I plan the video I want, shoot the video I can, and edit the video I have. I’ve been through this process enough times to know how it goes. Usually everything is fine along these steps. Sometimes I have to make adjustments, but I still get something useful. Other times, I end up trying to polish a turd in the editing bay (especially when there are audio problems, gat’dang those are frustrating). Occasionally something gets so messed up along the way that I scrap the entire project or even kill the shoot right there on set. I’ve only had to do that a handful of times though.

Of course, creating good content that I am happy with does not guarantee the audience will like it. That has a lot of random elements and can’t really be controlled directly. The levers that drive audience engagement are unwieldy in the best of circumstances.

If it doesn’t interfere with my main customers or cause anyone problems or harm, and it doesn’t break any laws, they are welcome to go for it. If it’s a physical product, it’s their property once they buy it. They can disassemble it, modify it, fix it, resell it, give it away, destroy it, and otherwise use it in unintended ways all they want.

If it’s a digital product, there are IP laws that disallow piracy and unauthorized commercial use and stuff like that, but I don’t really care about how people use my digital products if it’s just for personal use (again, assuming they are not harming anyone). If they want to print posters of it, use it as art references, hold viewing parties, or whatever else, it’s fine by me.

Your app is a task manager for families. Maintaining an organized task list for an entire family over the long haul requires a lot of discipline. You will never, ever, in a million years, retain more than a tiny sliver of your new users. It’s just not gonna happen. Also, you won’t get real feedback because your former users will never say, “It seemed like a good idea at first, but I am too fucking lazy to keep up with all this.” They’ll opt instead to come up with some excuse about missing features or UX problems.

Your dedicated lifelong users will come slowly. They will always be a teeny tiny fraction of your new users. Once you have them, though, you really have them.

Are your competitors actually thriving solely by maintaining a large user base with minimal churn for a dedicated family task manager app? Unfuckinglikely. They either have other apps in their portfolios, or they are not actually making money.

I don’t know if I’d call it a mistake, but what they do is, they see people with the “entrepreneur” identity, and they want that identity, but they don’t actually want to do the day-to-day stuff entrepreneurs do. They don’t actually like doing entrepreneurship. You see this same thing in the arts a lot, people wanting to “be artists” or “be musicians” or “be actors,” but they don’t actually like making art, playing music, or acting.

There’s a lot of the same thing in the filmmaking subs I’m on. People post in there about wanting to be great directors, and their posts are all like, “I have wanted to be a director for years. I watch films by Tarantino and Nolan and Spielberg and I find them so inspiring. I want to be like those guys. Despite wanting to be a director for years, I have never actually made a single film of any kind. Yes, I have owned a phone with a high quality camera built into it for my entire adult life, why do you ask? I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

GoDaddy lost most of their customers back in the day when they showed their true colors and released a statement in support of SOPA/PIPA. Since then, the only way they’ve been able to stay afloat is with the shadiest of business practices. Steer clear of those scumbags. Shopify is a way better platform.

There are a bunch of business name generators online that allow you to play around with different inputs. They probably won’t give you your forever name, since they aren’t concerned with things like memorability, simplicity, search placement, etc. but they might give you just enough input for you to come up with something that works well for your business.

You don’t need to be rich to get away from your toxic household. You just need a basic livable income, like you could get working any full time job. Honestly, if you are in a bad living situation, any attempt to better yourself, whether it’s entrepreneurship, love life, or fitness, will fail. You’ve likely already seen that happen time and time again. Your single driving ambition should be to get out on your own, away from your toxic household. Nothing else you do will matter until then. One job application working out could do it for you. You don’t have to be superman to make that happen.

With my existing business, I would 1000% use that as studio space for photography and film.

I film a lot of models who build their branding around their butts and am even launching a butt-themed subscription-based pay site soon. I am on set for every shoot featured on the site. I also work with other butt-adjacent sites like Amazon Amanda’s new site, BBW Adventures. This puts me in a lot of conversations about plaforms like yours, with the exact models you’re looking for.

