MTF needs a slumpbuster: Too many swings, no hits.

[MTF]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

The truth is that starting a business in today’s age isn’t easy, especially not an online business. I’ve done very well the past year for which I’m very grateful but there definitely are a lot of problems on the horizon and there’s always the question of how far you can go.

For one revenue isn’t profit, and even profit isn’t profit unless you take it out of the business and don’t invest in its development.

Most entrepreneurs, even the very successful ones, are always on the brink of failure. Sure, maybe someone who has $10M in the bank has escaped that rat race — maybe.

But for me, sure I can take $200K for myself but all the other money HAS to be reinvested to keep growing. And the choice isn’t between growth and stagnation, it’s between growth and bankruptcy. There is no stagnation.

My advice for the newbies is sell sell sell, bring in the dough, and figure things out once that’s happening. Most people severely underestimate the amount of sales activity and marketing they’ll need to do to stand out from the noise.

I recently calculated my time… I spent an average of 20 hours every week on sales calls with people last year. Can you imagine? 20 hours, every single week. And that’s not counting time spent on anything else, including marketing to generate all those calls.

In my biggest month last year I spoke to 124 people over Zoom in a month. Can you imagine yourself doing that?

My advice for you is just get paid dude. You spend so much time building, but where’s the money?! It’s like trying to put together a brothel you got all this nice furniture and it looks amazing but where are the hoes?!

Stop trying to do complicated things and start asking yourself how you can get your hands on $$. That’s your priority numero uno as an entrepreneur. No $$, no nothing. You can’t even be an entrepreneur without money. It’s like saying you’re a general without any soldiers. The general is defined by his soldiers. What will you do without resources? These days even going to a public toilet costs money. Maybe you laugh, but it’s true!

I think what “broke” you is market timing. You had the bad fortune to time the market perfectly so you made a lot of dough, without many costs at all, and wothout even the need to reinvest in the biz. So that gives the appearance of success, but you haven’t gone through the absolutely gruelling pain of doing 12 sales calls per day, or testing thousands of creatives on ads, and so on. Most of us who didn’t get timing right and were successful had to do that. You don’t have that experience so when it doesn’t work, you stop pushing, thinking that if you have a good idea, it’s supposed to be easy.

You may have a good idea and make a ton of money. Hell, even with a bad idea you could get lucky and make a ton of money. But don’t count on it. There’s 1000 and 1 problems in business.

Let me tell you a story — last year early on we got hired by this agency. They were 3 guys, relatively early stages, they basically had 3 clients paying them $10K/mo in total. We helped them cross not 6 figures, but 7-figures.

Guess where they are at now today? Down to $20K/mo and looking to quit. They quickly discovered that the biggest problem, once you know wtf you’re doing, isn’t making sales. That’s something we can iron out quite quickly. It’s building a sustainable company. Most agencies will never tell you this, but their churn rates are 70%+ on average over a year from what I’ve noticed — especially true for advertising, SEO, PPC and marketing agencies.

Can you imagine? Bring in $1M worth of business, and 1-year down the line you just have $300K worth of business left. 2 years down the line and you just have $90K left. It’s like the sales have to keep ploughing in or you’ll go bankrupt. Is it any wonder that even if they cross 7-figures they’re not rich?

So there isn’t just ONE problem you have to solve in business. There’s many many different problems that you need to solve.

Maybe you have a physical product biz. Easy to scale. But your profit margin is just a measly 10%. You have to bring in $1M worth of sales just to be able to pay yourself a meagre $100K salary… which still leaves the business with no money to reinvest in growth!

 

[Kak]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

I think this is less about your business skills and more about what you demand of a business.

You usually have a LONG list of "I don't want to's"

Unfortunately, the vast majority of opportunities require doing at least some things you don't want to do.

The more things you exclude, the narrower and narrower the likelihood of success. Being open to feeding a business what it needs helps a lot.

At this point you know what you want to do and what you don't want to do... And you have the luxury of saying no. You're just trying to find something that fits that criteria. Do I believe you can? If you keep at it you'll probably find something, but it's going to be harder than being game for whatever, if only temporarily.

Trust me, I'm the guy that IS open to mostly whatever the business requires of me... And I've still metaphorically beat my head against the wall plenty.

I'll always scrub the proverbial toilets to make things work.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

You usually have a LONG list of "I don't want to's"

Unfortunately, the vast majority of opportunities require doing at least some things you don't want to do.

This reminds me of what Kyle said to me when I told him I don’t want to go fit an $8K water filter at someone’s home

It’s true — if you’re willing to do anything, making a lot of money gets a lot easier!

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

From my POV, you unnecessarily complicate things, combined with what @Kak said with all of these "won't dos" and unmovable beliefs.

Every time you post about a different idea, I'm like, "WTF? I don't get it!?" And then invariably, those ideas are always based on some hot trend you read about. More irony: Your avatar is about giving up 3 feet from gold, which you seem to do as soon as the struggle hits. Dig, no gold, go dig somewhere else: Yet, you never dig deep.

Again, your idea of business and collecting a profit is "X = Y + A + B + C + D" followed by all kinds of dilly-dallying with A, B, C, and D where your focus needs to be only X and Y. . . . "Well folks, if I create an optimized website and drive traffic there with expensive Facebook ads and then those people click on my ads then Google might pay me 12 cents for my effort, but only if the Google algorithm doesn't F*ck me this month."

