The Industries I Would Avoid Starting In Right Now

1. 1

   Content mills and SEO agencies

   Per-article pricing against a substitute with no marginal cost. The clients who used to buy now produce it themselves, badly, and don't care.

   • ·Priced per article
   • ·Buyers have moved production in-house
2. 2

   Generic outsourced back-office work

   The billing unit is the hour, and the hour is the thing being replaced.

   • ·Revenue is indexed to the unit under pressure
3. 3

   Thin AI wrappers with no data of their own

   Your supplier is also your competitor, and they ship your feature as a checkbox at no incremental cost to your buyer.

   • ·No proprietary data
   • ·Feature parity arrives from the model provider
4. 4

   Commercial office real estate

   Demand didn't come back. The debt is still there, and leases signed before 2020 keep rolling off into a smaller pool.

   • ·Pre-2020 leases expiring into lower demand
5. 5

   Consumer subscription apps

   Acquisition keeps getting more expensive while trial-to-paid stays flat. A brand survives that. Most of these don't have one.

   • ·Rising paid acquisition
   • ·Flat conversion

How I put this in order. This is my judgment, not a dataset. I rank on structural trouble rather than a bad quarter: shrinking demand, a cost base that can't shrink with it, and a substitute that is already good enough. The lines underneath each entry are what I'm watching, not citations.