Uncategorized Archives - Solopreneur Grind

A very valuable networking event and sales tool

Josh Schachnow — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 00:10:35 +0000

Happy Monday folks, summer continues to fly by, with a lot of exciting times too.

Let’s jump in:

A very valuable networking event and new sales “strategy”

We had another good week on the tech front. Even though summer tends to slow things down a bit here in Canada – on the business side – our revenue curve continues up and to the right.

Also had a cool discovery this week. Which is that the government offers a grant for SMBs to help them implement new tech, that we (Visto) are likely eligible for.

Or in other words, the government offers free money to our clients to implement software like ours. Which is pretty awesome, if we can convince potential clients it’s worth their time to apply for the grant (which we think it is).

We discovered it from someone we met at a networking event last week, and are going to push it hard as a sales strategy – especially to try and convert leads who are on the fence about using our product. Certainly de-risks giving our tech platform a try if you can get the full payment back from the government, right?

Suffice to say, I’m excited to get back to sales this week with that tool in my back pocket, and I’m certainly glad we attended that networking event.

It was a pretty interesting one as well because they had a great panel that focused on a) hiring your first 10 employees and b) mental health for founders/entrepreneurs. Two very important topics, I’d argue.

It seems like, to me, part of the battle in solopreneurship is finding the right balance between focus and “getting out of the house”. Especially when you figure out something that works for your business, it’s very important to put the blinders on and grind it out, grow grow grow, and not get too side tracked.

But it’s also good to, periodically or as-needed, get out of the house, talk to some outsiders, take a break. It usually gives good perspective and you might pick up on a new opportunitity, strategy, partnership, etc., along the way.

Key takeaway(s): hire away your least valuable skills

I’ve usually never regretted attending a good networking event, and last week was no different.

Keep in mind the word “good” is important here – because if you do your research then most networking events are a good experience, but some can be weak.

This one was good because it was organized by great companies, they had an interesting panel/topics, and served dinner (major points in my book…).

Alex (my cofounder at Visto) and I had some really good takeaways too, such as:

the grant we discovered that should drastically improve our sales
good tips on how to find the right balance as entrepreneurs
things to think about for your first hires

More specifically, we learned that for those first few hires, you want to hire away your least valuable tasks so you can focus on where you add the most value.

For example, Alex spends a lot of time building our platform and also doing customer service. Our initial thought was to hire another developer so they could build our product faster, but we realized that Alex’s highest value skill is coding – not doing customer service.

So instead of hiring another coder, we should hire someone who can handle customer service, unlocking more time for Alex to focus on his high value skill – coding.

Might sound obvious, but sometimes you need to step back and see the forest from the trees to put those ideas in place.

Book of the week

I’m still reading Jack: Straight From the Gut by Jack Welch and am about halfway through. It’s a pretty big book so I’m not sure if I’ll be done by next week, but let me tell you, I can already confirm this is an A-range kind of book.

The closest comparison I can make right now is to Bob Iger’s autobiography, because they’re both “lifers” who worked their way up their respective companies until they became famous CEOs, and I also loved Iger’s book too.

More info next week…

That’s it for me – have a great week, make sure to get my business updates right to your inbox here, and keep grinding,

– Josh

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Not-so-fond memories of law school

Josh Schachnow — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 22:03:13 +0000

I had an interesting call today with a co-op student we have helping us out at Visto.ai.

I’m not sure what it’s like where you live, but here in Canada, the government/schools do a great job to incentivize co-op programs, ie., matching students with companies to get them work experience.

We have a first year law school student working with us. Very nice, smart, polite gentleman.

And we spent some time talking about first year law school exams, because he’s heading into his first law school exam season in December.

Boy does that bring back memories…

Mainly because exams in law school, especially in first year, sucked.

It was a lot of reading, studying, etc. And at the time, felt like the hardest, most difficult and important thing ever.

And I guess at that point in time, it was.

