Hey folks, hope you had a great weekend.
Had a fun one as my dad was visiting, and we ended up going to the exhibition here in Toronto.
For those who don’t know, the “ex” – as we call it here – is basically a huge carnival with games, rides and lots of food.
I hadn’t been in a long time, probably 10 years or more, but we went as it was nice weather, something to do and nostalgic. When I was growing up, we used to go as a family every year!
It was definitely a lot of fun, although extremely busy – the lines for rides were so long, we didn’t even bother going on any of them.
Luckily the lines for what we were really there for, the food, weren’t so bad.
The prices were also crazy.
$25 just to get in, $4-5 for a bottled water, $12 for a corn dog, $15 for a poutine.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, but reminds me a lot of sports games, movie theatres, and other spots like that where they get you inside with a big attraction (movie, sports, rides), then charge you an arm and a leg for food and drinks.
I went to a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game a few weeks ago, and a tall-can of beer was $14… for 1 beer (as my dad would joke, “for how many??”).
Anyway, there’s probably a business lesson in there somewhere for solopreneurs. I’m not one to charge outrageous fees “just because I can”, but maybe it’s that people become less price conscious in certain situations, locations, communities, etc.
Or when they simply don’t have any other options.
Again, I don’t think I’d ever feel right charging someone $5 for a bottled water, but maybe there’s a more reasonable way to replicate that model.
Another big theme for my week was focus.
If you read my updates last week, we’re underway building our next immigration tech product for Visto (my immigration tech company – visto.ai).
It’s exciting and also probably my favourite part about building a tech company – the design and execution of a new tech product that never existed before.
The other thing I’ve noticed after building a few tech products now – not as a solopreneur, as I’m not a techie, but with a small team – is that they foster extreme focus. If you’re between building stuff or not sure what to do next, business can be unpredictable.
I mean, business is usually unpredictable, but more-so than normal if you’re not working on much as a tech company.
Building a new tech product really makes it easy for you and the whole team to get laser focused on one thing, and (hopefully) one thing only, which is great. It’s a very clear objective, and that makes everything else just a little bit easier to plan.
Alternatively, if you’re between projects or products or companies, you might feel a bit lost.
You might go day-to-day without getting much concrete work done, and you might not feel a sense of progress at the end of the week.
Unfortunately, that can be a common occurrence as a solopreneur – depending on where you’re at in the journey of course.
That’s why I think it’s key to keep your main goals for any business, project, etc., very narrow. I’ve since narrowed mine down for my businesses even more.
What I mean by this is that at any one time, I only want to have one, or maybe two, key focuses for a solopreneur business at any one time. If you’re a solopreneur or working with a small team, you simply don’t have the bandwidth for any more than that – unless you want to do each one in a very mediocre way.
With Visto, we have our first product that’s live, and now we’re adding one more – and we’re going to keep it at that for a while until either (or both) really take off.
With Solopreneur Grind, I want to keep creating great content (through this blog and my podcast), and maybe create a new community as well.
But that’s it.
Anything more and the quality of each would suffer.
Are you feeling stuck or just not able to get started with something as a solopreneur? What is the one, or maximum two things, you can focus on to move the needle for that business or project?
Find those and throw the rest out. Unless you have a big team… then you’re reading the wrong blog!
That’s it for today. Have a great week, make sure to sign up to get my best updates here and keep grinding.
