Half year update on the Solopreneurship journey

Half a year has passed since I started my Solopreneurship journey. As I did at the end of Q1, I've recently looked back at the quarter that just ended to summarise the key milestones and lessons learned to share with my readership.

If you like reading things chronologically, you might want to start by reading the first update and then come back here.

90 Days In: Key Lessons from My Solopreneur Journey

Let's look at Q2 now.

What I focused on and what I deliberately sacrificed

The experience and the reflections I matured during Q1 allowed me also to take a step back and better articulate the overall strategy I intend to deploy while developing my business.

I summarised it in a LinkedIn post that took inspiration from the original Tesla Secret Masterplan¹, which is still a masterpiece in strategic thinking, clarity, and communication to date.

According to that overall strategy, in Q2, I made Mentoring and Coaching my priority.

I had to do many things to keep the business alive and deliver on the ongoing commitments with B2B clients, but I focused all the efforts on expansion and growth on the B2C side.

The key investments I made this quarter to move the needle have been:

1. Rebuilt my website to make it look less like it was built in the late 90s

2. Built a landing page and a marketing funnel and launched a Google Ads campaign to drive traffic to it.

3. Shared a one-off promotion for free mentoring sessions via my newsletter

4. Offered free mentoring sessions to 4 members of the Women in Tech community.

Rebuilding the Website

I am a big proponent of the release early, release often mantra so popular in the open-source community. In the product space, we often talk about Reid Hoffman's famous quote

If you're not embarrased by the first version of your product, you've launched too late²

I can guarantee you I was definitely embarrassed by the first version of my website. It started with a simple static website hosted on the Vercel free tier, then moved to a very simple WordPress instance.

I've never been strong on web UI design, so it took many iterations and banging my head against different designs before landing on the current version. It also helped a lot to rely on external eyes to provide unfiltered feedback on the results.

Currently, the site runs on WordPress, and all the pages are built via OptimizePress³. I knew I would use OptimizePress for building online funnels; therefore, I decided to settle on a single templating tool to maximize consistency and reusability.

I've enriched the site with additional information about my services. Since doing that, I've already had a few inbound leads.

Though this new setup is significantly better than what I had in place at the beginning of the year, I'm already growing tired of the limitations and inefficiencies of WordPress as a platform.

I am considering moving to a different setup later in the year, but that's not my priority for now.

Landing Page, Funnel, Google Ads campaign

While I was rebuilding the website, I also implemented the first online funnel to promote my Mentoring and Coaching services. As this was uncharted territory for me, developing the landing page and the rest of the funnel took some time. As mentioned earlier, I used the Funnel module in OptimizePress for this purpose.

Setting up the campaign in Google Ads was also new to me.

Luckily, for all the marketing-related work, I'm leveraging the support of an advisor. I still had to do most of the work with the setup, but they helped with keyword research and provided much feedback on the funnel and campaign configuration.

Even though my ultimate goal was to gain new paying clients, the campaign aimed to get people to sign up for a free 30-minute mentoring call.

The following assumptions justified that choice:

• People are interested in receiving support;

• A free session should lower the barriers to signing up compared to regular paid sessions;

• A 30-minute session is enough time to provide value;

• Once they see the value, a reasonable amount of people will become paid clients;

The reality turned out to be quite different.

These are the results after running the campaign for about a month:

• 1.83K Impressions

• 153 Clicks (8,38% CTR)

• 4 Sessions Booked

• 2 People Showed up for the call (i.e., 50% no-show)

• 0 converted to paid client as of today

The experiment cost me €438 and gave me strong evidence that this is not a viable approach to expand this side of the business.

The way I interpret the data in hindsight is the following:

• A single landing page is not enough to build trust for services that are relation-based. No matter how much social validation you add to your page, you're still a stranger to people landing on your website. People need more in the way of validation before sitting with you on a call to share their challenges.

• When people sign up for free stuff are more likely to treat it more casually, hence increasing the no-show rate. Especially if they don't already know you, which means there is no social pressure: if they don't show up, they don't risk jeopardizing a relationship which does not exist.

• A single session of 30 minute can deliver value (got consistent feedback in this direction), but it's not enough to built the required level of trust for people to start giving you money for the service.

I found confirmation for some of these hypothesis in another test I ran in parallel, which we're going to talk about next.

