What I've learned in 2023
my fuckups and learnings
What’s good young and eager mind?
Trust you had a sick Xmas with your loved ones?
Well, hopefully, you’re enjoying the holidays.
Here’s me at my auntie’s (wife’s side obv).
It’s almost 2024! Is your New Year’s Resolution to grow your audience on X?
If you’re tired of spending hundreds of hours posting into the void while having nothing to show for it, this is for you.
Growing your audience is great because it positions you as an Authority & gives you inbound leads.
Instead of having to chase people, you simply post an offer and your audience buys it.
But there’s a cold start problem…
It’s extremely hard to get traction and get that flywheel going.
That’s why I’m starting a tight-knit Twitter Group called the Turning Pro Community.
It’s for people who’re sick of being Amateurs and want to Turn Pro.
We’ll be able to give each other feedback, engage with each other’s content, and share lessons.
The price for the first 10 people is €10/month and it increases when that tier is sold out.
Join me here and lock in your price:
Today, I wanna share some reflections on 2023.
So in no particular order… here we go:
Cold DMs really work if you know what you’re doing
I’ve gotten to the point where I’m getting a 42.5% reply rate.
That means I can send 200 DMs a day and get 83 replies.
Even when people decline, it’s “thanks so much” instead of “fuck off spammer.”
Excellent when you’re trying to test new ideas, want to grow your audience and make new friends, or simply as an additional marketing channel.
I know other solopreneurs love to claim cold outreach doesn’t work but that’s kinda like saying you can’t meet women by striking up a conversation with them…
Just cuz YOU suck at it doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.
However, the API changes have killed all automated tools for now, adding a sentence that says “reply STOP to stop getting these messages.”
That screams automation and the whole point behind effective cold outreach is to NOT make it feel automated.
If you’re early and especially if you’re stuck, I’d highly recommend putting on your steel-toed boots, rolling up your sleeves, and putting in some elbow grease and just do it manually.
It takes 2 hours for every batch of 100 DMs manually. (Inc. a line of personalization.)
If you’re still in a 9-5, you can knock that out during the lunch breaks and your commute.
If you’re interested in cold DMs as a marketing channel and you got the $, you can give someone access to your DMs via the settings and have a virtual assistant do it for a few bucks a month.
Software should be back in Feb/March. Know multiple founders who’re working on it.
Growing on X & LinkedIn is extremely hard…
If you don’t do it the right way.
This year I’ve tried to grow on X without having much to show for it.
In the past I’ve spoken about kind vs. wicked learning environments which are terms from psychology that talk about the feedback loop (sort of).
What you want is to get quick feedback so you learn what is and isn’t effective.
Short, clear feedback loops are good.
Long, fuzzy feedback loops are bad.
In gaming where people cheat with bots, they don’t ban people instantly.
Instead, they do ban-waves after 6 months or so for this exact reason. It makes it incredibly hard to figure out, after the fact, which actions led to the ban. Which makes it harder to create a better bot that doesn’t get banned.
On X, the median (not mean) is no engagement.
I.e. the vast majority of creators aren’t getting ANY signal on why what they’re doing isn’t working.
I’ve come to learn (by getting help from experts) that apparently, the whole name of the game is NOT creating great content but making more friends with people who are also trying to grow.
Hence the Turning Pro Community.
When you do that, you get two benefits:
You get more reach because your content is seen by their audience when they engage with you
The algorithm sees that engagement as a positive sign so it gets amplified
That’s not to say you should make shit content, it still needs to be good.
But the difference between stagnation and growth is not stellar content, it’s being part of a small but powerful tribe.
I’m not sure if, once you hit a certain threshold, you can simply focus on creating great content but my gut says no for three reasons:
If you look at big creators like Justin Welsh, Dan Koe, Kieran Drew, etc. their content is not “bad’ but it’s not exactly mind-boggling either. The equivalence would be “elementary school math” vs. PhD level math. They’re absolutely in the former category. Which makes sense since the beginner market is the biggest by far.
They’re still focused on the aforementioned strategy. They just change the tribe and engage with other multi-100K accounts.
The content stays very similar during their growth and doesn’t become more sophisticated.
X is one of the best channels to make money
I’m in the Ideation Class, which is a paid discord channel for YouTubers.
They primarily use X for acquisition despite being able to consistently get a million views on their vids.
In their words:
“On X people can DM you, then you can sell. On YT, you gotta send them to a lander from the vid or description. Most people won’t do that.
On top of that, most folks on YT want everything for free whereas on X people are more comfy paying for stuff.”
I made tens of thousands off of X and I know many others who’re doing really well on X too.
My friend Audrey just hit her first $10K month for example “despite” only having 5K followers.
When you vanish, your newsletter takes a hit
I ghosted y’all for 2 months or so.
Got extremely ill and tried to shift from daily to weekly on top of that which turned out to be harder for me.
When I got back, I got a lot of unsubscribes and a significantly lower open rate.
People are busy and forget who you are and why they subbed to you quickly.
On the positive side, I also got a couple of extremely kind emails.
