The best business to start is one that really excites you. Starting a business is a serious life commitment, and you will be doing little but working on it. It has to be something inherently rewarding to you.
Making money excites me. I don't really care too much about what it is, I find that as I earn more and more money, the business starts to excite me more and more. I'll sell potatoes if I make millions, I'll sell my used underwear if it makes millions.
I don't want to do something that I hate, but I'll be ok if it is "average" interest.
Plus, nothing excites me...so what do I do? Well, sleeping all day every day is exciting, but I don't think anyone would pay me for that, damn it. Not working at all excites me. Does someone want to hire me for not working? If I start my own company, does anyone want to pay me for sending me money and getting nothing in return? Because as I think about it, that is what is starting to get me more and more excited.
Also, I think about all the people who work in jobs that they hate, just to make money. One woman I know, she works 2 jobs, 8 hours each, every day. She has 5 children she supports. She used to didn't work but 3 years ago, her husband, who was the main earner, died. She is now working minimum wage jobs, at $15/hour, struggling.
One does what one has to do, even if they hate it for a long time. I kind of get sick of the whole "Do what you love otherwise you can't work" mindset. It's kind of arrogant... you have to be happy working, but others still go out every day, to jobs they hate, and somehow keep doing it every day. But, you will quit if you don't LOVE what you're doing. Crazy thought process, as I see it. Arrogant. I mean, guess it's great that you are a Stanford or Harvard MBA and only have to do what makes you happy, otherwise...well, there is no otherwise. I must be happy, nothing else will suffice, right?
Do you know what excites me? Do you know what I'm passionate about? Drinking, fucking, playing video games, supporting my family, gardening, and creating art (not necessarily in that order). Can I get paid to do those things? No, and if I could, it'd pale in comparison to what I might earn as a urinal cake factory owner. I may not be excited by manufacturing urinal cakes, but I'm certainly excited by the money, which I then use to pursue my true passions.
If money is your sole goal, then you might be happiest working for a FAANG company, engaging in investments such as real estate, etc.
Starting a business is probably not for you. The odds of you making bank in a relatively short period of time are very low. The odds of your business failing are very high (regardless of your motivation for starting a business).
Sorry, don't mean to be mean here, but this is exactly what I'm talking about.
To start out, my last comment not about me. It's about "loving what you do" unthinking mantra. Which I think the whole idea is a load of crap.
As far as your saying to work in a FAANG....that pretty much exemplifies my point. You prove it for me in your first sentence. You do realize that it is more difficult to get a job at Google than it is to get into an Ivy League school? And let me tell you, there's on way in heck that I, or 99.999999% of the USA is going to get into an Ivy League school, let alone Google...want to see my GPA? I graduated with a 2.01...2/100s of not graduating because of GPA. So yeah. No way in heck am I going to get into a Ivy League shool OR a FAANG company.
There are people who have to work at McDonalds or as a cashier at 7-11 their whole life. They can't do anything else. Do you think they like it, or hate it? If someone has a high school education and is not a Stanford graduate, that's what it is. Minimum wage job for so many. And no real hope of getting more.
So prattle on about having to love your job, otherwise you're not going to work at it and will fail...I've always seen this as the height of arrogance. Don't get me wrong, it's not bad if you love what you do. But if someone with all the advantages in the world (university degree, great parents, etc) is going to whine because they don't LOVE what they do, while the lowly peons have to suck it up and work two minimum wage jobs to make it...just total arrogance, and tone deaf by most of the startup community. The world is chock-o-block full of people that hate their jobs. But they go in, every day, to a job they hate, to support themselves and their family.
That's all I'm saying. And, this is not meant to be aimed at you personally, because there are SO many people that repeat this. It's aimed at the startup community's philosophy of you must love what you do or fail.
> It's about "loving what you do" unthinking mantra. Which I think the whole idea is a load of crap.
Which is not the mantra I was intending to evoke.
My only point is that starting a business is something that consumes your entire life. You will eat, drink, and live the business 24/7 for a very long time -- if what you're doing isn't something that you inherently derive enjoyment from, it will make your life very unpleasant and reduce your ability to make it succeed.
This is very different from some sort of bland "do what you love" thing. This is recognizing the human truth of what starting a business entails.
>My only point is that starting a business is something that consumes your entire life.
