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Reading a recent shagbark post about how women are attracted to men who don't have bosses over 'wagies', I found myself thinking about owning a business. As as American it's obviously glorified, but I'm wondering if it's easier to own a business now than it was in the past?
Seems to my relatively uneducated mind that over time in America owning a business has in some ways gotten harder, some ways easier. Nowadays you can do the online business, make money not doing anything physical, just using your wits and social network, basically. Forms can be filled out electronically, etc etc.
On the other hand, back in the day it seems most Americans used to be business owners, especially when more rural lifestyles were more common. Folks owned farms, or a general store, and didn't really have many forms to fill out, though of course they paid (much lower) taxes.
Anyway as a somewhat half-assed tie in to the culture war - which tribe is better for business? Red tribe nominally wants to be but... they also seem to not follow through with that a lot. Blue tribe has become more kleptocratic lately. Maybe it's a tossup?
I've had a business for 20 or 30 years now (and worked in the same industry before that) and I would definitely say that it's easier now than in the past. The reason being that computers, the web, scanners, email, etc. have all made it much easier to handle administrative work yourself. So for example, if I need a particular document from a particular file, I can pull it up in seconds on my computer. Instead of having to go to a file room and dig around. So it saves on the real estate I need and also means I don't need to hire an assistant.
As far as whether it makes it easier to attract women, I would say that (of course) it depends a lot on specifics. If I were sitting in a bar and an attractive woman sat down next to me and introduced herself, I would prefer to be able to say that I am a tech lead at Google than tell her I am the CEO of OMW, Inc. And status matters a lot. There are a lot of women out there who would much rather date an attorney who makes $300k a year than the owner of an exterminating business who earns double that.
I would say that on balance, I probably wouldn't start my own business with a view to attracting women. Because you really are better off attracting someone while you are young and getting married. And it can take years and years for a business to really take off.
Naa, tech leads (who can be almost any level) are a dime a dozen; if the woman's actually approaching she's thinking you're Senior Staff or better, and will be moving on otherwise.
Well, I'm not familiar with the tech industry, I'm just going by my general experience with bars and women. Based on that, I'm pretty sure that being a tech lead at Google (which may not be senior staff, but it's not like you are a janitor) would be better than being the CEO of OMW, Inc. The second option might mean that you are basically unemployed.
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Well, I'm putting together my first attempt at entrepreneurship myself right now, so I'll let you know how it turns out. Without going into exhaustive detail, I'm making a tabletop wargame with a focus on proxies. The model's base is 25mm, the same base size of unaugmented humans in a certain popular grimdark game, and the historically insired factions will hopefully convince some historical wargamers to try converting minis. I plan to make the core rules free online with a small initial kickstarter, and probably only start making any real money with expansions and a 2nd edition.
Theres a culture war angle here in that I think that alot of tabltop gaming companies like WotC and GW are quite incompetent and will likely bleed fans over time. That's its own can of worms to be opened in another post though.
I'm at the point where I'll have to start advertising it via videos, reddit posts, etc which I absolutely despise. I love talking about it organically with friends, but theres something fake and wrong feeling about doing so to make future sales, even if its nessesary.
So far though for me its been alot of working in photo editors on my rulebook and making 2d pixel sprites for tabletop simulator testing. Oh and a small mountain of varoius spreadsheets and documents. I may move back to the US from the UK to start the company, as America seems more amenable to businesses in general.
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Like most Shagbark posts, this is post-hoc cope to justify what he was going to do anyway. Really, Shaggy, women don't like wagies? But if they did, you'd become one? It's too late, he has already depicted me as the screaming soyjak and himself as the handsome Aryan Chad.
The reality is that among my coworkers even the very physically, shall we say, ungifted don't seem to have problems finding wives and having one or two kids.
I can't speak to the ease of running a business, but 20% of small businesses close within a year. Presumably most of those are run by idiots, but the odds still don't seem great.
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Prepare to be reamed by beurocracy. And not in a nice consensual way. What we're doing to small busnises is an atrocity.
What are we doing, can you be more specific?
There's so much beurocratic overhead that you're better off breaking a thousand little rules or going dirty with bribing the local compliance admin. I'm not going to mention specifics but basically in my case the inspectors look the other way pretending to do inspection, it's a "thing".
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As usual, shagbark is saying things that are true in a manner of speaking, but which don’t apply, because he’s an insane hippie drifter making money through gnomic philosophy. If you want to live in a shack eating roadkill so you don’t need to have a real job, business-ing part time can get you there. But you don’t want to do that. Only shagbark does. Earning a normal living as a business owner is… intense.
