I asked 100 people what online business they want to start

I am doing research for a new project and asked 100 people about building an online business. The results were obvious on one side and funny on the other. I thought about sharing the result here, as it might help some fellow IH.

How did I find these 100 people?
I started out with the only way I have ever know how to reach people and that’s by directly contacting people I know and do some promotion. But after a couple of interviews, I found out that the people I know where not that interested in building an online business which ended up giving me strange results. A lot of “I don’t know” and “I am interested in all topics”
Promoting a survey to find people interested in building an online business ended up being very expensive and time-consuming. After building a simple survey in Typeform and promoting it in Facebook groups and using Instagram ads the results were very demotivating. So I ended up using Pollfish for the first time and it was a great experience.
What did I ask these 100 people?
So my main goal was to find out, what markets are people interested in? what is preventing them from building an online business now? and how would they like to learn about building an online business?
What did these 100 people tell me?
When asked which markets people are interested in there were a couple of expected suspects

What markets are you interested in?
The biggest category is the people that are interested in building an online business but are not sure what they want to build (50,9%). Health & fitness comes second (15,8%) followed by Fashion (10,5). Some other categories stood out, electronics (5,3%), collectables (10,5%), real estate & construction (3,5%), interior design (3,5%).

A good follow up question to this would be to get to know why they want to build an online business.

Honourable mentions
Someone was just completely honest and said “want to sell crap people can’t afford”

What is preventing you from building your own online business?
A lot of people experience that they don’t have the money to start an online business (52,1%). Which in some cases makes sense, but it shows an opportunity to learn people how to build an online business with minimal investment. Some people who don’t know how to start and comes down to obtaining knowledge about building an online business (26%). The last group of people does not have enough time (13,5%) or feel like they need development skills (2,1%) to build an online business

Honourable mentions
Some people feel like the current situation and the risk of spending a lot of time and money on building an online business is not worth it at this point (6,3%).

The best way to learn about building an online business
I wanted to know what is the best way to learn about building an online business. Granted the fact that the group of people might not know how themselves. Maybe a TikTok would resonate perfectly with people who are interested in how to build an online dance course. A big group of people like to learn through step by step guides (33%) or through a seminar (16,5). People who would prefer one on one sessions (15,4%) had the same specific need of experts showing them how to build an online business step-by-step.

Honourable mentions
A lot of people tell that they like to see examples (9,9%) that have already build an online business in the past and how they did it.

Key takeaways
The big majority of people don’t know what type of business they want to start, think they need a lot of money and are looking for a step by step course. The idea of starting online business appeals to them, but they are still in the beginning phase of finding out what they want to build.

The main categories that do really well on the internet are also the categories that people are interested in. Taking those categories through a step by step course would be a cool idea.

The things I was not expecting going into this, where the collectable category being popular and the one-on-one personal approach to teaching about building an online business

If you have any questions or suggestions. Please let me know. I hope these insights help you in any way to build your own online business. If I look at these results and any of those categories would strike my interest, it would be a good starting point to dig a bit deeper into the motives of this specific market.

What do you think if you look at these results?

Originally posted at https://medium.com/@eldonbuzink/i-asked-100-people-what-online-business-they-want-to-start-e0d6714c37da