Can You Really Start a Business With Almost No Money?

Often, yes. You can usually test a small business idea with very little money, especially if you're selling something simple and you keep your income while you try. Building it into something big is a different question, and that usually takes more than the headline figure suggests.

Most people who want to start something are waiting for money. I'll start when I've saved 10 lakh. When I get a loan. When I find an investor. Sometimes that's a sensible reason to wait. Often it's just the most respectable excuse going. Here's how little some very well-known Indian businesses began with.

The starting numbers

₹80. In 1959, Jaswantiben Popat and six other homemakers in Girgaum borrowed ₹80 and rolled four packets of papad on their building terrace. That was the start of Lijjat.

₹100 each, from ten women. Ruma Devi got a group together in Barmer to buy one second-hand sewing machine. The network has since grown to 30,000 artisans.

₹3.50 a kilo, on a bicycle. Karsanbhai Patel was a government lab technician who mixed detergent in his backyard in Ahmedabad and sold it door to door. That was Nirma.

₹8,000, borrowed. After repeated attempts at CAT didn't work out, Prafull set up a roadside tea stall in Ahmedabad and put up with a lot of comments from people who thought it was beneath an educated person.

₹10,000. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw started Biocon with that in a rented Bengaluru garage, after banks refused to lend to a 25-year-old woman.

A 50 sq ft room. iD Fresh Food began with Mustafa and his cousins packing batter in a room that small.

One handcart. Prem Ganapathy got to Mumbai at 17, robbed of his ticket money, and washed dishes for ₹150 a month. Saving up got him a rented handcart outside Vashi station. Dosa Plaza came later.

What they have in common

Look at that list again and you'll notice these weren't clever ideas. Papad. Detergent. Dosa. Tea. Nobody needed to be told what the product was.

Each of them sold something ordinary to people who already wanted it, and then did one thing better. Nirma was cheap. Lijjat was strict about quality. iD's batter was fresh with no preservatives. Prem kept adding to the menu until he had 105 kinds of dosa, on a handcart, which is a little bit insane and also really smart.

And because they had no money, they had to get customers early. You can't spend a year perfecting a brand when you've got ₹80. You roll the papad and you try to sell it by evening. I think that's the actual advantage of starting small. You find out very quickly whether anybody cares, and it hasn't cost you much to find out.

What these stories leave out

I'd feel dishonest stopping there.

₹80 in 1959 wasn't what ₹80 is today. It would be a mistake to read that number as "you can start a business with the change in your pocket". More importantly, the amount of money is usually only part of the story. Falling back on a family home, having a spouse's salary, knowing the right person, these things are real capital even if they never show up in the headline. Kiran already had brewing qualifications. Karsanbhai still had a government job at the time, as far as his story goes, and that gave him some cover.

And for each of these names, thousands of tea stalls and home businesses never grew at all. Some of those people worked just as hard. Some of their stalls are perfectly good small businesses that feed a family, and that's a win too, even if no one's going to make a video about it.

Some businesses really do need money too. You won't open a hospital on ₹10,000, and it's not a character flaw to know that.

So what can you do with ₹5,000 this month?

Try this. Pick one thing you could sell to ten people you don't know, and spend as little as you possibly can to make the first batch. Keep your job while you do it, and don't get a logo made yet.

Sell it. Write down what people complained about. Make it again.

If nobody buys, you've lost ₹5,000 and learned something it would have cost a lot more to learn later. And if a few people come back and ask for more, you've got something most people with big savings and bigger plans never get around to finding out.

There are plenty more stories like these on the site if you'd like a few more before you begin. But don't take too long reading them.