It's beyond adventurous to start a new business these days when you consider the world's reliance on social media and popularity/wealth as a requirement for success. There are so many people doing absolutely the same thing these days, many people have good ideas, but many also copy and mimic the ideas of others these days too due to the ever pressing need to project success and to create content for social media posts...
So many people present flawless images of success and popularity in being an entrepreneur or creator in pretty much every field that valid/great ideas get drowned out so easily online... Often the only method to get your message to potential customers is to invest in marketing your work. If everyone is doing that very same thing, and many people are faking their success, coupled with wealthy individuals that can easily copycat ideas, it creates massive and almost insurmountable barriers to organic success for you as an independent business.
These days, the biggest threat to your success is not being rich to begin with. Citing that as a factor, don't quit your day job if you don't have enough savings to fund you through development and growth, as an obvious cue.
There is usually only one main page on most sites for publications now (The Front or "For You" Page). It's usually a page that's often a wild and crazy mashup of posts from all disciplines and fields of interest, some promoted and others that are already popular. These home pages serve the platforms, and although it's a dream for any of us to make it there, it's very unlikely that will will until well after we've found success and profit. A better, and far more obtainable goal (for those of us without spending hundreds and thousands of dollars or having a team of people working for us) is to create your own front page, on your own web site, while also leveraging social media as an extension of your own site.
Our online and often in-person attention spans are also shrinking because of normalized short form content we now see on most entertainment, news, and business platforms. Short attention spans make it very easy for us to view something important, but also forget it 5 seconds later, and also to even forget that we bookmarked or saved it, so even marketing is overwhelming to most of the people that would support a new independent business or brand. I don't want to endorse the process of repetition in marketing, because that is very overburdening now, where even well known companies repeat and repost commercials, push out terribly repetitive jingles, and use veiled sponsorships to corrupt even the best of us to integrate their products into posts. I'd like to believe there will be some end point to subconscious and psychologically manipulative marketing, it's really harmful to our mental health and well being if you truly observe it's impact.
Many of the places we go now, we're presented with content that looks quite normal, but in reality it's driven, promoted, and funded by the marketing of products and services, and sometimes even by politics and nefarious interests. because of the nature of how platforms operate to keep us engaged, it's very easy to not be able to tell the source of posts, and the dates and times in which posts were made... We can easily follow and subscribe to accounts that can undermine our reputation or serve to hack our accounts, with little recourse if damage is done, because most platforms have weak user and technical support systems... The people that "know people" within social media companies often win for this very same reason.
For organic business awareness and brand development, sites like Reddit started out great. For the past few years, forums are often run with other intentions than open communication... Many mods secretly steer business in their own directions because of the flood of competition, and it feeds deceptive marketing techniques and brigade culture. Many planforms are also over-run by fake and "bot" accounts, that often have a much wider reach than any of us as individuals can with a standard account... The other side of marketing involves a concept of "growth hacking"... That's the policy of using secret techniques to cheat the structure of paying for success and popularity, which is often employed by scammers and others in the process of creating brand identity.
With all the advice out there in starting a new business that totally floods the Internet and social media non-stop, it can be intimidating to leave your day job and start a business of your own. I will neither tell you to do it or not, because I haven't seen your business plan and working capital...
I never want to be stuck in complaining, it is however vital to success to always evaluate the current playing field, and to create a plan for reducing and/or eliminating risk of failure. I never want to paint the world as rosy, I'm much more of a the "Glass is half full" personality.
Some essential opinions on this subject in my mind are as follows:
- .Great ideas should be heard without requiring trickery or promotional payment. Sharing the idea is what creates value.
- .Deception shouldn't be applied to the promotion of great ideas, and shouldn't be tolerated by audiences.
- .Wealth doesn't necessarily indicate intelligence nor ability to create success.
- .Be clear about pricing, and bring back the culture that when the word FREE is used it is truly FREE.
- .Be clear about your limits, and bring back the culture that when the word UNLIMITED is used it is truly means UNLIMITED.
- .Make clear what is fair and what is not, normalize listening to and addressing valid grievances from your audience.
- .Technical support is important. If you can't properly and fairly support your user base, you've grown too big and need to scale back.
- .Simple is better, it always has been. The more complicated things get, the less useful and fruitful they tend to be.
- .Time is money, if you're spending a lot of time working on promotion and not making money, someone else is profiting off of your time.
- .Stop using superlatives to describe goods and services (e.g. "Amazing", "Game Changing", and "Epic"), maybe try rating them on the classic scale of 1-10 so they can be compared more objectively. Be vocal when comparisons and reviews are skewed or totally fabricated.
- .Stop supporting, promoting, and praising things that don't truly support you and your success.
CONTEXT: http://circuitbored.com/communicate/viewtopic.php?t=215 .
We also constantly need to evaluate how much we are fostering "monopolistic dynasty" culture and nepotism in the business and political world, and how it's totally destroying capitalism... We all really need to bring back a sense of distributing speaking/presentation time among wider ranges of audiences and speakers, and fostering discussions that aren't based on just popularity and wealth as indicators of validity... When the entry points to being heard in communities are closed and too limited, they only foster idea theft, nepotism, corruption, and cultural stagnation.
The above are the very same things may well contribute to the very same culture that has negatively infected the same office workplaces we often want to leave.
Don't quit your day job if you're not prepared for these hard obstacles to overcome in finding your business success. It is far more comfortable to let a corporate organization worry about spending and hiring people like you to solve problems than doing all of it as an individual on your own... I will say though, breaking barriers and finding success as an individual is often far far more rewarding than a corporate desk job for those of us who venture to try despite all the frustration and pains.