And big, bold goals usually have to do with you being able to sell stuff.

The good news is, there are billions of people buying stuff online every day. Globally, consumers complete tens of millions to over 100 million online purchases every day, translating to more than $18 billion in daily online revenue.

$18 billion!

I’ll bet my sweet bippy a big portion of these purchases aren’t things people need.

A lot of them aren’t even great decisions. I know some of you here, you sell things that matter: great health, career, parenting, traveling advice.

These are things that deserve to get attention and to sell, and you deserve to see at least some of those daily transactions go into your pocket. And let’s be honest here, you’re probably not even looking for like a billion out of the 18 billion, even though you may well deserve it.

No, us, solopreneurs, we’re much more modest than that.

But we still need to eat. And we like to do fun stuff and take care of our loved ones.

And to get the slice of the pie we need, we need to understand marketing better.

First, real quick, what is marketing.

This is my definition of marketing, and it’s based less on my business degree and more on my 12 years of solopreneurship experience:

Marketing is the practice of attracting attention to yourself and your offer in order to close more sales.

Let’s break this down and explain why it’s important to remember it:

1. Marketing is a practice. Most official definitions call marketing a “process” but a process is something that is and a practice is something you do. And I’d like you to approach marketing as something you do.

2. Attracting attention to yourself and your offer. Too many solopreneurs focus too much on attracting attention to themselves and not enough on attracting attention to their offers.

3. In order to close more sales. If you’re not closing more sales, you’re not practicing marketing effectively.

So how do you practice it effectively?

3 ways to do marketing as a solopreneur.

• Outsource it to platforms

• Ignore it (surprising, no? Bear with me.)

• Do it yourself

Outsourcing marketing to platforms.

This is what everybody does, including me when I first started out.

If that’s the marketing strategy you’ve chosen (or rather, fallen into), you’re probably focused on learning how a certain platform works and using its levers to get attention and sales.

A few things to keep in mind about this:

First, there are two types of platforms: platforms focused on sales and platforms not focused on sales.

It’s not just about monetisation options. Yes, social media now offers monetisation, but the way I see it, they do this to “trick” people into making the platform more interesting, so that other people stay there and click on ads.

The primary idea of IG and Facebook isn’t for their creators to make money. It’s for businesses to pay for ads.

On the other hand, platforms like Fiverr only ever make money if a client enters the platform and buys from a seller. So you see how a platform might behave differently depending on its structure, right?

Second, platforms go through different phases. From a business perspective, they’re usually startups that depend on funding to get off the ground. During the funding stages, platforms are focused on attracting creators/sellers. They need something to offer to the end consumer, after all.

But when the money starts to run out, they usually restructure so that they attract consumers. And things change drastically.

It’s what happened with Medium. During the stage when they wanted to attract writers (so people would have something to read on the platform), they paid writers the big money they got from their investors. When the time came for them to turn profitable on their own, writers started leaving the platform in herds and complaining about income and visibility.

What worries me about Substack is that the easy growth phase is clearly over. Writers across the platform are reporting subscriber growth dropping dramatically — some by 80–90% — and the algorithm increasingly favors newsletters that already have large, paying audiences. The platform is building a reader-side discovery engine that naturally guides new readers toward the biggest, most proven publications in each category.

Now, to be fair, Substack isn’t Medium. It reached positive cash flow in 2025 and just raised $100M — so this isn’t a platform running out of money and abandoning its writers.

But that doesn’t mean the dynamics aren’t shifting. The explosive, almost effortless growth that many writers experienced in 2024 and early 2025 is gone, and what’s replacing it is a more competitive environment where the platform’s internal algorithm holds more power over your visibility than your own effort does.

Urgh!

Ignore marketing.

I used to say to people that you ABSOLUTELY NEED TO DO MARKETING.

Now, the part of this that’s true has to do more with positioning. Figuring out what to sell, who your client is and what they need. It’s part of marketing but not exactly it.

