Last month I asked Do You Love What You Do? In this post, I suggested that the majority of mumpreneurs start with a passion for their business, and it can be this passion that keeps you going when times are heard. However, passion isn’t everything.

Helen Lindop has a great blog about her quest to become a mumpreneur. Recently, she has been writing on Following Your Passion When Nobody Wants to Pay You For It. Helen says, “I’ve had some personal experience of this when I tried to set up a coaching company. I was fully qualified by a well-respected coach training company, I got great reports from my tutors and I took their advice to find a niche I was passionate about. But it was incredibly hard to make any money.”

So, if you’re at the starting point, make sure you do your research. Create questionnaires to explore whether people will buy and how much they will pay. Don’t just circulate questionnaires to your friends – they are not representative of customers in general. And get a mix of online and paper responses: the balance you need will depend on the sort of business you propose to run.

There is some good advice about making sure that your niche will make you money in The Ultimate Mumpreneur’s Guide to Online Business Success. And there are a couple of links to free online survey tools in the PRBasics resources.

Good luck with your business research.