And the kind of woman who wants to eat roadkill in a shack so her man doesn’t have a job is very likely to talk about how he doesn’t have a boss. Sûre. Bosses aren’t thé fun part of jobs. But that woman is definitionally not the median.
I think the real signal that is being pointed to by this kind of comment is that women find being subordinate in male dominance hierarchies to be an unattractive trait in a potential mate. At the same time, men will often say that being overweight is an unattractive trait in a potential mate - but overweight women still get laid. Men prefer virgins, but non-virginal women get married all the time and there are plenty of virgins who are virgins simply because no men would want to be with them for other reasons. Living off roadkill while living in a shack is a much bigger hit to a man's desirability than having a boss, and that's a trade most women are willing to make - but if you're a woman who believes you deserve only the absolute best of men, you're going to want a man who does not have to adopt a submissive position in a dominance hierarchy while also being a wealthy provider.
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I'd honestly say the shagbark lifestyles seems quite appealing. I really hate authority, and being an insane hippie drifter doesn't sound too bad. If I didn't already have a fiance and a dog and other commitments, I would seriously consider it.
Having been homeless a few times, it does have its charms, but they pale in comparison to having a refrigerator with food in it and a place to sleep that doesn't have earwigs.
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As a serial entrepreneur I can give it a mixed review. Starting a business is hell, operating a reasonably successful business is superior to being an employee. Most companies fail, so most entrepreneurs will only experience the hell.
The difference between being self employed or freelancing and running a product company is vast and underappreciated. A freelancer is effectively an employee constantly chasing new contracts. Job stability is traded for higher income and higher flexibility. This path is works for self-motivated competent people. My best advice is to find freelancing work first and then start freelancing. Don't quit your job to start looking for freelancing gigs.
Product companies are a different beast. Developing a product or a service costs far more than you expect, takes longer than you expect, and it is harder to sell than you expect. There are so many aspects of a company and if you fail one, your company fails. A few years down the line life gets better. I don't have that much to do any more. Tech team has its road map, customer support has some questions, sales and tech team are bickering as usual, and I need to settle their dispute. I have a few candidates to interview. Other than that not much happens. More time is spent eating lunch and maintaining relations with people than actually working. Building and creating processes and institutional knowledge from thin air is tough, keeping them in maintenance mode isn't nearly as hard.
As for dating being an entrepreneur is a terrible idea. Expect to work far more than average. Expect to be in a world with 90% men. Replying to tinder messages is mentally taxing when you have dozens of unanswered slack messages and emails. Being in the right headspace for a date is tough when one of the investors is acting up and making absurd demands on a call a few minutes before the date. As you become successful you will be invited into new social circles. These social circles consist of married men who are older than you and who don't now 25 year old women. Women are far less interested in hearing about your startup than you think. It takes years to make a business profitable and during these years you are broke, over worked and don't have a real job according to women. You can have a company with 100k in monthly revenue and a team. If your expenses are 100k you make no money and women think you are unemployed spending your life on a hobby.
The stereotype of the new money man with a golddigger isn't purely based on the poor taste of new money. If you are stressed, only know men, work crazy hours and don't have time to date gold diggers will be the women you meet. Who will chase a guy on tinder who is average looking and rarely replies but has a fancy watch? A guy in a bar who doesn't go out a lot and hasn't had much flow with women for years and is severely sleep-deprived will only impress certain types of Asian and Eastern European women.
If you want to meet women get a job with average pay that is a bit relaxed and where you meet a lot of women.
Yeah, if you want to meet women, become a bartender and learn how to play guitar. Starting a business is attractive in the way having a classic sports car or becoming a bodybuilder is attractive: almost exclusively only to other dudes.
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Interesting, thanks for the response! Yeah it's easy to romanticize business, I'm sure it's quite difficult in practice. I am already engaged so the lady part isn't relevant for me necessarily, but I always do wonder if I could have more freedom/time/dignity as an entrepeneur. I don't know, seems like it really depends!
Running a business is really rewarding and the only real path to true success for most people. I am grateful that I went into business.
With that said the results vary wildly and getting going is tough. If you have an opportunity take it. If you are going the freelancing route you can take your time and secure some clients first. If you want to found a product company then make sure to do your research.
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No, you won’t.
You might have more money as a small business owner. There’s even business models with very low risk- someone else figured out how to do it. But you will be working 80 hours a week for that money.
Idk, I know a few people who have lifestyle businesses where they essentially sell an online course or some other low-effort offering, and after a couple years of work have set themselves up to make plenty of money and work maybe 10 hours a week.
Probably quite difficult, but it's doable!
Those people are the equivalent of Instagram influencers. It’s folly to think you’ll be one.
