If I Started an Online Business in 2026, This Is What I'd Do

I've been running an online business for over 6 years now and have turned it into a 6-figure income working around 20 hours a week. I didn't go to college, I didn't get a degree, and I barely got through high school. So in this video, I'm going to show you what I would do if I lost everything and had to start an online business in 2026 with no audience, no courses, no email list, literally from zero. My goal here isn't to give you a bunch of options and confuse you. I'm just going to walk you through the path that I would personally take if I had to start from scratch knowing what I know now, because I would have done things very differently. That way you don't waste months building the wrong things or overcomplicating this. So the very first thing that I would do is decide on my niche. Most people don't fail at business because they're bad at business or the things that they do. If you are really good at tennis, golfing, cooking, they fail because they never get clear on who they're actually helping and what they're actually helping them do. When I started my business in 2018, I went from blue-collar construction work to being a spiritual life coach at the ripe age of 22. Yeah, I was that guy. I struggled for years to get clients, not because I was bad at coaching or the fact that I was 22, because people still paid me, but it was because I thought that a niche was some label or identity instead of what it actually is. Back then, I was trying to help everyone. I had one client with relationship problems and another one that just wanted more confidence in their life, and then another one that had career problems and was trying to run a business. And because I wasn't specializing in anything specific, I wasn't really known for anything, which made my business harder to market. Things didn't really change for me until I moved into the performance and productivity space. Now the message was really simple. I was helping entrepreneurs and business owners work less and get more done. That was way easier to explain, easier to sell, and easier for people to say yes to because it was a clear problem. I'd work with coaches, entrepreneurs, business owners, even sales professionals who were just drowning in work or their tech was a total mess and I would help them clean it up and be more efficient. Instead of getting confused by the word niche, just replace it with the word problem because a niche is just a specific problem. If you can genuinely solve that problem and enough people are willing to pay you to have it solved, you have a business. So if I were starting over today, I would pressure test my niche with the 4 Ps. The first P is passion. What are you passionate about? If you're not gonna stick with this thing for 10 years, you don't see yourself being passionate about it and wanting to keep learning and improving in this area, for the next 10 years, then you probably shouldn't do it. I'm a big fan of not just making money, but also enjoying the way that we make money, because that's what I believe makes us have a really fulfilling career. The next P is proficiency. What are you actually good at? Have you done the thing that you're trying to help people with or teach them? Even when I was a 22-year-old life coach, I had a lot more awareness because I struggled with my childhood. I went through a lot of different chaos in my, in my family life and all this kind of stuff, which I'm not gonna get into, but that allowed me to get into personal development at a really young age, and even people who were 30 years old, 40 years old, did not have the level of awareness that I did, and that's why people still paid me because I was just very aware for my age. So have you actually done the thing that you are helping people with? The next P is profit. Can you make money from this? If you see people online who are growing audiences and selling products or coaching and they're working with people and they're actually making money from this, that's a good sign that you can too. Don't worry about the market being oversaturated. If you are passionate about helping people with this area and you are proficient in it, then that's enough for you to get started. There's a lot of people out there who are just saying that they're good at things even though they're actually not. And what people crave more than anything nowadays is real true expertise from lived experience. If you've actually grown and scaled a business and had a multimillion dollar exit, then you can help other people get to that position as well. So just make sure that you know other people are paying for products like what it is that you're trying to create. And if you've paid for those products, that's a good sign that you can make money from it. The last P is perspective. What is your unique perspective? That last one matters a lot more than most people realize because your perspective is what separates you from everybody else talking about the same thing. Don't just be a fitness expert. Help men over 40 lose weight. Don't just be a personal finance expert. Help UK retirees age 55 to 65 plan for retirement. Your profitable niche sits in the middle of all 4 Ps. If you don't have your niche dialed in, everything else in your business will be harder. That's why this is the first thing that I would lock in. Now once I got my niche dialed in, I would move on to step number 2, which is to set up the business. Before you worry about content, branding, or fancy logos, there's one question that you really need to answer. Can someone easily pay you? When most people start an online business, they spend way too much time trying to set up the business and make it perfect instead of just setting up a simple way to get paid. They're worried about logos, websites, business cards, and picking the perfect tools, but that doesn't matter as much as people think. Early on, the goal isn't to build the perfect business right out of the gate. The goal is to make it stupid simple for people to say yes and give you money. So if I were starting an online business again, I would just focus on these 4 things. First, setting up a business entity, as in LLC or sole proprietorship. When I first started, I did a sole proprietorship 'cause it was easy. I'd make sure I have a way to accept payments, a calendar booking link, and a checkout page, which is totally optional, but I think it's really ideal. Now, the tool that I would personally use if I was starting over right out of the gate would just be Kajabi. Kajabi