The Dip
It's not that scary.
It's one thing to look at this graph of success and nod.
It's another thing entirely to sit inside a dip — revenue falling, pipeline empty, confidence eroding — and trust that something useful is happening.
Feast and famine is one of the most talked-about fears in solopreneurship. The common experience is exhausting: you’re either overwhelmed with work or watching the pipeline dry up, and even the quiet periods offer no real rest because anxiety fills the space that clients left behind.
But looking back at my own business, every significant leap forward came after a deep dip. And I’ve stopped believing that’s a coincidence. It’s a pattern.
Most business consultants treat feast and famine as a problem to be solved: fill the pipeline, stay visible, and ideally engineer yourself permanently into feast mode.
Functionally, the cycle exists because your attention is the single constrained resource — when you’re serving clients, you’re not finding them, and vice versa. So it makes sense to schedule LinkedIn posts.
But optimising that system means staying perpetually busy which leaves no room for the question that actually matters: is this still the right direction?
After burning out on Fiverr and nearly walking away, I restructured the entire offering and came back with dramatically higher prices and better clients. After Fiverr’s algorithm shifted and income collapsed, I rebuilt my sales and delivery process for copywriting from scratch, which opened the door to multiple five-figure deals.
After my Medium readership fell to a tenth of what it had been, I stopped trying to recover what was lost and pitched Business Insider instead. After a $40K writing project ended and left a significant gap, I moved into real estate and made $100K on the first deal.
None of these were obvious next steps. They only became possible because the dip created the space and the pressure to think differently.
But that’s the critical condition: famine only works this way if you know how to read it.