5 Business Models Thriving In 2026 (Digital Products, E-Commerce, Coaching & More)

0:00Hello and welcome to Make It Happen. The podcast will weed out into all things money, mindset, manifestation and more because I want to help you make money and create your dream life. Hey guys, it is Ea and producer Holly. Big ideas need good fuel and that is why today's episode is powered by brew, barista quality, ice coffee and matcha make the making things happen now available at World's Nationwide. All the good business ideas are taken. It is a message that I get in my dams all the time. People thinking that it is impossible to make money online because everything is too saturated. But in reality, this could be further from the truth. We are living in one of the most exciting times in history to start a business. Now there are definitely businesses that are absolutely thriving right now and the difference between people who are struggling and those building very successful businesses is not luck and is not timing. It is understanding which approaches actually work in today's world. So today we are going to go through five business models with the biggest opportunities

1:00in 2026. And I just really want to challenge the idea that you need to come up with something brand new to have a successful business. Like honestly most of the biggest brands in the world, they haven't actually reinvented the wheel. For example, you look at Stanley Carp, they didn't invent water bottles but they are everywhere and liquid death, it is literally water and it is packaged in a way that sells to men that want to look like they are drinking a beer at a barbecue. So yeah, often I think if a market is saturated, it is because there is demand. So what matters more than the idea is how you execute it. So yeah, you have worked with thousands of students over the last couple of years. Do you want to take us through the five business models? Tell us what is working right now. All right. So these are my top five picks. So these are not actually an order, I would say any one of these five is fine but these are my top five favourites. So the first one being digital products. This is basically where you create something one time, it could be something like an online course, e-book, template, even things like software tools and then you can sell it over and over again on your website without any additional work. Now the best part about digital product businesses is there is no inventory to manage, no

2:02shipping and the profit margins are usually pretty high, it is usually around 90%. So what do you think the average person could realistically turn into a digital product? Honestly, you can really turn almost anything. Like if I can think of some examples, if you were a personal trainer for example, you might be able to sell meal plans and rather than personalizing every single one, you might just have different categories so different types of people with different goals might be able to just buy a certain one. There's like a tiny element of personalization. Or like let's say you are a consultant, like a children's sleep consultant or you just have a passion for kids. You can sell things like sleep guides and anything that is going to make the parents life easier by having kids sleep. People will pay for anything that is going to save some time, solve their problems. I think the thing is that you don't even have to sell this for a lot of money, it's more volume. If you can sell it for quite cheap, people are probably more likely to buy it, but I feel like you can even tear it. So for example, you have a low ticket digital product, some sort of like e-book or a template

3:05or something like that, you sell it for a lower price, it's like $49. People come into your ecosystem, they join your mailing list, they get to know you a little bit, and then you might even have like a $295 training or some sort of other package, which then goes to like a $3,000 package, which maybe is like six months of training. I don't know, there's so many different ways that you can go about it, but for sure, digital product is definitely a really good business model. Yeah, think of this as what do people ask me for all the time? Like if people are always asking you to do like Excel spreadsheets or people asking you to do like a budget for them or if they're the day I ask my friend, I was like, can you try to meal plan for me? She's just into fitness, like she's not a personal trainer or anything like that, but she does like a zero to five K logs, her runs. But I'm asking that is probably 10 other people asking that as well. And then it's like, okay, how can I monetize that? Yeah, I feel like that's a really good indication of what you could create if people are actually already asking you for tips all the time. I feel like another thing around this is like sometimes people feel like they can't create

4:05content or these digital products around something because they feel like they're not qualified enough. Like I was on a call with a lady the other day and she's selling a kids product. So I'm talking to her about her content pillars, like what can we create on social media for you? So I'm saying, okay, well, you could maybe come up with tips and tricks for kids. You can talk about child safety and sleep tips appearance. And she pushed back and said, no, no, no, like I don't have a qualification. I'm not a nurse. I'm not a sleep consultant. Like I can't get this advice out. Yeah. I thought, well, why can't you? There are plenty of people out there that they do not have a qualification. They don't have a degree, but they're very passionate about that thing. And that's actually fine. That's enough. Yes, and you don't need a degree and to be cut at spreadsheets or organization, but like people are probably willing to buy their knowledge of you. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And another good example of this is friends that invest. So friends that invest, she has created this really big social platform. She just hit 750,000 followers on Instagram this week. She's a good friend of mine. But she creates finance content or content about money.