It’s hard to understand what I’m about to say if you don’t have an audience yet but it truly means the world.
I don’t take it for granted.
Having people sign up to read my thoughts is one of the few times I feel the word “privilege” is apt.
Speaking of newsletters…
Substack has no discoverability
I moved from publishing on Squarespace for 5 years to shipping on Substack this year.
Unfortunately, the same issue persisted… zero discoverability.
I’m the one who’s written all my content, so I know what I wrote.
9/10 times I struggle to find my own shit.
E.g. at the end of this piece I talk about good lowercase g vs. Good capital G products/content.
But I can’t find it on Google cuz substack hardly indexes shit.
That means that Substack functions like podcasts.
They’re great at deepening the relationship with your existing audience but they suck at bringing in new people.
That’s a problem since every time you ship a post about roughly 1% churns.
So those people need to be replaced just to stay the same size.
I need to launch more stuff
In 2024, I’m going to launch WAY more products.
I teach my students in the Solopreneur Gym to not fall in love with their idea but instead to fall in love with the audience they wish to serve.
That way, you can spend all your energy making friends (see the above point on X) and researching their problems.
Then, building the solution & selling it becomes the easy part.
Unfortunately, most beginners fall in love with an idea, spend months or years making it, and then launch it to nobody.
When it fails to get traction they turn to “marketers” to figure out how to make it work.
But marketing is not the maple syrup you put on your pancakes after they’re done, it’s the flour, it’s the milk, it’s the eggs…
It’s an inherent part of the value creation process and it starts with research.
Put more directly: you can’t turn a shit idea into gold no matter how hard you try.
There are exceptions which I’ve spoken about in the past. E.g. the diamond ring, Listerine, soap, iron jewelry, and more. But assuming the heuristic above is true will serve you better.
But if you have a good idea, you don’t need to perform magic to make a living off of it.
To use YouTube as an analogy:
“A day in the life of RJ Youngling” is never gonna take off.
I got a tiny audience and no one cares about my day no matter how great the title and thumbnail is.
Conversely,
“I cooked a ready-made meal inside a volcano”
Even with an uncreative title & a lousy thumbnail, it’s still gonna do well because the idea is so appealing.
But, while it’s easy to tell which ideas are obviously bad, it’s hard to tell which ideas are obviously good.
So that’s why you’ll benefit from just launching a lot of things quickly and just letting the market decide.
At the same time I need to say “No” more
I got at least 5 podcast episodes sitting on my drive cuz I haven’t gotten around to editing and uploading them yet.
Part of that is cuz I’m so busy and part of it is that I feel like the ROI isn’t there.
The whole omnichannel marketing approach is a terrible one for solopreneurs.
Pick one channel & strategy and stick with the program.
If you try to juggle 5 plates, you don’t drop 1, you drop them all.
It’s hard to build an education business
KP, and many others, have had a similar experience with cohort/live courses.
Instead of trying a ton of ideas quickly, I tried very hard to make the Solopreneur Gym work in 2023.
In 2022, I did well. Mostly by consulting for big companies.
This year, I wanted to focus on building a kind of school for people who want to pursue solopreneurship as a career path.
I did it intentionally because I had enough money put aside.
I hoped, like every founder hopes, that when you’re pushing a boulder uphill at some point you reach the peak, cross it, and the boulder starts to go downhill.
I can now confidently say that if your business doesn’t start that way, it’s unlikely it ever well.
Worse yet, even if it could, you don’t know when.
1 week, 1 month, 1 year, 10 years?
How long until you lose your runway or until you give up?
Remember the difference between the artist and the comedian.
The artist is selfish.
He makes what he wants to make.
The comedian is in total service to the audience.
He only makes what makes them laugh.
The artist has a hobby. He’s an Amateur. He does what he wants and fully relies on luck to succeed.
The comedian is a Pro. He does what he must do and gives that precedence over what he wants to do.
Anyway, here’s why it turned out to be harder than expected:
Difficult to sell.
Solopreneurs who make money feel like they already know everything so they’re unwilling to spend money on education.
While beginners tend to be broke or feel like it’s all available for free online.
So you’re looking for beginners who’ve failed for a few years (so you don’t have to convince them the problems are real, they’re already bought in) and who also have enough money to pay you.
I’ve been able to find about 100 of those people but it was far from being cost-effective.
In other words, the cost of acquisition of a customer to the lifetime value of a customer (CAC to LTV) wasn’t interesting.
Interestingly enough, I’ve found pretty much no correlation between the price and the conversion.
So if you’re thinking about doing something similar (make sure you have a big audience that trusts you first), I wouldn’t even bother with pricing under at least $500-$1,000.
Too many Amateurs
Many students who paid a good chunk of money ghosted.
One of my hypotheses was that high tuition fees would increase motivation.
Nope.
Some people never showed up.
Others came in hot and disappeared 3 months in.
The hard thing about cohorts is that you’re asking people to pay you money AND STILL do the work.
But what people actually want is to give you money and have you do the work.