But do you need the practice of getting attention? The truth is, you don’t. You can skip all that and go directly to selling. That’s what I plugged into my solo business around year 4.

I continued to show up and make money on Fiverr, but to offset the platform’s hot-and-cold dynamics, instead of posting on social media, I built a recommendations engine.

It’s easy, really. I realised I have a few friends and acquaintances who run businesses that were adjacent to what I did: Google Ads company, marketing agency, etc.

So what I did was, I told them I’d give them a 10–20% cut of every client they recommended, and all they had to do was send the client my way so they’d book a call. I do the sales. If I close the deal, they get their cut. That’s it.

I’ve made tens of thousands of dollars this way. Some projects were one-offs, some turned into regulars, and then those clients started recommending me, too.

Do-it-yourself.

The best way to define this approach is that the do-it-yourself marketing depends only on you and no one else. You’re not dependent on platforms and you don’t need someone sending you clients.

Now, you can do all types of marketing simultaneously, but where focus goes is important.

For example, in the do-it-yourself approach, instead of counting on platform hacks, you pay for attention. If you have a good offer, you run ads to it. Why go the long route?

A lot of solopreneurs are worried about paying for ads, but the attention you’re getting right now isn’t free. You pay for it with your time, focus and energy. Those are valuable resources, and when you give too much of them away for crumbs of attention, you’ve got a bad deal.

Another way to do marketing yourself is to focus on the quality of your online presence. Build a website. See if you can get a Google Knowledge Panel (it’s algorithmic, but you can influence it). Do a professional photoshoot. Write a book. Create professional visual elements for your marketing. Get featured in prominent publications.

The best thing about this approach to marketing is that it compounds. Everything you do stays forever and no platform change can take it away from you.

This piece is the overview. The webinar is where we get into the how — and if you’ve been nodding along reading this, you’ll want to be in the room. It’s exclusively for paid subscribers. All the details are right below.

See ya there!

Maya

And a new you can achieve new things.

James Clear says in Atomic Habits that small decisions compound into a new identity because they give you the proof your brain needs to believe it can.

But sometimes there’s one thing that’s so meaningful, that’s such a big proof you’re a next-level person, it makes all those small decisions easy. Then change just happens. Effortlessly.

To me, it was that trip to New York from which I just got back.

I’ve been dreaming to go since I was 10. You know how psychology says you don’t go for your dreams because you feel you’re not enough?

That’s literally what it was.

I could’ve gone 16 years ago when I spent a summer working in the US. I could’ve gone every single year after that (before the husband, before the kids).

But I didn’t. It just stayed in my mind as something too big. Too bold. Too expensive. Too impossible of a place. A place to which there was just no chance I’d belong. What would I even do there?

Do you have something like that? A “silly” dream or idea or goal that if you’d act on it, it would change how you see yourself.

For a friend of mine, it was buying a Porsche. Before he bought a Porsche, he did a bunch of other impressive things, like start and grow a successful software company.

But that didn’t make him feel different. He was always smart. He probably always knew he’d achieve something like that.

Buying a Porsche though, that was more than being successful. That was being successful and then some.

So he worked on his company day in day out, and every little success just brought him to the next goal.

When he got that Porsche? Wow. Brand new person. Bolder vision. Bigger clients. More confidence. Because of a car?

Same thing with a friend who got a nose job and then lost 30 pounds.

She could’ve lost the weight before the nose job, you know. But the nose job made her see herself differently. Made her see herself as beautiful. So the weight just flew off of her.

Now, I have a lot of great things coming your way. Bigger, bolder. New York was insanely inspirational and I’m convinced now more than ever that solopreneurship is the future of the knowledge worker.

But for now, for this very first post after my return, because I want you to feel that same shift in identity that will change your life, I just wanted you to know that, sometimes, one bold move is enough.

Make the move.

See you soon,

Maya

Many of you are building their businesses around educational content an focus so much on the educational part of it that they forget something much more important.

