Aspie Entrepreneur

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Hello,

I have been thinking about working for myself since it is very very hard for me to work with other people. My Job now is in Human Resources, imagine an Aspie working in Human Resources, were the interaction with people/humans is on a day to day basis, but I make really good money doing it and have been doing it for a few years now. The paper work part of it is easy, but the problem is that they keep freaking promoting me, when I have told them not to give me any promotions. So now, I am getting to the point were I want out. But not to settle for another Job, if the average Aspie knows the definition of Passive income, it calculates to me of minimal contact with Human Beings as possible, while getting paid.


The Idea: Not sure if anyone has heard of DVDNow Kiosk machines, but I have been researching this hardcore for about 2weeks now, non stop. I believe, with a key location, and a few machines, I would be able to generate a generous amount of income, and hopefully to match what I make now. But that would take quite a bit of time. A brand new machine cost around 20,000USD, but I have found some used ones for sell around 6,000USD. I believe, by me not having to use a loan to purchase the machine, I would come out great and have a good advantage since there is no loan involved. The hardest part of the Job will be filling the machine every friday and replacing about 5 movies, the old movies I will sell back to the supplier or sell on ebay. I have researched the overhead maintenance and support cost and it is around 200USD per month. I believe the machine will do good at a Grocery store, or large apartment complex away from any Redboxs. I know I can't compete with them, and I won't try, but I will lock down areas that they are not interested in. They are very corporate when it comes to location. I understand that with technology, these things will probably die out, and I understand allot of people are just downloading movies from the internet, but I also know that there are still allot of people that don't care for internet and can't afford it. My mission will be to infertrate the area most likely to not have internet. Some of these areas will probably have internet access, but I will still take them on since allot of people have no idea what they can do on a computer. I believe overall, if the foot traffic in the area is high, then I should be ok, I realize this is a short term investment, but if it works, it will throw me into other things which is what I am counting on. Please don't bring up redbox, I know they are dominating, but they have some flaws I have seen that I can make money off of. Just you know, this is not the first thing I have started working on, about 7 months ago I got my own website up and running, nothing fancy, but I wanted to test the waters. Travelhotelbooking.net, she is page rank 2, which I am proud of, but she is not making that much money yet, and I don't have allot of time for the site, but I will come back to it. I have about 25 positions in the stock market, geared towards high Yielding companys, I know I will end up paying taxes, but it does not brother me since I pay around 20k in taxes every year anyway. I am doing everything I can to phase out the need for a Job, so I need some highly logical minds to tell me if this all makes sense, and what path would you take if you wanted to stop working and get out of the stress of dealing with so many people all the time. I know I will have a few customer compliants with the DVD machine, but nothing that I get with my current Job now, so it would be easy for me to handle. Aspies, please let me know your thoughts.

Sorry about the incomplete sentences, I don't have my external keyboard.

Just a few thoughts in no real order:

How much will royalties cost you?
Starting without borrowing money is very good. Loans repayments can and often do kill startups.
It may be tricky to find good locations that aren't already taken.
You will have to pay a fair amount of rent wherever you locate your machine. Even though it only takes up a small area, if it is in a prime spot you will have to pay a lot per square foot.
You are probably best off just getting one machine to start off. Keep your job and see how it goes. If the one machine turns a sensible profit then look into getting more until they bring in enough to keep you. Giving your job up straight away is a very risky move. I had little choice in the matter and I was lucky enough to get away with it but I still would not recommend it.
Pick a 'bail out' loss and stick to it. If your enterprise loses more than this amount throw in the towel. Don't keep trying to recover your losses. You'll only get into trouble.
Put some more work into your website as well. If you have several different sources of income you are much more likely to succeed.

Being self employed can be very rewarding and things would have to get pretty bad before I ever went back to an employed job. As it is I earn a very good income doing things I enjoy doing. It did however take me several years of very hard work with little income to get to this point.

You need to be able to keep motivated over a long time or you will probably fail. Can you do this? My main motivation is that the only other alternative is employment and I really don't want that.

Thanks for the reply,

It is not exactly a franchise, so no royalties will be paid. I do however have to pay for online transaction tracking, and boardband service which comes to 150 per month, and new rentals, depending on how many are released for the week., the supplier for the DVD's gives big owner discounts and buys back the used DVD's that I am no longer displaying. I will do some investigating for locations and competition when I get home from over the water. Redbox dominates public areas, there weakness may be that they forget about residential places, college campuses etc etc. Another thing it allows me to do is advertise other peoples business, I figure if I get 2 business willing to advertise their business on my machine it will cover most of my expenses, especially if my daily rentals are low. I understand about me paying rent for a location, I was wondering would it be better/smarter for me to get a contract saying I will pay 10 to 15 percent of my profit. Even though I hate my Job, I am not crazy enough to let it go just yet, not until I have almost matched what I make now. For now, this is a test run in my eyes, kinda like dipping your toe in the water to see if it is warm or cold. I did some investigating, RedBox is not Dominating Puerto Rico, sure they have a few machines, but hardly dominating, which tells me they are still expanding into international Territory, which I can get a piece of the action as well. Yeah, I feel you on picking a bail out, I should have learned that with stocks. The website was something that was new to me, and I only knew a little, plus I was not doing the SEO & SMO on the site, I had a team working on it since I never had the time, but I do know a few things, I thought that was impressive for someone that had no IT experience to get a site running. I believe Aspies hate working, period, I have wanted out for a long time. I have been over in Afghanistan working as a contractor for almost 7 years now, and have seen allot of things good and bad that I thought I would never see, but the bad, tells me that I am still motivated since day one of getting off the plane and stepping foot on ground, my drive is like yours, working with/for people scares the he11 out of me. If you have any other ideas, please share.