5 Online Businesses You Should NOT Start in 2024

Every week another YouTube video promises you the “best online business to start in 2024.” They all sound convincing. They all show income screenshots. And most of them are sending you straight into a trap. The businesses they push are either saturated, slow, or designed to make the platform rich while you grind for table scraps.

Alston Godbolt has actually sold courses on Udemy, listed products on Etsy, and offered services on Fiverr. He is not theorizing. He built accounts on those platforms, watched the numbers, and walked away. In this post, you get the honest breakdown of five online businesses he says you should skip in 2024 and what to do instead.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why Udemy course sales often pay out as little as $2.50 per sale and what you should do with your course instead
The one condition under which print on demand still makes sense in 2024
How Etsy’s fee structure and terms of service work against your ability to build a real customer relationship
Why Amazon’s same-day delivery has permanently broken the dropshipping customer expectation
How a former $84,000-per-year software developer got offered $50 for high-level work on Fiverr
The content-first alternative that applies to courses, products, services, and affiliate offers
Not sure which online business model actually fits your situation? Get your answer at finder.platformproof.com

Why Most “Best Business” Lists Lead You Astray

There are literally thousands of YouTube videos ranking the best businesses to start. The problem is that not all of them are created equal. Some of those business models are going to consume too much of your time. Some are what Alston calls a race to the bottom, where you work hard and compete on price until your margin disappears. Others are simply outdated, built for a market that no longer exists the way it did three or four years ago.

The five models below have two things in common. First, the platform takes too much control away from you. Second, they make it nearly impossible to build a real relationship with your customer, which is the only thing that leads to sustainable income. Understanding why these models fail is the first step to picking one that actually works.

Business 1: Selling Courses on Udemy

Udemy is one of the most well-known course platforms in the world. It is also one of the worst places to build a business if you care about your time and your earnings. Alston has courses on Udemy about affiliate marketing. At his best, he makes about $7 per course sold. At his worst, he has made $2.50 on a single sale. That is not a typo.

Here is why the math falls apart. Udemy controls the pricing. They can discount your course down to $9 without asking you. You might have priced that same course at $99 or $149 or even $499 on your own platform, but Udemy decides what the customer pays and takes the majority of the revenue. Corporate buyers make it even worse. When a company purchases through Udemy’s business program, the per-sale payout drops even further.

There is also the volume problem. Udemy is a search-engine game. To get consistent visibility you need to upload a high number of courses, continuously optimize your listings, and invest real effort into SEO. That is a significant workload. And after all that work, you still cannot collect the email addresses of the students who buy from you. You have no way to follow up, offer them a second product, or deepen the relationship.

The better path is to host your course yourself. Platforms like Teachable, Thinkific, Podia, or even a simple Gumroad page let you set your own price, keep far more of each sale, and capture every buyer’s contact information. If you are going to do the marketing work anyway, which Udemy forces you to do regardless, you might as well send people to a page where you keep $99 instead of $2.50.

Business 2: Print on Demand

Print on demand is not a bad idea in the abstract. You design a product, someone orders it, a third-party printer fulfills it, and you collect the margin. No inventory, no upfront cost. It sounds clean. The reality in 2024 is that the market is flooded.

Artificial intelligence has made it cheap and fast to generate designs. That means the number of listings competing for attention has exploded. Many of those listings are low-quality. The volume of mediocre print on demand products is polluting the market and making it harder for genuinely good work to surface. Alston describes it as AI muddying the waters for creators who are trying to do print on demand well.

The platform problem is the same one as Udemy. Most people selling print on demand products use Etsy or Creative Market. Both of those platforms require continuous uploading, consistent SEO work, and heavy fee payments. And again, you do not own the customer relationship. You cannot easily follow up, upsell, or build a list from those transactions.

Alston gives one exception. If you are already building a personal brand on TikTok, YouTube, or Instagram, print on demand as a revenue extension can work. Your audience trusts you, they want to support you, and they will buy branded merchandise because they feel connected to you. But if you are starting from zero with no audience and your plan is to open an Etsy shop and go from zero to $10,000 per month on print on demand, that plan is not going to work the way you have been told it will.

Business 3: Selling on Etsy

Even beyond print on demand, Etsy as a general platform is a problem. Alston calls it a race to the bottom. You could spend real time building a high-quality digital planner, pricing it at what it is actually worth, and then watch the market pressure force you down to four or five dollars because other sellers are listing similar products for less.

The fee structure is part of the issue. Etsy charges listing fees, transaction fees, payment processing fees, and optional advertising costs. Your actual take-home on a low-priced item can be surprisingly thin after all of that is accounted for.

