As A Solopreneur, You’ll Waste A Lot Of Time On This

Here’s a list of ventures I’ve started and quit since 2017.

• A digital magazine for The Post-Grad Survival Guide. I made two in late 2017 and never made another.
• A video game streaming channel. I streamed for about 6 months and quit in 2020.
• A podcast with friends in 2019. We did a few podcasts together and stopped after 6 weeks.
• SEO for my website. I pursued that for a few months in 2021 hiring writers and everything but ultimately quit.

I’ve been in business since 2017. As a creative person I have a ton of ideas. As an impulsive person, I get too excited and jump in before thinking it through. As a flawed person, I start things that fail.

It’s part of the game, and I end up wasting a lot of my time because of it.

So my message is this:

You’re going to waste a lot of your time and money on stuff.

Here’s how to keep it in perspective.

1 Good Idea Pays For 10 Bad Ones

In August of last year, I did my first LinkedIn Sprint. It was a cohort writing challenge for LinkedIn and I selected 40 people to join me.

It was amazing. It felt “right” from the very start, and we did 6 more of them over the next 12 months.

That one product has made me over $70,000 since last year.

It birthed a cash cow in a time when I needed one dearly.

If I never followed my intuition to create that challenge, I don’t know where my business would be today.

Your one idea that works pays for the ten ideas that didn’t.

Writing on Medium and my course about how to use this platform has made me six figures. My past travel vlog made me six figures as well.

I’ve explored many business ventures since 2017 — dozens in fact — and only three or four of them have made me significant money.

You got to explore the bad ideas to get to the good ones.

You Need To Waste Your Time

As creative people, entrepreneurs need to waste their time, too.

If you don’t pursue an idea, you’ll always wonder “what if?” later on.

And what if your idea works? You don’t REALLY know whether an idea for a business will work or go down in flames.

You will know after you try, though.

You don’t have any choice — waste your time or never find that next cash cow.

Normally Things That Work Will Work Pretty Fast

Here’s a somewhat decent piece of business advice.

Normally things that will work in the future will start working pretty fast.

“Excuse me Tom, what ?”

What I mean is that if a business idea is going to work, it’ll start working pretty fast after you first try it.

For example Medium. I started writing here in 2016 after trying to start my own Wordpress blog. After I got 1,000 views in my first month, I was absolutely hooked.

I saw the promise of this place, and decided to keep going because I was seeing decent initial results. Obviously I didn’t get famous in my first month, but it was better than any blogging platform I had tried yet.

The first time I uploaded a video to Facebook for my vlog, it got 2,000 views. I had been struggling to get more than 100 views on Youtube for months and my very first Facebook video got 2,000 views.

When I started the LinkedIn sprint it felt right from the start and I got tons of interest immediately.

Stuff that’s going to work well in the future tends to work a little at the very start.

Keep that in mind.

As a solopreneur you’ll fail a ton. You’ll waste a lot of time. There’s no getting around it. But if you’re lucky, you’ll find one of your ideas takes off seemingly from the moment you start it.

Get my free 5-day course about how to get your first 1,000 followers on Medium right here. :)