u/No_Score_4072

I run a small agency and I’m finding ways to grow it and bring some systems in place to run it. I read online about the need of founders to focus on client acquisition or customer experience rather than investing in ops, it’s good in theory, but it’s just tough to do. I still need some control over how the place is running day in day out. I need some systems that I understand (not black box) so I can tweak when needed. What sort of ways are you implementing to get over this or what systems helped you?

The more I am doing social media / content creation process for promoting my products, the more I'm realizing that content creation is more like a game and that's why people enjoy it so much. You keep leveling up every day, you improve your content and you keep leveling up and see better results. There is a very live metric that you can see any time. Very accessible way to see what competition is doing and learn from it. There's the social ranking part of it.

But is that just how social media keeps you in the game? I feel I'm thinking more about the part of growing on socials rather than purely thinking of how my products benefit from it. I initially thought they're connected but it might be true only in long term (once your brand grows big).

How do you balance the time spent on socials versus other way of promoting your business (SEO/cold outreach/launches etc)?

For me it was my belief that I'm incapable of doing 'design' well. I hated design so I'd always avoid it. I guess I still have a bad taste in it, but I've at least come to a point where I can get the job done when designing marketing/branding material for my products. I think there's always something for everyone that they hated, but had to overcome it since they now can't escape it.

I'm new to entrepreneurship, and I read the advice online to build multiple products, see what's getting traction and then go deeper into only those. I think this is good if you have an audience to just build and launch to them. I have no audience, so when I implement this approach, the issue is I need to spend a lot of time trying to get traffic to each of the products. And hence it's not an easy call to just 'see what sticks'. I feel I need to go back to building one thing deeply but I also don't think you can just land on a good idea so spending too much time on one product isn't the best way forward either. How does one balance this when you don't have an audience?

When I started my solopreneur journey, every step I took opened up a whole world I didn't know existed. Idea validation? A science of its own. Marketing? Even deeper. Then I got to social media distribution specifically - and realized that's basically its own PhD too :P

At every layer, the thing I was "just getting into" turned out to be massive. And the more I dug, the more I realized how much I didn't know.

I actually kept thinking that i had to learn faster, learn more, cover more ground - that I'm not doing it tight.

In the end, I figured that the idea is not to learn more, it's to lean less.

If you go deep into one thing - really, really well - it covers for everything else you're mediocre at. A great idea sells itself even with average marketing. Great distribution can carry a decent idea further than a brilliant one with no audience. One thing, done exceptionally, buys forgiveness for the rest.

The real fight was never the market or the competition. It's you - your own urge to know everything before you'll let yourself start.

Anyone else hit this wall? What was the "one thing" you finally picked to go deep on?

Been deep in rebuilding my own landing page lately, and the one thing I kept circling back to is trust -does this person know my problem, are they real (sharing about myself), have they stuck around. Once I fixed that, conversions did move. But it didn't feel like the whole thing has improved.

There's clearly more going on. Page structure, how fast someone gets to the "what's in it for me" part, whether the price feels fair before or after they've seen the value, how much friction is in the actual buying step. Trust gets you to take the page seriously. Something else gets you to actually click buy.

For people who've tested this practically - what's the one change to a landing page that moved your conversion number the most, and was it a trust thing or something else entirely?

I shipped a few products this year in the time it used to take to even scope one. No team, no months of planning, just build and put it out and then see if it's getting traction (even minimal).

But I realized I have basically zero emotional attachment to any of the products. Old me would've felt the value of all the work I did to build it and would have kept pushing through the rough patch. New me just thinks "eh, didn't land" and moves to the next idea by the weekend.

Not sure if that's a good thing or bad. Maybe quitting fast is just good filtering - kill what doesn't work, save the energy for what does. Or maybe some of these would've worked if I'd stuck around long enough to find out, and I'm just calling it timely quitting.

How do you tell the difference between sticking it out and being stubborn for no reason?

I’m trying out the small bets philosophy of building a portfolio of microsaas businesses. Tried 3 platforms so far, will start 4th next week. But the issue i face is positioning, because i build digital products across platforms - Notion, Shopify, SAAS, consulting - i’m unable to position and build content for it. Anyone having opinions on this?