A short video by George Kao explaining why solopreneurs ('soulpreneurs') struggle to earn enough: increased supply of low-cost coaches, competitors for clients' limited disposable income, scarcity of clients willing/able to pay and do inner work, and the tendency of affluent clients to hire bigger brands. Kao recommends pragmatic remedies: leverage your existing network to discover paid-but-disappointing purchases you can improve on, and collaborate with peer solopreneurs to learn, practice, and co-create better offers.
Chapters
If you are a solopreneur who is struggling to make money in your business, you need to understand that there are some societal trends that you are battling. And once you understand these, then you can do something about them. 1. These days just about anyone can become a coach or a healer. There are certification programs that are under a hundred dollars. And so the fact is the number of service providers like us keeps growing. The number of your niche mates who the people who can serve your clients keeps growing. 2. Your thousand dollar coaching package is competing with your potential clients need to pay the rent, mortgage, save for their kids, college, or even just take a much needed little family vacation. And so the transformation that your offering offers has to feel so immediately beneficial compared to those other tangible things that they could spend money on. And that's not easy. 3. You need clients who have disposable income and who are willing to do the inner work. And as you've noticed, that's actually quite rare. 4. Many of the people who do have disposable income tend to hire the big names, the people with the polished brands and marketing teams, not folks like us who have homemade websites. I know that might be hard to hear, but here's some good news. Once we accept these realities, we can stop fighting against them. We can move forward, make progress in our business with more realism. And here's how. Reach out to the people who are already in your network, the people you can already reach, rather than imagining some far off audience that you can build and then find out what they have purchased related to what you want to offer but were disappointed by because oftentimes they have bought things from bigger names rather than small business owners like you, who actually do care about them. Find out what they've bought and that they were disappointed by, and then create your version of that because they've already shown you that they're willing to pay for something exactly like that. Secondly, collaborate with other solopreneurs. Look at your network. Do you have colleagues, you have classmates who are also probably struggling like most solopreneurs are, and get together with them and talk with them. What are they learning from their clients, their potential clients from the market? If you learn from each other and perhaps even practice together, sharing your services with one another so you can get better together, then you'll be able to offer better transformation and more aligned offers to each of your audiences.
