You might be considering a business in Romania. The reason? Well, maybe you live here. Your spouse or parents moved you here, you fell in love with the culture, you have Romanian ancestry that you are getting back in touch with, or you had another plan here that didn’t work out and you just like living here so you want to stay.
Some businesses are great, others not so great.
Full-time businesses as side businesses
A business is a lot of work, and can take your full attention. Your competitors are giving their full attention, and you are likely to fall behind. If you try and run a full business in addition to your career, you might end up too exhausted for either. The business will eat up more money as you are unable to pay attention to spending, and you will just end up with a lot of debt. You could get fired from your job for neglecting it, so you will be unable to pay that debt.
Of course, there are successful side businesses out there, and some people have jokes of normal jobs that they can pretend to do while doing the side business. Just make sure you realize that a lot of time in the business is more than just customer contact time. Actors need to learn lines, teachers need to prepare lessons, accountants need to keep up with legislation, driving while tired can be fatal, and so on.
Lack of clear business model
It is true that it makes sense to adapt to market changes and opportunities, but what is much more difficult is just adapting to whims of stakeholders or false stakeholders.
If you are not sure what services you are supplying, you might end up hiring people with nothing to do, or buying products that you won’t use, or worse, renting premises that you have no need for. Long term contracts create expenses that need to get paid. This will destroy your cash flow even if you get a good price on everything, and it will also drain time and energy needed to run the business.
Poorly documented business
If you sell something at a loss, you can claim taxes, right? Well, not if it is personal goods. If you don’t keep great documents of your business, then no accountant can help you.
Charging too little
Some people think that offering a free sample helps. It can, if you have a large enough full priced product and if enough people who try the sample go for the larger project. A little taste of a watermelon might encourage buyers to buy an entire one. That said, if you give away an entire watermelon for free, all you are going to do is put other watermelon sellers out of business as well as yourself.
Offering free taster classes in a language school can disrupt your usual students.
You need to not only cover your expenses, including business expenses, living expenses, emergencies, and so on, but also to have some left over to take advantage of future opportunities. And remember, if you are unable to do your job for any reason, you might need to hire a substitute. But can you afford to do that at the prices you are charging?
Crowdfunding (especially Seedblink)
Seedblink is a nightmare. I wish I had the money back that I invested with them.
When you are asked to sign away a document, they claim that they will answer any questions. They have answered none of my questions. How did the business lose money? How do they plan to make more money next year? How much did the leaving executive get paid? All these and more appear to be secrets.
Despite only giving a loan (which should mean you gain money, not lose it, right?), your details are available to other investors. They could leak, leading to more spam in the future.
NFTs
NFT supposedly stands for non fungible token, but perhaps a better definition is a non-feedable tulip. (That is a reference to the tulip craze in Holland, where everyone was buying tulips at increasingly crazy prices. Eventually, there was a guy trying to sell tulips for a thousand gilders each, when a gilder was worth something like a pound of gold, and gold was . No one bought it. The craze was over, and the crazy lost a lot of money.
Now, in old commerce, you could eat and sell the tulip itself. With intellectual property, you might have the exclusive rights to sell images and videos of the tulip, or make books based on the tulip, fragrances that smell like the tulip.
Now, with NFTs, rather than owning the tulip itself, or the artistic rights to reproduce any aspects of the tulip, you own an electronic certificate saying that you were dumb enough to buy the NFT of the tulip. That certificate is duplicated many times on the internet, increasing the chance that you will get spam from more nutcases.
Fake real estate
Reading the newspaper reminds me that there are scams. I am not really into investing in real estate in general, because there are endless expenses (especially if you are unable to rent the property, which is very likely in a country with a decreasing population and a low birth rate).
But if you do invest, do a little research to make sure the person selling actually owns the property.