Why would you get office space if you can be a one-man startup? You can meet your clients at their office or home, meet somewhere professional and private, or even rent something by the hour from one of those places for a veil of legitimacy if so inclined.
To work? Unless you do all your work at home. Which is going to be your apartment. Do you have enough room for an office? Or are you going to use the kitchen table?
For legitimacy. As for renting space:
1. Might not be any space in your area, depending on where you live.
2. Know what sucks? Having to work around the schedule of your client, you, AND whoever else may try to book your space.
Of course, if you wanna start up a store, shop, or something else, well... good luck doing it on a "rent by the hour" mode.
Why would you start off with employees to pay?
Depends on the business. Maybe not an accountant but certainly other ventures require more than one person.
Government licenses to operate aren't really that pricey.
True.
A website for an accountant isn't a significant venture. How hard is it to get Wordpress installed, find a survey form plugin for Wordpress, and customize a template? A properly motivated person could do it themselves if they didn't want to pay someone to do it.
Motivated, sure, but it would likely not look very good. No amount of motivation is going to give you skills.
And wordpress? Really? Let's make your business look like a joke from the URL. I'm sure it won't hurt.
Marketing... modern marketing methods are Pay Per Click, or Pay Per Action, electronically targeted by location, age, interest, and search query. You could just pay for 30 leads and stop if you really wanted. Classifieds exist, as does word of mouth when you do a good job. None of this requires $500 a week to start off small.
Yes, tell me, how often do you click those little pop-up boxes? I, like many others, block ads. And geo location is great but you're not gonna get many hits if you're that small.
You weren't smart enough to start a business and you have failed as well. Back to your mother's house for you.
And you are? How many businesses have you started? How many times have you failed?