5:06She has an optometrist degree. You literally do not have to have a degree in what you're talking about. You can just have a passion for it. That's totally fine. Pun intended. You're invested in the topic. Whatever people constantly ask you for help with, what do you think that you're really good at, try and turn that into a digital product, see how that goes for you. Okay. What's next on your list, Ian? All right. So number two on my list is service-based subscriptions. So it is basically like doing a one-off project, except you build a long-term relationship with the client who's going to pay you every single month for something ongoing. So technically like a retainer or just like a monthly fee could call it. And what you want to do is you just want to find a problem that your customers or your clients potentially have and literally just solve it for them. Might their lives easier in terms of what would that look like? It could be social media. So you could, let's say, somebody struggling to create content in social media. Maybe you come in once a month, you go to their house, you help them shoot the content, you edit it for them, you get it live. I guess the difference between this and just being a freelancer, it's the ongoing work.

6:06It's not just going up and being like, hey, let me shoot some social media for you, but every month come in, audit your social media and just offer something that's just ongoing, so that you've always got that money coming in every single month. And if you are a freelancer, if you're not just looking for fresh jobs all the time, you know, I feel like repeat customers or selling packages or bundles is way better than selling these one-off things. Yes. Just in terms of like stability. I even think of like making happen. I could do all these one-on-ones with people. But actually, that's not even that helpful. If I just spend one hour with you one time ever, you get a little bit. Versus instead, we sell actually like these full packages of, you get 12 months of help, we do live daily calls with you, you get our full business training. And then it's like, okay, if you do that, you will actually get results. Versus me just trying to sell your one-off and like, you walk away and you're like, I still don't get it. It's just way better to sell a package. Yeah. So if you had a web development agency or you know, you start off as a contractor, but then you end up being an agency when you get more team members, you could offer things like monthly maintenance. It could be continuous optimization, continuous reporting.

7:09If you're a videographer, instead of trying to find these like individual shoots, maybe you could do a monthly content package. It's a business pays you a thousand dollars a month, you've got 10 businesses on this retainer. Any remand, you're just helping them refresh their content. That's such a good idea. You can brainstorm what your customer needs and then figure out how you can offer that to them every single month. I feel like that's so much more stable than just the one-offs. Especially when you're freelancing, you're always looking for like, where is my next job and it's stressful. Yeah, I feel like that. It would be very stressful. I think unless you've set up a bit of a sales funnel and you've got like your website working for you, your ads working for you, your social media and then you like, no, you're guaranteed. Can I get more work? As long as you figure out what is this client's pain points and you package something so you know that can improve their life, make their life easier, help them make more money, save them time. That's just what you do. That's just shifts, kids, really. All right. What's number three? Okay. So the third model is a dense and community building. So this is something I am personally quite passionate about. So essentially you can just create a group of people who share a common interest or goal

8:10and insert that community through products or services or partnerships or events. A good example of this is our girls and business event. We just had this last weekend. Basically it is an annual conference. So girls and business actually started out as like a little networking thing. We used to do a little networking lunch. It was just like eight years ago. And the whole point of this organization, this group was just to connect people, people interested in their career or their business. They don't have to have a business to be a part of this. And then over the years, we've tried to make it bigger and bigger and bigger. We just did 950 people over the weekend. Next year we've already talked to the venue. We've probably tried to 1200, 1400 people in the room. So yeah, I feel like people right now are just craving this connection and community. Community. When you started girls and business, for you, it was just a way of connecting with people, finding like minded people, sharing pain points, that kind of thing. Did you ever actually feel like it would turn into this massive event where there was 900 people? So what happened was, I was 21 when I started my first business. I really did the first three years without having a single friend or a single person I

9:11knew that had another business. Just probably because I was so young. And all my friends were getting their first job or like traveling on OE's. I was like, who do I ask a business question? I don't know. So I'm just not going to talk to anyone. I didn't talk to anyone. I was like, it would be great to have like some people that I could talk to. And then we thought, okay, well, we'll just charge for some tickets to cover the cost of the meal. Yeah. So the first event was at a restaurant. I think it was like $50 for the ticket which covered like a $30 meal. I think we put together the goody bags and maybe a drink or something like that. Like it was a pleasure just to break even. And we thought, oh, okay, actually, we could maybe make a little bit of money from this. Just to pay for our team and for our time to organize and put this on. And maybe make it a little bit bigger than what it is. We're now booking out the biggest conference locations in New Zealand to do this. It's just so fun. Honestly, it's not really, it's not about the money at all. Actually, gozamas is not about the money. It is really just about connecting with people and putting on these incredible days for people. But I think this is a cool thing. It's not about the money. It's actually about like building a community of people,