Here’s how to make people say “F*ck Yes!” to your educational offers (and no, it doesn’t have to do with offering “more value”).

If you’re looking to monetize your skills by writing educational content or creating educational products, but:

• 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

First written 4 months ago, this is the best advice I can give to any solopreneur worried about AI (whether you’re selling services, content or products).

After I saw a significant drop in paid subscriptions end of last year, I analyzed the situation and started applying the exact steps I recommend here. Over the last 90 days, my paid subscriptions are up 20%.

So I dare say it works.

It’s longer than my usual posts, too, but if you can spare 15-20 minutes for a deeper dive into what’s coming in the next few years, this is where you should spend it.

Enjoy!

Everything you’ve been told to do to survive the AI revolution as a solopreneur (and a knowledge worker) is exactly what will make you obsolete.

I’m not a technology-first person, I’m a strategy-first person, so I’ve been careful about discussing AI.

I’ve always considered it in the frameworks I give you, but I never went out to talk about it.

But the thought of how fast AI is moving has been nagging me.

Lately, instead of doing more to get attention, I’ve been sitting here, in the quiet, reading, thinking and talking to Claude about the future of solopreneurship in a world of highly advanced AI.

What it would look like. When it would come. What we can do to prepare for it.

You’ll want to read those revelations.

What woke me up

This letter from the future (2029) when AI won’t need us anymore. (Yes, you read that right. AI won’t need US anymore.)

“Every time you got better at prompting, the AI got better at not needing prompts.

The thing that made you valuable — your ability to translate intent into instructions the AI could follow — was the exact thing the AI labs were working to eliminate. You were building expertise in a gap that was closing. The better you got at bridging the space between what you wanted and what the AI could deliver, the faster it learned to close that space on its own. You weren’t developing a durable skill. You were perfecting the art of operating a machine that was actively learning to operate itself.”

The backwards intuition

So what’s a solopreneur to do? Let’s talk about leverage points a little.

In her essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, Donella Meadows writes:

“Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.”

The idea of leverage points isn’t new, but the problem is that most people apply it intuitively. And intuition can lead you on.

Here’s an example from Meadow’s essay:

“Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point. Then I’ve gone to the company and discovered that there’s already a lot of attention to that point. Everyone is trying very hard to push it IN THE WRONG DIRECTION!”

Asked by the Club of Rome to show how major global problems — poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, resource depletion, urban deterioration, unemployment — are related and how they might be solved, Forrester made a computer model and came out with a clear leverage point: Growth.

Not only population growth, but economic growth. Growth has costs as well as benefits, and we typically don’t count the costs — among which are poverty and hunger, environmental destruction, etc. — the whole list of problems we are trying to solve with growth! What is needed is much slower growth, much different kinds of growth, and in some cases no growth or negative growth.

The world’s leaders are correctly fixated on economic growth as the answer to virtually all problems, but they’re pushing with all their might in the wrong direction.”

Apply this lens to solopreneurship in a world of highly advanced AI, and something uncomfortable comes into focus.

What we’re all pushing

The almost universal advice across business and creator communities right now is to use AI to push on capability and output. Use AI to produce more. To produce better. To produce faster. Niche deeper. Grow the audience.

This feels like the leverage point because it has always worked historically. More skill, more value delivered, more economic result (for you and others).

But in a world where AI has essentially infinite capability and infinite output, pushing harder on capability and output is exactly Forrester’s backwards intuition. You’re pushing growth in a system where growth is precisely what’s been commoditized.

The leverage point looks like productivity and skill, but it isn’t.

The actual leverage point

The highest leverage point in any complex system is changing the shared idea underneath everything (rather than the flows and stocks that everyone can see and measure).

The paradigm everyone is currently operating from is: value comes from what you can produce. That paradigm made complete sense in every previous economic era. It’s so deeply embedded that questioning it feels almost absurd.

The actual leverage point right now is the source of value itself: you. We’re shifting from production-based value to existence-based value. Not what you make, but what you are, who you’ve become, and the irreplaceable specific human reality you inhabit.

