This is a story about building a solid foundation that turned out to be too shaky, burning it to the ground and starting from scratch.
I’ll share a lot of behind-the-scenes moments with you so that you can learn from my mistakes and benefit from my experience.
When I think about my business at the end of 2021, I see this:
Only it wasn’t fine.
But let’s start from the beginning.
How it started
I’ve been in the SEO industry for over a decade. And most of this time I worked full-time in different companies. Which was pretty straightforward: build your expertise in the niche, do a good job, improve skills, enjoy, repeat.
I loved it.
And I was also a person who:
- Enjoyed working by myself and not talking to my colleagues too much
- Never wanted to have client meetings and meetings in general
- Never ever wanted to do any sales
- Never thought I could lead a business and be an entrepreneur
Here’s me at one corporate party many years ago:
(I actually crushed into this wooden house one minute before that photo had been taken 😀 )
It’s funny because here is what I do now:
- Connect with great people and have meaningful conversations regularly
- Have work meetings with the people I hire
- Do sales
- Lead a successful business
Life is an interesting thing, isn’t it?
How I loved what I did… till I didn’t
My solopreneur journey started in September 2019 when I decided to quit my full-time SEO job to start my own gig.
But I faced the reality pretty quickly.
I realized I had 0 business skills. I was terrified to talk to potential clients, let alone pitch to them. With my first client, I needed to put all my strength together to just message my price on Slack (and then of course say something like “It’s negotiable. And if it takes longer, I won’t charge you more anyway”. Can you believe that? 😀 ).
But it showed me one thing:
I needed to pick up business skills. And I needed to do it fast.
So I talked to my entrepreneur friends a lot. I would leave our conversations with a lot of notes so that I could go over them later.
The second thing I did is I found a couple of courses and went through them. Taking lots of notes, of course.
I’m really good at learning and picking up things fast. So in a few months, I could already comfortably talk to clients and close good deals. Now I knew how to show my expertise and be confident (and 2 years later I created a course about that – Freelancing Freedom).
Then COVID hit.
I keep track of all my numbers. And here’s my business income for May 2020:
Not fun, right?
So I knew I needed to just keep going and improving what I did and how I did it.
Fast forward to July 2020, my monthly income was already $14k, then $16k.
So what I was doing was working.
Till it didn’t… for my mental health.
I was quickly burning out.
I wanted to scale and have more freedom. And the only ways to do it were:
- Get more clients and increase my prices
- Start an agency
I didn’t want to work more, I was already overworked.
And I said to myself a hard ‘no’ regarding building an agency.
Note: There’s nothing bad about working with clients or building an agency by any means. Some people are cut out for it, some are not. I became good at consulting but I quickly realized that it wasn’t my long-term plan. There are thousands of possible paths to choose from, and I’m talking about mine.
So I got scared as I wanted to grow but I couldn’t go for a long time even with the speed I had then. Add a lockdown to the equation and you have a perfect recipe for burnout.
So at the end of 2021, I was sitting on the floor in my condo in Toronto, and crying hysterically. I felt no hope. And I didn’t understand what to do next. The only thing I knew – I wanted to have a 100% control of my calendar and have fewer clients or no clients at all.
How it changed
When 2022 came, I sat down with my notebook and wrote down 5 things I didn’t like in 2021 and wanted to stop doing in 2022.
And then for each of these things, I wrote what I’ll do instead in 2022.
It gave me much more clarity about the things I needed to fix and do differently in 2022 to keep sane.
Additionally, I thought about my values that would help me build a better and more enjoyable business that feels more like fun than work.
At that moment I thought about my biggest value – freedom.
For me, freedom means:
- I am 100% my boss
- I don’t need to report to anyone
- I can play in my business and have fun
- I can take a vacation at any time without notifying anyone (except for my team)
- I can fully control my calendar
- My income is scalable and does not directly depend on the number of hours I put in
The last one was especially huge for me. My long-term vision was to multiply my income and decrease the hours I work while supporting and helping people with my expertise.
That’s when I decided to change everything.
I decided to switch to being a course creator full-time. It would check the boxes for everything I mentioned above about freedom.
It would help me scale my impact while having full control over my time.
From an idea to the reality
I finished all my SEO clients’ projects. And I decided to pause any new ones.
It was terrifying as I started building my income from scratch. I didn’t have any guaranteed retainer or other payments coming in. So it was a leap of faith for sure.
Note: you don’t need to ditch everything to launch a course. You can definitely do it while working with clients or having a full-time job (it might even be easier as you’ll still have guaranteed income and more room for play). My decision was based on my individual preferences and my vision for the next few years.
One thing that made the process easier for me – I wasn’t a newbie in it.
