Acquaint yourself with the “coaching” industry (think: life coaching)
Almost all the money in it comes from milking people who’ve been sold on the idea of launching their own life coaching business, not from people with other careers seeking life coaching.
Whatever tiny legitimate side of that market exists is very-obviously saturated to the tune of a large multiple over what’s sustainable, and it’s pretty clear the real money remaining is in selling people the idea that they too can launch their own coaching business (“be your own boss! You don’t want a boring corporate job forever, do you? That may be fine for some people, I guess, but not for you!”) and have an easy, lucrative career, then charging them money to (supposedly) teach them how (“well of course coaches need coaches, too!”).
And yet, despite all this being pretty damn obvious, lots of people get sucked into the scam-vortex anyway.
Similar things happen all over the place. Starting restaurants without a solid path to success even on paper, et c. Folks deceive themselves really well when dreams get involved.
So, lots of people waste both time and money on clearly-bad business ideas.
There's thousands of video games for instance that are just blatantly obviously bad ideas but nevertheless get years of work put into them. This goes for any tier too, indies, AA, AAA, etc. Why? Still haven't figured that out, but I've seen way too much effort put into games that are destined to fail. I don't know where that drive comes from particularly in the indie space but I really wish I had it. Point is, the quality of an idea does not seem to be a major factor that constrains people from committing a ton of resources bringing it into reality.