One-off promotion via the newsletter

During the same month, May 2024, I decided to run a parallel experiment: offering free 30-minute sessions to the readers of this newsletter⁴.

I wanted to try this tactic for 3 main reasons:

1. This is traffic I “own” in the terminology of Russel Brunson⁵, which means I should see a reasonable conversion rate;

2. People who follow me on my newsletter know me significantly better than any random person reading about me on a single landing page;

3. Though the number of subscribers to the newsletter is limited, it's constantly growing. If this approach turns out to be effective, I can reuse it at pseudo-regular intervals.

The results here have been interesting.

Considering that I communicated this promotion only in two weekly articles, I got these numbers:

• Total views approx 2,1k

• 7 calls booked

• 6 people showed up for the call (i.e., only 1 no-show or ~14%, and the person sent a message in advance to let me know they could not attend)

• 0 converted to paid client as of today, with a caveat

While it's true that none of these 6 prospects turned into paying clients for my 1-to-1 mentoring sessions, 2 of them signed up for a new paid product I'm testing out in Q3. More on this later.

This experiment cost me basically €0.

It confirmed that people must overcome a non-negligible trust barrier before signing up for mentoring, even when it is free. The fact that these people know me better through my newsletter also correlates with a higher degree of participation in the booked calls.

The newsletter seems significantly more promising than paid campaigns via Google ads, and coming at zero marginal cost makes it a very attractive channel for future promotions. I still intend to keep this newsletter free for the foreseeable future, and I'll keep experimenting with ways to drive revenues out of it indirectly.

There is a third and final channel I’ve been using both in Q1 and Q2 to expand the network of prospects, and that's what we're going to talk about next.

Pay-it-forward free sessions

I got this idea initially while on one of my frequent thinking walks. These are 1-hour walks I take on the hills next to where I live to help me reflect on ideas, challenges, or specific topics. They are a great source of insights and have helped me get unstuck on multiple occasions already since starting my own business.

The idea I got can be broken down as follows:

• I want to contribute to the community. When I was younger, I used to do it via open-source contributions⁶, but since moving into leadership roles, I have not done nearly enough of that

• I want to get better at mentoring and coaching people, especially from contexts and industries that I'm less familiar with.

• If I do a good job at delivering a non-trivial amount of value to people needing help, it will positively contribute to my reputation and brand.

That's how the idea came up to set aside a pool of hours every quarter to dedicate to free sessions for specific segments of the population.

In Q1, I offered free sessions to 3 individuals who had been recently affected by mass layoffs.

In Q2, I offered free sessions to 4 Women in Tech community members.

During this quarter, I delivered a total of 16 hours of free sessions to these 4 ladies. Considering my standard hourly rate of €300/hour, that's almost €5k worth of sessions I've given away for free.

If I looked at this purely from an economic standpoint, it would not make any sense. But as I mentioned earlier, that's not why I'm doing it.

There are multiple benefits I get out of running these programs for free, and they include — ordered by importance:

• It feels great to have a positive impact on the lives of people you would have never met if it wasn't for such initiatives.

• I get a lot of valuable feedback from these sessions that I can use to get better at doing my job.

• I get highly motivating reviews and testimonials that I can then use to promote my services.

• Some of them might turn into paying clients at some point in the future.

To help you understand it better with an example, this is the most heartwarming piece of feedback I've received so far from one of the individuals I've been supporting.

Your guidance has led me to make significant changes in my objectives, priorities, and the way I organize myself, both at work and at home with my partner.

I am deeply grateful for all I have learned and for the positive impact you have had on my life in these three months.

Then I think, what must your life be like? If mine shifted so much with just four sessions, you, who have yourself at every moment =). Thank you.

If that is enough to keep offering free programs every quarter, there are also some positive returns for the business.

From the Q1 cohort, one person became a paying client of my 1-to-1 Coaching and Mentoring service.

From the Q2 cohort, one person signed up for the new product I'm testing out in Q3.

I'm pretty sure the long-term benefits in terms of reputation and feedback will also be massive. In a fundamentally trust-based business, I believe it is essential to be able and willing to play the long game.

Putting it all together

Now that we've looked at the main actions taken during Q2, it's helpful to understand their overall impact. After all, actions without outcomes is just a way to keep yourself busy without making real progress.

When we look at the B2C side of my business, it increased by 5,8x between the end of Q1 and the end of Q2.

