entrepreneurship

Scratching the Surface of Self-Employment

Although most of my professional life (over 30 years) has followed a self-employment path, predominantly through contracting/consulting relationships, I feel underqualified to answer questions about starting a business.

There are more reasons why people engage in business startups than there are people involved in starting a business. Some people choose business startup and development as a vehicle in itself. For them, it doesn’t matter what kind of business they start as long as it fulfills a strategic impetus to develop an organization that can become a valuable product to sell for a significant profit.

These are primarily “financially-aligned types” who choose endeavours based on perceived market opportunity, potential returns, risks, and barriers to entry. They seek out unfilled market niches or attempt to determine nascent trends to capitalize on or means by which they can exploit untapped resources. Their strategies for business startups are predicated predominantly on the potential for generating profit over any other concern. They may focus on knowledge domains in which they have interests or expertise. However, they tend to be “business agnostic” in that any business concept will do as a startup if it shows revenue or resale potential.

Some people start a business to capitalize on something of personal value to themselves that they can justify a deeper involvement beyond a hobby they can share with the world. Many successful food products, for example, began as family recipes that were unique and popular enough to grow a business into an enterprise.

Here’s a link to a video of “14 Entrepreneurs Who Built Food Empires” for reference (1:45 min):

An uncle of mine began his residential construction business because, in his own words, he “got tired of kissing ass.” He rejected employment as a labourer when I was still a preteen in the 1970s and decided to work in the construction industry because that represented to him, at the time, the lowest barrier to entry with the most significant potential to generate an income.

His formal education was minimal, and so he leveraged the skills and knowledge he possessed at the time to develop and begin his journey as a contractor. At first, he worked in low-level construction roles while developing skills in related areas, such as becoming a drywaller. This approach to gainful contract employment allowed him to accrue enough capital to leverage into a bank loan on undeveloped property he could use to build a house entirely under his initiative and effort.

His goal was to invest his time and labour into developing a product that resulted in a return that he could live on, reinvest into another property, and repeat that formula until he could grow a larger business entity.

He managed to create modest success over the decades. He was also a victim of his limitations as the Peter Principle manifested itself by making his attempts to expand beyond residential construction result in failure.

His path to riches is no longer available to low-income, low-skilled entrepreneurs for numerous reasons, including, but not limited to, the real estate market, which has largely been co-opted by corporate entities and incomes for construction labour that have radically shrunk.

Nevertheless, as a youth striking out independently, I was inspired by his initiative. I chose to emulate his path, partly out of desire and partly out of the opportunities available to me in my circumstances. I began my path by pursuing a compulsion for self-expression that led me to become the only person in my immediate family who completed an undergraduate education in the arts.

My career development path wasn’t as linear as my uncle’s, nor as prone to guaranteeing revenue growth and acquiring a strong capital position. I found myself constantly pivoting as the market rapidly changed through the introduction and evolution of a rapidly changing information technology landscape.

Now that we’ve gotten through that preamble and created a context for today’s post, I’ll proceed to my regular format of answering questions.

Question # 1:How can someone without capital start a successful business?
https://www.quora.com/How-can-someone-with-no-capital-start-a-successful-business/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

The path to success for people with no capital is a brutal row to hoe (and it’s become much harder over the last few decades as trillions in disposable income have been stolen from the middle class)*. You begin by selling your services. You then develop marketable skills and expose yourself to a stream of parasites (yes, I’ve become somewhat cynical — what can I say?) who will exploit your desperate need to survive for bottom dollar. Over time and much hardship, you can develop a body of work and a reputation that allows you to grow a better quality of client base.

Eventually, you develop enough of a portfolio that corporate clients will hire you for contracts. You’ll earn enough to reinvest into yourself and your business when you reach that level. That’s when you plan to transition from being a service provider to being a product developer.

Service provider is the most arduous slog that forces you to deal with the greatest number of exploitative sociopaths and gains you the least value of return for your time. It is possible to succeed at that level if you can excel at networking with people. If you’re an introvert, then it’s a rough go.

