Be careful with your thinking here. If it really is bad soft skills that is keeping you from getting/holding a job, then you'll have a tough go at your own business. Running a business requires a lot more soft skills than getting a job, because you live and die by your sales, no matter how good your product is.
So just make sure that you have at least an idea of how you will get some sales that involve minimal interaction with other people.
> Running a business requires a lot more soft skills than getting a job, because you live and die by your sales, no matter how good your product is.
Yes and no. The good thing about the internet is that you can get a decent sales funnel without having to talk to a single person. Write interesting blog posts on relevant topics, help others by showing how to solve their problem with your product, etc. There's a lot to learn here for a techie nerd, but the learning curve here is much easier for those who aren't naturally good at dealing with people.
Getting people into your sales funnel is only the first step, though. Converting those people into sales, however, is an extraordinarily social, soft-skills reliant activity.
I say this as someone who had no problem getting jobs, but social anxiety made me desire the idealized notion of working in my home office and seldom conferring with people -- just delivering great solutions with every waking moment.
I started my own business and quickly discovered that about 80% of my time was courting and talking to people. People love talking. Getting someone to commit to a sale is often just a brutal enterprise.
From a time perspective, the advice to write pertinent blog posts just isn't really that lucrative anymore.
>I say this as someone who had no problem getting jobs, but social anxiety made me desire the idealized notion of working in my home office and seldom conferring with people -- just delivering great solutions with every waking moment.
Same here.
>People love talking. Getting someone to commit to a sale is often just a brutal enterprise.
You just need to distinguish the types. The type that just loves talking is usually obsessed with self-importance and doesn't really care about the solved problems. You can talk them into a sale if you schmooze them good enough, but as a nerd you have a few chances. The type that appreciates great solutions doesn't care about chit-chat more than you do, but they are harder to reach because they are usually busy solving problems. There's a separate long story why the first type is better at forming hierarchies and obtaining political pull, but long story short, you need to focus your funnel on the second type. If the central part of your site is your smiling picture and a phone number, you'll attract the former. If it's a product trial, well-organized documentation and tutorials, the latter will be your catch.
I am apparently more confident (to some people) at selling a product of my own on the internet than I am at selling myself as an employee in person. They're not exactly the same for me.
In any case I seek to find work that I would be happy with, and where my current soft skills wouldn't prevent me from doing so.
In the professional sense, I have pretty good interactions with people at work, and generally considered to be a reliable worker. But social faux pas are judged ever more harshly at job interviews.
This isn't necessarily true. One of my past mentors is somebody who just isn't wired for corporate life, but works really really well as a consultant for those same corporations. The sheer amount of work he has had to do to claw his way to the top of the web development consultancy world is insane, but it was a much better fit for him than trying to shoehorn himself into a corporate political hierarchy.
Glynn Shotwell, the COO of SpaceX, recently in a Ted interview said that the rocket business is about relationships. I feel any business is a lot about people. Technology is important as well, but the relationships have a little edge.
Gwynne Shotwell handles sales relationships in addition to being COO -- SpaceX sells a high-priced product, and as they say, "people buy from people". Her engineering background is probably a huge help.
You might need less soft skills as you will be using exact skills on-demand, because you would have broader chance to find a fit. Of course, getting the client is another story..
So just make sure that you have at least an idea of how you will get some sales that involve minimal interaction with other people.