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Pandemic aside, if you have something of value to sell, just do that. It doesn’t have to be a whole business first. First thing I ever sold was single recipes for $5. I didn’t have much of an audience or a plan beyond that at the time, and it’s ok if you don’t either.
I was BROKE broke when I started Kitchenista Diaries. I sold everything I owned and moved back home, for starters. Cut out all non-essential expenses, couldn’t pay all my bills either way. Applied for stamps & used the groceries I got to create my food blog content (and eat.)
Built an audience here and IG in the meantime. Nobody tells you how long it takes to do that organically, no blueprint. Once I had blog traffic I leveraged that to start going for paid sponsored posts. Another huge learning curve bc nobody tells you how to price digital content.
It sounds cooler than it was but really I was making $250 per blog post and most of that money went to groceries. It would be almost another 5 years before I was consistently signing 4-5 figure contracts.
So I needed another income stream. I decided to sell $5 recipes and eventually ebooks, another learning curve. Required better camera equipment too. I want to say I spent $600 on my first “real” camera. Now that, worth the investment because it meant better quality content.
Ebooks take time especially if they require heavy photography, like cookbooks do. That is a LOT of labor and trial and error. So many late nights learning how to use Adobe Indesign because I didn’t have the budget to pay someone else to do it. But eventually they got sold.
And even with the ebooks, I realized that my sales would be mostly seasonal. The money was great but it wasn’t consistent all year. So I tried catering as another income stream. Ha, nobody tells you how to start doing that either. 
Did I mention I had no car during all of this? And a baby? And another kid? And mental health setbacks? It was... not a fun time in my life. I was pretty miserable and spent a lot of time crying and feeling like none of this would ever work. For whatever reason I kept going.
I’m doing more than okay today. Living back on my own, moved to a whole new city. Still selling those same ebooks (thank you.) Don’t cater but I still cook for a client part-time. Cleared six figures in sponsored content alone this year, in a pandemic.
I don’t have any cute business advice to package up and sell nor do I want to. I just do food. The moral of my own personal story was that I can figure this shit out. But it takes time, a lot of mistakes and losses, and I had to humble myself to ask for the help required.
And after all that I still don’t know why in the hell I opened an LLC. 
