Why does solopreneurship feel so hard, even though you’re competent, experienced, and doing everything “right”?

You show up (a lot) and you deliver quality. Yet the work feels heavy in a way effort doesn’t seem to fix.

Why?

It’s a structural mismatch.

You’re applying inherited economic myths, like “work harder”, “be more visible”, “push more output”—to human-scale work.

It won’t work because the logic behind these pieces of advice comes from industrial systems: factories, firms, teams, departments. When you apply them to solopreneurship where the business is one person with finite energy, they don’t produce growth but exhaustion.

That’s why 2026 in Smarter Solopreneurs won’t be about “doing more marketing.” It will be about laying the proper foundations of a solo business.

If you read Not Entrepreneurship and You Think You’re Growing, you’re already sensing what I mean, but sensing isn’t enough.

You need to see a few steps ahead to understand why the marketing advice you’re getting is mostly BS. Curiously, a lot of it traces back to growth strategies universities have taught for decades. Humans endlessly rebrand old ideas as revolutions and it’s this false novelty you’re buying into.

Let me explain.

Why humans resist foundations.

Humans resist foundations because they are invisible while they are being built.

Our evolutionary instincts were shaped in environments where speed meant survival. When food was scarce or danger was near, the correct response was immediate action, not long-term planning.

As a result, we are psychologically primed to trust motion over preparation.

This bias carries cleanly into modern work. “Marketing first” feels seductive because it produces visible signals quickly: attention, replies, likes, inquiries. These signals resemble progress, even when they are not. The digital economy reinforces this illusion, rewarding those who broadcast loudly and frequently, even if what they are broadcasting has little value.

The result is a collective overestimation of short-term output and a systematic undervaluing of the deep work that actually sustains a solo business (or any business) over time.

History shows repeatedly that civilizations, institutions, and individuals collapse not from lack of effort, but from weak underlying structures.

Think of big-box stores that responded to Amazon by running more ads and more promotions. Think about creators who push hard on certain platforms but lack foundational business and monetization structure. When the algorithm changes, they increase effort, but it’s usually pointless.

Humans are very good at increasing effort inside a failing system, and very bad at questioning the system itself.

Here’s how popular creators trick you into increasing your marketing effort in ways that don’t work.

The marketing strategies everyone recommends.

If I had to reduce most solopreneur marketing advice to its simplest form, it would sound like this:

1. Show up more often.

2. Offer more value.

3. Show up in more places.

4. Create more offers.

This advice feels intuitive because it mirrors how large organisations grow. It actually maps neatly onto three classic strategies that have been taught for decades.

Market penetration focuses on selling more of what you already sell to the people you already reach. In practice, this translates into posting more, promoting harder, adjusting prices, offering more value, and squeezing more output from the same setup.

Market development is about taking existing offers into new markets. For solopreneurs, this usually means expanding to more platforms, more audiences, sometimes more languages, and constantly adapting messaging to fit each new context.

Product development aims to sell new products to existing markets. That’s the pressure to build a library of offers: new services, new packages, new ideas.

Always more.

That’s the three strategies in two words.

If you dust off old marketing textbooks, you’ll find these strategies described as sensible. And they are. For institutions.

In a company, market penetration means spreading effort across teams, tools, budgets, and time horizons. In solopreneurship, it means you become the pricing committee, the marketing department, the product team, and the quality control system.

Market development assumes surplus capacity: the ability to experiment, adapt, and absorb inefficiencies while new channels ramp up. A solopreneur has none of that slack. Every new platform increases cognitive load and decision fatigue.

Product development presumes research budgets, feedback loops, and risk buffers. For a solopreneur, it often becomes a permanent state of second-guessing: Should I add this? Change that? Build something new?

The reason these strategies persist in solopreneurship even though they’re exhausting and inefficient…

Is because, culturally, we moralise growth.

If your business isn’t moving, the implied solution is to try harder, be more visible, say yes more often. Structural limits are reframed as character flaws. Exhaustion becomes evidence of commitment. And questioning the model feels like weakness rather than intelligence.

