There’s a conversation that happens at parties, family dinners, and random encounters that every online business owner dreads. Someone asks what you do for work, and you have a choice to make. You can tell them the truth, the whole complicated truth about your Shopify store or your SaaS product or your content business. Or you can say something simple and watch their eyes glaze over with polite disinterest instead of lighting up with unsolicited advice and thinly veiled skepticism.
Here’s what I’ve learned after years of navigating this social minefield: just tell them you work remote. That’s it. Two words that end the conversation before it becomes exhausting.
The problem with telling people you have an online business is that everyone suddenly becomes an expert. Your uncle who still uses AOL email will explain why your pricing is wrong. Your neighbor who’s never sold anything online will tell you about this great opportunity she heard about on a podcast. Your old college roommate will pitch you on why you should really be using TikTok, or blockchain, or whatever the current buzzword happens to be. Everyone has opinions, and precisely none of them are useful.
Worse, you’ll get the questions. The endless, tedious questions. How much money do you make? Is it stable? What happens if Facebook changes their algorithm? Have you thought about getting a real job? Aren’t you worried about retirement? What’s your backup plan? These questions come from a place of concern, maybe even care, but they’re exhausting to field when you’re just trying to enjoy your cousin’s barbecue.
Then there’s the other extreme. The people who get too interested. They want to know everything. They want you to teach them. They want to “pick your brain” over coffee, which really means they want free consulting for their half-baked business idea. They’ll say things like “I’ve been thinking about starting something online too” and suddenly you’re expected to be their mentor, their cheerleader, their business plan validator, all because you mentioned what you actually do for a living.
When you say you work remote, though, something magical happens. The conversation moves on. People nod, say “oh that’s nice,” maybe ask who you work for if they’re particularly curious, and then you’re talking about something else. Sports. The weather. Literally anything other than your conversion rates and customer acquisition costs.
Working remote has become normalized enough that it doesn’t raise eyebrows anymore. Half the professional world went remote during the pandemic and never came back. It’s mundane now. It’s not interesting enough to warrant follow-up questions. And that’s precisely what makes it the perfect answer.You’re not lying, either. You do work remotely. That’s technically accurate. The fact that you’re working for yourself, that you’re the CEO and the janitor and everything in between, that’s just detail. Detail that doesn’t need to come up in casual conversation with people who don’t actually need to know.
There’s also something freeing about not performing your entrepreneurial identity for every person who asks a simple question. Being an online business owner can become such a central part of your identity that you feel compelled to announce it, to validate it, to defend it. But you don’t owe anyone that performance. You’re allowed to just exist in social situations without turning every introduction into an explanation of your business model.
The people who actually matter, the people who are close enough to you to understand and support what you’re building, they already know. They know the details. They know the struggles and the wins. They’re the ones you actually want to talk to about your business. Everyone else is just making conversation, and “I work remote” gives them exactly the amount of information they actually care about, which is very little.
This also protects you from the energy drain of defending your choices to people who fundamentally don’t understand them. When you tell someone you run an online business, you’re often implicitly asking them to validate your life decisions. And when they respond with doubt or concern or unwanted advice, you end up in a defensive posture, justifying yourself to someone whose opinion ultimately doesn’t matter. Skip that entire dynamic. Work remote. Move on.
There’s a certain wisdom in knowing when to be visible and when to be invisible. Your online business doesn’t need to be announced to every casual acquaintance. It doesn’t need to be explained at every social gathering. It can just be the thing you do, quietly and competently, while telling the world you work remote.
The paradox is that the more successful you become, the less you feel the need to announce it. The people who constantly talk about their online business, who make it their entire personality, who can’t get through a conversation without mentioning their latest launch, those are often the people who are still seeking external validation. The people who have actually built something sustainable tend to be quieter about it. They know it works. They don’t need strangers at parties to believe in it.
So save your energy. Save the explanations, the justifications, the elevator pitches for people who are actually in a position to care. For everyone else, you work remote. It’s true, it’s simple, and it lets you get back to the conversation, or the meal, or whatever you were doing before someone asked that question. Your business doesn’t need every casual acquaintance to understand it. It just needs to work. And whether people know about it or not has absolutely nothing to do with whether it actually does.