Product development requires a lot of up-front investment in time and capital, so it has a much higher barrier to entry. It’s also much riskier because your products may not succeed in the market for many reasons that often concern marketing issues, rather than product quality or market demand.

If you can get that animal tamed, you’ll be well on your way to creating a comfortable nest egg for your retirement… assuming that dramatically negative and unforeseeable surprises don’t upend all your work to leave you with nothing but resentment.

Good luck.

  • The self-employment ecosystem as a contractor/consultant was quite different in the 1970s than it is today. The middle class had plenty of disposable income and free time outside their work days to invest in various business schemes. I remember this dynamic as a standard media trope in family comedies. The household’s father perpetually chased wacky get-rich schemes each week while losing the family fortune with each failure.
  • Interestingly, it’s been revived as a trope in a new animated series entitled “Universal Basic Guys.” Here’s a link to information about it on IMDb: www.imdb.com/title/tt23469464/

It hasn’t received a very flattering rating of 4.8 out of 10. Although it may not be a creative piece of formulaic comedy, I found it amusing and entertaining enough to catch the entire first season. I wasn’t aware of its rating before mentioning it here, but it has received enough viewership to be greenlit for a third season in 2026. I am now looking forward to seeing what they do with it in the upcoming second season, which may be airing in September (based on its first season premiering in the same month of 2024).

As an aside, I have considered ideas for an animated series of my own over the years. However, this approach to a business startup requires more up-front development time than I’ve been able to afford while working to keep a roof over my head. It’s for these kinds of initiatives that I strongly endorse UBI. Nothing beyond investment capital is more valuable to a creative entrepreneur than time.

I had a brief opportunity to explore the creation of a graphic novel, but realized it would take about three years to manifest my idea into a finished product. I couldn’t afford to invest that time in something requiring an additional year or two to generate enough revenue to justify the effort. I suppose I could have started with a shorter product concept that could generate revenue in a shorter period of time and develop it over a greater number of years to become a lifetime body of work. My creative imagination, however, spans a wide range of concepts beyond a graphic novel. I wasn’t prepared to limit myself to a narrow focus, particularly when I had an online educational product in development that I intended to convert into a passive revenue stream.

Question #2: What’s the smarter move in 2025–2030 — to build your own tech company or join a stable corporation with thousands of employees?
https://www.quora.com/What-s-the-smarter-move-in-2025-2030-to-build-your-own-tech-company-or-join-a-stable-corporation-with-thousands-of-employees/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

There is no answer to this generic question. Every person and every circumstance is different. No one can honestly assert that one route is better than the other because this isn’t deciding which flavour of ice cream you want from among the choices in a freezer.

For most people, building their own tech company is beyond their reach due to a lack of resources. A majority of the population has no choice, upon completing a relevant education, but to find work immediately so that they can avoid homelessness and spend the next couple of decades paying for the education they have just completed.

This question is posed by someone so entirely out of touch with reality that they have no clue how privileged they are to believe those are equally valid options for anyone.

This question implies that the querent can avail themselves of resources that most cannot. The blatant ignorance of this fundamental reality for most indicates their mindset is insufficiently sophisticated to succeed in a self-determined course of action for their career. A decade or two of experience in some tech aspect may trigger an inspiration they can build on after being exposed to more of this harsh reality we all share.

A third option might be best for those who can consider these two options viable for themselves, but are unsure of which they would prefer: employment within a startup or small business environment that would expose them to the challenges they would face in building their own company from scratch while insulated from the risks of failing at high levels of decision-making for their business.

Good luck

My recent focus on developing a potential income stream through my written words has grown out of a therapeutic need for self-expression (mainly in response to a traumatic event changing my life course), which led me to Quora. I understand how radically diverse the field is and how few succeed in creating a lucrative career for themselves in this kind of endeavour without focusing specifically on writing for revenue generation.

