Do you dream of becoming self-employed?
💡 More than 50% of people in America want to become self-employed and be their own boss.
So why don’t they do it?
Many people have limiting beliefs regarding becoming self-employed. They fear being forced to file for bankruptcy because of a lack of cash coming in.
- They fear creating something new in their life, being dependent on other people like clients or cofounders.
- They fear telling their bosses, coworkers, families that they have created their own businesses.
- They fear not being good enough to charge clients money. This is a very dangerous one because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. You will never try new things. This fear leads to a lack of exploration and experience which leads to a situation where people actually ARE not good enough. The only way out is to try things anyways and improve on the way. Get rid of this fear ASAP if you have any ambition in life.
In this video, I talk about why should you pursue your own business and how exactly you can do it on the side:
I am assuming that you are currently working in the main job, or you are a student of computer science, and you are thinking about building your own business in the mid-term or long-term.
So, what’s the best time to start a new business?
Ten years ago.
The second best time is NOW. If you want to start your own business at one point in your life, you should start it now on the side.
No matter what you are doing else. I don’t recommend that you get rid of your main job and go all in right away.
Going Part-Time
Instead, a much better way of becoming self-employed is to work part-time on your freelancing business. Maybe you decide to work for five to ten hours every Saturday?
Over time, you plan to create a very sustainable, robust, and long-term side business.
Having a functioning side business will make you more robust because even if there are market changes and lose your job, you’ve something to fall back to. You can always go back to the business and do more of what already works — now full-time.
Or, if the business fails, you still have the job that protects you in this case.
But you should expect that neither the business nor the job fails. They will coexist and there will even be synergies where one feeds the other.
You will earn more, save more, learn more.
This is a huge advantage for you as a small business owner because you can think long-term. The job brings in a steady stream of income, while you can build a robust, stable, long-term asset (the business).
- You can write a book, give courses, steadily grow your online community, and grow your client bases and testimonials.
- You can write blog articles. Many people wrongly believe that this is not a profitable use of your time. But if you write a blog article now, it will take months to rank and then bring in a consistent flow of traffic.
- You can then start selling stuff on your website — or monetize your traffic with ads that are truly passive income. But blogging is a long-term strategy.
Slowly building a moat around your part-time business
You can even go for a business with a high barrier of entry because you have an unfair advantage: you are not dependent on your business — so you can try things and try things and try things until something works.
Or you can write a complicated piece of software that nobody else can afford to write because they need to make money fast. 99% of new market participants need to make money fast — their biggest liability.
But these things you can do only because you work on your business on the side. You can grow your business by reinvesting the cash it earns because you don’t depend on it.
This is how I did it
This is actually how I created my Finxter.com platform for learning Python.
I was able to think long-term. It took me years to build. I wrote everything from scratch in Python — it was tedious but my primary income was coming from working as a doctoral researcher in computer science.
The slow and steady work on the app created a decent barrier of entry because new market participants cannot invest a lot of time creating new platforms — they are running out of money quickly.
Summary
💡 In summary, if you are thinking about creating your own business, don’t wait and start now. Think radically long-term.
An excellent way of creating a side business is to become a Python freelancer. You can learn the business side of things, become better, build reputation and knowledge, and earn good money proportionally to the time invested. You can then build upon your new skills to attract better and better clients. All while growing your skills.
Python Freelancer Course: https://blog.finxter.com/become-python-freelancer-course/