This is a paradigm shift that’s violently resisted because it requires abandoning the mental model that got everyone to where they are.

It also feels vague, grey and mushy. What does that even mean, to be valuable simply for existing? What should you do with it? (See, we have a problem with just being. We always need to do.)

I’ll give you some pointers below (derived from system thinking) about what that would look like and what you need to focus on.

But now, let me tell you why I think that in a highly advanced AI world…

Solopreneurship may become the new normal

Read more

Out of all the webinars I’ve done on Smarter Solopreneurs, this one has gotten the most positive feedback.

Here’s what it’s about.

There’s no way to make money online if you’re not selling.

Sure, you can argue with me that Medium or YouTube pay creators to “just create”—but it’s still a hard sale to get attention.

I’ve worked with over 2000 solopreneurs in one capacity or another, and most of them struggle to sell.

What’s sad is that their mistakes are totally fixable—they just don’t know how to fix them.

I can make you a sales powerhouse in 1 hour.

Give me 1 hour of your time and I’ll teach you:

• What to sell

• How to sell it

• To whom to sell it

It doesn’t matter what you want to sell: my strategies are based on my extensive sales experience (including being a Corporate Sales Director) and work on anything.

• I’ve sold $240K worth of copywriting services on Fiverr (and got interviewed by Business Insider for it).

• I’ve sold another $250K worth of copywriting & consulting services to big businesses.

• I’ve sold $10K worth of paid memberships + digital products (and I launched my paid Substack last December and my first digital product in June)

Ready for the Sell Anything webinar?

The Sell Anything Webinar will show you:

• The sales process - and what to sell at each stage

• The products that will sell best - and how to know whether you have “product-market fit” fast

• The customers who will buy - and how to single them out in the sales process.

Paid subscribers will find a link to the recording below.

Read more

We keep going with the best-of series.

This was originally published in 2024, but you’ll want to bookmark it. And I rarely say this about my work.

Here’s the problem:

The last few weeks, a few big clients reached out to us (me and my husband, he’s a marketing expert) and we signed 4 and 5-figure contracts.

This threw me off balance.

Selling services can make you SO MUCH MONEY. My God!

I know if my focus goes there, with all the know-how and credibility we already have, we’ll cross the million dollar mark easy.

But I thought back to that time when I had a service business and I was just so miserable. I’m a HUGE empath and when I work with lots of people, I’m soaking in their emotions. I don’t want to be in meetings all day long, even if it pays the world.

And you know what else helped?

The Solopreneur Assessment I designed with the help of a friend who’s a professional therapist.

I took it myself and it turned out I’m an Artist and my best solo business is a content business. Not that I didn’t know this already, but it’s so easy to get distracted online.

In fact, I’d say it’s the #1 problem most of us have. It’s not that we don’t know what to do, it’s that we can’t choose what to do.

Yesterday, I chose.

Well, I chose again (because of how I got distracted for a while).

And I chose Substack. Substack is again my top priority. Everything else is secondary.

This is NOT to say that my content will be all about Substack. I’ll just figure out how to make the best of Substack to distribute my message: anyone can build the business of their dreams online.

If you want to learn what’s the business of your dreams, the “What type of solopreneur are you?” professional assessment will tell you what’s your business, what are your strengths and weaknesses, and specific tactics for overcoming your weaknesses.

It’s available for paid subscribers below.

Remember, focus is magic!

See you soon, Smarter Solos!

Get access to the Solopreneurs Assessment below if you’re a paid subscriber →

Read more

During that time, I’ll be sending you what you (my readers) dubbed my best work over the years.

Originally published in 2024, this piece will make you less jealous, more confident and teach you how to see the success of others as an opportunity, not a threat.

Why some people get faster results online

Anytime my growth slows down, I feel like the world stops and all that exists is me and the slow, too slow, almost non-existent uptick of subscribers.

Why?

Aren’t?

