Flat lines and lost deals

And my plan to fix them

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Y’all want to get personal? No? Too bad.

I’m not as good as I thought I’d be at this soloprenuer thing. After putting up a goose egg in February, my income has been running 80-90% of what I’d projected in the 2024 Bond family budget, which isn’t too bad. But that income has been exclusively from clients with which I had fairly deep personal connections before launch. To date, I have made exactly zero dollars from outside my inner professional circle.

When I decided to start RoboCMO six months ago, I was confident that I would be able to attract new clients from social media by turning myself into a content machine, sharing my keen insights into the go-to-market issues that keep startup founders and marketers up nights, allowing me to build a big LinkedIn following and newsletter subscription base. I even thought that in a few short years, the majority of my income could be coming from content creation (paid subscriptions, affiliate commissions, etc…) rather than consulting work.

In the 1/3 of a year since RoboCMO entered the chat of LinkedIn and Substack creators with this sick “coming out of stealth” post, my content has garnered a whopping:

• 65 free newsletter subscribers (and ONE pledge of $150 per year for a paid-version-to-be. I love you for it, my dear patron).

• Fewer than 100 LinkedIn followers. LinkedIn’s reporting on follower count is abysmal, so I can’t know the exact change in follower count over that time span without recording and adding up every single day’s total, but some quick scanning tells me it’s definitely fewer than 100.

These figures are way below my pre-launch expectations. I didn’t actually make a model of user growth, but I think I would have projected about 1,000 newsletter subs and an extra 2,000 LinkedIn followers by now. My thinking was that I’m a good writer, I have 15+ years experience working on go to market in startups, and gosh darn it, people like me. So I should be able to write top 5% stuff. Call me crazy, but I still believe that.

My problem has been quantity. I’m only posting around 3-4 times per month on LinkedIn and publishing every other week on Substack, when pretty much every influencer I see on LInkedIn posts multiple times per week. Some post every day. Why do I post so irregularly? God knows it hasn’t been for lack of time. I think the answer is that I’m still really uncomfortable with anything that feels like self-promotion. Yeah, I know - that seems like an important fact to have built into my pre-launch projections and decision to pursue this business model, but here I am, struggling to overcome a belief that every post I make implicitly asserts that I’m adding the highest value take to the ocean of content from highly qualified people that already exists. That thinking makes it difficult for me to post anything - what the hell could I possibly have to say that hasn’t already been said better? I imagine some of you feel the same way.

But I’m realizing, shockingly late, that success as a marketing solopreneur is highly correlated to the quantity of one’s published content So, imposter hang ups be damned, I’m going to start giving the world a lot more unsolicited advice. What’s more, I’m not even going to feel bad about it. After some soul searching, I’ve convinced myself that posting my thoughts in my areas of relative expertise isn’t merely self-serving; there’s an audience, probably a large one, that’s likely to find value in that content. The same likely holds true for you, dear reader. Here are a few reasons:

• Content Feed Variability: Your audience isn’t you. They don’t follow all the same people you do. The fact that you’ve seen a handful of posts about the same topic from folks that you may think more qualified than yourself doesn’t mean your audience has seen those posts. They need your content.

• Variable Learning Modalities: What’s more, even if you can’t the best post ever in the history of, say, email deliverability, there is a large slice of the audience for whom a less technical approach will be more valuable than the world’s deepest dive. They need your content.

• Value of Repetition : Even if someone else has read and understood the best, deepest post ever on a topic, understanding an idea in the short term is different from really internalizing an idea into your long-term mental model. Achieving that internalization of an idea generally takes many exposures to it over a long time. They need your content.

• Social Value: The content is only part of the equation. People will read posts about stuff that they know they already know because they like the writing and have an urge to know the author better. To connect. To follow someone else’s journey and relate it to their own. To put the “social” in “social media.” They need your content.

RoboCMO’s second biggest focus over the second half of the year will be creating more content to build an audience and, hopefully by extension, a sales pipeline that’s wider than my inner circle.

As difficult as creating demand for my services has been, closing deals has been even harder. I’ve probably had a dozen sales conversations, but I’ve only had 3 clients, and all 3 of them were very close personal connections. So, I’m 0 for 9 in sales convos with folks who aren’t my besties. This seems like an even bigger opportunity than increasing top of funnel. Going from 0/9 to 1/9 would yield a 33% increase in clients. Getting that zero higher is even more important when paired with the goal of having an increasing amount of pipeline being strangers.

And while you might be thinking “3/9” is a pretty good close rate! That “0” includes several opportunities that I should have signed. Intros to healthcare startups from investors and advisors, intros from friends to ecomm sites (which I used to work in) needing B2SMB targeting (my specialty!), and everything in between. I even had startup exec reach out to me right after I got laid off. He told me he’d been following my work at my old company, was a huge fan, and needed growth marketing help ASAP. His startup was even in lead generation, an industry I’d worked in for four years. I sent him a proposal with both high and low intensity options and prices. And never heard from him again. I followed up a bunch. But the opportunity was dead.

What the hell happened?

• My positioning and messaging sucked. As a marketer, this is embarrassing - much of my job is figuring out how to concisely communicate how my clients’ products/services will change their customers’ lives for the better, and yet I didn’t do the same for my own services.

• My packaging/pricing may have been off/too high for some to buy before trying. I’ve taken all the advice from the soloprenuer community to (a) avoid hourly pricing, and (b) avoid the common practice of under-pricing your own value. But I’m thinking a low-priced intro offer (likely an audit), may serve to build both trust in my value and test client-consultant fit.

Nailing these two areas to improve my conversion rate with less-than-besties will be my number one focus the rest of 2024. I’m looking forward to reporting back to you (and all of your newly subscribed friends).