Hey there, Dachia here.
Welcome back to Focus on Your Small Business.
I had an interesting moment this last week.. and it reminded me of several other moments.
And if you are building a business or thinking of building one, this pertains to you.
You have an idea. You think it’s a good one. You think that your product or service or message is needed. Bonus.. you think your product or service or message is marketable. It has value. There are people out there who will pay you for it.
You start building… you run into a small challenge… you keep building… another small challenge… you come up for air and look around and either see somebody building the same sort of business and wonder if you are too late.. or not good enough… not ready… not smart enough… OR you see nothing like it and wonder to yourself if you are just delusional that this will work.
When I had my idea for the membership site I thought it was brilliant. Honestly. I thought it was so smart. So I looked around to see if anybody else was doing it and saw nothing. I did see lots of membership sites for social media. but not with the same avatar in mind.
And then I started to get bogged down in the details. Building the site was one thing, but I also needed to start building an email list.. so I needed a lead magnet and I thought I should be doing youtube and I hadn’t been on instagram in awhile and should I bother doing anything more with any of my facebook business pages, oh man… my website still has that old look on the one page, and oh look a great plug in, and I swear I either fell or ran headlong into every rabbit hole I found. And I would start to question if I was doing this right. Was it a good idea? Was this going to work? Did I pick the right niche?
And then a couple things happened.
Pay attention here… I’m about to say something important.
First, I remembered my feeling when I first came up with the idea for this membership. My first challenges were not so far down the path that I couldn’t remember the beginning. I could remember telling my brother about this idea and how he was actually impressed and thought it was a good idea. I had told him of dozens of business ideas over my life… this was the first one he could really understand and so I knew I had something.
I didn’t have this idea out of an emotional experience. It was logical and rational. So that was one thing.
The other thing that happened was while I was building the membership site, I was on LinkedIn with a connection and she was telling me about something and I mentioned this site I was building and who it was for and what I hoped it would do for people. And she expressed interest and said she’d like to see it when it was done.
Flash forward a few months and the site is done and I’m now working on other tasks, like marketing, and I kind of forgot about this gal and then when I remembered her I couldn’t remember where I had ‘met’ her… But one day, I’m on LinkedIn and she had sent me a message asking how it was coming.
The week or two before I was in another frame of mind of ‘is this going to work?’ ‘Did I make a mistake?’ And when I got her message I realized that she was just one person. One person who I just happened to mention the site to and she was interested.
There are 300 million people in this country. I need an incredibly tiny number of those to see my product.
It IS a good idea. It DOES have value.
I just need to get it in front of people.
I know you are often going through the same thing. Questioning yourself and your idea. Especially when you are going solo. When you have a partner or a team, it can be lot easier to stay the course. But when it is just you, it is a lot harder.
When I have these moments now, I can remember back to the beginning and while I don’t remember many details, I do remember that this business was created out of a logical, rational train of thought. And often that’s all I need to get myself back on track.
Now if your business idea was created from an emotional experience, that’s fine… if it’s something that helps people emotionally. There are a ton of great businesses that were created out of a desperation and sadness and frustration and other emotions. And people that are in that experience are likely your market.
Don’t lose track of where your idea came from. Because that memory will likely help get you through.
When you have your moment of clarity and you say to yourself, this is a good idea. This is needed. I’m onto something… and there might be a big story that goes with that acknowledgement, and if so great… because you can remind yourself with details… but it might just be you walking quietly and going through the whole thought process and you can say ‘yes… this idea is good. I can do this.”
Hang on to that. Tell yourself right then that there will be a time down the road that you are questioning yourself and your business and when that happens you will remember this moment when you clearly said, this s a good idea and you can do it.
I’m hanging onto that memory that a stranger on LinkedIn said it was a good idea and came back to check on it.
If navigating the online space isa bit overwhelming or you simply realize that your time is more valuable than spending hours and hours of it searching for what you need to do and how to do it, and you just want to get to actually doing it, go check out the membership site. Take advantage of the free trial. And in fact, take advantage of the 25% discount code on the video.
That’s dachia.com/membership
That’s all I had for you. Make it a great week. It’s all up to you with a little bit of me. I’ll talk to you next week.