But looking back about 8 years later, it feels like just another hard step in the journey. It required time and effort and grinding out the hours, but it wasn’t the end of the world.

It’s something I try to remind myself in business, especially during tough times as a solopreneur.

Maybe you’re going through some tough stuff, or a big uphill battle, or what feels like a dead end.

And heck, maybe you are.

But for the most part, if you’re a good person, if you work hard, if you stay focused, if you put your mind toward solving big problems – you will either get there eventually, or have a great learning experience along the way.

Along similar lines, I had a good chat with one of my mentors yesterday who said something interesting.

We were talking about the ups and downs that come with running a business.

And I told her that the saying “when it rains, it pours” in solopreneurship seems to be very, very true.

I’m not sure about you, but from the last 5 years I’ve spent running businesses, it really does seem like we get stretches of “peace”, and then every month or two, you get hit with a whole bunch of crap that happens all at once.

I’m not sure how or why it seems to happen that way, but she had a really interesting response to that which I wasn’t expecting.

I’m paraphrasing, but what she said was that in her more spiritual opinion, things like that happen as a result of you doing lots of good work, creating good energy, and as one last challenge before you can realize the success of what you’re doing.

Or in other words.

If you’re working on something really new, or cool, or great, you’re creating all of this energy in the form of effort, marketing, networking, etc.

And that energy generates stuff – more energy in the form of “things” happening, some of which can be good, some of which can be bad.

And if you push through the bad or hard stuff, you’ll get to the awesome stuff at the end of the tunnel.

I know, that was really vague and wishy washy, but hopefully it makes some sense.

Keep working on great stuff, understand that sometimes, hard or bad things may come your way, but if you push through them, you’ll get to realize the light at the end of the tunnel.

Not sure if anyone else needed to hear that, but I certainly did.

Have a great day, don’t miss out on my daily solopreneur updates here, and keep grinding.

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How and when to hire a contractor as a solopreneur

Josh Schachnow — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 15:02:49 +0000

Got an awesome response to one of my recent email updates from a subscriber:

“Great reminder. Re: things I’m struggling with and potential good topic for a workshop or idea for the community… how to hire and work with contractors when you’re a solopreneur.”

I love getting responses to my emails, and I also love getting topic suggestions from you because it makes part of my job a bit easier (as some of you know, sometimes just coming up with an idea to write about is the hardest part!).

Hiring contractors as a solopreneur

I’ve worked with many, both while I was trying to grow my law practice and also now growing my immigration tech company, Visto. Heck, I’ve also worked with a bunch building Solopreneur Grind too.

I think there are two very important things to keep in mind when thinking about hiring contractors:

1) are you hiring them at the right time and for the right reason?

2) strategies to find one that’s good for you and your business

Let’s start with the first part.

Especially if you’re a solopreneur, keeping a close eye on your monthly revenue, expenses and profits is super important.

When it comes to hiring contractors, you need to ask yourself “why?”, and also make sure it makes sense from a numbers standpoint.

There are really only 2 good reasons to hire a contractor:

you want to grow your business
you want to spend less time on your business

In the first case, you want to grow your business which means you want more revenue. But you might be in a position where you simply don’t have more time in the day to do this, because you’re spending all of your day on sales/marketing, operations/fulfillment (to actually provide the product or service) and any other admin stuff.

So if you want to grow, you decide to hire a contractor who can take over some of the work you’re doing so you can unlock more time to make more revenue. For example:

you hire someone who can help provide your product/service/solution to clients so you can spend more time selling
you hire someone to do outreach and book sales calls for you, or do your social media marketing, to drive more qualified leads
you hire a bookkeeper to handle your monthly finances to free up more time for client work or sales

But remember this: if hiring that contractor does not unlock more time or energy to increase company sales, it’s not a financially smart move.

Put more simply: company revenue after hiring a contractor should always be greater than company revenue before hiring a contractor (maybe not immediately, as it may take a few weeks/months to take effect).

