You Deserve More | How To Start An Online Business

There is a belief sitting in the back of a lot of people’s heads that nobody ever names out loud. It is not a fear of failure. It is a fear of success. The fear that if you actually start an online business and it works, something bad happens. Your family treats you differently. You feel guilty about making more money than your parents did. You panic about taxes. You do not know what to say when someone asks how things are going and the honest answer is “really well.”

This video was recorded walking around Lake Andrea in December, and Alston makes a point that does not get enough airtime: you deserve more, and the first thing you have to do is give yourself permission to believe that. Not in a motivational poster way. In a practical, here-is-what-the-fear-actually-looks-like-and-here-is-how-to-move-past-it way. If you have been putting off starting an online business because you are not sure you are the type of person who does that sort of thing, this post is for you.

What You’ll Walk Out With

Why fearing success is more common than fearing failure, and what to do about it
The real reason people say “I don’t want to make too much money” (it is not about taxes)
Why your “more” does not need a dramatic origin story to be valid
The Disney Princess framework for figuring out what you actually want
The four buyer types every content creator is probably ignoring
How to read a sales page as a masterclass in audience psychology
A practical content framework for reaching every type of buyer in your audience
How to find the right online business model for your skills and personality with finder.platformproof.com

The Fear Nobody Names Out Loud

Most people who talk about the mental side of starting an online business focus on fear of failure. What if it does not work? What if people laugh at me? What if I waste my money? Those fears are real, but they are also well-documented. There is a less-discussed fear underneath all of that one, and it goes like this: what if it actually works?

Think about what that actually means. You start making money online. Maybe you start making more in a day than some people you know make in a week. What do you say to your family? How do you explain that at Thanksgiving? What happens to your identity as someone who has always been “regular”? For a lot of people, this fear of crossing some invisible line is what quietly keeps them from starting at all. They never say it out loud because it sounds absurd. But it is real, and Alston talks about it directly because he lived it.

Then there is the tax thing. Alston brings this up because he has heard it from actual people: “I don’t want to make too much money because then I’ll have to pay more in taxes.” Stop and sit with that logic for a second. You are considering staying broke on purpose so that you owe less to the government. You are choosing less freedom, less security, and less time with your family so that your tax bracket stays low. Apply that reasoning to any other area of your life and it falls apart immediately. But because money is such a charged topic, that logic sounds reasonable to people who say it out loud. It is not. It is a signal that there is a deeper belief to work through before the business question even matters.

The $84,000 Wake-Up Call

Alston was a software developer making a little over $84,000 a year. That is not a bad salary. By many measures, it is a great one. It was also roughly double what his parents made with a single income. And that created a strange problem.

Growing up, money was not discussed in his household. It was a scarcity topic. Private. When he was filling out his FAFSA for college, he had to leave the room so his parents could enter the financial information. Not because they were hiding something shameful, but because money was just not something you talked about openly. It was always a source of stress, never a source of conversation. That kind of upbringing leaves a mark. It shapes how you think about what you are worth, what you are allowed to earn, and whether wanting more is greedy or justified.

So when he got to $84,000 a year, there was this awkward discomfort sitting alongside the achievement. He was doing well. Better than he had been raised to expect. And still something was missing. He was waking up at 4 or 5 in the morning, leaving before his kids got up, potentially missing soccer practice and basketball games, working in a cubicle that had a tiny window to look outside through. He enjoyed the craft of programming. He did not enjoy what the job cost him in terms of his actual life.

That is when the online business question started getting serious for him. Not because he was broke. Not because he had lost everything and needed to rebuild. But because “more” showed up and had a very specific face: more time, more presence, more freedom to decide where he was going to be and when.

Your Origin Story Does Not Need a Rock Bottom

There is a formula that runs through a lot of make-money-online content. You have probably seen it. The speaker was once broke, homeless, or completely lost. Then they discovered something, worked impossibly hard, and now they are sharing the secret from their success. It is a compelling narrative arc. It is also not the only one, and if it is the only story you think is allowed to justify starting an online business, you are going to keep waiting for a crisis that does not come.

Your story could look like Alston’s. You are doing okay. You have a job that pays the bills. You have a life that looks fine from the outside. But there is this low-grade dissatisfaction that you cannot quite name. A feeling that you should be somewhere else, doing something else, with more control over your own schedule and your own income. That is a valid reason to start. You do not need to have been evicted. You do not need to have maxed out your credit cards. You just need to be honest about what you actually want, which turns out to be the harder thing for most people.

The rags-to-riches formula exists because it sells well. It hits a certain kind of buyer. But the real question is not whether your story is dramatic enough. The real question is whether you are willing to admit that you want something different, and whether you are willing to do something about it.

What Is Your “More”?

Alston brings up Disney princesses as a framework, and it is a better one than it might sound. Think about every Disney princess movie. The princess always starts with a feeling that something is missing. She wants something she cannot name. She does not start the movie knowing that she wants to defeat the villain or find her true calling. She just knows that what is in front of her is not quite it. That unnamed wanting is what drives the whole story.

