Making money online has never been easier, or harder

The barrier to making money online has never been lower. It has also never been higher. Both are true at the same time, and most people only notice the first half until they launch.

Software is cheap. Marketing is saturated. If you understand how those two facts feed each other, you stop spending your energy in the wrong place.

The easy half: building is almost free

When I started building for the web in 2020, launching a real online business still took real effort. You needed a developer, or months of learning. You needed a designer. Payments, hosting, email and analytics were each their own project.

Today most of that is a subscription and an afternoon:

• A store. Shopify gives you checkout, payments, inventory, taxes and hosting on day one. A good theme gets you to "looks legitimate" before lunch.
• The product. Print-on-demand, dropshipping and digital downloads mean you can sell without holding stock or touching a warehouse.
• The code. AI tools can write a landing page, a Liquid section or a small app in minutes. Things that were a two-week contract are now a prompt and a review.
• The content. Photos, copy, product descriptions and ads can all be drafted by a machine.

The cost of making something has collapsed. That's genuinely good news. More people can try, and trying is cheap enough that failing is survivable.

The hard half: everyone else got the same tools

Here's the catch. Every tool that made it easier for you made it easier for everyone else.

When anyone can launch a store in a weekend, thousands of people do. When AI can write a thousand product descriptions an hour, the internet fills with them. The supply of products, apps, courses, newsletters and videos keeps climbing. The number of hours people have to look at them doesn't.

Attention is the scarce resource now, and it's priced like one:

• Ads cost more because there are more businesses bidding for the same eyeballs, and platforms sell that attention to the highest bidder.
• Feeds are louder. Organic reach on social platforms keeps shrinking as more people post more often.
• Search is crowded, and AI answers now summarise results before anyone clicks through.
• Trust is thinner. Shoppers have seen enough template stores and too-good-to-be-true offers to be suspicious of anything that looks generic.

So the barrier didn't disappear. It moved. It used to sit in front of building. Now it sits in front of being noticed and believed.

Building is no longer the moat

If anyone can build what you built in a weekend, then the building isn't what protects you. What does?

Taste. When every store can look "fine", looking considered stands out. A brand that has a point of view in its typography, photography and copy reads as a real company, not a weekend experiment. This is most of what I do for clients: making a storefront feel like it was made on purpose.

Trust. Reviews, a real person behind the brand, clear policies, a fast site that doesn't break on a phone. Boring things, but they're what turns a click into an order when a shopper has ten other tabs open.

Distribution. An audience you can reach without paying for it every time: an email list, search traffic, a community, a following that actually cares. This is the part that compounds, and the part you can't generate in an afternoon.

Specificity. "Candles for everyone" competes with the whole internet. "Candles for people who host dinner parties in small flats" competes with almost no one, and knows exactly where to find its customers.

What I'd do if I were starting today

If I were launching an online business now, knowing all this, here's how I'd spend my time:

1. Pick a narrow audience first, then the product. It's much easier to find and convince a hundred specific people than ten thousand vague ones.
2. Spend less on the build and more on the brand. Use the cheap tools to get live fast. Put the saved time and money into what people see and feel: a clear name, great product photos, honest copy, a site that loads quickly.
3. Own a channel from day one. Collect emails. Write useful things people search for. Social platforms and ad accounts can change the rules overnight; a list you own can't be taken away.
4. Show up as a person. In a sea of faceless stores, a founder who explains why they made the thing is a real advantage. People buy from people.
5. Treat the store like a product, not a launch. Watch where visitors drop off, fix the slowest pages, test the offer. Small improvements to a store that gets traffic beat a shiny new store that gets none.
6. Play a long game. Content, reputation and email lists are slow to start and hard to copy. That's exactly why they work.

Cheap to start, expensive to matter

The honest summary is this: it has never been cheaper to start a business online, and never more expensive to make one matter.

That's not a reason to give up. It's a reason to aim your effort differently. The software is the easy part now, so don't make it the whole plan. Spend what you save on the things a template and a prompt can't give you: a clear point of view, the trust of real customers, and a way to reach them that you own.

If you're building a Shopify brand and want the storefront to do that job, making you look like the considered option rather than one more template, that's the work I do.