What kind of business are you looking to start? I dream of being my own boss too.

First, congratulations on the new family member.

Not knowing exactly the nature of your entrepreneurial skills, I have found good success with meet n’ greet, press the flesh as it were. Some businesses need a lot of advertising, some don’t need any. Join your local Chamber of Commerce or Business Association. Keep your ears open. Treat every interaction as an opportunity to grow your business.

For example, I am getting along in years so farming 20 acres got to be a bit much for one old guy. I started leasing acreage to other local farmers mainly for growing silage. I was at one of our local farmer’s market one day and by chance overheard/eavesdropped a conversation a small group was having. They were talking about looking for small plots of land that they could all go in on together and have a communal garden. You help with the labor, you get a share of the grow type of thing.

So I approached them and listened to them talk and suggested that I may have the solution they were looking for. Long story short, I now have four, one acre plots that I lease to locals for their communal gardens. I provide the pipe stand for a water supply with bib to split off different watering troughs and I plow the plot for you. All you have to do is work the soil, grow your veggies, and profit.

So basically now, I have positive cash flow with moderate to minimal work. I still maintain a one acre plot for my personal grow but in all honesty it’s far to much for just one person to eat. I usually donate most of that to local food banks in town. Which is another good thought to keep in mind. We all get help along the way in life. No one is self made. Pay it forward. Give something back to the community local to you.

You create business accounts.
Use them exclusively for business.
Use a separate browser to access those accounts.
Create a firewall as much as you can between the personal and professional online.

Business is inherently ethically dirty. Doing work for money is already an ethical step down. But in the environment you live in, it’s necessary to survive. So you do it. For you and your kid.

Use Thumbtack or search engines/listing sites specifically for your type of business. Make friends with your clients. Cater to a specific group. Word of mouth can be powerful at gaining new business, but it takes about 6 months to get going.

Do local networking the way we used to do it before social media — make up business cards with QR codes advertising what you can do, and leave the on public and semi-public bulletin boards (community centers, sports and fitness places, churches and shopping malls, parks that have boards set up, farmers markets, etc.). If you need to, try going door to door. If you can afford it, buy bulk mail and distribute a flyer locally. Let your friends and neighbors know what you can do. Take a few jobs below cost at first ifyou need to, listing your regular rate and a promotional or loyalty discount.

Personally I never made enough money to survive on doing this, but it was enough to keep me above water between contracts.

just make business accounts on mainstream social media. idk what your job is or if you can do it but in parallel you can also have business accounts on federated/private/ethical whatever you call it social media and with that you are also promoting other networks etc. if u have more people working with you use some federated chat xmpp for example instead of slack, stuff like that

it’s not your fault, there is no “ethical” production/consumption in capitalism

For running a public-facing business where your customer leads have to come from online, I don’t have a good answer, except maybe to take an attitude that it’s your company rather than you who is using the social media. I did a similar thing when I had to do some windows development for a client. I don’t run windows on my own computers, but the client supplied a windows laptop that I did the work on, so it was their computer rather than mine, ok fine. I realize it’s possible to overstretch that concept but it’s a matter of your personal comfort level.

As an ordinary working stiff working privately for companies or clients but not seeking public exposure, I haven’t had significant problems despite not using the big social media including linkedin and github. Just respond to advertisements and stuff like that to get jobs, and self-host a public code repo if you want one. Once someone commented on it but it still wasn’t an issue.