Most people who are thinking about starting an online business are in that same position. They have a feeling. They do not have a clear picture of what they want. They know the current setup is not working and something else exists. Alston’s point is that this feeling is not something to dismiss or push aside until you can define it more clearly. The feeling is the signal. The feeling is “more” calling to you. You do not need to know exactly what it is to start moving toward it.

He did not fully understand what his “more” was until he had kids. That is when the abstract wanting became concrete: he wanted to be there in the mornings. He wanted to not miss games. He wanted the flexibility that a traditional job was not going to give him. Your “more” might reveal itself the same way, slowly, through life, or it might come from a single conversation that changes your perspective. The important thing is that you take it seriously instead of explaining it away.

The Four Buyer Types Your Content Is Probably Ignoring

The second major thread in this video comes from a conversation Alston had with a coaching client. He was telling her what to do for content creation, based on what he would do. She told him, politely but clearly, that his approach did not match her personality. And that observation opened something up for him: he had been teaching people what to create without accounting for how they create, or more importantly, for who they are trying to reach.

There are four buyer types, and if your content is only built for one of them, you are leaving most of your audience cold. Understanding these types does not just change how you sell. It changes how you create content entirely.

The Logical Buyer

This is Alston’s natural buyer type, and probably yours too if you have been creating content for a while. The logical buyer wants data, comparisons, and clear cause-and-effect reasoning. They want to know: if I do this, I get that. If you show them a step-by-step process with numbers attached, they are in. They respond to competitive advantage framing. “This gives you an edge” lands for them. Statistics, income figures, conversion rates, time-to-result estimates. Give them proof and logic and they will trust you.

The Emotional Buyer

The emotional buyer is not buying your method. They are buying the feeling your method promises. They want to know what life looks like on the other side. Freedom. Time with their family. Not dreading Monday morning. If your content only talks about the mechanics of what you do, you are invisible to this buyer. You have to paint the picture of what the outcome actually feels like. Alston mentions that this type of content is harder for logical creators to produce, because it requires you to step outside the spreadsheet and into the story of your own life, which feels uncomfortably personal if you are not used to it.

The Story and Connection Buyer

This buyer needs to know who you are before they will buy anything. They are watching your walking-and-talking videos, not your tutorial breakdowns. They want backstory. They want the Kmart layaway story. They want to know about your kids and your old commute and your cubicle window. They are building a relationship with you, and that relationship is what converts them eventually. Alston points out that this is partly why he started doing the outdoor walking videos. It shows a side of him, and of where he actually lives, that the polished tutorial content does not show. A viewer watching him walk around Lake Andrea in December learns something about who he is that a screen-recorded income breakdown never communicates.

The Analytical Buyer

The analytical buyer just wants the deal. They scroll to the bottom of the sales page. They skip the video and look at the bullet points. They are not opposed to buying, they just do not want the buildup. If you build your content exclusively for the emotional buyer, the analytical buyer bounces. If you build it exclusively for the analytical buyer, the emotional buyer never warms up enough to convert. The goal is not to pick one. The goal is to build content that contains something for each type.

What Sales Pages Already Know

Alston’s pro tip in this video is one of the most practical things you can do this week if you are thinking about content strategy. Go find a sales page in your niche. A real one, from someone who clearly makes money. Read the whole thing. Do not skim it looking for the price. Actually read through the copy from top to bottom.

You will see every buyer type addressed in sequence. There will be a story section with an emotional hook. There will be bullet points with logic and specifics for the logical buyer. There will be testimonials, which speak to the story-and-connection buyer who needs to see social proof from people like them. And somewhere near the bottom, there will be a simplified summary for the analytical buyer who wants to know what they get and what it costs without reading the whole thing first.

That structure is not accidental. Whoever wrote that page understood that their audience is not one type of person. They are four types of people, and a sale can come from any of them. Your content strategy should work the same way. Some videos for the logic crowd, some for the story crowd, some for the emotional audience, some for the “just show me the results” crowd. Mix intentionally instead of defaulting to whatever feels comfortable for you personally.

Not sure which online business model fits your skills and buyer type?

Find out in two minutes at finder.platformproof.com.

A Content Plan That Reaches All Four Buyer Types

Here is a practical framework for building a content mix that does not ignore three out of four people in your audience. You do not need to post four times as much. You need to think about what each piece is designed to do before you create it.