10:13but you can also monetize that community eventually if you want to as well. Mm-hmm. I've seen people do it. Like I think in America, I've seen there's like dinner groups. Yeah. So they put this out completely random people into the community. They charge a ticket who wants to come to my dinner party. And then people buy tickets and they're all coming to someone's. It could be even Essam's house. I had a friend recently and because I love loan hiking, but not all my friends like it or are free to come with me. And she's like, you should start a hiking group. And I was like, that's actually such a good idea. Just like my did people that want to come and do stuff that I want to do. And then my business brain's going off and then I'm like, okay, I should like charge for this and I should just take people and adventures and like, okay, I'm looking to start a business right now. But how it can so easily snowball into something that's a really cool event or a group of people and you're making money out of it. Out of something that you really love doing. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's a really good model. All right. So number four on our list is consulting or coaching. So this is where you use your expertise to solve a specific problem, usually charging between anywhere from $500 to $10,000 or more. So the good thing about this, you do not need hundreds of clients.

11:15You can just sell to a smaller group of people who really value the outcome that you provide. It's sort of like the digital products, but just a service version of that. How would you specifically frame this for somebody? Well, I guess it's like, okay, maybe you have been working in a field for five 10 years and you feel like you reasonably have enough experience to give other people advice about it. You can't. You know, I guess as long as it's not in conflict with your company, we've actually got one of our members, Holly. So last year I was mentoring Holly from succession. She came from a law firm. So when she started working with me, she put her job at the law firm. And she was like, I want to go out on my own and I want to do something on my own. She wasn't quite sure at that time, like exactly what it would look like, but basically now she just sells wills to people. So all day every day she creates, so she creates content on social media about being a lawyer and about wills and trusts and stuff like that. She gets people through via an ad or via a organic social media content. They come on a website and they book a session with her to do their will. Mm-hmm. That's all she does every week. She just does wills.

12:15Will after will after will after will. I think that at taking a niche really isn't it? It's another really good example. I can be a teacher and maybe you could do consulting to help people with kids with ADHD or kids that are struggling to connect with their families or have communication problems. Like you can actually just help people, but you can also charge for it because it's your time. Exactly. And it's not like a new experience. So for example, you might say I'm a marketing consultant, but specifically you could offer a consultation or coaching program that's like, I help dentists generate 30 qualified inquiries every month or something generic, which is like I'm a career coach. Specifically you could have something that's like, I help senior women negotiate six figure salaries. Yeah, I feel like it's really good to be specific because people will just see you as the expert in the field. They're like, okay, well, I'm a dentist and this person is saying that they can get me 30 leads every month. So I'm going to go to them because they literally called me out. They called my persona out. They called out my pain point. Therefore they're the specialist and I need their help. It's really interesting that more of us don't think of our knowledge this way because you've got to work every week,

13:16nine to five, every single week and your employer is leveraging that knowledge from you. So why do we not think that we have enough knowledge to then go and share that somewhere else that is actually valuable? I feel like it's probably just more the, how will I get an influx of clients? Yeah. It's really an issue for people doing that. But again, we have social media. You do your marketing right. You can have some ads going through. Sit up a nice website. That is how you generate clients. That's how your employer is generating clients. Yeah. So you very well could just do that for yourself. Just check that you're not going to get state office. Yes. Yeah. No, just no non-compete. But once you're out of that, absolutely. Okay. What's the next business model? All right. Business model number five. This is my favorite. I've been doing it for a decade. E-commerce. So this is selling products through systems that handle everything through marketing, to fulfillment. And over time, once you've done the setup, hopefully minimal ongoing involvement from you. I guess that's why we build a business. Of course, it's a bit of work at the start. But in the long run, ideally, we want to be out of it.

