The Traditional Marketing Funnel Is Dead for Solopreneurs
My job as a solopreneur is to stay happy, build trust, and deliver value. Here’s how I break up the work.
A traditional marketing funnel has four stages: awareness, interest, desire, and action. This old model assumes a whole other group of people are making and delivering the product. That’s doesn’t work for a business of one. As a solopreneur, I created these four pillars to map my calendar to customer-facing work.
🎙️ #1 Market: Many options here. The businesses I invest in focus on organic marketing — specifically newsletters, podcasts, SEO, social text, and social video. I optimize for one-to-many (1:M) activities.
💳 #2 Sell: I’ve learned these lessons many times over. No “call for pricing” for a solopreneur. Make it as easy as possible for your prospective customers to understand what you charge. Limit pricing variations. Don’t discount. Accept credit cards if possible.
📦 #3 Deliver: Product-led growth (PLG) brings your product into your sales and marketing funnel. PLG-led thinking erases the artificial boundary of making and selling your product. Huge unlock.
🤝 #4 Retain: Help your customers succeed. Continue to listen to their pain points and look for new ways to solve them. Measure their success. Then, feed these learnings back into your marketing.
Rapidly iterating on these four is how I make money and accelerate the solopreneur’s flywheel.
Related Posts
Productize Yourself: 3 Lessons from Seven-Figure Designjoy Founder And Solopreneur — Brett Williams @ Designjoy has made $3M over the last six years by productizing himselfThat’s ⟵
Attention Solopreneurs: Sell In Fewer Places! — I’ve managed multiple businesses in tech that, at some point, used every common sales channel ⟶
Your Time Is Money: 3 Reasons Solopreneurs Should Become Ruthless Time Allocators — 💸 Context Switching Is Expensive: Meeting overload can find its way into inefficient companiesDo ⟶
