Five Businesses You Can Start in America With Less Than $1,000
Many people have written to me lately asking: what are the best businesses a new immigrant can start in America with no more than $1,000 in capital? The good thing about these businesses is that they need no degree and no great experience, and they suit men and women alike. Here are five that I think fit.
First: home and commercial cleaning
The first thing a newcomer to America notices is that house cleaning here is expensive, and not everyone can afford it, because labor is costly and in many places simply not available. That makes it a very low-capital business for anyone with a head for trade. Often it depends on your own physical effort and a little marketing among the people around you. Add $200 to $300 of cleaning supplies and you are ready to start.
Anyone who has lived in America knows how often they needed someone to help clean the house or organize a room or a closet, and could not find someone trustworthy and clean. In homes where both husband and wife work, the house always needs cleaning.
Before you start, check the licensing requirements in your city and state.
In my view you need neither a company nor employees at the beginning. If you start on your own, trust in God, with cleaning supplies, squeegees and buckets, the work gets done. If you want to expand, you can hire some of the workers who stand outside “Home Depot” every day, a large store that sells and rents tools for construction and contracting, much like the day laborers back home in Egypt. Most of them are men who earn their living by the day. Pick the ones who look clean and serious, and ask whether they know women who could work with you.
But beware of the worry it can cause you if one of them turns out, God forbid, to be dishonest and steals something from a home you clean.
The same goes for offices and companies. Many of them contract someone to come in at night after the staff leave to clean the offices. Getting a contract with even one office is a blessing. It is a good business for anyone who focuses on it, and in my view it costs no more than $300 in tools and supplies, apart from your own effort and good marketing.
Second: gardening and lawn mowing
In America most houses, especially the expensive ones, have a back yard and a front yard. Most people are either lazy by nature or their time is valuable, so they do not want to commit to keeping the garden tidy and mowing the grass themselves, and they look for someone to do it for them.
Most municipalities here fine people who do not mow the grass in front of their homes regularly, so keeping the yard in order, with no trash and no long grass, has become a requirement, especially the front yard that faces the street. There is some leniency for the back yard because only the household sees it, but if a city or municipal inspector sees it, you will probably get a warning or a fine. That is where the need for this business comes from.
It suits someone with a calm mind and good muscles. It costs no more than renting a mower from Home Depot or any nearby shop, and these shops are everywhere in America. You rent the machine you need for $20 to $50 a day or two, depending on need, and return it. My estimate is that the cost does not exceed $100 to $200, and the longer you rent, the cheaper each day gets. Even if you rented the mower for the whole month, the capital for the business would not exceed $1,000 in any case. In return you can easily earn three or four times that figure. It is a good business, so focus on it and trust in God.
Third: commercial and industrial photography
I mean photography for individuals and small shops, that is, startups and new projects. Demand for it is high here in America. Just by carrying a camera and walking down the street, many people stop me and say: we have a shoot, or a wedding, and we are looking for a professional photographer.
This business has two requirements: some experience with photography and lighting, and a reasonably professional camera. For the first, there is no way except to teach yourself from YouTube and the internet, or to look around you for a skilled photographer and say: train me, and go out with him without pay so he teaches you the craft. As for the camera, I don’t think that is hard, since used cameras are not expensive. You can easily find one in good condition for around $1,000, while a similar one new costs over $2,000 and may reach $2,500. That is a big saving and a good start for your business.
There is one important detail: demand and prices rise if the photographer is a woman, because many Arab and Muslim families do not like a strange man coming in to photograph their weddings and women-only occasions while the women are relaxed, only a woman like them. That is what actually happens. I have often been asked to recommend a female photographer in New York for weddings or women’s events, and because there are not enough female photographers, demand for them was higher than for professional male photographers.
The income is in no case less than $4,000 to $5,000 if you work only four or five days of shooting a month. Think about this business, whether you are a man or a woman, and trust in God.
Fourth: selling handmade products and leather goods
You can sell them online or in shops near you. I entered this business myself years ago, and I still work in it on the side whenever I have time. America, and the Western world in general, places great value on handicraft. If you have a skill that you practice with your hands, and you use it well and market it well, you will be living in clover, as we say in Egypt. The business does not need much money. All you need is the materials you will buy and the craft you already have.
And if you tell me, “What if I have no craft?” I say that before I came to America I did not know photography, or anything about standing behind a camera. I was a journalist and television presenter in Egypt, so I had experience standing in front of the camera, as I stand in front of you now, but I knew nothing about lighting, photography, framing, tilt and pan movements, gimbals or cranes. I learned all of it, one hundred percent, online, from YouTube. I have friends who are directors with long experience in television and film directing. When they saw what I produce, especially the documentaries I make here in America for some channels, which are my main source of income, they did not believe that I shot, directed and edited the film myself, because I taught myself everything from zero until I reached a level I am happy with, thank God. What I did, anyone can do: determination, persistence and a desire to learn something new will bring you a lawful living and help you build a business inside America.
I have made videos before about how to market these products and similar ones, and you can market them easily on well-known American sites, starting with the handmade section on Amazon, then eBay, and not ending with Etsy, which began with the very idea of selling and marketing handmade products.
It is a lovely business whose capital in no case exceeds $1,000, but the return can be five or six times that if God favors you and you make a product that is in demand, such as leather goods, and people get to know you and buy from you in large quantities.
Fifth: reselling discounted new items and used items
I have talked about this business before. One of my friends has funded his entire household from it. He holds a high degree that could earn him good money if he had it recognized in America, but he loves trade and focused on it, and God has blessed him and he earns good money. God bless him and everyone.