In the second case, maybe you just don’t want to work as much and you’re okay with making a bit less money. So you hire a contractor to unlock more of your own time – not to grow the business like in the first instance, but to chill and enjoy life.

That’s really it. If you’re thinking of hiring someone and that contractor isn’t going to unlock more time for you – either to increase revenue or have more time to enjoy life – then it’s not a wise move financially. You’re just eating into your own margins.

How to find contractors for your solopreneur business.

Over the years I’ve used a decent number of contractors, from contract creators, to video editors, to developers, UX designers, social media managers and more.

Here are some of the best ways to find contractors as a solopreneur:

1) Referrals

This is far and away the best option, if you can use it. I’m not going to write a novel on it because it’s pretty self explanatory, but most of the great contractors I’ve used came through referrals.

Ask friends, ask coworkers, post in group chats you’re in – whatever it takes. If you can get a referral from someone you trust who has worked with the contractor before, it’s ideal.

2) Online communities or groups

This is similar to referrals, but a little farther removed.

For example, if you’re in an online community or mastermind group, ask those folks. If you’re in a Solopreneurs in Toronto Facebook group, ask there too. Still worth doing your homework and vetting the contractor, of course.

For example, I’ve had pretty good experiences posting in reliable chat groups or even Reddit threads/subreddits.

3) Marketplaces

We’ve all seen them and heard of them – or maybe not – but some of the more popular ones here are Upwork and Fiverr.

I’ve found Upwork to be pretty good, BUT you have to put in the time to vet properly. The reasons Upwork is good:

there’s a lot of contractors on there
they provide a lot of info/stats that make vetting pretty easy

It just takes some time to weed out the crap.

Fiverr is good, but I primarily only use it if a) the work I’m looking for is very simple and b) I’m not looking to spend a lot of money. For boring, repeatable and clear tasks, it’s a very cheap way to find good help.

But for something more detailed, requiring heavy lifting (figuratively) or on-going work, I’d stay away from Fiverr.

The last thing I’ll mention is that more and more marketplaces pop up everyday, and some specialize in certain tasks.

For example, if you need a software developer or virtual assistant, there are marketplaces that specialize in just those specific roles. They might be better than a broad marketplace like Upwork.

May this help you find the contractor of your dreams, and if you like my updates and want them straight to your inbox, make sure to join my daily email list here.

Thanks for reading, and keep grinding.

The post How and when to hire a contractor as a solopreneur appeared first on Solopreneur Grind.

How to charge insame amounts of money for things and focusing

Josh Schachnow — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 14:27:19 +0000

Hey folks, hope you had a great weekend.

Had a fun one as my dad was visiting, and we ended up going to the exhibition here in Toronto.

For those who don’t know, the “ex” – as we call it here – is basically a huge carnival with games, rides and lots of food.

I hadn’t been in a long time, probably 10 years or more, but we went as it was nice weather, something to do and nostalgic. When I was growing up, we used to go as a family every year!

It was definitely a lot of fun, although extremely busy – the lines for rides were so long, we didn’t even bother going on any of them.

Luckily the lines for what we were really there for, the food, weren’t so bad.

The prices were also crazy.

$25 just to get in, $4-5 for a bottled water, $12 for a corn dog, $15 for a poutine.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but reminds me a lot of sports games, movie theatres, and other spots like that where they get you inside with a big attraction (movie, sports, rides), then charge you an arm and a leg for food and drinks.

I went to a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game a few weeks ago, and a tall-can of beer was $14… for 1 beer (as my dad would joke, “for how many??”).

Anyway, there’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere for solopreneurs. I’m not one to charge outrageous fees “just because I can”, but maybe it’s that people become less price conscious in certain situations, locations, communities, etc.

Or when they simply don’t have any other options.

Again, I don’t think I’d ever feel right charging someone $5 for a bottled water, but maybe there’s a more reasonable way to replicate that model.

