[winternett]

Marketing is the biggest absolutely soul crushing aspect of starting a business now. Social media is a heist that allows others to impersonate you even if you don't use it, it also lets your competition hijack your own SEO and undermine you... Any small business with a good idea is suddenly subject to competition with much larger companies because of how the Internet works now.

Marketing is a huge initial investment to make citing the sheer oversaturation of ads and scams on the Internet as well. There is no guarantee that even paid ads will reach relevant customers because advertising is so gamified everywhere. If you don't already have customers or contracts in tow when starting a business, you're marketing to strangers, who in turn can be scammers.

I literally get calls and messages off of Google that are from fake customers regularly, they even follow through screening calls for reasons unknown and then try to dictate payment terms, which usually begin with me doing work for them and then receiving payment later.

I actually have missed potential clients by mistaking them for scam callers.

You can have the best product or service in the world now and easily sit unnoticed. Success is at the mercy of how much cash you can burn on promotion and development, for years, before you can actually succeed. Even those with solid funding are not willing to risk it on an idea without serious momentum already behind it because of the current state of online scams.