#Entrepreneurship #BusinessAdvice #Unemployment #HardWorkPaysOff
Hey everyone, I’m reaching out for some guidance. I’ve been unemployed for the past 9 months after working in the VFX industry for over 20 years. I’ve hit a wall with job hunting and I’m considering starting my own business. But I have no idea where to even begin.
🤔 Here are some questions I have:
– What industries are thriving right now and could be a safe bet?
– Are there businesses where I can start making money immediately?
– Is drop-shipping still a viable option in 2024?
– Any recommended books or YouTube channels for coming up with actionable business ideas?
I’m willing to put in the hard work, but I need some guidance on how to get started. Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Let’s brainstorm together and help each other out! 💡👩💻 #SupportEachOther #EntrepreneurialSpirit
Hmm. I’d probably start a youtube channel and post a little vfx video every day. Maybe make videos highlighting all different content creators or a generic one m to send to content creators to try to get someone’s attention. In the meantime, school districts are always looking for substitute teachers (my state you only need a bachelors degree) and jobs like forklift driver or factory worker are often hiring. I would also think you could teach your skill – either online or even doing kid camps (learn to make a YouTube video in one week type thing – I think young kids would eat that up.) Police departments are also all hiring around me and some of them will pay while you go to police academy. Good luck.
So sorry to hear what you’re going through. That sounds incredibly frustrating and stressful.
I don’t have a ton of advice, but a few general notes I’d make:
– As you’ve pointed out, businesses selling products can take a long time to get off the ground. Businesses selling services are generally faster to get off the ground. The downside of course to businesses selling services is that you don’t “own your time”: you’re trading your time for the customer’s money, which sounds like it’d be fine in the short-term but is likely to cap the overall upside of the business. In your shoes, I think I’d be looking to start by selling my services.
– Lots of early-stage businesses need to start building loyalty by overdelivering on whatever promise they’re making, which means that they’re just sort of inherently less efficient than big businesses that have the benefit of existing brand awareness, customer reviews, etc.
– There’s a lot of fancy terminology, but at the end of the day businesses are about having the right product, sales, and marketing. “Product” means that you have something useful that people are willing to pay money for. “Marketing” means that you have some way to reach some critical mass of ideal customers. “Sales” means you have some way to “get them over the line” to a sale once they express interest in purchasing.
– Most first time entrepreneurs overestimate the importance of product and underestimate the importance of sales and marketing. “What you make” is incredibly important, but revenue-wise it’s only important if you can convince future buyers to buy your product.
– Generally your life is going to be a lot better if you can “ride the wave” of industry trends as opposed to fighting them. Any industry wave has winners and losers: in the case of VFX,
I’m not gonna lie: I think pivoting from VFX to auto part sales is an incredibly bad idea. It completely wastes a deep skill set that you have and any ideas you have about auto parts or whatnot are likely to be incredibly naive about how the industry actually works and what the opportunities are. Contrast that with VFX, where you’re definitely frustrated about the state of the industry but you have a deep and nuanced idea of what the problems are in the industry.
… but realistically, you know what people are desperate for in the industry a lot better than I do, which is my point. Pick an industry that you have a nuanced understanding of because you have a much better idea of what people need.
A few thoughts:
– Presumably part of the reason that VFX is in such a state of Flux right now is because of AI: is there any way to do a deep dive on practical ways to use AI in traditional VFX? I’m a developer, and from my own personal experience I see that there are lots of AI tools on the market and no one has any real idea of how to use them. I imagine that if you start playing around with a lot of the tools, showing what the “real” ones are and what the impostors are, and showing how to integrate the real ones with traditional VFX workflows, it could be an incredibly useful asset to the industry
– Once you’re creating content that’s super useful and building a subscriber base (probably on TikTok + YouTube, given the visual nature of what you do?), you could start building a few info products — basically short, practical, paid courses — that summarize those YouTube videos, go a little deeper in some areas, and you could imagine a VFX company being willing to pay for / subsidize for their employees.
– Alternatively, you could spin up a consulting company doing effectively the same thing (and using TikTok / YouTube channel as a means to market your consulting company). If I were doing that, I’d create a landing page (there are tons of templates you can use, check out Webflow + their template library). I’d focus in that case on things that clearly position you as “the real deal” and what your value prop is to companies
– When you’re spinning up anything, positioning and social proof are everything. Focus on how to succinctly communicate to new people running into your content that you’re the real deal in 10 seconds or less. On a landing page, that probably means a really clear headliner describing your value proposition “I help VFX companies integrate AI into their pipelines”, “I’m a 20 year VFX veteran who’s worked on X, Y, and Z”, and then a whole bunch of testimonials from as big of names as you can get in the industry that can endorse you and give you testimonials about how awesome your work is.
I’m gonna be real: I think it’s gonna be tough to get any of these off the ground when you’re literally desperate for money, and I think I’d aim to find some flexible part-time work below your skillset to pay the bills while you get this off the ground.
Anyhow, hope this is at all helpful.
