How to start an online business, and what the communities teaching it charge

The only early decision that matters

Whether you are selling your time, somebody else’s product, or something you own. Agencies and freelancing sell time. Reselling and dropshipping sell somebody else’s product. Content and software sell something you own. Everything else is detail, and the three have completely different shapes: time pays soonest and stops when you do, ownership pays last and keeps going.

Before choosing a community, people tend to find it useful to settle which of those three they want, because the communities teaching each route are different.

Who teaches each route

Here are the largest communities shown on this site for two of those routes: agencies, which sell time, and reselling, which sells a product you buy in.

A price tells you who a room is aimed at rather than how good the teaching is, and the largest room in a niche is not necessarily the cheapest. Each table links to the full ranking for its route.

Before you pay for any of it

• Be able to say which of the three things you would be selling, and check that the listing says which one it teaches.
• Compare the price against others teaching the same route.
• Look the community up here and read every reading we have taken since we began. One tells you where it is, a run of them tells you which way it is going.
• Budget for the running costs too: advertising, tools and time.

Nothing here is a recommendation and no figure on this site says what any of this returns. What it can tell you is what access costs and how established a seller is, which is the checkable part.