Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.
Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.
With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.
I love shuffling poker chips. I love the sound that they make. I love that it gives me something to do while I'm thinking or churning through something. I always have poker chips on my desk to shuffle. And this is because I have a poker chip set because I used to play poker a lot.
I loved playing Texas Hold'em. And if you're familiar with the game, you'll know that you throw in some money for the ante, basically, to let people know you're in. Then you get 2 cards. There's another round of betting. Then you get 3 more cards and another round of betting. One more card, a round of betting, and the final card, and another round of betting before everybody shows their hands. And your job is to make the best 5-card hand, knowing that 5 of those cards are community cards, and there are only 2 unique to you.
Now, you may know after the first three cards called the flop that you don't have the best hand. But you think, well, I'm really only in for a little bit, so I might as well see the next card called the turn card.
Now, maybe your odds get worse and someone makes a bet, but there's only one more card to see, so you might as well make that bet too. The river comes. There's one more round of betting. You've made it that far. You might as well just pay to see what everybody else has.
This is the fallacy of the sunk cost. The idea that you've put some amount of effort, time, or money into something, so you might as well see it through. Now, maybe if you don't play cards, this has happened to you with a book or a movie. You're 100 pages into a book, and you're not into it, but you think, well, there's only 100 more pages left or 200 more pages left. Or you're 45 minutes into a half-hour movie, and you're like, well, I'm almost done. I might as well just see it through. But your time, your money and your effort are more valuable than that. This is why it's the fallacy of the sunk cost and not the life hack of the sunk cost. Because you tell yourself that, but you don't need to finish. You don't need to see the next bet. You can turn the movie off or take your bookmark out of that book and start reading something else.
And the reason I'm telling you this is because I've broken the fallacy of the sunk cost for something that at the beginning of the year, I told you I was all in on, and that's my Be Everywhere Strategy.
So let me tell you why I have decided that my Be Everywhere Strategy was a complete and utter failure, and why that's a good thing.
Hey, everybody, and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without spending too much time on it.
I'm your host, Joe Casabona, and each week, I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It's like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs. By the end of each episode, you'll have 1 to 3 takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.
All right. So let's dive into it. First of all, if you are new here or you don't know what my Be Everywhere Strategy is, this was my idea that I would just publish to every platform imaginable. And this is not in the social media sense. This is in the publishing of my stories, my articles, my videos, and my podcast.
And the reason I did this was because I wanted to maximize my reach. I wanted to see if I could get more people by publishing my blog posts, not only on my WordPress site but on Medium and on Substack. I cited the discovery problem. The problem with hosting your own site is there's no built-in discovery function. That's an issue with podcasting too. Something that YouTube solved insanely well for videos. Something that Substack is solving insanely well for articles. Something that Spotify is trying to solve for podcasting.
And on top of that, I was also starting to pull back from social media. I went all in on social media in 2023, and it seemed to be a pretty crappy year in general. People thought they figured out the algorithm only for it to change. People left Twitter in a mass exodus. Facebook is getting dated, I guess. Threads is new, and people don't really know what it's about yet. And so my Be Everywhere Strategy was simple. Publish all of my content and all of my membership content anywhere somebody could pay me.
And the problem was the level of effort. I maybe didn't realize, or maybe I did, or maybe I told myself, “Hey. My VA can do a lot of this anyway, or I can automate a lot of it”. And so I thought, well, it shouldn't be that bad. It won't be that bad is what you tell yourself when you hope it won't be that bad. But the level of effort was a lot.
Publishing to Substack is not super easy if you're publishing to or from there because they don't integrate with anything. There are no third-party integrations for Substack. They want you to be on Substack. And so I'd have to publish my articles in one place, copy and paste it to Substack. I'd have to publish my podcast where I normally publish it and then also publish it to Substack because they don't do their own RSS ingestion. They want you to be there. And that's great if you're there, but I wasn't there. I wasn't trying to just be there. And so I got into a situation where I was just doing too much, and the juice didn't seem to be worth the squeeze. Now granted, I only gave it 3 months. But 3 months trying to do maximum effort in a bunch of places is untenable.
