Building a business by yourself is hard

If you have experience, this is your time to dish out advice

It’s crazy to me that when I was working as a software tester, the money came easy. I never had to look hard for a job or assignment (except the entry level one), they sort of came to me. That’s the power of networking and living in an economy that was very beneficial for the tech worker.

I paid a price for the work, however. I felt very unfulfilled because half of my time was spent in meetings and other forms of bullshit that I could never really justify. It seemed strange to me that I made lots of money (lots being way more than I needed) while my sister busted her ass as a nurse for a fraction of my income. The book Bullshit Jobs clarified all my feelings in this regard. I applied the contents of the book to software testing and made some sobering discoveries.

it’s me! at work as a nutrition coach

I’m now trying to move away from IT, partly because I never felt I belonged there. I’ll spare you the entire sob story, but being a minority in tech on many levels wasn’t always fun. I endured for a good 10 years, but I’d like to leave. But perhaps I cannot leave forever and I might have to come back, purely for the money. Ahhhh, capitalism.

The thing is, I’m trying to build a business around coaching. Coaching in the sphere of lifestyle, strength sports and general health. Anyone with half a brain can see the problem already: everyone and their mom is a coach these days. No one wants to do the real work anymore, everyone wants to be on the meta level and have other people do the hard work of changing. This was also a problem in IT, the whole business was rife with coaches of various types. And they were paid handsomely, too!

In the lifestyle business you don’t get paid handsomely, unless you have already won the popularity contest. I have a very tough time getting clients. One on one coaching has to be sort of expensive or I can’t make a living out of it. But, people find it too expensive because almost no one likes to pay for their health before there is an apparent problem, which is a problem.

So, I suck at marketing then? I have watched YouTube videos, followed online courses, read books, read articles about marketing. There are a couple of issues I have with it.

1. One, a very large part of me feels it’s fake as fuck. You have to embellish stuff: either the results (guarantee stuff you cannot guarantee), the vibe (be extremely positive) or the process (it’s super easy, I promise!!). I despise fake, so I have a problem here.
2. Two, the level of superficiality. Most social media outings are so shallow, there is barely room for nuance or realness. Negativity, clickbait and quick fixes will win.
3. Three, you only see the successful people. I’m constantly confronted with the people who already made it. Their content isn’t that different from the message I’m putting out, but because they already have the following they’ll get likes and I don’t. It is such a popularity contest. I never really cared for it because I never had much to gain from social media, but now that my business depends at least a bit on it (more popularity and followers = more leads) it stresses me out and it gives me tons of insecurity.

The insecurity stems from the fact that, if you go to the meta level and you look for “what to do to get more success on social media to drive sales for your business”, the level of advice you get has a very high draw the rest of the fucking owl vibe. You have to “find your niche”, “find the right tone of voice”, “put out content that resonates with people”. Well, I think I’m doing that? If I look at accounts in my niche on Instagram they’re putting out message X and I’m putting out a variety of that same message. But it doesn’t make a difference for me so far, not much is happening in the realm of new followers or more reach.

However, if you don’t succeed, the marketing-advice people can always retort with “well, you’re probably not putting out the right type of content then”, and variations of that phrase.

And I’m like: but what about the survivorship bias? You’ll only see the successful people, but what happened to the people who also tried it, worked hard for it, but didn’t succeed? What can we learn from them?

Perhaps, in the near future, I’ll be one of the failures. And I’ll be honest about what I tried and did. The faith I have in my new business is like a roller coaster. Sometimes I believe in it, but a lot of the times I don’t.

If you feel like dishing out advice, feel free to do so. If you know people who are good at building businesses or marketing, please share it with them. I’ll give you a small summary of my current struggles and initiatives:

• should I start posting in English? For now, I’m aiming at the Dutch market, but maybe it’s too limiting. My website is only in Dutch, but that is easily solved by putting it through a translation service.
• I’m working on more services other than the 1:1 coaching: I’m writing a book. In the end, I want to have more tiers of products: freebies like my blog (under construction) and the stuff I put out on social media, books, courses and 1:1 coaching. Right now, I only have the coaching.
• the big problem: I only have the coaching right now, how do I effectively get more clients? This is the question that keeps me up at night what makes me feel like I’m failing.

Lastly, if you want to support me, please follow my business on Instagram and share my posts with others. Although, if you’re not Dutch (chances are you aren’t) this is already a tough ask because all my content is in Dutch. You could also share a google translated version of my website.

I am aware that this post can come across as playing the victim. This is not the intent, but it’s kind of hard to write about struggles without feeling a tiny bit of sorry for yourself. I hope you understand.

End of pity party! Back to work.