Planning and research

Whether you are setting up a small business in the real world or doing so online, it is absolutely essential that you start off with a plan. As the saying has it, ‘if you fail to plan, you plan to fail’, which is definitely a saying that accurately applies to starting your own business.
If you are a starting a business online, you have a significant advantage in that all of the information you could ever need is available on the internet, and most of what you need to know is available at no cost.
As you would expect in the planning stage, you need to look at every aspect of your proposed business with a very critical eye because this is certainly no time for ‘rose tinted spectacles’. However much you might love to set up a business that panders to your passions, there is little point in doing so if that business has a very limited chance of achieving success even before you launch it. While you might have a passion for Mongolian nose flute playing, you are (unfortunately for you) in a very small, select group of people who are interested in the same topic, and it is extremely unlikely that you would be able to build a viable business around such a narrowly defined interest.
These are therefore the questions that you must ask as a way of establishing the initial viability of your idea.