If Everyone Is Selling, Who's Buying?

New to this series? Start with Part 1: If Everyone Is Talking, Who’s Listening?

Recently, I came across a woman on social media who said something that stopped me: “Do I want to be an entrepreneur? Not really. But I cannot bring myself to apply for another job.”

It was funny. It was relatable. But underneath it was something I’ve been thinking about for a hot minute. How many people are becoming entrepreneurs because they genuinely want to, and how many are doing so because traditional employment no longer feels like a viable option?

The job market is complicated right now. Headline unemployment numbers don’t tell the full story of job seekers facing longer searches, repeated interviews, and increasing difficulty securing employment. For someone navigating that reality, the options can feel increasingly scarce.

Naturally, people begin looking for alternatives…

Start a business.

Monetize your expertise.

Become a consultant.

Build a personal brand.

Turn your knowledge into an offer.

The Entrepreneurship Escape Hatch

Entrepreneurship is increasingly positioned as an escape hatch. Can’t find a job? Create one. Got laid off? Become a consultant. Can’t get through the hiring process? Work for yourself.

Individually, that can be excellent advice. Some people discover through necessity that they prefer the autonomy of entrepreneurship. Others build successful businesses that create opportunities they might never have found through traditional employment. But entrepreneurship isn’t simply employment without a boss. It requires finding customers, communicating value, generating revenue, managing uncertainty, and developing skills that may have little to do with the expertise someone originally intended to sell.

More importantly, starting a business is not the same as building one capable of replacing a salary. Not everyone wants to spend their days thinking about sales pipelines, lead generation, marketing, pricing, and cash flow. There is nothing wrong with someone saying, “I actually just want a good job.” A healthy economy should have room for that person, too.

Yet we’re increasingly directing people exhausted by the employment market toward an entrepreneurial marketplace that can be exhausting in an entirely different way. And that raises an uncomfortable question.

If Everyone is Selling, Who’s Buying?

In Part 1 of this blog series, I explored what happens when millions are encouraged to become content creators simultaneously. The supply of content can keep expanding, but human attention cannot. There’s a similar imbalance worth examining in entrepreneurship.

We can continue creating more sellers, but every seller still needs someone on the other side of the transaction who is willing—and able—to buy. People have finite incomes, and families have housing, groceries, transportation, healthcare, childcare, debt, and other expenses competing for the same dollars entrepreneurs hope to capture. Businesses face their own budget constraints. Every purchasing decision exists within these financial realities.

When people feel financially uncertain, their priorities shift. Discretionary purchases receive greater scrutiny, consumers become more price-sensitive, and spending increasingly favors essentials. Marketing can influence how people perceive value and where a product falls on their priority list, but even brilliant positioning cannot overcome economic reality.

You cannot market discretionary income into existence.

Now consider the woman at the beginning of this article. Imagine she loses her job, spends months applying, watches her savings decline, and eventually decides to start a business. The economy has gained another seller, but it hasn’t necessarily gained an equally capable buyer. In fact, she may now be spending less than she did while employed.

Multiply that dynamic across enough households, and the question becomes: What happens when the number of people trying to monetize grows faster than the purchasing capacity available to absorb what they’re selling?

Supply Doesn't Create Demand

This is where I think much of our entrepreneurial advice skips an important step. We encourage people to package their expertise, create an offer, launch a website, build an audience, produce content, and monetize. Most of that advice focuses on the supply side: What can you create? What can you sell? How can you position it? How can you get more people to see it?

But those questions only tell half the story. We also need to examine the other side of the transaction: Who actually needs what you’re offering? Who can afford it? How many of those people exist? How many customers do you actually need? And what is the most credible path between you and them?

Viability Before Visibility

Suppose you’re a consultant who needs eight $10,000 engagements to generate $80,000 in annual revenue. You don’t need everyone to know who you are. You need eight clients willing and able to purchase your services. Gaining more followers or generating more views on social media may not be your most important objective. A better question becomes: Where can I find those eight potential clients, and what is the most credible path to reaching them?

Maybe social media is part of that path. Maybe it isn’t. Perhaps four carefully selected industry conferences place you in rooms with the people who make those purchasing decisions. Three strong referral relationships might generate more business than a year of daily posting. Professional associations, strategic partnerships, direct outreach, former colleagues, or speaking engagements might connect you with prospective clients more effectively than an algorithm ever could.

Somewhere along the way, I think we began conflating business development with audience development. They can overlap, but they’re not interchangeable. An audience isn't a customer base; visibility doesn't necessarily equate to revenue.

Relevance Over Reach

What if, instead of constantly trying to maximize reach, we became more intentional about relevance? Rather than measuring success by how many people encounter our content, what if we focused on reaching the people most likely to need, value, and purchase what we offer?

Your business doesn’t need everyone to pay attention. It needs the right people to care.

If you need eight clients, your objective isn’t necessarily to become interesting enough for 100,000 strangers to stop scrolling. It may be to identify the environments where your prospective customers already gather and establish a meaningful presence there. That could happen online, offline, or through some combination of both. The strategy should begin with the economics of the business rather than the demands of an algorithm.

Entrepreneurship Beyond the Hype

None of this means we should discourage entrepreneurship. It creates extraordinary opportunities for autonomy, innovation, employment, wealth, and solutions that traditional institutions sometimes fail to provide. Nor do I believe the answer is simply telling people to return to conventional employment when many are exploring entrepreneurship precisely because that system isn’t working for them.

But we should be more careful about presenting entrepreneurship as an easy escape hatch. There’s another marketplace waiting on the other side, and it has constraints of its own.

Attention is finite. Purchasing power is limited.

Perhaps the more useful question isn’t simply how we encourage more people to sell, but how we help them build businesses that are genuinely viable within those constraints. That requires thinking beyond visibility, monetization, and personal branding to examine actual demand, customer capacity, and sustainable business models.

We've become remarkably good at teaching people how to enter the marketplace. Perhaps it's time we become equally invested in creating the conditions for them to thrive within it.

Are we actually creating more genuine opportunity—or merely manufacturing more competition?

I’d genuinely love to hear how you’re experiencing this. Leave a comment—let’s talk about it!