Another big theme for my week was focus.

If you read my updates last week, we’re underway building our next immigration tech product for Visto (my immigration tech company – visto.ai).

It’s exciting and also probably my favourite part about building a tech company – the design and execution of a new tech product that never existed before.

The other thing I’ve noticed after building a few tech products now – not as a solopreneur, as I’m not a techie, but with a small team – is that they foster extreme focus. If you’re between building stuff or not sure what to do next, business can be unpredictable.

I mean, business is usually unpredictable, but more-so than normal if you’re not working on much as a tech company.

Building a new tech product really makes it easy for you and the whole team to get laser focused on one thing, and (hopefully) one thing only, which is great. It’s a very clear objective, and that makes everything else just a little bit easier to plan.

Alternatively, if you’re between projects or products or companies, you might feel a bit lost.

You might go day-to-day without getting much concrete work done, and you might not feel a sense of progress at the end of the week.

Unfortunately, that can be a common occurrence as a solopreneur – depending on where you’re at in the journey of course.

That’s why I think it’s key to keep your main goals for any business, project, etc., very narrow. I’ve since narrowed mine down for my businesses even more.

What I mean by this is that at any one time, I only want to have one, or maybe two, key focuses for a solopreneur business at any one time. If you’re a solopreneur or working with a small team, you simply don’t have the bandwidth for any more than that – unless you want to do each one in a very mediocre way.

With Visto, we have our first product that’s live, and now we’re adding one more – and we’re going to keep it at that for a while until either (or both) really take off.

With Solopreneur Grind, I want to keep creating great content (through this blog and my podcast), and maybe create a new community as well.

But that’s it.

Anything more and the quality of each would suffer.

Are you feeling stuck or just not able to get started with something as a solopreneur? What is the one, or maximum two things, you can focus on to move the needle for that business or project?

Find those and throw the rest out. Unless you have a big team… then you’re reading the wrong blog!

That’s it for today. Have a great week, make sure to sign up to get my best updates here and keep grinding.

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Steering the ship and bending over backwards for clients

Josh Schachnow — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 20:52:33 +0000

Anyone else feel like this week is flying by?

Yeah, me too…

Anyway, most of this week has been spent on business operations and sales.

Operations to make sure the wheels are spinning and the clients we have/immigration work we’re doing is progressing forward.

So far, the tech seems to be doing it’s job and we’re getting into a good flow with our new immigration app.

Sales is – and will for quite some time – be a big focus for me, as we slowly want to start ramping up the number of users/companies on the app.

The interesting thing about solopreneurship and entrepreneurship is that on a weekly basis, I find there are the things you’re doing and the things you’re thinking about. And they aren’t always the same thing.

This week, I’m doing more operations and sales calls. But I’m thinking about the general direction of the ship.

The ship, of course, is the business.

Now that we’re live, now that we’ve got 15+ companies using our app, now that it’s working well enough…

Where do we go next?

What things are working that we want to double-down on, and what things are not worth it (at least for the time being)?

These – at the end of the day – are the things that the CEO has to decide on behalf of a company, or just for yourself running a solopreneur business.

I think that in the last week or two my mind started to drift. I started noticing other opportunities that seemed promising, and spent some time evaluating them.

I don’t think it was in vain, but what I’m doing this week, is resetting. Resetting and solidifying what we know works right now, and building toward a future of 2-3 key focuses that are in the direction we want to go in.

I also wanted to share an “issue” we faced on Friday.

If you do any form of client work, you might be able to relate.

Long story short is we’ve been streamlining our process to help Canadian companies find developers from around the world that want to come to Canada.

This means building a database of developers, vetting developers based on the needs of our clients and sending a shortlist of the best ones.

One client doesn’t love the format of our shortlist, and requested it be sent to them differently.

My first thought was: none of our other clients have complained about it, so why should we change it? It will only create more work for our team.

