Specifically the US but I guess this could be asked anywhere.
I am not of the assumption it is actually possible for any normal person that doesn’t already have millions. The days of an honest mom and pop seem long dead (since at least the 90s, maybe 80s). Or if there are any, they are struggling to even stay afloat.
Like many, I thought I’d always want to start some sort of good business that actually serves a need. I now see that as impossible. I know people who made small niche software in the 80s, ended up making it a decent size company and retired with millions. I do not think anyone could do that today, especially with how tech is now.
I see plenty of scammy tech startups. This isnt what I’m talking about. Imagine a CNC shop starting today. They largely dont exist because no one does engine work anymore and most things are throwaway. Similar thing for any type of repair, none exist because its all throwaway. The only businesses I ever see are reselling things made by slaves in China. No one makes anything (other than 3d printed junk).
I’d be quite surprised if anyone is living decently off a real, honest business that they didnt get millions from their parents to start and that doesn’t exploit the hell out of others.
There are tons of service oriented small businesses that are honest. Because they don’t generally pay a high overhead for things like retail space they can be very profitable as well.
I suppose mowing lawns or cleaning gutters is viable. But I’d need insurance. I do have a truck and trailer, old and shitty, but still.
You can usually get licensed and bonded pretty cheaply and some states have specific statutes that allow for handyman type work.
I had a good friend who was a window washer. All he used was his little truck, dawn soap, a bucket, and squeegees (some with extendable poles for high places). He had a ladder as well but rarely used it unless it had windows on the top like a partial sunroom.
He showed me the technique and you could do a window in less than a minute once you got good at it. He generally did commercial buildings so all he would do is the outside of the windows.
I bet its cheap in my state. Never thought to look. I cleaned some gutters once and couldn’t believe how easy it was and how happy folks were to pay for it. Its a little dangerous though.
Also good ideas!
All you need is an LLC. And those are like $50 to register? After that, how honest you are is up to you. The headlines are full of big companies and flashy names, but there are a lot of people out here working for themselves or with a couple of people at a tiny company.
The issue for me is how to make yourself known, and let people hire you instead of doing it themselves.
Any time I have an idea, I think sure but if I was the client I’d just do this myself. It kind of seems a lot of diy businesses dont make sense because anyone can do it themselves and learn on YouTube.
You overestimate how much most people are willing to DIY. I have done a lot of handyman and tech support work for friends and family, I’ve told them I’m just going to type their problem into YouTube and do what it says. They still act like it’s a magic trick when I fix something.
I started my own handyman business 3 years ago and I don’t consider it a scam nor did I need to invest millions up-front. Not even thousands in-fact. I earn a comfortable living from it and tons of gratitude from happy customers.
It’s pretty easy to stand out to your advantage by being fair and honest. People notice it and they tell other people too.
I actually and sincerely believe that is peoples’ best shot at employment in this economy, if you don’t want to work as a carer. Identify things that actually need done in your community and do them, eg. pest removal, hazard clean up, painting, roof replacement, etc.
Oh man, so many door to door pest folks around me already its getting tiring!
Part of my issue is I do most everything myself. I figure why pay someone when I can do it. And everyone else thinks that way too right? Ha, it feels like it.
Painting. I mean anyone can paint right? I paint my own house and my own rooms. That seems so easy.
One thing I just thought of is house inspecting …I’m not great at repair but I can definitely spot things that others overlook. I wonder how saturated that market is.
Painting. I mean anyone can paint right? I
Nope. I cannot paint. The elderly cannot paint. You should see the nightmare whoever my landlord hired left in my apartment. People would rather pay someone who can get it done properly.
Its so hard to think in those terms. But I appreciate it! I actually enjoy painting . I’ll bookmark that in the brain.
Of course you can. You know what you need first? An idea for a business. You’ve given nothing and just said why it’s not possible.
One question - by “exploit the hell out of others” I’m guessing you just mean……employ people to work at your hypothetical business? If so, I’m going to assume that this is all a “socialism/communism is what we need“ bait post.
No, sorry, I meant exploit as in make a little plastic doodad for 2 cents and have people in China make it for you then sell it for $20. I don’t want that. Or have a shipping business where I pay people minimum wage etc.
I have tons of ideas. Theyre all outdated or just not viable in a few years. I really have no clue how anyone does it !
Paying minimum wage isn’t exploiting.
