[monero-xmr]

Then you tell someone to start their own business so they can treat their workers the way they deserve to be treated, then you get a bunch of excuses about why that is impossible! I guess there is just a conspiracy from every business to prevent honest people from being in charge

[shocked9380]

I work for a company which treats workers very well and the company is doing very well themselves. Of course it's possible; don't let anyone tell you it isn't.

[monksy]

Assuming you do that you'll still get vc forcing a different treatment.

[jandrewrogers]

No one is required to take VC.

[harimau777]

They are if they don't have capital.

[freefaler]

Many bootstrap business owners did it somehow without a VC...

[thirdacc]

How can I do it without capital, straight out of college, with only around 2 years of real-world experience and no network? Honest question.

The only play that occurs to me is surviving off of gig work, building the business as a sidehustle. But I've seen so many people who seem to be permanently stuck there, with no real business to grow and no way to explain their resume gap to employers.

From what I've seen lurking here, successful bootstrapped businesses come from experienced people who know what they're doing and have savings to fall back on.

[freefaler]

Find a good local problem that you have connections with people who'd buy it. Doesn't need to be a software, many small businesses start as sole proprietor working for himself and slowly growing the company by hiring help.

No cheap programmer would copy your "fixes-fences-in-Boston.com" idea. A lot of local services aren't sold properly on the internet, so if you combine the two you can get something out of your time and labour.

Also local bureaucrats love to "regulate" and automating local compliance is also a good niche. Now with all LLMs around the scope of what is possible has grown, thus the niches where it could be applied have grown too.

Don't drink the VC/YC combinator cool-aid, that you "go big or go home". It's better to own 100% of your comany, than 3% of a VC based startup most of the time. You see outliers like Facebook, Airbnb & etc... but as 37Signals has proved for the majority of startup founders the risk/reward ratio is skewed not in their favor.

[p3rls]

Figure out what you want to build. Figure out how much you will need to build it. Now cut that in half and only build the most important parts.

-Dropped out, no connections, still built stuff.

[makerdiety]

What all indie hackers are doing is getting support and resources from an equivalent of venture capital investment. Which is Cathedral approved education that effectively reduces to attaching an epistemology onto yourself that limits you and prevents you from functioning outside the cramped divisions of civilization-approved entrepreneurship.

The education offered by civilization includes logic that's crafted by a pedagogy that's biased toward vulgarity and social skills that don't perform well when it comes to building anything that would help a man get away from a forced commitment to anything more than maximizing viewer impressions on provocative Internet-uploaded content. The average tech entrepreneur isn't any better than a McDonald's hamburger grill operator or a female OnlyFans model or a delivery app driver, once you remove your civilly trained bias toward low resolution videos on socioeconomic dynamics.

To use a great illustration, even a billionaire techno-commercialist like Elon Musk can never hope to achieve independent wealth acquisition. Because his education, personal origin, and development are not really deviant and an instance of someone that can perform beyond the abstract black box that is knowledge given by civilization's life experiences which the life offers to every man. He will always come up short, whenever it's a question of exiting from the liberal-democratic regime and its permanent ironic anti-libertarianism stance. The question is: How to build a business that's not required to conform with all expectations, social and physical/ontological? Leading up to aerospace technology and acquiring science for Earth-to-Mars orbit transfers ain't it. Even having a business starting capital of one hundred dollars in the style of the $100 Startup comes with a history whose financial system component is tied to having a certain social obligation. A certain physical requirement commonly called life.