One of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea is because CGP Grey does it. Right? He, you can subscribe to him on YouTube, Substack, and Patreon. But CGP Grey has a team, and he already has a huge following. And he doesn't publish as frequently as I do. Yes. He's doing super deep research, and he has a team to help him publish stuff. But that's not you know, that's, like, I guess, another fallacy. Maybe it's not an official fallacy, but it's, I see another creator doing it, and so that's what I decide is good for me too. Right?
Aaron Judge's swing wouldn't work for me. I mean, for a lot of reasons. But, you know, he's like a full foot or more taller than me. So, like, the way he approaches hitting a baseball would have to be vastly different. Well, I guess I'll use another professional baseball player. Right? Jose Altuve. Aaron Judge is a, like, a full foot taller than Jose Altuve. The way they approach hitting has to be different because they are different people. And maybe they achieve the same goal, getting a hit or hitting a home run, but their approach has to fundamentally be different.
And so about 3 months into this experiment, after I told a bunch of people enough to make me want to continue for that sunk cost fallacy while I've already started it, and I told people I'm doing it. About 3 months into it, I've decided it's a bad idea. And there are three events that made me realize it was a bad idea, and I'm going to tell you what those three events were right after we hear from our sponsors.
Look. When you have an online-based business, speed and reliability are the most important aspects of a service. Not far behind that is actually owning the website that your business relies on. When you own your website, you're not subject to an algorithm, changing terms, or accidental shutdowns.
That's why I'm so excited that LiquidWeb is back as a sponsor of How I Built It this year. Their cloud VPS is some of the best-in-class hosting you can get when your business relies on your website. From speed to security and protection to regular backups, with LiquidWeb, you can trust your website will remain in tip-top shape.
Not technically savvy? Don't worry. LiquidWeb offers fully managed hosting, which means they have a team of knowledgeable experts looking after your website for you so you can focus on running your business. If you need fast, reliable, and secure hosting for your business, check out LiquidWeb. Head over to [howibuilt.it/liquidweb], today.
I've had a sordid past with membership platforms. I've never really been happy with one because I've always had to jump through hoops to get things working. Then I found Memberful.
Memberful has everything you need to get your membership program up and running quickly, content gating, newsletters, community spaces, private podcasts, and more. I love the private podcast feature. Since my host doesn't have a payment gateway, I need to figure out a different way to sell it.
Memberful can handle sales and management for me. Plus, you know I love automation, and Memberful integrates with a ton of services. They even have webhooks and support custom apps. It's the central place for every aspect of your membership.
My membership is on pause, but you can bet that when I launch it again, it will be on Memberful. You can get started today for free at [memberful.com/howIbuiltit]. You don't pay until you start collecting payments. That's [memberful.com/howIbuiltit]. [memberful.com/howIbuiltit].
Hey. Real quick before we get back into the episode, I want to tell you about my free newsletter, Podcast Workflows. If you are wondering how I can successfully run this show plus two other shows, plus run a business, plus run three children, Podcast Workflows is for you. You will get weekly emails with behind the scenes look at how I produce this show, experiments I am trying with other podcasts, and general advice to start, grow, and monetize your podcast. You'll also have the opportunity to become a member and get ad-free extended episodes of this show as well as bonus content. You can do all of that over at [podcastworkflows.com/join]. That's [podcastworkflows.com/join]. Sign up for free today.
Okay. So the three events that made me realize my Be Everywhere Strategy was a bad idea.
The first one I alluded to or explicitly stated, really, it's so much work. In fact, it's so much work that I had a blog post lined up called, No Reasonable Person Would Do This, where I was writing about how much work it was and why I still thought it was a good idea. And halfway through it, I was like, no reasonable person would do this. Why am I doing this? I'm not making any money on Medium. I'm not gaining subscribers on Substack. And, in fact, I don't want to gain subscribers on substack necessarily. And that's the second event that led me to think this is a bad idea.
