How to Be Self-Employed
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Imagine this: you’ve locked down your digital privacy such that nothing is revealing your distinct identity on the Internet. You live in a place and have utilities to it that don’t connect to your name. You don’t connect to a phone tower at your house. In other words, you’re doing everything correctly. You’re off-grid from a privacy perspective. At this point who knows who you are, what you do, and where you live?
Well, potentially your employer. To get a job in places like the US you must fill out tax forms that demand your national ID number, your name, and your address. You probably have to live close to your place of employment, obviously, and at the very least your employer will knows things like how much you earn. You might also have certain non-negotiable requirements such as publicising your photo on the company website or registering for LinkedIn. Sure, there can be ways to get around all of this, but in general if you are an employee, you are not off the grid.
Now imagine, by contrast, that you are self-employed. You don’t have a boss; instead you have clients—or customers—many of whom have never seen you and don’t really need to. You have a business entity that interacts with them, including receiving payments in its own name. The address of this company—should an address be needed—is that of a registered agent.
This is the privacy advantage of being self-employed. To say nothing of the freedom advantage. Working for yourself means you can live in a privacy-respecting area, become an international nomad should you choose, or live in an RV and travel around your country. Self-employment also means the ability to choose your schedule, which allows you to see past the rat race and pursue more worthy endeavors. Self-employment is the ultimate reinvestment strategy. Running a business is also the only real way toward serious wealth, and that is because a business can scale and earn you money passively. Forget the Dave Ramsey nonsense about saving money for 40 years with the hope of surviving inflation. You’re unlikely to get true wealth by skipping Starbucks except on Saturdays and by investing your salary into a 401k (one of the attributes I’ve learned about successful people is that they are not afraid to spend money). As an employee there is a cap on how much you can make. As a businessperson you can get that life-changing wealth that can allow you to open up many more options in your life. Self-employment done correctly is the surest path toward personal freedom and privacy.
Oh, and by the way, as you know: nothing in this episode or on this show is legal or financial advice.
Let’s make no mistake though: self-employment is not easy. First of all it will require the initiative, risk-taking, and creativity to come up with a service or good that people want. It will require some extra accounting such as paying your tax agency the money that previously your employer would have handled, and keeping records of your business expenses and income and all the rest. You’ll be responsible for your own insurance and things of this sort. You’re essentially running things yourself. You’ll experience feast and famine regarding when you’re paid and by whom. You might end up working 80 hours to avoid a 40 hour work week. So it’s not that simple.
By self-employment I mean that you make your money without the need to sign employee documents to work for someone else. I mean also that you are not reliant on a single person or company for your money. Let’s say you take the simplest self-employment strategy and start working for your current company as an independent contractor. Well, if they decide to drop you, then you don’t have an income. That’s hardly what I would call being self-employed. And in fact acting in this manner is considered by the IRS to be employee behavior and not contractor behavior. Self-employment is about being independent from any single source of income while getting enough money to go about your life.
For privacy reasons your business should be portable. While I respect people who work as plumbers with a brick-and-mortar office in their city, having a physical business will put you on file with that city or county, and while you’ll still be able to have privacy by means of doing things in a business name, you’ll have a pretty clear footprint for anyone who wants to track you down. And you’re tied down to one place. So for the purpose of this episode, I consider self-employment as running an operation that does not have a physical requirement: in other words, that has an online component.
Now, let’s walk you through the mindset needed for self-employment before I give you some ideas for businesses. We’ll then conclude with some suggestions for achieving privacy throughout.
THE MINDSET
Self-employment is a mindset above all. You have to want to do something yourself.
I find that self-employment is overthought by many people. Go to any third world country and you’ll find people selling things on the beach or on the street. Sure, they’re not hugely successful, but they look at what people want, they acquire those things, and then they sell them. That’s a very simple model of self-employment. Find out what people want to sell it to them.
Don’t overthink this. All businesses are selling people something. The business you’re working at right now is doing precisely that. Unfortunately being an employee makes you lose sight of the bigger picture. You’re a middleman trying to appease your boss instead of appeasing a customer. Self-employment is about cutting out the middleman—your boss—and solving a problem directly.
Once you start developing this mindset you’ll see opportunities everywhere. Is a pandemic threatening to sweep through the nation amid a mask shortage? Learn how to sew masks, make hundreds of them, and market them on your local websites. Is some public figure like Andrew Tate taking off in search engines? Have several hundred replicas of his trendy sunglasses imported from the Chinese website Alibaba and sell them on your own Shopify website. The ideas never stop when you start recognizing them.
