The Problem with Online Businesses is that they’re not real.
Worse, at the moment? Very few people have spare cash lying around that they’re willing to spend on something fake.
^ That is the extent of my answer, and you could stop reading here if you liked and still have a fairly complete picture of my opinion here. I’ll also walk you through why I came to this conclusion.
2007-2009, When I first began my business journey.
Back in the day online business was the new thing. Everyone had a blog and some of them were even good. You’d go around several blogs just commenting and you’d do your best to post daily. Daily posts weren’t exactly “good” as a rule, but it didn’t matter because it was the start of the content creation boom and getting eyeballs was fairly easy if you could string sentences together.
An interesting thing started happening; people started businesses around helping other people get better at blogging, marketing, and business. It was also the time of the Life Coach. Lots of people we take for granted as household names now (at least, in the internet space) were just starting out or becoming popular.
A new type of business was king, then. You didn’t need a business plan or any of those stuffy traditional methods of marketing, sales, and operations. You just showed up and it rained money. Sometimes, anyway. Luck was a factor, personality was a factor, and getting attention was key.
Social Media
Fast forward some and Facebook appeared. Twitter. LinkedIn. Etc. Internet business people moved onto those platforms as well, blog posts got better because people would take more time over them and try to do something interesting. Daily social media became the new battle cry. Multiple times daily if you could stomach it.
People didn’t even remember “old” business practice by then. Besides there were so many “good” courses on starting a business, and it wasn’t that hard to be a service provider. Money flowed, and if you happened to be good at something, you could make a ton of it.
Businesses Serving Businesses Serving Businesses
What happens when you get a bunch of online entrepreneurs together making money quickly and not knowing what to do with it?
You get a lot of businesses appearing to serve those entrepreneurs.
Some were useful. Accounting, Bookkeeping, Graphics, Web Development (I have a separate rant on web design), anything that needed you to have a specialist set of skills to administer was great. These people did really well.
Some centred around training various aspects of business. Marketing, Sales, Social Media, Newsletters, Course Design, Coaching, and so on. Some were good, others were… not. It was a bit more murky. Unfortunately, if you went to one of these courses or coaches and it didn’t work for you? There was a culture of “Oh, you must not have been trying hard enough/your mindset was off/you didn’t really want it.” So then you had the beginnings of the train > fail > train conveyer belt.
Now.
What happens when people can’t afford to support that conveyer belt any more?
A couple of interesting things. First, the less skilled trainers and service providers start to struggle. Then fold. Next the moderately good ones start having difficulty finding people. If they have much in the way of business skills (the old kind), they’re probably going to be fine with some adjustments. People teaching old style business skills will probably still be fine, and their market cleared up considerably.
If your methods/service/products/whatever actually work well, then you’re likely to still be fine. If they do not work or only kind of work ish for certain people then the chances of that business folding are high.
Basically, you have to actually be good to succeed when circumstances are hard.
What has that to do with online businesses?
Simply put, many of them aren’t good. For a number of years you were able to start up alone, with only the vaguest of plans, and expect to make some sort of money for your time. You didn’t have to speak to people in person, there wasn’t a need to even consider funding, and your local chamber of commerce was an “optional extra.”
Basically, you didn’t have to be a business. You could be a hobby, you could dabble, you could flail around and change what you’re doing every few months. That was before.
That’s not true now.
Now you need a solid foundation. To talk to people (clients, investors, peers, locals, press, etc). To have a plan and even somewhat follow the plan. To pay attention and make adjustments. To build something tangible, worth having, worth investing in, and ultimately worth believing in.
In short, you now have to be a business. Even on the internet.
And having a business is a lot harder than we’ve been led to believe over the last decade.