So when solopreneurs struggle, they rarely conclude, “This system doesn’t fit human-scale work.” They conclude, “Something must be wrong with me.”

The best marketing strategies for solopreneurs (that will give you results without exhausting you).

When marketing is aligned, it becomes structurally easier over time. Not because it requires no effort, but because each unit of effort reinforces the next. Clarity reduces friction. Consistency builds recognition. Reputation lowers resistance. What once felt heavy starts to feel inevitable.

Aligned systems don’t feel easy at the beginning. If anything, they feel slower. But unlike intensity-driven strategies, they don’t demand constant escalation.

So when I say that marketing for solopreneurs should be easy, I don’t mean effortless. I mean compounding.

Here are the marketing strategies that compound.

Read more

Because your solopreneur identity isn’t the entirety of your identity. It’s a part of it—affected by all other parts, but separate nonetheless.

And in defining it, most people go one of two ways.

The first is the entrepreneurial way.

You ask yourself, “What does my audience / clients want?” and you adjust your solopreneur self to fit that.

If you’re naturally entrepreneurial—and that’s an important if—you will choose this road. As a result, you’ll find it easy to achieve business goals others struggle with. You’ll make more money, faster. You’ll gain more attention, faster.

But there’s a cost.

It’s easy to become a commodity. It’s difficult to differentiate yourself from thousands of others who solve the exact same problems.

The second way to define who you are as a solopreneur is the artistic way.

You ask yourself “Who do I want to be?” and you adjust your solopreneur self to fit that.

If you’re naturally artistic, you will find yourself compelled to go this route; to ignore what people want and do what you want to do.

But if your artistic self fails in achieving your professional goals—and it probably will, at least in your mind, because you will compare yourself to the results of entrepreneurial solopreneurs—you suffer.

And suffering does what suffering always does.

It will change you, at least for a bit. You’ll try to give people more of what they want, and perhaps you’ll succeed for a while.

But solopreneurship is inherently personal. If your business doesn’t align with who you are, you will inevitably give it up or want to change it again.

Now, here’s the uncomfortable truth.

We can’t change who we are. Not really. Not in a foundational way.

Entrepreneurial solopreneurs will always spot the gap in the market.

Artistic solopreneurs will always hear the inner voice first.

Instead of changing yourself to please the market, learn positioning.

Soft positioning will infuse your work with unmistakable personality.
Hard positioning will make your offers unmistakably valuable.
And you can blend them so your business becomes rooted in who you are, but able to flow and adapt.

That’s what we’re doing today.

In this newsletter:

→ What positioning is and why it matters
→ What soft positioning is
→ What hard positioning is
→ Warning about misusing positioning & how to use it properly.

What is positioning & why it matters.

People do not buy without a position. If you don’t choose your position, your market chooses it for you.

When someone finds you online, their brain asks two questions instantly:

1. What is this?

2. Is this for someone like me?

This happens in milliseconds.

If you don’t answer those questions clearly, the brain answers them without your input, using whatever information it can gather (your tone, your content, your niche, your topics).

And because humans are lazy categorizers, the brain almost always does this:

“Oh, this looks like X. I already know what X is. Done.”

Meaning, you get lumped into the nearest familiar box, even if it’s the wrong box. People will always choose the most obvious, lowest-resolution interpretation of who you are.

• “Ah, another mindset writer.”

• “Another online business coach.”

• “Another productivity newsletter.”

• “Another freelance designer who does logos.”

None of these are insults, but they’re generic. Generic = low willingness to pay.

Buyers need a reason to pay you vs the other 1000 like you. To make this decision, they usually default to price, personality, or popularity.

If you’re not the cheapest and you’re not super popular, personality (=positioning) is the only ace up your sleeve.

There are two types of positioning. I find most solopreneurs need to work on hard positioning, but some are very hard and need a softer touch.

Let me elaborate.

Read more

And I’ve been around the block—I’m not that easy to impress.

If you want to get the short-cut for earning more with email marketing, the Click, Send, Earn e-book is now $3.99 and you can get it here.

Have you ever felt like sales & marketing are sleazy, pushy and you want nothing to do with that?