is the main tool that I use to run my current 6-figure online business from my website, my courses, email marketing, literally everything. It's all in one, so you don't need to duct tape a bunch of different tools together, and it's a super simple tool once you get the hang of it. So I would just start with that. I'd make a simple checkout page, connect payments, and make it easy for someone to book a call and enroll, and that's it. And by the way, if you want an extended 30-day free trial of Kajabi plus some awesome bonuses to help you get set up faster, answer, I'll drop a link down right below this video. I'm going to give you a course that shows you everything I've done to set up my six-figure business so you could do it right out of the gate. And you also get a one-on-one call with me where I'll sit down with you and answer any questions about business or Kajabi. Bottom line here is don't get lost in the weeds with everything that you need or think you need to run a business. Just make it really easy to get paid for now, and you can focus on the other stuff later, like your website, courses, and all that kind of stuff. So once I got my business set up, the next thing I would do is start working with people one-on-one. When I started my online business, I thought that I had to have a course, a funnel, and a big audience to start making making money. But now I know that that's not true. What you actually need is proof. Proof that you can get someone the result that you say you can get them, and that people would actually pay you for it. The fastest way to get both is one-on-one coaching. Before you ever start thinking about passive income, you have to get comfortable with active income. So by working with people one-on-one, you make money way faster, you learn what people actually want, and you build confidence that you can deliver results fast. If I were starting from scratch today, here's exactly how I would do it. I'd first start by making a list of people who already know me, AKA my warm audience. I think about friends, past coworkers, social media followers, phone contacts, emails, etc. And I'd start reaching out to them every single day. Some people will tell you you have to do 100 reachouts a day, which is great if you have the time, but even just doing 10 to 20 every single day really compounds over time. So I pick a number for the amount of people I'm going to reach out to each day, and I wouldn't spam or pitch them. I would just start conversations and be a real human. After chatting for a bit and catching up, I'd say something like, hey, by the way, I'm looking to help 5 people right now go from pain to desire in X amount of time without obstacle or challenge. Do you know anyone who might be interested in that? Bonus points if you can tie the pain, desire, timeframe, and challenges or obstacles to exactly what they're talking about or what you know they're interested in. And here's a key I learned from a mentor of mine. You don't pitch them. You don't say, hey, do you want help with this? You ask if they know anyone, even if they're someone that you would love to work with, because they'll say one of three things. They're either going to say no, I know someone, or that's me. And that last one happens a lot more than you might think. One of my clients, Jason, did this exact thing for a new futures trading offer, and he made $8,000 in just a few weeks. And he had zero online business experience when he started. He just knew how to do futures trading. Jason started earning money really fast in his online business by simply talking with the people that he already knew. And if I could restart, I'd work with people for free or at a really low price just to get undeniable proof. Because once people are getting results, raising your prices becomes obvious and natural. If you skip this step everything else in your business becomes harder and slower. So after I'm starting to work with a few people, then I'd move on to the next step, which is creating an online course. Here's a reason why so many online courses never make money. When most people think about starting an online business, they usually jump straight into building a course as the first thing that they do. They'll disappear for months, record a bunch of videos, and hope that somebody buys when they put it out there. But the problem there is that they're building it alone in isolation with no proof that what they're teaching actually works or that people even want it in that format. They're just kind of guessing. What I've learned over time is that a course works best after you've already helped real people get real results from the frameworks, and that's why we do one-on-one coaching first. So instead of building a course first, I'd use a course to enhance my coaching experience. I'd build inside of Kajabi and prescribe lessons to my clients between calls so I'm not repeating myself or spending half of the session teaching when we could be working. That's the job of the course. The course would have the same frameworks and transformation as my coaching, just in a do-it-yourself format, and Everyone who works with me one-on-one is going to automatically get access to that course in Kajabi when they sign up through my checkout page. Once clients are getting good results from the course itself, selling it as a standalone course becomes way easier because it's already proven to work. This way, your course isn't a gamble, it's an asset. Later on, you can sell this on its own as a do-it-yourself program or couple it with a paid community to create more scalability. When you build your course alongside your coaching, you end up building a better program faster and you'll actually know it works on its own. Searching clients and building that course, there's one other thing that I would be doing at the same exact time, and that's building my email list. Most people confuse getting attention with actually building a business, but if attention were enough, there wouldn't be broke content creators with millions of followers. Social media can get you seen, but it doesn't guarantee that you're going to make money. If I were starting from zero, I wouldn't be concerned with going viral or posting everywhere. I'd be focusing on building something that I actually own, and that's why I would start building an email list right away. An email list gives you a direct line to people who care about what you're building. and as it grows, it gives you more warm traffic to reach out to and help through coaching or offers. Here's how I would