I wish I could pop on here and tell you just how easy it is to grow an online business, but I have a conscious and wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if I did.

I already don’t sleep enough as it is being a dad of young kids…

And so I’m here to tell you how it really is, even though no one wants to hear it:

This stuff takes time.

It takes time to build an audience.

It takes time to learn copywriting.

It takes time to build decent sales funnels.

It takes time to figure out automations.

It takes time to create good offers people want to buy.

And it takes time to build the right mindset about it all.

I’m not trying to convince you to not build a business…

But I don’t want to paint the wrong picture either.

The only reason I was able to sell a bunch of ebooks, courses, and even some memberships and coaching is because I learned the skills, developed the skills, and kept at it even when it felt tough.

Here’s A Better Mental Approach To Online Business

Instead of going “all in” trying to make a bunch of sales from day 1, understand this kind of business takes time, effort, consistency, and the patience to stick it out even when it feels like nothing is working.

Treat every step of the way as a learning opportunity.

And it’s also really important to understand some baseline metrics, such as:

A good email landing page might get 20–50 out of 100 people to sign up.

A good sales page might get 1–2 out of 100 people to buy.

Most people give up before they even get 100 clicks to their sales page and wonder why it didn’t work.

Once you have some data to work with, you can start improving your content and funnels and pages and make more sales with less traffic.

But the only way to get there is to get started and keep going no matter what.

Any questions? Let me know.

Talk soon,
-Gabe

Originally published at https://gabejohansson.com on August 17, 2025.