Jesus Christ, if this was the best idea I had for delivering value (and making money) I'd feel EXACTLY the same as you.

Frustrated. Depressed. Miserable.

My idea of business?

Results = X + Y.

Not "Results = X + Y + A + B + C + D" where you pretty much ignore X, spend a fortune on Y, focus on A, spend time optimizing for B, hope for C, test for D, and then "maybe" get RESULTS.

Your struggles reminds me of the person who continually claims they can't lose weight, but also refuses to focus on what matters: diet and exercise ... or, Results = X + Y

As I wrote in my last X post, when you continually knife yourself in the back and bleed out, the answer to your problem isn't better bandages, the answer is to stop stabbing yourself.

 

[Fox]

Can we have a new thread for @MTF's post and the responses.

He is well capable of succeeding again and it would be great to have a dedicated forum thread to help make it happen.

 

[runnaboi]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

I have lost belief in myself a lot of times, not just in my business skills. I am not sure if it will help you, but what I do is find the smallest win I can achieve to chalk up as a "win". Rinse and repeat until you slowly get your confidence back. And I really do mean a small "win". For me at times it has been to walk around the block once in a week. Then slowly increase the goals. And make sure these small goals move you in the direction of your overall life goals - or 10 year goals.

 

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[Andy Black]

@MTF

Good for you posting. I think that's a good sign. I didn't want to say yesterday, but now you've opened up I'll post and try to help.


We're all the biggest limiting factor in our own businesses. I feel a lot of yours stems from beliefs and mindset.

You also seem bitter about putting in work and not getting results. It seems to permeate your mindset and responses at the moment.

I replied to one of your posts yesterday with a few podcasts that might inspire or help you. You keep saying you don't listen to podcasts (which I find weird if they might help you) but I made the effort. Yet you came back with comments about the people on the podcasts having success because they belong to "the right Twitter country club". I suspect you didn't listen to the podcasts. I also suspect if you did listen to them you'd find something wrong with them rather than just one nugget that would inspire you and nudge you in a slightly different direction.

So I think your main problem is your mindset at the moment. You seem to constantly throw the baby out with the bath water.

You've also said you don't want to do the marketing and sales. You just want to put your head down and produce content. That's you "following your passion". It's like the Karate instructor opening a Karate school next to 20 other Dojos who doesn't want to think about marketing and sales.

It's admirable that you can churn out 150 articles/newsletters, and that you then put your head down and create X number of videos from those articles. You can certainly ACT. I suspect you'd do better if you focused equally on ASSESS and ADJUST.

Marketing isn't complicated, or sleazy. It's a process of figuring out what people want to buy, and how to sell it to them profitably. It's not "running ads", sleazy promotions, or whatever else you think marketing is.

ACT. ASSESS. ADJUST.

What's your assessment of where you're at?

How will you ADJUST?

 

[Andy Black]

Oh, and get quick wins @MTF.

Noah Kagan has a good little book on getting started in a weekend. Whether you follow his blueprint or not isn't the point. You should be able to make a sale in a weekend.

A sale means getting revenue.

A lot of your current activity seems very long winded and you'll only find out if you'll make any revenue in months.

That feedback loop is too long.

Echoing what MJ said, your steps seem very convoluted.

Want to get somewhere quicker? Start as close to the end as possible.

Your goal is to earn money (by providing value).

How can you do that quicker? How can you start as close to the end as possible?

 

[MTF]

The truth is that starting a business in today’s age isn’t easy, especially not an online business. I’ve done very well the past year for which I’m very grateful but there definitely are a lot of problems on the horizon and there’s always the question of how far you can go.

For one revenue isn’t profit, and even profit isn’t profit unless you take it out of the business and don’t invest in its development.

Most entrepreneurs, even the very successful ones, are always on the brink of failure. Sure, maybe someone who has $10M in the bank has escaped that rat race — maybe.

But for me, sure I can take $200K for myself but all the other money HAS to be reinvested to keep growing. And the choice isn’t between growth and stagnation, it’s between growth and bankruptcy. There is no stagnation.

My advice for the newbies is sell sell sell, bring in the dough, and figure things out once that’s happening. Most people severely underestimate the amount of sales activity and marketing they’ll need to do to stand out from the noise.

I recently calculated my time… I spent an average of 20 hours every week on sales calls with people last year. Can you imagine? 20 hours, every single week. And that’s not counting time spent on anything else, including marketing to generate all those calls.

In my biggest month last year I spoke to 124 people over Zoom in a month. Can you imagine yourself doing that?

My advice for you is just get paid dude. You spend so much time building, but where’s the money?! It’s like trying to put together a brothel you got all this nice furniture and it looks amazing but where are the hoes?!

Stop trying to do complicated things and start asking yourself how you can get your hands on $$. That’s your priority numero uno as an entrepreneur. No $$, no nothing. You can’t even be an entrepreneur without money. It’s like saying you’re a general without any soldiers. The general is defined by his soldiers. What will you do without resources? These days even going to a public toilet costs money. Maybe you laugh, but it’s true!