They?

Subscribing?

All the nasty voices in my head gather around and put on an acapella show. A one. A two. A one, two, three, four…

You’ve lost it.

You’ll probably never get it back.

All success you’ve achieved was purely luck

and now everyone knows you’re good for nothing.

Yes, you’ve lost it.

Shalalalalala.

I start looking at what people growing faster are doing. I start to question every decision. Should I write about the topics they write about? Who even cares about my topics?

Should I work harder, even though I know it would be unsustainable? Should I use more social media platforms?

Then, the moment I run out of ideas about what to change about myself, I realize I really shouldn’t change anything.

I can grow faster while still being me. You can, too.

Read the full post here.

Do you have something you’ve been dreaming of since you were a kid and somehow never got around to it?

To me, that’s visiting New York.

And for a poor kid from Bulgaria, that was a big dream.

When I was a teen, my dad’s business took off and things started to look up. At 18, I got accepted in NYU but my dad’s business collapsed the same year. So I couldn’t go.

When I was 23, I went to a Work & Travel program in USA. However, because of my boyfriend at the time, I ended up in San Diego. (Men!)

Well, the time has come 🎉

I’m leaving for New York end of this week. I will be away for 2.5 weeks.

When I return, I’ve planned a new webinar for you: Marketing for Solopreneurs Who Hate Marketing + a lot about how to sell coaching as a service (because I see that’s what many of my subscribers want to do).

But my time in New York will be time for exploration and inspiration, not time for writing.

Luckily, I’ve written over 250 issues of Smarter Solopreneurs and some of them have “blown you away” (your words, not mine).

The next 6 newsletters you’ll get will send you back to some of my best work. Posts that will give you clarity, direction, motivation, skills, marketing and sales know how.

Don’t skip them!

We’re kicking off the 3 weeks best-of series with 5 copywriting-based strategies that will help you 10x the value of your writing—whether you’re writing your newsletter or a sales page for your products & services, this is how you impress & sell.

Let’s dive in.

Subscribe now

10X the value of your writing

Even if you feel like writing is easy…

Writing to sell is hard.

And I know how many of you feel about this word: selling. Blah!

It’s so encouraging to see how Substack creates paid subscribers out of thin air. You write your usual things, go about your usual day, and boom, a paid subscriber out of nowhere.

Nice!

Easy!

So why are you reading this?

Substack is about to become highly competitive.

It’s already happening. Michael Simmons (blockbuster.thoughtleader.school) called it “Subscription shock.”

Growth Rate: At first, readers subscribe to many publications. But as they build up a base of people they subscribe to, they get more discerning.

Churn: Once readers realize how much they’re spending and that they’re not actually reading what they are paying for, they unsubscribe from lots of publications.

Survival Of The Favorite: People stay subscribed to a handful of their favorite newsletters.

And how do we become people’s favourite Substack?

Enter copywriting.

Copywriting is a highly undervalued marketing skill.

Here’s something I want you to remember:

Copywriters are the most expensive people in the room.

They can sell fridges at the North Pole.

Copywriting is about WAY more than just writing.

It’s about:

• Buyers psychology

• Positioning

• Market research

• Testing (so knowing how to read the numbers)

• Understanding the different marketing channels

• And then there’s some writing involved

More Substackers need to learn & use copywriting principles.

To read the full 10X The Value Of Your Writing post, click here.

See you soon!

Maya

"Launch fast. Ship before you are ready. Perfect is the enemy of done."

Sounds smart. Sounds like the kind of thing people who actually get things done say.

And for a specific type of person, it is the right advice. The person who has been noodling for two years and has never shown anything to anyone. For them, ship fast is a lifeline.

But for most new solopreneurs—and even not that new solopreneurs—”launch before you’re ready” is SO the wrong thing to do.

Here’s why.

By launching before you’re ready, you only answer two questions:

1. How many people need this?

2. How much do they need it? Like, are they willing to pay the price you’re asking for it?

That’s it, those are the two questions you answer. Well, you kind of answer.

