Welcome to Fluther, indeed.
I haven’t done an online business, but from the shoestring business I did create and run for about a year and a half (as a sideline to my ‘day job’), the big problem was promoting it. Getting it known, building a reputation for service, delivery and price. I would imagine that that’s the biggest challenge facing any new business.
My daughter, on the other hand, has opened her own food cart in Madison, WI, and had a great first year. She’s actually starting to make profits, which I didn’t think that she’d be able to do in her first year. (She also scored top marks in a city-employee survey of all Madison carts, beating out a lot of well-established competition.) And now with the cold weather approaching, she’s taken to accepting orders sent to her via text message, and even received one via her Facebook page.
Even for her, though, and the terrific word-of-mouth advertising (she loves it when one person from a neighborhood office tries the food, and the next day five or six people show up from the same place) and the article in the local paper, the big thing is still promoting the product.
What is your business, anyway? Not that we want to invite spam, of course, but you might as well put a plug in a response, right?