The Micro-business Mid-Life Crisis that Brought Me to Medium
By: Karen Cherry
Tags: Startup, Microbusiness, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Mindset

What the hell am I doing here?

Photo by Esri Esri on Unsplash

I was forty-two seconds into part two of James Wedmore’s Your First 100 Leads mini-course when my brain unexpectedly slammed on the brakes and screeched me into an out-of-control skid. Hadn’t I heard this stuff a million times already? What was I doing listening to more entrepreneur-wannapreneur digital marketing guru magic-beans babble? And, hold on, what did I want new leads for if I have nothing to sell?

I have nothing to sell. (Screeeeeeeeeech……….)

Not only did I have nothing to sell, there was nothing I WANTED to sell to those (imaginary, fictional, pie-in-the-sky )100 leads. SCREEEEECH……….

And yet here I was, wasting my time watching yet another freebie digital marketing course. Even worse, I fully intended to implement what I learned (I’m a compulsive do-er), so before long I would be working to get my 100 new leads, those elusive, faceless, nameless people who might want to — one day — buy something from me.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love work. I love creating, love building, implementing, love trying new things. I have even learned to (sort of) enjoy selling the things I create. And I love — no, I’m passionately, borderline-insanity-style addicted to — getting paid for my digital products. Addicted. It’s hard to overstate how empowering and exciting it is to wake up in the morning and see money in the bank because someone has found and bought one of the digital products I have created.

My digital products are B2B (business to business) products and I have a tried-and-true sales method for them. It’s a simple non-funnel and it runs 24–7 with almost no input from me. I like it a lot.

But — disappointingly — when I tried to use that method for B2C (business to consumer) sales, it didn’t work. It totally flopped.

Sad but true: if I wanted customers for my new B2C side-business, I was going to have to hustle.

Ah, the hustle, the god-damn frickin’ hustle. Every entrepreneur startup writer loves talking about the hustle. News flash: the hustle sucks.

Hustling and scraping for new leads, following the James Wedmore method; how much time would that take? I already knew the answer to that question, because I have done it before. A lot. A lot of work to get a few leads. More work than I wanted to do, more time than I wanted to spend. Why on earth would I work my arse off to get B2C leads when I wasn’t even sure the new business would be profitable?

Where was the value? What was the point? Why was I spending my time on this marketing-guru mini-course? On any of this stuff?

Isn’t my time valuable? Don’t I charge $220 per hour for consulting work in my main side-hustle and earn great money in my day job? Why am I chasing these new and shiny digital marketing rainbows? Why? My brain by this time had completely lost traction and was skidding off the solid surface of my rational mind towards the vegetation on the edge of sanity road. Whhhhhyyyy?

I snapped shut the laptop and sat down on the kitchen floor (where I had been unpacking the dishwasher while watching the video — single-mum multi-tasking as always)… Deep breath. And another. Rational-Karen took control of the wheel; ease pressure on the brakes, steer in the direction of the skid, breathe, slide, slide…. relax. Slow down. Stop.

A few things had got me to that point. We were coming out of corona-virus lockdown in my home town of Sydney, Australia, and my employer was making plans for us to ‘get back to normal’. Problem was, I didn’t want to get back to normal.

I like working from home, I didn’t want to start commuting again, or give up the flexibility of my at-home work schedule. The owners of the business were keen to have us show our faces in the office on a daily basis, but the more I thought about it, the more I was sure that I needed to get stubborn about continuing to work from home.

What would I do if they said ‘no’ and I had to quit? I love my job and I really like the secure, predictable salary, so giving it up wouldn’t be easy. But if push came to shove I was ready to walk away. Still, it was a nerve-wracking proposition.

Second, I had spectacularly succeeded in getting 5000 enrollments to my newly-launched B2C online training course, published on the Udemy platform. Unfortunately, they were all free-coupon enrollments and between them they had gained me only 4 reviews: not enough to convince the Udemy algorithms to show my course to anyone else. Of the 100+ hours I had invested in the course, I had so far made only $3.50.

Third, I had just that week been catching up on the bookkeeping. My main business activity; selling B2B digital products, was making plenty of profit but my new B2C venture was a disaster. The expenses, though small, far outweighed the revenue for the year. And those expenses were eating into my years’ profit for the B2B business.

The crazy thing was that on an almost daily basis I was still dreaming up new B2C Udemy and Skillshare courses to make. I couldn’t wait to write more scripts and make more courses, even though by now it should have been clear to me that they weren’t providing a good financial return for the time I was spending.

Even though I had got my course-making process streamlined and efficient, even though I was (finally) fast and confident at recording and editing, even though I could make courses faster than I originally thought possible, the dollar-for-hour value just wasn’t there. Not by a long shot.

It was time for a rethink. A major rethink.

The smoke was clearing from my mind-melt-down skid-marks. My mind was stationary, though my heart was racing. I took another deep breath. I decided to go cold turkey and give up digital marketing videos and course creation; to take a break from ‘doing’ and to instead spend a little time thinking. It was time to ruthlessly cut the stuff that wasn’t working and put some effort into figuring out what I want to do with the next few years of my life.

I placed my hands carefully back on the wheel, put my imaginary car back into gear… and headed off to find a quiet place to contemplate my next step. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Six months later…

The B2C venture was my side side hustle. Yes, a side hustle for a side hustle. It was an attempt to help other people find the success I had achieved in my B2B side hustle. I had learned so much while building my business. I wanted to share that knowledge so others could build their own micro-businesses too.

I wrote the piece above in June. It’s now December.

After I wrote it I spent a few weeks just thinking. Ultimately, I decided to keep creating ‘how-to’ content, because I love doing it. But in future, I decided, I would deliver it only as text, without trying to turn my written content into video classes.

And so I came to Medium. To write, to share, to get paid.

It was a good plan. And it’s been spectacularly unsuccessful. Enjoyable, yes, but financially an utter failure. In five months of writing, I have earned a grand total of $10.37 from Medium.

My Udemy enrolments have improved a little. Udemy and Skillshare now send me around $30 each per month, with no marketing effort and no new courses published. My food safety business continues to make around $2000 to $4000 per month with just a few hours of work per week. If I spent more time on it I’m pretty sure it would earn even more.

I have so many better ways to spend my time than writing on Medium. So what the hell am I doing here?

Good question. Perhaps I’ll answer it one day. Or not.