approach building my email list from scratch. First, I would pick one platform to create content on, and I would begin creating content that answers real questions inside of my niche. Personally, I would focus on YouTube because it's free, it's searchable, evergreen, and it keeps working long after you hit publish. I still get leads and sales today from videos that I posted from over a year ago. Each week I would focus on one solid long-form video on YouTube, and then I'd use a tool like Opus Clip to turn it into short-form content so I'm not on a content hamster wheel every single day and having to always be coming up with something new. Pro tip: I would batch 4 videos at a time so I stay ahead and don't burn myself out. The content really has one job, and that's to get me discovered by the right people and move them onto my email list. To do that, I would create a simple lead magnet that solves one small, specific problem related to my offer, not a PDF that grazes over everything. For example, if my core offer was helping people create and sell online courses, the lead magnet would just be helping them figure out a profitable course idea. This fully solves one persistent problem and naturally opens the door to the next problems that my core offer helps them with. If I can help you go from having hundreds of course ideas floating inside your head to picking the single most profitable one that you know is going to be the best course idea, you're going to trust me more because I actually helped you get that clarity. But now we have new problems. How am I going to write the sales page? How do I structure the lessons? How do I structure the course itself? What are the best tools that I use? And all of those other problems are what I address and solve inside of my paid program. That's the way that we should be building lead magnets. From there, I would promote that lead magnet in every piece of content and email my list 1 to 3 times per week, focusing on building real trust until I hit around 500 subscribers. At that point, my course is already proven with coaching clients, and I have a warm list of people who want more, which is exactly what you want before you launch anything. So once I got to that point, then I would launch my course to my list. Back in the day when I would create a course, I would just just publish it. There was no buildup, no context, and no real promotion around it. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. But the wild part is that this is what most people do. It's like if Marvel just dropped Avengers: Endgame in the theaters with no trailer, no teasers, and no hype whatsoever, and then they were confused about why nobody bought a ticket. If you're launching a new product, it's a big deal. And if you don't treat it like one, your audience won't either. So instead of quietly publishing a course like I used to do, here's what I would do if I were starting over. I'd plan an actual launch with a clear week where the course is the focus. I'd pick some kind of urgency or scarcity element like the doors are going to close at the end of this week. There's some special bonus that you can get only during launch week, like a 2-hour one-on-one session with me or something like that. Or the price is going to go up for this program at the end of this week. And you can even combine 2 or all 3 of these components as well. The week before the launch, I would warm people up with a few pieces of content that hint that something new is coming. This is like Marvel launching out the trailers and building buzz. I would have just enough to create awareness and anticipation. And then during launch week, I'd send 7 emails throughout the week, 1 email per day, Monday through Thursday, promoting the course and talking about how it's going to help them and solve their problem. I'd show as much proof and case studies as I can during this week inside of my emails as well. And then I'd send 3 emails on Friday, 1 in the morning, 1 in the afternoon, and 1 in the evening. Each one is reinforcing the same message and reminding them of the urgency or scarcity element that I chose so that they have a reason to act now during this week. And once the launch is over, I'd go right back to my normal rhythm. Now, this may sound like a lot, but just know that you are not spamming your audience by doing this. You are just giving the launch of your program an actual chance to work. And once I've launched the program and gotten some sales, then I would turn that program into an evergreen income stream. There's a big difference between making a bunch of money during some big launch and building something that makes sales every day for years. Launches are great because you can make a lot of money in a short time, but They're temporary. What transformed my business was turning those launches into automated systems. Every course I create eventually gets turned into something that sells on its own over and over again. That way I'm not getting stuck in launching over and over again just to make some money. Instead, I let my systems do the work. This is how I was able to travel to Sweden for 2 weeks and still make $10,000 without working while I was away. And here's the part that most people overcomplicate. Turning an online course or coaching offer evergreen doesn't require a massive funnel or crazy tech skills. All you really need are 3 core things: a lead magnet, a short email sequence, and a sales page. That's it. So after my launch, I'd use Kajabi's automation tool to connect those pieces so new people can come in, get value, and buy without me having to be involved every time. By getting good at turning your online courses evergreen, your business stops depending entirely on your time and starts giving you some of that time back. And speaking of getting time back, when you're starting an online business, you need to have the right tools, especially if you want to sell online courses and coaching. Because having the wrong tools are going to make you waste a ton of time with tech problems and waste a lot of money paying for unnecessary subscriptions. So watch this video next and I'll show you my top 5 best online course platforms of 2026. Hey, if you thought this video was helpful, please like and share it. It really helps grow the channel. If you're not subscribed already, please do that as well. And if you have any questions or comments, leave a comment down below and I will get back to you as soon as I can. As always, take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I'll see you in the next one.