The Mystery of Creating an Online Business

At least once a month, I have these recurring thoughts:

• Why isn't every possible market saturated yet?
• Why do I sit here, observing all these opportunities, and rate-limit myself by not attacking more of them?

I can tell you, from experience in running a small software company in a horizontal market, that it continues to baffle me that there is still room for more competition and more growth in the markets. I mean, I habitually create simple products in areas that you would consider a long-ago-solved-problem, and somehow I'm making it work. Granted, I'm not making a killing, but I have found it amazing[1] that I can even turn a profit!

Creating a successful business, I have found, has more to do with being willing to spend the time to execute on it rather than having to do with foresight, existing knowledge, or having sudden, miraculous market insights. Regardless of the kind of business you start, whether its a warm niche (something you know a lot about) or a cold-hearted horizontal market, you will never know how to be successful in it unless you actually start doing it, and keep doing it.

To illustrate my point:

Reading so much of Rob Walling's content as of late, I feel like its helping me get back to the fundamentals and re-energize myself to take on more of these opportunities I've been neglecting. Its helping me realize that building a business can be deliberate, formulaic, and mysterious at the same time. The cool thing is the mysterious bits fall away as you execute. Following Rob is also helping me realize that the opportunity-cost of dithering on picking the right idea or waiting for that one-in-a-million idea to come along is way too high to keep stalling.

Time to get building again!

[1] What's more unexpected in my travels is how your mindset changes after you pass a certain threshold. You stop doubting that you can succeed as a solo-entrepreneur or a small company and you stop waiting for success to happen. You begin to see that success in many kinds of businesses can be formulaic... and repeatable! Once that happens, your fear ebbs and the biggest barrier you face is dithering on the best idea to attack next.