Because if 50 people saw your offer, then you don’t really know whether people need this, because is this a large enough representative group? Not unless it’s a very specific group of people for a very specific offer.

Which is what makes you fall for another silly advice: build the audience first. Then more people will see your offer.

And if they don’t want it, you can just launch another, then another…

So now you’re driving yourself crazy, building the audience, posting more on more platforms, and launching offer after offer.

Then, if you’re lucky, you find me. (Modest, I know.)

And I tell you: STOP! Breathe. You can win without an audience, without launching fast, and without all this unnecessary racing towards… I’m not sure what.

My former boss has always been all “Done before perfect! Done before perfect! Sell, sell, sell! Do it yesterday!”

I hated that. It taught me a lot but I’ve seen it lead to poor first impressions with important people and ruined deals.

Yes, overall it’s been a successful strategy, but not a perfect strategy.

And it’s worth mentioning that he has 500 employees.

So when he says “I want it done!” it’s not him who has to do it. And if it fails, it’s not him who has to fix it.

And if it’s something he’d find tedious to do but it sells well, that’s fine, because it’s not him who’d have to deliver it.

And if he has to keep the prices low at first to penetrate the market, that’s fine. It wouldn’t affect his income that much.

Do you start to see why this strategy isn’t perfect for solopreneurs?

Here is what to do instead, in 3 steps.

(And for paid subscribers: I will also review your offer and assess its sales power. Will tell you how to get this at the end of this email. Here is what people tend to message me after getting a report back.)

Subscribe now

Read more

And it’s not because people aren’t ready for them. It’s not because you’re not good enough.

The reason is much simpler.

There are two parts of your solo business:

The core value you offer and marketing.

For solopreneurs, it’s important to stay focused on delivering their core value to the best of their abilities.

That’s what will keep you in business, will get you recommended, will get you great reviews, will help you command higher prices.

To be able to do that though, you need to make marketing easy.

If marketing is hard, you’ll be stuck in that loop and won’t have the energy to deliver quality. Which means that all marketing efforts will lead to clients who leave feeling meh. They won’t come back. They won’t recommend you. They won’t leave reviews or will leave bad ones.

I know everyone is telling you to focus on marketing but Jeez! Don’t!

Only focus on it long enough to make it easy.

A crucial part of making it easy is understanding that…

Attention and value are governed by completely different rules.

Attention is about recognition — the familiar framed slightly differently, the promise of resolution to a problem your audience already feels.

It’s neurology.

Value, on the other hand, is built through depth, nuance, earned trust, and repeated demonstration of expertise. It accumulates slowly.

And it requires the audience to already be present.

Hard to deliver value when there’s no one on the other side.

So how do we get people to pay attention?

Simplify.

This is the lesson, in a word.

Simplify your marketing. Whatever you want to say, say it simpler. Make it shorter. Think upstream.

People took Britain out of the EU by saying “Take back control.” That’s it, that was the official Brexit slogan, and it did most of the heavy lifting.

Did you know that the day after the referendum “What is the EU?” was the second most searched question in the UK?

And you sweat over how to explain your offer?

Now, if you can take this advice and run with it, go! Go simplify. Enough reading.

But here’s what I’ve noticed happens after I give this advice in 1-1 conversations.

People say:

• Yeah but what I do is too complex and oversimplifying it will make me look stupid.

• Yeah but I will sound stupid to the people who really know what it’s all about (including my former boss and colleagues).

• Yeah but HOW? I want examples.

• Yeah but even if I do simplify it, will people get it? Will they buy it?

The answers to these questions below.

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’ve ever wondered why some people have wildly successful solo business without ever posting on social media, this is for you.

If you’re tired from hustling and want to feel more like a craftsman, this is for you.

In the Distinctly Better webinar I talk about:

• How focusing on quality will change your business.

• What is qualit…

Read more

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.

