A 2-Pronged Approach to Growing Your Business

How to get out there before you have a customer base

When you are just starting out, basically starting from zero, you’ve got no email list or following and perhaps no real product developed.

So, how do you even start a business from that spot?

If you’ve been around and reading solopreneur advice, there’s some advice out there for solopreneurs to starting out by freelancing.

I really, really like that advice.

It’s how I got my start. I’m definitely still at the in-progress stage for building out my business and moving into that next phase, including building my email list and product/service set, but I know that the freelancer stage has really taught me a lot.

It taught me (and still does) what people will pay for, in other words, how my work provides value to people. It taught me how to interact with customers and how to sell my services.

It’s not always a straight line, but it doesn’t have to be

I’ve experimented with offering different types of services too, and honestly, some just didn’t fly. Every time I experiment, I expect that some things will work and some just won’t. I don’t see these as failures, I see them as learnings.

Starting out as a freelancer is also great market research (see what I did there?). And, I get paid to do it.

Now, I’m not just willy-nilly offering random freelance services. I’ve done some research first, both on what’s already out there and how my skillset fits into that bigger picture.

Start up challenges

So, there’s a challenge when you start to build your business. Lots of them, actually:

• No one knows about you

• You aren’t sure what to write about in your blog

• You don’t have a product

• You don’t know, really, who your customers are

• You don’t know what they’ll pay for

Wow, doesn’t sound like much of a business, right?

Ouch.

But it’s true and it’s a hurdle that’s not easy to get over, unless you have some way to experiment and learn.

This is why I like a two-pronged approach.

The first prong

One prong is to do that writing. Start talking about what your business is about or, will be about, or what you think it will be about. Yes, you will be talking to no one at first. And, you know what? That’s okay. It’s better than okay.

Why?

Because you likely aren’t yet sure what you really want to say. At this stage, there’s freedom in working on and polishing the writing. There’s freedom in not knowing ‘exactly’ what you want to talk about or how you want to talk about it.

But you also get to hit that publish button and practice getting your message out there. Awesome.

If you are currently writing, you may have already figured out that this prong takes time to build. It takes time for people to start to notice what you are saying. And it takes time for you to figure out what you want to be saying.

The second prong

The second prong is putting yourself out there where people are already buying. This is where that freelancing comes in. (Or, in some cases, putting your first product on a shopping platform, but more on that later.)

I see freelancing as a way to do even deeper market research. Doing so will help you not only hone your skills but also help you figure out what people are actually interested in purchasing.

The great part is that you get paid to do this research!

In full transparency, this research is likely not going to pay all the bills, at least not at first, so set your expectations for that.

But, that’s okay because this is really your deeper-dive market research. This is an opportunity to work with real customers who are paying you real money to do real work. All that real-ness is a great teacher. It’s quicker than guessing and it’s way less expensive than taking out ads you’re not sure will work.

Before you know it, the writing you are doing in prong 1 will become more meaningful and your messages will become more clear. Before you know it, your research will have helped you create a product/service that you can sell more broadly and in different ways, moving from service and hourly to products, if that’s what you choose. Or maybe you’ll choose a hybrid of both.

You’ll also have more confidence in what you create because you’ll already have that real customer feedback.

If you haven’t considered a 2-prong approach like this before, you might want to.

Next week

Next week, I’ll talk more about platforms and marketplaces. There are a ton of them out there. Once you’ve had a first go at defining your wedge, you can start to look around for platform(s) that make sense for you to start this kind of deep-dive research on your business.

Speaking of real-ness…

Do you have questions about this? A comment? Let me know!

Stay tuned,

Julie