Happy Sunday folks, hope the weekend went well and I’m back with another solopreneur blog post and update.
Certainly no shortage of snow on the ground here in Toronto after yesterday.
Anyway, have you been keeping up with this FTX news lately?
My goodness.
I was never a big Crypto or NFT believer – I do hold a little bit of Bitcoin and Ethereum for fun – but this is exhibit A of some of the downfalls of the systems, as they exist right now at least.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there is value in something like a decentralised currency, and NFT’s when they actually start using them in a way that provides real value (not just slapping a monkey on the cover and calling it a day), but I don’t know if we’re there yet.
And unfortunately, the whole FTX debacle probably doesn’t help the progress.
For example, I was reading some articles saying things like:
- the company has no updated records of their current employees
- the company was lending funds to another company, owned by the FTX CEO, that was making large/risky bets with the money
And more.
What’s even crazier is the company was backed by A-tier investors and celebrities.
Sequoia is an A-tier venture capital fund, Tom Brady was a spokesperson, Kevin O’Leary an investor.
How does all of that happen?
I’m not sure, mostly because I’m just a simple lawyer in Toronto with a very small tech company that hasn’t raised anywhere near as much funding.
But it’s not so hard to see how certain markets and industries went nuts over the last 5 years. Lots of free money, huge fundraises, insane valuations, big salaries.
There had to be an adjustment. Not just for companies like FTX – which needed to come back down to planet earth (and maybe prison?) – but the entire industry.
Fortunately, in the latest episode of the SG Podcast, I was able to talk to someone far smarter than I in the tech industry – Amir Feizpour.
Not only is he a friend in Toronto, he’s a data scientiest (aka he’s smart as hell) turned tech founder, building something much more advanced than I’ll ever understand.
But he’s also a down-to-earth, well-spoken guy who makes confusing things sound simple. So it made for an awesome episode.
We talked about:
- How he went from an academic, then to the corporate world, and eventually starting his own business as a data scientist
- The ups and downs of getting into entrepreneurship with no business experience
- How to succeed in the startup world; fundraising, pivots, product-market-fit
To watch or listen to the episode, head over here.
In other news, as you know, we’re in the process of finalizing our next immigration product at Visto, and it means doing lots of stuff.
Testing, demoing, getting first users to give it a try, recording suggestions from users to prioritize new features or changes to make.
It’s really cool, especially when you’ve designed and built it from scratch.
It also starts getting intense, because with the product almost ready, you have to start showing some traction, revenue, etc.
But so far, so good.
If there’s anything specific you want me to share or focus on while we go through these testing/demo’ing phases, please let me know!
I’ve also been doing some testing with my Solopreneur Grind podcast content.
Namely, creating snippets from my podcasts and sharing shorter clips – 45 to 60 seconds – on Tiktok and Youtube shorts.
I think if you have any form of medium/long form video content, you’re leaving money on the table if you aren’t doing it too.
By sharing shorter snippets, you’re getting more distribution and can drive more traffic to your longer form content.
For example, if you post videos on Youtube (I post all my podcast videos there), cut 5-10 clips from the video that are 45-60 seconds long and post them on Tiktok and/or Shorts.
Or in my case, hire your fiancé to cut and edit snippets for you 😉
It’s still early on, but I’m getting 100-200 average fews on my Tiktok snippets from my SG Podcast.
Don’t believe me? Check out (and follow!) the SG Tiktok page here.
It’s low hanging fruit – you’ve already created the full video, why not break it up and share the clips to drive more traffic?
That’s it for me on this update – thanks for tuning in as always, make sure to sign up to get my daily updates here, and keep grinding.
