I'd rather not tell this story

I feel uncomfortable sharing this story, but I think it’s important that I do.

It starts with some very painful failure that would be easier to keep to myself.

But my guess is, to some extent, you may have experienced a bit of this.

And the reason I want to share the story with you is because it led me to a revelation. The business rather than religious kind.

A content process and strategy which started in January has led me to booking $65,000 in revenue (more or less pure profit).

That’s business directly derived from inbound leads.

And look, I hate mentioning money. I don’t like talking about money, I don’t like asking people to pay me money. I’m very British in that way 🙂

I have clients on this email list with whom I have relationships that I value far beyond the money that exchanges hands.

But revenue is one of the tangible, core reasons why you or I are making content. Right?

And I’m trying to demonstrate that everything I’m about to share in this, and following emails, leads to real business outcomes.

Let’s go back to November 2023

It’s 2 am, and I’m out of bed again, wide awake.

This has been a regular occurrence for me for the past 18 months.

At least 4-nights a week, I can’t get to sleep.

There’s a recurring loop of failure running through my mind.

Two years earlier, I had a job heading up marketing for a SaaS startup in the construction space.

I felt under-appreciated, under-paid, and unfulfilled. The vibe amongst staff wasn’t great, either. There was a blame culture and little alignment from investor to founder to staff.

So I quit, deciding that I’d go solo. I had a vague idea of what I’d do, positioning, strategy, content.

I had a few contacts, picked up some freelance work. But it was scraps and it was scatty. SEO here, copywriting there, illustrations for presentations.

I was working for people who had low budgets and high expectations.

The big play was to build an audience online with my content.

​I’ve spoken about this in detail before, so I won’t repeat everything here.

In a nutshell...

I started playing the social media game. Went on one of the well-known audience-building courses, joined an engagement group, grew 17.5k followers across Twitter and LinkedIn in 6 months.

I built a newsletter of 1,000 people, amongst which I had founders, CMOs, and Directors from Silicon Valley startups, Premier League football clubs, and a host of private equity and consulting firms.

It wasn’t getting me any work

Or at least not the work I wanted.

I was getting leads, but most weren’t a good fit.

Which brings me back to November 2023.

After 18 months of trying and failing to build my own brand (in any meaningful commercial sense), I was reaching an end point.

Financially, I wasn’t making enough. We were slowly eroding our savings.

I was experiencing these regular sleepless nights running through the shame of all the mistakes I’d made, coupled with the anxiety of all the worst-case scenarios of what would happen to our family (my wife and three young sons) when I ultimately did fail, and we ran out of money.

I was getting to a point where the pain and anxiety of failure outweighed the public embarrassment of getting a job and implicitly declaring myself not good enough to go it alone.

Besides the shame of not providing for my family, a lot came from my original belief that I was ‘good’ at content marketing.

I’d been doing it for other people for the best part of ten years.

I had a decent track record of getting clients’ or employers’ coverage in places like The Guardian and Time Out Magazine. I’d built newsletter lists, through content, to 10k+. I’d built organic traffic from zero to 30k+ monthly.

Then, on the backend, I generated revenue through marketing funnels in Hubspot.

But seemingly, I wasn’t able to do it for me.

Maybe I wasn’t good enough

Maybe those past successes were due to luck, budget, and the team I had behind me.

Maybe I just didn’t have all the ingredients required to become a successful solo consultant and entrepreneur. Good at some things, but not a complete enough individual to go alone.

It’s time to quit.

I tell my wife, I just can’t do this anymore. I’m failing you all.

She stopped me.

I’d raised this fear several times over the past two years. She always gave me the belief I needed to keep going, that I was good enough, that I just needed to give it more time to figure out.

But she could see that it was severely hurting my mental health, and besides our depleting bank balance, she knew that I couldn’t continue like this much longer.

So we agreed, one last push

We set a deadline of February 2024.

If by the end of that February, I hadn’t picked up at least one good client doing the work I wanted to do, with a price tag to cover our monthly bills, I’d stop everything and start applying for jobs.

We had enough money to cover us until then.

But the deal was that I had to give this one goal everything.

I’d turn down any work that distracted me and didn’t help me achieve that February goal. Picking up scraps was just delaying the inevitable.

No more scraps.

Everything I would do in the next four months was with that goal in mind, and I wasn’t looking beyond February.

What happened next completely changed the trajectory of our lives.