Start with going through Y Combinators Startup School. After that you will have a solid foundation how to act
Sent you a PM.
Identify the strengths & skills you have developed thus far.
Think about what problems you can solve with those skills.
Think about who may have those problems
Narrow down who doesn’t have good options for solutions to that problem
Once you’ve identified this, start building a personal brand & create social content speaking directly to these people.
1) The problem
2) The cost of inaction
3) The transformation Story
4) How you’d approach solving the problem
5) Make an offer to help them solve it
The goal is to figure out what you can teach someone in 60 minutes that brings them immense value.
Start by offering 1:1 60 min consulting calls , charge per call.
Create a newsletter, free version = simple/foundational content. Paid version = advanced/deeper level content.
Start weekly group coaching, 1:Many for a fixed monthly retainer.
Create a community with weekly AMAs & plenty of resources.
Create a course
Create a knowledge library & sell access.
Simple answer, figure out what you can teach, who you can teach it to, how you can teach it, & then figure out how to monetize it.
Paint numbers in curbs. Charge $25, add a custom logo for $50.
You can easily make $300/day and still have time to work on applying and getting back in your main field of interest.
You’re called “diffusion throwaway” so maybe you feel threatened by Generative AI. Why not deep dive into AI and become someone who can create graphics with AI? Humble Bundle has a newbie AI bundle out right now. Instead of manually creating all the assets, you can be “the guy” who is an expert at using Generative AI as a tool. You will always need that person.
You can’t care how other people make money. I’ll tell you why. Some people are making money doing absolutely nothing, leveraging talents and or advantages that are impossible for you to achieve. You can’t make millions of Bitcoin for example compared to the guy who got Bitcoin in 2009 (first to market). Other people are taking advantage of family connections, natural talents or decades of dedication in their craft. There’s no such thing as “fast easy money” especially not in a high interest rate world and especially if you want a lot of money right away to replace a salary.
If I was you I would create a marketing page and completely pivot to Generative AI and become a master at Prompt Engineering. It’s a new skill, so there’s few experts and you can become an expert in a short time. Then use your credentials with VFX to back that up. In the meantime take a survival job or job to plug the holes (get to cost adjusted 0 budget no matter what, it doesn’t matter what you have to cut) and pay your mortgage and bills. Uber, food delivery, anything.
Hundreds of jobs in 9 months is low. Brute force spam rate is several thousand a month to six thousand in six months. You are probably looking incorrectly as well. In terms of the macro, I think that work is changing to cut out “middle management” which unfortunately could mean you. You have to pivot and rebrand and change yourself into a wheel turner. If you sound or smell like middle management and especially traditional middle management you could be killed. Whether this is smart or not or the long term consequences of this is beyond our pay grade… all we know is that middle management is being killed, so you don’t want to be that. Or if you want to be that, you have to be the person who can still get their hands dirty, who can still do the work.
Overall you’re going to have to do a lot of things you don’t like to survive.
Can your skills translate to video games?
I haven’t waded through all of the comments, so I’ll say this: What goes down must go up. We’re in a down housing market. Use this time to endear yourself, to a small real estate office. Create the most badass content up front for free. When the house sells, you get paid. Once your reputation precedes you, you will collect 50% deposits to lock down dates, yada yada yada. You’ll be doing commercial buildings, dentists, restaurants, etc., then you’ll be hiring guys just like you to do the work. Hollywood Homeseller dot com. I just shoot from the hip sometimes. Don’t over-think this. Get moving.
You sound like you have a lot of great experience to offer people looking to learn and excel with VFX. You could start a coaching and consulting company for little to zero cost to you up front.
We are sitting in the perfect economy and focus (“getting ppls attention”) for your craft!
Become the guide (Obi Wan) to someone’s (Luke) story!! It is both fulfilling and you can make it lucrative with some work and a bit of time.
Start with fiverr.com. Peopleperhour etc
Lawn care work, hot dog cart, home painting, gutter cleaning, house cleaning, window cleaning, would all be some things you can get started with if you just really need to do something.
I’m in recruitment. If you can get assignments, I’m sure you have a pretty good network. You could hite for perm positions and do consultancies. It’s just sales basically, but you can start with a computer and your network at least. If you score a gig or place someone at least in my market the going rate is 10-25% of candidates offer.
There are businesses that help older people digitize their photographs, old home movies, etc.
Plenty of work in video editing for corporate and events in the US. But the prices are not the same as tv/movie. Easy to stay busy though.
I would say, no job is safe. Especially not in VFX. And VFX is so hard, so many things to learn.
Did you consider Amazon?
Where are you from originally? Have you considered freelancing your VFX skills to architects and real estate developers? They often need fancy CGI for virtual tours and things like that.
If you’re good at something, you can always adapt to a new kind of client by **repackaging your skills** and showing how they can help sell the client’s products or services.
**The key is networking**. You can use the Meetup app to find people in your area and build your network.
You need to find something that you actually like and want to do. Getting into an industry just cause it makes money isn’t always the best idea, you’ll get bored quick and will want to jump ship.