It was my conversation with Nathalie Lussier, who was on this show, where we basically talked about our experiment with Substack. We had both joined at the same time, and we talked about kind of our concern over some of the bad press that Substack was getting at the time. And then I asked her what her approach was. And she had actually gone all in. Right? She was maintaining one mailing list that was in, I
think, Keap, and that was for her business. So she still has that. But then she moved anybody who had expressed you know, anybody who from that mailing list reasonably over to Substack, and she just writes on Substack now. And, by the way, if you wanna hear that conversation, that's episode 405. So ]howibuilt.it/405].
And, the other episode I referenced, the My Experiment with Substack and Being Everywhere, that's 402. So [howibuilt.it/402]. I'll put everything in the show notes for this episode as well as in the description in the show notes for this episode. The show notes for this episode are over at [howibuilt.it./413].
So, anyway, with that conversation, I asked her what she did, and she is only writing on Substack now. And so I thought, well if I'm gonna do what Nathalie did, I need to make a decision. Should I import all of my subscribers to Substack? But I have a lot of historical data in ConvertKit that I wouldn't be able to bring over to Substack. I have people tagged a certain way. I reach out to my members or was reaching out to my members that way. I have people tagged as coaching clients. I still wanted to write in ConvertKit and WordPress.
And ultimately, after that discussion, I thought, if I'm not gonna go all in, if I'm concerned about going all in if I'm hedging my bets, is this really the right strategy for me? If I wanted to abandon ConvertKit and go to Substack, first of all, I'd save, like, $500 a year or more, $600 a year, whatever it is. So there's a big financial reason to do it, but I also have a welcome sequence there so people can get to know me. And that's an important sales factor for me.
The point is I'm not just writing content to my mailing list. My mailing list is also a marketing tool. And so I came away from my conversation with Nathalie thinking, do I want to maintain two lists where I am manually syncing them, essentially? I'm merging them and then importing them in two places every so often because there's no automation. Right? If there was, if there was an automation where anybody who subscribed to my Substack got added to my ConvertKit list or vice versa, then maybe, this maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation. Maybe I wouldn't be doing this episode right now. But I'd have to maintain two lists because I'm not ready to get rid of ConvertKit.
I'm trying not to be hasty about things this year. I'm trying to think through things. And so I came away from my conversation with Nathalie thinking, I either need to maintain two lists or go all in on one platform. And my content, again, hasn't been there that long. I was there since November, but I wasn't seeing any benefit to being on Substack to support the maximum effort of publishing in a lot of places. And then the third thing that happened and the real impetus for me doing the Be Everywhere Strategy in the first place, including being on Substack, because that could be, like, a central place for my membership, is I decided to kill my membership or sunset. I was by this time, you've heard the episode with Gia, Georgiana Laudi, and she said she prefers to use the word sunset, which is nice. That's a nicer way to put it.
I decided to sunset my membership. I talk about that in Episode 408. And so with that decision, I was like, what's even the point of using Substack at all? If I'm really trying to publish on [podcastworkflows.com] and rank at [podcastworkflows.com], and I have my podcast and I'm publishing it in my podcast host. Why am I doing Substack at all in the first place?
So those three things. Explicitly writing No Reasonable Person Would Do This, and then me still thinking I should do it. My conversation with Nathalie, which I think went in the opposite direction I thought it would have after I finished recording with her. And me sunsetting my membership, those three things made me realize I don't need to be everywhere. I shouldn't be everywhere. Because now I'm dividing my attention. I'm not doing one thing well. I'm doing a bunch of things poorly.
