Self-Employment

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.

What effects do you think AI will have on society?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What effects do you think AI will have on society? Realistically, are people overreacting who say they’ll take all the jobs and run the world?”

Realistically, machines can’t “take jobs away” from people. Organizations and the capitalists who fund them while demanding optimal revenue generation at the lowest cost possible are choosing automated solutions to the labour cost.

This trend, of course, does displace workers as technologies have always done. Unlike previous generations of technological advancement, however, the displacement is not limited to specialized functions.

For example, armies of people sawing logs by hand were not entirely displaced by the introduction of sawmills. Labour was reallocated and redefined. Instead of pushing a saw back and forth, labour became a process of pushing buttons.

Of course, fewer people needed to produce the same volume of lumber, but there was also enough demand to scale production and create employment opportunities further up the production line.

At the height of the technological transition to a digital age, we saw many jobs displaced, but new categories of employment at much higher levels of complexity emerged. Secretaries who transcribed letters were replaced by administrative assistants who functioned in a data entry capacity. At the same time, executives eventually learned it was more efficient and pleasurable to directly type their thoughts into word processors rather than proofread changes multiple times over in an often frustratingly long process.

Network technicians, web designers, database developers, and an entire class of Information Technology workers sprung up almost overnight — by contrast to how the labour demographic had evolved since the dawn of the Industrial Age.

That’s no longer the case in today’s dynamic.

The AI revolution will not spawn demand for new labour beyond the minimal replacement of armies of people pushing saws with one person pushing buttons.

Before this current stage of technological evolution, it was easily argued that displacement versus the creation of new jobs approximated a one-to-one exchange. The hundreds of thousands of trucking jobs replaced by self-driving vehicles will not result in new jobs created to transport goods globally. Self-navigating cargo vessels will not create 15 to 30 new jobs per ship when intelligent robots replace workers.

Hundreds of millions of jobs worldwide will be transitioned to an automation model.

This brutal inevitability ignores issues used as political footballs and bypasses all the fearmongering over demanding higher wages. Automation will displace jobs, but not because automation “takes those jobs.” Technological innovation has always been and always will be a more efficient way of doing business.

Although the transition to an automated society is often viewed as a technological transformation, it is primarily a social transformation. People are going to have to stop thinking about “getting jobs” and starting about how to generate revenue for themselves by leveraging services as independent entrepreneurs. This view of capitalism has always been at the heart of the capitalist vision, and it was cemented in our psychology when business was granted personhood status.

The primary challenge within this transition is to provide the means to pursue one’s independent revenue-generating efforts with the necessary resources to succeed as an independent business owner.

We are inundated with exposure to the results of resources transforming our world by creating new classes of the wealthy whose net worth far exceeds previous generations — even after accounting for inflation. Henry Ford, for example, was a highly successful industrialist, but his net worth and reach don’t come close to Elon Musk’s status as a centibillionaire. It can be argued, of course, that such a disparity is a consequence of a corrupted tax burden. Still, those factors don’t fully explain the difference in dollar value between Ford’s millions and Musk’s centibillions.

The profit potential has never been more significant simply because the markets that once comprised a few million consumers now stretch across the globe, with a population approaching eight billion potential consumers. This global reach is why it is often argued that it’s easier today to become wealthy than before.

The reality, however, is that just like yesteryear, resources are required as seed funding to support the creation of tomorrow’s industry giants.

We cannot continue to rely on dynasties to dominate the innovation engine because they are not naturally innovative. They are conservative and often repressive by nature because they are risk-avoidant.

The heart of capitalism beats to the tune of innovation. There is no more significant potential for innovation than the eight billion people mostly trying to carve out a living while engaged in activities they value. The handful of billionaires and centibillionaires cannot compete with that innovative potential. By allowing our species to be directed by such a small number of individuals, we are limiting our potential as a species while granting too much power to people who are so grossly corrupted by it that they have become a threat to our future survival.

We must level the playing field and empower the little people who can put to great shame the illusion that the powerful in society are so far above the rest of us that we can’t survive without their direction.

Not only can we survive without them, but we can prosper in ways currently impossible under their thumbs.

We need UBI to release humanity from the yoke of our oppressors and fully embrace our creative potential through the innovative possibilities unlocked to us all through a fully automated society.

Will money and economies still exist if all jobs are automated?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will money and economies still exist, if all jobs get automated? If all jobs are automated, what will people work to earn money? If all jobs are automated, will people receive everything they want and need, for free, without having to work?”

Within a fully automated society, people will have their needs taken care of.

Wants are an entirely different beast.

If you want money to travel around the globe, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

If you want to buy a sportscar instead of using public transit, you’ll still need to earn money to afford that.

How you make money will be more a choice for you rather than a necessity made of compromise by a perpetual lowering of your expectations.

You won’t be forced to take a job you hate because you’re afraid of being made homeless. You’ll be able to hold out until you find a vocation you like and that brings meaning to you and your life.

You’ll have many more options for being self-employed than now in ways only emerging today as viable systems to help you bring your imagination to life.

I’ve recently discovered an entirely new concept for doing just that. Check it out:

The site is called “Makeship.” What makes it unique is that you can design your character, and if your design is accepted, it will be made into a plush toy that you can sell for a profit. They handle all the “heavy lifting” from converting your design into a 3D plush toy, its production process, and, to a large extent, a lot of your marketing through crowd-funded campaigns.

Makeship

Many new initiatives are sprouting up everywhere that approach manufacturing, sales, and distribution from a service-oriented perspective.

You’ve probably already heard about dropshipping, where you can essentially choose products from a distribution catalogue and assemble them in a store where you handle all the sales for those products. They handle all the packaging and shipping for you.

This is just the beginning of the new world of automation.

Large entities will capitalize on individual ingenuity, innovation, and effort by empowering the little people to go out and carve their niches in the commercial world.

With the assistance of AI, we’ll be able to produce full-scale movies for distribution simply by the prompts and tweaks we make to flesh out our creative visions in ways that others would want to consume.

Life won’t cater to people without ambition or desire to work, but it will become a panoply of options and opportunities everyone can exploit.

With these tools at our disposal, we’ll finally enter an age where merit is not lip service disguising favouritism. Whatever you imagine will stand or fall on the strength of your effort without being buffeted about by the day’s politics.

Instead of fearing automation, we should be learning to embrace it and leaning into it to begin pushing our governments to adapt to a new world without waiting for widespread suffering through the transition process to compel them to solve problems that can be avoided.

UBI will save millions of lives if we begin implementing it now. If we wait until millions of jobs are lost, then we will lose a lot more than millions of lives, and we’ll end up coping with the daily chaos of ongoing riots and widespread destruction of property.