Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur: 3 Tips You Need for Business Success

To kick things off, let’s answer the big question: what the heck is a “wantrepreneur?”

The term is a little slangy, but I’ve heard it out there in the wild long enough to know it’s an important issue worth talking about.

My definition of a wantrepreneur is:

An aspiring entrepreneur who dreams about starting or growing a business, but doesn’t ever get around to actually doing it.

Now, this isn’t in any way meant to be a dig at anyone who’s guilty of being a wantpreneur. I get it – because I was one too! (And I still am sometimes, because old habits die hard.)

But it might be a necessary dose of tough love for the dreamers out there watching YouTube videos, buying courses, and reading articles or books about entrepreneurship… without any actual business to show for it.

In this post, I want to talk about what it takes to get past the “dream” stage of entrepreneurship and into the “doer” stage where success actually happens. If you read to the end, you’ll take away some concrete ideas on how to turn your potential business into actual profits. Let’s dive in!

Hi, I’m a Wantrepreneur

In case you don’t know me, my name is Daniel Thrasher, and I’m Senior Content Manager here at ClickBank. In my earlier article about how to make your first ClickBank sale, I shared a few details from my own entrepreneurial background:

I graduated college in 2010 and launched a freelance business writing content for some clients. As a copywriter of SEO blog posts, webpages, emails, social posts, and other digital content, I had a firsthand look at a lot of the tactics people were using to make a successful business online.

And yet, I didn’t even seriously attempt my own online business until 2019 – and my first affiliate sale wasn’t until 2021.

I go on to point out that the real reason things started to happen for me as an entrepreneur is because I FINALLY started a specific business (the Improve Songwriting brand) around a specific topic (the music niche) on a specific traffic channel (SEO blog) for a specific affiliate offer (Piano For All) and practiced doing that one thing well, instead of endlessly bouncing between the countless different options under the sun.

Obviously, picking a business to start is the biggest prerequisite to success, but a LOT of people don’t make it past this stage… so let’s start there.

Why You Can’t Choose Which Business to Start

The opportunities out there seem endless. And in many ways, they are!

I grew up in a connected world where the internet was already allowing everyday people to blog, post, and sell products or services online for a fraction of the cost traditionally required to start a business – back when “starting a business” usually meant a brick-and-mortar store, restaurant, or professional practice.

But now that the internet has brought down the cost of starting a business, almost every business model is on the table. And that might actually be a bad thing.

Too Many Options, Too Little Time

The low barrier-to-entry is a huge blessing of the modern business landscape, but it’s also a curse. As I explained in my post about 17 ways to make money online, there are a TON of different ways you can make extra cash on the internet – and any ONE of these can become a full-fledged business in their own right!

At the risk of sounding too academic, there’s a term for this phenomenon, popularized in a book and TED talk of the same name: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz.

Schwartz argues that the freedom to choose – and the sheer number of potential options – is actually making people more anxious, dissatisfied, and ultimately paralyzed. This is apparent in the realm of online business, where people can pursue a dizzying range of business models or moneymaking ideas, including:

  • Dropshipping
  • Digital products
  • Online arbitrage
  • Coaching
  • Consulting
  • Freelancing
  • Investing
  • Content creation
  • Social media influencing
  • Software
  • Ecommerce
  • Affiliate marketing

And that barely scratches the surface!

No wonder someone who’s new to the world of business and online marketing would get stuck in analysis paralysis with such a big list of potential opportunities.

Scarcity of Resources

Here’s the other reason why you’re probably not committing to a specific business path and instead stuck in “wantrepreneur” mode: you don’t want to waste your time and money on something that doesn’t end up working out.

Not using your limited resources is a perfectly valid reason NOT to start a business – but the thing is, if you actually WANT to start one, then you’ll NEED to part with some amount of time and money to actually do it!

I think the sticking point is that all of us want a guarantee that the thing we’re doing will get the results we want, whether that’s passive income, time and location freedom, or just more money than we’re making now. An entrepreneur knows that failure is a part of the process – but a wantrepreneur wants all the benefits of the online business without putting the time and money in to build one unless they’re guaranteed a payoff later.