But at the same time,you know you need to sell and market your work if you want to make your business a success?

This discrepancy makes a lot of solopreneurs suffer.

I’d argue the big reason many of us don’t know marketing is we don’t even try to learn it. It’s almost a dirty word.

Instead, we sell only when we’re absolutely desperate for things to start working out (faster).

And that’s when we push people away even more.

Because scarcity rewires how we communicate — and old-school pressure tactics taught us the wrong instincts.

This combo creates what I call the desperation signal. And the big problem is:

Desperation repels the people you most want to attract.

Let’s break down why this happens — and the small language cues that give it away.

Why We Slip Into Desperate-Sounding Marketing

Reason 1: Scarcity brain changes how you sell

Research on scarcity mindsets shows that when money, time, or clients feel low, the brain shifts into tunnel vision.

If rent is due on the 30th, your brain fixates on “I need this client.” Not on “How to price this fairly?” or “Does this reflect my brand?”

Scarcity collapses your time horizon so almost anything starts to feel justified if it increases the odds of getting a yes today.

Reason 2: Old-school sales conditioning

Some solopreneurs aren’t desperate, they’re just repeating tactics they were taught:

“Always Be Closing.”
“Direct response is about getting an action NOW.”
“People won’t come back — close them on the first visit.”

But follow-up research shows something different:

→ Pressured buyers are less likely to return.
→ Pushy messaging increases reactance — the buyer’s instinct to resist.
→ Brand perception drops, especially for independent creators.

And because solopreneurs depend heavily on trust, repeat business, and referrals, pressure-based selling becomes a growth bottleneck.

Why Confidence Outperforms Pressure (According to the Research)

Calm, confident marketing doesn’t just feel better.

It actually performs better, across industries, formats, and audiences.

And the research is uncomfortably clear about why.

Decades of persuasion studies show that people respond more strongly to confident communicators.

When your message sounds grounded, measured, assured, your reader’s brain codes it as expertise (Tormala & Petty, Journal of Consumer Research). Confidence becomes a shortcut for credibility. Credibility is a shortcut for action.

On the flip side, pushiness backfires in predictable, measurable ways. Reactance research — thousands of studies, not one-off papers — shows that the moment a message feels controlling or urgent, people instinctively pull away (Steindl et al., 2015).

Confidence converts better, not because it’s “nice”, but because it gives the buyer psychological safety, and psychological safety is the foundation of all long-term commerce.

When you stop sounding like you need the sale, people stop defending themselves from you and start listening.

The 3 Signals That Give Away Desperation in Your Sales Pitch

You can always spot it in someone else’s writing, but we rarely “hear it” in our own.

a) Over-explaining

• Justifying prices you could simply state

• Anticipating objections before the reader even has them

• Filling silence because uncertainty feels unbearable

b) Over-promising

• Selling the upside while hiding the effort

• Claiming universality

• Promising speed or ease without the trade-off

c) Over-urgency

• Repeated “last chance!!!” messages

• Fake scarcity

• CTAs that feel breathless instead of grounded

What Over-Explaining Looks Like

• “The newsletter is €7/month, which I know isn’t nothing, so let me explain…”

• “I try really hard to make each edition valuable…”

• “You’ll get frameworks and templates — basically everything…”

• “If you’re worried it won’t apply to your situation…”

• “I don’t want to spam you, but…”

All of these shrink your authority. They telegraph lack of confidence even when your work is exceptional.

What Over-Promising Looks Like

• “You’ll finally grow your audience fast.”

• “This works for everyone.”

• “You can implement this immediately.”

• “You’ll earn more while working less.”

Strong offers don’t need inflated promises. They need clarity and grounded expectations.

What Over-Urgency Looks Like

• “Sign up today because the next edition is coming tomorrow and I don’t want you to miss it.”

• “Hurry! Please don’t miss this!”

• “I won’t offer this again” (even though you absolutely will).

Become the solopreneur who earns what they’re worth.

Every week, your business gets sharper.

Your offers get better.

Your income catches up.