I think what “broke” you is market timing. You had the bad fortune to time the market perfectly so you made a lot of dough, without many costs at all, and wothout even the need to reinvest in the biz. So that gives the appearance of success, but you haven’t gone through the absolutely gruelling pain of doing 12 sales calls per day, or testing thousands of creatives on ads, and so on. Most of us who didn’t get timing right and were successful had to do that. You don’t have that experience so when it doesn’t work, you stop pushing, thinking that if you have a good idea, it’s supposed to be easy.

You may have a good idea and make a ton of money. Hell, even with a bad idea you could get lucky and make a ton of money. But don’t count on it. There’s 1000 and 1 problems in business.

Let me tell you a story — last year early on we got hired by this agency. They were 3 guys, relatively early stages, they basically had 3 clients paying them $10K/mo in total. We helped them cross not 6 figures, but 7-figures.

Guess where they are at now today? Down to $20K/mo and looking to quit. They quickly discovered that the biggest problem, once you know wtf you’re doing, isn’t making sales. That’s something we can iron out quite quickly. It’s building a sustainable company. Most agencies will never tell you this, but their churn rates are 70%+ on average over a year from what I’ve noticed — especially true for advertising, SEO, PPC and marketing agencies.

Can you imagine? Bring in $1M worth of business, and 1-year down the line you just have $300K worth of business left. 2 years down the line and you just have $90K left. It’s like the sales have to keep ploughing in or you’ll go bankrupt. Is it any wonder that even if they cross 7-figures they’re not rich?

So there isn’t just ONE problem you have to solve in business. There’s many many different problems that you need to solve.

Maybe you have a physical product biz. Easy to scale. But your profit margin is just a measly 10%. You have to bring in $1M worth of sales just to be able to pay yourself a meagre $100K salary… which still leaves the business with no money to reinvest in growth!

Yeah my experience has been the opposite of yours. I've never worked that hard and never struggled as much yet retired early. I know it's still possible to do it because I know people who are still doing it. It's not an irrefutable fact that every business owner has to be a step away from bankruptcy.

It could be because you're in a different industry and selling services or because you have employees. If every business was like that (always at the brink of disaster) then I wouldn't do it at all. I value my personal life more than business.

I think this is less about your business skills and more about what you demand of a business.

You usually have a LONG list of "I don't want to's"

Unfortunately, the vast majority of opportunities require doing at least some things you don't want to do.

The more things you exclude, the narrower and narrower the likelihood of success. Being open to feeding a business what it needs helps a lot.

At this point you know what you want to do and what you don't want to do... And you have the luxury of saying no. You're just trying to find something that fits that criteria. Do I believe you can? If you keep at it you'll probably find something, but it's going to be harder than being game for whatever, if only temporarily.

Trust me, I'm the guy that IS open to mostly whatever the business requires of me... And I've still metaphorically beat my head against the wall plenty.

I'll always scrub the proverbial toilets to make things work.

I agree with that.

Most of my "I don't want to's" are definitely just because of my own preferences, limiting beliefs, and/or laziness. I need to work on that. It's all interconnected and is probably a defense mechanism as well (I don't want to do X but in reality I'm afraid of another failure so I'm telling myself I won't do it).

By the way, you writing skills have greatly improved. This was a very well-written post.

From my POV, you unnecessarily complicate things, combined with what @Kak said with all of these "won't dos" and unmovable beliefs.

That's a very interesting observation considering that what I do is actually motivated by wanting to do something simple. I can't grasp complex concepts and prefer to rely on math.

I see publishing as a simple business. Write, get people to read it, make money from ads with a predictable RPM.

I don't have to care whether they're buyers. I don't have to care if the product matches the audience. I don't have to care what price is right. I don't have to care about shipping or customer support. I don't have to care if in the end I have unexpected costs and my profit turns negative.

Yet maybe it's only simple in theory but not in reality. Or even if it is simple, it doesn't mean it's a good business.

Results = X + Y.

Not "Results = X + Y + A + B + C + D" where you pretty much ignore X, spend a fortune on Y, focus on A, spend time optimizing for B, hope for C, test for D, and then "maybe" get RESULTS.

Your struggles reminds me of the person who continually claims they can't lose weight, but also refuses to focus on what matters: diet and exercise ... or, Results = X + Y

I had this in self-publishing. Write X books combined with a (repeatable and predictable) launch strategy, make money. Writing was like 95% of the job and that was great while it lasted.

I'm just looking for something simple but maybe I just need to sever that mental connection with the past and stop looking back so much.

 

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[MTF]

Can we have a new thread for @MTF's post and the responses.

He is well capable of succeeding again and it would be great to have a dedicated forum thread to help make it happen.

Thanks but I don't think another thread will be helpful for the forum. I've littered the forum with too many progress threads that went nowhere.

I have lost belief in myself a lot of times, not just in my business skills. I am not sure if it will help you, but what I do is find the smallest win I can achieve to chalk up as a "win". Rinse and repeat until you slowly get your confidence back. And I really do mean a small "win". For me at times it has been to walk around the block once in a week. Then slowly increase the goals. And make sure these small goals move you in the direction of your overall life goals - or 10 year goals.

I understand that and can empathize. Most of the time I think of myself as a piece of shit so it's a win just to tell myself that I had a win and not laugh inside with contempt at myself.