Here’s the good news: the actual financial cost of starting most online businesses nowadays is so trivial that you can usually bootstrap with savings or income from your job, instead of taking out a loan or home equity line of credit to get started. But it isn’t ZERO dollars, either, even with so-called “free traffic” approaches like social media influencing or SEO blogging.

The mental shift you need to graduate from a Dreamer to a Doer is to think of these early steps as paying your dues, getting valuable experience, and discovering what doesn’t work so you can hit upon what does. Almost no one starts with success right out of the gate, so the sooner you get started and intelligently invest your resources into a business of your choice, the closer you’ll be to the results you want.

Tip 1: Follow a Proven Playbook

By now, we’ve established that most wantrepreneurs are paralyzed by choice and a fear of wasting time and money.

But there’s an antidote to both of those problems: following a proven playbook by someone who’s already done what you want to do!

Deep down, you probably already have an idea of which type of business is interesting to you. Maybe you’re drawn to affiliate marketing, or selling your own digital product, or becoming a coach. Regardless of which one it is, someone out there has already done it successfully – and if you follow the steps they did and put in the work, you’ll be able to see similar results.

So, if you’ve been stumbling around looking for answers in books, YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and so on without success, then it might be time to invest in a single program that’ll teach you what you need to know. These can be pricey, sometimes in the hundreds or even thousands of dollars, but it’s the closest you can get to “guaranteeing” success, because the playbook is proven. That’s what makes it worth paying for.

And guess what? That’s exactly what I did.

As an SEO blogger, I followed a combination of Income School’s “Project 24” and Authority Hacker’s “Authority Site System” to learn more about affiliate blogging and apply their lessons to my own site. As a result, my blog grew and I started making money from display ads and affiliate sales.

This initial step is going to require some research and soul-searching on your part. What type of business do you actually want to build? What can you stick with for the next 3-5 years?

Choose Your Business Model

At ClickBank, we firmly believe that affiliate marketing is one of the very best business models anyone can follow, because you don’t have to create your own product and you can benefit from the sales skills of the world’s best marketers and copywriters. Basically, if you can master a single traffic source, from running YouTube Ads to becoming an Instagram influencer, then you can make money as an affiliate.

I put together a list of the best affiliate marketing courses, if that’s helpful to you – but I also want to specifically recommend Spark by ClickBank and ClickBank’s 1×1 coaching program, where real experts provide the exact roadmap they used to become Platinum clients on ClickBank (making more than $250K in sales per year).

And the best part is, we have the data to prove it, because all of their product sales are processed through our platform. We can validate that these are experts who know what they’re talking about and aren’t just another “guru.”

But whichever route you choose, I highly recommend you decide on a business model and find one expert with a playbook you can follow to the letter. That will eliminate the analysis paralysis and give you the confidence that investing time and money into this business can pay off later!

Tip 2: Set Constraints

There’s a famous saying attributed to Julius Caesar during a campaign to invade Britain in 55 BC. After they reached the shore, Caesar supposedly ordered the burning of his own boats to demonstrate to his men that there was no turning back.

“If you want to take the island, burn the boats!”

I know, that’s an extreme step – but that’s literally the point!

You know what this has to do with building a business. Most people who think they want to start a business are making it an infamous “side hustle” outside of their full-time working hours, or maybe just a thing they do off and on when inspiration strikes.

Even for people who are all-in on their business full-time, they may still have a Plan B, and a Plan C, and so on, for what happens if the business doesn’t succeed. I’m not necessarily saying you should toss all caution to the wind, but if you know you can get back on the boats and sail back home if your next campaign flops, there’s a lot less urgency to actually get results.

And so, people don’t.

Again, I’m guilty of this too! I’ve been fortunate to work at ClickBank for many years, so I don’t have the same pressure to scale my business ideas to a full-time income as someone without a career path. But I know that and acknowledge it, while a lot of other aspiring business owners do not.

Ultimately, you need to be honest with yourself about whether you’re willing to go all-in to make your dream a reality.

Goals Are Dreams With Deadlines

Every time I go to the gym, I see this phrase plastered on the wall while I’m jogging on the treadmill:

Goals are dreams with deadlines.

