What If You Have Nothing To Sell Yet?

Does that mean you shouldn't start?

Nov 17, 2023

Here’s an excerpt from a conversation with one of my favourite subscribers:

“What bugs the hell out of me is that all of us are supposed to have something to offer, something to teach/share, but I can’t seem to put my shit together to "teach" something.

I am into psych and philosophy and have a background in teaching and counselling, so I might start playing around with creating some psych/counselling/coaching-related PDFs as lead magnets... and keep playing and building other stuff up... I dont know.”

So. You want to make money online. You follow all the gurus. You know you have skills to share.

But what exactly should you be selling? Teaching? Where do you even start?

Secret to Success: What to do if you don’t know what to do.

First, you’re overthinking it.

You’re in the beginning. This is the fun part. This is the honeymoon of solopreneurship. You’re reading, you’re testing, you’re trying. Every little result is exciting.

It’s supposed to be that way. Stay in that moment for a while and make the best of it. Don’t get overwhelmed by all the million-dollar stories when you have 3 followers and zero digital products.

When I get anxious, I always catch myself thinking 10 steps ahead. Breathe and stay in the now.

Second, make sure you make some money.

One of the big mistakes I made as a beginning solopreneur was that I quit my job too soon. I think I did it to prove to myself that I’m taking solopreneurship seriously.

Looking back, I know I would’ve had more time to explore and try things if I had a stable income.

Don’t think that your day job is slowing you down. As long as you make some money, you can play around with solopreneurship and build your thing without worrying that you need to sell something now.

As long as you have some income, all you have to do is set aside time to develop your one-person business.

Use your time to develop your strategy.

Now that you’re focused on the now and not worried about money, we can have some fun.

I don’t know about you, but I love developing strategies. I’m a big-picture thinker.

Instead of hurrying to figure out your day-to-day schedule, start thinking strategy. Look into:

What problem can you help solve?
What dream can you help achieve?
What type of people do you love talking to/working with? (I LOVE solipreneurs. They’re smart, they’re brave, they’re curious, they don’t take themselves too seriously and I can talk to them all day.)
Which social media platforms do you enjoy spending time on?
Which social media platforms you haven’t tried but you know you should?
How much money would you like to be making from solopreneurship short term and long term?
How, ideally, would you be monetising your business? (So many options these days; digital products aren’t the only way.)
How, ideally, would you be spending your days? I’m a writer, and I love that part of the job. I also enjoy talking to people every now and then, so I do a bit of coaching. Maybe you’d be good at recording videos or starting a podcast.

When you have the answers, start testing stuff. Enjoy this stage of deliberate experimentation.

Make sure you know this is the stage where you just try things. It’s okay if they don’t work out. It’s okay if they do work out, but you don’t like doing them. Anything is okay.

Make sure you design your business around what you want, not what someone else tells you to do.

Start an e-mail list (use Substack).

Progress equals happiness.

When you have nothing to sell, you start measuring progress with followers, likes and comments. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Online business is a numbers game and people are more likely to buy from people with a lot of followers.

But the best way to measure your progress in the early days is to start collecting people’s e-mails.

The “easy” way to do that, I find, is Substack.

Create a concept for a Substack newsletter (it’s okay to take some time to think about this) and just start writing. You don’t need to worry about selling stuff or growing fast. Just start.

Treat your content as the product.

In the beginning, all you do is post content. It’s free content, so most creators post whatever they like.

That’s good for now, but if you want to see growth, start thinking about your content as if it’s the product. Because it is.

People don’t pay you money for it yet, but they pay you with their attention and time—and those are two ultra-valuable resources.

So, after your first 50 or 100 posts/articles/newsletters, start:

Noticing patterns. What does your audience like?
Learning how to write/create better. How to structure and write your content so that it’s more engaging and helpful?
Treat it as if it’s paid content. The way you think about what you do affects the end result.

When you start creating better content, you’ll be ready to start creating products.

Create easy products in the beginning.

Have you ever seen someone else’s product and thought, ‘Man, I could create that, but it would take me forever’? Big digital products require a lot of time and energy.

Now that you know what your audience wants and have some e-mails, you can start experimenting with simple, free or low-cost products.

Think PDFs, short e-books that are an extension of successful articles, or a few recorded videos answering the most common questions you’ve seen in your field.

If you want my blueprint for creating best-selling mini-products fast, you can find it here.

Put these products on Gumroad or FreshLearn. See what happens.

If you do all that, you’ll have enough know-how to figure out the next step and maybe even build your first big, expensive digital product. Ideally, it would be something you know the audience wants.

Peek Behind the Curtain

Recent success:

We’re about to buy our fourth property. I don’t even know how my husband and I became part-time property investors. We just always found real estate interesting, we have broker friends, and random conversations somehow turn to deals.

It helps that interest rates are still very low here in Bulgaria. We are planning to purchase an investment property in Western Europe at some point, but we’ll see when we get to that.

I’m learning a lot from property investing, a lot of things that can be applied across multiple industries, and I’ll start sharing those lessons soon.

Recent failure:

My novel was rejected by the Radish platform. I’m taking it well. This is the second time this novel got rejected and it’s not even finished yet, so at least I’m putting myself out there.

Something new I’m trying:

I have some news. I’m about to launch a paid version of the One-Person Business Success newsletter in early December.

I’ll still send 2 e-mails per week to all subscribers (paid and free). I appreciate your support so much; I won’t start charging you for what you’re already getting for free.

The only difference will be that paid subscribers will get an extra section in each e-mail with:

More practical advice
More stats & examples
More success stories to learn from

If you don’t want to miss a thing from One-Person Business Success, you can pledge your support now. You’ll be charged when I turn on the paid option and start getting the paid versions of my e-mails directly.

Why I’m doing this: because I don’t want this to become a sales newsletter. I’ll let you know when I have something to sell, but this newsletter will primarily be about you, not me.

See Pricing & Pledge

Sending you love & confidence,

Maya