In some ways I guess. Just feels scummy to have someone work 8 hours and give them $70.
You don’t have to pay them low. You can make the choice to pay them above average.
If someone will work for $70 for 8 hours, unless you’re forcing them it’s not exploitation.
If you have money and others don’t and they are competing to get a job, and you pay them minimum wage, you are exploiting them. You can pay more, you can help the economy, and you refuse to. You are exploiting them because they have no choice.
I thought I’d always want to start some sort of good business … I know people who… retired with millions. I do not think anyone could do that today
It seems you equate “starting a good business” with “retiring with millions”. I would consider those very separate.
And a CNC shop is very capital intensive to start so yeah, probably not going to start one without a loan from somewhere. This also makes me think you’re only talking about huge companies or manual labor work, when plenty of people have honest accounting businesses and live pretty comfortably.
I just put it that way because I know a lot of folks start fun small businesses like selling 3d printed trinkets, but thats not going to pay my bills and go to my retirement fund. Boring as it is, I’m better off sitting on my butt at my current job 9 hours a day. I just wish there was more.
Ok, so you think it could be possible, just not for you?
Well sure. I started a mobile auto repair business. That’s a field that is rife with incompetents, junkies, and straight up scammers. It’s the Wild West as far as businesses go.
Unlike most of the mobile guys in town, I went all in on the professional front. Had a webpage, business cards, uniforms, took CC on the spot or online, emailed pdfs of estimates, diagnostics, and invoices, etc.
By the time I wrapped it up, I had a huge roster of clients. Years later I still get calls. I did it simply by being honest and trying to make sure my customers interests were also my interests.
I turned down work if it was outside of my abilities, I never upsold, if I broke something I paid for it out of pocket, and tried my very hardest to not recommend any repair without solid diagnostics first.
Had I wanted to keep going, I could have easily hired a crew and expanded. Once your name gets out, there’s more work than one person can shake a stick at. And expanding means transitioning from laborer to manager. Then it’s on to franchising.
When you get an LLC, the banks will throw money at you. Even without collateral. What ever you are being offered in personal loans now, times it by 10. Show a years worth of growth and reasonable fiscal management and they’ll give you a key to the vault. No joke.
So, yes, if you have a skill, you can do honest business and turn very little into a lot.
Why did you stop?
Personal issues got in the way.
I hope things are going well for you, you seem like a standup guy/gal/pal.
Thank you for the kind words.
I recently saw a mobile mechanic who uses an old ambulance as his repair rig with “EMS” (I’m assuming Emergency Mechanic Service) on the side. I thought it was really creative and a great rig to store and haul tools and equipment.
I have a “fun car” that needs occasional work and I don’t have the space to do a lot of things myself. We have a guy that only works in the specific make (most older models) and he’s always busy. He’s got one “assistant” that I’m 100% certain will be taking over the shop in 5-10 years.
That is good info.
I have often thought about a car centric business but as I stated in another post, I’m too late for that by about 20 years.
In the USA you need hardly anything to start a company. A sole proprietorship is literally just a person saying “I am a business” and that’s that. If you’re going to sell stuff you need a state sales tax number, if you’re going to employ people you need an EIN from the IRS. Otherwise you just…start a business. Whatever that business is decides your costs. You want to clean houses? You need a bucket of cleaning supplies maybe (maybe your clients just need a helping hand and they already have the supplies!). You want to start a construction company? You’re gonna need a lot more. I’ve been trying to start my own company and honestly the hardest part isn’t the money, it’s how much stuff you have to do to get a website running and looking good, to make sure your product is good, to try to find places to sell, business cards, marketing, etc.
I’m, for once, jealous of the USA.
Here in Spain to open a business is bureaucratic hell.
Before doing anything you need to register in several administrations, not one, several. Once registered no matter you have sales or not, you have to pay a monthly social security quota. Several hundred euros a month even if you are not yet made a sale.
Then even if you don’t sell absolutely anything, because your business was shit or whatever, you have to present sale tax models, even if they are at 0.
And there’s no minimum, you have to do all this even if tou just want to sell one cool t-shirt you made for 1€.
At the end even the smallest business end up hiring some specialized person just to handle the bureaucratic mess for them, which add up to the monthly cost of having a business opened.
Oof. I’m sorry.
It’s pretty easy in Norway too. “I am a business”-scale is registered online, and there’s a miniscule fee, and after a few days you get the paperwork in the mail confirming it.
