When I left my banking job to pursue my side business full-time, I had this rosy image in my head. I'll be my own boss. I'll make my own hours.
I'll build something meaningful whilst working from cute cafes. It only took a few weeks, however, for me to realize that it couldn't be more different. So, in this video, I wanted to break down the brutal truths about solo entrepreneurship and how to overcome them to succeed.
And we'll be doing this across three important revenue milestones. getting to your first 50k in revenue, scaling to 100k and then pushing beyond to sustainable growth. So let's dive into the things that nobody tells you about this journey.
So let's start with the first stage of business and that is the survival phase. It's about in revenue numbers getting to your first 50k in annual revenue. You're figuring out here if your idea even works, if anyone will pay you and if you can actually do this.
So the first thing to know is that you need to be prepared to climb the cringe mountain. and often in public. When you're starting a business, essentially a public one where your friends and family can see your work, you have to climb something called the cringe mountain.
And the cringe mountain, it's brutal because you're not climbing it alone. You're climbing it while everyone watches. And at the start, when you're right at the bottom, it can be very embarrassing.
You're clumsy. You're unsure. Your work is not great because you're learning in public and everyone can see it.
And this is the stage where the most judgment happens. You can feel people criticizing it, laughing about it silently most likely, but you can still feel it. And it's only when you start climbing that mountain and getting towards the top that people's view can completely change.
You could be doing the exact same thing, but now instead of being laughed at or criticized, you're now applauded. The hardest is the climb because you're constantly battling an inside voice with external noise. And even a tiny seed of doubt at this point can throw you off track.
So, I've already gone through this, so here's what I'd recommend. Firstly, create a really small support circle of people who get it. Even if they're online friends or very close family, there's only a few people that you really need to open up to here.
Secondly, focus on serving one person well rather than pleasing everyone. You can never please everyone. And third, save screenshots of the kind comments that you get early on your journey.
And always revisit them daily, weekly, however often you need to remember why you're doing it. And I wanted to add here that if you can keep showing up while it's awkward, while it's cringey, while no one gets it, you can build a kind of confidence that no one can take away from you. Because once you do it once, you realize that you can do it over and over again.
The second thing to look out for at this level is to brace yourself for the income roller coaster. I didn't realize the huge benefit from just having a salary hitting my bank account on the same day every month. It was predictable, reliable, boring maybe, but you can plan your life around it.
And then I started my business and suddenly my income was fluctuating month on month. One month I'd make 3 months worth of of my banking salary and the next I'd make 25% of it and then the next I'll make less than 20% of it. And this isn't just financially stressful.
It actually messes with your head because during the busy periods, you're really excited. You are a bit overwhelmed with work. But during the quieter periods, you have this panic and anxiety.
you're starting to wonder if this is the new normal and if you should just update your CV and go back into your full-time job. What makes this especially challenging when you're just starting out is that each downturn, it feels permanent when you're new because you don't have years of data. So, you can't see the natural cycles of your business.
So, what I found worked incredibly incredibly well during this stage or this cycle for me is firstly have a financial buffer specifically for your side business. This is separate to your personal emergency fund. This is for your business capital buffer so you don't make desperate decisions.
Secondly, create something that brings in recurring revenue, even if it's just a small subscription, but it gives you that confidence that something's going to come in every month. And third, have a specific slow period plan that you can activate at any point. And the third biggest factor to consider at this survival phase is that your motivation will flatline repeatedly and you need to be ready for it because if you don't overcome this, you will give up on your solo entrepreneurship journey before seeing any material progress.
There is this myth that if you're passionate about your business, motivation will never be a problem. That is complete nonsense. Even when you love what you do, you'll have days, sometimes weeks actually, where you just don't want to show up.
where every task just feels pointless. I hit the lowest point for the first time about 6 months in. I've been working constantly and I at this point saw a huge dip.
So I seriously considered giving it all up at this point and thinking, "Okay, I need to go back into banking. " But what people don't tell you is just how your revenue works in cycles. Your motivation will also work in cycles, often attached to your revenue.
So when you're alone, there's no boss or team counting on you to push through those low periods. So you need to do it by yourself. So two things that massively helped me here is first know your why.
The deeper reason that pulls you through those low periods of motivation and second create artificial accountability. So what I often did was I'll announce deadlines or launches publicly. That way I had to force myself to deliver because there was no turning back at that point.
