Is the market really saturated?

Sounds like a cheap excuse to me.

“It’s a race to the bottom.”

“Clients are lowballing left and right nowadays.”

“Is it me, or are views getting lower?”

We’ve all heard those comments from people around us.

When people say or write that, all I hear is, “I prefer to blame external circumstances rather than do what’s in my control.”

Moving forward despite bad circumstances

My father immigrated to France around 18 with almost nothing. He still went to one of the best engineering schools and, a decade later, became a director in some of the big consulting companies we know.

I probably inherited from him the strong belief that there is a lot I can do to get out of a shitty situation. There is a lot I can control in my life. My sheer will and grit can get me pretty far.

Sure, there are external factors. But it’s cheap to give up the control we have over a situation because of those. Have I tried everything I could before admitting defeat? Blaming my environment is the equivalent of admitting defeat.

I was interviewing

Ben Hyneck

this week (find the interview below), and we were chatting about solopreneurs bearing 100% of the responsibility of their business. For some reason, it took me a year or two to grasp the difference between blame and responsibility.

The difference between blame and responsibility

Let me take an example to illustrate the difference. In May 2023, my wife and I got married and left for a couple of weeks. I just quit my job in April. Before I left, I wrapped up some client work and told them I’d be back in a couple of weeks.

Once I was back, everyone ghosted me. I was early in my freelancing journey, but still it was rough. I didn’t expect it. For a week or two, I sent many proposals on Upwork (at least 4-5 per day), tried Fiverr and replied to automation-related keywords on Twitter. It took a while, but eventually, the work ramped up, and I’ve barely sent any proposals since then.

Any of the excuses at the beginning could have been applicable. Everyone was talking about the recession coming. People were being laid off, with tons of people getting onto the freelancing market, presumably. I thought about all that stuff a lot back then. Was it a stupid decision to quit, then? Am I just having a hard time because it’s a recession? Do people have tight budgets?

Those questions matter up to a certain point. But at the end of the day, the situation is in front of me, and I need to make progress. Those questions won’t move the needle. I’m responsible for the situation and the steps I can take to resolve it. I can blame my lack of timing all I want. I can blame the economy. I can blame competition. But it’s not going to solve it.

We go deeper in the interview with Ben. We chat about turning around challenges on the way to replacing our past full-time income. You can check it out by clicking the button below.

3 juicy links of the week

1. How to get from 0 to 10k to 100k to 1M per month

   1. In this interview, Daniel Priestley and Ali Abdall break down the path to go to 1M per month. The emphasis is on selling high-ticket services because products usually require a long period of investment in money and time before they take off. You need to sell 1000 subscriptions at $10 per month, whereas for a service, you could be selling $1000 per month and find 10 clients. Let’s be honest. The math checks out, but there’s also a learning curve with service businesses: developing the offering, finding the clients, closing the sale, and fulfilling the work. It’s not easy, but it’s easier than finding a shit load of people to subscribe to your app.

2. But That Doesn't Scale

   1. Marie Poulin (one of the first Notion consultants) asks, “Why do we need to grow at all costs?” It feels like the concept of heaven was replaced by retirement (wait decades to get your reward). In the entrepreneurial world, the equivalent is working 100 hours per week hoping for a liquidity event in a decade or two. Who knows if heaven exists? Who knows if I’ll still be alive and well to enjoy retirement? Who knows if my product will get tremendous traction? It’s been brewing in the zeitgeist; people and myself included want to enjoy our lives now (while still thinking about the future), and it doesn’t necessarily include sacrificing everything to grow and scale no matter what. I can just mean reaching a solid phase and maintaining it.

3. 10 things that got Dan Kulkov and his partner 20k per month

   1. I like this tweet because it doesn’t bullshit. We’re in the middle of an AI revolution and everyone and their family wants to leverage it to avoid doing the grunt work. So many people have come to me to create automated content without their input. We all want that magic formula. We all believe it exists, only to realize later that it will take effort to figure it out. It won’t magically appear out of nowhere. We figure it out because we try many things that work and others that don’t. We do it many times until we find something that gets enough traction.