 

[MTF]

We're all the biggest limiting factor in our own businesses. I feel a lot of yours stems from beliefs and mindset.

You also seem bitter about putting in work and not getting results. It seems to permeate your mindset and responses at the moment.

Yes, that's exactly the case. I admitted in my post that I'm a cynical self-hating hypocrite.

I replied to one of your posts yesterday with a few podcasts that might inspire or help you. You keep saying you don't listen to podcasts (which I find weird if they might help you) but I made the effort. Yet you came back with comments about the people on the podcasts having success because they belong to "the right Twitter country club". I suspect you didn't listen to the podcasts. I also suspect if you did listen to them you'd find something wrong with them rather than just one nugget that would inspire you and nudge you in a slightly different direction.

Yes I agree with that assessment.

It's hard for me not to be bitter and despise these guys. It's exactly the same thing as a handsome celebrity telling an ugly random dude how to pick up girls. Their advice is useless because it doesn't apply to a person like me who doesn't want to use social media and doesn't have connections everywhere. Any of these guys could launch a newsletter about eating decomposed leaves and they would still make money with it just because of their fame.

I checked the summary of these podcasts and skimmed through Nathan Barry's post on flywheels. I concluded it doesn't apply to me because you can't make a flywheel out of nothing. It's sort of like the advice how to write for Twitter when you have 0 followers. It doesn't matter how you write because nobody is reading it. Meanwhile, a cheap platitude will garner hundreds of thousands of views as long as you're famous.

You've also said you don't want to do the marketing and sales. You just want to put your head down and produce content. That's you "following your passion". It's like the Karate instructor opening a Karate school next to 20 other Dojos who doesn't want to think about marketing and sales.

Fair point and a very good simile.

It's admirable that you can churn out 150 articles/newsletters, and that you then put your head down and create X number of videos from those articles. You can certainly ACT. I suspect you'd do better if you focused equally on ASSESS and ADJUST.

I've recently learned that this ability is useless. Who cares how much I can produce if it doesn't make any difference. It's just busywork.

Oh, and get quick wins @MTF.

Noah Kagan has a good little book on getting started in a weekend. Whether you follow his blueprint or not isn't the point. You should be able to make a sale in a weekend.

A sale means getting revenue.

A lot of your current activity seems very long winded and you'll only find out if you'll make any revenue in months.

That feedback loop is too long.

Echoing what MJ said, your steps seem very convoluted.

Want to get somewhere quicker? Start as close to the end as possible.

Your goal is to earn money (by providing value).

How can you do that quicker? How can you start as close to the end as possible?

I don't have any products or services to sell and struggle to come up with any. This is why my feedback loop is so long. I just want to build an audience and send it to other people to monetize it because my own monetization methods suck (as evidenced by making $2.5k from 20k subscribers).

But to respond to what you said in a positive way (as I don't want it to sound like I disagree because I do agree with you), I just need to leave that concept of audience building behind because it clearly hasn't served me well.

I will try to figure out how to start close to the end and will never again do these silly long-term plans where you don't know if it makes sense until a year or two pass and you're getting nowhere.

Thanks for food for thought.

 

[StrikingViper69]

Yes, that's exactly the case. I admitted in my post that I'm a cynical self-hating hypocrite.



Yes I agree with that assessment.

It's hard for me not to be bitter and despise these guys. It's exactly the same thing as a handsome celebrity telling an ugly random dude how to pick up girls. Their advice is useless because it doesn't apply to a person like me who doesn't want to use social media and doesn't have connections everywhere. Any of these guys could launch a newsletter about eating decomposed leaves and they would still make money with it just because of their fame.

I checked the summary of these podcasts and skimmed through Nathan Barry's post on flywheels. I concluded it doesn't apply to me because you can't make a flywheel out of nothing. It's sort of like the advice how to write for Twitter when you have 0 followers. It doesn't matter how you write because nobody is reading it. Meanwhile, a cheap platitude will garner hundreds of thousands of views as long as you're famous.



Fair point and a very good simile.



I've recently learned that this ability is useless. Who cares how much I can produce if it doesn't make any difference. It's just busywork.



I don't have any products or services to sell and struggle to come up with any. This is why my feedback loop is so long. I just want to build an audience and send it to other people to monetize it because my own monetization methods suck (as evidenced by making $2.5k from 20k subscribers).

But to respond to what you said in a positive way (as I don't want it to sound like I disagree because I do agree with you), I just need to leave that concept of audience building behind because it clearly hasn't served me well.

I will try to figure out how to start close to the end and will never again do these silly long-term plans where you don't know if it makes sense until a year or two pass and you're getting nowhere.

Thanks for food for thought.

Are you willing to share what the product was? Maybe we can turn it around

 

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[Andy Black]

Their advice is useless because it doesn't apply to a person like me who doesn't want to use social media and doesn't have connections everywhere.

Not true.

I don't particularly want to use social media, it's more a hobby for me, an itch I haven't scratched yet. I'd rather build Google Ads campaigns that generate X number of signups a day for $Y and makes $Y back in revenue on the front end. The concept of turning it into a flywheel where it would naturally grow over time was an aha for me.

I can build trickles/streams/rivers of steady leads and revenue using Google Ads, but have never thought how that could be fed into itself.