The bigger issue is the value ladder problem. In a healthy online business, your first sale is just the start. You acquire a customer, you have their email address, and then you can send them offers for your next product, recommend affiliate products that serve them, and build a long-term relationship that generates income repeatedly from the same person. Etsy makes that almost impossible. The customer belongs to Etsy, not to you.

There are workarounds. Some sellers try to include inserts in their orders that drive customers to a separate email list. But Etsy’s terms of service are strict about this. Many sellers have had their accounts suspended for trying to collect customer data outside of Etsy’s sanctioned channels. Alston has his own Etsy account and crossed about 25 sales before stepping back. That firsthand experience shapes his recommendation: create content instead, drive your own traffic, and keep the customer relationship on your own turf.

Business 4: Dropshipping

Dropshipping had a real moment. The promise is simple: you run a store, a customer places an order, and a manufacturer ships the product directly to the customer. You never touch inventory. The margin is the difference between what the customer paid you and what you paid the manufacturer.

The model has not disappeared. But customer expectations have shifted in a way that creates a serious structural problem. Alston gives a real example from his own life: he placed an order on Amazon at 7:00 p.m. one evening and the package was on his front steps by 10:00 a.m. the next morning. That is the baseline now. That is what customers compare every other purchase against.

Most dropshipping, especially dropshipping sourced from overseas manufacturers, cannot come close to that timeline. Products routinely take one to three weeks or longer to arrive. Customers who expected faster delivery leave bad reviews, open chargebacks, and complain on social media. Your customer service load goes up and your reputation takes damage that is hard to recover from.

The advertising cost problem compounds this. Dropshipping used to work because you could run Facebook ads to low-cost impulse items, like phone cases or small gadgets, with a reasonable cost to acquire each customer. The cost of Facebook advertising has increased significantly over the past several years. Margins that used to work no longer do.

Alston mentions Amazon FBA as a comparison, but notes clearly that combining dropshipping with Amazon FBA is against Amazon’s terms of service and will get your account banned. If you want to pursue product sales seriously, Amazon FBA is a separate model that requires buying and shipping inventory to Amazon warehouses upfront. It is not a dropshipping play.

His one exception here mirrors the print on demand exception: if you have a personal brand where people know, like, and trust you, they may be willing to wait for your product to arrive. Without that foundation, you are competing on price and speed against people and companies that will always beat you on both.

Business 5: Fiverr and Online Service Marketplaces

Fiverr is a platform where freelancers list services and clients hire them. It covers design, writing, development, marketing, video editing, and hundreds of other categories. It sounds like a reasonable way to monetize your skills. In practice, it creates a race to the bottom on price that often makes your time worthless.

Alston’s personal example makes this concrete. He held a certification in Amazon Web Services and had worked as a software developer earning $84,000 per year. When his family was expecting twins and he needed extra income, he went to Fiverr to offer his development skills. Clients would bring him genuinely complex, high-level work and offer $50. That was the going rate for what the market would pay on that platform, regardless of his qualifications.

The same dynamics that govern Etsy apply to Fiverr. Freelancers from countries with lower costs of living can undercut your prices and still make a reasonable wage in their local currency. You cannot win a price war against someone for whom $10 represents meaningful purchasing power when the same $10 barely covers your coffee.

Fiverr also gives you no control over the customer relationship. You cannot take clients off-platform without risking your account. You cannot build a list. You cannot upsell them on a higher-tier service without going through the platform’s fee structure. Every dollar you earn, Fiverr takes a cut of.

The content-first alternative works here just as it does everywhere else. If you are skilled at building WordPress websites, create a multi-part series showing yourself build a full five-page site from a blank slate. Show the features. Show the process. Show testimonials from satisfied clients. That content builds trust, demonstrates your competence, and positions you to charge ten times what a Fiverr gig would pay because the client found you and already believes in your work before they ever send a message.

Which online business model actually matches what you have to work with?

Skills, time, starting capital, and audience size all point to different answers. Get a personalized recommendation at finder.platformproof.com.

The Pattern Across All Five Failures

Look at the five businesses above and one pattern shows up in every single case. You are building on someone else’s land. Udemy controls your pricing. Etsy controls your fees and your customer access. Fiverr controls your rates and your client relationships. Dropshipping leaves you at the mercy of manufacturers and shipping timelines you cannot influence.

Alston’s counter-recommendation is consistent across all five: create content and own the traffic. When you create content, whether that is YouTube videos, TikTok posts, Instagram content, a podcast, or a blog, you build an audience that belongs to you. That audience can be directed to any offer: a course you host yourself, a print on demand store you run independently, a web design service where you set your own rates, physical products you sell through your own store.

