For years, I thought my biggest problem with online business was that I hadn’t found the right answer yet.
Maybe I needed a better system.
A better course.
A better product to promote.
A better way to get traffic.
Or maybe I just needed to learn a little more before everything finally started to make sense.
So I kept looking.
And I found plenty of answers.
The problem was, most of them were answers to somebody else’s questions.
It has taken me a long time to realise that.
Over the past few months, I’ve spent a lot of time talking through my business ideas with ChatGPT. Not asking it to build a business for me, and certainly not blindly doing whatever it suggested.
Quite the opposite.
Some of the most useful moments have been when I’ve looked at a suggestion and thought:
No. That’s not me.
And strangely enough, those moments have probably taught me as much as the suggestions I agreed with.
Because eventually I stopped asking:
“What should I do next?”
And started asking:
“What am I actually trying to build?”
That turned out to be a much better question.
What I Started Learning About Myself
Once I started looking at the business from that angle, some things became surprisingly clear.
For one thing, I don’t want to become a coach.
There’s nothing wrong with coaching, but I realised I didn’t want to build a business where my income depended on continually selling my time to other people.
I also don’t want to become another online guru telling people I’ve discovered the secret to making money online.
I haven’t.
I’m still building this myself.
And perhaps most importantly, I realised I didn’t want my business to become an endless cycle of finding the next product, course or opportunity to promote.
I’d spent enough time chasing things myself to know where that could lead.
What I wanted was something simpler.
A business I could build steadily.
Something that could eventually produce an income without requiring me to be working every hour of the day.
And something based around helping people I actually understood.
That’s when another piece started falling into place.
The people I understand best aren’t successful online entrepreneurs.
They’re the people still trying to become one.
People who’ve bought courses but haven’t finished them.
People who’ve tried different systems and wondered why nothing seems to stick.
People who’ve spent months learning but still aren’t sure what they should actually be doing.
People who start with enthusiasm, get overwhelmed, stop — and eventually start again with something else.
I understand those people because I’ve been one of them.
And in many ways, I still am.
The difference is that I’m beginning to understand why I’ve struggled.
The Clues Were Already There
When I went back through some of the articles I’d written previously, something interesting happened.
I realised I’d already been writing about many of these problems.
I’d written about chasing every new tool or course.
I’d written about trying to figure everything out myself.
I’d written about the start-stop cycle that keeps beginners stuck.
At the time, I thought of them as separate problems.
Now I’m not so sure.
I’m beginning to see them as different symptoms of the same underlying problem.
I had spent a lot of time trying to build an online business without ever becoming completely clear about the business I was trying to build.
Without that clarity, I bounced between different ideas, systems and opportunities. Each one seemed to make sense at the time, but together they weren’t taking me anywhere in particular.
If anything, I was creating more confusion for myself.
I didn’t need another opportunity. I needed a clearer sense of direction.
Finding Some Structure in the Confusion
That realisation didn’t suddenly give me all the answers.
But it did change the questions I was asking.
Instead of looking for the next thing I could try, I started looking more closely at what any sustainable online business actually needed.
What was I building on?
Who was I trying to help?
How was I going to reach those people?
How would any of that eventually turn into income?
And perhaps the question I’d struggled with most over the years:
How was I going to keep moving forward instead of stopping and starting again?
As I talked these things through, five areas kept coming up.
Foundation. Audience. Content. Conversion. Execution.
Those became what I now call my 5 Pillars of Sustainable Online Income.
There’s nothing revolutionary about the individual pieces. In fact, I’d encountered most of them many times before.
What was different was finally seeing how they belonged together.
I’d often concentrated heavily on one part while barely thinking about another.
I could spend hours learning about traffic, for example, without having a clear enough idea of where I wanted that traffic to go or what I wanted to happen when it got there.
Or I’d find a product I could promote before I’d really thought about the audience I wanted to build a relationship with.
And sometimes I’d simply keep learning because learning felt like progress — even when I wasn’t actually building anything.
Looking at the business through five connected areas gave me something I’d been missing.
A way to see the whole picture.
Not another course to complete.
Not another opportunity to join.
Not another promise that this was finally going to be the thing.
Just a simple framework that helped me look at what I was doing and ask:
Where am I reasonably strong, and where am I getting stuck?
AI Helped Me Think. It Didn’t Make the Decisions.
There’s another part of this journey that’s important to me.
I’ve used AI extensively while working through all of this.
But I haven’t handed over the decision-making.
There have been plenty of times when AI has suggested a direction and my immediate reaction has been:
“No. That doesn’t feel right.”
At first, you might think that’s AI getting the answer wrong.
Sometimes it probably was.
But I’ve realised that even those conversations were useful.
Because being presented with something I didn’t want often forced me to explain why I didn’t want it.
Why don’t I want to coach people?
Why don’t I want to build the business around continually promoting different products?
Why doesn’t that piece of writing sound like me?
Why does one direction feel natural while another feels forced?
AI could give me alternatives, challenge an assumption or help me organise a messy collection of thoughts.
But ultimately, I still had to decide what fitted me.
And perhaps that’s been one of the biggest lessons from the whole process.
AI didn’t give me clarity. It helped me work towards it.
Maybe the First Step Isn’t Another Answer
I’m still working all of this out.
I certainly don’t have every part of my online business where I want it to be yet.
But for the first time in quite a while, I feel as though the things I’m doing are beginning to point in the same direction.
And that feels very different from simply starting again.
If you’ve been trying to build something online for a while, perhaps some of my story sounds familiar.
Maybe you’ve bought the courses.
Tried the systems.
Experimented with different tools.
Started building something, stopped, and then eventually started something else.
If so, I’m not going to tell you that I’ve discovered the answer.
I haven’t.
But I do wonder whether you’re asking yourself the same question I eventually had to ask:
Am I struggling because I haven’t found the right opportunity yet — or because I’m still not completely clear about what I’m trying to build?
That’s a question only you can answer.
It’s also one of the reasons I started putting together what became my Business Clarity Check.
It isn’t designed to tell you what business you should build.
It’s simply a way of looking at the five areas I’ve been using to make sense of my own business — Foundation, Audience, Content, Conversion and Execution — and identifying where things might need some attention.
Because sometimes the next step isn’t finding something new.
It’s getting clearer about what you already have, what’s missing, and where you actually want to go.
That’s the journey I’m on now.
And this time, rather than pretending I’ve already reached the destination, I’m going to share what I learn along the way.