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202. High Quality, Low Overhead: The Secret Sauce Behind Solopreneur Success · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: What do global connectivity, getting fired, and standing out in a sea of freelancers have in common? They're all part of the modern solopreneur's journey, at least according to digital media expert Naresh Vissa. In this episode, we dive into how today's freelance economy was built, why getting fired might be the best thing that's ever happened to your business, and what solopreneurs can do to rise above the noise in a global marketplace. So whether you're pricing your services, prepping to go full time, or rethinking your sales approach, this episode is full of real talk and actionable advice. You're listening to the Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for those just taking the bold step or even just thinking about taking that step into the world of solo entrepreneurship.
• 0:44
  My name is Carly Ries and my cohost Joe Rando and I are your guides to navigating this crazy but awesome journey as a company of one. We take pride in being part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all aspects of solopreneurship that has empowered and educated countless solopreneurs looking to build a business that resonates with their life's ambitions. We help people work to live, not live to work. And if you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the show for you. So if you're eager to gain valuable insights from industry experts on running a business the right way the first time around or want to learn from the missteps of solopreneurs who paved the way before you, then stick around.
• 1:24
  We've got your back because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. Naresh, it is so nice having you on the show today. I have so many things that I wanna talk to you about that Joe and I were talking up about offline. And so just for time's sake, I feel like we should just dive right into it. And that is the freelance and solopreneur economy has been growing so rapidly the past few years.
• 1:49
  What do you think are the biggest factors driving this whole shift?
• 1:53
  Naresh Vissa: Well, a few things. Number one is we live in a time that is more connected than ever before. So thirty years ago for example, not even thirty years ago, I'd say twenty five years ago, my job, which is running a digital media, digital marketing agency did not exist because of the lack of connectivity. Today we are more connected in more ways than we could even imagine, and we're only getting more connected moving forward. So this connectivity has really created this almost this I hate using this term, but this globalist world where the countries are connected, and you can be in The United States, or in India, or in Philippines, or in South Korea, or Japan, or Australia, or Eastern Europe, and you're part of this online and digital ecosystem.
• 2:51
  Doesn't matter which country you're part of the same, but ton of countries. It doesn't matter what country you live in or where you live around the world. All you need is an internet connection, a computer or a laptop, and boom, the global digital economy is at your fingertips. So that's why we've seen this rise in freelancing and independent contractors all around the world.
• 3:14
  Joe Rando: So clarification on that. So are you saying that people that couldn't necessarily interact before are able to interact and that drove it, or is it the fact that we can kind of work remotely, work at a distance that there was an implicit pent up demand to be independent work as a one person business that was then enabled by virtue of the technology connecting us together like this.
• 3:38
  Naresh Vissa: Well, it's both of those. So for example, if we lived in the nineteen nineties today or the nineteen eighties today, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation. We would not be able to see each other's faces and record and have this conversation. We wouldn't be able to have meetings. We wouldn't be able to hire freelancers or contractors or part time employees because none of this ecosystem was built out.
• 4:06
  It's the internet that gave rise to everything that we're doing right now from wearing these earbuds to wearing your headphones to the microphone that's in front of you to the connection that allows us to be connected to the Internet, to Riverside, which is a software that we're using to record this. None of this was available in the eighties or the nineties or even much of the February. So the point that I'm making here is that if I was born in the eighties, I wouldn't have been able to start Krish Media & marketing, my company. I wouldn't have been able to Most digital entrepreneurs, most online people or even IT people, they'd have to work in another line of business. They'd have to do something different.
• 4:55
  So I was able to start my business and do what I do because of the online and digital landscape, because of the online and digital marketplace. So to answer your question, it's both of those really.
• 5:07
  Carly Ries: it's funny because obviously we target solopreneurs. We work with them day in and day out. But Joe, I mean, we joke about this all the time. I am also a contractor. I'm a solopreneur.
• 5:17
  And Joe and I have worked together off and on for nine years, and I've never met him. And we live in this virtual world. He could've hired somebody in Massachusetts. I'm out in Colorado. Yet, with the way the technology is, we've been working together for nearly a decade, which saying that out loud blows my mind, and I haven't actually thought about that for a second, which is crazy.
• 5:40
  But I feel like this access to anybody in the world is a great thing, but it can also make it really, really hard to stand out because now your competition isn't just Joe Rando next door, it's Joe Rando across the globe. And so I just kinda wanna hear from your personal experience, what were some of your biggest challenges that you faced early as a solopreneur, and then how have you overcome them? Because I'm sure other people have gone through that exact same thing.
• 6:10
  Naresh Vissa: So a couple of things. Number one, competition is a good thing because competition makes everybody better. If there's no competition, then let's say if there's only one person in in an industry or one company in an industry and there's no competition, then they can put together they can put out the worst quality service, the worst quality products, and people are still gonna buy it because there's no competition. But when there is competition, now people have a choice. And they're gonna pick what's cheaper or what's higher quality or just what's better for them.
• 6:43
  So more competition is a good thing. Now to answer your question head on, firstly, I live in the United States Of America. I brought up this global economy And a 100% of my client, I'm trying to think, I wouldn't say a 100. 95% of my clients since I've been in business for twelve years are American based businesses. They're Americans. only about 5%, so that's one out of 20 clients that we've worked with have been overseas. So as far as standing out goes, the competition is still within The United States. It's like this other mark the the the global marketplace, it's like The US is still the hub and the base, but these other countries are there to support US based businesses. So they're the ones doing the back end stuff, and this is when you hear, oh, our developers are in Ukraine or Belarus or in India or our team is in India. Those are the support people.
• 7:46
  They're not the actual front facing companies that I think US based businesses, they want that American company as front facing because maybe they have experience working with India or some of these other countries and they didn't have the greatest experience. So they prefer to pay a little bit of a premium working with an American based company, even if the back end work is being done by someone in Belarus or in India. So as far as the competition goes, I still see this as American companies competing against American companies. So there is competition. It's just not as global as you would expect.
• 8:28
  Carly Ries: Got it. So how do you recommend standing out against the competition?
• 8:33
  Naresh Vissa: Well, a few things. Number one, it requires a very complicated answer. Not complicated, but a very thorough answer. So number one is I think pricing is incredibly important because, like I said, we're more connected than ever before. Pricing is so crucial and it's so key.
• 8:53
  So the cost of these, if you wanna call it web services, information services, technology, technology is deflationary. So the cost of these services should go down and continue to go down. So one way that you can stand out is by offering lower prices. So that company that is still operating in that nineteen nineties mindset most likely charges a premium that's multiples over what the cost of something should be. So my business for example, the way that I marketed and promoted myself and that I stand out, is I say we're a low cost solutions provider.
• 9:33
  So we try to get people through the door at a low cost. They can go to these big marketing agencies and pay $3.04, five times more or they can come to us or they're gonna get the same if not better quality, much better communication and service. So we're like very very quick. I'll give you an example. We're working on a book cover design, front cover, back cover, spine for a client who's releasing a book.
• 9:57
  And he went to one of these big book design agencies and they said it will take three months to do the work. Whereas I told him, hey, fill out this form that we have and after you submit that form to me, it'll take us three business days to do the entire project and one to two business days of of edits after that. So that's how I'm able to stand out from the competition through my pricing because I'm way cheaper, because I have that open line of communication, because we're much faster, the quality is still very strong. That's how you stand out, but I found that pricing is the most important key.
• 10:35
  Joe Rando: So I'm gonna jump in because this is something I talk about a lot, and I agree with you completely that solopreneurs can charge a lot less than bigger companies and do really great work. It's one of my arguments is, you know, hire a solopreneur and you probably won't be sorry. But I also argue that you don't wanna just compete on price. So at least when it comes to you versus other solopreneurs that are in a similar business, I assume you're not advocating going after them and competing on price as much as it's about competing on price against the big guys, so to speak. Is that fair to say?
• 11:10
  Naresh Vissa: Well, pricing, to me, that's number one because it depends on what service we're offering here. If we're talking about, like I said, design services, there are tens of thousands of designers out there. And the fact of the matter is people are going to base their decisions on price because they have 10,000 other options. So that's where that's where price is really important. Now I wanna bring up an example of where I got into trouble with pricing.
• 11:35
  When I first started my company, the advice I got from somebody much older than me, somebody very close to me and it turned out to be very bad advice. They said you should charge as much as possible. It's a free market. Just charge as high as you can and you'll be good. So I did that.
• 11:52
  I actually landed some pretty big lucrative contracts. But what happened with that high pricing strategy is that the contracts were only three months long and at the end of the three months, the client felt like they got gypped. They would pay the rest of the contract and they would not renew the contract. And so it was difficult to grow. It was difficult to get referrals and it finally reached a point to where a client said, I'm not paying the last month because I feel like I'm not getting enough for what I'm paying.
• 12:20
  And it was that experience where I went through that, we reached a settlement, and I changed my pricing strategy from just charge as much as you want. Even though they agreed, hey I'm gonna pay what's on the contract, they always felt like no matter how much work we did, they always or how much work I did, they always felt like they were getting ripped off. So when I changed that pricing strategy, our retention rate has just skyrocketed. That was about ten years ago when I changed that pricing strategy, the retention skyrocketed. So I just made it more fair and now a lot of my marketing is through my current existing business.
• 12:58
  Joe Rando: Yeah. I just wanna be really quick. This is really important. What you're saying it's really important, and I agree with you. But this idea of what it sounds to me like you've done is gone from trying to be as high as you can be and maybe a little higher than you should have been given the expectations of your customers to pricing more fairly in a way that customers feel like they're getting treated well and you're making enough money to be happy to do the work.
• 13:20
  Is that fair?
• 13:21
  Naresh Vissa: That's almost exactly what I did. Yes.
• 13:24
  Joe Rando: So, but are there people out there that are trying to outcompete you on price but can't win because they can't produce the quality at the price? You know what I'm saying? I hire a designer. I hire anybody. I have a certain minimum expectation of what I'm going to get for quality, and I don't want the low price leader.
• 13:43
  In fact, I usually throw out low bids because low bids are usually low for a reason. And I'm just trying to get to understand what you're saying in a way that I think is clear for people that are hearing this.
• 13:56
  Naresh Vissa: So as I started this conversation, I said there's never a compromise on quality. So the quality is still a plus quality. It's our philosophy is high quality, low price. So I know what you said is, you made it seem if I were to distill that, low price, low quality. Quality when I was charging top notch, the quality is still the same as what I was charging the premium amount and the work is extremely high quality.
• 14:29
  So the reason why I have repeat customers and why the customers are referring their clients over, it's basically a referral program I created is because of the quality, not necessarily because of the price.
• 14:43
  Joe Rando: I get it. Because if I can get high quality and low price, I'm all in. But how do you do that? How can you do that and your competition not do that?
• 14:53
  Naresh Vissa: So my competition doesn't necessarily do that. They don't do that.
• 14:57
  Joe Rando: And Why don't they do that?
• 14:59
  Naresh Vissa: They don't do that because they operate their business in a more old school format of they have overhead that I don't have.
• 15:08
  Joe Rando: this is what we're getting to here. but I'm saying not the agencies, other solopreneurs. I get the solopreneur lack of overhead, but we're talking here about the idea of having high quality and low price and still making money. And that's not, you know, that's not obvious how that's done.
• 15:25
  I'm really interested. I really wanna understand how you're doing this, if you don't mind sharing the secret sauce.
• 15:30
  Naresh Vissa: Well, I'm trying to get to the secret sauce. There are a lot of different factors here. And one of them look, one of them that I can talk about for example is cost of living. let's forget about the agencies. Let's talk about the solopreneurs.
• 15:45
  Somebody who lives in New York City or who lives in San Francisco or let's just say New York or California or the Northeast in general, they're gonna charge a higher price because their cost of living is a lot higher than somebody like me who lives in Florida. When I moved to Florida when I was renting, I now own several properties, but when I was renting in my mid twenties, I was paying something like $900 a month for rent, cable, internet, utilities. I mean that's, and I had moved from Maryland where I was paying closer to maybe $131,400 dollars a month. So when you think about, that's a factor that you have to take into consideration when you're charging your clients. It's yes, I need to make enough money to pay my rent and pay my bills and pay my groceries and the popular thing right now is paying for eggs which I don't eat eggs, but you need to take that into account.
• 16:43
  But I was able to come down on my price even more from when I lived in Maryland and then I moved down to Florida because my cost of living went down. Of course, there's no state income tax in Florida as well. So that's an important factor to take into consideration. I know that I was competing against many solopreneurs in New York City for example. I know some tech people who I compete against who are just straight solopreneurs in New York City and they do have to charge top dollar.
• 17:11
  And I've seen them. In fact, I've cut contracts with clients who I work with. I've cut contracts with solopreneurs because we found people within The United States and overseas were offering that same IT service for a much lower price and better quality. So just because you charge a high price doesn't mean that you're getting great quality. And now with these websites, which I'm sure you've covered on your show, like Fiverr and Upwork and freelance.com, people are vetted and they have reviews and they have stars in front of them and you can see who's good and who's not good.
• 17:50
  And I started using these sites twelve years ago, a long time ago. I started using them twelve years ago. And there was a trial and error process with them and you go through the trial and error and you find the good people. But as a solopreneur, you can join these sites and build up your reputation on these sites and get more business that way as well. And you'll see that the pricing is very competitive on these sites.
• 18:16
  Carly Ries: Yeah. That all makes sense. Well, okay. So for people that want to start off as a solopreneur, like these sites might be a good idea, but you also recommend that people start their business as a side hustle, which we wholeheartedly agree with. So can you kind of elaborate why and how people can pull off that transition from corporate to corporate with a side hustle to full time solopreneur?
• 18:39
  Naresh Vissa: I'm gonna share what I did because everybody is different, but I actually got started on the side when I was still in college. So I was like 19 years old when I got started with the side hustle. And I thought it was gonna be a lifetime side hustle. I liked it a lot. I started out producing AMFM radio shows.
• 18:57
  This was a long time ago, on the side and I could do it all remotely. And as podcasting became a thing in 2011, 2012, that's when I got involved in that. And then one of my clients ended up hiring me full time. Now throughout this process while I had this side hustle, I was in school and then I got a full time job. I was working a full time job.
• 19:19
  And it was in 2013 that I left my full time job because my side hustle was growing and I felt like, or I should say the company I was working for, one of their largest competitors basically told me that they would become a client of mine. And I had many competitors for the company I was working for saying like, I'd love for you to work for me, and instead of working as an employee, because as an employee you can only work at one place. I said, you know what, I should just pursue this side hustle full time and that way I could work with all these different companies. And they happened to be in the neighborhood that I lived in Maryland at the time. So that's how I got started with the side hustle.
• 20:02
  It was 2,008 when I started it and 2013 when I jumped in full time. So it took about five to six years to fully feel comfortable and confident to jump into that side hustle. What I did not do was just go straight to the side hustle. I still had a safety net, I still had the full time job, and I knew that if the side hustle didn't work out after I jumped in full time, I could always go back and get a full time job.
• 20:27
  Carly Ries: Well so speaking of just jumping in and I mean people are so nervous even with the side hustle to go full in on their solopreneur likes. So do you think there are any key traits or skills that make some solopreneurs more successful than others?
• 20:43
  Naresh Vissa: Well, it's complicated. And I know I already used that term once before. This is all complicated stuff. I think people are very used to studying for a test and getting an A. Interviewing for a job and getting the job.
• 21:00
  They're not used to doing the HR and doing the finance and doing the marketing and doing the sales, doing the business development. As a solopreneur, you are your own business. Even though you might be a one man show, you have to do it all. And so my advice is if you're good at all these different things and you have a passion, well not a passion, but if you like. It's almost like a game for me.
• 21:26
  Like I like running my books and you know, right now it's tax season for example. Well I don't like actually doing the taxes but I mean I have folders and folders worth of documentation and I like collecting all that and then handing it over to my accountant. And then again when it comes to the sales side, I am the face of my business.
• 21:55
  Joe Rando: Do you like selling? Do you like selling?
• 21:57
  Naresh Vissa: I hate selling, but I like sales. So I don't like hard selling.
• 22:02
  Joe Rando: Yeah. Okay. But you're saying you have a sales process that you enjoy?
• 22:06
  Naresh Vissa: I have a sales pro and my philosophy on sales is very different from how the old school salespeople tell you to do things. I'm not an interface car salesman type. I'm not gonna be calling people on the phone following up. Hey. We had this meeting.
• 22:20
  What do you think? I'm very here's what I have to offer. Here's why I love it. Here's why I think it's good for you. If you're interested, you contact me and you come to me and boom, it's gonna happen.
• 22:34
  It's very very I believe in low grads. How I like being sold to. I don't like being sold to first off, but I like if I have a pain point, I know what I want and I'll move forward and I feel you have to treat people that way. And it's worked out really well for me. I did not mesh very well with many clients because they wanted me to be that hard pushing, high pressure, hey you need to buy this right now type of thing.
• 23:00
  That's not who I am. So to answer your question, do I like sales? I don't like selling, but like I told you, I do like sales. And I'm pretty good at it.
• 23:11
  Joe Rando: You created a sales process that you enjoy. That's awesome. That's the part a lot of people have trouble with that. That's very cool.
• 23:19
  Carly Ries: Well, and I wanna circle back really quick to the qualities and characteristics of successful solopreneurs. Because I think one thing you just said when you said studying for a test, like you can study for a test and get an a. You can interview for a job, get a job. And I was like, are you talking to me specifically? Because when I first started as a solopreneur, I was the hard working student that went in that a.
• 23:43
  if I interviewed I'd try hard to get that job and all that. But my issue was I could always prep for those, and there weren't any problem solving opportunities. It was study, get it. Research the company, get it. And when I first started, it was the lack of like, where do I go to figure out how to put my sales process together?
• 24:04
  Luckily, what I left to do was marketing, so I had that in my back pocket. But where do I go to figure out my accounting? Blah blah blah. And all these things. And I think that's what throws people.
• 24:15
  It's just feeling like, well I've done well doing this and interviewing for these jobs so I can run my own business. But then they have to figure out how to run every aspect of their business which people aren't really trained to do.
• 24:27
  Naresh Vissa: They're not trained to do that and that's why I say it's like a game. I had to do a lot of stuff on my own. It's purely out of not necessarily learning because I liked playing that game. I liked learning that stuff. I think I'm kind of a born businessman.
• 24:45
  And as a businessman you have to do all this. Gonna have to eventually you can hire people but you still have to learn it yourself. So I, in high school, don't take business courses in high school. You don't take business course until college really. In high school, my school offered like two business classes the entire four years.
• 25:03
  And I took both of them and one of them was an economics class, the other one was an actual business class where you like start a business and you go out to the street and try to sell products and manage people. So I did all that and I was bad at it. I was really bad but I'd say, you know what, I think I can get better. I think I can get really good at this. I think I have a knack for this.
• 25:23
  This wasn't very good this time around but this is something that I could see myself pursuing and doing. And I immediately did that. By the age of 16 I was basically in the business world and already thinking and ideating and I got my first internship when I was, as soon as I could drive. It was a paid internship for a marketing company and I didn't know much about the company. It was software sales company.
• 25:47
  I didn't know much about software but I said you know what, I'm just gonna do this and the skills that I learned when I was 16 years old, it set the stage and they're skills that I still use today.
• 25:58
  Carly Ries: Well so there are a lot of people that, like you've said, this has gone my way, I've been successful at this, blah blah blah. But you also say that getting fired is a part of the solopreneur game. And why do you think that's important and when can people learn from it?
• 26:14
  Naresh Vissa: Well, being fired in general is really important in life because when you're fired, you're told that you're not good enough. Because if you were good enough, then you wouldn't have gotten fired. So the people who hang around, they're people who actually have value that should hang around. So what can you learn from being fired? It's A, I wasn't good enough.
• 26:42
  Why wasn't I good enough? B, I need to improve. I'm not good enough and therefore I need to improve on x y and z. So I've been fired many times, many many times even while being a solopreneur, even if I have many different clients, clients still fire me all the time. And sometimes it's a dollars and cents issue.
• 27:05
  It's hey we can't come to an agreement from a dollars and cents perspective. But other times, and it hasn't happened much recently, but when I was younger, it was that hey you're just the quality, we talked a lot about quality here. The quality isn't good enough or you're not good enough. And so being fired I think is a really important part of the journey because it'll force you then be that salesperson, to try to get more clients, to try to keep that. It can be a traumatic event and I remember I got fired once from a big client and I basically talked about changing my pricing strategy earlier, but I also said I need to have as many clients as possible.
• 27:49
  I can't be dependent on one or two clients. I need to have 10 clients or 12 clients. So it taught me that because I remember somebody told me, they said the biggest problem I see with these solopreneurs, solopreneurship has been going on forever, and somebody who I respect, somebody who does very well, is successful in business told me, they said the biggest problem that I see is that people, they only get one client, they're dependent on that one client, they lose that one client and then they find themselves unemployed and I don't wanna see that happen to you. And literally three months after he told me that, that did happen to me. And that was during my first year in business.
• 28:30
  And I said hey that's a good lesson to learn. I was like 24, 25 at the time, and I said that's a good lesson to learn so now I'm gonna expand. Because it's easy to get complacent whether you're working a full time job, one stream of income, or you call yourself a solopreneur with one big client. It's easy to become complacent and I learned through that experience and said, I'm not just gonna get more clients, I'm gonna start a second business and I'm gonna buy real estate properties and I'm gonna get a real estate license and save money on taxes. Because saving money on taxes is also kind of an income stream because that's money that you get to keep in your pocket.
• 29:04
  So now I'd say solopreneurship is just like one out of five things that I do. And it's because of that PTSD that I got from getting fired or being laid off. And I feel like this specific segment is so important because right now there are mass layoffs and mass firings happening all around The United States, whether in the private sector or in the government. And what people don't talk enough about, they talk about the empathetic part and the emotional part of it, but what they don't talk enough about is firings, layoffs, this has been going on since the beginning of humankind. And what we need to do is teach our children, I have two young boys, We need to teach our children what I just said earlier, not to become dependent on any one specific source of income.
• 29:48
  I actually saw the statistics that forty percent of US citizens will get fired. Forty percent will get fired at least once over their career. So that's quite a lot I mean, that's almost half the population that is gonna face a layoff or a firing. And men get fired more than women or men get laid off more than women. So if you're a man, the number skyrockets to something like sixty percent of your chances of being laid off or fired, at least once during your lifetime.
• 30:22
  So it's going to happen, I hate to break it to people who say oh I've never gotten fired, I've never gotten laid off. It's gonna happen, especially the older that you get the higher your salary. If it hasn't happened to you yet, is going to happen and what we need to be teaching is these skills. Because if you have skills, we talked about being a solopreneur, the way that you get clients, the way that you get business is by developing certain skills, showing off those skills, and charging for those skills because those skills create value. And this is completely lost in all the mumbo jumbo of layoffs and all that other stuff because somebody who can who can create value and who provides value will always have a job.
• 31:04
  Always have a job.
• 31:05
  Carly Ries: So Joe, he said if it hasn't happened, it could happen to you. So, just tell me what I need to do to not let it happen to me. Well, so it sounds like you you have the no regrets, all opportunities kind of mentality with all of it. They're all educational moments. But if there was something you could have changed in the past, what would you have changed that other solopreneurs can learn from?
• 31:31
  Naresh Vissa: Well, I brought up the pricing. That's number one. Number two, I'll bring up some legal things. You definitely wanna read legal contracts when you get into them. If you don't have legal contracts, you want them in place. even if that means going on chat GPT, getting chat GPT to put together a legal contract for you, or downloading a template, you absolutely want that because when you're a solopreneur you don't have a legal department, you don't have a safety net or a lifeline looking out for you and I brought up legal issues that I had earlier. And it's simply those legal issues are because I created my own contracts without actually getting a lawyer to read over them.
• 32:07
  Joe Rando: Yeah. It's interesting with ChatGPT and contracts. I'm nervous advising it without a review because I've seen ChatGPT go off the deep end. You know?
• 32:20
  And so it's a little bit like, you know, I've tried it just to see what it would do. I had to create a a residential lease for Massachusetts, and it looked pretty good, honestly. And I know a little bit about leasing Okay. Because I came out of the real estate business. So, yeah, with respect to ChatGPT and contracts, you gotta be careful because it does hallucinate sometimes.
• 32:37
  So better than nothing. I've always said, you know, you're better off having a contract than not having a contract, but just be a little careful.
• 32:44
  Carly Ries: Yes. Well, so many good tips of nuggets of wisdom in this conversation. Naresh, I don't want to end this call. I feel like we have so many more things that we could cover, but we ask all of our guests this question. What is your favorite quote about success?
• 33:00
  Naresh Vissa: It's a quote from Thomas Jefferson who was one of my favorite presidents.
• 33:09
  I can answer your question head on, but I just wanna talk about Tom Thomas Jefferson really quickly because he was actually a solopreneur. And how was he a solopreneur before he became president? Our presidents, when this nation was founded, they were renaissance men. Ben Franklin who did not become president, never tried to become president, but he was one of our founding fathers.
• 33:30
  He invented the stove. He invented, the lightning rod. He invented so many you can find so many more things that he he was basically an inventor and he helped lead us to independence. In Thomas Jefferson's case, he invented many things. He was a prolific writer.
• 33:46
  He was, obviously super smart and he invented the swivel chair. I think one of you is sitting in a swivel chair if you can roll around. That's because of Thomas Jefferson. And so, I bring up Thomas Jefferson because he's had my favorite quote on success which is, I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have. And he was somebody who works tirelessly, would just constantly work and work and opportunities kept coming his way.
• 34:12
  And people would say, oh you're such a lucky person to become president. You're so lucky to have invented this. And he said, it's not luck. It's just me just constantly working and working and most of the stuff like the presidency, like being a part of the founding fathership, That happened because those opportunities came his way because of his hard work. It's not like he was just obviously there was no TV back then, but it's not like whatever the equivalent would be to just sitting at home and twiddling his thumbs and then somebody came to him and said, hey why don't you write the declaration of independence?
• 34:43
  That's absolutely not how it happened. He was just a tiresome constant worker.
• 34:47
  Carly Ries: Oh great quote and I love how you tied it back. Well if people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?
• 34:53
  Naresh Vissa: Nareshvissa.com, Nareshvissa.com. And my company is called Krish Media and Marketing. It's an online digital media and marketing agency. It's Krishmediamarketing.com.
• 35:07
  Carly Ries: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on this show today. We really appreciate your time. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. Please share this episode with a friend, subscribe on your favorite platform, and leave that five star review, and we will see you next time.
• 35:24
  You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs. Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.