John - this is for sure not true. I've known a lot of business owners that work a straight 9-5 and have done VERY well. Not Facebook, but $300,000-$400,000 per year, that's top 1% earners.
I know a LOT of business owners that come in one day per week to check on how their team is doing.
This whole "24/7 work" is just a load of nonsense. Do some? Sure. But we all have a choice, and I know as an actual fact so many people that are successful do not do that. For a fact. And, I know people in the exact same industry, don't pretty much the exact same thing, that work 18 hours per day. Usually the one working 8 hours per day is wealthier, because generally, the person who works 8 hours per day is organized and prioritized, and the person working 18 hours a day is unorganized, doesn't know what they are doing, can't prioritize, etc.
So, John, it is just not true. I urge you, if you are starting to run your own business, not to fall for that false god of working 8 days a week, 48 hours per day. I don't care what Elon Musk or anyone else says.
So again, if I were you, I would say to work 9-5 and then when you are done, leave the business at your office, come home and do other things. It's ok, really.
Starting a business does NOT entail what you think it entails. Heck, even someone building a nuclear power plant, all the workers and CEO don't work 18 hours per day.
>This is very different from some sort of bland "do what you love" thing.
I don't think so. Do what you love is at the root of all of the whole work 18 hours a day thing.
>This is recognizing the human truth of what starting a business entails.
I know what starting a business entails. I've started many. A lot of what people say is just simply not true. I've read the same exact things as you have, about how one has to work 24/7 and live and breath it every day. No. I know this is not the case, I've seen it personally. Reality is what you make it. If you say reality is working 18 hours a day, that's what you're going to do. If you say it is 8 hours a day, that is what it will be. And both can succeed, have succeeded. I've seen it, in person.
That Venn diagram is a bastardisation of Ikigai https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai. If you search that word on Google Images, you'll see the same diagram, but it's a departure from the concept, made for self-help content. I recommend looking into the origins of you're interested in it.
It’s too hard to solve 4 constraints simultaneously.
Get financial independence (with any reasonably paying job), then you can solve the remaining constraints without always looking over your shoulder whether the world still wants to pay you.
Arguably worst advise ever. What you describing should be a hobby, but not business. Without demand excitement vanishes quickly, replaced by disappointment, anger and frustration.
The best business to start is the one solving a problem (not the created problem which is so typical for IT startups). With proper execution this business is doomed to succeed.
The best jobs for society seem to be the worst appreciated and compensated.
Corporate tax accountants "earn" orders of magnitude more than janitors and nurses. Media puppets earn far far more than investigative journalists. Lawyers are respected more than teachers, in many ways. It's all absolutely batty.
That said, seems to me the best compensated people, with the least friction in their career, and with the least amount of overt evil done to society seem to be consultants. If you can start a consulting business in some field you can probably do well, financially at least.
I am not a consultant. From here though, it seems like they get paid astoundingly well by large companies that have no real way to measure the outcomes, so you just have to be confident and chipper and give people the feeling that you know what you're talking about and can help them.
> Lawyers are respected more than teachers, in many ways.
Wonder what those ways are - in my environment (and it's very business oriented, very far from teaching), teachers are respected way more than lawyers.
Yea, lawyers make more cash, but it's totally different story and has nothing to do with respect.
The cash is a big, big deal. And it comes with benefits like having more time off, better health care, a higher quality of life. Cash is intimately linked; highly, highly correlated with respect from strangers. You can't ignore it.
Lawyers can afford better clothes, giving them instantly more respect from strangers. They eat at more expensive restaurants, shop at higher class shops, fly in a better class. Their respect might be shallow and paid for, but again, let's not ignore it.
Now think of two generic families - one has a kid who just graduated law school, one has a kid who just graduated teacher's college. I don't think the teacher's family would be significantly more proud, in shallow terms. Probably the opposite, and that's sad af.
Think of what happens when a cop stops a teacher, compared to when they stop a lawyer - who are they more scared of overreaching with?
In many situations, the lawyer has more connections, and more capability in many ways to inflict consequences on people who mess with them.
I've heard many times that teachers are overpaid - seriously, I have. People complain that their job is too fulfilling (which is insane, for sure, but I do hear it). People are envious of the three month "holiday" every year, ignorant of all that needs to be done in that time.
