Jesus Christ, Starting Your Own Business Is Hard!

The more time you spend on social media sites, the more googling you do, the more the magic algorithms figure out what you’re all about. Pretty soon, you’re confronted with some hard to ignore advertising that in some cases, is very tough to scroll past.

Over the Summer, I spent a lot of time thinking about how to diversify and grow my income to support my family. Sure, I make OK money as a university English lecturer, but prices are going up and it’ll only get worse with another baby on the way. I haven’t quite managed to turn writing on Medium into the cash cow I hoped it would be yet, so I looked into starting my own online teaching business to run alongside my face-to-face work. It seemed like a simple idea at the time; come up with a few service offers, make a website and hundreds, nay, thousands of eager students would come knocking from all corners of the world. After a couple of days searching for ideas on inspiration on the net, my social media feed was suddenly full of adverts for Samcart and various other companies, all promising to help turn my teaching business into a multi-million dollar juggernaut overnight. Well…cough. It hasn’t quite happened. Yet.

Starting your own business is hard. You have a good idea or two and straight away, you’re convinced that the rest of humanity will buy straight into it with zero salesmanship on your part. Now for the ACTUAL truth.

No one is going to help you

Writing on Medium for the last couple of months has been nice. Other writers are quite willing to give your work a read and a comment, giving you a nice little boost along the way. The business world is different; no one cares about your ideas unless you can convince them to. It’s all about getting them in front of the right people and then blagging them into thinking that they need YOUR services over other people’s. This is hard. There seems to be little incentive for people to share your business with others and some days it seems that no matter how hard you try, how many social media posts you make promising free trial lessons or discounts, all you’re faced with is crickets.

There are almost too many options out there

In trying to set up an online business, I’ve been confronted with a slew of options in terms of websites, payment portals, social media designers, online stores, advertising, copywriting, tax…the list goes on and frankly, it’s hard to know where to start. As soon as you think you’ve decided on one thing (say choosing Wix to host your website) you’re shown a ‘better’ option in a Facebook advert, promising to earn you twice as much as you can with the original website provider you chose and you start to question your choices. I’ve learned that the answer to this is to make a firm plan in the beginning and to stick to it. All of these services do pretty much the same thing and if your product or service is rubbish or badly thought through in the first place, it doesn’t matter which website you use to sell it; no one’ll be interested anyway.

It’s really, really, really exhausting

I am knackered. I’m more tired than I have been at any other point in my life and that includes after the birth of my son, where I would routinely wake up 4–5 times per night to feed him and change his nappy. I haven’t had time to write on Medium for 2 weeks. I don’t talk to my wife anymore. All of my focus seems to be on building this stupid business. On top of this, I’m doing it all around working my main job, so it’s almost like having two full-time jobs at the same time. Needless to say, some days I find it hard to keep my eyes open let alone string a sentence or two together to post on Medium. This would all be ok if people seemed to be interested in what I was offering, but at the moment, the silence is deafening…

Final Thoughts

I know I probably shouldn’t complain too much- first world problems eh? It’s not like I’m down a cobalt mine in Liberia hacking hunks out of a rock face, breathing in toxic fumes for $2 a day. Still, it’s taxing. All I can say is I hope the hard work will all be worth it and that the needy English learners of the world will start crawling out of the woodwork pretty bloody soon. If not, I might just decide to throw in the towel.