The corporate solopreneur
Role playing the wrong game
“What’s on your roadmap for Q3? Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
That’s the stupid question I asked at the beginning of my freelancing journey.
Actually, not so stupid
In the correct context. But when you had a $250 contract with a client, it just doesn’t make sense to ask this.
But naively, I thought, “In my previous job, that’s what the team did, and we landed 6-figure contracts. That will make me look professional and get me recurring work.” In hindsight, I was roleplaying in the wrong game.
The clients we worked with in my 9-5 were enterprise companies or startups that had a successful product and secured funding to do a V2. They were very, very far from the bootstrapped or small businesses I was working with at the time.
I have a hammer
And I was banging it on my client’s head.
I got ghosted roughly 90% of the time. Because they probably didn’t have a master plan of how their year was going broken down by quarter.
That’s the stuff executives or managers would do in big companies because they have to show their bosses how they are going to spend their budget and how helpful it’s going to get to reach the company’s goals.
Chill down, boi
Pretty much the right solution.
I’m not working with big enterprise companies or funded startups, nor do I want to.
So in the end, what worked was understanding and realizing the context behind each of those businesses. They don’t have grand schemes and magnificent visions of the future. They just want a process or a part of their company automated. They hire me for a project. If we find some other projects to do, why not. Otherwise, we part ways and they’ll come back to me when they need something else done.
The right tools for the right job
In the end, it’s fine if I don’t have the tools for a specific job or situation. Next time, I’d assess the situation and see if the tools I have fit the particular context of the problem. If not, I either figure it out, ask for help or find the right tool somehow.
What about you? Has that ever happened to you? How did you handle the situation?
3 juicy links of the week
On Friday, I started a challenge to make $1 per day by selling something—anything—for 100 days straight. It’s been 4 days, and the experience has been interesting to say the least! You can follow the whole behind-the-scene on my Twitter.
My unconventional coding story
This guy had a shitty job for 10 years and somehow found the time to learn coding when he was told his department would be outsourced. I love how he was paid to learn while finding gigs on Upwork and how he levelled up his life big time in a decade.
My Amazon FBA business made 20K per month, and I ran it from a tiny notebook.
A great lesson from Mike. I’ve also been trying to pay experts or find people who know more than me. Most often for me, it’s mostly about keeping a peace of mind and making sure a professional is helping me.