Stop buying endless courses & subscribe to Smarter Solopreneurs for a year.

See what happens.

Subscribe now

How to Sound Confident in Sales & Marketing (Even When You’re Broke)

Including:

• The internal shift: how to regulate the nervous system, reduce scarcity-brain, and get back to grounded decision-making.

• The external shift: how to behave, structure offers, and communicate in ways that signal confidence (even when you’re broke).

Read more

If you want to grow your audience and actually monetize it, you need to look at this.

Igor Kheifets just released his Email ATM Blueprint — a step-by-step system for turning an email list (small or big) into predictable income.

No social media grind, no funnels, no complicated tech. Just a clear, repeatable way to earn from your email list.

It’s worth checking it out. You can learn more about it here.

This issue is for solopreneurs who work a lot but don’t make enough money.

If I had to write a book about solving this problem, the first chapter would be called:

You don’t talk about yourself enough and/or in the right way.

I know you’re taught to be good and modest. But why is advertising a product okay, yet advertising yourself isn’t? I’ll tell you why—it’s because you’re not accepting it as “normal.”

I used to be just like you.

Until one day, my husband, who’s in marketing, said, “What the hell are you doing, charging as little as you did when you first started??”

And I said, “No one would pay me more.”

And he said, “Of course they won’t. You’re not telling them why they should.”

Jackpot!

Well, I still sell on Fiverr, but I went from $80 to $800 in average order value.

And my gigs now start with a sentence about me instead of a sentence about my client’s problem (which is what all newbie copywriters would tell you to do).

By the end of this newsletter, you’ll learn:

• Why the way you see yourself & talk about yourself changes everything (with proof!)

• How to think, talk & write about yourself so that clients WANT to pay you more.

• What are the most special things about you that you should use during every single sales pitch.

If you want to keep reading, consider taking advantage of the current Black Friday Promo and get 10% off your Smarter Solopreneurs subscription.

Get 10% off forever

How self-image changes behaviour and results.

Read more

But I didn’t know how bad exactly.

Over the last 6 months, many of my paid subscribers cancelled their subscription.

These days, in an attempt to clear my head, I’m going over the 193 Substack posts I’ve written to organise them into several collections of my best-ever advice for solopreneurs.

While going through the data, I discovered that, over time, 130 people had become paid subscribers of Smarter Solopreneurs.

But I’ve lost the trust of more than half of them.

More than half!

FYI, for a subscription company, the average annual churn rate is 1-5%.

Well, step aside, average companies.

Because here comes the winner with 62% churn rate in 6 months.

So why did that happen?

Luckily, I’m not a quitter.

So instead of throwing in the towel, I’ve been trying to figure out WHY??

Now, I’ve been a marketer for a long time and my instinct is to go back and see:

• What offers I’ve made when

• The pricing

• The structures I used for the sales copy

• The conversion rates

But this time, I just didn’t feel like the answer was hidden in the numbers.

There was something that felt off about my entire approach…

You know the feeling.

When you’re doing all the “right” things, but it all feels… lifeless.

I couldn’t quite name the problem until, while reading the latest Robert Galbraith novel, it just came to me.

Paid newsletters aren’t a transactional business model!

And I was treating them as such.

The Smarter Way: Secrets of Powerful Relational Marketing

In this newsletter:

• Transactional vs Relational businesses: do you know what type of business you’re building?

• Relational business examples.

• Relational marketing and how it’s different from transactional marketing - for paid subscribers

• The secrets to powerful relational marketing - for paid subscribers

Transactional vs Relational businesses.

Transactional businesses are all about value for money.

They’re focused on facilitating a transaction: you get this, I get that.

There might be upselling involved.

There might be a newsletter involved.

There might be social media marketing.

But it all revolves around **the transaction**

Transactional businesses sell a specific service or a product.

In relational business models, the long-term relationship is just as or more important than the value you offer.

And marketing a long term relationship is different than marketing a one-off sale.

Relational business examples.

Relational models are usually subscription based—that’s the premise for building a relationship. You need a longer period of time to facilitate it or it’ll just be a one-night stand.

