Ted Mittelstaedt ⋅ Portland , OR Portlandia IT LLC ⋅ 20 years experience

Hi Benjamin,

Hate to tell you this but in online retail Price is King. Lots of people with millions backing them have gone bankrupt trying to retail online. Even Amazon flirted with bankruptcy for many years.
Let's say you are doing plumbing work in the military and you get out and setup a brick and mortar plumbing store. You are a master plumber and you make a point of personally greeting everyone who walks into your shop and asking them what their project is. When people ask questions you give them excellent and experienced advice. When commercial plumbers come in you know what they need and have it in stock.
After a while all of these things you do for people - maintaining stock levels, free advice - will be valued. We call that value-add and in the brick and mortar world people will pay for it. Residential customers will come to your store and ask your advice and even if they have to pay 5-10% more for the fixture they will feel it is worth it. Commercial plumbers will value the fact that you are saving them time and hassle of chasing some weird part down. You will be successful.
Now let's say you decide this formula works so well you decide to apply it to the Internet. So you spend a lot of time creating a great plumbing website jammed full of value-add information with the hope that people that find it as a result of search engines will buy what they need off of it.
What you will find I am sorry to say is people will happily come to your plumbing site, avail themselves of all the free and good advice, then when they figure out (using your help) exactly what they need - 5 clicks and 5 seconds and they will find the part 10% cheaper elsewhere - and they will buy it. This is how it works on the Internet when you are trying to sell something online and hoping that people will pay for the value-add. They won't.
What works for an online business is actually creating something and either selling it or selling advertising for it.
Let's say you have a great idea for a truck tool rack. You are a welder. You design and weld up the tool rack and it's the cat's meow. You patent it. Well, you can have the junkiest website out there selling your product - but if it truly is revolutionary and cool then people will buy it from you and you will make money.
Let's say you are a writer and you write wonderful stories people enjoy reading. You post your stories and you put some advertising on your website. Once more, you are going to make money when you get lots and lots of people visiting your site.
The key here is product creation. People will pay online for products they like that you create. But they won't pay online if you are just taking products someone else created and attempting to put a little value-add on them.

Barry Sosnick ⋅ Greenlawn , NY Great Whites Pediatric Dentistry & Orthodontics ⋅ 5 years experience

The starting point is not determining what would make a great ONLINE business, but simply a great business. Unless you identify a need, a solution and a enough customers to cover the costs, whether the business is online or not is irrelevant. If you have a great idea, follow it, regardless of whether it requires physical location or solely an online presence.

The prior responses talk about price competition. Keep in mind that there are three fundamental strategies, according to Harvard University's Michael Porter. Low cost is one approach and, according to Porter, there can only be one low-cost producer. The second strategy is differentiation. It is going after a large portion of the market, by not competing directly on price. Think of Target competing against Walmart's low prices with slightly nicer stores and a little more fashion focus.

The final strategy is segmentation. It is a way of competing against larger business by offering a finely tuned offering to a a smaller slice of the market. Family Dollar, for example, competed against Walmart and Target by focusing on consumers with extremely limited incomes. Family Dollar's customers cannot afford larger packages, so they have to buy smaller packages that fit their budgets.

I hope this starts helping clarifying your vision. If not, feel free to follow up.

Best of luck!

Tom Cal, CFA ⋅ San Francisco , CA Army Veteran, Investment Manager ⋅ 25 years experience

Read the book "Lean Startup"

Brian Richardson ⋅ Columbus , IN U.S. Army, Sergeant ⋅ 8 years served

Hi Benjamin,
Kudos on starting early! That, by itself, is hugely in your favor.

And Ted makes some great points. Regardless of what you do, you don't want to have to compete on price, you will probably lose.

I might suggest you dig a little deeper and find out what it is you are good at, what you enjoy, and what could be a worthwhile product or service. And yes, making your business different than all the others is difficult, but important.

Just because I love eating brownies, doesn't mean I will be successful selling brownies. And just because I make the best brownies in the world, doesn't mean I know how to sell them or run a business selling them.

Don't get me wrong, passion is important, but there are other aspects to a successful business than passion alone. The flip side is that if you don't have ANY passion for what you are doing, it will be easy to quit if things don't go as planned.

http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx is one thing you can do to start to find some direction as to what you are or are not good at. Any personality or skills test will NOT find you a business to start, but it can add to the way you approach starting a business. Take them with a grain of salt as they are not 100% valid, but it might bring some light to your process.

Some articles that may be of value to you.
http://vetlaunched.com/hobby-job-business/
http://vetlaunched.com/best-time-start-business/

Feel free to message me here or thru my site. Good luck!

Brian Richardson
www.VetLaunched.com