Notice the trends happening. Notice the popular products making the rounds. Be an avid follower of Amazon top selling lists in various categories. Regularly check the most downloaded apps. What are people downloading, buying, investing in? A hundred years ago during the California gold rush a man named Levi Strauss either didn’t believe the hype or didn’t think he could compete. Instead he started selling shovels and pants to the prospectors. He became rich from doing so while most prospectors ended up with nothing. He recognized a need and accommodated it.
People want all kind of things. You simply have to acquire those things and sell them yourself. Stores like Tesco and Wal-Mart in past decades have benefited from being the only ones to know that you can have cheap goods made in China, slap your own label on them, and sell them in stores for a huge markup. Today’s Amazon sellers have undercut these retailers in this process and some of these sellers are one person selling from a laptop while traveling the world. Today you don’t even need to physically touch the product you’re selling, much less store it. You don’t have to create anything. You simply have to acquire something and then pass it along with your own packaging and marketing spin on it. And while the marketing is the issue in this case, the basic process has never been more simple and available.
Bolster your education in entrepreneurship through reading and watching. My favorite book is MJ Demarco’s UNSCRIPTED: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Entrepreneurship. Definitely pick that one up for some motivation and red pill gems. Likewise there are myriad YouTube channels of people doing their grind in various online businesses and showing you how. All of this is good for motivation, but you’ll have to etch out space for yourself at some point. The work of creating a profitable business requires an immense concentration of creativity and committed effort. It requires having an open mind and looking around at what opportunities are available. A business creator might starve for days with no clear path, and then one day it might strike him. Or he might starve for longer. No one is coming to save you. So you have to get after it and keep going even on the bad days.
For this reason I highly recommend you don’t just quit your job until you have a means to offset that income. Although I do recognize that stress can be good and that necessity is the mother of invention. And remember, there are short-term jobs always available on Craigslist or from your local companies, many of whom are willing to pay you cash for things like manual labor. You have many companies these days paying high wages for basic jobs. You have food banks. You have welfare. Uber is always available. You can sell your household items on eBay that you don’t need and buy yourself an extra month or two. Chop down your dead tree and sell it as firewood. Expenses can always be cut drastically. It is pretty hard to actually fail in the West.
The basic mindset of self-employment is to start seeing problems to be solved. As an employee you’re used to ignoring the end-customer and thinking instead of how to please your boss. That’s a silly view of business Entrepreneurs are the most unselfish people on earth. They put themselves in the shoes of other people every moment of the day and ask: what do these people want? How can I help them? That’s the mindset that you have to adopt.
EIGHT IDEAS
Okay, fine, you want a few concrete ideas for self-employment. Let me first start by discouraging you from one particular path. Resist the get-rich-quick schemes that don’t involve a stable income stream. Your odds of getting wealthy by day trading stocks or crypto are fairly slim and certainly unstable. I much prefer to pursue a solid business model where you are selling a good or service to someone and where you don’t have to invest a huge amount upfront and trap your money in an up-and-down endeavor.
Okay: the ideas. I’ve already mentioned the one. You can sell things on Amazon. Plenty of people are doing this these days. You can approach this in a few ways. Some people buy cheap goods from outside the country—China for example—import them, spruce them up with their own packaging, and send them to Amazon facilities to be sold. Maybe you get creative: there are people who have become rich selling toilet paper with the face of the current US president on it. People will absolutely spend money on a novelty or humorous item, and these are so simple to create. Or you can try to compete in a larger market and offer something that competitors are not. To be fair, there are more people selling on Amazon each day and if you choose a popular category you have a steep uphill battle. Your best bet is to use your creativity to find something that does not have an overly strong market presence on Amazon and focus on that.
Number two. Let’s say you have a particular skill: photography or drawing or editing. You can join a website such as Fiverr, 99Designs, Upwork, or even various subReddits such as Jobs4Bitcoin to find contract work. Sites like 99Designs and Upwork can be more exposing as they can require photo IDs and qualifications, etc. But others like Fiverr and obviously Reddit are much more relaxed. Take your skill and sell it online. Pretty simple. If you think yourself a decent rapper, then you can offer to record rap songs for company advertising or for entertaining diss tracks. Explore digital nomad forums and see what these people do for a living. To put it simply: if you can do your work on a computer then you can probably be doing that work as a self-employed contractor.