I'm neither a teacher or a lawyer, but I know many teachers who deserve far better lives, and many lawyers who deserve far, far less.
It may be a cultural thing, but it does seem to me you use prosperity and respect as interchangeable terms, while they are not.
If police guy stops a lawyer he indeed wouldn't possibly mess with him but certainly not because of respect, quite the opposite. The is russian saying which can be translated as "don't touch shit - it won't smell".
I personally don't have respect to someone just because they have 7 digits in bank account or huge villa in LA/SF. Or went to Cornell/Harvard - thanks to life experiences I've seen a lot of graduates from both institutions who were dumb af. That just doesn't make any sense.
Again, it may be a cultural thing, but respect is something achieved by someone's actions, not assets. I know few people (sadly very few) who sacrificed their wealth for a more meaningful things in life. Their assets are next to nothing, yet respect to them is tremendous.
Saying teachers are overpaid is ridiculous though. Wonder if people who say that send their kids to public schools.
my partner was a consultant at Bain and regularly worked 100+ hour weeks in a small town outside of Dallas where he ate all his meals at a hotel. The day he left was one of the best of his life!
It's a definitely a lot more than being confident. There's a ton of important data skills, people management and strategy skills involved, and a lot of times your "clients" are not on your side. It's pretty common for a CEO or department head to hire a consultant to work with a department that's not doing well, so the folks you actually end up working with can resent you (especially when they know how much you're getting paid).
Bain is different than what he is talking about. You are an employee at a services company. It's like being a lawyer or an accountant. You have to maximize the hours you work because the money goes to Bain so they work you to death for their money.
If you work for yourself, you are your own boss and can work how you want.
I know great companies that do work in the industry. I talk to business owners, find what they want and need, do an analysis, and then get the companies that I work with to come in and do the actual work.
I do the upfront work for free and then collect a cut of the work done by the companies that do the work.
Maybe I'm a salesperson, maybe I'm a consultant. I call myself a consultant, I guess, since I do the analysis report and bring in the solution?
What makes you tired of being an employee though? Entrepreneurship is more "honest". You'll get compensated based on your competence and results. If you go around asking, "What's the best business to start," are you really qualified for this line of work? Especially when the primary skill is finding product-market fit.
You still have to justify shit to people - the customers, the investors, the tax people. You're still powerless, subject to the whims of regulations and unstable partners. You can quit one bad job after another, but you're stuck with a company you own, especially if you have relatives who have invested in it and staff who are relying on you to pay rent.
In my opinion, if you are engaging in the brainstorming method of saying "I want to start a business," that will never get you anywhere.
Starting a business is about seeing a problem, solution, and/or opportunity, and being able to execute it with domain expertise, all at the right time. Of course, it's also about grinding out sales leads and finding paying customers – a lot of is is sinking way more hours into it than you would sink into a 9 to 5.
I don't think this process is successful very often when we use the "daydreaming" method encompassed in the way your question is phrased here.
There aren't a lot of ways to "quit my job real quick." Most businesses are going to involve way more work than a day job, and the ideas can't just come out of thin air or from strangers on the Internet. Frankly, my advice to someone daydreaming is to just look around for more fulfilling salaried work.
I've seen lots of problems with solutions but nobody wants to buy.
I've seen someone pick up tumbleweek from their backyard and open an online store and make tens of thousands in a week of opening, and millions a year, selling a product they don't pay for, and it takes minimal work.
I think there's a lot of pure luck in being successful, at all levels.
A lot of successful people chalk it up to pure luck and it is not false humility, either.
Had Bill Gates been born 3 years later, or had his parents not sent him to his exclusive high school and he had no access to computers...so many little things can derail stuff.
This isn't true. Many successful, profitable businesses were started by just surveying the landscape and being better/different to something pre-existing.
I think the process you're describing is a lot more targeted and. methodical than the vague question of "what business should I start?"
The person who comes forward with prompts like "I'm a full stack developer, what problems do you think I could solve with software?" or "I work in hospitality, what's on your wish list for when you go out to eat/stay at a hotel?" that's going to produce a lot more useful feedback.
When one asks "what business should I start? I want to quit my job" it comes across to me as "Work bad, how do I plant a money tree in my backyard?"