The most common objection I hear when people talk about creating an online income is: "I don't know anything special enough to sell."
This is almost always wrong.
The bar for "special enough" is not being the world's foremost expert. It's knowing more than someone who is trying to solve a problem you've already solved. That's a much lower bar, and most people clear it in multiple areas.
Why Bother With a Second Income Stream at All
Warren Buffett put it better than I can: "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die."
That's the whole case for a second income stream. One paycheck, dependent on one employer, active only while you're actively working, is a fragile setup — and most people know it, they just haven't done anything about it because "building a second income stream" sounds like a much bigger project than it actually has to be.
There's a well-worn path here, and it's worth naming because it works: put money into the stock market and let it compound. The S&P 500 has historically returned around 10% annually before inflation over long stretches of time, according to data from S&P Dow Jones Indices — roughly 7% after adjusting for inflation. That's not a guarantee for next year, or any single year, but it's the long-run track record. If your employer offers a 401k match, that's the easiest money you'll ever make — it's an immediate, guaranteed return before the market does anything at all, and the contributions grow tax-advantaged on top of it. Check your plan's specific match formula and the current IRS contribution limits, since both change year to year, but the short version is: if you're not capturing the match, you're leaving free money on the table.
That's the boring, reliable version, and if you're not doing it yet, start. But it's also not the version I actually want to talk about.
What You Actually Have
Spent years learning a skill professionally? That's value. Gone through a significant life transition — health transformation, career change, building something from scratch? That's a story that connects with people who are at the beginning of the same path.
You don't need to know everything. You need to know enough to help someone who knows less than you do. That person exists, they have questions, and they're looking for answers.
The Packaging Problem
The bottleneck for most people isn't knowledge — it's packaging. Knowing something and communicating it in a form that's useful to someone else are different skills. The good news is that packaging is learnable and the formats are straightforward:
Written content: Blog posts, email newsletters, ebooks. Low production overhead. Good for detailed, reference-style information.
Digital products: Guides, templates, calculators, planners. One-time creation, recurring sales.
Services: Consulting, freelance work, coaching. Higher hourly rate, requires your time. Good for validating what people will actually pay for.
Courses and workshops: High effort to create, but potentially higher revenue per transaction.
Start With One, Validate Before Building
The mistake is building the whole system before anyone has paid for anything. Start with the smallest viable version of the product or service, find one person who would benefit from it, and try to get them to pay.
If you can't get the first person, you have information — either the packaging is wrong, the audience targeting is wrong, or the demand doesn't exist. Any of those is useful to know before you spend months building.
I started with ebooks. First one in final production, more already in the pipeline behind it. Each one gets easier because the distribution infrastructure is already built.
Start small. Prove the demand. Expand from there.
If You're Not Sure What Your "One Thing" Is
Everything above assumes you already know what to package. A lot of people don't — not because they don't have anything worth packaging, but because it's genuinely hard to see your own skills and experience clearly from the inside. What feels ordinary to you is usually the exact thing someone else would pay to shortcut.
This is the part I actually help people with directly, outside of what I write here for free — sitting down with someone, digging into what they actually know and care about, and figuring out where the income is hiding in it. Less "here's a generic framework," more "here's specifically what you've got and how to build something real out of it." If that's the part you're stuck on, reach out — that's a conversation I'm glad to have.
— Dr. Scott