🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Most independents I know are struggling a bit right now. Not always publicly, of course. Online everybody still seems to be absolutely flying. Every founder is apparently scaling effortlessly. Every second post starts with somebody announcing they just closed a five-figure deal, checked the moolah rolling into their Stripe account, or helped their clients generate 17 million dollars through some framework you can buy for a limited time at a...
19 days ago • 5 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Most people create in isolation. They sit behind a laptop, creating stuff based on the assumption that they know what their audience needs, what they’re struggling with, and what will be useful to them. Sometimes they’re right. Often, they’re guessing. And here’s the problem with that. If you look at the same materials, on the same platforms, from the same people as everyone else, you’ll probably end up with the same conclusions, the same...
26 days ago • 4 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Last week, I talked about how you (probably) don't need a massive audience size. If even a small percentage of people buy what you offer, you can work out pretty quickly how many people you actually need. And in most cases, it’s not that many. So if that’s the case, what do you then need? You need to be sharp. Btw, if you are new here, you can browse all past Solo Sauce newsletters right here. Explore the archive Most people start too broad....
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Most people think they need a big audience to make their business work. Thousands of followers. Tens of thousands of views. Maybe even millions. Social media has made that look like the goal. And I get it. When you constantly see people with huge numbers raking it in (at least, that's what they say), it’s easy to think that’s what success looks like. I’ve thought that too. But here’s a question worth asking: Have you ever worked out how many...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Last week, I talked about the importance of building your own email list. You can read that again HERE. Cause when you build everything on borrowed land, it can be taken away in a heartbeat. Let’s say you’ve reached out to a handful of people. Maybe 10. Maybe 30. Maybe more. Now what? What do you actually send? Most people think they need to be the expert. That they need to have all the answers and say something smart every time they send...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. My buddy Marc told me years ago to build an email list. I didn’t. Two reasons: I thought email was on its way out. And I was busy. Work was coming in. Projects were flowing. The last thing on my mind was sitting down to write emails. It didn’t feel urgent. Yet Marc built a list over time. Shared insights & ideas. And built an intimate community. Fast forward to now. The economy is down. Work isn’t always predictable. Some periods are full...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. The world isn’t getting worse at thinking. It’s getting faster. And that’s a problem. People are naturally lazy looking out for shortcuts: Minimum input, maximum output. I’m no anthropologist, but I'm pretty sure people have always tried to find easier ways to get things done. The difference is, we didn’t always have the tools. When my parents were running their family business in the 80s, the day just… stopped at some point. Work ended. The...
2 months ago • 3 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Steroids work. You get bigger. Stronger. Leaner. Faster than you should. From the outside, it looks like you’ve figured something out, like you’ve cracked the code. People ask how you did it, and before you know it, you're giving fitness advice like a true guru. But you haven’t built what actually gets you there. You’ve just skipped it. You cut corners. You look at what gets results, what gets attention, what moves quickly, and it’s tempting...
2 months ago • 2 min read
🎧 Listen to the podcast version of this email here. Last week we talked about how your audience is no longer like a dog. They don’t come to you, excited and ready to listen. Ready to play. They’re more like a cat. Back in the day, you could hold attention in a room. People would sit there, listen, wait for you to make your clever point. Not always because it was brilliant, but because it would be rude to get up and walk out. Online, that dynamic is gone. People choose what they pay attention...
2 months ago • 3 min read