The world of entrepreneurship is filled with stories of people being told for years that the unit economics of their idea simply will not work, only for them to end up working better than even the operator had ever imagined.
So feel free to ignore absolutely anything discouraging i say about the math of business. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs flat out ignore these numbers.
I put it here thinking of those with dependants and mortgages, who know in their hearts they want to build a business but can barely let themselves imagine leaving the security of the job that there family depends on. You may not have the ability to drop everything and go all in on starting a business, you’ll have to allocate pockets of time throughout the week to make incredibly high leveraged actions. It will be harder for you. It will seem impossible for some. But it definitely can be done.
Additionally, regardless of your position in life, even if you can’t see yourself making any of the amounts needed to make any of these businesses actually replace your income. You should still start anyway. You just never know what opportunities will come up once your start truly putting yourself out there. You need to have faith in inertia. That is, the belief that by jumping in and trying something, even if it doesn’t totally work you’ll be that much closer to finding something that does. (See reps).
Making $100 an hour in a one-off odd job compared to $40 an hour working for someone else might just motivate you enough to find a way to drum up more business for yourself.