However, not all subscriptions are relational business models. If it’s all about the value and there’s almost no relationship, it’s still about the transaction. Such is the case with:

• Netflix

• Canva

• Dropbox & more.

Here, you pay to maintain access to value.

In relational business, you pay to maintain access to someone or something you believe in. Access to the specific way they do things which can’t really be replicated.

Because can you replicate your best friend?

Examples of relational business models include:

• Paid newsletter — whether it’s yours or the New York Times, there’s a specific angle there'; a relationship to the type of writing & journalism; an identity confirmation.

• Paid communities — all about relationships! And it’s not just tiny solopreneurs who have these; Tony Robins has a premium paid community that costs a small fortune.

• Artist patronage systems (Patreon)

• Coaching or mentorship retainers & more.

Relational marketing.

So here’s the reason I fucked up so bad and got so many unsubscribes:

I used transactional marketing for a relational business.

I focused on “here’s the value, here’s how much it costs.”

And it doesn’t work for relational businesses because:

Read more

• “Find your inner light” courses

• “Become a better you” newsletters

• “Get healthier” coaching

• “Amazing copywriting” services

• “Mental health” ebooks

Look, I get it! I was YOU 12 years ago when I launched my pink business & relationship coaching website where I wrote blog posts about self development.

People have no clue what they would get if they pay you.

And who would buy something they don’t understand??

Simplifying your offer sounds easy, but it isn’t.

I know because I’ve worked with over 2000 solopreneurs one-on-one and I’ve heard what they think:

• But I want to have freedom to do whatever I want.

• But this (huge!) competitor has the same offer and makes it work.

• My friend told me this part of my offer is the best.

• My offer is for everyone who needs it / who gets it.

• My offer is too complicated to simplify.

• I want my offer to have more value, not less.

• I can’t simplify my offer because the problem I solve is too complicated.

Listen.

This type of thinking is keeping you poor because:

• No one can have FULL freedom. As a solopreneur, you have the freedom to choose your constraints, and that’s a lot! If you want full freedom, journal.

• Big competitors have earned the right to do vague offers because they have A LOT of credibility. Become famous first, then make vague offers.

• Is your friend really in your ideal audience?

• Your offer will have more value if you make it BETTER not BIGGER

• Making your offer simple doesn’t mean promising simple solutions. It just means being specific.

So. If you’re ready to join the solopreneurs who know what they’re doing…

It’s time to simplify your offer and make it both easier to sell AND easier to deliver.

Here’s how.

Read more

• You’re not getting the attention you want

• You’re not getting the sales you want

• You’re not communicating your ideas in an effective way.

There is a way to fix that.

Most of you are writing things that are genuinely smart, practical, even life-changing…

But few people get to the last paragraph.

Even fewer act on your advice.

You think it’s because:

• “People don’t care about my topic.”

• “I’m not successful enough and lack credibility.”

• “I just need more visibility.”

No.

The real problem is both simpler and more uncomfortable.

You don’t need to sound smarter. You need to make people feel smarter.

Your content doesn’t make people excited.

Learning isn’t logical. It’s emotional.

You don’t teach by explaining but by transferring state. You need to inspire. That’s goal #1.

The best content creators make you believe. They make you believe in yourself, believe in your dreams, believe in the platform, believe in whatever you desperately want to believe.

Because people don’t learn when they’re informed. They learn when they’re inspired. Ignited.

They have to want it. They have to feel a spark of energy in your words; the same energy you felt when you discovered it.

That’s exactly why we see creators who share the same advice get very different results. One gets 20 paid subscribers, 50 shares and a few client requests—the other gets peanuts.

If you want someone to pull out their credit card or share your post, you need to make them so incredibly energised that they can’t possibly stop themselves.

They need to think F*CK YES! the entire time they’re reading you.

And you can write F*CK YES content.

Trust me!

High-power writing is not a gift from God.

It requires knowing a few psychological rules and building the right process.

The typical advice for highly emotional writing is to write when *you* feel a strong emotion, but that’s super unreliable. What if you don’t feel any strong emotions this week??