If you’re very low volume and revenue, that’s it, basically. Above a certain level you need to file for a VAT number, but it’s pretty simple. And scaling up as you need to is no biggy.
Source: I’m kind of a business owner. Revenue: around 400$ equivalent last year.
What an incredibly pesimistic and sad take. It has never been as easy to launch a life changing product as it is today.
Agreed. I think there are tons of businesses people have never heard of because they serve a specific niche and aren’t public facing or household names. I don’t think its easy to launch a successful business but it wasn’t easy in the past either amd we don’t remember all the companies that didn’t make it.
Regarding ‘honesty,’ that probably depends on the market and what your competitors are willing to do. Its probably a lot easier to run an honest local restaurant than some international finance firm. You’ll probably need to sacrifice your integrity to reach those higher echelons because everyone else there was already willing to do the same.
Yeah, I just dont see it as possible. From my perspective:
-
Fix cars: this won’t last for more than maybe 5 or 10 years as most cars under 20 years old are unrepairable or getting impossible to find parts for. Need a $20,000 dealership computer to even change a brake pad. And electric cars won’t need maintenance.
-
Some sort of programming. I never could really grasp programming much as I wanted to, and anyone today would go to ai or India to have something made cheaply. Not viable at all.
-
Retro console or CRT TV repair: the types involved in that hobby already know how to fix it themselves. Repair is insanely costly and usually out weighs the cost of just buying another thing. This goes for repair of almost anything today.
-
Art: I mean, we have seen that etsy has sloppified. Not viable. Why pay for a t shirt when I can have a much cheaper one with ai slop art. (Normal people do not care if its human made)
-
Music recording /mixing : again, if people want this they are doing it themselves or having ai do it. Theres 0 market for how costly and time consuming it is.
Thats basically my skillset. I have absolutely nothing that is a viable business. Now if I knew how to fix houses or do wood work, that’d be a huge money maker, but I am awful at housework/woodwork. And that usually takes employees as well for a lot of jobs you can’t do alone.
Inventing a product…I mean its all been invented. Theres only so much plastic junk we can have made.
-
Not nearly as dismal as you portray though admittedly it is turning that way. Even so 3rd party repairs for cars are far more legally protected than tech shit. And the dealership software is often leaked. Again while it’s admittedly becoming far more difficult to be independent repair shop there’s still time to push back here
-
you can’t do it so it’s not viable? Weird. Making programming a viable entrepreneurship endeavor is far more about having a novel idea than execution (assuming you have capital). Honestly these days even if you don’t have capital you still just need the idea, if the ideas good you could likely build a proof of concept with an llm and generate capital. And a “novel idea” doesn’t even have to be groundbreaking, often it’s just “here’s this thing that’s been done before, but slightly better”
-
repair of electronics can be viable but it is increasingly dismal (and worse than cars, though interestingly in some ways getting significantly better. Iphone repair, which was a fools game 5 years ago, is suddenly viable again). I spent years repairing electronics through college and grad school and made pretty healthy cash tbh; if I’d done it full time I’d easily have been able to comfortably support myself. Your issue here is that you want to limit yourself to niche shit. While retro consoles and crts are popular in many ways their popularity pales in comparison to something like a phone, which literally everyone has. Despite this it is fully possible to make a ton of money modding and repairing retro consoles. It’s not “fuck you” money but definitely enough to live. I know someone who does it and they have many competitors. The hardest part for them seems to be sourcing consoles for a reasonable price. They are constantly behind on stock though.
-
art has always been a total crapshoot for earning money and honestly making a viable career in art has basically always been more about nepotism and “networking” than talent. Even then it still almost always takes a significant amount of talent and dedication. The people I know working in art or music production don’t necessarily have glamorous jobs and frankly aren’t even the greatest artists of our friend group. But they have serious work ethic and are willing to create like AI. You want an ominous score for a shitty tv show? They’ll make it, even though their preferred expression is weird esoteric bullshit. And they’ll have it done in a day.