In terms of overall contributions to revenues, if in Q1 B2C represented about 1% of the total, in Q2 it represented about 6,5% of the total.

If at the end of Q1 I had a total of 2 paying clients, by the end of Q2 that number went up to 9. Some are more regular than others, most doing monthly sessions.

It's not too bad for a single quarter of focused effort while still spending most of my working hours on B2B clients.

These are still small numbers compared to the lion's share that B2B is still taking, but slow and steady is what I want here.

These were the key metrics for my business in Q2, as they reflect what I wanted to focus on.

There are some additional metrics that I've been paying attention to.

• By the end of June, I reached 85% of my minimum revenue target for the entire year. When I set off on the Solopreneur journey at the beginning of the year, I set a clear minimum revenue target for the first 12 months to help me decide rationally, rather than emotionally, whether to continue, pivot, or return to employment. I am happy to report that I'm very close to hitting that number well in advance; that means I will likely continue this journey in 2025.

• This newsletter has crossed the milestone of 1024 subscribers early in Q2. We tend to celebrate round numbers, and if you don't understand why 1024 is a round number, it means you either don't like nerdy jokes or don't understand binary numbers. Or both. Either way, you're still welcome around here. Thanks for your continued support.

• I read a total of 11 books in Q2. I have always loved reading and recently decided to make it my default activity instead of defaulting to my phone or other low-quality distractions. Every month, I write short reviews of the books I read, which helps distill the key learnings from them.

• I took 28 1-hour+ walks, a bit more than 2 per week on average. As mentioned above, these walks are essential as physical exercise and as a way to generate ideas and insights that help me move forward in my journey.

What's next, Q3 focus

Building on the promising results from Q2, I will continue focusing on the B2C side of my business during the upcoming quarter.

As we're getting into the summer period, this has two main implications: time off with the family and less client work due to seasonality.

As a side effect, I can spend more time in builder mode.

Besides adding a few more clients to my 1-to-1 mentoring sessions, I'm actively working on two additional products I want to test and validate soon.

A membership for group mentoring

Not everyone can afford monthly 1-to-1 sessions, even though they would greatly benefit from it.

This is why I recently started testing a different approach: a monthly membership that gives access to two 1-hour group monthly calls. In each call, we address topics or questions submitted in advance by the community members.

I am building up an initial cohort of 10 people willing to help me test and refine this concept.

In exchange for the support and willingness to help, I am offering them a special price: a 40% discount on the listing price. This price will be locked forever, even if and when I decide to raise the listing prices for the product as I add more value to it.

The next group call is scheduled for August 6th, and with this article, I'm opening up the possibility for you to snatch one of the few remaining slots.

I plan to announce more details in a follow-up post, but if you are interested in this product, reply to this email, and I'll share all the relevant details with you.

The plan is to launch the product publicly between the end of Q3 and early Q4. Timing and details will largely depend on the feedback I receive during the initial testing phase.

Online Course

The second product I'm working on is an online course. I plan to offer a set of classes covering the whole journey from individual contributor to Engineering Manager, then Senior Engineering Manager, Director, VP, and CTO.

The first chapter will focus on the first step, helping people become better Engineering Managers.

I have defined the full course outline and am actively working on producing the slide material before the video recording stage.

The course is supposed to be launched after the membership, and I plan to offer all members discounts on all the classes I'll be launching in the future.

As I'm still working on the content, I have had less time to clarify the go-to-market strategy for the course.

I am pretty sure that I'll offer early access at a very low price to gather feedback from the first cohort of highly motivated people to improve the course before going live.

If you're interested in being considered for testing out the course, reply to this email explaining why, and I'll add you to a list of people I'll contact when the time is right.

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That's all for the quarterly business update and the latest chapter on building in public.

See you all for the next update sometime in October.

If you found this valuable

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1. You can find the original post here: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-just-between-you-and-me

2. See this post from Reid Hoffman on the topic: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/arent-any-typos-essay-we-launched-too-late-reid-hoffman/

3. If you’re interested, here is an affiliate link

4. See this post https://makemeacto.substack.com/p/one-thing-ive-noticed-with-the-smartest for the original announcement

5. This is from Brunson's book Dotcom Secrets. You can find my review of it in this post: https://makemeacto.substack.com/p/books-i-read-in-march-2024

6. If you want to know more about these contributions, you can find some details in this post: https://makemeacto.substack.com/p/contributing-to-open-source-to-accelerate