14:16Realistically, how much money do people need to set an E-commerce business these days? Okay. So I have started with all sorts. My very first one, my shape, where I, I don't know the exact number I started with, but I remember I had the $6,000 in my bank account at the time. And I didn't drain the whole thing either. So I did not start that with very, very much at all. My gift box business, celebration box. I started that with $3,000. We went and got the actual gift box itself. And then the items that went in the gift boxes, like the lollies and things. Just didn't cost that much. That's all that was needed. Perfect. Now, actually, one of our members in Australia, she also has a gift box business. So she has a business called Sugar Coat. And I just saw her in an article on the news. She was doing 200 to 400 orders a week. She was 19 years old at this point. That's crazy. Exactly. And knowing that you could start a gift box business with under $3,000, that would be like, all you need to really get the stuff and running. To 200 to 400 orders a week at that age, I think is very, very clever. But yeah, basically I reckon you need like under 10K.

15:17Do you think, in your opinion, is it better to launch with like a hero product? Yes. Only because like a lot of the time you have to do a minimum order quantity. If you're going to customize anything, you have to reach a minimum order quantity. That could be 100, 200, 500 units, which means that you often can't launch with an entire range. But that doesn't matter because there are businesses out there. Lots of businesses, they're generating millions of dollars every single year. And they even though they are reasonably big now, they still only have a few products. So I'd actually fallen into this trap myself. There was a period where I thought the more products I released, the more colors and flavors and different variations, the more you would make as a business. It's actually, it was actually the opposite. The more products you release, the more different products you have to do marketing for. You have to make sure all the influences are being sent every single product. All your ads are of all these different products. It becomes very complex for you as a business owner. But even as the consumer, I get decision for tea. Even when I got a restaurant and the menu's too big, I'm like, I wish,

16:18like, this is too much to decide for them. Just give me a couple of options to choose from. Well, I did that the other night. I went to Ahing, one of the new, like, Michelin star restaurants. And they had this thing called food story. It was like a pre-packaged meal plan thing. Yeah, they were like, let the shifts decide. I was like, yeah, we'll pick that one because I don't know what the other stuff is. I've made decisions my entire day. I have decision for tea. Just somebody take the wheel. Just make it easy for us. Make a belly bundle, which has like four of the key things that you think are going to help me. And I will buy that belly bundle. Yeah, I agree. Another really good example of that is like, love your guts. I was on their website the other day. And I was like, okay, I just want to fix my tummy issues. I have no idea what's going to fix that. But they had one pack and it said, this will fix your gut pack. I was like, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm going to buy that one. Just tell me what I need and I'll buy it. It's a way of package it. Do you think it's very different launching an e-commerce brand today compared to when you first started shapewear?

17:18There's definitely differences more around the marketing itself. So in terms of like picking a product from Alibaba, you put it in your packaging, white labeling, you create a website, you brand it nicely. So it looks nice and people are willing to pay more for it. The price you paid. Yeah, that is all the same. That's not changed. What has changed so back in when I started promoting my first business, you would do a lot of influencer marketing with the big influencers. So you've got your big ones which might have had 100k followers, 200k, 3k followers, and you'd pay them a fee like 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, whatever it was. Those big influencers now are charging so much money. Back then I felt like nobody knew how powerful that was. Yeah. So brands would pay $1,000 and make a hundred grand back sort of thing. Yeah, it's crazy. Like no one, the influencers didn't know. And over time, they clearly figured it out. So everyone's hiked up their rates. And now the businesses, a lot of them, they kind of forward all of those extensive rates. Some can, but a lot can't. So the strategy has more change to this micro-influencer seeding strategy.

18:22And you'll see a lot of big businesses like Comfort. He has grown to 500 million dollars in revenue, US dollars, and three years. One of the fastest growing Shopify stores. His literally said his strategy is mass sending out product to micro-influencers, giving them an affiliate code so they can earn a commission if somebody buys using their code, which isn't intended for them. But does it, does it mess? I remember Udi, the Australian company Udi with the like, yeah, the comfy snuggly, like a blanket. Yeah, yeah, totally. It was the same. They did mass micro-influencers seeding. They might have worked with some of the bigger influencers too, but the huge part of their strategy was that mass. Yeah. But I also think that like the days where you send a product to a really big influencer, like as a consumer, I see that and I'm like, oh, it's an ad. And that's fine. And it's getting awareness and stuff. But when I see micro-influencers talk about products, I feel like I just trust them more because I don't know why. I think it's just because I assume when it's like a big influencer, I'm like, oh, this is an ad. You're only in this different strategies to it. I would say try every strategy.

