The views expressed by the contributing Entrepreneurs are their own.
With wages stagnant and layoffs seemingly part of everyday life for the past three years, many professionals have sought to start a sole proprietorship business. A sole proprietorship is a business (often digital) that the owner can run without a team.
In September 2022, I quit my job. Despite having two law degrees and a Master of Sciences, I was landing a one-year contract that paid me $50k a year while working 50+ hours a week. Now, I had some savings and had been planning to start my sole proprietorship venture for a few years, so I wasn’t starting from scratch. Before this one year contract, I founded a tech startup and worked a higher paying job in the tech industry.
Related: 4 Ways To Make Over $1 Million With Your Internet Business
When I quit my job, I figured I had six months of runway to make enough to cover my annual expenses before I got a job. It is vital that before you embark on any solopreneurship journey or give up your source of income, you know exactly how long you have to make your business work. This allows you to minimize stress by defining a stopping point instead of endlessly dragging yourself and your family through the pain of trying to start a business while drowning in debt.
Let’s start your journey to $150,000 and learn exactly how I did it, step by step.
Related: The 5 Stages of Personal Wealth — How to Master Your Money for Business Success
1. Hack your original audience
The biggest challenge in building a sole trader business is starting the journey and building an initial audience. Going from 10,000 to 50,000 followers is much easier than going from 0 to 10,000. From my experience and talking to many content creators, I have learned that you need to hack your first 10,000 followers. There is no set formula for this early stage of building your brand.
The most common mistake I see when people start their journey is that they try to build systems that can get them from 0 to 100,000 followers. This doesn’t work. you will need to fight for each subscriber until you reach a base of subscribers who are consistently engaging with your content (often around 10,000). Once you have a fan base, you can start building your systems, but it’s a waste of time in the early days.
My first step started about two years before I left my job. At the time, I was working for a newsletter publication, sending summaries of daily business news to about 40,000 business people every day. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to add a link to my by-line for over a year, prompting readers interested in legal information for their startup or small business to sign up for my newsletter. This little trick helped me get my first 10,000 followers.
Other ways I’ve seen content creators hack their first 10,000 followers include viral videos, product creation, viral tweets, cold messaging, cold emails, paid ads, and more. If you are starting your journey, this is where you need to be creative and focus all of your time and effort. Until you manage to lose your way to 10,000 followers on social media or a newsletter, you will struggle to monetize effectively and consistently as a solopreneur.
Related: 4 Ways to Avoid Loneliness as a Solopreneur
2. Focus on one channel
Once you get 10,000 followers on a channel, you need to focus on that channel. For me it was email. For ten months, all my content was written for email. if I had time, I reused it for social media. A big scaling mistake that solopreneurs make when building their audience is immediately trying to scale it to multiple platforms. Don’t lose momentum on a platform by dividing your attention. Dominate a channel before using your influence and follow that channel to give you a headstart on any other channels you choose to use.
3. Diversify your sources of income
While you should focus on a single channel for growth, you need multiple channels for income. My audience is startup founders. I get paid by advertisers to promote products, by the founders themselves to teach them how to raise money, and by investors to refer companies to them. Focus early on securing multiple sources of income. even if you’re earning little from each source, it’s better to increase the size of those offers than to try to find new channels when others are desperately drying up.
Related: Diversify Your Income: Protect Your Finances With These Strategies
4. Capture each price point
When monetizing your audience, you need to capture every price point. A major failure I see today is sole traders charging $10,000+ for advice with no cheaper services available. While it’s true that a $1,000 offer can cannibalize some of their higher-priced sales, I’ve found that lower-priced products can help generate interest in higher-priced products and build trust and loyalty with your audience.
If you only help people who can pay $10,000 for advice, why should the average person follow you? Too many creators abuse those followers who can’t pay large amounts. they build a brand with their likes, retweets, subscribes and followers and then abandon them when they need help.
Related: 5 Strategies to Thrive as a Sole Business Owner — Without Getting Burned Out
5. Interact with followers
The usual advice you’ll likely hear is to comment on top creators’ posts to gain exposure to their audience and grow your following. In my experience, this is not the optimal route. Instead, I chose to spend my time connecting with my audience.
Although my comments on their posts won’t get 1,000+ views, they create a relationship between me and my followers. It means a lot to a random follower or reader when I take the time to write to them or comment on their posts. In the long run, they’re more likely to endorse my posts, stay a follower, and buy a product, not to mention the many great relationships I’ve built with followers!
