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How’s it going today guys so today we’re going to continue my series talking about different interesting business ideas and today’s business idea is all about drones and starting your own drone business now i know a lot of people out there like drones i know a lot of people are interested in them and i don’t want to make disappear like a business you can just jump
Into or something you can just start by merely going out and buying a nice quality drone there’s a lot of regulation and laws in place now and you have a lot of stuff you have to take care of on the legal side of things before you are a commercial drone operator but if you’re up for the challenge and you are really passionate about drones and it’s something you
Want to do full-time then there are definitely ways you can make a good living or even more than that make a lot of money being a commercial drone operator so recreational drone operators can turn their hobby into a profession so i would recommend that if you’re somebody who doesn’t know anything about drones why not start on the hobbyist side of things because
There’s certainly a learning curve there or you’re going to have to learn the stuff anyway so why not start flying one you know as a recreational hobby kind of and then once you really have some experience under your belt maybe that’s when you would consider doing this as a profession but if you’re someone who already flies a drone as a hobby and you do it for fun
And you want to make some money then you there are things you can do to make good money as a drone operator but it’s not as simple as posting an ad on craigslist a lot of people don’t realize this but you can’t just go on craigslist or go on a website and say hey i’ll take photos of your land i’ll take videos of your real estate and you know just throw me a couple
Hundred bucks for that that is um there’s that’s illegal for one thing okay and you could get fined hundreds of thousands of dollars from the faa so if you’re going to do it you’re going to want to be legitimate with it and you’re going to want to follow all the legal proceedings to actually do this so commercial drone operators must apply for a 333 exemption
With the faa which is the federal aviation administration drones or uavs on unmanned aerial vehicles are actually considered an aircraft so you have to go through the faa you need a drone pilot license you also should carry insurance on your drones in case your thousand dollar equipment falls out of the sky or you injured someone with a drone by some chance you
Also are required to have flight logs so if you’re somebody who’s going to be using a drone for commercial use understand you have to log all of your flights as well as your modifications so there’s a lot of stuff you have to do within the faa in order to be a commercial drone operator but while many of you see this is a bad thing i would actually say this is a
Good thing because this is a high barrier of entry basically this means that everyone out there is not going to just start a drone business because it’s incredibly difficult to and there’s a lot of things you need to do in order to do this the right way and to do it legally so as a result if you’re someone who is ambitious enough this high barrier of entry is
A good thing because there’s going to be less competition out there so if you’re someone who is a hobbyist and you want to figure out how to make some money with your drones here are four ways you can do this number one is through inspections so my first example is building inspections for roofs or possibly chimneys things that are hard to reach so rather than
Climbing up there and inspecting a roof maybe there’s a roofer who wants to redo a roof for somebody who has a leak in the roof and they want to see what the problem is rather than send somebody up there on a ladder or get someone up there where it may be difficult to you could just throw a drone up there or you could go up there and get a video of that roof
For them another example would be roof inspections for solar installation so somebody who’s looking to put solar on their roof and they want to check out the structural integrity of a roof or even plan out the array they may have use for a drone as far as getting a video of that roof also for insurance claims think about insurance companies that may have a roof
Claim and they want to actually take a look at the damage of the roof and determine how much money they have to pay out in insurance they may find your drone service to be very useful rather than sending somebody else up there to check it out you know walking up there on the roof or climbing up their utility inspection this is a huge one guys this is actually –
Was my former job before i was full-time here on youtube i actually part of my job was driving around and looking at the powerlines and doing the routine maintenance so looking for damaged or broken equipment and replacing stuff that needed to be replaced i did i basically did all behind-the-scenes work but we spend so much money as a utility inspecting power
Lines and inspecting all that equipment this could all be replaced by one drone in a lot of the times i’m going to be honest with you guys you know we’re on the ground looking with a pair of binoculars at a 40 or 50 foot pole we can’t see that very well sometimes so i’m sure a lot of stuff slipped through the cracks if you could have a drone flying over the power
Lines even set on a course so it was done by gps that would take a lot of people out of the equation to make that a lot less expensive for a utility to do their routine inspections the same thing could apply for oil pipelines for bridges for cell phone towers and even wind turbines so there’s so many things that are very difficult to get to that we could get to
More easily with a drone another example would be land surveying for construction for urban planning for mining for vegetation management i could talk i could do a whole video about drone inspection businesses but i just kind of want to point you guys in the right direction to get you guys thinking okay my second example here is something totally different this
