🟢 27 days in, I fold?!

The pressures of solopreneurship and how I'll respond

(5 min read)

I got laid off in December and then enjoyed a few weeks of holidays with lots of family visiting. 🎄

My start date of this new solopreneurship adventure I consider to be Jan 5, 2024.

When you subscribed:

I promised I’d keep sharing what I know from my previous entrepreneurial successes, what I’m learning now, and also the truth about how things are going.

I knew it wouldn’t always be rainbows and butterflies. 🌈🦋

Today, let’s cover:

🟢 The mini panic I’m in

🟢 What hasn’t worked

🟢 What looks like it’s working

🟢 How to proceed / what I’m excited about (Don’t worry; I won’t make this whole post a bummer)

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Panic

27 days¹ into this journey, I still have no plan… other than what I recently shared with

Maya Sayvanova

of

One-Person Business Success

:

I want to earn a comfortable living for myself rather than work hard for owners of another company.

So I want to attract an audience and help them.

I want to find a way to enjoy myself while I do it and minimize unenjoyable tasks.

I also want to avoid just creating a job for myself.²

I want to create assets so that my income can scale faster than my effort.³

For example, courses, apps, paid subscriptions.

But I need to get clear on my ideal customer, the transformation I can help them achieve, and what that looks like.

“Scared” is a word I’ve almost never used in the past 40 years I’ve been alive.

Not because I’m macho but because I wasn’t in touch with my emotions.⁴

But now I’m starting to identify thoughts that definitely feel—yes, I’ll use the word—scary.

(I’ll pat myself on the back and acknowledge that I’ve gotten better at identifying emotions in recent years, partially because I was forced to, but that’s a different story.)

At the turn of the year, I committed to myself:

I’ll publish a twice-weekly newsletter (this one!), attract 10k subscribers, and figure out how to profit $200k/yr while shrinking my workweek to 20 hours. 

I’ve long dreamed of that kind of life.

The “prudent” approach would be to work a full-time job and start earning extra income on the side…

“Take the leap” only once the business has enough momentum.

But the layoff killed Plan A.

So Plan B was:

Focus 100% on my solo project: Write on Substack, and see if I can come up with a way to earn enough money to cover my living expenses.

Then yesterday I realized what a smarter person would have uncovered ahead of time.

My mortgage and other expenses are larger than I fully grasped. 🤦‍♂️

Our savings accounts will be dwindling faster than the vague expectations I had in my head.

After that, our investment accounts would start shrinking too.

These thoughts feel extremely uncomfortable.

Even before now, I’ve already wondered:

Given how much we’ve earned in our careers and how frugal our lifestyle is, how in the world do we not have more in our accounts?

But that’s not a constructive thought, so let’s move on.

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Like what you read? This post is public, so feel free to share it. 🙂

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What hasn’t worked

I like the idea of “small bets”.

So I meant to quickly create a couple apps and share them with people.

If they “took off”, I could focus on building them out further, promoting them more, monetizing them, etc.

I created 2 apps.

Unfortunately I didn’t obey the principle that says:

When running a business experiment, it’s smarter to start a project with a strict time limit and loose feature goals than a project with strict feature specs and loose deadline goals.

People chronically underestimate how long it will take to build certain features.

I was no exception.

Even as basic as these apps are, they took me longer to publish than I intended.

SmartHomeList.com

“Your Amazon Alexa lists. Here on the web. Free!”

SmartHomeList.com attracted 64 free users already, which I would consider a win…

Except that my metrics imply that almost all of them signed up only out of curiosity.

Of the 64 people who have seen the site so far, I think it’s solving a pain for very few of them.

Monetization here is highly improbable.

Cross-platform Emoji Picker

I also built my first ever desktop app.

And instead of building just for one operating system, I was interested to build an app that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux!

It was a cool learning experience.

And I personally use this app every day and will slowly add features that I enjoy.

But only 2 other people have tried it out. I suck at promotion.

And this seems unlikely to solve a severe pain for anyone.

Posting daily Substack Notes

It’s early, but this has seemed ineffective at attracting more of an audience.

Posting daily on LinkedIn

The LinkedIn gurus say that posting daily for months or years is key.

I have not tried it for a year straight yet.

Maybe something magical will happen later.

But I can say that I’ve had 20-day periods where I get literally 0 likes. And very few impressions.

I’m generally wary of investing too much energy into a platform that doesn’t make your audience “portable”.

(Email newsletters feel much more sane to me.)

