#6 - The Best Type Of Digital Business To Build In 2024. Make Your First £1,000 Online.

Service the Trend.

There’s just about a million different ways to make money online, whether through traditional “digital businesses” AKA product or service business, or through more unique methods that we cover; sports analytics, trading, influencer, courses, SAAS, drop shipping, print on demand, the list is literally endless.

But what’s the absolute best way to guarantee you make money when you see a new one of these digital-business-types start up.

In my opinion it’s to “service the trend” - don’t play into the saturation, instead “sell the shovels”.

If there’s going to be millions of people looking to use AI in the next couple of years to build a digital business, instead of becoming one of those million, think about what type of services and products that those people will actually need to use.

AKA: Service the trend.

Service The Trend

Create a software, tool or service based business that actually enables and improves the individuals looking to do this specific trend/wave.

Let’s say this is the Amazon FBA wave (5 years ago, albeit all these waves tend to carry on forever really and then slowly dry up).

In this case, ordering the products from Alibaba, setting up the listings, doing launches etc would have been a pretty easy way to lose time and money unless you were either early enough on the trend, or had very unique skillsets surrounding those business models.

Instead of swimming this way, into the red-ocean. Think about what those people would have needed.

You could have thought about the individual core services they need; listing optimisation, image creations, benefit driven content, A+ Content etc.

These are all fine and would have worked if you were early enough, but you are competing with a lot of people in this space. But if you are good at the service and enjoy the more freelancer business model, these were easy ways to go, I know because we did this and did close to 60 on-page, listing creation and image optimisation packages through our agency.

But what’s a better angle is to think 2-STEPS deeper.

2 Steps Deeper

So continuing with our Amazon FBA example.

Step 0 is the Amazon FBA business model.

Step 1 is the services/products tied to creating that business; optimisation, images, photography etc.

Step 2 though is what happens when you think one step further. So what else, or what non-obvious services/products would Amazon business owners need, and/or what services and products would these amazon step 1 people need.

A couple of creative answers could be softwares like: TaxJar - they coin themselves "Sales Tax Compliance for Modern Commerce" nowadays, but early on they just helped Amazon FBA companies with tax compliance when you are selling in multiple areas. VAT/US Sales tax nexus, all an absolute nightmare.

Another example is all the review follow up softwares that cropped up. There’s tons of these, but most are very basic SAAS businesses that any developer could have put together in a few months.

With some good marketing and being ahead of the curve, these businesses did really well.

Another example would be mock-up photography builders such as Place it. Or Figma.

These businesses helped to serve the server. So everyone looking to become freelancers on the back of the Amazon wave can use these softwares/websites to make designing the images a lot easier and quicker.

There’s also a number of other logistics, SAAS and tech companies that came off the back of this Amazon FBA wave.

But let’s say you aren’t a designer or a developer but you still want to think big. What’s the other angles.

Create An Inefficient Business

An example of this is to create businesses that DO NOT scale (easily).

For example, buying inventory at below cost to people who want to get out (because their FBA venture failed).

Incredibly common.

People will hold on to tons of inventory way past the point where they could make a product work. This is usually due to the fact they got a generic product from China and simply didn’t have any marketing or capital to push a launch.

As a result a product that cost £2 from China, with a RRP of £15 on Amazon, that doesn’t make any sales, you can likely get for £1 per unit to take this off the sellers hands if you take all the units.

I know I would have done this back in the day to get rid of my inventory and recoup some of my losses.

There’s multiple websites that enable this.

But then what?

You sell it slowly through Ebay, Amazon Arbitrage and even local! (Shocking I know).

The reason why no one does this is because it’s not a sexy business model.

Not only that but it’s actually quite time intensive sending individual orders through Ebay, sending small shipments into Amazon for arbitrage opportunities and setting up listings on local ads sites like gumtree, Facebook marketplace and Spock (in the UK).

But the truth is, that’s probably the single easiest way to turn £100 into £1,000 within a month or so. All because others won’t put in the effort to make that happen.

All in all, creating these step 2 or service the server type businesses are extremely useful for someone looking to make their start online and who doesn’t have a lot of funds but is willing to put in the work.