I checked the summary of these podcasts and skimmed through Nathan Barry's post on flywheels. I concluded it doesn't apply to me because you can't make a flywheel out of nothing. It's sort of like the advice how to write for Twitter when you have 0 followers. It doesn't matter how you write because nobody is reading it.

You missed the part where he says flywheels are hard to get started. That first revolution can take a lot of energy and a lot of time. Once you get going it gets easier, and easier, and easier.

Do you think Nathan Barry just started with loads of followers? What about Sahil Bloom? What about our very own @Fox and @Valier (James Jani on YouTube)? They figure it the feck out and keep chipping away till they get the flywheel working. And as their audience grows (and their skill at delivering what the audience and algorithm's want grows) then the flywheel moves faster and faster, and produces more and more.

But that first iteration of "hard" doesn't mean they keep doing the same thing again and again that has no effect on the flywheel. Hard means "doing things that don't scale". Reaching out to new subscribers or followers and asking why they followed. Getting into conversation in the DMs or in the comments. Figuring out if you're attracting the right audience with the posts that seem to get more engagement, and adjusting if you're not. Hard is going through the act-assess-adjust process faster, without ego, while focused on adding value and reaching your goals.

By the way, I love the "figuring it out" part. That's my strength, and achilles heel. When I've figured something out I'm often onto the next thing instead of getting the flywheel to turn faster and faster. Your ability to keep doing the same thing over and over is a strength, once you figure out what you need to do over and over. So stop with the putting yourself down.

Meanwhile, a cheap platitude will garner hundreds of thousands of views as long as you're famous.

What's your point?

That it's harder when you've not already got an audience?

That it's harder when you don't know how to appeal to your audience and the algorithms?

How do these accounts get famous? Why not figure that out?


Here's a LinkedIn account (page?) with 6M followers. Does it inspire you that it could get so big with simple memes and posts? Or does it annoy you?

Leadership First | LinkedIn

Leadership First | 5,794,021 followers on LinkedIn. Believe In The Impossible | At Leadership First, we are committed to publishing the very best inspirational leadership quotes and articles from the best leadership minds in the world. We are dedicated to helping every leader create an excellent...

www.linkedin.com

 

[Black_Dragon43]

Yeah my experience has been the opposite of yours. I've never worked that hard and never struggled as much yet retired early. I know it's still possible to do it because I know people who are still doing it. It's not an irrefutable fact that every business owner has to be a step away from bankruptcy.

It could be because you're in a different industry and selling services or because you have employees. If every business was like that (always at the brink of disaster) then I wouldn't do it at all. I value my personal life more than business.

Of course it's possible. It's possible to win the lottery too – that doesn't mean it's a good strategy. And maybe a step from bankruptcy is an exaggeration, but knowing that things could fail even while you're growing fast – that's a constant anxiety for most entrepreneurs. I think you've read Phil Kinght's bio – he too was a step from bankruptcy even when the firm was making millions in revenue.

The truth is you live in a very competitive world. Competition eats away at profits. The only way you can make outsized profits is either be bigger and better than everyone else, OR have some advantage that no one else has, usually in the form of connections. Are you connected to billionaires? Are you a phone call away from the President of your country? If you were, then yeah, you could very well set up a web design company that hosts the Presidency's website and the mayor's website or whatever and makes $1M per year with 0 hours of work every week for you.

Everyone who follows your path at best gets lucky once and "retires" just like you. Then they end up being back to broke 20-30 years later. Because you cannot escape the fundamental reality that competition eats away profits, and your golden opportunity is BOUND TO fail given sufficient time. It's by definition unsustainable, otherwise you would not be able to make such large profits so quickly.

If you want to do something sustainable, then you must put in hard work and expect it to be slow at first. It's the tortoise vs the hare all over again.

 

[Andy Black]

I just need to leave that concept of audience building behind because it clearly hasn't served me well.

Funnily enough I'm seeing more value in building an audience (and the skill of building an audience) after listening to those podcasts, particularly this interview with Sahil Bloom from 41 mins onwards:

Google Podcasts

With Google Podcasts, you can find and listen to the world's podcasts for free.

podcasts.google.com

 

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[Yula]

I don't have any products or services to sell and struggle to come up with any. This is why my feedback loop is so long. I just want to build an audience and send it to other people to monetize it because my own monetization methods suck (as evidenced by making $2.5k from 20k subscribers).

I'm not sure what you currently do, but if you do have a 20k subscriber email list then there are so many ways to monetize them.

A client of mine for whom I write emails has two lists of 70k each, one focussed on people who are actively looking for side hustles and the other is in the health niche.

They make money with these lists by:

- Promoting their own digital products, such as e-books etc. (I read in your previous posts you like putting out content, after every 10 blogposts it's quite simple to compile it into an e-book)
- Doing affiliated mails
- Upsells
- Doing paid promotions

In 6 months alone, they made with one of their list EUR 275K.

What are you currently doing to monetize your lists?

 

[KJFast]

I don't have any products or services to sell and struggle to come up with any.

I feel you with this, have been feeling in the same position. Started reading 12m to 1mil by ryan daniel moran and felt very motivated again and “i cant wait to start” but when reaching the part where it talks about finding your target customer, feel that “shit i cant think of anything feeling.”

