ChemtrailDreams

Is he correct in his accusation? If he's right it's not defamation.

I once went to one of these to sign up. There was a desk there, and a guy sitting behind the desk. He introduced himself as "Sail Boat", apparently his name, and he said he was just released from prison and he was friends with the owner. He was nice enough. He showed me around the nastiest gym, puddles of sweat (or worse) everywhere I've ever seen. I'm sure the gym was very profitable but Sail Boat did not get my credit card and my sign up.

Coffee roasting is an extremely competitive industry. Places like Black Rifle that just re-badge someone else's mid or low tier beans and sell them to consumers who don't know better were very popular 5~ years ago and they largely all failed except for a few, notably BR for leaning heavily into subcultures of conspiracists and edgy right-wing marketing. You can still make a buck being a right-wing media grifter selling low quality products like bad coffee, tactical baby gear or fake brain pills but that market is pretty saturated too.

As someone who has done freelance, pay rates on places like Upwork have gotten so bad that everyone I know has abandoned platforms to go back to other forms of seeking jobs. Upwork self selects for rushed, low quality work and egregiously low pay.

Sometimes the shame is that you know at some level your business is shameful, embarrassing, crass, or a scam. Things like dropshipping, MLMs, etc. That's when you want to listen to your gut. If instead you know that you are proud of your business and it makes the world a better place, then your family and friends will be proud of you too.

This sounds like a passion project, not a business. Take a page from the wikipedia/Godot/etc book and simply ask for monthly donations from users with no perks because you're one person offering a free service. I'm sure you'll get some bites.

I think you should value your wife's input more. Any success I have ever had was by holding the worst case scenario in mind at all times and making smart decisions. If you're driving near a cliff, do you not want to see the cliff so you know where to not drive off? If either of you is too emotion-driven I think it's you.

If you used the work laptop you're fucked. If you used your own computer you might be ok, but you might need your boss's permission.

Yes, in cities they are almost all opened as vanity projects of adult children of wealthy people and operate at a loss. Some of them stay open for the exact length that their business loan allows them to and then go out of business. The only ones that make money are localized in small, extremely rich towns and are tightly controlled by the local wealthy property owners.

Yes, obviously. Anything that smells like this is a scam. Everyone here needs to develop their scam detector more.

Nobody trusts their bosses after a bunch of people were unceremoniously laid off recently and a bunch of other people were forced to work in highly dangerous conditions as 'essential workers' during the past 3 years. Promises were made and then broken around WFH, further eroding trust. Debilitating contagious disease are still rampant, and understanding previously extended to workers for COVID is no longer there, and more people have to work sick. Cost of living has increased, and despite much of the macro data, many people's wages have not kept up. I believe most of the factors around low motivation and productivity are a combination of poor health and declining life expectancy, material financial conditions, and betrayal from promises made by employers.

So bottom line is with credit cards I don't pay anything to get cash back, the merchant is charged a fee and the cc companies come out way ahead in profit. At a 1.5% cash back rate (a pittance compared to credit cards), if you're charging a $5/mo subscription I would need to buy $333 in products per month to come back out to zero and get the same value I would get from Wirecutter today. Your business would need me to buy less than that and be incentivized for me to buy few products, leaning your reviews negatively, to be profitable. You would also need a well-paid editorial staff and a large testing facility to buy and test hundreds of products for it to be a higher value than free sites like Wirecutter, requiring up-front capital and likely much more than a $5/mo subscription. I don't see this working or being 'neutral'. Additionally, neutrality is not the main hurt point of review sites for me, the main hurt point is not reviewing the products I am interested in or the use cases I want to use them for.