Things I Did Before I Started My Online Business

Things I Did Before I Started My Online Business

Okay so let me paint you a picture real quick. I’m a developer. I build websites, mobile apps, the whole thing. I actually built Bizpremi myself from scratch every line of code, every feature, every late night debugging session. So when I tell you I still struggled to “start an online business,” I need you to understand how weird that sounds even to me. Because yes, you’d think someone like me would just… know what to do. Right? but wrong.

Knowing how to build things and knowing how to build a business are two completely different things. And that gap between those two things? That’s exactly what this article is about.

Here’s everything I went through before I actually got things moving. The honest version, not the polished Yes it’s easy, look how I did it. You understand?

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1. I Thought My Skills Were Enough (They Weren’t)

This was honestly my biggest problem at the start. I had the technical skills that most people trying to start online businesses would literally pay for. I could spin up a website in a few hours.

I understood APIs, databases, hosting, domains, UI/UX — all of it. I genuinely thought that was the hard part and everything else would just fall into place. It did not fall into place.

What I didn’t have was a clue about marketing, monetisation strategy, audience building, or how to actually get people to care about what I was building. I kept building things — beautiful, functional, well coded things and nobody was coming. Not because the product was bad. Because I had no idea how to reach people or how to turn traffic into income.

That realisation hit me harder than I expected. I had always been the “tech guy” in every room and suddenly I was the guy who didn’t know what he was doing. Humbling doesn’t even begin to cover it.

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2. I Told People About My Plans (Classic Mistake)

Just like every other excited person who’s ever decided to start something, I opened my mouth too early. I told friends, family, a few people I know from the tech community. I was hyped. I genuinely thought people would match my energy.

Instead I got you don’t wanna do 9 to 5, you can’t stand working for someone. You want to be your own boss. it’s not easy, it’s too risky. And my personal favourite can’t you just freelance instead.

The frustrating part was that these were smart people. Some of them were even in tech themselves. But there’s this weird thing that happens when you tell someone you want to build something for yourself rather than for a client or an employer people get uncomftable. Like your ambition is somehow a threat to the normal way of doing things.

I stopped telling people after a while. Not because I lost confidence, but because I realised the conversation wasn’t useful. I needed to just go do the thing, not talk about doing the thing.

Now, I am not saying telling a few persons is bad no, there is this my very good friend. he goes by Kingsley Neji. funny enough, he is also a co founder of this wonderful website Bizpremi. He is also the owner of one of the best Sports Website out there SportPremi. I built it of course. But that’s not the point.

What i’m saying is, it;s rare to find friends like that. Friends that encourage and supports your vision.

3. I Went Deep Into Research Mode

So here’s where the developer brain actually helped me. When I commit to understanding something, I go all in. I started reading everything I could find about online business models, monetisation, digital products, affiliate marketing, SaaS, content businesses you name it, I was reading it.

The difference for me compared to a non-tech person doing this same research was that I could actually evaluate what I was reading more critically. When someone was selling a course about “building a website to make passive income,” I already knew what was technically involved in that. I could see through the fluff pretty quickly.

But even with that advantage, there was still SO much noise. Every blog post, every YouTube video, every newsletter had a different opinion on what the “right” model was. Do you build an audience first? Do you build the product first? Do you do affiliate marketing? SaaS? Info products? Digital downloads? Services?

I probably spent two to three months just in research mode before I made any real moves. Looking back, some of that was necessary. Some of it was just procrastination dressed up as productivity. I’ll be honest about that.

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4. I Wasted Time Building Things Nobody Asked For

Okay this one is very specific to people with technical skills and I need to talk about it because I see other devs fall into this trap all the time.

When you can build things, you build things. That’s just what we do. So instead of validating an idea first, I would just… build it. Full product. Proper backend, clean frontend, mobile responsive, the works. Hours and hours of work. Sometimes weeks.

And then I’d launch it and hear crickets.

