Dear Online Business Guru’s: This Is What You Avoid Telling People
And it needs to be said
In 2015 I escaped my 9–5 to follow my passion and build an online business
I published a bestseller on Kindle and created online courses.
Now I spend my time living around the world as a digital nomad, making online income and livin’ the dream….
Do you also get so annoyed when reading sentences like the ones above?
At least, I do.
Even though it perfectly describes my life of the past years.
(Except that I never had a 9–5 job, because before I was just a random gigging musician).
I’ve found an online violin school, wrote several books and have gotten enough success with it to live from the work that I do.
Most famous “online business guru’s” love describing their “amazing” life they have thanks to their business. They depict a luxury lifestyle, spending their time laying on beaches with a laptop, spending their money on fancy items and taking selfies in front of waterfalls with their just-as-fancy business friends.
They will make it perfectly clear that they have a so much more fun in life than someone having a “regular job” like you. I mean, jobs are soooo 2018 right?
Don’t get me wrong:
I have absolutely been benefitting from articles of “online business guru’s” in the past when figuring out how to go about building my own business.
But I also believe they often share only about a limited spectrum of what it means to own an online business.
More often than not, their business is convincing others to start an online business (and buying their products to do so).
They actually benefit from making it seem an “oh so easy” to run an online business.
Plus they make it seem that “anyone” can easily do so at any time.
These are the things that I wish the online guru’s would share more about:
It Actually Does Cost Money
One of the most common arguments online guru’s give to why starting an online business is possible for anyone is the following:
Starting an online business requires NO money!
So having no money is no excuse — anyone can do it.
But is that really as true as it seems to be?
When I think about the actual cash that I have spend building my business, it seems so. It has been costing me a “only” a couple of thousand dollars before I made my first sale.
Those upfront costs would be WAY higher if I’d have started a business that requires a huge initial investment.
What the guru’s mostly DON’T share is this: building an online business does cost a lot of time. And in this day and age, time IS money.
Or otherwise said: they are not sharing anything about the opportunity costs.
If you are working on your business for 10 hours a day (like I & many entrepreneurs did in early stages) you will have NO time to work a full-time job.
But you still have to pay your rent, utilities, food and occasional bus ticket (and add many things more to that list if you have kids, a phone contract, a car, …)
Which means that the longer you are working on getting your business of the ground, the more it will cost you.
I have worked for at least a year without pay, often 10 hour days, before I made my first sale.
And during all that time, I could have been working at a normal job that would have actually paid me for my efforts.
Many of my real, actual human connections that have built a product based online business (no freelancing), have taken about 3 years to make enough money to live from their business.
So if you really want to start an online business, be prepared to put effort AND MONEY into it.
You Need To Be Able to Speak English (Or Another Major Language)
Another thing that seems to be hugely underestimated in the online business and entrepreneurship community is the fact that if you speak English (or any other major language), your chances to succeed online are about 200% larger if not more.
I never ever saw anyone in the online business community mention anything about “required language abilities”.
Especially when building a business in a niche area (which many new entrepreneurs do), the market is way too small if you speak a language that is not widely spoken.
Most people in this world do NOT speak English as their main language. This means they have a huge disadvantage when competing with other native English speakers in their niche.
If I personally had not been able to speak English (i.e. have the privilege to get educated), I don’t know if I’d have ever made it online.
If you want to be starting an online business, better be sure to learn a major language today and learn it well!
You Will Need To Be Tech Savvy
Or yet again, have money.
You’ll have an about 99.9% chance that a problem on your website will arise.
Even though I personally started to build websites when I was 13 years old, it still took me months to get the hang of dealing with minor website troubles.
I’ve worked through free online courses on html, css and php by myself which was a major help. But there went a lot of time into this. And I can’t even imagine how much time this would have been if I wouldn’t have been growing up around computers.
If you are starting an online business as a non-techy, you can expect to take a lot of time figuring out how software works or on silly things like moving an image 2 cm downwards on your website.
You Will Probably Never Make 100.000 Dollar From One Webinar
From my first webinar ever, I made about 5000$ in 2 days.
For me as a random 25 year old girl, that seems pretty impressive right?
Except, that this is the FULL truth to the story:
First I worked at least 12 months without pay to get a following online and known in the industry I am in.
Then I spent a few months doing market research, to find out about what my audience wants.
After that I spent 3 months building my online course.
Then I spent 3 months working out a marketing strategy, going through a pre-launch and my final webinar launch.
I made 5000$ on that launch.
Then I worked on customer service and getting people through the course for another 2 months.
PLUS did I mention that this 5000$ was BEFORE taxes?
All at once, 5000$ doesn’t sound like all that much anymore…
And neither does this 10.000 dollar, or even 100.000 dollar that a guru claims he makes.
100.000 Dollar revenue is something completely different than 100.000 profit.
I wished most guru’s would be honest about the money that they really spent on their ads, team, software, equipment and taxes. And about how many months they need to cover their business expenses & personal income before they will be able to make a big sum of money like that again.
I’m sure some people do actually make 100.000 profit in a single day, but these are only a few and they most probably have a team with professional marketers to help them achieve this result. This is not something realistic to expect for yourself.
Rather, expect your first product launch to be small, but celebrate it big time anyway.
From your first launch you will learn many new skills that are invaluable in running a business. And eventually, these skills will help you to achieve the results you’re looking for.
You will still have a boss. They are called customers.
Do you dream about being freed from your boss when working for yourself?
Surprise!
You will still have a boss. The only difference is that he now turned into hundreds of small mini-bosses that are called customers.
Having a business means to work with customers, who are REAL people, not just a number that is throwing money at you.
And if you are a business owner with a heart, you CARE about these people and want to give them your best.
Which means you are working hard for them!
And when they are upset, you are upset too and want to make it right.
When they are happy, you feel accomplished!
Doesn’t that sound pretty similar to having a boss?
It Is No “Easy Income”. In Fact, We All Work A Lot.
A phrase that online business guru’s often use when talking about online income is that it is “easy income”.
Well in a way it is.
If you succeeded as an online business owner, you are probably extremely passionate about your work.
Otherwise you wouldn’t have made it through 3 or more years with barely enough income.
It is also true that as a business owner, you can scale your business, so you always have a potential to earn (and work) more.
Still, I wouldn’t say that the income is “easy”.
Firstly, just as much as you have the possibility to earn more, you also have the possibility to earn less.
There is little amount of industries that evolve at a faster rate than the tech industry.
Other online companies around you are evolving and improving themselves, and you have to keep up with them (or be earlier) in order to keep offering the best services.
Secondly, if you actually have a successful business you most likely really care about your customers, otherwise they probably wouldn’t feel joy spending their money on your services.
Caring about your customers means you want the absolute BEST for them.
So you will constantly find new ways to improve your products & your site, so you can give them the best customer experience they can possibly have.
And that means, you will be working. A LOT.
More than most employees will ever do, because probably by that point you have become so passionate about all of it, that you now officially turned into a workaholic.
If you’ll start an online business, you can expect to keep working hard, even if your business is off the ground. So make sure to start a business around a job that you are truly passionate about!
An Online Business Is a Real Business (And Should Be Treated As Such)
Once I was sitting in my kitchen with a friend of my boyfriend. He asked me what I did for a living.
I told him, that I am a business owner and told a little more about what I do.
He told me: well, you can’t really call that a business. That is an “online” business, not a real business.
I asked him why an online business is not a real business, to which he replied something along the lines that “online businesses are much easier to build than real businesses, so they don’t count as serious businesses”.
This portrays exactly what people start to think about online businesses when the guru’s make it seem like it is all “oh so easy” to build an online business.
The truth is, starting an online business is just like starting any other business.
It is a LOT of work.
And if you start on your own with little money or experience, you can expect to work even more.
When you start out, you can expect to work 10 jobs at the same time: marketer, expert in your niche area, content creator, writer, sales person, website developer, business strategist…and much more.
You will ALWAYS have to deal with uncertainty and risk, especially in your early years.
It will cost you money AND time and you’ll never be completely sure if you’ll get a return on investment.
People around you most likely won’t believe in you and/or don’t understand what you’re doing, until after you started to see success.
You won’t be able to “come home from work and forget it”. Your work becomes a part of who you are.
It will ask your EVERYTHING.
And that is exactly why I love it so much.
But, let’s just at least be honest about it.
Did you like this article? Please comment or clap, that would be highly appreciated!
I started to openly write about my thoughts to start real conversations with people like YOU (i.e. to connect with old friends & get to know new people) so I would seriously really like it if you share your thoughts or feelings about this. Please share if you can relate, or what reading this made you think about.