I was going to write out a few thoughts here because it seems clear to me where a lot of little things are holding your platform back from growing like you would want it to, but my energy drink kicked in and I ended up doing a deep dive into your business, and the “here are a couple questions models would want to know” post kept expanding as I looked through your site more. I’ll reach out in a DM.

The biggest challenge in renting equipment (other than actually acquiring the customers in the first place) is that anything you rent out gets destroyed quickly, due to transport and whatever setup/teardown you have to do. A piece of equipment with a 5 year lifespan may be designed with the assumption of 1-3 transport/installations over the course of its entire life, and here you are moving and reinstalling it every week. Not to mention, your customers will be less experienced with using it, so they are more likely to break things.

The key to being able to compete with larger rental companies on price and reliability as a one person operation, is to rent out something that you know how to work on. This will give you a big competitive edge because you don’t have to replace anything or hire expensive third party repair services for basic maintenance and fixes.

Large work site equipment like generators and stair climbers could work. You could also do event stuff like sound systems and stage lights. You could do boats or work vehicles. Camera gear is a hot one, but my god is it fragile and expensive.

I immediately thought of “accidentally tripped over a barbell and became Arnold” when I read the OP.

I have worked jobs that made me think like a cynical asshole due to bad working conditions. I quit those jobs and regained my kind, egalitarian attitude. If you do not like who you are becoming as a business owner, you can quit and find some other way to make a living.

Also you will not accidentally make a huge company. Scaling up like that is an extremely deliberate process, involving a lot of different people cooperating, that usually doesn’t work even under the most favorable conditions.

Back when I was doing more game development stuff in the 2000s, I had this idea to make a bespoke video game studio. The idea was that once we had a team of devs and artists in place and working smoothly together, we could pitch corporate clients to have a video game as part of their marketing.

It never became anything more than an idea, and I’ve long since moved on to another industry, but the pitch would probably be even more effective today. Imagine a fitness model or a band spending $20k to have a little video game with all their branding in it. If it was one of those “play for a few minutes once per day” type games, that’s a lot of daily brand exposure for each player.

If you are looking for passive income from your art, you might consider creating assets for game developers and selling them on the Unity asset store. It’s not really my jam so I can’t help with specifics, but you could take a look and see if it tickles your fancy: https://assetstore.unity.com/

Back in 2017, I cleaned up some black mold. I went online to research what kind of respirator to use during the cleanup, and it said to buy something called an N95. I bought a few extras and tucked them away with my work tools just in case I needed them for something in the future…

If you are a simple working folk, then you are already getting paid to solve problems. It also means you have at least some access to a functioning business, so you can learn about how that business operates to solve customers’ problems. Additionally, you can learn about what problems typically frustrate your employer and then figure out how to solve those problems for other businesses in exchange for money.

If I were transported back to 1960 with all my current knowledge, I wouldn’t try to get rich. I’d make sure I was set up reasonably well financially of course, but I wouldn’t bother getting rich. Once I knew I was set financially, I’d go all in on playing up the crazed but extremely accurate prophet angle. I do not dream of riches. I dream of acting weird on Ed Sullivan.

There are two main issues getting in the way of effecting the type of forum you are looking for.

The first is general desperation among the people on the forum. Most of the people posting here are broke or stuck in dead end jobs and are looking for some way, any way, to escape that pain. They are not in a position to contribute to the community in any meaningful way. Maybe someday they could, when they get on their feet, but by then, they have likely moved on from here.

The second issue is how broad the topic of entrepreneurship is. When you go to more narrow subreddits like /r/videography, you see a lot more practical discussion because even though that forum includes everything from hobbyists, to salaried employees, to freelancers, to producers, they have a lot more in common than the people posting on /r/entrepreneur. On the videography sub, you can ask a camera question, and people will answer it. You can ask about how to deal with a conflict with a difficult client, and people from the same industry talk about how they handle the same situation. On this sub, everything tends to be written in much more general terms.

>Im also mad that my friend here is getting job offers but not me with more basic jobs.

this is the whole thread right here in one sentence.

Get a job so you can eat and sleep indoors, then work on getting your mental health under control? Seems pretty straightforward. You might have to put your projects on hold while you get that handled, but it’s not like you’ll get much done on them anyway as long as your health and finances are a mess.