-
see above
Wrt woodworking/carpentry: you have to work at it and train? No one is just “good” at this. Like any skill it must be developed through education and experience. At the end of the road there are tens of thousands of licensed electricians, plumbers, hvac, etc people who own their business and work independently (sometimes hiring contractors for bigger jobs) but all of them had to work for others first to learn to not kill people with shitty work (though tbf some didn’t do so well at this part)
Wrt inventing: same as software. Devil is coming up with the thing, though don’t discount being able to bring it to market. Almost every stupid plastic bullshit thing had to have someone with cad experience and the knowledge to contract with manufacturers
Wrt cnc: there are plenty of machinist shops that are independently owned out there. If anything your issue here is startup costs, as a $2000 diy cnc isn’t going to cut it for pro use unless your company is targeting making fancy signs at flea markets. But again this is also a trade that is generally learned and expanded on. You work for a machinist and actually learn to do shit, then you maybe buy a used mill and pick up some jobs on your own, then buy more equipment, more jobs, etc
It seems like maybe you’re in the part of life where you’re realizing that your interests don’t necessarily line up with your skills. That’s okay and it does kind of suck but it means that you maybe need to try more shit, or maybe look at why it’s a challenge for you to stick with developing a skill set outside of art
-
-
Building a business takes time. 10-15 years. That’s just the reality of starting a business in anything.
It’s absolutely doable to start in practically any branch and make a living. But it actually takes effort.
There has never been a business model that involves little effort, besides gambling and getting lucky.
Right, its not easy that’s for sure. I just am unable to think long term if something absolutely isnt going to pay off, then I wasted my 1 life. I’m also terrible at selling myself and I always undercharge because I can’t bring myself to rip people off.
Why aren’t you thinking about experience? Whatever you do, and however much you succeed or fail, the point is to enjoy yourself and learn from your mistakes. Life takes a long ass fucking time, you will suffer, you will succeed, there will be pain and happiness. You will feel like you wasted your life and you will feel like you’re on top of the world. Just try to be true to yourself.
And ripping people off is only done through lying and deceiving. If you give your customers the space to say no, and a fair time to compare your prices to others, you can ask whatever you want. That has nothing to do with ripping people off. Market value is market value. Which is just as high as people are willing to pay. It’s up to you to find a good balance between the amount of time you have and the market value. There is nothing wrong with undercharging or overcharging. It all depends on how much time you have.
You’re not going to be a millionaire, you’re not going to make it big, your life is going to be a boring struggle like everyone else’s. There is no ‘American dream’, it’s all fake, stop clinging to it. Do things you enjoy, you have ambition to get good at, find out what motivates you, stay humble, stay human.
A CNC shop wouldn’t start because someone decides “I want to start a CNC shop”.
It would start cause some guy has a mill and a lathe for hobby stuff, and does some work for a mate or a local business.
And then gets more work, and gets work that requires CNC, and gets more work than 1 person can deal with, and then needs more machines and machinists and CAD tech and designers and so on.Yeh, a business could get something from PCBway or whatever. But maybe they need it by the end of the day, or maybe they need an opinion on something, or maybe they can’t do the actual technical document production but can provide some measurements and a rough sketch.
Apply that to anything.
The UK Army’s L96A1 was made by 3 guys in a shed.The Ministry of Defence wanted Accuracy International to submit an entry, but when they won handily, suddenly the three men in Mr Walls’ shed were charged with producing over 1200 rifles and all of a sudden needed to prove they could make that many weapons.
What they did was rent out a workshop for a day and filled it with all of the guns they had made in the shed up to that point, claimed the rest of the staff were out to lunch and later found out when they went to eat with the requisitions lieutenants that the inspection was purely to ensure the operation was not just three men in a shed.
Haha that story is amazing. Do you have a link to more info? I’d love to read up on the whole thing
Same attitude as Carroll Shelby driving early Cobras around town for a week and then having them repainted for the next week so it looked like there were more of them being made
I started a repair business in 2024 the only hurdle was insurance that cost me a lot, but with my reputation I had customers etc from the get go
We did it a decade ago. No funding. Slow slow growth. Finally doing well… I think you still can. But it won’t happen overnight.
I commend you
There’s a bunch of mobile car diagnostic guys on YouTube who specialize in diagnosing issues that other shops can’t figure out. There’s also local managed service companies who do it for local businesses and install things like cameras. There’s tons of local business opportunities that aren’t completely scummy but they’re usually extremely niche. And yes there’s still engine shops that are extremely busy especially in farming areas where equipment gets repaired instead of thrown away.
Depends, is it an AI-driven protein business with dynamic pricing that donates 200% of its annual revenue on purchasing a used inventory of trump branded elementary school textbooks?
What an idea!
