[Kivan]

What was your experience, can you share with it?

[Toy Soldier]

Originally Posted by Kivan

What was your experience, can you share with it?

Depends. If you're willing to take losses / start slow / work on it in your spare time while holding down another paid job (or are being supported, e.g. a married couple) AND you have a good original product / idea... then with hard work it'll build over a few years into something profitable.

If you're expecting to jump in feet first and make a self-employed living, almost impossible.

UNLESS it's a skilled trade that's in demand and you get certified and some experience (e.g. plumbing and gas engineering, electrician etc.). Or even things that don't need certifying if you happen to be skilled at them (carpet and laminate laying, tiling, plastering etc.). It should be relatively possible to make a living with your own business then, if you're good at it and with good word of mouth.

[Toy Soldier]

Oh as for personal experience, my wife was registered as self employed before she went back to University... just to supplement income. I'd say she made about £5k profit over maybe two years, but that was only an hour or two work a day, her main focus at the time was freelance journalism and she was more interested in getting published than being paid for it.

It was more when we were running our forum which made approx £200/month profit at it's peak... but frankly I was putting a LOT more than £200/month worth of work into the coding and server admin side of it (and also working full time). We were also hit hard by the Google "Adpocalypse" (google ads dropped dramatically in value per view / click at one point a few years back) and then also **** hit the fan regarding some of the ads that were showing up and we had to remove google ads completely and rely on direct paid ad placement... and it was still full of arseholes so we ended up just shutting it down...

The moral I guess is; the hours that will go into starting something up, compared to the return financially, will almost certainly be WAY below minimum wage so unless it's something you really love and are doing it mainly for that reason, with a hope of making money eventually, then most people end up caving.

[michael21]

Originally Posted by Kivan

What was your experience, can you share with it?

Yes it very very hard