A long term vision for this new venture is to help people be more creative every day. On one hand, that looks like crafting kits and workshops so people can steal a moment of creativity.
But taking that mission even further, it means supporting the creative people around me so they get to be creative. And the best way I know how to do that? Help them get paid for the thing they create.
So, I'm finding myself having more and more in-person conversations with people about "business". Actually sitting across from someone who I know has genuinely unique skills or who can create beautiful things.
I'm excited to report that more than half of them have at least toyed with the idea of starting a business. But when we dig into "why haven't you done it?" the conversation goes almost the same way every single time.
Most people have confidence that they can make the thing and deliver the value. They already do it every day. The making is the easy part.
What comes up is the not fun stuff: insurance, taxes, sometimes shipping. What would happen if somebody gets hurt using something I made? What if I label a jar wrong? How do I keep my house safe if somebody sues me? What would I even do about health insurance if this ever became the only thing I did.
Those are the roadblocks every time, in some order. I keep leaving those conversations thinking: this is exactly what keeps people from breaking through. And not to get too political, but it is what the biggest businesses, and even your own employer, want you to do.
It's already a solved problem, just not where you can see it
The truth is that none of these roadblocks are unsolved. It gets solved constantly, all day long, by the companies most of us work for.
Your employer pays your wages. Your employer pays a big chunk of your health insurance. They carry general liability. They carry workers comp. They pay their corporate taxes, and they pay somebody to sort out sales tax in a bunch of states they've never set foot in. And they are not losing money on any of that. They're doing fine. They're doing better than fine, after all of it, including after paying you.
So the problems have answers. The answers just live somewhere you've never been allowed to look, handled by a department you'll never meet, which makes them feel like secrets instead of facts.
The article you read, or the tall tale you heard
Most of the fear I hear traces back to a single article somebody read once. A single story someone shared with them. A maker got sued over an ingredient. Somebody mislabeled something. Somebody lost real money over a product they sold at a market. You read it, it lodged, you said "this is NOT for me."
Why I got off easy
Full transparency: I started my business right out of college when I had nothing to lose. No kids, no house, no car payment, no credit card debt. Which meant two things at once: there was almost nothing anybody could have taken from me, and there was almost nothing I needed to spend money on. If it had gone badly I would have gotten a "real job". That was the entire downside.
So I didn't get comfortable with liability and insurance and taxes because I was brave, or because I understood any of it better than the people I'm having coffee with. I got to skip the part where being wrong would have cost me something that mattered. Jason wrote something similar a while back in the self-funded post, about how privilege mostly shows up as permission. Starting at 22 with nothing to lose was its own version of that, and now 20 years later, it's funny how little credit I gave it at the time.
I don't have the fix
There is no answer to getting over these fears. Which is annoying, because this is the part I actually want to help people solve.
I don't know how to make somebody comfortable with this stuff. I don't think there's a trick to it. Reading a guide about LLCs doesn't do it. Watching somebody else pull it off doesn't fully do it either, or these coffee conversations would be going differently, because I'm sitting right there having pulled it off.
The closest thing I've got is hard math. Every business you drive past on your way to work is paying for insurance, and figuring out sales tax and use tax and workers comp, and carrying whatever risk comes with being open to the public.
Most of them will still be there next year. So the whole pile of it is survivable, at their scale, with their overhead. And you are not starting at their scale. You're starting with one product and a folding table, and a version of this where the worst case is that you stop.
People are already doing this and making money at it, which means it's possible. I keep landing there and then not knowing what the next sentence is. How do we get someone from knowing that to actually being okay?
If you've made that jump, I want to hear what did it for you. And if you're the person with the closet full of things you've never sold, I'd love to know which one of these is the one that stops you, because I have a suspicion it isn't the same one for everybody.
— Kim