And when you’re trying to help people change their identity on a fundamental level (which includes new ways of thinking and creating new habits) that’s an even bigger ask.
It’s difficult to keep a community from becoming a ghost town.
Many students had Amateur habits and weren’t Pros.
One of the things I’ve learned is that I’m much more of a pro-athlete coach than I am a therapist.
If you can’t show up and do the work, I don’t wanna do therapy with you for weeks on end to get to the bottom of it.
Either you keep up or I find someone who can.
You can’t want success for your client more than they want it for themselves.
That’s an important heuristic that is gonna take you a while to internalize.
But if you pull people who don’t wanna be pulled it’s gonna create conflict and resentment.
Not just on their side… but also on yours.
And that’s another thing I learned.
Not only were the economics disappointing, but I wasn’t finding joy in helping those kinds of students.
The best advice I can give here is to qualify prospects not on their talk but on their walk.
I’ve met zero people who didn’t promise me the moon.
Then when it’s time to put in the work… crickets.
The students who got the most out of the gym where the ones who were already working hard prior to joining.
Also, figure out a way to keep the students coming back.
For example, if they need to jump in the community for constant feedback on whatever you teach, that’ll help with your engagement.
But it has to be a need, not a want.
Hard to get momentum
If you have a good month/year recruiting new students, that doesn’t really seem to carry over.
Instead, the counter resets to zero and you gotta go on the hunt again.
I spoke to Daniel Vassallo (who runs Small Bets with Louie Bacaj) and they’re consciously shifting to other marketing channels for that exact reason.
The first few customers all came out of Daniel’s audience (which was like 60K at the time if memory serves) but that started to dry up.
Which means he’d need another 60K followers to rinse & repeat the same marketing strategy.
But because that takes years, that’s not feasible.
You constantly need “fresh blood” because the conversion rates are so low.
So if you keep pitching your audience, it’ll be exhausted very quickly. All the buyers will have bought already.
This is why it’s common to see solopreneurs post pics on X about their $10K+ month once or twice only to disappear off the face of the Earth. What usually happened is that they had a few good months followed by months of little to no sales. Ultimately, the only thing that matters is your profit at the end of the year. Not a handful of okay months.
Results today can come from work you did months ago
DMed a guy months ago.
We chatted for a bit as I performed my diagnosis.
He disappeared for a few months and hit me back up a few weeks explaining how he still had the same problem (which means I don’t have to convince him) and he was ready to move forward.
We jumped on a call and he became a customer.
It’s important to understand this to keep your motivation strong.
People will have a terrible February and lose all motivation.
They’ll set their personal best in May and be over the moon again.
Meanwhile, the reason May was so good was because of all the work you did in Feb and a lot of the clients just happened to close simultaneously.
This is why I always say “Chop wood. Carry water.”
It means, just focus on the inputs, the systems, and let the results take care of themself.
The Winner Effect
Dr. Fogg teaches something in behavior science called success momentum.
It’s the idea that small wins increase your motivation which leads to you being able to handle a slightly harder task, and if you again get a small win, increase your motivation, and so on.
I recently learned about the Winner Effect.
Apparently, men who’re successful with women at a younger age receive positive reinforcement which leads to them being better with women throughout their lives.
Same thing in business.
Same thing in sports.
In fact, the kid who’s 6 years and 11 months old will have an advantage over the kids who’re 6 years and a month old.
Because of that, they’re constantly better, which leads to them getting to play more, which leads to good experiences that build their self-confidence, which leads to them being better when they’re older.
So an arbitrary cut-off date for a team (6 years old) can create a positive/negative domino effect depending on your birthday.
At least, that’s the word on the streets.
I haven’t done a literature deep dive and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be a good use of my time since like 2 subscribers are interested in that BUT…
I’ve noticed something similar when it comes to my own business.
Frequent small wins, even when the total is quantitatively lower, just feel better than infrequent big wins.
Also keep in mind that if you only close a $100K deal on Dec 12th, your average revenue is $100K for that year.
But you were stressed out of your mind the entire time and you’d be super uneasy going into 2024.
“What if I didn’t close that deal?”
Vs. doing “only” 5.8K a month on average, which is about $70K a year.
$30K less! Yet you’d feel great.
Especially if every month was a bit better than the previous one.
This is a behavioral economic finding called peak-end rule by Profs Kahneman and Tversky.
Plans for 2024 & good news
To end on a positive note as per the peak-end rule…
I did make tens of thousands of dollars this year by literally selling my thinking.
The fact that people will pay for expertise will never not be the coolest thing to me.
In 2024, I think I’m going to put a good chunk of the effort I’m investing in social media in YouTube instead.
I think YT has a better chance of actually becoming a flywheel and unlike the other platforms rewards great content.
That means you can just spend time creating Good (capital G) videos instead of having to play some arbitrary game for the algo.
I still think X is really effective but I think/hope YT+X will work synergistically.
I’m getting the substack warning that the post is too long for e-mail so that’s probably a good place to wrap it up.
Hope you got something out of it and talk soon.
RJY