Brain dump of a wantrepreneur
medium.com
medium.com
"Here is how blogs make money: Join this multi level snowball marketing system, like I did, and sell to the next sucker down below.
Btw. I'm broke now."
Of course when you've succeeded once, doing it again is easy - It's the first time that's hard.
I think the author is right to be afraid of starting a new project. Unless you know people who can fund you and/or help you secure deals, there is no point in starting anything - It will fail; it doesn't matter what the idea is, how smart you are or how hard you work.
Maybe intelligence and work ethics mattered 10 years ago but not today. Today they are practically worthless - Almost everyone is intelligent and hard working.
Start a project if you enjoy it, but don't expect it to pay off ever - The reality is; it won't.
The tech sector is ten times harder than all other sectors with low barriers to entry, and bootstrapping is ten times harder than doing it without investment. Sure, once you've gotten over the experience hump like the supermen already have, you can start being picky about where your money is coming from.
But really, the knowledge base on offer here just isn't up to snuff for an inexperienced person here to learn what he / she needs to learn to avoid failure. You can fetishize failure all you want, but all that says to me is that the community is failing to give the people joining it the tools they need to succeed.
A guy who knows how to fix a car is not going to have any easier of a time launching a successful business than a guy who knows how to build an app or website. If anything, I would think it would be easier for the tech.
The E Myth is a best-selling book precisely because of how hard it is to go from being someone who knows how to do something to creating a successful business that does that thing.
The sad part about this blog post is that the woman who posted it doesn't seem to be good at the thing she is trying to build a business around. The group she is an affiliate of seems predatory.
My experience: I own 3 retail stores, and a SaaS product. I have been in both the brick-and-mortar retail space and the tech space for over a decade.
That's patently ridiculous. We know how to market auto mechanic shops. All the knowledge is there, you can even go to a library to read about it. Nothing about the industry has changed so drastically in the last fifty years that you have to throw out the book.
Small business marketing and economics are so simple and well-understood that your grandma can start a catering business, and, so long as she follows the formula, can guarantee she won't starve. She can listen to the banks and the accountants and the lawyers and be confident she's getting good advice.
Ask your grandma to start a website. Nothing about that space is well-understood to the point where she can have any reasonable amount of confidence in any course of action she decides to take. Sure there's forums, there's books, but the landscape changes so often that you have to treat everything as if it's already outdated.
It never fails to amaze me how often people immersed in technology seems to catch Stockholm Syndrome every time they think about business in this space. It's hard. The fact that there's zillions of choices makes it harder and not easier. The fact that you can do whatever you want makes it harder and not easier.
Local marketing is not easy. Putting together capital for real estate, buildout, equipment, etc is not easy.
Hubris is saying that something most people fail at is so easy to execute that a grandma could do it. Not to mention comments like that are both sexist and ageist.
How many successful car mechanics are there vs how many successful software companies are there? I'd say you'd have many, many, many times more successful car mechanic companies than software companies.
The successful mechanics won't make as much profit as the successful software companies, but more mechanic companies will succeed.
It'd be interesting if someone did some research on wealth and income inequality in the software industry; I think the numbers would be mind-boggling.
I think that basically; the more innovative your product is, the more unlikely it is to succeed.
It's always easier to find a concept that already exists and is successful and copy it (with minor key differences) than to actually innovate with something completely new.
I don't understand this. The tools are out there and available to everyone. It's education and getting skills. The rest is luck. If you want to create a product, you need to have the skills to do so.
Sometimes, it feels like people expect entrepreneurship or making money from a project to actually be easy. It's more like the NBA:
You either bring the skills, get lucky, and start early enough or it's not for you.
But the OP clearly fell for an easy money scheme. Somewhere in her blog she even writes about the absurdity:
"So how do you make money if you can't or don't want to make a project on your own?" -> This is so utterly silly, it hurts.
Not for them but for yourself."
Then in the next sentence she says she'll never forgive "him".
A huge part of being both independent and successful is to constantly be moving forwards. Forgiveness is in fact emotionally "for you", but you need to actually let go. I see no indication that this author has actually broken free of any of the entitlement she lamented early in the piece. But maybe a whiny piece on failure is good for views? Everyone come and see the train-wreck so I can get some impressions!
Also, 'make money online' is probably the most oversaturated and highest noise:signal ratio niche there is.
My advise for this young lady is to get off her emotional roller-coaster, plant herself in a chair, turn off all her devices, and begin to think rationally.