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220. The Biggest Mistake Solopreneurs Make: Selling to “Everyone” · The Life-First Solopreneur

• 0:00
  Carly Ries: Think you can just wing it without knowing your competition or clearly defining your customer? That's a fast track to frustration. And in this episode of the Solopreneur Success Cycle series, we break down why understanding your competitors, direct, indirect, and even budgetary, can spark better ideas and help you find your niche. Then we dive into creating customer personas and even negative personas so your marketing hits the bull's eye every time. Whether you're just starting out or refining your strategy, these insights will save you from spinning your wheels and will help you focus on the clients who matter most.
• 0:32
  You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for anyone on the solo business journey, whether you're just toying with the idea, taking your first bold step, or have been running your own show for years and want to keep growing, refining, and thriving. I'm Carly Ries, and along with my cohost, Joe Rando, we're your guides through the crazy but awesome world of being company of one. As part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all things solopreneurship, we help people design businesses that align with their life's ambitions so they can work to live, not live to work. If you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the place for you. But if you want real world insights from industry experts, lessons from the successes and stumbles of fellow solopreneurs, and practical strategies for building and sustaining a business you love, you're in the right spot.
• 1:20
  Because flying solo in business doesn't mean you're alone. No matter where you are in your journey, we've got your back. Okay. So Joe, we are back with another episode of our solopreneur success cycle series that we are tying into the launch and release of our book Solopreneur Business for Dummies that is coming out early October twenty twenty five. In the last episode, we kicked off the the planning phase of the solopreneur success cycle.
• 1:46
  But that is the biggest phase of the Solopreneur Success Cycle by far. So keeping these Sound Bite episodes short, the ones that just Joe and I do.
• 1:55
  Joe Rando: And just a quick correction. Sorry. It's the step. Because we have phases and we have steps. So just don't want anybody confused.
• 2:02
  Carly Ries: Thank you
• 2:03
  Joe Rando: But it is the biggest step.
• 2:06
  Carly Ries: The biggest step in the phase of this Solopreneur Success Cycle. Are you guys still with us? So in the last episode we talked about business models, we talked about what to call yourself, we kinda gave an overview of planning in general. And for this episode, we are going to specifically talk about your competition and defining your customer. Because planning those things out before you actually start the race, I guess I'll say, are key.
• 2:33
  Because if you don't know your competition and you don't know your customers, you are going to be spinning your wheels and you're gonna be, Joe mentioned in a past episode, just going through trial and error unnecessarily. And that can really really affect your mental state and the progress of your business or even the launch of your business if you keep just going in circles. So Joe, let's start with competition. Competition, defining your competition. Why is this even so important?
• 2:59
  Can't people just work in a silo and hope their business does okay on their own?
• 3:04
  Joe Rando: Yeah. You can. I mean, I think you're missing an opportunity if you do that. I mean, as a solopreneur, we talked about in the previous episodes, you don't need, to be the lion's share of any given market. Right?
• 3:16
  You just need a little tiny piece. So competition isn't always as huge a deal because, you might have, five other solopreneurs that you're competing with and a couple of big companies, and you get a tiny percentage of the market, and you're perfectly happy. But, so competition isn't the enemy like it is with bigger companies. Where if you're not growing, you're dying.
• 3:37
  So you're usually trying to take business away from your competitors. But it can provide a lot of insight. So it can do things like, number one, help you maybe niche down a little more, find an underserved market. It can help you spark new ideas or ideas that other people have that you didn't think of.
• 3:57
  You know, just a quick example of competition. one of the things that's happened to me a couple of times in my life is I wanted to buy something, and I went out and looked at all the products and didn't like any of them and built one. And the first time I did it, I built a tool for figuring out where to put retail that ended up becoming Trade Area Systems. And, it really worked out nicely in the long run. We sold it in 2020.
• 4:23
  And the second time was I wanted to buy a task management app. I tried a bunch of them, and I didn't like any of them because they didn't do what I wanted them to do. So I started building one. That is the soon to come out finally LifeStarr app, which I won't go into details, but so the competition really inspired these products. Because if I hadn't looked at competition, I wouldn't have realized what I wanted that was missing.
• 4:50
  So by looking at competition, you can get real insights into maybe things that you could do that you hadn't thought of. So that's number one. Number two is understanding that there's different kinds of competition. The direct competition is the obvious one. I'm a life coach for men 60, and Bob is a life coach for men 60, so we're competitors. That's great. But there are other kinds of, competition, like indirect competitors. for example, I help people, I'm a life coach that helps people that feel that their energy is low and they want more energy.
• 5:34
  And I could be competing with a personal trainer who brands themselves around, getting people into shape so that they have more more energy.
• 5:42
  Carly Ries: Or even coffee brands.
• 5:44
  Joe Rando: Yeah. That's pretty indirect. Yeah. what's that coffee called? Death Wish or something with the really high caffeine? I mean, there's just, a lot of ways to solve the problem. And then there's the really extreme ones, the budgetary competitors. So you've got something where the example I liked was the idea of, say, I make custom jewelry.
• 6:11
  And so some guy comes to me, and he's looking at getting a ring for his tenth wedding anniversary for his wife. you know, so a custom made ring about to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary for his wife. But he's also talking to a travel agent about taking a cruise for their tenth wedding anniversary. So I'm competing on budget. Right?
• 6:30
  There's a certain amount of money. He's either gonna spend on a ring. He's gonna spend it on a cruise. But for solopreneurs, I think that's a little beyond the pale most of the time. I mean, maybe not for you particularly, but for most people, I don't think they have to go that far.
• 6:46
  But the direct and indirect, I think, are important to think about. Just because, number one, not so much you go, oh my god, somebody else is doing what I'm doing. Well, that is not the end of the world. Even if it's a big company, if big companies ruled the world, there wouldn't be startups. So don't let that scare you, but do learn from it.
• 7:06
  What are they doing that you might do differently? how could you maybe take, one tenth of 1% of their business because you do something a little different, a little better, a little more focused on some aspect or pain point? So that's the thing with competition. It can really inspire you. And just go back to this idea of that Jay Acunzo expressed, which is don't be the best. Be their favorite. So you're gonna talk about defining customers. the people you define, try to be their favorite, and let the competition go after everybody else.
• 7:44
  Carly Ries: Well, so speaking of customers, Joe, the worst thing that I can hear as somebody that helps solopreneurs is when we say, well, who benefits from your service? And somebody responds with, everybody.
• 8:00
  it's like, no.
• 8:02
  Joe Rando: I can help the whole world.
• 8:04
  Carly Ries: No. No. No. So your business, you may have a project or service that benefits people. Let's say you're a coach.
• 8:11
  And if you're a life coach, you could theoretically help a bunch of different people depending on what angle you take. But you may wanna get more specific than that. So let's say you're like, I'm gonna target people that are middle aged. I'm gonna target people in their forties and fifties that are, they may be wanting to revamp things of their life. Great.
• 8:28
  So you have an idea of who this customer type is. Like I'm going for middle aged people that are trying to trying to teen things up a bit or their previous career, previous whatever is getting stale. So you have this idea of who these people are. But in order to speak to them and really connect with people and really resonate with them, because when it comes to targeting customers, you need to connect with them emotionally. You need to make them feel that they are the only person that you're talking to and really connect on an emotional level.
• 8:59
  And to do that, you need to have a very clear picture in your head of who these middle aged people are. And so that's where the idea of a persona comes in. And that's when you take the customer type, like these middle aged people, and you give them a name. You create a story around them. instead of saying, oh, I target for a forty five year old male who's looking for a career change, you say, I'm targeting Charles.
• 9:27
  Charles is a 45 year old male who has three kids, a wife and a dog, lives in suburbia. He's had a really hard time in his previous career because of x y z, and actually define those. He's looking for something that's more fulfilling in his life. He's looking for more time in his day to spend with his kids because they're growing up so fast that he wants to be able to make it to their soccer games. Even though it already feels like they're already flying out of the house.
• 9:52
  And with his new job, he wants to do x y z. In his free time, he loves skiing. He loves going hiking. He loves work walking the dog and barbecuing in the summer. That is so much more specific than talking about targeting 45 year old Charles.
• 10:12
  And that persona can help target your messaging because you know so much about these people. And don't just randomly give them the story. The story should be made off of research, off of punches, off of talking to your customer types to create these personas. You need to get a ton of information to create these people. You can't just wing it and hope for that persona. I probably should've started with that.
• 10:33
  But this isn't a made up story. This is based off of sound research, experience and talking to these people. So that you know, oh, well, Charles likes barbecuing. So if I'm talking about coaching, I'll say in my messaging, free up more time for those summer barbecues. Like, let's figure out what's going on and talk to those pain points.
• 10:53
  Talk to those interests and talk to them. So developing personas is extremely important in your messaging, in your operations, because it can define where your product goes to. It's just such an essential step in the planning process. But you also have negative personas.
• 11:12
  Joe Rando: Yeah. I just had one thing I wanted to say because people listen to this and they go, that sounds kinda goofy. You know? I mean, it just sounds weird. But here's an example that I was at Inbound last year, the HubSpot conference, and the guys from the Morning Brew were talking.
• 11:29
  And I don't know if you know the Morning Brew, but it's a huge newsletter that goes out every day, I believe. And they're talking. They have this person. They didn't say his name, but they have his LinkedIn profile up on their screen, and they write the morning brew for this guy. A real person. they're looking at him. They're saying, what does he wanna know? And that's how they write the morning brew. I mean, literally, their persona is a real human. So this is not as crazy as it sounds.
• 12:01
  And I just wanna point out one other thing before we go into negative personas, and that is, especially for solopreneurs, it doesn't hurt if you have some cred around the persona. I think that's a plus. It doesn't have to be. But, I always use the example. I've talked about this a few times of somebody making golf clubs. they're making golf clubs, and they decide to target, left handed women under five feet tall. It's great niche. Right? There's probably plenty of left handed women under five feet tall that play golf that a solopreneur could make golf clubs till they die.
• 12:37
  But if you're not a left handed woman under five feet tall or have a lot of testimonials, you know, social proof from women, left handed women that are five feet tall that your golf clubs are awesome, it might be tough to sell that. I just wanna throw that out there.
• 12:54
  Carly Ries: Yeah. And really quick before we go on to negative personas, like you said, only aim for like two to three real personas. because you think you can target everybody out there, don't create a persona for everybody out there.
• 13:05
  Joe Rando: And one is okay. One is also okay. Yeah. Might be better for solos.
• 13:12
  Carly Ries: As specific as you can get, the better. And for negative personas, these are the people that you don't wanna talk to. you need to get a clear idea of who those people are . Just full transparency for Joe and I and the LifeStarr team, we have a persona that we call Get Rich Gary. And he could still be a solopreneur, but this is somebody that just wants to get rich quickly.
• 13:33
  He wants to wake up in his pajamas, make a million dollars, maybe an exaggeration, but maybe not, by 5PM without putting in any effort, and he's only there for the big bucks and and nothing else. That's not who we target. We like talking to people that like to focus on lifestyle and create businesses that support their life goals, not somebody that just wants to get rich quick. And so in all of our forums we have people kinda fill out, like, where do you fall in this process? Like I'm a solopreneur that wants to learn.
• 14:03
  I'm just starting my business. And then Get Rich Gary is also in there like, I wanna make a lot of money. I can't remember the exact phrase right now. But that's a negative persona, and then we suppress them from our conversations because that is not somebody we support and we let them know that.
• 14:16
  Joe Rando: We send a nice email. I Mean, we just explain there are other people that they probably would have more fun with.
• 14:23
  Carly Ries: And it doesn't make them bad people. Negative personas does not mean they're bad people. It just means they're not aligned with your company focus and who you're trying to target.
• 14:32
  Joe Rando: We're not gonna help them. They're gonna come in here and go, where's my plan?
• 14:36
  Carly Ries: Yeah. We're not a good fit. We'll be honest with that. And again, if you can say no to these people, it frees up the opportunity to say yes to the people that are much better aligned, which are your regular personas. Anyway, feel like I could go on and on.
• 14:49
  I'm so passionate about this topic. So we'll end it right here for today. We still have more on the planning step of the solopreneur success cycle. So tune in for those. But listeners, thank you so much for tuning in.
• 15:01
  Before next time, please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite platform. Leave that five star review. Share this episode with a friend that you think can really benefit from all of this, and we will see you next time on the Aspiring Solopreneur. 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.
• 15:23
  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.