Now moving on to level two and this is the scaling phase. At this point, you've made it past the 50K annual revenue mark and you're already making money and you want to take it to the next stage. What are the issues that you're likely going to face at this point?
First, analysis paralysis. It is real. In a regular job, you're responsible for your specific role.
But when you start a business alone, you're suddenly the CEO, you're the CFO, the CMO, the COO, the customer service rep. The sheer number of decisions you have to make every single day at this point can be exhausting. You're thinking, "Okay, have I priced this right?
Should I use Stripe or PayPal? What about my logo? How can I improve my website, my business structure?
" And you feel like you're chasing your tail. The truth is, your brain only has capacity for so many complex decisions each day. And when you're depleted, you start making choices that are just counterintuitive to what you should be doing.
So, here's what I focused on in this stage. Create systems for decisions that repeat. So, have set working hours.
Use meal prep in your personal life that helps you with your solo entrepreneurship life. Use the good enough for now rule. So get things 80% right and then move on.
And third, just find one entrepreneur that you respect. And at the start, you can just copy their tools and their systems. And actually, one of the tools that I use for my website and to sell my newest product, the financial well-being toolkit, is Hostinger Horizons, who are very kindly sponsoring today's video.
Hostinger is an all-in-one solution that makes creating a powerful online presence easier than ever. So whether you're a freelancer who wants to showcase your portfolio or you're building a side business, Hostinger Horizons has you covered with this AI powered website and web app builder. So here's how it works.
You start by simply entering your idea. So you tell Hosting of Horizons what you're looking for. Maybe it's a personal portfolio.
Maybe it's a really sleek landing page. a simple e-commerce store or a personal habit or even a budget tracker. Their AI will generate a complete professionallook web app for you in seconds.
From there, you can then refine it even further. You could tweak the layout, you could adjust the colors, and you can make it exactly what you want, all with the AI assistance, making it incredibly easy to adjust in real time. And then when you're ready, go live with just one click.
No complicated deployment or third party connections. is all built into this. Plus, you can manage hosting, domains, email, all in one place, which means less hassle and more time for focusing on the other parts of the business that actually matter.
We personally use Hostinger for our own website hosting, and it's been a game changer in terms of ease, reliability, and speed. We actually moved from another platform to Hostinger. And the best part is Hostinger offers a 30-day money back guarantee.
So, you can try it completely for free. You can get a free trial today with Hosting Horizons. Use my code Nisha N I S C H A to get 10% off your first month.
Link is below in the description. Moving on to the next issue you'll face at this level, and that is resource constraints. The thing nobody tells you about solo entrepreneurship is that you're going to be severely resource constrained.
And I don't mean just by money. You'll be constrained by time, by skills, by connection, by energy, too. And what I often found in the early stages was I was comparing my starting off look to someone else who was 5 years into their journey.
And I felt bad about it. I felt like I was comparing myself and wondering why I look or why I am so far behind. And here's what I now realize is that those early stage constraints can actually be your biggest advantage if you approach it the right way.
Because when you're just starting out, you have something that established brands or people don't. You have the permission to be scrappy. You can implement ideas really quickly.
You can test concepts without bureaucracy. You can pivot instantly when something isn't working. There's no team meetings that you need.
No, okay, I need to communicate the idea to others. It's just you making decisions and then executing. And so if you really understand that, you could use it to your power to act really, really fast on any idea that you have.
The third thing at this level is that imposttor syndrome never really leaves. I always thought, okay, when I get to the next stage in my business, I will feel more comfortable. I'll feel confident.
Imposter syndrome will disappear. It does not disappear. It's particularly hard because there's also no one, no boss, no promotion, no formal structure to tell you you're on the right track.
And so, it's so easy in this stage to think or to wonder, is this all actually luck or are you good at this? And this feeling never truly goes away. But what I found really works.
Most importantly, the thing that made a biggest difference to me was keeping an evidence log. And this is what my mentor told me to do. Have it.
Put in all your wins, all your testimonials, all your success outcomes in that. And then you can always remind yourself as to why every time you doubted yourself, you overcame that doubt and you overcame what was holding you back at the time. And the second thing is reframe I don't know what I'm doing to I'm learning as I go, just like everyone else.
The most successful business owners I know aren't the ones who never doubt themselves. They're the ones who take action despite their doubts, despite their limiting beliefs. They use imposter syndrome as a signal that they are pushing themselves into new territory.
