Any time someone says "will never do that online," I have an almost Pavlovian response of "sounds like doing that online is a good startup idea." In pretty much

Any time someone says "will never do that online," I have an almost Pavlovian response of "sounds like doing that online is a good startup idea." In pretty much every case where people have shown an interest in doing offline, once the experience has been replicated closely enough online, it's ended up working well. The first company I worked at out of school, BuildASign, started as a software to design signs online (incredibly, the founders were the first people to build an online sign designer, at least that they've found). They intended to sell it for a few grand to a local sign shop, as they were all in grad school. All the sign shops they approached said "No one wants to design a sign online! They want to come in and see samples and get help from a person." So the founders threw up a site, planning to do all their fulfillment at a store to demonstrate why they should buy their software. The response was so strong that they quickly decided not to sell, and bought a printer. Today, they have a 100K sq ft manufacturing facility and have had at least 5 straight years of high growth revenue in the high 8 figures (and have been profitable since year 2, plus - until a very recent PE investment - were entirely owned by 3 people). Point being, once something can be done well enough online, people will do/buy/use it.