My second thought was: this is kind of a sticky situation, because we obviously want to keep them happy as a client.

My final thought was: is there a middle ground here, where we can use their feedback/suggestions to improve our current shortlist for all clients?

I think there probably is.

What we decided to do was discuss it as a team, sleep on it over the weekend and come up with a solution that:

addresses some of the concerns of the client
maintains a lot of our current systems and processes, so it stays manageable and scaleable for our team
could actually improve our deliverable so that all clients benefit in the end

My key takeaway was: some client demands are unreasonable, some are very reasonable – but some are in the middle. For the ones in the middle, think of them as suggestions and feedback on ways to improve your product or service, without sacrificing the processes you already have in place.

Because while we don’t want to build entire processes for a single client (in our case, because we’re trying to build scalable tech – this could be different for a solopreneur business, especially if it’s for a very big client), we do want to use any feedback we can to make things better.

We ended up taking the weekend to consider her feedback and think about how we could improve our process because a) I think all feedback should at least be considered, even if it seems ridiculous at first, and b) she is in fact a great client so there was probably substance to the feedback that we should address.

Her feedback came with 2 suggested alternatives, but we ignored them both.

In a sense…

We didn’t follow either of her alternatives (because it would have meant going out of our way for just 1 client), but instead took the core problem and improved our entire process to address it.

The result?

She loved it – and the rest of our clients might benefit from it as well.

So the next time a client or anyone else has feedback about something related to your product or service, don’t ignore it. It might not be wise to do exactly what they’re asking for, but it’s usually wise to understand their underlying complaint and try to address it.

Hope your week is going well, and if you like my solopreneur blog and want more of this content right to your inbox, make sure to sign up for the daily email here!

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Marathon training and building toughness as a solopreneur

Josh Schachnow — Tue, 26 Apr 2022 20:39:50 +0000

As many of you know, I take a holistic approach to solopreneurship.

It isn’t just about business strategy, tactics, etc.

It’s about being a happy, successful person – in whatever way you define it for you.

A huge part of that, and a part that I think is often overlooked, is the health side.

Physical health (eating well and exercising) and mental health can have a huge bearing on how you – and by extension your solopreneur business – operate in the short and long term.

Why am I saying this?

Well, I’m segueing into a topic I’m really excited about these days – I’m training to run a marathon at the end of May.

And the more I train and the closer I get to race day, the more lessons I learn that can also apply to entrepreneurship.

I don’t want to spend days writing emails about running, but I’ll keep you posted once in a while on my marathon training and lessons learned along the way (Marathon Monday perhaps?).

To give you some perspective, I’m about 2 months from race day and this week I have 46km to run (over 4 runs – the longest being my 24km run this weekend… please send help!).

What I’ve quickly learned is that our bodies are capable of doing much more than we give them credit for… if you treat them right.

Yes, I can run 46km in a week – if I am eating enough (healthy) calories per day, stretching/doing yoga, sleeping enough, etc.

Side note: eating enough has probably been the hardest part so far. I know this might sound like a first-world problem, but my body is screaming for nutrients if I don’t put down a minimum of 2,500-3,000 calories per day at this point.

And our brains probably are too. If we live a healthy life, get the right amount of rest and also training, we are probably all capable of so much more.

And there’s no one who preaches this more than David Goggins. If you haven’t heard of Goggins, he’s a former Navy Seal who can quickly be described as a physical freak.

He runs ultra-marathons, holds crazy records for things like most pull-ups in a day, and wrote a pretty great book that I read a few years ago.

Ones of his core messages is that he doesn’t train like an animal for the physical benefits – he does it for the mental benefits.

Or in his own words, he trains to “callous his mind”.

You know how when you start bench-pressing often, those callouses start to form as extra skin on the inside of your hands?

They’re there as an extra layer of protection for your skin.

Goggins pushes himself to the limit, physically, so that his mind has that extra layer of protection.