I can’t do that because I’m just not built that way. I decided this is my path now because I realized I had written quite a bit on Quora when I reached twenty thousand answers. Publishing answers to questions has been a natural evolution from venting online on social media. I’m still doing that in many ways as I randomly select topics that inspire my verbal diarrhea to construct long-form written pieces.

I’ve been somewhat surprised to discover that my words have attracted a slowly growing audience, including followers and subscribers. I want to take a moment to express my appreciation for your support.

For the record, it’s made me more self-conscious about my expressions to the degree that I have learned to restrain my salty language and become a better person.

Thank you.

Should US healthcare be a business?

It should not be a business because it’s a public service, just like the military and the police… just like education should be.

When public services are operated with a profit-driven mindset, they deviate from their intended purpose, becoming corrupt and inefficient. This distortion invariably leads to their failure to serve the people.

Some things should never be run as businesses because their priorities are not profits but service, a value inherent to and critical for delivering effective public services.

It’s a fundamental truth that the primary goal of any business is profit. However, this profit-driven approach is incompatible with providing high-quality service. The two cannot coexist.

In business, one can choose only two out of three options between speed, price, and quality. It is a business mantra that recognizes you can only provide some of the three.

People who fail to understand business also fail to understand community development because you can’t provide a high-quality public service if profit is involved in any capacity. It is for this reason that all election campaigns should be publicly funded instead of privately financed for the profiteers who have corrupted the political landscape while transforming the nation into a fascist corporatocracy.

Restraining corruption within the political landscape demands a wall between business and state in the same fashion that a wall should exist between church and state. As institutions, they should not directly influence the other two’s nature, shape, or operation.

Corporations are medieval institutions based on authoritarian structures. Because of that, they cannot help but corrupt democracies, just like churches are also authoritarian structures capable only of corrupting the operations of a state.

The only efficient and effective way to operate a national healthcare system is to provide high quality at the lowest cost. The only way to achieve that goal is to pool all resources together and leverage a basic economic strategy called “economy of scale.”

As a citizen and a consumer, you apply that same strategy each time you buy something in bulk.

This isn’t rocket science, and the fact that the U.S. still can’t get its act together to do the right thing for its citizens is a testament to how badly corrupted by billionaires the nation has become.

The fact is that billionaires have invested a lot of money in programming people to believe the government is inefficient. The truth, however, is that all organizations become inefficient the larger they become.

The real solution to many problems the U.S. and the world are struggling with is acknowledging that “too big to fail” means “too big to exist.” No multinational corporation should exist today. No centibillionaires should exist today.

We’ve made a horrendous error in judgment by allowing power to be concentrated in the hands of the few. The consequence of that corruption is that a majority are now struggling needlessly when they were prospering only a few decades ago.

Community development is a service we provide for each other as part of the social contract.

There are plenty of opportunities outside of community service to make profits. There is no justification for turning every waking moment into a monetization opportunity — for anyone- and creating a culture in which that’s the expectation, which is a dysphoric consequence of a dysfunctional state of being that will sustain itself indefinitely.

As we have entered the late stages of capitalism, we can either adjust course toward a healthier and sustainable existence, or we will invite chaos into all our lives. We can stave that off by simply adjusting our biases. The first bias to change is acknowledging that healthcare is NOT a business.

Plenty of for-profit business opportunities exist within an endeavour as massive as healthcare. Like any non-profit enterprise working within a zero-based budget context, private industries are still free to operate on a for-profit basis. For a service as massive as a national healthcare system, that presents an incredible array of opportunities for innovation and competition by and between for-profit industries. The critical difference is that the decision-making body or board governing the healthcare operation isn’t distracted from providing essential services by a for-profit mandate.

There exists neither a need nor justification for basing the service provided to save lives on catering to a profit motive. It’s the worst way to serve a public with an inferior service at a cost that’s much more excessive than money because the price includes the lives of innocent people who are unfairly and unnecessarily made desperate to survive.