You do not need money, a degree, or permission to start.
My name is Leah. I am a single mother in Ballarat, a fine artist with 26 years of practice, and a self-taught web developer. I built ten businesses in two and a half months with no investor, no co-founder, and no development team. If you are a single mum who wants to start a business but you have no money and no idea where to begin, this page is written for you.
I am not going to sell you a dream. Starting a business as a single mum is hard. You are tired, you are stretched, and you have less time and less money than almost anyone. But the barrier that used to make it impossible, needing cash to hire developers, designers, and marketers, is gone. That is the part nobody has told you yet.
Starting a business with no money
The old model required money up front. You paid a web developer thousands to build a site. You paid a designer for a logo. You paid a copywriter for words and a marketer to get you seen. For a single mum on one income, that was the end of the conversation before it began.
Today the entire stack of a real business can be built for the cost of a monthly subscription. A domain is around fifteen dollars a year. Hosting on Vercel is free to start. A database on Supabase is free to start. And Claude, the AI I use to build everything, does the work of a developer, a designer, a copywriter, and a strategist inside one conversation. The whole thing can run for under two hundred dollars a month, and often far less while you are starting out.
Starting a business with no experience
You do not need to have run a business before. You need to know one thing from the inside, an industry, a problem, a job you have done, a service you have paid for and been let down by. That lived experience is your unfair advantage, and it is worth more than any business degree.
I built Nest & Nurture Society from twelve years of hands-on cleaning experience. I built Solene Haus because galleries exploited me as an artist. I built CALLS Health because families cannot get a doctor to their door. Every business I own started as a problem I had personally lived. You already have yours. You just have not written it down yet.
How Claude changes everything
Claude is an AI that can write code, generate content, build business strategy, research an industry, check compliance, and produce marketing copy, all in a single conversation. It is the reason a single mum with no team and no money can now build what used to take a funded startup.
Claude is not magic. It makes mistakes, and you need to learn how to spot them and fix them. You need a clear plan of what you want at the end. But once you know how to work with it, Claude is the equivalent of a full agency working around the clock for the price of a subscription. That is the shift that makes all of this possible.
How to pick the right business
Do not start with what is trendy. Start with what you know and what makes you angry. The best business for a single mum is one built on a problem you have lived, in an industry you understand, serving people you actually care about.
Ask yourself three questions. What industry do I know from the inside? What problem in it has personally hurt me or someone I love? Who else is being hurt by the same thing? The answer to those three questions is your business.
The exact steps I would take
One. Write down every problem you have personally experienced in an industry you know. Two. Open Claude and describe the industry, the problems, and who is being hurt. Three. Let Claude help you turn that into a platform concept, a revenue model, a brand, and a simple tech stack. Four. Build the first page, just one page, and put it live. Five. Create content that answers the questions your future customers are already typing into AI search. Six. Keep going when it gets hard, because it will.
That is the whole method. It is not a secret. It is just work, done with tools that finally make the work possible for someone in your position.
Start today, not someday
You do not need money. You do not need experience. You do not need permission. You need one problem you know from the inside, Claude, and the willingness to keep going.
Come and join the journey at Single Mum Building Empires. Subscribe on YouTube and watch me build these businesses live, from a blank Notepad file to a website on the internet. If I can do it as a single mum in Ballarat, you can start too.