Read more

11 years without a day job. Multiple business models, multiple industries. 5-figure months. Near-zero months. The full spectrum.

I’m in a good place now, but here’s what bothers me: I could’ve gotten here much sooner. The early signals were all there, I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

published my contribution to his “First Digital Dollar” project yesterday — the story of my very first digital dollar, what it was quietly telling me, and why I didn’t listen.

Read it here. Learn from my lag.

You can also join our live talk that starts in about an hour (8am Los Angeles; 11am New York; 4pm London).

To doing it your way,

Maya

Well, why does any business exist sustainably?

Because someone specific wants something specific and believes a specific person or thing can give it to them. That's it. Every dollar ever exchanged happened because of that alignment.

If you don’t tell the market what you are, they’ll assume they already know.

And they’ll assume the most boring version of it.

Position. Then you won’t have to compete on “valuable content.”

The “be specific” advice sucks.

It implies that you’re not specific and it’s difficult to become something you’re not.

But you already are specific.

Every solopreneur already has a specific history, way of thinking, clients who've loved them, problems they solve faster than others.

Positioning isn't manufacturing something new. It's excavation. It's to name what's already different and stop hiding it behind vague language designed to appeal to everyone.

There’s a reason solopreneurs resist this work, and it’s not laziness. Positioning requires a kind of commitment that feels threatening. To say “I serve this person with this problem” is to implicitly say “I do not serve everyone else.”

That triggers scarcity fear — what if the niche is too small? What if I’m wrong about who I’m for? What if I close a door I’ll need later? The vagueness is protective. Keeping the positioning fuzzy feels like keeping options open. It feels safe.

But here’s what’s actually happening psychologically: the solopreneur who stays vague is also protecting themselves from a different vulnerability — the vulnerability of being seen clearly and still not chosen.

If you’re specific and people don’t want you, that’s a more pointed rejection than if you’re generic and people scroll past. Specificity raises the stakes of being ignored. So the resistance to positioning is often, underneath it, a fear of full visibility.

What will help is understanding the process behind positioning.

Because in solopreneurship the product is entangled with the person offering it, positioning seems more personal than it needs to be.

When something feels personal and overwhelming, giving it a structure is genuinely liberating. The process creates distance — not emotional distance from your work, but cognitive distance from the chaos. Instead of sitting with a vague, anxiety-producing question like "who am I even for?", you have a sequence of smaller, answerable questions.

Read more

Is posting content on social media still worth your time as a solopreneur?

Because the decline is stark.

And it’s not just Twitter.

Read more

Subscribe now

First, let’s define what a thinking problem is.

A thinking problem is a problem that can’t be solved with more execution.

You could drive all day in the wrong direction, and driving more won’t take you “there.”

Now let me tell you why I think marketing is a thinking problem.

It’s because I talk to you and keep hearing the same thing: “I’m doing a lot and not getting enough in return.”

You say it in different ways.

• I’m posting daily on Notes but I’m not growing.

• I’m getting readers but not clients / paid subscribers.

• I’m sending cold pitches but get no responses.

• How do I get more clients? I’ve tried everything.

In short, you do a lot of marketing, yet you can’t solve the problem of producing revenue in a sustainable, predictable way.

Speaking of revenue, it doesn’t help that most marketing advice you hear is geared towards building a presence, not a business.

A presence is a public thing that exists on platforms and can be impressive to look at. A business is a system that reliably produces revenue from a group of people who value what you offer. The two can coexist, but the strategic intention behind each is different, and conflating them is the source of most of the pain you’re feeling.

Read more

Subscribe now

If you treat metrics as an identity, every result redefines who you are. A bad week = you're bad. You optimise for the next dopamine hit.

But in the first 3–12 months, your metrics mostly reflect how well you've copied the platform's current grammar — the posting time, the hook format, the topic trend — not whether your actual perspective is connecting with the right people.

And even after that, surface-level self-trust ("I know what I think") is common.

Operational self-trust ("I act on what I think without needing external approval first") is rare.

