today’s business world has made starting a business much more accessible to people, particularly college students studying entrepreneurship. Starting your business is a great way to generate income while in school, but it’s also great practice for any future business ventures that you may wish to explore after graduation. Alternatively, starting a successful business early while studying in a top business college allows you to have a viable business to fund other ventures in the future.

Of course, choosing what kind of business to start while you’re in college can be difficult. If you’re having trouble finding the right type of business for you, why use the following ideas a springboard:

Artisan Desserts

How It Can Start:
Start out by baking special versions of baked goods you love. Think three-chocolate chip chip cookies or red velvet cinnamon rolls. Choose two or three baked goods that you can offer and set an order limit for each one every week. Then, you can make your deliveries over the weekend. Naturally, you’ll want to keep your operation costs low and start by promoting your new business over social media exclusively.

How It Can Grow:
There are many ways to grow this type of business. From expanding your offerings to actually opening up a brick and mortar stall in your favorite stall, this business idea scales well depending on your level of success.

Feasibility:
During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was an explosion of selling baked goods online. In fact, several students and fresh grads were able to build budding businesses by focusing their efforts in making delicious baked goods and creating a solid social media strategy.

Videography Services

How It Can Start:
Student organizations that organize big events are always on the lookout for reasonably-priced videography services to help document the big day. These orgs, of course, are more likely to prioritize student-run services from their own school. Alternatively, you can also start out by offering your services to faculty events.

How It Can Grow:
It really depends on what kinds of events you enjoy covering the most. Videography services will often find one or two types of events they specialize in. These include, but are not limited to: weddings, corporate events, birthday parties, etc. Depending on what you want to specialize in, you may want to expand your team and hire others to help you cover two or even three different events on the same day.

Feasibility:
This is one of the most successful business ideas over the last 10 years due to the need to “capture the moment” and to “preserve it forever”. Just know that competition can be quite fierce, especially if you want to specialize in videography services for weddings and debuts.

Dropshipping

How It Can Start:
You can get started by first creating a list of suppliers you want to source your products from, based on the items you want to sell. You can sell pretty much anything you’d like, but it’s recommended to stick to things that interest you. That way, it’s easier to determine if a product is good or not. After that, it’s as simple as creating an e-commerce website on platforms like Wix or WordPress and spreading the word.

How It Can Grow:
Growing this type of business largely depends on building a strong online reputation. This involves quite a bit of online marketing and advertising. It may be a good idea to study successful dropshipping businesses like Drop (formerly Massdrop) or Geardrop. As your reputation grows and your brand becomes stronger, you may want to purchase your domain to get rid of the unnecessary /wix.com URL extension.

Feasibility:
Dropshipping is the perfect option for students who want to run an eCommerce business, but simply don’t want to deal with the issues that come with stocking inventory. Take note, however, that it’s important to ensure that the suppliers you will be ordering from are trustworthy and “above board” to ensure quality products and reliable shipping.

Proofreading Services

How It Can Start:
Unlike some of the other ideas in this article, proofreading will require you to have sample work that potential clients can go through. The best way to accumulate sample work would be to hop on freelancer portals like Fiver and take on proofreading assignments.

How It Can Grow:
After you’ve accumulated sample work that shows off your proofreading skills, you can easily apply for more challenging assignments such as editing papers for your professors. If you wish to pursue this venture after your student days, you can easily opt to expand operations by taking on as much work as you want and utilizing freelancer portals to pass on the work. If you do this, though, just make sure you take a look at the finished work for one final round of proofreading before submitting to your client.

Feasibility:
Proofreading services are invaluable in many different businesses, from corporate circulars to academic papers. The best part about this business is that it pretty much requires minimal startup capital and you can easily control your business’ growth rate, ensuring your workload is always at a manageable level.

Develop an App or Web Service

How It Can Start:
First, you’ll need to decide what kind of problem your app or web service will attempt to solve. Think motivation apps, guided meditation apps, note taking apps, and so on and so forth.

In the beginning, it’ll take a lot of hard work in terms of coding and debugging, so this is ideally a venture you start with at least a few other partners. Find people around campus who can help beta test your app and continue developing it into the perfect solution for the problems of your target market.

How It Can Grow:
This really depends on what route you wish to take. Many people who develop successful apps or web services try to grow the App or Web Service as a full-fledged corporation. A prime example of this, of course, would be Facebook. In other cases, some developers are more than happy to sell the app or service to a corporation, taking the money and developing a different app or using it to fund a different business venture. The choice is yours.

Feasibility:
There are numerous examples of entrepreneurs starting tech-related businesses while in college. While this does take a lot of technical knowledge and skills, the payoff can be well-worth the effort. Given how the world is rapidly transitioning a lot of functions to digital platforms, starting an App or Web Service that solves common problems faced by your intended users is a great business to start as a student.