Plus, the strongest emotion I feel lately is exhaustion from managing 2 businesses and a 4-person household. And that’s not the emotion I want to use in my writing.

Luckily, I’ve been at this for over 11 years now. I’ve written over 2000 sales pages for clients and have gotten over 23K followers and 8K subscribers with my articles.

If I counted on what I felt to write good stuff, I’d be back to an office job on year 2.

F*ck Yes content is your only chance to start selling.

If you get 1 million views tomorrow and your stuff are *yawn*—it’ll turn into the biggest regret of your life!

If you write about the most interesting topic in the world but the reader is bored by the second paragraph, what do you think will happen?

If you lower the prices to the lowest of the low, but readers just don’t “feel it”—don’t you think they’ll pay double to the next guy who makes them jump out of their skin with excitement?

Look, this is the Internet. The way to communicate ideas is primarily writing. Even with video, it’s writing, because pro video creators still write scripts.

So you can’t go around this. You either learn how to write to ignite, or you’re a dead man.

Here’s how to write F*CK YES inspirational content that energises your readers so much, they can’t help but want more.

Here are the science-backed techniques for making your readers addicted to your writing (or your viewers addicted to your videos) + one tiny shift from my process that exploded my results.

✨ The first realisation that will change your content forever. Super simple, yet few beginners realise this.

✨Cognitive Dissonance & Resolution - or how to create AHA moments for your readers EVERY TIME.

✨Emotional Contagion - plus an science-backed AI prompt to give you emotional words that will turn your content from yawn to EVERYBODY SHUT UP!

✨Self-Determination Theory - 3 things your reader needs to feel motivated. You’ll also learn to spot these in the content of successful creators.

✨ My dirty little secret - how I keep writing things that ignite people even when I feel like shit.

Read more

They have an offer problem.

The right offer sells almost by itself. The wrong one won’t move no matter how many times you post, launch, or tweak your funnel.

The Irresistible Offer Series breaks down the art and science behind irresistible offers — the kind that turn browsers into buyers and casual readers into loyal fans.

Why the right offer changes everything.

Building irresistible offers sounds too good to be true. Like finding a soulmate or something.

But there’s logic behind it and it is this:

• Most solopreneurs build offers they want to sell instead of offers their audience wants to buy. And you can have both.

• Most solopreneurs don’t know how to present their offers in ways that make them irresistible.

I’ve worked with over 2000 solopreneurs one-on-one: both as a copywriter and a coach.

A lot of them want me to do magic—to write sales copy so good that it sells an offer that’s unclear and has zero connection with the market. Or to tell them a secret hack about how to sell more: post more on a certain platform or do video??

It’s not that simple.

That’s why I’ve created the Irresistible Offer Series.

Inside the Irresistible Offer Series

Here’s what you’ll find:

Read more

• Your audience isn’t converting.

• You have followers but not buyers.

• You keep restarting your business because you can’t build momentum.

Then I can tell you the problem you have right now—and it’s probably not what you think.

It’s not that you don’t post enough.

It’s not that you don’t “offer value.”

It’s not that you’re not “consistent.”

It’s that you don’t have your Super Audience yet.

And probably that you think you’re not good enough to have a super audience yet.

But you are!

And by the end of this newsletter, you’ll know exactly how to attract your people.

What is a Super Audience?

Kevin Kelly calls them “true fans”. Seth Godin calls it a “tribe.”

Some people say you need 100, some say you need 1000.

This really depends on your business model.

The important thing is you need those people who would panic if you stopped doing what you’re doing.

Your Super Audience isn’t just loyal readers or clients. They’re advocates. They:

• Buy from your repeatedly

• Share your work

• Actively recommend you

• Send you thank you notes

• Give you energy, confidence, and even new sales opportunities.

They’re the heartbeat of your business.

Why you need a Super Audience?

Two reasons:

(1) They give you certainty in an uncertain game. When you have them, you can launch something new and get traction fast. If you’re running a subscription business, they give you the minimum income you need.

(2) They help you grow in a powerful, authentic way. You can share their reviews for social proof; get notes on how to improve your offer; ask for referrals and get warm leads instantly.