Also realise that you should broaden the appeal of your skills. Let’s say you have a good camera and some decent photography skills. Unfortunately few people are looking for the kinds of photos you typically take. So you learn some of the basics of taking photos for Amazon sellers and sell that service. It’s very much in demand. Always think about broadening your market by recognizing the needs of the people with money around you and don’t stick your nose up at any opportunity.
Number three: Ebay. You can sell things you own, things you buy from others, things from friends and family, or go to yard sales and shops and find things that have value. You can scan books at bookstores to see their value. If you go around your town with some savvy, you can find enough second hand stuff to sell on a website like eBay and live to fight another day. Most people don’t realize the collectibles they have stored in their attic.
Number four: along similar lines, Craigslist. I recall a story of someone using some basic mechanic skills to buy broken fridges and then sell them for a handsome profit. All of this ran within Craigslist. You could learn some of these skills and then deploy them. Just make sure to do it all in cash, which is easy enough on Craigslist. Once again, this is unattractive work that can definitely pay the bills.
Number five: making content online. I’m not even talking about having a channel where you talk about things that you’re an expert on. YouTube and social media present endless opportunities because they have billions of eyeballs on them each day. An option that doesn’t require expertise is to take clips from popular sports and put them into a highlight reel or compilation. You could then accept donations or advertising money on YouTube. This option requires almost nothing from your end. Just time. There is an endless appetite for sporting events and compilations. You could then get on Instagram and TikTok and funnel people over to your main channel or website. Is football over-represented? Then how about locking down a different niche sport such as tennis or golf? Or finding a way to make entertaining collages around a certain theme: worst plays in rugby history for example.
Let’s mention here in passing that context is important. When do people want to watch sports highlights? Probably the morning after they occur. Possibly within hours of the event. If you are the first to market, you can get up the rankings. Part of moving away from a 9-5 job is precisely in recognizing that work must be done when your customer wants it: not when you want to do it.
Number six: we return to Amazon. And we return because it is a massive market with huge amounts of money flowing through it. Another idea is to re-sell on Amazon quality things that you know people already want. There’s a channel on YouTube called Reezy Resells that shows this lifestyle. It’s not glamorous, but certainly viable. The idea is simply to buy products somewhere—anywhere—and sell them for more on Amazon. So let’s say Costco is having a sale on electric toothbrushes. You buy fifty of them from your local store and resell them as your own salesperson on Amazon. This could be outside heaters, bottles of ketchup from a popular brand, or cotton swabs. Maybe you find a niche candy from another country that is rare in your country and find a way to get them imported. You can then charge six times the original price and people will buy them. This happens on Amazon every day. It doesn’t have to be glamorous at all. In some of his videos Reezy will rent a van, drive around to 6 Home Depots within three hours of where he lives, and end the day with 40 sale products that he knows he can sell for $8,000 profit. That’s not bad for a day’s work.
One note on Amazon Seller accounts. Typically Amazon Seller will have an elaborate vetting process where you will even have to get on a video call and show your passport next to your face. I don’t actually know if Amazon is storing these: probably they are. There will be some non-negotiable privacy barriers to entry that you will have to weigh in your costs. Of course, if your friend is *ahem* your business partner, maybe he could take the bullet for you on these kinds of things.
Number seven: self-publishing. That’s something that I do. And on that note check out my book The Watchman Guide to Privacy on Amazon. Please leave me a review there, by the way, which helps me a lot in the algorithm. Amazon Publishing makes it incredibly easy to sell a book. You basically just have to write it and format it. And create a cover. Amazon does the rest, including printing on demand and dealing with returns. Obviously you’re not guaranteed a best-seller overnight. But if you have talent for writing, and you can solve a problem with non-fiction, you can potentially do well enough. And sometimes you don’t even have to write. The top selling book in the privacy category on Amazon is often a blank notebook where you can write down passwords. And there are adult coloring books with Jordan Peterson quotes that also do fairly well. Ask yourself: why are people buying this? Is it the cover. Is it a clever idea? That stuff sells. Who cares if you think it’s stupid or wouldn’t buy it yourself. That’s a huge mistake that businessmen make. You’re not selling to yourself; you’re selling to everyone else. And everyone else likes stupid things.
You can also, by the way, go around Amazon and sell PDFs directly on your website. Michael Bazzell has started doing this using a service called SendOwl.