Audit your last ten pieces of content. Which buyer type were they built for? If nine out of ten were built for logical buyers, you know what to fix. If all of them told stories but never included data, same problem in reverse.
Pick one underserved buyer type and build one piece specifically for them this week. If you are a data person, force yourself to record a walking video where you talk about why you started instead of what you did. If you are a story person, make a video with actual numbers and a comparison chart.
Look at your best-performing content and identify which buyer type it served. Most people find that their audience is dominated by one type, but there are usually pockets of the others waiting to be reached.
Study three sales pages in your niche. Take notes on where each section shifts buyer type. This is a better education in audience psychology than most courses you could buy.
Build a quarterly content plan with at least one video per month intentionally targeting each type. You do not have to change your personality or create content that feels fake. You just have to be deliberate about which angle you take on a given topic.

The Honest Drawback

Here is something Alston acknowledges directly: creating content for buyer types that do not match your natural personality is genuinely hard. He admits that emotional content is difficult for him. He is a logical and competitive-advantage thinker. Telling personal stories on camera, sharing the Kmart layaway memory, walking around a lake in December and letting people into his neighborhood, that stuff does not come naturally. It requires real effort to do it well and to keep doing it consistently.

The risk of this framework is that you try to create content for the emotional buyer and it comes out flat because you are forcing something that does not feel genuine. The fix is not to avoid those types of content but to find the version of them that does feel like you. Alston did not record a scripted monologue about his childhood. He went for a walk and talked. That is a version of personal, story-based content that fits his way of operating. Your version will look different. The point is to find it, not to copy someone else’s format.

Find Your X

The thing Alston keeps coming back to in this video is the idea of knowing what your “more” actually is. Not a general desire to make more money, but a specific understanding of what you are working toward and why it matters to you. That clarity is what separates people who start and stop from people who build something real over time. If you are still working out what your version of more looks like, and what kind of online business might actually fit who you are, start at finder.platformproof.com. It takes about two minutes and gives you a concrete starting point instead of another list of options to sort through on your own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it really okay to want to make more money than my parents did?

Yes. The discomfort you feel about that is a product of how money was discussed, or not discussed, in the household you grew up in. Alston describes filling out his FAFSA in college and having to leave the room so his parents could enter financial information privately. That kind of environment creates a belief that money is something you do not talk about and do not surpass. It is a believable belief given where it came from. It is not a useful one for where you are trying to go. Wanting more for your family is not disloyal to where you came from.

What should I say to family and friends when my income starts growing?

You do not owe anyone a detailed income update. You can be honest about what you are working on without sharing numbers you are not comfortable sharing. The more useful preparation is internal: deciding in advance that your success is not something to apologize for or hide. The awkwardness tends to come from not having made that decision yet, not from the income itself.

Do I really need a dramatic backstory to be credible online?

No. The rags-to-riches formula is popular because it converts well with a specific buyer type, not because it is required. Alston was making $84,000 a year as a software developer when he started seriously building his online business. His story is not dramatic. It is relatable to a huge portion of the working population who are doing okay but want something different. There are a lot of people in that situation and they are actively looking for someone whose story matches theirs.

How do I figure out which buyer type my audience is?

Look at which content performs best for you and how people respond to it in comments and replies. Logical buyers tend to engage with data and ask follow-up questions about process. Emotional buyers share your content and describe how it made them feel. Story buyers send you personal messages about how your story connects to theirs. Analytical buyers often just buy without commenting much. Engagement patterns tell you a lot about who is in your audience and what they respond to.

What if creating emotional content feels fake to me?

It probably will feel uncomfortable at first, especially if you have built your whole approach around logic and numbers. The goal is not to perform emotions you do not have. The goal is to find a format that lets you be personal without requiring you to be someone you are not. Alston’s walking videos are his version of personal content. He is not acting. He is walking and talking and showing where he lives. You can find an equivalent format that matches your personality. The key is that you are showing something real about who you are, not just what you know.

How does the G-Bolt Systems coaching work?

Alston mentions that G-Bolt Systems has one upsell: a one-on-one coaching conversation. During that call, he builds out a landing page and puts it in your account, builds a lead magnet, and sets up an email sequence so you have a functioning start to your online business. It is a done-with-you model rather than a course you work through alone. The idea is to get you a real push forward rather than another list of things to eventually do.

Should I be on multiple platforms or focus on one?

Alston addresses this indirectly when talking about a coaching client who was running three different YouTube channels targeting three different niches. His advice was to focus. Spreading across multiple niches and platforms before you have traction on one is one of the most common ways people stall out. The signal that you can expand is consistent results in one place, not the desire to hedge against uncertainty by doing everything at once.

What is the first step if I want more but I do not know what more looks like yet?

Start where you are. Do not wait for a clear vision before you take any action. Alston did not know exactly what his “more” looked like until life made it obvious through his kids. In the meantime, he kept seeking, kept taking degrees, kept trying different paths. The clarity came from movement, not from planning. Start with a short quiz at finder.platformproof.com to get a specific direction based on your skills, and go from there.

Sources

Alston Godbolt, “You Deserve More | How To Start An Online Business,” YouTube, recorded at Lake Andrea, December 2023
G-Bolt Systems coaching program, gbolt.systems
Platform Proof Finder, finder.platformproof.com

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