The idea, in short, is to resell items you find at reduced prices online, in wholesale markets, or in the well-known used-goods markets in America. There is a whole world here of used clothes and tools, whole popular and commercial markets built on this model. Many people buy used goods without any hesitation, from clothes to home furnishings to electrical appliances, covering almost everything in a home.
You earn more if you follow the right strategy, which is to divide yourself between selling discounted new items and selling used items where a large profit margin is expected. For example, many dealers go to “Costco,” a shopping warehouse built on selling wholesale at wholesale prices to customers who pay a yearly membership. It is not only Costco. There are other well-known big stores and chains that do the same, such as “Sam’s Club” and “BJ’s.” Smart dealers walk through these stores and look through the goods. If they find a T-shirt from a good brand, a pair of shoes from a certain brand, or an electrical device that is on sale or clearance, they buy it immediately and resell it, either online or among the people around them. They earn a lot because what matters to them is selling a lot, not making a lot on each piece. If someone buys a jacket or a T-shirt and makes $10 or $15 on each piece, and sells 50 or 60 pieces of that product a month, a respectable sum comes in.
The story is the same with used goods. There are markets and shops that specialize in selling them, called “thrift stores” here, and in almost every American city there is a Sunday market where people spread out their things, whether ordinary individuals or dealers reselling what they bought elsewhere. People walk through these markets and used-goods shops and go through everything in them. I have seen on YouTube, and some people who work in this field have told me, that they found truly valuable items whose sellers did not know their worth. They buy them for five, six, seven or ten dollars and easily sell them for seventy, eighty or ninety.
This business does not need a lot of capital. About $1,000 is enough, with two conditions. First, you must not need your money back quickly. Know that at the beginning you will not sell all the pieces fast, and even after people know you and your name spreads, not every piece will sell quickly, so do not rush to get your money back. Second, you must be skilled at recognizing which pieces can earn you a good profit. Do not buy what you like yourself or what you think is good if the market does not need it. Study the market well, know what is in demand, and get good at buying cheap, because the cheaper you buy, the bigger your profit margin.
Before I finish with this business, let me tell you about something that happened to me, I think in 2020, in the days of Covid, a little before or a little after. A somewhat older woman, like an elder sister to me, called me and said: Mr. Moustafa, I follow your videos and I know you like to help people, and I got your number from a friend of mine. I said: I hope all is well, dear lady. She said she was older, and that she had a son with a physical disability, and that she was from Lebanon. Because the boy is American, born here or holding citizenship here, she had brought him because treatment here is much better. She said: Help me, Moustafa. I have watched many of your videos and tried to look for work in Arab shops, but everyone says I am too old and they may not need me. All she wanted was one or two thousand dollars to add to what she gets from the government for her son’s care, to keep the household going.
I spoke with her for a while and suggested some businesses, but unfortunately none suited her, because she had special circumstances: no experience and not much capital. Until, in the middle of the conversation, God inspired me to ask her: My dear sister, you are from Lebanon, and I know Lebanese women like shopping and wandering through malls to buy distinctive fashion pieces. Is that true? She said: Yes, of course, I love it and adore it, but what does it have to do with the businesses you want to talk to me about? I said: That is the business. I had heard and seen some friends working this way: buying discounted goods and selling them. I talked to her and found her hesitant at first because of her age, and she said: I don’t know whether I will be humiliated or not. I said: If you like it, you won’t be humiliated, you will do it happily. She said: And what is the capital? I said: At the beginning not much, in no case more than $1,000. She said: No, even $1,500, God willing. I said: Excellent. She said: But I will focus on clothes. I said: Fine, and there are stores that do periodic discounts besides the wholesale stores, and it is known that they offer goods at reduced prices from time to time, but you have to go through all of them regularly. She said: Like what? I said: Like “Marshalls,” “Ross” and “T.J. Maxx,” and many shops of the same level and the same idea, which sell famous brands at reduced prices.
I advised her to do something better: not to go and buy at just any time, but to focus on the known sale times here in America, when many items drop to clearance prices. That is, you buy from a store that already gives a good price, then wait until that good price falls to something lower, and you buy at a price better than good and make a big profit.
The woman went once, twice, three times, and stayed in touch with me until God favored her and her affairs settled. At that time I taught her to open an account on Amazon and on eBay, and to sell on a well-known American site called “Craigslist,” and thank God she grew year after year in online selling. That was at the end of 2019 or the start of 2020, and we kept talking for about ten months until I was reassured about her, then contact stopped, life got busy and I forgot the matter.
Then about a year later I got a call from a number different from the one I had saved under her name. She said: Mr. Moustafa, I called you today because you came to my mind, and I want to tell you where I have got to, and apart from that, I pray for you with every penny I hold. I said: May God honor you, sister, tell me what is new. She said: Do you remember how I was and what I used to tell you about my dream and my ambition? I said: Yes, you wanted one to two thousand on top of what you get from the government for your son’s care, and you did not want more. She said: I am working in the same way you told me about three or four years ago, and God has been generous to me. Instead of one or two thousand, I now make $6,000 or $7,000 from only three or four shopping days a month. I was happy for her from my heart. She told me she now knows when beautiful new goods arrive at the big stores, so she goes around them and buys all the pieces she has learned are in demand and sell quickly, and she became known by name for bringing very beautiful and very cheap women’s and children’s clothes. She is no longer limited to selling online. All the Arab women in her city rush to buy from her.
This is a true story whose details I lived myself. If this woman could do it, then you, or anyone watching us, can do it easily.
Conclusion
These are five businesses that I think are profitable in America with no more than $1,000 in capital: cleaning, gardening, photography, handmade goods, and reselling discounted new and used items. Focus on them, and may God grant you success.
Article originally published on 3 October 2026.