Everything I'd want to do on a "side gig to iron out the kinks and then eventual business" basis is regulated to the point where that path is economically impossible and the only way to be in the black is to take out a big f-ing loan, quit your job and go all in on your new business. And it's not just me, all my buddies have this gripe. We've all got skills and experience and equipment outside our immediate careers and we'd like to use those to provide value to people but there's just no way to do that inside the rules and none of us our interested in risking our retirements operating outside them.

I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take.

I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.

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jimbokun 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

The YCombinator era where you could start a web business for low cost for a still unserved market was a short lived anomaly.

The cost of starting a new business has returned to the historical baseline.

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mothballed 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Where I live out in the country there are a lot of people with those kind of businesses. They bring you the goods and services to/from in a truck. If you ask to look at what they have... they have no address and won't tell you anything more than their goods/services dropped from the sky. At that point, I don't try to probe further... if I am happy I would rather not know.

	▲	cucumber3732842 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Where I live out in the country there are a lot of people with those kind of businesses. They bring you the goods and services to/from in a truck. If you ask to look at what they have... they have no address and won't tell you anything more than their goods/services dropped from the sky. Yeah there's a fair amount of that here too. Thinking about it on a meta level I think on the "low end" it's basically just a hack around how expensive employees are when you consider exposure. Sure you could have your $15/hr guys stay late and power wash your box trucks, deep clean your facility, etc, but some guy with a van will come in and do it on the weekend for a flat fee and if he falls off the ladder that's not your problem. And on the high end it's a hack around overhead. You can have some guy show up on a jobsite, set up a tent to keep predatory eyes off and weld up the broken thing on your backhoe or the rental company calls that guy and repairs it on your job site without telling you giving you deniability. No expensive compliance costs of adding hot work to your job site or running a shop where that stuff happens regularly. >if I am happy I would rather not know. Always better to be able to say you don't know rather than "I asked and the answer seemed fishy but I didn't probe".