In reality pushing past is the best way forward and even though nothings immediately come to mind, I’ll keep researching.

Also love how he mentioned about not taking a profit from the business, made me realise I gotta work a lot more and make some short term cash to pay for my driving lessons and anything I want to buy in the meantime.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

@MTF your post had 18 responses so I moved it to its own thread.

I had this in self-publishing. Write X books combined with a (repeatable and predictable) launch strategy, make money. Writing was like 95% of the job and that was great while it lasted.

Yes you did.

1. You wrote a book that had tangible, monetary value.
2. You put that value in front of people.
3. People bought, and you made money.

1 + 2 = 3

The Amazon ecosystem simplified the process (namely step 2), but it all is still the same.

For example, every book I write applies to 1 + 2 = 3.

Also, GoalSumo.com is a business I've cofounded and help grow— and the same thing applies:

1. Create relative value, in this case a SAAS platform that will never stop in its evolution, and upon its initial launch, was horrible, even embarrassing.
2. Get that value in front of people and adjust accordingly. While having country club connections help, people will not buy something that isn't valuable.
3. Earn profit.

In our case, we're continually iterating with 1 and 2, but the process remains relatively simple...

1 + 2 = 3.

Now, I can't make sense of anything you're doing because you've gotten away from 1 + 2 = 3 and everything is always so indirect and convoluted.

Create value and sell it.

Iterate through 1 and 2, and 3 will come.

And no, writing 100 articles for Google and hoping people click to your ad-heavy website is not value, it's just a dumb arbitrage game that is a waste of your talent. And if you insist on dismissing people due to a survivor bias (But S. Bloom can sell anything and make money!) then why can't you also dismiss the person who makes a killing doing these stupid arbitrage games?

The same skills that made you a great free diver is the same skills that will make you a success in business. Again.

 

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[Panos Daras]

It’s like trying to put together a brothel you got all this nice furniture and it looks amazing but where are the hoes?!

That was deep.

 

[xShepherdx]

I completely lost any belief in my business skills. I feel like all the success I have I owe just to luck and the right timing. Without it, I'd be nothing.

These days, I'm just a cynical hypocrite. Friends ask me for business advice but honestly what the F*ck do I know? Just the shit I read online since I've been unable to make any business work for the past 4 years.

I just can't find any energy anymore to keep trying to figure it out. Little things overwhelm me. I've lost that resolve and the entrepreneurial spirit of figuring things out.

Not sure what to do about it other than rant since trying just doesn't work and leads to even more failure and disappointment.

Just wanted to say thanks for opening up and sharing this. I'm sure it wasn't an easy post to type.

Since getting rid of my last business I've also had moments of incredible self doubt and lots of sleepless nights wondering "am I really cut out for this?"

I've struggled to find "business ideas" and everything I could come up with felt super inauthentic to the point that I couldn't build up the motivation to work on any projects.

My solution was to:

1) Talk to a therapist as frequently as possible about what's going on in my life and in my head. I've found that MFTs who deal with and understand/use systemic thinking worked best for me.

2) Tackle my ADD/ADHD head on by using a combination of medication (which I was previously against), talk therapy, and systems/processes that help me overcome the challenges of ADD.

3) I got a shitty day job that pays the bills and took the stress off me trying to make a business work with zero start up capital. This gave me some breathing room to fix myself and build up resources for a new venture.

I'm still ironing stuff out but I feel 1000x better than I did 3 months ago. Aside from all the personal benefits, I've also developed a much better sense for business and have a short list of good ideas to pursue that I'm actually excited about.

I've followed your story for a while and I'm sure you've tried things like those before, but I figured I'd share for everyone else who might be following along. Maybe you'll find some direction there too.

You seem like a good dude who is smart and very capable. Maybe by focusing on yourself first will get you better results than jumping right into another business? (Or worse, throwing in the towel completely.)

Oh, and +1 for moving this into its own thread. I found a lot of value in your original post and the many replies that followed.

Edit: Found the thread, can one of the mods move my reply into it as well?

 

[Black_Dragon43]

1. You wrote a book that had tangible, monetary value.
2. You put that value in front of people.
3. People bought, and you made money.

I think MTF is doing X = Y + A + B + C precisely because this simple process 1->3 is no longer working for him. So he tries to solve that by adding extra steps. Otherwise why can't he just go back to write book -> put book in front of people -> get sales?

Clearly it's not because the book doesn't have tangible monetary value. And it's not because he can't place it in front of people (he has big lists he could use).

So why are they not buying anymore?

Because the competition today for selling books is 100x what it used to be.

If back 10 years ago clients had MTF's book or 4-5 alternatives, now they have MTF's book and 100+ other alternatives.

So simplifying by itself won't help him.

He needs to find a way to sell – that's what he can't do today. He can't sell. And he expects that if he just places the product in front of people, they will buy, but clearly that's not working out so well.

I run into this issue all the time – it's not as easy as telling someone pay me $X and I'll give you Y, when there are thousands of other people doing the same thing. Now I need to persuade them to trust me over everyone else when it comes to obtaining Y.

And this is what makes marketing complex.

It's the same for you – you can't just place GoalSumo.com in front of people and get them to buy. Otherwise it would be easy: run ads, make cash.