The diagnostic is not what you believe in principle, it's what you do under pressure.

It’s those rare creators that stand up for something they believe in that we end up looking up to. Here’s what they do (instead of watching the results of every post) & how to become one.

Like many creators, Bo Kevin, a film-maker, reached a point of burnout where his worth was tied to the performance of his last post.

Read more

The solopreneur market is growing fast, which means more competition for the same clients.

In a system where everyone is trying to optimize marketing and content, the highest-leverage intervention is actually the one nobody is working on — the conversation.

When supply of skilled independents increases, differentiation becomes critical, and the sales conversation is one of the last places where a solopreneur can differentiate in a way a portfolio or proposal simply cannot.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritize human interaction over AI.

What’s curious is the direction of the trend — after several years of increasing interest in self-serve and AI-driven sales, we're now beginning to see a reversal, with more buyers expressing a desire for authentic human engagement.

I know what you’re tinking.

“How could people possibly want sales calls? Who likes to be sold to?”

But your potential clients aren’t avoiding calls. They’re avoiding a specific type of call they’ve been on before: the 45-minute discovery call that's really a monologue about services they didn't ask about. Or the "free consultation" that turns into a soft close.

They've learned, correctly, that most sales calls extract their time and attention and give back very little.

That’s why my belief is that the sales call as a persuasion event is largely dead for solopreneurs.

Yet, a sales call as a consultation (a real consultation) can be an insanely valuable experience on its own. It can be the best 45 minutes that have happened to your potential clients, even if they don’t buy. In fact, that should be the goal.

Because:

• Even if they don’t buy, they’ll recommend you to someone who will.

• If they do buy, they’ll be willing to pay a premium.

• They’ll be far more invested in your work together.

• They’ll leave great reviews and keep talking about you years later.

I was always better at sales than I was at marketing. I don’t have huge social media followings or fancy portfolios, but I close 80% of the calls I make. And I don’t do calls for less than $2000.

Want to know my secrets?

Most sales call advice you hear is wrong. Let’s start by eradicating ideas that don’t work for solopreneurs.

Read more

But no one tells you there are different types of engagement.

There’s a real difference between subscribers who engage because they love free content versus subscribers who engage because they’re evaluating whether to pay. Even if both groups open every email, the people who convert are thinking differently from the start.

It’s not about optimizing for engagement. It’s about optimizing for the right kind of engagement.

Lenny Rachitsky spent 10 months building his product management newsletter to 10,000 free subscribers with strong engagement. When he launched paid subscriptions in April 2020, something unexpected happened: his free subscriber growth accelerated.

“I found I got a big bump in free subscribers from that same time,” he wrote. “I got a few hundred free subscribers coming in the day I launched paid, and I think it’s because you convey value, and it’s like, ‘this is really good, I guess, if people are paying for it.’”

He converted 486 people to paid in the first six weeks. Within three months, he hit 1,000 paid subscribers. By end of year: 3,000 paid.

If you look at the numbers closely, impressive as they may be, it took him a month and a half to get to 486 paid out of 10K free—and then he more than doubled that in another month in a half without doubling the free subscriber base.

Why? The engagement metrics that looked impressive before he launched paid weren’t what drove conversions. What drove conversions was strategic scarcity—putting 75% of content behind a paywall.

The subscribers who engaged with everything weren’t necessarily the subscribers who converted. The subscribers who converted were the ones who saw the paywall and thought “I need access to all of this.”

The most critical trend for newsletter monetization over the next 1-3 years is the shift from Engagement Optimization to Subscriber Quality Filtering, where creators move from maximizing total engagement to attracting subscribers who actually convert.

To build a newsletter business that generates revenue, you don’t need viral growth. In fact, analysis of 40 million newsletters shows that newsletters optimizing for engagement convert 60% worse than newsletters optimizing for clarity.

So what do you need to convert subscribers? How do you filter for quality and how difficult is it? What’s most important and what’s noise?

Read more