Time's Up
In my mailbox yesterday was an unexpected bill from the government, formally asking that I pay this year’s income taxes. These are calculated based on the previous year’s income and are generally deducted from a person’s pay cheque every month. However, as I’ve not had any income to deduct from for 100 days, the government is naturally inclined to seek its tithe directly. Unfortunately, the amount they’re asking means that my savings will no longer last into September and instead run out at the end of July, bringing my attempts to be self-employed to an end. There is simply no more time.
Thinking back on the past six months, I probably approached this endeavour all wrong. The plan was to build one or two active sources of income – things that would encourage subscriptions – and build a number of smaller passive sources. The passive efforts were all directory sites that catered to the Japanese market by presenting a curated list of highly-rated locations for specific niches. This required the creation of a platform that could automate the collection, transformation, and presentation of the data, which I was able to do in short order. Google and Bing have both indexed the sites and alternated between listing and de-listing the pages based on seemingly inconsistent expectations. As such, after nearly four months, they have generated 33 Yen from ad revenue.
Not at all worth the effort.
The active efforts were for things that interest me a great deal, and I thought might interest others. An education-focused site that would act as a lead-in for student reporting tools, a canine-centred Q&A site that consists of an LLM that was tweaked with dog-resources, and a writing support tool that would use an LLM to help encourage and refine personal writing. It would be easy to invest a year into each and every one of these, building tools that solve problems in a collaborative fashion. Two of these have been released, the third is a few weeks away from being ready. However, when I talk to people about these things, the response is generally the same: “I don’t need that.”
Not everything has a market. That much is obvious. However, what I find odd is that the things that really interest me seem to be so uncommon that I do not know of anyone who is also interested in them. Despite almost 20 years in education, the people I talk to at schools about software are not at all interested in moving away from processes that rely on a spreadsheet, a generic WordPress.com website, and email. WoofGPT, the dog-centred site, is unnecessary because of Google and ChatGPT. Soliloquy, the personal writing tool, is also irrelevant because very few people seem to write anymore.
To say that I am out of touch with modern people’s pain points would be putting it mildly. I am trying to solve problems that exist only for me. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but it does not make for a viable business model.
Last week I started dipping my toes back in the job-hunting waters. There are companies around Tokyo who are doing things that I would find interesting, but moving back there would be illogical. Around this part of the country there are companies looking for people with my general skill set, but my Japanese is not nearly strong enough to work in a “proper” environment. This is something I’ve been working on this past year, but it has not been the priority. If anything, my Japanese is worse today than it was a year ago when I was communicating with people daily. Now I interact with others once or twice a week at most.
Unfortunately, there is very little time for me to be picky anymore. In six weeks the accounts will be empty, which will make it impossible to cover the mortgage or food from the start of August. There are jobs that I could likely obtain relatively quickly, but the wages would be less than a third of what I made last year. Some money is better than no money, though it will require some things to be sold off to cover deficits.
So that’s it. My time is up. Until I learn what people actually want — and find a way to deliver it sustainably — self-employment will remain an aspiration, not a reality.