Jade,

I started my business offline about a year ago. I bought one embroidery machine for a start and after working hard on marketing got clients from my locality. Everyone including me had problems at start, but as things came by, i got better.

Now i am running 4 machines and have good work load. Although i still have my digitizing done an excellent company (fairly cheap than the others). I am still in the process of learning digitizing.

In my opinion, an offline start is best, you can go online anytime after you are good at what you do.