So when shit hits the fan in life (pardon my French), he’s ready for it. Because he’s already put himself through about as much pain as anyone.

As I continue to train for the marathon in May and also think back to my competitive sports days, I couldn’t agree more.

Yes, exercise and sports are great in a physical sense. And you should do them to stay healthy, physically – the benefits are endless.

But you’ll also train your mind to be stronger.

When you’ve pushed yourself to run that extra 5km after you thought you had nothing left.

When you’ve lined up against 300 pounders trying to rip your head off.

When you and your opponent have pushed yourselves to the brink of exhaustion… but you need to give that much more to pull off the victory…

Then all of a sudden, that 5-page report for your balding boss doesn’t seem so intimidating (not trying to offend anyone who’s bald!!).

Or that presentation for that random client isn’t as nerve-wracking.

What I’m getting at is this: the more you push yourself physically, the stronger you’ll be mentally, and the better off you’ll be as an entrepreneur, employee, you name it.

And the more intense this marathon training gets, the more I can see it in action.

So do yourself a favour and start pushing yourself to workout more, harder, or give yourself a new physical challenge of any kind.

Hope you enjoyed this solopreneur update and if you want them straight to your inbox, make sure to sign up for my daily email here!

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The “glamour” of tech, financial projections and more of Amazon

Josh Schachnow — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 18:48:05 +0000

Hey folks, back with another business update in the solopreneur world. Let’s jump in.

My last week(s) in business

As many of you know, the last few weeks/month or so have been spent on fundraising for my immigration tech company (Visto.ai) which continues to take up most of my time. It’s a necessary, yet not the most fun part, of being a tech co-founder (I much prefer working on product, sales, marketing, etc.).

The good news?

We’re making good progress. I feel like fundraising and tech companies in general have been glamorized by Hollywood (The Social Network, etc.) with focus on the big business success stories, like the Amazon’s/Facebook’s/Google’s of the world. But in reality, the journey usually isn’t as pretty.

The reality is that most tech companies fail, whether it be at just trying to get off the ground, or trying to fundraise, or trying to scale… there are lots of opportunities for things to go wrong.

I almost wonder if being a tech co-founder is painted as being too pretty a picture, but hey, who am I to make that determination?

Either way, I’ll continue to try to paint the picture of what my experience is like and you can make of it as you will.

What I’m thinking about

As we get closer to the (hopeful) close of our fundraise, I’ve been spending more time on budgeting, expense tracking, revenue projecting and all of the other fun financial activities that come along with running a tech company (especially during a fundraise).

Surprisingly, it made me realize how little of this I was doing while running my more “traditional” solopreneur business, aka my immigration law practice. While I did monthly bookkeeping and annual tax stuff with my accountant, there wasn’t much forward-looking prep – ie. revenue projections/goals, runway calculations, etc.

For those of you working on more traditional/service based businesses, is this something you do? Am I alone here?

My month-to-month financial prep for my firm used to consist of retroactively looking at my revenue from the last month and making sure it was much higher than my expenses, and that was pretty much it.

But when you’re trying to bring investors on board and raise money to build out your team, it’s crucial to calculate your burn rate (how much you’ll be spending per month) and revenue projections (some investors want to see where you think the company will go, and also so you can calculate how many months you can go until you run out of cash…).

Anyway, it’s been an interesting exercise – especially because the only thing we can guarantee when it comes to projections, is that they’ll be wrong (the key is keeping the wrongness to a minimum :P).

What I’m reading

I’m about half way through the second book about Jeff Bezos/Amazon by Brad Stone, Amazon Unbound. If you’ve been on my list for a few months, you’ll know I read his first book, The Everything Store, quite recently (and you can read my review of it here).

I actually didn’t realize Stone had written a second one until I saw it in a used book store last week, and promptly scooped it up. It pushes 500 pages but is a great read so far. I’m over 1/2 way through and should have a full review for you in my next update.