The reason why you can't just run ads and make cash is because of the intense level of choices that people have. Should I hire an accountability coach? Should I use a planner tool? Should I use GoalSumo.com? And so on – GoalSumo becomes just ONE out of thousands of possible alternatives.

So the question becomes how can you persuade the masses that GoalSumo is by far, unquestionably, the best tool to achieve your goals? I'd say that the best way, if you are open to it, is to do deals with influencers. People are dumb. People will listen to whatever their favorite influencer says. Just get Ali Abdaal, Andrew Tate, and a few of the other big names promoting it, and GoalSumo can become a 7-figure business.

So it's not a question of value here – GoalSumo and probably a lot of the other options can have value. The question is all about differentiation – how do you stand out?

 

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[eliquid]

I have a lot of thoughts and opinions on this for @MTF. I can't share them all here, but I will share 10 or so.

Specific to his business and books in particular.

I've actually bought several of your books and went through your funnel and been on your email list. Back in 2016 we even talked on DM here at the forum in exchanging some ideas and business advice.

This is going to be really hazy and hard to type, because I am mostly working off memory here. I am positive I will get some things wrong, but if you can bare with me and go with the flow while I shoot from the hip:

1. I think with any success, once you learn and become smarter from the success.. you can start to doubt yourself. There are many people under you, less talented and younger making more only because they haven't learn to doubt themselves yet. I would learn to control that doubt. Yes, it is hard, it will always be with you. I struggle with the same as well but I have learned to somewhat control it.

2. Knowing what I know about your books and funnel and emails, I do think a major part was timing. That is NOT to discredit your talent or work. It's not. But from memory, it seemed things start to maybe go downhill when Amazon reduced or removed the bonus payout from the Audio portion of it's sales. I maybe have this wording wrong, but didn't Amazon pay out money for those that joined via or joined into the audio portion of their program? Once that hit, i think it was a slow slump in revenue for you. I think as an early pioneer, you got in and dominated a niche that had great payouts multiple ways, and over time competition came in and payouts changed.

3. In reference to the above ( #2 ) I went through the same things. I was an early pioneer in paid ads. With GoTo in 1999, Google Ads in 2000, and FB/Meta Ads in 2007. I was also a pioneer in affiliate marketing. Each of my biggest gains were from the fact I was one of the first to do paid ads in certain platforms with payouts and little to no competition. I still make a lot of money today, but the easiest and largest gains in any 1 time frame where those dates of 1999-2000-2007/8. When things got crowded and rules/laws changed, I had to adapt and change. Even with SERPWoo in early 2015, it was a pioneer first and all the easiest and largest money gains ( the upward movement ) was in the beginning. Things got harder and slower as time passed ( acceleration ).

4. It's no different with SEO. I was one of the first people in SEO back with Yahoo Directory and DMOZ. Even made one of the first SEO plugins for Wordpress on my own. SEO changes though and competition creeps in. I had to adapt.

5. I feel like we have seen you do this on the forum before. It seems a lot of highs and some lows. I feel like in other threads you have mentioned this at least 2 other times where you were down about business and your abilities at different points in time over the years.

6. Weren't you selling a service to help people write or publish their books? Wasn't this how @Fox got his book up? Why are you not doing that service?

7. I think you are a great writer, but I think what failed was you didn't adapt to the changes in the industry. I think you tried to, but never really did the change. Maybe you gave up early in the changes to be able to adapt.

8. I've noticed too, like others have mentioned, the giving up early or frowning down on advice given to you in the past about things on the forum here from others.

9. It's going to be hard to compare everything to what it was before. You need to adapt to new outcomes and just realize if $2.5k is all you can get from the email list of 20k people.. it's not a failure, its the new normal. And you just need to improve the new normal to $4k... instead of thinking it's failure and giving up.

10. You need to break out of the niche of book you write, or provide different value if you keep writing the same niche going forward. You maybe have different niches and pen names under your belt, but I'm talking about what was ( and maybe still is ) your main niche and pen name. Once someone like me has 2 or 3+ of your books, a lot of the same info is repeated in all the books with just a little difference it seems in the new ones. The stories may be different, but the main points and takeaway are often the same as prior titles.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

It's the same for you – you can't just place GoalSumo.com in front of people and get them to buy. Otherwise it would be easy: run ads, make cash.

The reason why you can't just run ads and make cash is because of the intense level of choices that people have. Should I hire an accountability coach? Should I use a planner tool? Should I use GoalSumo.com? And so on – GoalSumo.com becomes just ONE out of thousands of possible alternatives.

So the question becomes how can you persuade the masses that GoalSumo.com is by far, unquestionably, the best tool to achieve your goals? I'd say that the best way, if you are open to it, is to do deals with influencers. People are dumb. People will listen to whatever their favorite influencer says. Just get Ali Abdaal, Andrew Tate, and a few of the other big names promoting it, and GoalSumo can become a 7-figure business.

So it's not a question of value here – GoalSumo and probably a lot of the other options can have value. The question is all about differentiation – how do you stand out?

This is tangential ... but we are still fine-tuning 1 in the [ 1 + 2 = 3 ] equation.

And we agree 100% -- once we have a more perfected system (with a mobile app) our #1 marketing priority will be influencers and affiliates— not paid ads.

