In a recent blog post I was asked the following question:
Thinking back to the beginning of your online business / solopreneur career, which early decisions did you make and how did they impact your business success?
Me and 52 others answered this question below.
Did you know that the average adult makes approximately 35,000 decisions every day? That’s a mind blowing number, even if most of them are small decisions (should I have Spaghetti Carbonara or Bolognaise for dinner?).
No matter how insignificant, the sheer number of decisions wears you out until you get to a point of decision fatigue.
Don’t base your decisions on the advice of those who don’t have to deal with the results. Making bad decisions seems unavoidable. How could you get 35K decisions right each day? And while a bad dinner choice may only result in an upset stomach, the wrong decision in your business career could prove much more serious.
Even more so when you’re a solopreneur (the focus of this roundup). As a “solo entrepreneur” you don’t have a large team to consult about decisions. It’s pretty much up to you to get it right.
So, where do you turn for advice? There’s no shortage of experts for any conceivable part of business-building. But whom can you trust? As a rule of thumb, insist on proof of results.
When a niche marketing expert tells you s/he has helped hundreds of clients build 6-figure businesses, ask him/her for a list of clients with real names and domains.
When web hosts or website builders claim to have thousands of “successful” customers, ask for case studies, or a results page with sites built by their customers, ideally lots of them, and in a variety of niches.
Through a series of recent studies we realized just how important the early decisions are for your success as a solopreneur. When you start “on the wrong foot,” it takes you much longer to see results.
The takeaway from these head-to-head comparisons was clear: the platform you choose for building your online business plays a much bigger role for achieving success than you may think. We’ll talk more about this in our summary.
First though, let’s turn to our 53 experts who contributed to this roundup. These are people who’ve already “made it” in their various fields of expertise. They’re the kind of people you want to learn from when you’re just starting out, or when you haven’t yet reached the success you were hoping for.
We asked them a single question:
Thinking back to the beginning of your online business / solopreneur career, which early decisions did you make and how did they impact your business success?