It’s cheesy, but it’s true.

Aimlessly working on your business with the vague hope of seeing success someday isn’t a recipe for success. That’s why I highly recommend setting a concrete deadline with a goal wrapped up in it.

A few years ago, I interviewed of ClickBank’s successful affiliates, Francisco Valenzuela, who’s extremely disciplined with his goal setting. I was impressed at his system of writing down the next goal and using post-it notes and a physical journal to actually record them.

We can learn a lot from his example. Instead of vaguely saying I’m going to build my blog, I should say, “I’ll publish 100 articles around these categories in the next 6 months.”

To make this possible, I want to suggest adopting a practice called “just-in-time learning.” For us wantrepreneurs, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of endlessly learning about different tactics or practices that we’re not even implementing.

My challenge to you is to completely stop reading and watching education about anything you’re not about to deploy next in your business. For example, if I have a blog and I think a lead magnet funnel is the next most impactful thing for me to work on, I’m allowed to read about how to create a lead magnet, the best landing page builders, or setting up an opt-in form – as long as I follow that up by actually building a lead magnet funnel.

What I can’t do is think I should build a lead magnet funnel, but spend a lot of time learning about how to create and publish bulk pins on Pinterest using AI. That is, unless I decide to do that next instead. The rule is to learn something just in time to put it into practice – and following this rule will help you stay focused and making progress on the most impactful things!

Tip 3: Scale Your Most Profitable Inputs

My last tip is to periodically take stock of where revenue actually comes from in your business, and then double-down on the activities that generate it. Here’s what I mean.

Every business has inputs that generate the majority of the output (following the 80/20 rule). The rest of what you do day-to-day may contribute to revenue growth, but it’s a mistake to put too much time into the 20% tasks instead of the 80% ones.

If I continue with my blog example, here are some of the many activities I can do to grow my business:

  • Write and publish blog posts
  • Find a new affiliate product to promote
  • Tweak my site settings
  • Optimize my site speed
  • Improve my brand look and feel
  • Research web hosts
  • Build a new opt-in form
  • Do keyword research

Now, these are all activities that sound productive. And they all are, to an extent.

But as an SEO blogger, there’s one thing above all others that will truly make me more money: publishing more content.

Every time I hit publish on a new article, there’s a new opportunity to rank and be discoverable in search, a new piece of content to promote to my email subscribers and drive them back to my site, and one tiny new plot of digital real estate to host my affiliate tracking links and display ads.

Do the other tasks help? Of course. There are certainly times when I should do keyword research or make my site faster. But only one thing – publishing new content containing affiliate links and ads – will give me more chances to get clicks and sales.

If all I ever did was publish content, I would continue making more money – but the same isn’t true for any other item on that list. Not even hunting for new affiliate products.

That’s the difference.

Your Revenue-Generating Tasks

So, what are the biggest revenue-generating tasks for other entrepreneurs and business models?

  • For an influencer, maybe it’s going live with a sponsor.
  • For a SaaS company, maybe outbound sales or attending industry conferences.
  • For a media buyer affiliate, maybe testing new creatives and optimizing their paid campaigns.

Every business is different, even two within the same industry or business model. But the fastest way to go from “wantrepreneur” to entrepreneur is to figure out which activities are driving more revenue…

And then do those at scale.

At first, maybe just you.

Then later, by reinvesting revenue back into those revenue-generating inputs.

It’s simple, but it’s not easy. Are you in?

Don’t Be a Wantrepreneur Wrap-up

I hope this post was encouraging! I don’t want to be a downer at all – I just want to give advice to anyone struggling to realize their business dreams like I did.

Growing up, I was a total perfectionist, so my mom would often tell me, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.”

It’s not easy to go from an academic environment where a B+ felt like a moral failing, to a business environment where you’re not only allowed to keep trying and failing at things, but encouraged to.

That’s definitely how marketing works, and that’s how business works too. To take the leap to actual entrepreneurship, you just need to do a bunch of things, figure out what works, and then do more of those things that are working.

Hopefully, ClickBank can support you in your path to entrepreneurial success! But no matter what you decide to do, I can tell you that the journey is absolutely worth it.