19:23Figure out, you know, check the results yourself. And if it's worth you, do more of it. If it has a little bit of you, pivot. But yeah, I feel like that's probably the key difference of what's changed. So in terms of which business model is right for you, it actually really depends on your situations, your skills, and probably what is your end outcome that you're trying to achieve. So if you are starting with very little money, I would say that digital products or services, they are pretty good for you just because you don't need any capital for any inventory or anything like that. Yeah. If you already have valuable expertise, it's a, you know, spent 10 years as some sort of field or been a mom or a parent for 10 years, you do have a lot of experience with children in that case. Then something like consulting or coaching, this could be your best part. If you have an audience or a community, then I would just be thinking about what sort of problems do they have and can I solve everything for them? If you do have a community, you will be getting messages from people all the time and you should be able to tell what are the things that they're asking me? Yeah, so true. Like I think about making happen, I know that the number one thing

20:23I get asked all the time is I am struggling with my business idea. I get asked every single day. Therefore, I've now created resources on how to find a product idea and, you know, doing a live challenge next week of how to find your idea. But we know that it's a pain point, so we're going to create something around that. If you want some sort of physical product, which is also fun and love in e-commerce, I love a physical product business, that could be your go-to as well. I guess the good thing about that is it's scalable and over time, it doesn't only need you to be a part of it. Yes, so true. Yeah. Like you have your website, you run your ads, you can have a shipping company, ship the product out for you, you basically can really step back. Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to put you on a spot right now. I've got a couple of examples. I've got some personas and I want to read them out to you and then you're going to recommend the business model for them. Okay. Okay, I have $500, no audience, but plenty of time. I would say just do like a service, plenty of time or digital product. The thing with a digital product is it does take a little bit of time

21:24to make these digital products, right? Yeah. But once you've got them, you can sell them forever. Okay, what about 50,000 Instagram followers, but I've never monetized them. Okay. I like there's lots of ways you can go around this. I sometimes have calls, strategy calls, or people that have big audiences and they're like, okay, I want to figure out what to do. Yeah. But I think it's just figuring out what does your audience resonate with? So if all the time, like if you've spent the past five, 10 years building up an audience is interested in fitness and well-being, then obviously that is probably the field that you're going to sell something and whether it be a physical product like a weighted vest, or it could be healthy recipes. Like there's lots of different ways about it, but I feel like just pick what makes sense for your audience. Okay, so say you're a freelancer. You're making five K a month, but you're completely exhausted. You are a freelancer. I think that's like digital, that would be like digital product, right? Like a, like if you're exhausted, you're not going to go, you're not going to want to spend more time doing consulting. So it's like you're a freelancer. Cranage is your product for yourself. You could.

22:25Yeah. But also another way around that is actually like what sort of happened to me. So when we started making happen, I was doing one-on-ones with every single person, which was amazing. I feel like I really could help people. But it got to a point where we had so many girls signing up. I was on Back to Back calls from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Like four days a week. And there was a point where I was like, I literally cannot do this anymore. I'm not eating meals because I'm just back to Back calls. And then I worked with this company in America and they were like, oh, you know what? You can actually turn this into more of a group structure. And at the first, I thought, oh, no one's going to want to do that. But actually, it's, we did it because I had no choice because I literally had no time left. And it's actually worked out really well. The good thing about the group structure is people come on and they actually hear of other people's problems and the situations that they, other people are going through, which they would never have asked that question themselves. They can actually learn from that. That's such a good idea. And then it's like saves you from repeating the same information like over and over and over again as well. Yeah. So yeah, I feel like pivoting your business structure if that's happening to you into something group

23:26or something more scalable or digital product, it can absolutely be done. Okay. Perfect. All right. So I think the biggest takeaway is you do not need to have it all figured out before you start. Pretty much just pick a model that makes sense for you. Find some sort of problem that people are willing to pay to solve. And I'm just focused on doing that one thing very, very well. Now, if you already have a business, but you were struggling to figure out what's going to get you to that next level, that's actually where we come in with Make It Happen. You can book a call with us through the link in the description. And we're going to look at where your business is now, where you want to take it and also what you need to scale. So thanks for listening and we will see you next time. Bye.