Is drone repair so what is one thing that we know about drones is they are not very durable devices i’m sure if you guys have seen videos of people crashing these things then you know that they fall apart very easily and they break and there are also things that people like to modify and upgrade so a lot of people get involved with drones they have no idea what
They’re doing and they damage their brand-new drone the good news is well i guess this is good news if you’re in the drone repair business is because of the price point because drones are so expensive for that initial purchase it’s cost effective to repair them now what i recommend opening up a television repair shop absolutely not because those are so cheap when
They break you just buy a new one but because many drones are a thousand dollars plus it’s cost effective to actually repair them so you could repair the drones if you have the skills and the tools and the interest in that but you would definitely want to advertise your services online and probably have people ship you drones that are damaged because i don’t
Think there would be enough people in your immediate area that have broken drones or drones in general to have a business like that you would definitely have to advertise online but you can even do something like making youtube videos or the basics or even showing people in videos how to fix stuff and when they watch your video they’re going to be like that is
Really complicated i’m just going to pay this guy to do it so you could be very subtly advertising your services by showing them how difficult it really is to do what it is that you do number three my third business is agriculture so you could be involved with surveying crops and collecting data so flying over fields and looking at the actual crops themselves
And you want to be looking for things like soil hydration and pest control these are things that farmers spend a lot of money on they spend a lot of money watering crops that don’t need to be watered and they spend a lot of money putting down excessive amounts of pesticides and too much fertilizers so you could basically go in there and get videos of their crops
And tell them what sections need to be watered what sections need fertilizers what sections need pest control and your business would pay for itself because you could go up to them and say hey i’m going to save you x amount of dollars or x percentage on your watering costs and you’re fertilizing costs and all of that in your pest control costs for this low cost
Service right here that i’m offering but i would go above and beyond this i wouldn’t just give these farmers videos because they’re not going to want to look at that and most of them are not very technologically inclined you know they’re not going to be the type that are going to sit down and look through a video and be like oh because that crop is yellow it
Means it needs more water what i would do is full service analysis so i wouldn’t just go out there and collect this data i would also analyze it and tell them hey look you need water in this area you’re over watering this section of your crops you need fertilizer in this section that way you can just go up to them and tell them what needs to be done and as a
Result they’re probably going to pay you more for that service rather than just getting a video of that now that obviously there’s a lot that goes into that but um if you had a good team this is something you could easily do with a group is do a you know advanced analysis of crops and of agriculture okay the fourth and final business idea i have is a pretty
Simple one because these are the ones we’re kind of complicated and i’m sure it would be difficult to end up being a contractor for like a utility and getting permission to fly over their powerlines so on a smaller scale of things let’s talk about a drone photography business so basically you could do photos or videos of real estate this is my favorite example
So think about people who are looking to sell a piece of land rather than showing a google earth image of that land or pictures from the road of a forest wouldn’t a drone aerial shop be better or a video of that property as far as selling it think about filming events or weddings you know wouldn’t an interesting thing to have a video of your wedding in a time
Lapse another thing that was huge too and i actually just saw this over the weekend i was on vacation in maine and i went through a community center there or i guess the visitor center and i looked up at their television and they had these beautiful drone shots at the beach and i saw and the video had talked about how there was the company who did that they had
Their logo in there they specifically do drone videos for tourism purposes so they go to tourist areas and they get all kinds of beautiful videos for the town and i’m sure that works into their tourism budget and they get these great videos of the beaches and of the areas around there and that’s something that’s just so much better conveyed with a drone video
Than just a photo from the ground so there’s another example and then the last thing you could do is get really amazing photos and videos yourself and then sell the rights to your media on your own website so maybe you have gorgeous drone videos of waterfalls or mountains and then you sell the rights to those online and make money that way but anyways guys that’s
Pretty much all i got for this video this is for very interesting drone business ideas now there’s a lot more out there if you guys have any ideas that you want to recommend please drop them in the comment section below and i’m sure as you guys can see with what i talked about earlier there’s a lot of stuff you have to do so if you do want to go out there and
Start your own drone business make sure you do your own research and make sure you’re following all the laws and all the faa regulations but if you guys enjoyed this video please drop a like and if you are new to my channel please consider subscribing to be notified of any future uploads and as always i thank you for taking the time to watch this video you
Transcribed from video
4 Ways To Make Money With Drones (Business Ideas) By Ryan Scribner