Anyway, that’s it for me. Have a great week, keep grinding and if you need some more of my content, make sure to join the email list here!

The post The “glamour” of tech, financial projections and more of Amazon appeared first on Solopreneur Grind.

Top 3 Lessons from Interviewing Over 50 Successful Solopreneurs

Josh Schachnow — Fri, 17 Apr 2020 14:18:52 +0000

This is a super exciting post because special episode 50 of the SG Podcast went live recently. I started the SG brand/podcast almost 2 years ago and didn’t really know what would come of it, so making it to episode 50 was pretty cool.

Instead of doing my usual interview with a successful solopreneur, I self-recorded an episode talking about why I started the brand/podcast, how I got it started (for those interested in starting a podcast of your own, you’ll see how easy it is) and what I’ve learned from the 50+ guests I’ve had on.

It’s pretty cool, because after interviewing the first 15-20 guests, I started noticing these patterns in what successful solopreneurs were doing. Noticing similar responses, or similar struggles, or similar things they did that led to success.

I wanted to share a few of these key lessons from my first 50 episodes, and also recommend giving it a listen here to get the full experience!

Top 3 lessons from interviewing 50+ successful solopreneurs:

1) It’s a really tough journey and you have to work hard

No one has had an easy journey to success and there is no way to get around doing a lot of hard work. Whether it was putting in time on the evenings/weekends, quitting their 9-5 or some other way, they made the time and took incredible amounts of action. Without it, there’s simply no way to get your own business off the ground. And if you don’t think you’re cut out for it, solopreneurship may not be right for you (which is totally fine too!).

2) Focus on your target market and create value

You can’t just “follow your passion” blindly. Yes, you can start with your passion, but you need to get an idea of what parts of your passion people actually want and are willing to pay for. This is an important distinction, because if there isn’t demand, you will have a hard time. Next, focus on creating massive value, solving a problem or filling a need.

3) Get started fast, even if for free

The one thing many solopreneurs wish they did is start earlier. And there are probably tons of people out there with ideas who should have started already. One easy solution is to stop worrying about technicalities, or dollars, and just start helping people. Whether it’s free coaching, or some type of program, or blog posts, anything… just start. Not only will you learn about your market, you’ll gain some momentum, you’ll get some testimonials, referrals, and more.

You never know what can happen when you get the ball moving.

The other thing I’ve recently learned is that while some industries/business can be very different, a lot of the same principles apply. As you may know, I’m balancing my immigration practice and highly related immigration tech startup, and I gotta say…

Going from solopreneur to the startup world has been an eye opener.

While there is a fair amount of overlap and my experience building my own solopreneur business has helped a lot, there’s a whole new slew of things to do, know and figure out in the startup world.

That being said, it’s been super refreshing to try to figure out this new “environment” and tackle new problems – those are the most fun to try to solve, right?

My biggest struggle: finding and keeping engaged users. The immigration process is a long, personal and sometimes complicated process, so trying to keep potential users engaged and building trust with them has proven a challenge thus far.

But I have faith that I can solve it.

Sometimes you need to know when to go back to the basics, and also lean on people/resources to help you when you’re feeling lost.

Regarding the basics, I love the idea of “doing things that don’t scale”. There’s a great blog post on it from Paul Graham that I’ll include below. To find and engage new users, I’m starting to do things that don’t scale first (ie. the nitty-gritty, not-so-pretty stuff).

Also, a to-do/priority list and organized calendar is once again saving me. If you have a busy week, and/or are trying to manage multiple projects, and/or just don’t know what you should be doing, then you should be keeping a to-do list that you can constantly revisit, evaluate, update and work off of.

Hope all of this helps! If it does and you want a weekly dose of it, make sure to sign up for the SG email list here!

The post Top 3 Lessons from Interviewing Over 50 Successful Solopreneurs appeared first on Solopreneur Grind.