I understand that if I were a copywriting wizard I’d do better, both in Notes and on any other social media.

I’ll improve over time.

But:

I don’t want to be the type of person who sets alarms on their phone for when “the big creator accounts tend to post” and then rush to go “engage with them and their audience”.

Not only would that feel like I’ve created a job for myself, but also it would feel like a particularly superficial one.

I might continue to show up both on LinkedIn and Notes.

But I’m starting to see what

RJ Youngling

was saying about social media gurus “lying by omission” about the most important determinants of audience growth.

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What looks like it’s working

My first month brought more subscribers than I was expecting!

(Thanks for being here!)

It’s stupid of me to say this, since it’s so early, and everything can go wrong, but:

I’m excited to see that my audience has grown faster than my projections for the exponential growth I’d need to reach 10k subscribers within 1 year.

(What if everything goes right?)

In the coming weeks, if I am able to sustain this kind of growth, I’ll feel quite encouraged and might change what I’m about to say:

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How to proceed / what I’m excited about

When I say “I fold”, I mean that I will now go ahead and look for a part-time job to pay for our expenses, since I’d prefer not to see our accounts vaporize.

It’s disappointing.

I really wanted to get this business rolling ASAP and never have to work for an employer ever again.

I even had a dream last night where I met a guy who told me “If you’re thinking of getting a part-time job, DON’T!”

But the guy in my dream didn’t offer a better suggestion.

So I’ll try posting a profile on Upwork and that sort of thing.

Looking for part-time TypeScript web engineering jobs that I can do Mon-Fri afternoons.

I’m still optimistic overall, though!

I keep reading story after story about people like me who commit to a vision for their life.

Survivorship bias makes it hard to know whether I’m delusional for being so inspired by those stories, but I do believe I can create the life I want.

A) It’s helpful to remind myself that I’m really just fine-tuning from here, because my life already has most of what I want.

B) In our past businesses, Katie and I experienced a lot of the elements of what we want. That taste has stayed in my memory.

Also, this is Issue #11 out of 105 for 2024.

There will be many twists and turns, but I can already tell that some of it will feel easier over time!

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🕙 What we learned in recent posts:

🟢 The gross thought that helps me every day

🟢 “Impossible” transformations I needed to experience for myself

🟢 To never have to work a day in your life

🟢 Life’s forbidden pleasures

🟢 [See all posts]

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📓 In my personal life this week:

A 2-year-old in my life broke his femur. Yikes! Ouuuchh 😮

Wanna know how?

Playing ring-around-the-rosie. (Cutest way ever.)

At first I wondered how this could be possible. The doctors said when kids are this small, their femurs aren’t as big and strong as you might guess. “It’s the 5th one we’ve had to repair this week!”

Great news is:

In only 4 weeks, he’ll be as good as new. And eventually there will be no detectable sign of the break at all.

The human body is so resilient. It makes me hopeful.

I bet someday reversing aging will be possible. 💪

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💬 Question for you:

When have you had an abrupt change of plan, and how did you make the best of it?

Reply or leave a comment!

I’ll be so excited to write back to you.

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And if you've got a moment, I'd love to hear what you thought of this email.

Send me a quick message — I reply to every email ❤️

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I’m encouraging myself to remain detached from anyone’s response to the work I’m doing.

To do it for myself, regardless.

But at the same time, I appreciate you being here and rooting for me. 🙏

And if you’d like to recommend⁵ my work to others, surely it would help mellow my lizard brain and make this more sustainable!

Thanks! 😁

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📣 Special thanks to:

Andi Leeman

of

Earn More, Live More, Work Less

Substack says I got a subscriber who came from you! I appreciate it! ❤️

Louie Bacaj

of

The M&Ms Newsletter

and

Kristina God

of

Kristina’s Newsletter

, your recent restacks help me feel welcome.

1. At the time that I’m drafting this post.

2. Katie and I earned $5,000 per client in our previous business in a somewhat scalable way.

But it was uncomfortable enough that I’m sure I want something more scalable going forward.

We built the business in a way that very much depended on our continued efforts week after week (like a job).

3. Financial wealth = income-producing assets (not services)

4. Remember my recent post where I shared the story about curing 31 symptoms that I had when in my late 20s? Emotional awareness is key.

5. If you’re a fellow writer on Substack, you can visit /publish/settings/recommendations and search for “Ryan Walsh” and recommend me.

Substack recommendations are powerful!

If I get subscribers from your recommendation, I’ll include a link to your publication in a future issue as a thank-you.