The following is an extension of a rant posted to LinkedIn in response to some jabroni whose only remark was "this checks out".
I see this every now and then in various social feeds and it's always funny to me how the context of the platform changes people's perception of it. This is LinkedIn, where it reads like motivated go-getter success-porn. Elsewhere, people are eating this dude alive for his nonsense numbers, and no, this doesn't "check out".
I've started two businesses in the state of New Hampshire and while the cost of incorporating is well below the $999 stated here, the implication is that self-starting and directing your professional destiny is going to cost you less than a modern smartphone.
And man, do I have thoughts on that.
Here's the thing: A thousand bucks isn't even close to what it costs to start a business. If you're selling a product, unless you're producing this product entirely yourself with materials on-hand, you have to build a prototype, which no matter what the product is, it's going to cost you a tremendous amount of money. A recent project that a couple friends and I were tossing around was for a sort of all-in-one grill instrument that did a bunch of cool stuff. We mapped out a Kickstarter project for it with different add-on components for each stretch-goal. All we need was a physical product to present in the pitch video. The project froze in its tracks when our proposed prototype came back to us with a price tag on it: $13,000. Thirteen grand for what was, essentially, a fancy knife. One of my partners was savvy in the ways of industrial design and manufacturing, and we certainly weren't taken for a ride on this price tag. We just didn't have that kind of money and you can't really Kickstart a product if all you have is a 3D rendering of the thing you'd like to make. We were lucky that one of my partners was quite adept with Blender, the exceptionally wonderful open-source 3D design app, otherwise, we would have had to hire some jabroni on Fiverr to do it and that would have taken quite a bite out of our $999 budget.
Next, you have to source manufacturing and supply chain and if you do this domestically, in the US, you're looking at a significant amount of seed capital needed to produce an item that's going to cost consumers a tremendous amount of money in the end. Send it overseas for manufacture and you're still shelling out a mountain of cash for your product but it'll be far more likely to sell since the cost of production came down by quite a bit. But $999 is still a hilarious notion in this case.
Now, let's say your product is a service and doesn't require materials and shipping, you're still looking at spending a vast sum of money on marketing because even if you're able to build your own website on something like Squarespace of Wix you're going to have to drop a good deal of money on either an SEO consultant and/or a PPC consultant because that whole scene is byzantine wizardry that's going to take you a lot more than the hilarious suggestion of 2 hours to learn. And 2 hours? Dude, I've been playing bass for twenty years and I still sound like it's the first time I'm picking it up every time I play. Alas, your $999 likely bought you a single full-day of a qualified professional's time and still doesn't include your PPC budget. Trust me. The internet is noisy and if your marketing plan is adding to the din on Instagram and TikTok, get used to never sleeping again. I've freelanced for many people who take on the business of marketing themselves and while I have certainly seen a few of them make it work, it's exceedingly rare that you're going to be able to call on friends and family to patronize your business and spread the word. Guerilla marketing works, but it's a real high-stakes ride on the wheel of fortune, that one. The only way to hedge your bets and cut through the crowd of other people in your space shouting LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! is to hire someone whose job it is to hack the system and get you seen and it's going to cost you a significantly higher sum than a thousand dollars.
Your marketing budget, by the way, also applies to the product premise I laid out. The one where you somehow sourced a salable product in a large enough volume to derive a healthy living from with a little under a thousand bucks. And this is to say nothing of his thousand dollar smartphone. The sentiment which lies at the heart of this, by the way, is that poor people don't deserve creature comforts. It's the same idea as these Archie Bunker jerks on Parler complaining that people on welfare have phones, too, and it's shameful. "I work hard so deez guyz can have food stamps and dey got a phone datz betta den mine! Let's go Brandon!"
Now let's consider the place you do business. Do you require an actual place for this? If you intend to work out of your home, say goodbye to any sort of boundary between your work life and home life. When the two blur there will be no distinction between one or the other and while Russell here is suggesting that you hustle, grind, and sleep when you're dead, it's this shitty attitude that festers at the heart of the current labor shortages. The last couple of years have people reconsidering their relationship to work and the guiding philosophy of labor in America. This country was colonized by people whose sole outlook on life is that it is literally Hell, a tribulation that is meant to be endured and the only words appropriate for how they viewed work were harsh verbs like toil.
If you need office space, storage, or a place to build your widget, $999 might cover, like, 2 weeks on the lease of this place, but you can't sign a lease with only two week's cash of what is likely a minimum 12-month commitment. This entire notion is just outrageous and insulting because let's really get to the heart of the matter here: Russell Brunson, whoever the fuck he is, is floating the usual rich-guy meme that poor people are poor because they want tattoos and iPads more than they want a Ferrari. Even if this absurd idea had legs, that the road to riches costs no more than a modest personal investment and the burning desire to succeed, the people he's singling out in the blue text don't have a thousand bucks. Because that's how poverty works. It's quicksand and if you struggle to get out, the systems in place work hard to pull you in deeper. You can even see it in his comment on healthy eating. You ever buy groceries for more than just yourself, Russell? How about for a family of four? You're going to somehow provide three meals a day for 3+ people on a hundred bucks, you jackass?
What we need is a worldwide reappraisal of our relationship to work. Working-class folks are learning that they struggle equally with or without a job and no longer give a shit if there's enough staff on deck at their place of work to provide a timely service. The professional class is in the middle of an existential crisis as it dawns of them that all the pressure and stress that they live under isn't servicing some great good but, in fact, is just a soul-killing means to stuff the pockets of their boss, whose job seems to be replying to emails and talking on the phone.
If you want to go out to dinner, go out to dinner, take a picture of yourself enjoying a nice meal with people you like, take a picture of the bill and send it to Russell Brunson while giving him the finger. You know, for laughs. If you want to watch Netflix, watch Netflix. Put your feet up and relax, you've probably earned it.
Edit: I looked up Russell Brunson and it turns out that he's basically Great Value Tim Ferriss. A success consultant that writes books intended for Joe Rogan Experience fans and young people with more confidence than brains. His mother's name is Marde, which means shit in French.