So when imposter syndrome pops its head and you feel like you're a fraud, remember the fact that you even care enough to worry about your legitimacy actually makes you more likely to succeed, not less. And then we're moving on to level three, and this is the sustainability phase. Breaking through to 100K and beyond isn't about doing more of what you did at 50K or at the start of your business.
It requires often reinventing how you operate. At this stage, the challenges shift from tactical to strategic. So, what are the issues that come up at this level and how can we overcome them?
First, you'll realize that the systems that got you here will fail you. Now, when I hit 100K in revenue, I thought I'd finally made it. I had processes that worked, a content schedule that delivered results, and money was flowing in.
And then 6 months later, everything was breaking. My inbox was overflowing. Deliverables were slipping through the cracks.
And I was actually finding that I was working more than ever because I was redoing work that had gaps in them or had breaks in them. And so, what were before completely collapsed at this stage. And this is the scaling paradox which no one warns you about.
The very systems that help you succeed will eventually become your biggest bottlenecks. What was once scrappy and effective becomes chaotic and limiting and it's actually not built to scale. And so at this point there were parts of my business that I was rebuilding whilst everything was running.
It's like changing a car's engine whilst the car is driving on a motorway. So, what I found works here at this stage to avoid this is invest in proper automation and tools before you get to a point where you desperately need them because if you wait till it's too late, you end up losing money through a fixing it and through b missing out on revenue. Secondly, document everything so you can eventually hand it off.
And third, build with 5x growth in mind, not just 2x. Second thing at this level is that success brings unwanted complexity. So at 50k the business was super simple.
One main offer, a core audience, straightforward marketing. At 150k, suddenly there were a lot more partnership opportunities. There was speaking workshops.
There were multiple revenue streams. There were tax complexities. There were legal considerations.
My once a simple business had morphed into something that was far more complex and had to be done properly. And then there's the trade-off of do I say yes to this thing or do I actually focus on what I'm building at this current stage. the more options that come in make it a lot more harder to stay focused and you also at this stage start questioning or losing sight of your original mission because you start thinking about all the other things that you could be doing now that you've built this momentum.
Should you launch this membership or should you create this new course and suddenly the clarity that drove you in your early success becomes clouded with so many possibilities. So what I found works when you hit this stage is to revisit and recommmit to your core mission regularly. We have our mission statement written in almost every document, every platform that we have and every time someone new comes in or a contractor joins, they see it and understand it straight away.
It's to help people take control of their money and ultimately their lives through easy actionable personal finance tips. That is the overarching mission and everything that we do has to draw into that. Secondly, learn to say no to good opportunities so you can say yes to great ones.
And third, create a decision-making framework for whatever that decision is so that you know how to evaluate new opportunities that come through. And the third thing you realize here is that the leadership gap truly becomes apparent. Starting off, it was just me making all the decisions.
But after I crossed a certain revenue, I had to bring on contractors and then part-time help and then eventually full-time team members. And that's when I realized that managing myself was one thing, but suddenly I was responsible for other people's work growth, their livelihoods. And leadership isn't just about managing others.
It's about managing yourself at a higher level. And the skills that got you to 100K, which was hustling, wearing all the hats, making quick decisions, are often the opposite of what you need to do to get to 500K and beyond. It's delegation.
It's system thinking. It's strategic patience. And that's hard, but it's essential.
And what I found works here is invest in leadership development before you think you need it. Secondly, create clear values and expectations for your team. Communication.
Clear communication is vital. And thirdly, recognize that your business can't grow beyond your personal capacity to lead others. And that is the third level.
And despite all these ugly truths, I still wouldn't trade being a solo entrepreneur for anything. Because there's one beautiful truth that outweighs all the challenges. And that's the freedom to create something meaningful on your own terms.
When you push through the isolation and you actually build a community around your business, when you learn to make decisions quickly and confidently, when you develop sustainable motivation habits and systems that you can rely on, solo entrepreneurship actually does become what you imagined. And I'm not saying it's easy by any means, but being aware of these challenges from the start does give you a massive advantage. you can preempt what's coming and then overcome them before they derail your business or your personal life.
So, if you're starting a business alone or you're thinking about it, I'd love to know which of these challenges resonates with you and how you go about implementing some of the solutions. Let me know in the comments. And if you found this video helpful, feel free to share with someone else who might be on their solo journey.