How to build your Super Audience?

It happens in two stages:

1. Marketing — attracting the right people in the first place. Not everyone has the potential to be a part of your Super Audience

2. Delivery — turning buyers into believers once they experience your work.

Stage 1: Marketing

To attract people who have the capacity to become your most devoted fans, you need to use 3 science-backed marketing strategies that will make your offer irresistible to the right people, even if you’re a total beginner.

Read more

Have you ever been in a store where you want to buy 100 things? Maybe IKEA?

Or to a person’s website where you wish you could buy everything they offer? (I want Marie Forleo’s B-School, Time Genius and The Copy Cure, thank you very much.)

That’s how great offers work. They make you feel like “Urgh!! I gotta have this!!”

But most solopreneurs struggle to design even one great offer.

It’s normal they struggle. Designing a great offer is a BIG undertaking with many moving parts.

And the stakes are insanely high. The wrong offer won’t sell no matter how hard you push it. Sooner or later, you’ll burn out and give up.

The right offer will “fly off the shelves” effortlessly and your business will gain momentum.

When created Writestack.io , things finally started clicking after 2 years of struggling.

When I started offering to write about pages VS just website copy, people started throwing money my way. It turns out no one knows how to talk about themselves.

If you want:

• Effortless sales

• More money

• Predictable momentum

You need an offer that works.

Most information on creating irresistible offers is confusing.

There’s no lack of “design your irresistible offer” advice online and it’s mostly good but:

• It either gives you only a part of the full picture

• Or it’s custom, 1-1 advice, which is expensive.

This here is the only framework you can find online that gives you a full list of decisions you need to make to design your irresistible offer.

The problems with most offers.

Most offers fail because they’re unclear. People have no idea what they’re buying.

That’s not your fault. The internet flipped marketing upside down.

It used to be:“Here’s a product. Market it.”

Now it’s: “Here’s a problem. Create a marketable solution.”

And in trying to create “unique” solutions, solopreneurs overcomplicate everything.

When you’re unclear on what you’re offering, your audience becomes unclear on what they’re buying.

The process is frustrating and ineffective.

But by the end of this post, you’ll have it figured out.

Here are the decisions you have to make:

• Decide who to sell to. We’re looking for a specific type of client.

• Decide what to sell. This includes two sub-decisions.

• Decide how to sell. How to sell, not how to get attention.

• Decide how to position your offer. It’s easy. It just takes answering two questions.

• Decide on pricing. I bet you’re getting pricing wrong and it’s a key factor in designing an offer that works.

• The personal factor. Because you’re a solopreneur and if you don’t love your business, you might as well go back to your job.

• How to speed up success. This little mind shift will change how you launch your offer.

Below, I will break these decisions down further so you know exactly what you’re doing.

Who to sell to.

Decision 1: B2B or B2C.

B2B = business to business. This is when you sell to businesses. Here, clients usually have bigger budgets.

B2C = business to consumer. This is when you sell to consumers. Here, clients are more, they buy more emotionally, but spend less per sale.

Decision 2: Specific ideal client.

Find a group you can describe in 1–2 words—preferably a group you’re a part of or a group you have experience working with.

• Parents / Mothers

• Solopreneurs

• SaaS founders

• Teachers

• 50+ fitness beginners

• And more…

Specificity is leverage. Just make sure the market is big enough unless you’re selling very high-ticket offers.

What to sell.

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Okay, that makes sense. But, like…

What results, exactly?

How do I deliver results when it all depends on whether clients act on my advice?

Even if they do, how do I prove I was the cause of the results?

What if I’m not even sure I deliver results at all?

If you’ve ever wondered about delivering results, this one is for you.

By the end of this newsletter, you’ll know exactly:

• What type of results you (should) deliver. And what results you really shouldn’t promise.

• How to deliver better results (if you feel like you aren’t doing as well as you’d like).

• How to get results-focused testimonials from your audience.

Why results matter.