And, honestly, that's it. Right? That's why I'm not making any money on Medium. That's why nobody's following me on Substack because I'm not all in on those platforms. They're just a…I'm basically just trying to use those platforms, but they're smarter than that. They're not just like you can't just, like, keep your stuff here while you go live with somebody else, while you go travel the world. We want you to be all in. And so I've decided to be all in on my own website, ranking for SEO or, like, doing SEO stuff, writing there, making that the place where I point people to. To the point where I moved a bunch of my content from other websites to Podcast Workflows because that's the place where I wanna publish. That's the site that is going to help me establish my authority and make money as a coach and as a content creator.
So what's next for me in that regard? Well, I'm not gonna try to be everywhere anymore, but I am going to continue publishing select articles on Medium and Substack. Because I do think those places are a good place to have a presence. I'm not publishing my podcast there anymore at Substack. I've told my VA to take that out of the publishing process. It's just too many. It's too much, and there's no reason for me to do it anymore.
So, essentially, what I'm gonna do is publish regularly on Podcast Workflows. And then for any of these, like, big think pieces or these big interesting pieces that I think have broader appeal like my tools guide or my, what tools I'm using, I will publish those to Medium and Substack.
Medium makes it super easy. You give it a URL and you can import the story, and they still mark your website as the canonical link. And so that's basically just a place to reach Medium members. And then with Substack, I still do have to do it manually, or I can tell my VA to do it. But I think having some presence on there is good because there is a community over on Substack that I wanna be a part of, that I want to consider being a part of.
And I'm still not doing much on social media. I'm posting random thoughts, but, you know, on LinkedIn, I've kind of gone back to LinkedIn and started posting some podcasts think stuff. And, you know, as I actually you know, it's been paying off. I had something about, like, this terrible advice that I saw, and it got covered on a new podcast and lots of comments, and it's doing pretty well. And I wanna be a guest on that podcast. And I posted something about automation that, again, is receiving more impressions than I would normally receive. But I'm not doing it every day. I'm not doing the carousels. I'm just kind of posting thoughts. And if they if they work, great. And if they don't, fine.
All of my content effort is going towards [podcastworkflows.com] now. And if you go over there, I should say end this. I still put a ton of effort into this show. But if you go to [podcastworkflows.com], you'll see there's lots of stories I'm regularly publishing. And I'm really happy with it, and it's getting really good coverage. And I know this is the thing that I could grow. And it has its first sponsor in April, and I'm really excited about that. And I don't think I'd be able to do any of this if I was still trying to be everywhere. Because instead of thinking, how can I make [podcastworkflows.com] the best it could be, I would be thinking, how can I publish this story everywhere? How can I grow on Medium and SubStack at the same time? How can I kind of also grow my show even though I'm giving the content on podcast workflows to these other platforms?
So that's where I'm at. I wanna build Podcast Workflows and make it as successful as possible. That's my my focus.
So I hope you've enjoyed this. I hope you didn't get halfway through it and stop because of the fallacy of the sunk cost. I hope this wasn't a sunk cost for you.
Now, I do still have a pro version of this show that's ad-free and extended. And if you wanna join, you can go to [howibuilt/join].
And for this episode, I wanna be talking about the new artwork for what is currently called How I Built It, but will have a new name soon. And I'll tell you the process of how I came up with it. There's a live stream involved. But if you wanna hear that process and maybe see the artwork, it's probably not live as this episode comes out. So if you wanna see a preview, you can become a member over at [howibuilt.it/join].
You can find all of the show notes for this episode, of which there are a lot. I referenced a lot of other episodes over at [howibuilt.it/413]. You can also submit feedback over there. Let me know what you're thinking. I'd love to hear from you. If you have questions about the be everywhere strategy, if you think it's a good idea, or if you think I should try to continue, or if you have tips for, like, hey, how to make the most of Medium, let me know. I'm totally open to that. But my prime objective is building Podcast Workflows.
Thanks so much for listening. Again, all the show notes are over at [howibuilt.it/413]. I'll be talking about my artwork in the pro show.
Thanks so much to our sponsors. And until next time. Get out there and build something.