But being mindful of the equation, we are still prioritizing #1 (and your "stand out" question) and right now #2 is a bit of a laggard as we don't want to waste bullets in the chamber and spend money to a platform that isn't fully optimized. Altogether, the simplicity remains ... 1 + 2 = 3.

 

[MakeItHappen]

I don't know about your last business ventures. But how many of them were in industries similar to the Kindle trend of Amazon a couple of years ago?

I know quite a couple of successful entrepreneurs. All of them made their wealth in industries that have been around for decades and will be around for decades (if AI doesn't get involved ) None of them founded a start-up with an unproven idea and non of them jumped on a hot trend in a new industry. I think the highest likelihood of success in entrepreneurship is to go into a proven industry, get very skilled at it, and then show up with persistence and a value skew.

Example: Let's say someone wants to start a business with an almost guaranteed success rate. I would guess that if you decide to become a skilled plumber and start your own business, learn something about digital marketing and just show up long enough, your odds of failure are slim and you will become a multi-millionaire within 20 years. Now does that sound exciting? Maybe not... but what I am trying to say is that if you keep failing at business, maybe it's the industry and your skill level that decreases your odds of success from the beginning.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Just out of curiosity, how do you assess if (1) is fine-tuned or not? What's your current process like? Is it just a matter of running customer surveys?

For my own business I find advice to be often conflicting, and I always struggle to navigate it. It seems like most people who respond don't think deeply about the service, and as a result most of their feedback is superficial. One would expect the best sources of info for improvement to be customers who are struggling, but personally I found those the worst, because usually they have no idea why they're struggling and they blame it on the service, or simply don't even want to think about it. Whereas those who are doing amazing, have no clue why they're doing amazing, but they love it.

(Btw, feel free to start a new thread with our comments if you think our comments derail the purpose of this thread – I've always been intrigued by customer feedback and using it in business. So far I haven't used it much, and always relied on my gut feel, make the change, see what happens, adjust kinda thing).

I'll also add that personally I feel the stand-out in this case is often added by the marketing, not the product. Often people will use the product if recommended by the influencer they love, and even jump through hoops to use it. So I think the biggest challenge here is putting together a strategy to get influencers to accept advertising it – obviously it needs a financial component, it needs to be a good enough product so they wouldn't be embarrassed or harmed to share it with their audience and so on. It's a tough business, but definitely lots of potential – I imagine the profit margin on it is quite high being a SaaS.

I've copied our side-convo to the GoalSumo progress thread on the INSIDE so we don't derail this thread.

 

[ZackerySprague]

Keep going man, don't give up. The journey is no hard no doubt. You got this. Keep kicking, something will happen.

MJ told me once in a video last year. Life is not all about suffering. He knew there was light at the end of the tunnel and that is suffering will end.

I've been on contract jobs since last year October. Though I feel as if my career is at its end. It's not, but with a little perspective shift. I have skills that still keep me employed.

I hit a rough patch. Was out of work for 3 months (almost) tapped into some credit cards and used the savings I had. I wasn't expecting the layoff. Almost has the chance to payoff an entire loan. I will be able to soon now.

I've been in the recovery process since October last year. I have paid off all of the credit cards, I've used. And now the loan I was focused on paying back is back on track and has $2,044 dollars left.

I had a Window of opportunity to create something for 3 years. I can have regret and be sad about it, wallow in self pity. But we can always look at it a different way. I get the chance to start again, learned the lessons.

You can do it, I believe in you. Keep swinging harder, and harder everytime. No matter the foul balls, no matter the mistakes, or choices you've made. Keep swinging, until one day something will work. Something will and you will be glad you kept swinging.

Keep swinging even if you are tired, one day in the end it will all be worth it.

I've paid 16 debts since the end of 2022 when I almost filed chapter 13.

The Puzzle pieces will eventually align.

Something has to give! Keep fighting!

 

[MTF]

Thank you all so much for your contributions. I appreciate it a lot. I didn't expect such a response. I'll respond one by one to keep things organized.

 

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[MTF]

Are you willing to share what the product was? Maybe we can turn it around

I put it behind me and decided to completely leave this niche as it keeps me stuck in the past.

 

[MTF]

But that first iteration of "hard" doesn't mean they keep doing the same thing again and again that has no effect on the flywheel.

That makes sense. I confused taking action with taking action that's been proven to work through iteration. It's an important difference.

What's your point?

My point is that once you're famous, you can do whatever and it'll still work. But when you're starting out, you can be the greatest and it still won't matter because people value celebrities more than the content.

For example, take a look at Amazon bestsellers. There's always a lot of bestsellers written by celebrities talking about ridiculously basic cliche stuff (often inspirational). Come up with something else, tested through research and hundreds of case studies, and your book won't get anywhere close to that stuff. Your message doesn't matter because what matters is the superficial stuff. But that's just the way the world is so I'm merely pointing the obvious.

Here's a LinkedIn account (page?) with 6M followers. Does it inspire you that it could get so big with simple memes and posts? Or does it annoy you?

I think it annoys me more than inspires because it's a good example of useless content, sort of like naked women getting paid 1000x more than my physiotherapist doing a much more important job. These quotes don't change anything in anyone's life compared to proper, strategic advice. But people like it so who am I to judge that.