Understanding what results you deliver for your clients will help you:

• Sell more. Just look at this sales page of Marie Forleo. Now, remember, Marie Forleo is a #1 NYT bestselling author and a rockstar of a coach—and she still leads her sales page with results-focused testimonials.

  

• Raise prices. In a recent newsletter, Justin Welsh shared how he raised his prices from $250 per hour to $1800 per hour based on the results he found out he delivered.

  

• Get confidence and clarity. Knowing the results you deliver—and what clients value most about working with you—shows you where to focus, how to increase your impact, and how to grow your business.

What type of results you deliver?

This is where most solopreneurs stumble.

They think they have to promise the biggest, loudest outcome—“I’ll make you rich. That’s not the only way to win.

There are plenty of solopreneurs who succeed doing other things.

Ava Bookbear’s newsletter has thousands of paid subscribers and here’s what she has to say about it:

There are two kinds of results a solopreneur could deliver:

Easy to measure.
Sales. Followers. Weight loss. These are clear numbers. Clear graphs. Easy to prove.

Hard to measure.
Clarity. Confidence. Joy. You can’t put them on a spreadsheet, but people feel them just as deeply.

If your gift leans toward the second, don’t pretend it’s the first. That’s how you end up with disappointed clients and a business that drains you.

Your job is to set expectations with honesty. To say, this is the result I help you reach.

Not the biggest promise. Not the flashiest outcome. The real one.

For me, it’s clarity. Frameworks for decision-making. A long-term mindset that favors slow, meaningful progress.

That’s what I deliver.

What do you?

How to deliver better results.

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But the underlying theme is the same: the honeymoon phase fades, and you’re left with the hard work of building something profitable and durable.

Here’s how the messy middle shows up differently depending on your business model—and what to do to:

• Find better clients and work less to earn more (if you offer services).

• Keep selling a great product to more and more people (instead of burning yourself out building more products).

• Turn the attention your content gets into money without sacrificing creativity (if you want to be a content creator).

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Premium offers can make you successful faster.

Here’s why:

• Making more money will allow you to focus on your business

• Working with top clients will open doors for you

• Impressive success stories are welcomed in publications like Business Insider and Forbes

• People love zero-to-hero stories, so you’ll have no problem growing your audience

Premium offers are not that scalable, but they’re a great start to your solo business.

“Start? Did you say “start”? I thought you had to be a top expert to sell premium offers?”

No, you don’t.

Because there are 2 ways to sell high-ticket offers.

The first involves:

• Big marketing spend

• Tons of credibility: testimonials, bestselling books, working with big names, etc.

• Complex launches and high-converting sales funnels

Let’s be honest, you can’t do that as a beginner, no matter how many articles Russel Brunson writes to convince you how easy it is.

What are premium offers, exactly?

For solopreneurs, a premium offer is anything priced over $1000.

I know this price point makes most of you sweat.

Don’t worry, by the end of this post you’ll know exactly how to sell even $10K premium offers, even as a total beginner.

Then, of course, practice will make you perfect.

How to sell premium offers as a beginner.

Step 1: Cold Outreach

No one wakes up looking to spend an extra $1000.

Least of all, people who can afford it. They’re smarter with their money than us two.

Even if they have a problem you can solve, when they Google it, they’ll probably find your Tim Dennings and Dan Koes (or whoever are the leaders in your industry).

They won’t find you.

So how do they find you, then?

You guessed it, cold outreach.

Effective cold outreach is easier than it sounds. Here are the key steps to making it work:

• Surgical precision targeting. We’ll talk about the how of that in a minute. For now, just know sending 3 messages to the right people is way more effective than sending 1000 messages to just anyone.

• Short and relevant. Effective cold messages are 2-3 sentences tops. When you’ve done the targeting right, it’s easy to say the right 3 sentences.

• Invitation for a call. Beginners cannot sell premium offers without calls. The good news is that the call is the best part of the process.

• Real exclusivity. If everyone tells you yes, you can’t serve them all, right? Set a goal in your mind. Say, you want 4 clients at $2000 each. Then, in your message, you’ll say you currently have availability to onboard 4 clients only. That’s real exclusivity.

A few hacks for successful cold messages.

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