I first got interested in course creation early in 2019. I even have 2 curriculums for 2 courses written in some notebook: one for adapting in Canada for people from the Post-Soviet Union countries; and another one for finding a job in Canada. They were both based on the real experience that I had, then distilled and structured to help people like myself succeed.
I never executed them though. It happens to the best of us (and looking back, I’m happy I didn’t as I was missing the whole picture of how to not only launch a course but make it profitable).
I’ve always loved learning. And I naturally loved teaching as I can break down the concepts and teach the mindset behind decisions so that students are equipped for different situations. I love practical learning.
I also find that I’ve always created something that “I wish I’d had when I needed it”. I’m sure you’ll find yourself creating something like that as well if you decide to launch a course. And I think it’s the best path where you can really help people. But it definitely needs to be paired with extensive audience research so that you understand where your students are (Point A) and what result they want to achieve (Point B).
In 2019, I launched my first course – SEO Challenge.
I loved it and I was super proud of it. I managed to get 10 first students, and more than half of them never knew me personally. So it was a big win for me.
Then I ran it in launches between client projects in 2020-2021. It was not easy. And I don’t think I’ll ever want to get back to live launches again. But I learned a ton of things that would simplify all my next steps.
But the problem with the SEO Challenge was that I first created it and then thought about positioning. It made it hard for me to attract people to it consistently. Once people were in, they were happy. But it was challenging to communicate the value of the SEO Challenge (pun intended).
Creating scalable income while increasing impact
So from there, I started to plan a new course. I knew the topic as people had been asking me for this for 2 years – technical SEO.
But what I realized from my previous course creation experience – it doesn’t matter how many people ask for the course. It matters how many people join it.
And it’s 100% fair as you want to create a good valuable course, not something general with basic info. I invested around 600 hours in Tech SEO Pro, plus hours of my VAs and all future updates. So it’s a lot of work.
Hint: if you think that people selling courses want to rip you off, it talks more about you than them. Of course, there are many scammers out there promising you “quick money” or overnight success (that by the way, simply doesn’t exist). But if you view everyone who has to sell something as a foe trying to grab your wallet, it’s about your money blocks. What don’t you let yourself do or say? What’s something that other people do and say about money that triggers you?
At the same time, not all courses should be as extensive as the Tech SEO Pro, of course. And I strongly believe that no course should be created just for money, it’s a dead-end.
As a course creator, you should:
- Genuinely care about people
- Have strong expertise in the topic you’ll create your course on
- Have a framework or process to teach
- Can break down and explain concepts so that your students understand them
The times when you could just put together some basic staff, put a price tag on it and sell have gone. It’s much easier to be a creator now, so the competition is much higher.
And I just trust that if you’re reading this, you’re a kind human who cares about people and helping them achieve better results in the field you want to teach.
Here comes an issue…
The thing is: it’s easy for ‘scammers’ to sell things as they just don’t overthink it.
It’s so much harder for people who genuinely care. So they usually do some or all these mistakes (I’ve done them all!):
- They silently create a course and just announce it hoping people will buy it (most won’t, I’ve been there)
- Choose the wrong topic
- Choose the wrong positioning (or don’t think about it at all)
- Don’t understand their audience’s pains (so they can’t help to solve them)
- Launch a course without marketing aimed specifically at attracting the right people who you can help (I’ve done too much of this hoping that random appearances here and there will help sales. Nope).
So the truth is:
In order to create a successful and profitable course, you need to learn a specific mindset and need to go through clear steps that will help you learn more about your audience, find the right topic and positioning and attract more students who you can help.
In the end
I launched my Tech SEO Pro course in June 2022.
In November 2022 I managed to make almost the whole yearly salary I had at my last full-time job:
Now, not all months are like this, of course (for now). I just want to show you what’s possible.
Plus I managed to do exactly what I wanted:
I scaled my impact.
The Tech SEO Pro course has already helped 300+ people who enrolled in it.
It melts my heart to know about the difference I’m making.
And I also understand that it wouldn’t be possible if I just went the route most people would start with: create > launch > hope it sells > crickets.
A Reality show. Are you in?
I’m launching a new course soon. It’s going to be about SEO-Friendly Website migrations. And I thought it would be fun to show you behind the scenes of the launch. Kinda like a reality show but for a course. I’ll send you an email every Friday with the things I did for the week explaining my vision and choices.
It will include:
- How I approach the audience research
- How I validate the course
- How I hire and delegate some things
- How I create a launch plan and prepare for the launch
- What parts the launch consists of
- And other things I wish I knew before
I’ll start on January 27th.
Join a course creation reality show:
The email list is going to be 100% free. And it would be super helpful for those who want to launch their courses in the next year.