The content-first model also solves the customer data problem. When someone finds your content, clicks your link, and signs up for your email list or buys directly from your store, you own that relationship. You can send them offers next month. You can recommend affiliate products that serve them. You can launch a new product and have a warm audience ready to buy on day one.

A Simple Decision Framework

Before you launch any online business model, run it through these four questions:

Who controls pricing? If a platform sets or discounts your prices without your approval, that is a red flag.
Do I own the customer data? If you cannot collect your buyer’s email address and contact them again, you are renting customers, not building a business.
Can I build a value ladder? Can you sell something small first, then offer progressively higher-value products and services to the same customer? If the platform prevents this, your income is capped by single transactions.
Am I competing on price or on trust? Race-to-the-bottom markets reward the lowest bidder. Trust-based markets reward the person the audience already knows. Content creation moves you out of the first category and into the second.

Find Your X

Knowing which business models to avoid is half the job. The other half is identifying which model actually fits your skills, schedule, and starting point. Some people are better suited to service-based content. Others should be building digital products. Some have an existing audience they have not monetized yet. The right starting point depends on your specific situation. Find out where you should start at finder.platformproof.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Udemy completely worthless for course creators?

Not completely. Udemy gives you access to a large existing audience, which can be useful for building social proof early on. The real problem is the economics. At $2.50 to $7 per sale, you need enormous volume to generate meaningful income, and Udemy controls the levers that determine that volume. For most people, hosting your own course and driving your own traffic produces better financial results, even if the audience is smaller at the start.

What platform should I use to sell courses instead of Udemy?

The right answer depends on your technical comfort level and your budget. Teachable and Thinkific are well-established options with good student experience features. Podia bundles courses with email and community tools. Gumroad is simpler and lower-cost if you are starting out. All of them let you set your own price, keep far more of each sale, and collect your buyer’s email address for future marketing.

Can print on demand still work in 2024?

Yes, with the right foundation. If you are consistently creating content on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram and you have an engaged audience, print on demand can be a reasonable additional revenue stream. Your audience already trusts you and wants to support you. The model breaks down when someone tries to build a print on demand business from scratch with no audience, relying on Etsy SEO to drive all the traffic.

Why does Etsy hurt your long-term business even when it produces sales?

Etsy gives you a transaction but not a customer relationship. You do not have the buyer’s email address in a way you can freely use. You cannot contact them about your next product, run promotions to them directly, or recommend affiliate offers. Every sale is essentially isolated. Building real income online requires being able to sell to the same customer multiple times, and Etsy’s structure prevents that in most cases.

What actually changed with dropshipping that makes it harder now?

Two things. Customer delivery expectations shifted dramatically when Amazon introduced next-day and same-day delivery at scale. Customers now measure every purchase against that standard. Most dropshipping supply chains, especially those sourcing from overseas, cannot compete on speed. At the same time, the cost of running paid ads on Facebook, which was the primary customer acquisition method for most dropshipping businesses, increased significantly. Both of those changes happened at the same time and compressed margins on both sides.

Is there a legitimate way to do dropshipping in 2024?

Alston says yes, but only with a personal brand in place first. If people already know and trust you through your content, they are willing to wait for products because they believe in you. You also spend less to acquire each customer because your content does the trust-building work before the sale. Without that foundation, you are relying entirely on paid advertising and competing against operations with larger budgets and faster supply chains.

How do I avoid the race-to-the-bottom problem on any service platform?

By building trust before asking for the sale. When a potential client discovers you through content you created, they already have evidence of your skills and your thinking. You are not an anonymous listing competing with a hundred other listings on price. You are a specific person they have decided they want to work with. That shift in positioning lets you charge rates that reflect the actual value of your work. It is the difference between being found and being chosen.

What is the first step if I want to build the content-first alternative Alston describes?

Pick one platform and one topic you can credibly speak about based on skills or experience you already have. Do not start three channels on three platforms at once. Create consistently on that one platform, show your process and your results honestly, and build an email list from the beginning so you own the audience relationship from day one. The specific platform matters less than showing up with real knowledge and doing it consistently over time.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “5 Online Businesses You Should NOT Start in 2024,” YouTube, https://youtu.be/SbmBjNyGhvo
Udemy Instructor Revenue Share Policy, udemy.com/teaching/
Etsy Seller Fees Overview, etsy.com/seller-handbook/
Fiverr Seller Terms of Service, fiverr.com/terms_of_service

Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.