Latest / The Life-First Solopreneur / 32. What To Think About When Planning Your One-Person Business
Transcript
- Joe Rando (00:00): If you can help anyone, great. But the world is a noisy place these days, and so much content and ads and stuff are out there. So if you try to target everyone, they'll probably never even hear of you. And if they do hear of you, they probably won't notice you. If they notice you, they probably won't engage with you. And if they engage with you, they probably will still choose someone that targets them more clearly. Intro (00:21): Bigger doesn't always mean better. Welcome to the One-Person business podcast where people who are flying solo in business come for specific tips and advice to find success as a company of one, here are your hosts, Joe Rando and Carly Ries. Carly Ries (00:40): Welcome to the One-Person Business podcast. I'm one of your hosts, Carly Ries. Joe Rando (00:44): And I'm Joe Rando. Carly Ries (00:46): Today we're going to start a process of deep diving into various topics around the solopreneur success cycle. We'll be doing this for many aspects and phases, and our goal is to help you go from start to finish. From design to create a one-person business to grow into perhaps selling it. Joe Rando (01:01): As a reminder, the solopreneur success cycle consists of three phases of building a one-person business. Get started, do and adjust. The first get started is broken into four steps, set goals and vision, plan, and set up. The next phase, Due, is only one step, and that's followed by Improve, which has three steps. Refinery/reimagine, decide and adjust. There's a nice picture of this on the website, on the podcast page. So you can check that out if you need. I would need to see it. . Anyway, each step has multiple topics that we call skills associated with it. So we group those into categories like strategic, set up legal financials, one category, business operations, sales and marketing, and life skills. These are also broken into subcategories. When you use the filters and the tags on the podcast page here and the blog going forward, you're going to be able to find exactly what you're doing at the phase that you want to do with that. (02:05): We're putting this together in such a way that all these resources will help you kind of get what you need at that particular time. I know this sounds kind of complicated, but it's not nearly as complicated as going into a business and making mistakes. That gets really ugly. Plus, companies with multiple people usually have some experts in each category. You've decided to go on your own, so you need to know everything. We bring you experts organized around these topics to help you quickly learn what you need to know to be successful in your one-person business. Today we're focusing on the planning step of the solopreneur success cycle, which is the third step of the get started phase. At this point, you've decided what you want to do, but you need to clearly define it. That starts with the problem that you're solving for your customer. Carly Ries (02:53): For example, at LifeStarr, we're helping people that want to start one-person businesses, avoid mistakes and become more successful more quickly, while keeping true to their life goals as well. Joe Rando (03:03): The next step is to identify specifically what you sell. At Lifestarr, we have a lot of products. Podcasts. blogs, eBooks, a solopreneur community, but we only sell one thing, a premium version of our app. Carly Ries (03:17): I know that isn't released as of this date, which is the end of April, 2022, but it's coming soon. So stay tuned. Joe Rando (03:25): You should try to identify who you are selling to. That is who you're helping. I always say that you want to focus. There's an old saying that "the riches are in the niches," which, which actually only rhymes if he mispronounced niches. But anyway, it's true regardless of it's poetically challenged rhyme scheme. If you can help anyone, great, but the world is a noisy place these days, and so much content and ads and stuff are out there. So if you try to target everyone, they'll probably never even hear of you. And if they do hear of you, they probably won't notice you. If they notice you, they probably won't engage with you. And if they engage with you, they probably will still choose someone that targets them more clearly. Carly Ries (04:04): It's important to always keep in mind that you may not get this customer correct right out of the gate. And there are always ways to test your assumptions, like through social media, paid advertising, et cetera. And the results can validate your path or help you course correct. Joe Rando (04:17): Carly, what do you think of the idea of solopreneurs using personas to define their customers? Carly Ries (04:21): I actually think it's a great idea and just so we're clearly defining things, A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers based on data and research. And that's a big part of this. Some marketers are starting to think that personas are based on assumptions and are too broad, but I say create the persona and test those assumptions and through data, find out if your content resonates with them, how they interact online, et cetera. Having a clear visual idea of who your persona is not only helps with marketing, but your entire business. For a more concrete example of what this looks like, we have four personas at Lifestarr. Our primary persona is who we like to call aspiring Anna. Anna's in her early thirties and has decided she wants to leave corporate America behind in an effort to spend more time on the things that she cares about outside of work. She has a business idea but doesn't have the confidence or full understanding to get it or how to go about running a one-person show. She needs help navigating this journey and would greatly benefit from a community to learn and grow from, as well as educational, how-tos and an app to help her stay focused and organized. So as you see, we have a representation of who she is, which can help guide our marketing efforts and the content we create. Then through activity and analytics, we can see if she's actually the right audience or not. So I say personas are a yay, keep going with them. (05:38): Joe Rando (05:40): It's fun too. It's fun to put those together and kind of figure out who you're going after. Next we're going to move into the realm of competition. Who are your competitors? You don't have any? Fantastic. That probably means you don't have anyone that wants to buy what you're selling either. So seriously, everyone has competitors of some kind. Depending on your business, they may be competing with you in a geographic region or maybe you're an online business and they may be targeting the same customers anywhere. And you also may have more than one kind of competition. The first kind of competition is direct competitors. These are companies that do the same thing as you in a similar way and compete for the same customers. So if you have a cake baking business in your home in Dallas, someone else that has a cake baking business in Dallas is a competitor, but someone in Seattle is not unless you ship your cakes. (06:29): For example, LifeStarr's content competes with other sites that help solopreneurs but we think of them as friendly competitors. And why I tend to help each other out, but our app competes with other task management apps like monday.com, Trello and so on. Joe Rando (06:41): Then there's something called indirect competition. Sometimes you don't have direct competitors, but there are companies that fulfill the need in a different way. I like to call these budget-based competitors. The classic example is that say I'm the only rice seller in town. I sell rice, but people also buy potatoes as a side dish for meals. So even though there aren't any other rice sellers, anyone who sells potatoes is an indirect competitor because people may spend their side dish budget on potatoes instead of rice. Carly Ries (07:09): Again, just as another example for us specifically, the LifeStarr app has indirect competition in the use of do-it-yourself task management systems that people create and things like that. So, that's an example for us in real time. Joe Rando (07:23): Sometimes the biggest risk to your idea is some kind of replacement business or technology. Is there something coming along that could make what you plan to do obsolete? If so, what could you do to protect yourself from it? Or perhaps you instead could plan for how you will modify your business over time to protect against this. I am looking at therapists who used to have a pretty good lock on the market they served, but now they're all a bunch of online therapy apps that allow people to work with therapists from anywhere. This will likely have a large impact on the therapy business. Carly Ries (07:51): Like, could someone make an app that would hurt your business? If so, maybe you want the to make this app or at least plan it into your business as it grows. Just some things to consider there. Joe Rando (08:01): Now it's time to define your market positioning. We've figured out what you're selling, who your competitors are. Now this is something that most one-person businesses never do. And that's a mistake. Defining your market position can help you win more deals, charge higher rates, and enjoy your work more. We did an entire episode on this and that will be in the show notes, but let's cover it in brief. The question I like to ask here is, "What makes you special?" For example, are you a freelance writer or a content creator for the healthcare industry specializing in content for regional hospitals? Guess who's getting the regional hospital contract even though they're charging more? Carly Ries (08:38): Again, just as an example, LifeStarr is special because we're focused on people that are starting from one-person business and we help them from before the first steps, on through being up and running. We'll cover the whole journey from the very beginning, Joe Rando (08:51): As I mentioned in the competition discussion, geography can play a role in a lot of businesses, particularly one-person businesses. The big issue with geography usually has less to do with becoming more attractive to the customer and more to do with making your marketing spend more effective. Carly Ries (09:06): Yeah, I'm just gonna point out some things that you can do, like for location specific businesses, and again, this is my marketing thing just coming out, but if your business is location specific, there are a lot of free things you can do in your marketing efforts to help you separate yourself. You can focus on growing reviews, optimize and publish Google My Business listings, media content location specific by including geographical keywords. Add yourself to local directories. You can find partnerships, sponsorships in your area to start separating yourself from the competition as well as research other paid opportunities to help you stand out from the crowd. Sometimes being geographically focused can really help your marketing cause there's a lot more you can do than if you were nationwide or worldwide. Joe Rando (09:46): Next is specialties. Some businesses have specialties that you can use to differentiate. If you're an expert in nutrition and are creating a newsletter to help people practice better nutrition, it may be tough to get noticed, there's a lot of them out there. But if you're focused on nutrition for women in their thirties, that may get more attention from that group. Then there's specialized skills and knowledge. You can use specialized skills and knowledge as a differentiator. Sticking with the newsletter model, what if our newsletter writer knew a lot about endurance training and nutrition. They could target even more finely and get even more notice from the target market, Now they're going after women in their thirties that are interested in nutrition for endurance training. Next, you can look at industries. Sometimes you position your business as based on serving specific industries. (10:32): Our newsletter writer could go even further and tailor our offering to women in their thirties interested in endurance training and working in stem, (science, technology, engineering and math). Now that's gonna inform maybe the tone of her newsletter and all kinds of things and probably be very attractive to that relatively small group. Another way to differentiate is to use an ecosystem to position your product. I'll give you a a real world example. For us, when hiring a digital marketing agency. We only considered those in the HubSpot ecosystem. Carly Ries (11:02): That's actually how you and I met. That's what brought us together. Joe Rando (11:05): That's right. Way back, Carly Ries (11:07): Way back in the day, Joe Rando (11:08): Let's talk a little bit about risks. Most people are afraid that they will limit their marketing by drilling down like this. They're making a smaller and smaller target market, so there won't be enough business to support them. It is definitely possible to over-specify and leave yourself with an insufficiently sized market to support a business, but I just want to point out that it is way more likely that if you try to attract everyone, you just wind up not winning many deals. It's usually pretty easy to expand your offering as you grow. And since you're not likely going to be overrun with customers on day one, starting off more focused has really no initial downside. And it may have a big upside. If you hit a wall with respect to available customers, expand what you do. (11:55): Next I want to point out some exceptions to this. And this was a really interesting podcast with John Jantsch we did a while back. He works with a lot of smaller businesses that if you're not sure what you want to specifically do, you should spend some time initially trying different things to see what you like. And that's a great point. I always kind of assume that people know generally what they want to do and how they want to do it, but you may need to go out and work cheap or even free to get people to give you a shot, but this will give you a chance to decide where you want to focus. Carly Ries (12:27): I imagine that having a focus on a business that you don't like would not lead to a great situation. Joe Rando (12:32): I'm guessing you're right. The last step in the strategy component of the planning step of the solopreneur success cycle is messaging. Now that you defined what you are and what you are not, how do you want to talk about it to prospects? This is definitely Carly's area, so I'm gonna turn it over to her. Carly Ries (12:49): Honestly, the best way to talk to prospects is by not talking about yourself at all. In fact, I even got kind of squirmy using LifeStarr's examples earlier in this episode because it is so ingrained in me to focus on the customer pain points and intentions rather than the business. In your messaging, you want your customer to be the star of the show. Speak to them on your website and in all of your content. We've mentioned this in other episodes, but all they care about is if you have the solution to their problems, putting them front and center of your messaging will pique their interest. From there, they'll be interested in learning more about you, which is why it's still good to have reviews, testimonials, accolades, experience, and all that In your badass section. We talked about HubSpot in a recent episode, so I'm going to use them as an example. When you go to their homepage, it doesn't say we're the best CRM software in the world. It says an easy to use CRM, which directly addresses a pain point their audience would care about and that other CRMs may be frustrating because they're difficult to use. It immediately addresses something their audience needs solved. Joe Rando (13:50): I think that's right on. Carly Ries (13:53): Awesome. Well, that is actually all I have in regards to this. Is there anything else you wanted to add? Joe Rando (13:59): No, I think that's it. Obviously this is a big topic and we'll probably have specific podcasts in the future on the details of this. Just to point out, you can easily filter for these using the tags in the podcast page at lifestarr.com/podcast so you can find the ones on the topic you're interested in. But, I think that's good for today. Carly Ries (14:26): Awesome. Well, I feel like we covered a lot in a short amount of time. Just as a reminder, Joe and I love answering your questions as it relates to the SSC or the Solopreneur Success Cycle. You can ask us anything on that as well as other experts on the LifeStarr community at community.lifestarr.com. Then if you want to listen to more episodes, visit lifestarr.com/podcast or you can subscribe and listen anywhere you access your shows. We'll see you next time. Closing (14:55): 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.