Starting and running an online business can be exciting and engaging.  You may be left with little spare time as you enthusiastically dive into a new venture.  In the fun of starting up, it may seem hard to imagine that you’ll ever get to a place where you can relax and enjoy running your business on a routine business.  Nor should you!  People who settle into a routine are sometimes left behind.

Wired magazine has a regular feature called “Found: Artifacts from the Future”.  In this feature, people who have great Photoshop skills and too much time on their hands create pictures of everyday objects supposedly from 10, 20, or 30-or-so years into the future.  They’re usually very clever: travel insurance forms for teleportation devices; contact lenses with implanted circuitry for super vision; a handheld device that analyzes wine for its flavor, chemistry, and compatibility with foods; and other fanciful concepts.

This is all good fun, but if you’re starting an online business, you might want to review these artifacts.  Sometimes we spend so much time racing to keep up with the present, that we don’t consider the future.  A lot of electronic ink is being spilled, for example, discussing smartphones and 4G networks and how they affect online business.  But what happens after the smartphone?

To take a different direction, consider that cheap web hosting, in some form, will probably be here forever.  But what about your product line?  Have you considered where to take your business next?  Times change, and your business has to, as well.

This isn’t something to panic over or race to a psychic about.  But the temptation (and, for many, the tendency) is to get the business going, and settle into a comfort zone.  You get familiar with your inventory, you get familiar with some advertising methods that work, and you get familiar with a particular customer base.  Your daily work becomes a comfortable routine.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but it can leave you vulnerable.  Remember used CD stores?  Where I live, there used to be four pretty big ones all within a short drive from my house.  It was a brilliant idea: used CDs sound just as good as new CDs, so you could sell them at a huge discount and make a lot of money.

But the used CD stores didn’t survive the MP3 format—in fact, the music industry itself had trouble surviving the MP3 format.  Like print journalism, the music industry has had to scramble to find a new business model.  Having settled into their comfort zones and failing to keep an eye on the future, some used CD store owners were left in the lurch when the future happened to them.

Routine can be comfortable, and comfort is nice, but it isn’t really very much fun.  It can turn into a rut, if you’re not careful.  So, what about you?  What are you selling?  Will there still be a demand for it next month?  –next year?  –in five years?  How is your product changing over time?  Are your suppliers offering a vision for the future, including new products, new ways to use existing products, or exciting enhancements to existing products?  How prepared are you to drop an unpopular—albeit beloved—product entirely if time leaves it behind?

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