Number eight: streaming. You obviously already know that people stream themselves playing video games and otherwise entertaining viewers on platforms like Twitch. If you take this popular route, do it professionally, take it seriously, and find a way to stand out. Maybe you avoid that competition and find a way to help someone who is already streaming by managing their accounts. In all of these business ideas there are people who need to grease the wheels. Of course women have discovered that they can make money on the Internet just by, well, existing and while I’m not advocating all of those methods at all—which by the way have accounted for one of the great wealth transfers from women to men in world history—I will point out more generally that you have various advantages as a person that you don’t always recognise. So if you’re a moderately attractive woman you could create a Bitcoin channel, pretend to talk about Bitcoin, and in every video be dressed up to the hilt and smiling. And funnel men to your Instagram where you’re on the beach. And give out your Cash App and Bitcoin address at every turn. And if you do that you’ll get ten times as many followers as a guy who actually knows something about Bitcoin. There are worse ways to make a living. Maybe.
To complete this section, just remember that you cannot get away with mediocre. You have to do your service well. Giving someone something of value doesn’t mean that you have to be an expert. It doesn’t mean that that thing has to be serious and peer-reviewed and all the rest. An entertaining cat video provides value to people. You just need to do something that offers value. Do not be mediocre.
THE PRIVACY PROCESS
Let’s talk a few basic privacy tactics as you move toward self-employment. A lot of my suggestions involve Big Tech companies, and so you’ll want to be careful about exposing your IP address and personal details there while not getting locked out. I find that creating a YouTube account on public WiFi reduces your getting locked out of your account when you sign in later with a VPN. So definitely consider that. Immediately put 2FA on any account to reduce that company’s suspicion of you as well. Try to placate that company as best you can by also using the same device and VPN consistently when you log in.
On that topic realize that installing TikTok on your phone may give it access to things you’re not comfortable with, including potentially your geolocation. Phones are very bad in this regard. But a phone app has additional functionality these days and is more likely to be trusted if you ever have trouble logging in.
be prudent about what name and information you give. If Instagram reaches out to you to prove you own your account, does your name at least have the same initials as the person who signed up? The same birth year? Hopefully this stuff won’t happen, but if it does remember that they can boot you out and that could be devastating to your business.
Let’s talk about having a business entity. You don’t really have to have a corporation to do business. You can always do something in your name. The benefit of a legal entity such as a single member LLC in the USA is one of privacy and liability reduction. When you have an LLC opening accounts for you, you can use that LLC’s name, it’s EIN number instead of your Social Security Number, and otherwise have it as a bit of a buffer between you and the world. This is the case with eBay, where if you sell from a personal account you have to give up all this information, whereas if you run your eBay account through a business entity you can get away with using the entity’s information.
A single-member LLC in the USA might cost you $150 per year with a decent registered agent to manage it for you: including using their address and signing names instead of yours. It’s a very simple process, actually. And there are four states in the US that allow you to create an LLC without revealing the owners: New Mexico, Wyoming, Delaware, and Nevada. Technically you’re meant to register your LLC in the state in which you do business, but if you are completely online there is some ambiguity about that matter. Again, not legal advice. We’re just talking here.
With your corporate entity in place you can start using it as a buffer as often as you can. Sign off as the company, uses its tax ID number, use its address, and always find creative ways to hide behind it as best you can.
Unfortunately corporation formation is easy compared to getting a bank account. One quick way around this is to accept crypto. If you can do this, absolutely give it a go. But not everyone is willing to accept crypto, so you’re cutting off a huge portion of your audience. In that case your best bet, I’ve found, is to skip these online-only banks and go to a physical branch of a bank. They’ll get all the information from you that they’ll need—and you’ll have to give it to them as you would any financial institution—but the reward is the ability to send and receive payments with a corporate bank account.
A few other things as we conclude here. Most countries are going to want you to keep track of your profits in order to tax you on them. If you’re a small operation avoid online solutions like QuickBooks and just use spreadsheets and folders for as long as you can. Keep everything offline is always the best policy.
Think about whether you want to share money between your business and personal bank accounts. This creates a small connection between those banks that maybe you don’t want to have. In that case you can simply keep your business money in the business account, or create a separate personal account to receive the payouts. Or take money out of an ATM from your business account.
Do your best to create separate accounts for personal and business things in general. Two Amazon accounts, different email accounts, etc. It’s good practice for liability reasons in addition to privacy reasons.
As you start to ruminate on self-employment the privacy consequences and opportunities should become more clear. Remember, if you work for a company, you are technically a shill. So stop working for the man and start working for yourself. That’s the only way to privacy.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet