LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
In my four years of college I have taken part of as well as seen several startup opportunities where it is possible to make some extra cash. The most successful businesses you can start in a college community are those that deal with either making students money, saving students money, or college entertainment. Here are some ideas you might want to look into if they haven't been established yet at your college...
Selling T-shirts- Students love to by witty t-shirts that represent their school. If there is something your school is known for among the student body, might as well print it on a t-shirt and make some money off of it. Here is an example. At my school, there is a public bus system that runs throughout campus and to all the apartment complexes. The buses run until 3am. On the weekend nights, the buses are called "The Drunk Bus" because at this time the buses are loaded with wasted students going from party to party. Someone made a t-shirt of this with a clipart of a bus and sold it around campus to make a fortune. They then went on to make other t-shirts that represented the entertainment our school is known for and made a website out of it. From there, the site became a full blown entertainment site for our student body including forums, hotties of the week, student articles, videos of block parties, events, apparel, and even a yearly swimsuit calender featuring students. I myself made t-shirts and was successful at selling them at events such as tailgates. If your school has big sporting outings such a football, these are great venues to sell shirts.
There are several ways to approach selling t-shirts at school. You can either have them pre-printed at a site like customink.com where you will have to front the money and hold an inventory or you can use an on demand printing service such as printfection.com. Using an on demand print service will cost more per shirt but you won't lose money if you are unable to sell your entire inventory.
Auto detailing- Another business you can start is detailing cars. If you are in an area where there is money, there will be people with expensive cars who like to keep them in perfect condition. I started a detailing service 2 years ago. My startup costs were under $300, where I only needed to buy a porter cable set, a wetvac, mits and bucket, and waxes and polishes. I made business cards and started detailing friends and family cars, spreading the word of my business. In about a month I had more business then I could handle. I was making a lot of money, charging about $200 for cars and $260 for SUV's. I also approached all the car dealers in my area and explained my business and left them my contact info. I was contacted by one of the dealers to detail all the cars in there lot once a week for a discounted price. I did this as a summer job and made more money than any other part time job or internship I have ever had. This is definitely worth looking into if you have a passion for cars. There are plenty of forums available to help you learn the business as well.
Sell People's Books- Every semester at school requires the purchase of new textbooks. At the end of the semester, every student sells back their books for a small percentage of their price. Frequently, new edition are released and bookstores will not except books back. This leave students with a pile of books and empty pockets. What I did was open a half.com account and sold my books back online that weren't accepted. Fortunately, not all schools used the newest editions of books so there were always buyers. I took the liberty of offering to my friends to sell their books for them for 10% of the sale. This worked well in my favor as most people I knew didn't want to establish an account with half.com and take the time to sell their books back. In addition to this service, I would also sell stuff on ebay for friends for a percentage of the sale. I would scout out people with things they no longer used who didn't have an eBay account and offered to sell it for them. I sold all kinds of things such as DVD players, older ipods, mini fridges, etc...
Beer delivery service- The laws on this will vary from state to state but a friend of mine opened a beer distributor in Pennsylvania that also delivered beer to students. The price of beer would be more expensive but surprisingly students would rather pay the extra few bucks for a case of beer or a keg to be delivered to their home. Of course there were several ID verifications involved for liability but this business model can be very successful if it has not yet been established at your college. You could approach an already established beer distributor and offer to build their business by introducing a delivery service.
Haircuts- Not once did I pay for a haircut while in college. I always had one of my roommates do it. Once all of our friends found out we had clippers, they all wanted in and were willing to pay for it to.
House cleaning- I don't know how successful this was but there were a bunch of students who started a house cleaning service. They would pretty much clean up after a big party. Several fraternities used their services to clean up after their jams. I personally never used their service, but with the right marketing, this model can be profitable.
Computer techie- This is fairly common but still is possible to make some extra cash if you are good with computers. What you want to do is advertise your computer help services cheaper than all the competition and give your customers incentive to use you. There were some guys on my campus that would only charge for their services if you were completely satisfied with the solution. The would do all kinds of things from clearing up spyware, installing software, formatting your harddrive, installing new ram, etc...
These are no long term startups but they definitely have potential to make some pocket cash while you're in school. Post any other ideas you have.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by carinneee@hotmail.co
Featured on:
