find a profitable online business idea

How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

You’re currently reading Chapter 2 of The Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List.

How to avoid the “List-Building Rat Race”

When I first started my website, I spent $500 on a custom design, wrote tens of blog posts, and worked hard on it for months.

And yet, in over the course of 6 months, I only managed to get a measly 42 e-mail subscribers, and never expected to turn it into an online business that I could live off.

I LIVED the “List-Building Rat Race”, and it’s no wonder I ended up deleting my website after spending hundreds of hours and dollars on it.

Why did I struggle with growing my e-mail list?

Well, I probably broke every single rule in my Ultimate Guide to Growing Your E-mail List (oops):

I didn’t test my business idea or experience any Moments of Traction (TRACTION stage)
I didn’t create an Epic Lead Magnet that would turn my website visitors into e-mail subscribers (MOMENTUM stage)
I definitely didn’t create and promote any Remarkable Content (GROWTH stage)

Instead, I built a blog, started sharing my ideas, and hoped that I would somehow magically build an online business. It didn’t work.

The good news is that you don’t have to repeat my mistakes and spend 6 months grinding to 42 e-mail subscribers.

And the best way to start is to find a Profitable Online Business Idea.

Finding Your Profitable Business Idea might not be something that you think of as a crucial step to growing your e-mail list.

However, it can be THE thing that makes the difference between a business that grows exponentially and a business that stays stuck in the List-Building Rat Race forever.

In this post, we’ll talk about:

Why you need a Profitable Online Business Idea to grow your e-mail list in 2019
What is a Profitable Online Business Idea
12 Examples of Profitable Online Business Ideas
9 Ways to come up with a Profitable Online Business Idea
Why you shouldn’t spend hours and hours brainstorming ideas (and what to do instead)

Let’s dive in!

To Grow Your Email List in 2019, You Need a Profitable Online Business Idea

Back in 2006-2007, you didn’t have to have a particularly unique business idea to build a successful blog.

Since this was before blogging exploded and it was way harder to get into it (you couldn’t just buy a blog template for $50 and start blogging), there was far less competition.

You could simply start writing, and people in your social circle would read what you write. Facebook posts would get hundreds of likes and shares. Your content would automatically be found on Google, since there was little competition in most industries.

But in 2019, just writing a blog is not enough.

Today, there are over 40x more blog posts written than back in 2006-2007. This means that you likely have 40x more competitors than you did back than, if not more (if you’re trying to enter a very saturated niche like fitness, that number might be a lot higher).

That’s why today, to grow your email list and build a successful online business, it’s more important than ever to have a Profitable Online Business Idea.

The Business Idea Masterclass

Because finding a profitable business idea is such an important topic, I recorded a 65-minute masterclass about it that goes into way more depth – you can watch it here as a supplement to this blog post:

What is a Profitable Online Business Idea?

Today, with thousands of online businesses out there, your should come up with a business idea that is unique in some way to stand out and get noticed.

By a Proftitable Online Business Idea, I mean that you should try to:

Solve a problem nobody else is solving yet
Help an audience that nobody else is helping yet
Help an audience with a problem in a better or different way than anyone else

This will give you the highest chances of finding an online business idea that your potential customers will be happy to pay for.

You can find a Profitable Business Idea in a number of ways:

You could come up with a completely new problem that nobody is solving yet (teach people how to learn a new programming language)
You could take existing knowledge and tailor it to a specific audience that nobody is helping yet (teaching accountants how to get more clients)
You could enter a saturated market with a new angle (lose weight through spices)

As you choose your business idea, you should pick an idea that:

You are excited about, and could talk about for hours on end
You know a lot about, and you could confidently give advice about
There is enough demand for, and people are willing to pay for

I assume you already have some kind of a business idea in mind as you’re reading this guide, and that’s awesome.

But if you tried creating content or publishing an Epic Resource and you just didn’t get an amazing response (or you struggle with getting your first 100 e-mail subscribers), then your business idea is the first piece of the puzzle you should revisit.

12 Examples of Profitable Business Ideas

To get a feel for what makes a Profitable Business Idea, let’s look at some of the ideas from established entrepreneurs I interviewed for this guide.

Every single one of these entrepreneurs has an e-mail list of thousands of e-mail subscribers, successfully sold online courses or coaching programs, and the majority of them earn more than $100,000/year with their online businesses.

Here are some of my favorite examples:

Nagina Abdullah: Helping ambitious women lose weight with spices
Rusty Gray: How to become a professional animator
Karen Dudek-Brannan: How to become better at speech pathology
Gabriela Pereira: How to get better at writing without getting a degree
Sam Gavis-Hughson: How to master coding interviews at top tech companies
Danny Margulies: How to become a freelance copywriter
Jenni Waldrop: How to grow your Etsy business
Will Darling: How to mix EDM music
Luke McIntosh: How to become a bassist
Ryan Hildebrandt: How to speak at TEDx events
Christina Rebuffet: How to speak fluent American English
Geraldine Lepere: How to speak French

Notice how the majority of these ideas are unique / specific in their own ways (and interestingly enough, the majority of them are not in the health / money making niches).

Some people say that “you don’t need to be an expert to build an online business”, and that you don’t need a unique business idea to succeed, but the data seems to say otherwise.

If you want to live of an online business today, it’s more likely you’ll be able to do it if you come up with a unique business idea than if you try to pursue an idea that has already been done before.

9 Ways to Come up With a Profitable Online Business Idea

When I asked these entrepreneurs how they came up with their business ideas, they shared a few key strategies that you can use to come up with your own Profitable Business Idea.

These are the actual “strategies” that worked for them and helped them build 5-6 figure online businesses.

Strategy #1: Find the Common Complaints

Matt Rosenblum came up with his Profitable ONline Business Idea (marketing for life coaches) by reading Facebook groups related to his industry. He noticed that his audience complained about getting clients ALL the time, and that marketing their business and making it sustainable was a big challenge for them. Since he had a strong background in marketing, he felt like that was a challenge he could solve for them.

Just like Matt, you can pay attention to things people constantly complain about, whether it’s in-person or online. When you find a Common Complaint you can solve, you have a Profitable Online Business Idea worth exploring.

Strategy #2: Find a Game You Can Win

Danny Margulies knew that he wanted to help his clients with Freelancing, as that was something he was good at. Initially, he decided to focus purely on Freelancing through Upwork, and later on he focused on “Freelance Copywriting”, rather than the more competitive fields of just Freelancing or just Copywriting. That’s how he found a game he could win.

As you’re coming up with your Profitable Online Business Idea, ask yourself “What’s a game I can win?”, and try to find a specific audience (Freelance Copywriters) or a specific platform (Upwork) that you feel like is big enough for you to build a business around, but still small enough to be “Winnable”.

Strategy #3: Answer the Unanswered Questions

When Sara Kirsch started her online business, she joined a lot of Facebook groups in her industry and paid attention to questions that kept getting unanswered, or that didn’t get great answers. That’s how she found problems that nobody else was solving for her audience.

As you’re doing research around your Profitable Online Business Idea, try to spot the “Unanswered Questions”, and see if you can find a pattern. You can then use that pattern to form your Profitable Online Business Idea.

Strategy #4: Use Your Unused Research

Karen Dudek-Brannan started her online business by talking about speech pathology, a field she has worked in for 12 years. As she picked her online business idea, she wanted to pick an idea she already knew a lot about, and coincidentally, she had a “pile of research” she wasn’t using from her PhD that she could talk about in her business, which she used to build her online business.

If you have a collection of research / experiments you’ve done in the past that you never shared with anyone, this might be a great opportunity to build a business around.

Strategy #5: Share Your Personal Transformation

Nagina Abdullah saw her online business take off when she shared her personal transformation with the world. As a mom of two kids, she managed to lose over 40lbs and keep the weight off for over a year, and a lot of people were asking her questions about how she did it.

If you have an incredible personal transformation that people keep asking you questions about, this can be a great springboard for your online business.

Strategy #6: Find an Ultra-Specific Audience

Since the health industry was already pretty saturated when Nagina started building her email list, she also decided to focus on a very specific audience as she pursued her idea. She focused on helping busy ambitious women lose weight that didn’t have the time to think about what to do or where to start.

By having a specific audience in mind, she could say things to them that nobody else was saying (about losing weight when you have kids, about walking into a boardroom being consumed with how you look rather than sharing a message with your employees…).

If there’s a specific audience you can relate to or would love working with (and nobody else is serving well), you can try to reach that audience (instead of trying to compete with everyone in your industry).

Strategy #7: Answer Questions People Ask You ALL The Time

Vickie Gould wrote a lot of books, and people around her constantly asked her how she did it. She turned that into an online business where she helps people write and publish best-selling books.

If there’s a topic people ask you questions about all the time, it might be something worth exploring for your Profitable ONline Business Idea.

Strategy #8: “Someone Should Create This”

I recently talked to a friend about how he started his online business, and he said he’s had an idea for YEARS and constantly said to himself “someone should do this”, but nobody ever did. Eventually, he had enough of it and did it himself, and built an extremely profitable online business that helps millions of people all over the world.

If you have a feeling that “someone should create this” about a topic (but nobody ever does), then you could step in and do it yourself, and build a successful business around it.

Strategy #9: “I Could do This For a Different Topic / Audience”

Will Darling who helps people produce EDM music online had a friend who built an online business around helping people learn how to play guitar. He thought to himself “I could do the same thing, but for EDM music”, and it worked.

If you ever see someone building a business and think to yourself “I could do the same thing but for a different topic/audience”, you should definitely try it out.

Why You Shouldn’t Spend Hours and Hours Brainstorming Profitable Online Business Ideas (And What to do Instead)

Something that surprised me as I talked to entrepreneurs about how they came up with their Profitable Online Business Ideas was that almost nobody said “I sat down for 3 hours and brainstormed different business ideas, then came up with this amazing idea” when I asked them how they came up with their ideas.

Sure, some of them might have done a bit of brainstorming, but the actual ideas didn’t come from that. They came from something they were amazing at, that they’ve been doing for years (and just made sense, like with Rusty Gray, who helps animators get jobs as professional animators).

Or, it was that they randomly got an idea as they were browsing through Facebook groups online (like Matt Rosenblum and Sara Kirsch).

You can’t really brainstorm a Profitable Online Business Idea. It will come to you when you least expect it, whether you’re going for a walk, taking a shower, laying in bed in the evening or having a conversation with a friend.

Brainstorming is something that will merely help you START thinking about business ideas, and allow your brain to think of more ideas on the go.

What’s important is that WHEN the idea comes, you don’t dismiss it and say “it will never work” before you actually test it, but to go out into the world and see if there’s something there.

So take some time and brainstorm some ideas – then go out and test them in the world using the next chapter of this guide.

Summary: How to Find a Profitable Online Business Idea

In this chapter, you learned that you need a Profitable Online Business idea to escape the List-Building Rat Race and successfully build an e-mail list in 2019.

Without a great idea, your list-building efforts will bring you disappointing results and feel like an “uphill battle”. With a great idea, building an e-mail list will feel easier than you think

We covered that your idea should:

Solve a problem nobody else is solving yet
Help an audience that nobody else is helping yet
Help an audience with a problem in a better or different way than anyone else

You can find a Profitable Business Idea by:

Coming up with a completely new problem that nobody is solving yet
Taking existing knowledge and tailor it to a specific audience that nobody is helping yet
Enter a saturated market with a new angle

And that you should pick an idea that:

You are excited about, and could talk about for hours on end
You know a lot about, and you could confidently give advice about
There is enough demand for, and people are willing to pay for

We looked at 12 examples of Profitable Online Business Ideas and went over a 9 different strategies for coming up with your own idea:

Strategy #1: Find Common Complaints
Strategy #2: Find a Game You Can Win
Strategy #3: Answer the Unanswered Questions
Strategy #4: Use Your Unused Research
Strategy #5: Share Your Personal Transformation
Strategy #6: Find an Ultra-Specific Audience
Strategy #7: Answer Questions People Ask You ALL The Time
Strategy #8: “Someone Should Create This”
Strategy #9: “I Could Do This for a Different Topic / Audience”

And finally, I argued why you shouldn’t spend hours and hours brainstorming your ideas, and recommended you to test them in the real world instead.

In the next chapter of this guide, we’ll talk about how you can validate your Profitable Business Ideas in under a week and get to your first 100 e-mail subscribers without getting stuck in research.

Continue to Chapter 3: How to Validate Your Online Business Idea

Your Turn. Which Profitable Online Business Idea(s) did you come up with? Share them with us in the comments below!

Are you ready to build an e-mail list of 1,000+ BUYERS?

Download the full 393-page PDF version of this EPIC list-building guide, to print it out or read it on the go!

When should you give up on your online business idea?

By Primoz Bozic 1 Comment

How long do you think you should spend on your online business idea before moving on to the next one?

1 month?

3 months?

6 months?

The answer might surprise you.

I used to think that I needed to spend at least 3 months on a business idea before “throwing it away” and moving on to the next one.

To really make sure I did my research properly, that I understood the problems that my audience was struggling with, come up with amazing solutions, and so on and so on.

And this worked great when my business actually ended up being profitable… But not so great when they weren’t.

What a failed product launch taught me about validating business ideas

For example, last year I spent months working on my online program called “Insider’s Club”.

I did some (thought not enough) research, I wrote a long sales page, a sales sequence with 10 emails…

And then my product launch completely flopped.

I expected to get around 25-50 sales for the product, and I ended up getting 4 sales for it.

I was crushed for two weeks. I felt like a failure. I didn’t even want to talk about the program with anyone because of how embarrassed I felt about it.

I could make a list of things that went wrong there.

I didn’t do enough research. I messed up the positioning. I went against my instincts and changed the program name last minute to something that I didn’t really resonate with.

At the time I felt like those were the mistakes that I’ve made, and I said to myself I’d never repeat them again.

But overtime, I realized that while those were definitely the mistake I’ve made, there was an even bigger mistake that could have helped me avoid all of that work and disappointment.

The biggest mistake I made by far was not validating my product idea before going into a full-on product launch.

Because I had the “all or nothing” mentality when it came to product launches, I thought I needed to either do a huge product launch or don’t do it at all.

What I didn’t think of is doing a small beta test BEFORE spending months on developing a product and doing a big launch around it.

If I did that, I would have been able to see if there was something there far earlier in the process, and saved myself months of work that I could spend working on something else.

So I made a commitment to myself that every time I would want to launch a new online product, I would find a way to test if it’s profitable before spending months on it.

And because I didn’t want to spend so much time working on things that weren’t profitable, I gave myself a rule:

If I wanted to work on a new online product or service idea, I would have to make money with it within 1-2 weeks and make 529 savings plan.

If I got a huge response with a ton of interest (and paying clients), I would keep working on the idea because I knew it would be a huge success.

If I got no response or just a very small response (1 or 2 sales), I would stop actively pursuing the idea and move forward to the next one.

Since then, I’ve been implementing this system in my business, and it’s helped me completely change the way in which I run it.

What a GREAT business idea looks like

Let’s look at some examples of how this works in action.

I sent out a quick email to my email subscribers a few weeks ago:

It was for a beta course called “Your First Sale”, which helps online entrepreneurs make their first sales with their online business.

To try and validate this idea, I just wrote one email to my subscribers that had an application form attached to it:

Over the next few days, I got 39 applications for the beta course. I sent out the invitations for the beta course to a part of those (that were the right fit for it), and ended up getting 12 sales of the program, which was good enough to move forward with the idea.

I essentially went from the idea for this course to making the first sale with it with one email, one survey, and a few follow up emails.

No sales pages. No long email funnels. Not even a polished table of contents.

I knew there was something there.

What a business idea without potential looks like

Now let’s compare this to an email I sent out just a few days ago, about “Ultimate Guide Reviews”:

This time, the idea was to offer my readers a service where I would review their Ultimate Guides and give them feedback on them to make them 10x better.

With this beta test, I wanted to keep the process even simpler.

At the end of the email, I asked the people that were interested to just respond to my email.

I actually got a lot of responses to the email, from a lot of people that I felt would be a great fit for the service.

I was really excited, because I really loved this idea myself and I really hoped it would work.

But as I sent out the emails with more details and payment links to them, this is what happened:

Dead silence.

I waited a day. No sales, no responses to my email.

Two days. Same thing.

Three days. I received a few emails from my readers explaining why they wouldn’t take part in this beta test.

At first, this sucked.

I was disappointed because I really wanted this to work and I knew how valuable it would be for the people that took part in it, but they didn’t see it.

What to do if your business idea flops

At this point, I had two options:

I could keep pushing forward with the idea. I could try and figure out why they didn’t buy, change my service, and try to make it work. The downside of this is that I could very easily spend months working on something that there just isn’t a huge demand for.

Or, I could conclude the experiment and move on to the next idea with more potential (or focus on other parts of my business that I knew would help me grow it).

Now that I know better, I went with option #2.

Sure, if someone actually does end up buying the service, I’ll do an awesome job helping them out. But if not, I won’t spend time thinking about it, worrying about it, or being disappointed about it.

As one of my mentors Ramit Sethi likes to say, this wasn’t a failure. It was a test.

Sometimes no matter how much YOU want the idea to work out, if your potential customers aren’t willing to pay for it, it’s just not a good idea.

It’s happened to me before, and it will happen to me in the future. It’s happened to my mentors and friends. And it’ll probably happen to you too.

Now here’s the good news:

Just because one of your ideas doesn’t work out, it doesn’t mean that you have to move to a completely different business idea.

You might just need to slightly tweak it to make it work.

For example, I know that Ultimate Guides overall are a great business idea for me.

I’ve had plenty of 1on1 coaching clients for creating Ultimate Guides, and I’ve also got plenty of students in my Ultimate Guide System course.

It’s just that the specific idea of Ultimate Guide Reviews didn’t work out, which is totally cool.

So your business idea could still be VERY profitable, but you might just need to slightly tweak it to make it work.

Now let’s get back to the question from the beginning of this email…

“When should you give up on your business idea?”

From my experience (and seeing what others do as well), I’ve noticed that when you have great business ideas, like the ones listed at https://onlinemoneypage.com, you should be able to make money with it and validate it within 1-2 weeks.

That’s how quickly I got my first few coaching clients for 1on1 coaching for Ultimate Guides.

That’s how quickly I got 12 sales for Your First Sale Beta.

That’s how quickly one of the Ultimate Guide System students got their first 2 sales, without even asking for them:

That’s how quickly one of my Your First Sale Beta students got their first sale with their business idea:

That’s how quickly a lot of other people validated their business ideas (when I asked on my Facebook wall if I knew anyone who validated their business ideas in 2-4 weeks):

It really is that simple.

If you have a great business idea, you’ll be able to make money with it in 1-2 weeks.

And if you aren’t able to do that… It’s probably time to move on.

There’s really no point in spending 1,3 or 6 months on “making your idea work”. It’s unlikely that you’ll just wake up and your idea will become a huge success overnight.

If your idea is great, people will be super enthusiastic about it. They’ll want to work with you, even if you haven’t even started looking for clients. And if you start looking for them, you’ll have no problem getting them.

When you have a great idea, you know it. You see it. You feel it. And people will be EXCITED to pay for it.

So if you’ve spent more than 2 weeks working on your idea and you’re not seeing or feeling this… If you’re frustrated, burned out or overwhelmed… Or if you just aren’t seeing the results you want to be seeing with it, it might be time to move on to the next idea.

Notice how I say “move on”, and not “give up” on it.

Some people take pride in “pushing through it” and “never giving up”, which I think are great qualities to have, but are also sometimes misinterpreted.

Never giving up doesn’t mean that you should keep working on something that isn’t working out.

It means that you should keep changing parts of your business idea or testing different ideas until you find one that gets an amazing response, without giving up on your online business.

So you’re not giving up on your business by letting go of your existing idea. You’re just letting go of what’s not working, so you can spend the time working on something that will work (and completely transform your business).

Because when you do find a business idea that you love, you’ll have no problem making your first few sales with it. Your business will grow faster than expected. It’ll be come way more fun. And you’ll know that if you can get the first few sales, you can get a lot more of them.

How to find your next business idea

So if you’re ready to let go of your current idea and switch to the next one, here are a few ways in which you can do that:

You can pursue the same business idea, but test a different service or a product (remember how my 1on1 coaching and online course on Ultimate Guides were a huge success, but the Ultimate Guide Reviews wasn’t).
You can pursue the same business idea, but switch your target audience, the problem you’re trying to solve for them, or the result you’re helping them achieve (if your idea is social skills, you could try social skills for entrepreneurs, talking to strangers, turning your coworkers into your best friends, etc.).
You can choose a completely different business idea (I went from talking about productivity to teaching people how to create Ultimate Guides… And this idea feels 10x better than the last one).

At the end of the day, nobody will remember the business ideas that you let go of a year from now. But they will remember the ones that end up working for you.

Now here’s a caveat:

In order to know if your idea is good or not, you HAVE to test it.

You can’t just do research online and take endless notes.

You need to go out into the world and let people know what you’re doing. You need to actually offer people the opportunity to work with you (like I’m offering my beta courses and coaching programs).

Because if you never give the people the opportunity to work with you or let them know what you’re working on, they can never work with you, and you won’t magically make your first sale with your idea.

And in the worst case, you’ll put yourself out there and nobody will buy (which happens, even to me), which might not feel great in the moment, but will at least allow you to move on without GUESSING if the idea is good or not.

How to see if your business idea is profitable or not in 1-2 weeks

If I can share one piece of advice with you, it’s to test your ideas as quickly as possible.

Give yourself 1-2 weeks to test your business idea and see if there’s something there. Go all out on it. Put yourself and your idea out into the world. Let people know about it. Try to get some paying customers. Read from here to know how to increase your customer focus.

If the response from your audience is great, keep working on it. If not, switch the idea up a bit or move on to the next idea that you want to work on.

So instead of spending 3 months an idea that won’t work out (like I did in the past), you’ll be able to KNOW if your ideas will work out or not, and spend more time working on things that work, and you won’t waste your time on things that don’t.

Who knows, your amazing business idea might just be 1 or 2 ideas away (or it might be an idea that you’ve been thinking of testing, but you never did).

We cover the whole process in Your First Sale Beta in more detail, but here’s the general framework that you can use to do that:

Pick a business idea that you want to test
Test your idea for 1-2 weeks
Your main goal within the next 1-2 weeks is to get 1-3 sales with it
If you hit the goal, keep working on your idea
If not, don’t be ashamed to move to the next one

It’s really that simple. You don’t need to spend weeks researching your idea, collecting 30 pages of research notes or to talk to 50 people about your idea.

All you need to do is put your idea out there, see if people love it, and if they don’t, tweak it / keep changing it until they do.

ONCE you get your first 1-3 paying clients and you know that your idea is a success, you can go on and do some more detailed research, build an email list, create a polished online course and all that good stuff – but before you do that, find a great idea that people are willing to pay for first :).

BONUS: How I got 278,958+ website visitors, 6,150+ email subscribers and made $300k+ in revenue

Ok, so you know how to find a great business idea… But what’s next?

What’s the best way to get tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your website?
How can you build an email list of 1,000+ email subscribers?
And how do you turn your email subscribers into raving fans and paying customers?

Let me share with you the secret strategy (that nobody else teaches) that I used to get 278,958+ website visitors, 6,150+ email subscribers and made $300k+ in revenue.

I’ll let you in on my secret 100% FREE – all you gotta do is leave your name and email below :).

Enjoy!

-Primoz