Business Mistake: Going Into Business Businesses
There are countless businesses formed every single day that are in the “going into business” business.
If there’s a bigger trend among copycat entrepreneurs than what I’m going to talk about in this article, I don’t know what it is.
For some people this is a great idea. If you’ve been instrumental in the business world for years and you have the knowledge and experience to make a go of teaching other people the skills you’ve learned, then great.
It’s a terrible idea for a lot of people though. There are a ton of twenty-year olds who want to be digital nomads, get themselves obsessed with the Tim Ferriss lifestyle and then ask questions on forums about how to launch their info-product on how to be a digital nomad.
This can be forgiven of twenty-year olds, but the rabbit hole goes really deep.
I anticipate some of you are thinking, “Jamie, you basically wrote about this the other day in your entrepreneurship forum article… don’t do this again.”
I have to though.
Today’s Struggle
I’m trying to create an online course. (No, it’s not about how to create your own online course.)
I’ve been looking into various aspects of it; I’m concerned about the structure of it. At the moment, my plans involve me basically throwing the kitchen sink in terms of the amount of information and exercises and everything into it.
That’s obviously great, but I’m worried about the retention; I want people to actually become better via the product as opposed to give up and have it sit on their hard drive… or in their browser.
Anyway, that’s a topic for another day.
Today, I’ve been searching for answers to the problems above, and I’ve been met with pretty much nothing but what I talked about in the opening paragraph.
One article for instance started with, (And I’m paraphrasing a little), “We decided to build a product, and we needed a mailing list. So we decided to create a product about how to grow your mailing list.”
In one sentence, this article told me that they faked-their-product-till-they-made-it. Literally.
Away From My Woes… Back To You
I understand the draw of wanting to go into business. I love small business and I love entrepreneurship. It absolutely gets me excited, and I’m glad other people feel the same.
I can also understand how people get passionate about spreading knowledge and how-to information on how to go into business. You might read a great article about building a list or building a membership site and want to share it.
However you probably shouldn’t base your business on that.
- If you’ve just learned something… you’re not an expert. That’ll show up sooner or later (hopefully later than one sentence in… but you’ll get found out.)
- When you copy and collate information from stuff you’ve read online, you’re inevitably going to get comparisons to the material you’ve copied from. This is bad even if you do a good job.
- The Make Money Online niche is one of the worst niches to get into. It’s competitive, full of fluff and everyone instinctively hides their wallet before your page has even loaded.
- If you read about going into business then reformulate the material you’ve just read, you’re essentially creating a competing product for the product you’ve read. A product that’s more established than yours, has a bigger audience than yours and acts as gatekeeper to your success.
That’s a key point, so I’ll go into it in a little more detail.
Competing With Your Inspiration
People say that you should create something about your product that’s different from what’s on the market. That’s not just a fun thing that people say. It makes everything easier:
- You have a unique selling point
- And can market to new markets
- You could market to the same market in different ways
- You can work with other people in your market because your products serve different audiences
There are a whole host of other benefits.
Most people who get involved in making money online don’t do any of this. Instead, they’ll read an e-book about making money online and then add some weird twist that makes no difference and say, “See my product is different.”
That’s taking the easy route, and it won’t work.
I used to read a blog by a guy who made money online by selling make money online courses. He once said that if people commented with their business idea, he’d assess their idea.
I’d estimate that 90% of the comments he got were basic reiterations of what he already did. Every reader wanted to create a site about making money online, selling people on the dream of making their living through the web or motivational information for would-be entrepreneurs.
The site owner didn’t help them. Why would he? They wanted to steal his ideas and steal his audience. (Ironically, just like he’d done with his make money online site in the first place.)
Going Into Business Businesses Are Always Going To Be Like That
You can tell a good business idea from a bad one by simply looking at the audience for the business.
If the audience is broke, miserable and hates businesses, then you’ve got a terrible audience. If your audience is rich, happy and loves consumerism, you’ve got a great business idea.
Businesses about going into business tend to attract a rough crowd. There’ll be cannibalism of your ideas. There’ll be difficult customers who want everything handed to them. Or people who shamelessly rip off your products. There’ll also be reasonable critics who are going to point out that all the information you need to get started is already out there for free.
Those are going to be things that’ll get you down and stop you from wanting to continue.
But There’s A Silver Lining
The silver lining to this article is that whilst there are a billion lifestyle bloggers trying to sell list-building products, they aren’t going to be your competition.
… Assuming you go into any other field.
Really, you can make money teaching people how to knit. You can create a course about welding metal or writing technical documents for oil companies. Or you could be going into business by starting a service that organises people’s supplements and sends them automatically on a weekly basis or something.
You can do things that nobody else will think of because you know your interests inside-out.
The best thing is that you can use all of the tricks and skills of the “going into business” crowd; list building, sales letters and creating great content without having to deal with the competition and race-to-the-bottom mentality that that crowd brings to the table.
…So you should probably do that if you want a happy, healthy business for years to come.
(Rant over.)