Not because the build was bad. Usually the build was actually pretty solid. But I had skipped the step where you figure out if anyone actually wants the thing before you spend all that time making it. I was solving problems that I thought people had rather than problems they were actually screaming about.

This is probably the most expensiv mistake I made not in money, but in time. And for a developer, time is everything.

5. I Started Paying Attention to the Business Side Properly

After enough failed projects and quiet launches, I finally accepted that I needed to learn things that weren’t in any documentation or Stack Overflow thread. Business things. Marketing things. People things.

I started consuming content from people who were building online businesses and talking openly about the numbers revenue, churn, customer acquisition cost, conversion rates. Not the “I made ten million dollars” highlight reel stuff, but the actual mechanics. The stuff that explains why certain things work.

I got into reading about positioning, about finding a niche, about speaking directly to a specific type of customer rather than trying to appeal to everyone. This was genuinly a different way of thinking for me and it took some time to rewire my brain.

As a developer, I was used to thinking in systems and logic. Marketing felt messy and unpredictable to me. But once I started treating it like a system input, output, test, iterate it started to make more sense. It clicked eventually. Just took longer than my ego wanted to admit.

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6. I Started Bizpremi

This is where things changed for me in a real way. Instead of building random products for imaginary customers, I built something I actually understood deeply because I lived the problem myself.

Bizpremi came from a real frustration I had. I won’t go into the full backstory here but the short version is I saw a gap, I understood the gap technically and from a user experience perspective, and I built something to fill it. And this time I did things differently. I talked to people first. I showed early versions to real people and got feedback before I had a finished product. I thought about how I was going to reach my audience before I wrote a single line of code.

Building Bizpremi taught me more about running an actual online business than all the months of research I had done before it. Because this time I wasn’t just the developer. I was also the founder, the marketer, the customer support, the content person. All of it.

It is a lot. I won’t lie about that. But it’s also the most satisfying thing I’ve ever built.

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7. I Gave Up the Freelance Safety Net (Sort Of)

This was a mental shift more than anything else. For the longest time I kept freelance work running in the background as a fallback. And look — I understand why people do that. Bills are real. Life is expensive. Practical decisions have to be made.

But there’s a version of “keeping a safety net” that is actually just fear dressed up as sensibility. I was taking on freelance projects not because I needed the money urgently but because building my own thing was scary and uncertain and freelancing felt safe and predictable.

Eventually I had to get honest with myself about that. The online business was never going to get the real attention it needed while I kept one foot in freelancing. So I got more intentional about it — set boundaries, reduced the freelance work gradually, and pointed more of my energy toward my own stuff.

That shift made a massive difference. Not overnight. But it compounded over time.

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The Thing I’d Tell Developer-Me From Three Years Ago

If I could go back and talk to myself at the start of all this, I’d say: stop building first. Seriously. Just stop. Talk to people. Find the pain. Understand who you’re building for before you write a single function or design a single screen.

Your technical skills are genuinely a superpower don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. But they’re a superpower that can just as easily be pointed in the wrong direction. Being able to build fast means you can also waste time fast if you’re not careful.

The freedom that comes with running your own online business the no commuting, the no dress code, the no one telling you to come in on a Saturday all of that is absolutely real. I live it now. But the path to get there looked very different for me than it does for a non-tech person, and not always easier just because I could code.

The technical part was never my problem. The business thinking, the patience, the willingness to talk to customers and listen even when what they said wasn’t what I wanted to hear that’s where my real growth happened.

And honestly? I’m still growing. Every single day.

Conclusion:

When you saw, things I did before I started my online business. you must have thought, or expecting me hyping myself, or stating only the good. No I needed to be real, succeeding online, requires good direction trust me. Aside bizpremi, I have done a lot of businesses, some shut down, some not active. but in my failures, is your achievement. And to me those are not failures, but learning.

I want to see you succeeding in your online business. with love from Adegbola Valentine,

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