7 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting an Online Business

I've been building online businesses for about three years. I've made more mistakes than I can count, but a handful of them cost me the most time and were the most avoidable.

If I could go back and tell my starting self seven things, these are the ones that would have changed the most.

1. Your Niche Will Determine Everything — And Broad Is Not a Niche

I started with "personal development." I wrote about mindset, productivity, relationships, goal-setting, and habits. I thought being broad would reach more people.

It doesn't work that way. Being broad means you rank for nothing, attract no one specific, and sell nothing because your products can't be tailored to a defined problem.

The shift that worked: "productivity systems for remote workers who want to work 6 hours a day instead of 10." Now I have a clear audience, clear keywords, and clear products. The traffic that came in was smaller in absolute volume but massively higher in purchase intent.

The rule I use now: If you can't describe your ideal reader in one specific sentence, your niche is too broad.

2. "Launching Later" Is Just Procrastination with Better Branding

I spent eight months "preparing to launch." I was building the website, writing more content, tweaking my logo, making sure everything was perfect before I showed anyone.

Zero money was made during those eight months. Everything I "prepared" got changed after I got actual feedback from real customers.

Ship something imperfect. Get feedback. Improve based on what you learn from real users, not hypothetical ones. The time between "idea" and "first sale" should be weeks, not months.

3. Your Email List Is More Important Than Your Social Media Following

I had a small but decent Instagram following early on — about 1,400 people who genuinely liked my content. I made almost no money from them.

Then I started building an email list. 300 subscribers. First product launch: $1,100 in revenue. That's a 3.7% conversion rate from email vs. less than 0.1% from Instagram.

Email is direct. You control it. Algorithms don't suppress it. The subscriber has actively opted in to hear from you, which is a qualitatively different relationship than a passive follow.

If I could do one thing over, I would have started building my email list on day one instead of chasing social followers.

4. Traffic Is the Problem, Not the Product

For the first year, I assumed my products weren't selling because they weren't good enough. I kept improving them, adding more content, lowering the price, redesigning the covers.

The products were fine. The problem was that no one was finding them.

Distribution is harder than creation and far more important. A mediocre product with excellent traffic beats an excellent product with no traffic every time.

Once I redirected 80% of my effort from product improvement to traffic acquisition (SEO, content, community participation), revenue increased consistently for the first time.

5. Price Higher Than You Think You Should

My first digital product was $9. I set it there because I didn't think people would pay more.

I was wrong. Not because the product was inherently worth more, but because the price signals quality. At $9, people wondered what was wrong with it. At $27, people assumed it was worth $27.

I've tested this consistently: raising the price on an existing product rarely kills conversion, and often improves it — because buyers at a higher price are more committed and fewer of them request refunds.

Start at $27–$37 for a solid digital product and raise from there. Don't start at $7 and try to work up.

6. Consistency Beats Strategy

I spent enormous amounts of time optimizing my content strategy — researching the perfect keywords, studying the best posting times, analyzing what formats performed best. I changed my approach constantly based on the latest thing I'd read.

The people who were actually growing weren't doing anything brilliant. They were just showing up consistently — one post per week, one product per month, one community per quarter.

Consistency creates compound effects that optimization can't. Every piece of content you publish is either another node in your SEO graph or another asset that might go somewhere. The volume matters more than the perfection.

7. You Can't Outwork a Bad Business Model

I tried dropshipping for four months and worked harder during that period than I ever had. Customer service, ad campaigns, product sourcing, returns, chargebacks. I made a few hundred dollars in profit and spent more hours on it than I would have at a regular job.

The model was fundamentally hard — thin margins, high competition, no way to differentiate.

Digital products are a better model for solo founders. The margins are near 100%, the delivery is automated, and once you've created something it can sell indefinitely. That difference in business model structure explains more of my outcome than any skill I developed.

If the model is wrong, working harder just means you get to the wrong place faster.

Three years in, the main thing I've learned is that the answers are usually simpler than the questions. Pick a specific niche, build something, put it in front of people, and stay consistent for longer than you think is reasonable.

If you're ready to start, MadeThis is where I'd build the product side of your business — the infrastructure handles itself so you can focus on what actually matters →