The average contracting or restaurant business has a decent shot of making it, so do tech startups. This is essentially aiming at being a celebrity.
As somebody who has been looking into the economics of restaurants in the modern economy, let me say that the numbers are not good.
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Well, fair. I appreciate you giving me I suppose a dose of reality. I've always been frustrated with my jobs so the grass seems a lot greener on the other side, but knowing myself I'm not sure I have the temperament to run a business successfully.
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Agreed. If you're starting your own business you will be working like a dog. "I work 10 hours a week and make $$$$$" is a scam.
I mean, the person I'm thinking of isn't trying to get me to sign up for anything. She has no reason to lie. She just built a course to prep for a data science exam and has sold it well since there wasn't much else in the niche. I don't see how it could be a scam, like MLM style.
It's not a scam in the sense of getting your money, it's a scam in the sense of many self-employed people presenting an extremely biased account of their company, for various reasons, including self-justification. My brother-in-law runs a platform providing niche courses in psychology, and he constantly talks about how this kind of platform can create almost "free" money with minimal input from him since he only does the course once and then an unlimited amount of people can take them (and others can use the platform to create their own courses and he gets a cut, even more free money!). Except I know him & his life well enough that he spends a lot of time on it, regularly even on weekends, and from his wife I know that so far including all the running costs, the set-up costs (he isn't a programmer himself, so especially in the beginning he paid a handsome sum just to get the basic framework going), the gear he bought to make professional-looking courses ... he is basically still treading water. Maybe it will change, maybe not, but if you know him casually you might think he is making decent extra income with little work, the way he talks about it.
But maybe your people are for real. It's not impossible, just unlikely.
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Can't really give you advice for the US, but at least in Germany you're 100% better of being a wagie. The entire system is clearly designed around you, especially the tax system, but also benefits, insurance, absolutely everything. My wife got a free 10k "stipend" as support from the government for her "women-led startup" when our second child was small so she was still partially in maternal leave. It was extremely stressful since we had to communicate with multiple agencies to find out how this is handled and the majority of their staff literally told us they have absolutely no idea, so we got bumped up to the local boss ... who also told us they have no idea, lol. After a while we found out at least that, despite being called a "stipend" which in academia is usually not considered an income, this one is anyway since there legally is no such thing as a stipend for a business, apparently.
The best part? Since the staff from the family office was hopelessly out of her depth on how to handle it in general, we structured my wife's maternal leave in such a way that she claimed was best so that we at least know how much maternal benefit we still get (greatly reduced, but at least we get no surprises from the family office). A few months later insurance calls us, and tells us that my wife has fallen out of the public insurance: Due to the structuring she is now considered fully self-employed. To add insult to injury, the way we originally intended to do it would have not led to this complication, it was entirely a result of our negotiations with the family office. Suddenly she has to pay a few hundred € every month that we wouldn't have to otherwise. We recently calculated it out - taxes on the stipend, lost benefits, extra insurance costs - and we got basically nothing out of the stipend compared to my wife being 100% in maternal leave for the entire time. It was a lot of extra stress and work, almost entirely spent on negotiations with legal bodies, for no benefit for anyone at all whatsoever.
Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field, in some it seems to be unavoidable that you have to do a a jump from wagie to self-employed when going up the ladder, like attorney partnerships.
On the tribes, in very general terms blue is worse on pushing bureaucracy, but red fucks up international business.
Absolutely depends on field. The vast majority of Germans (and basically all other Euros) cannot independently reach real wealth by being wagies. There are exceptions - if you have the education (enough credentials in the correct field) to really go up the corpo ladder or to become an expert at the local branch of a US company/startup, you don't need to risk anything - but the overwhelming majority of people simply do not have a route to break into a 6 figure salary while employed. The distribution of salaries is just to narrow, and there's almost no long tail in Europe (things look orders of magnitude more dire if you aim above 200k: less than 1% of adults in Germany earn more than 200k EUR, and that number includes all sources of income - so there's a lot of business owners, partners and capital income recipients in that block).
But if you own a business? There's no cultural monetary limits. No education/credential requirements. "Just" the soft skills, the drive and some luck (which you need to climb the cropo ladder as well) can get into the top few percentile points of income/wealth. And sure, you need to build momentum. You need to pick a field that allows for commerce (because selling things scales much better than selling labor) and that allows you an easy path to exploit the labor of the people you hire. But both come practically built-in with many blue collar careers: many of the people in those field do not want (or cannot) directly compete with you, they want to be hired; and most of your customers don't only need to buy labor, they also need physical products (which you can sell them with good - and often obscene - margins).
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