many people's business is really not that impressive
I've recently participated in an entrepreneurship workshop hosted by my university, which focused on idea generation for a startup. I have absolutely no plans to do that, and I think I am the wrong person for this, but I wanted a brief glimpse into the mind of people in that space. We tend to be complete opposites, and I wanted to know and understand how they think and what makes them tick. I didn't last longer than 30-40 minutes in it; the language around all of this just sounds very cringeworthy to me. Anything very hypercapitalist, neoliberal, sales-y just gives me the ick. All I saw was very naive people misled by the idealization of "being your own boss" our society has, without a plan or a problem to solve. It was still impossible for me to empathize and see what they see.
Once in a while, I think about how many businesses are just a step between you and the source and just take over a single step for you (if at all) and it baffles me. It weirdly seems illegal when it’s not! As if someone’s gonna come along and say: Why would anyone pay if they can just buy directly? But that's not how it works; that's just the child view of it.
As a kid, I had a view of all of these jobs like doctor, vet, police man, fireman, builder etc., who are the source and/or who do a lot of the process. The person looking to build a house on their plot of land can usually not just build a house themselves, it makes sense to hire a company to do it to source all the materials, experts and workers. I understand wedding planners for really complex weddings. Then there’s the grocery store, that gives you easy access and presents it all well for you, factories that produce the products from different raw materials, experts that can interpret the numbers/laws/etc. better than you can as a layperson, and so on.
Later on, you realize lots of companies just buy the finished product for cheap and slap their logo onto it, or wrap their own packaging around it, or just dropship. They do practically zero work, aside from offering more of the same. Which is fine, I guess, but I can’t really put it into words how different it all used to seem to me. As if everyone produced things themselves and is a great innovator and problem solver. They still try to sell that idea to these wannabe startup people, meanwhile they will probably just slap their own logo onto a pair of pantyhose that is produced in the same factory as all the other ones, or take an app idea from a competitor and change the interface slightly.
Now when you read about someone’s business venture, they tend to just get someone else to do everything; some coders brag that they get clients, just to subcontract it out to some poor person on Fiverr or just let AI do it, and get paid for that anyway by unsuspecting customers. So often, it seems to be more about getting inbetween another company/freelancer and their (potential) customers to get a piece of the pie, instead of creating your own solution. Not even necessarily about making things easier, or creating a new product, but being the one that is found quicker (via socials, search engine etc.) and mediating.
Sometimes, you can still catch me being disillusioned about this; like when some girl online announced she bought a matcha farm, and my stupid ass imagined her actually on the farm coordinating the growth, harvests and all, taking care of machinery; meanwhile in the end, all she bought was a piece of the harvest to be turned into matcha in her own branded tin. She doesn't run the farm, she at best invested into it as a shareholder.
I cannot be the only one that is caught off guard sometimes when you see what someone's "own company" ends up being many times, and how overstated it all is? Just ask women on dating apps; 9 times out of 10, the dude that's telling them about being the boss of their own company is just a crypto bro, reseller/scalper or creating sloppy AI wrappers. They'll go on about having made something of themselves and created something "from scratch" and it ends up providing zero value to the world, piggybacks directly off of someone else's work and is neither new or impressive.
What gives?
Reply via email
Published