Hi friends! I’m extremely excited to share I’ve launched a podcast called Nat’s Notes, where I share the big ideas from the best books in the world. I guarantee you’ll learn something new and interesting each week and have fun doing it. You can find it on Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and anywhere else by searching “Nat’s Notes.” I hope you love it!
It’s generally much easier to be a creator today than ever.
But there’s one big reason I don’t envy the people getting started in their online-solopreneur-creating-things journey today:
Expectations.
I’ve been doing this for about a decade, and when I started, it was significantly harder to build an audience.
There were no highly optimized entertainment algorithms to do your distribution for you. Gaining traction meant commenting on countless sites, employing complex SEO tricks, maybe building a Facebook page. It was tough to get noticed.
When I started my first site1, I knew it would be a year or two before I saw any respectable amount of traffic. I was fully focused on figuring out SEO since that was the dominant form of passive traffic at the time, and there were very few ways to quickly hack your way to the top of Google without spending a startup-sized marketing budget on link building.
I happily chugged away on three articles per week for nearly two years before my first week with over 100 daily visitors. Two years! But that didn’t feel long because it was what I expected. It was what you had to do.
Now it’s a different game. New Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram accounts sometimes amass hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of followers in months. The growth channels on TikTok and Instagram are teeming with overnight success stories. It is possible to have the rapid success I never could have dreamed of 10 years ago. The expectations have shifted.
So now it's easy for an aspiring creator who doesn't get instant results to feel like a failure. All these other people are getting hundreds of thousands of followers in months, so why aren’t you?
And, worse, failure is much more visible now. If every article I wrote ten years ago had a public view count on it, I might have gotten too embarrassed to keep going after a year.
Knowing that your friends and family might watch you post TikToks and Reels for a year with only a few hundred views on each is terrifying. Not only do you know you’re failing, everyone else does too. I often suggest people don’t tell their family and friends when they start. It’s easier to find your groove in the dark.
But for the vast majority of people who end up “making it” as a creator, solopreneur, entrepreneur, whatever, it’s still a long game.
If you’re not willing to go for years with people you know watching you publicly perform to crickets, you shouldn’t even start.
Yes, you might stumble into some algorithm-hacking magic that catapults you to overnight success. But that’s a poor plan to rely on.
Don’t get fooled by the insane outliers. It’s a long, slow road. But if you can stomach the wait, the embarrassment, and the frustration, you just might make it.
Later destroyed by a hacker, sadly
Strangely, this is actually kind of comforting. Knowing that the path is long and difficult allows new creators (like myself) to accept it and not feel like they should be reaching as many readers as a few outliers. Great reminder to enjoy the process and be patient!
Very important message here Nat. Underneath the revenue, likes and engagement what truly matters is the art of creating. To deserve the benefits of being a creator you must create when no-one is looking.
I've been writing here every week since March 2022 and regardless of the now 598 subscribers, the 5 hours each week clarifies my thoughts, connects me to a flow state and puts out pieces that I can reflect back on in the future.
Reframing success from external (other people liking your work) to internal (you enjoying the process of creation) can help you to keep going when you're listening for the 1st signs of feedback.