Believe me when I tell you, it isn’t fun seeing that both of your products have flat sales and one has 0 users.

I’m a tech nerd. Sure, I can also be creative, but my profession is an engineer. A coder.

I don’t know anything about growth, sales, or marketing. These are things that I’ve never had to deal with in my career. Most engineering is done when someone requests it. I don’t have to think of how to sell it, what the go-to market strategy is, etc.

You can’t be a successful solopreneur without knowing growth, sales, or marketing. Sure, I’ve built ArtsyPetz and Rippl but building is a minority stakeholder in this venture. My goal is to make enough money to replace my corporate salary.

I needed to figure out growth, sales, and marketing yesterday. Luckily, the second best time to start is now.

Overthinking as Avoidance

Growth, sales, and marketing make me uncomfortable.

I don’t know anything about them and they open me up to all kinds of rejection and the possibility of failure.

They are the way you take something you crafted, and are emotionally attached to, and share it with the outside world. You offer it to complete strangers. You not only ask them if they like what you made but you also ask if they would pay you for it.

By doing that, you set yourself for the possibility of success and failure. My negativity bias rarely acknowledges the possibility of success

I’m also prone to overthinking as a form of avoidance and self-sabotage. If I set perfection as the goal, I always knew that it was an unrealistic goal. Since I know its unrealistic, I will inevitably fall short and won’t end up doing the work.

Why bother doing the work if you know you won’t achieve your inherently unrealistic goal?

More importantly, by avoiding the work I can avoid the possibility of vulnerability and rejection.

Going into solopreneurship, I knew overthinking was a problem. It’s always been something I try to avoid or work around.

Overthinking is still difficult to avoid even when I know it’s happening. It ultimately makes it harder for me to achieve the results that I want: replacing my corporate salary.

The Two Types of Overthinking I Deal With

The Vulnerability Trap: fear of judgment and rejection “help” me conclude that it’s safer to not share anything with the public.

The Quality Trap: consistently deciding that the current state of whatever I’m working on “isn’t good enough yet” and letting that be the reason I don’t share it with the public.

I deal with these often, all while simultaneously knowing that movement creates clarity. These traps prevent the movement and, therefore, prevent the clarity.

Taking Action Anyway

I’m refusing to write any code and I’m exclusively focusing on growth, sales, and marketing.

I found courses by Caleb Ralston and Ali Abdaal where both focus on building your personal brand. It involves learning the cycle of content creating and leveraging it to find an audience and provide value to them.

The courses are amazing (links at the end of the post, if you’re interested). Both Ralston and Abdaal and clearly great at what they do but they also are very realistic in their approaches. Both explicitly call out overthinking as a problem and the solution is to just do the damn thing. This is something that I knew was true before because I’ve always learned more by doing. It was nice to hear seasoned pros say the same thing. Sometimes, that kind of validation makes me feel a little less crazy for starting down the path of solopreneurship in the first place.

I decided to listen to the experts by creating my YouTube channel and made my first video. If you watch it (thanks!) you can see that I just jumped into it. It’s messy: the background has some clutter, the lighting looks like a spotlight from a helicopter in a high-speed chase. But the more important part is that I just did it and took such quick action that I didn’t allow overthinking to creep in.

Also, it got me a couple of comments and two subscribers. It’s not much but it feels like a lot. There were strangers on the internet not only watching the video but taking the time to comment and follow.

That felt pretty damn cool.

"Overthinking is still difficult to avoid even when I know it's happening."

What's Sticking

For a while now, I’ve known that being uncomfortable can indicate that you’re growing and learning. I’ve experienced this so many times in other contexts but for some reason it’s hard to bring with me into the world of solopreneurship.

I still fall for overthinking, even when I know better.

But the small steps I’m taking make a difference. I’m starting to recognize it earlier and doing something about it. Sometimes, I’m just taking action immediately so overthinking doesn’t have any time to seep in.

It’s nice to hear experts saying the same thing. The fact that I independently came to the same conclusion they did makes me feel a little more sane. They’re operating at a level that I aspire to and started as beginners.

I don’t think you can make an improvement without some kind of discomfort.

Overthinking is a justification for safety. It masquerades as diligence but it’s actually avoidance.

When I'm going through it, I try to reframe the situation by recognizing that discomfort is the price I pay for growth and improvement. The end result has consistently outweighed that temporary discomfort. Hopefully, I can keep stacking wins along the way. Maybe it'll start to sink in.

Resources

As promised, here are the courses I've been using to help me learn growth, sales, and marketing:

How To Build A Personal Brand by Caleb Ralston

The 7-Video Challenge by Ali Abdaal