It’s exhausting how intensely success is correlated with money when you’re an entrepreneur. All the headlines you see in magazines and clickbaity articles revolve around the entrepreneur who raised or made an insane amount of capital in a short sprint of time.

Money isn’t a great benchmark of success however if money wasn’t the reason why you started your business in the first place.

Many of us started our businesses because we saw a way to measurably do something better than it’s currently being done, or we saw a way to improve people’s lives drastically through our product or service. …

Does your business take a hit whenever there’s an algorithm change on your marketing platforms? Here’s how to get around this.

First off, let me be clear that there’s really no way to beat a platform’s algorithm. This won’t be a how-to on how you can finagle Instagram’s algorithm or “secrets” to show up first in a feed.

You can try to stay on top of algorithm changes and adjust your behavior accordingly, but that in my opinion, is an uphill battle and not the best use of your business’ time or energy.

Many of you have businesses that heavily depend its success on social or sales platforms, and algorithm changes on these platforms are devastating from a numbers perspective. …

Creating content for your brand blows if you don’t have a recipe to bake good content every week.

It is actually the most burdensome task to pull content out of your brain when you don’t have excited inspiration behind it — the struggle of getting something out in writing, and then feeling like you didn’t put your best face out there is a double whammy of regret that’s not pleasant to sit with.

On top of this, creating content is competitive now — you need to craft content that grabs people’s attention in a way that feels authentic. You basically have to be the most interesting person in the room to your audience. …

We’re in a golden age of content where you can’t get away with just being pretty to hold a customer’s attention.

Instagram helped steward the age of pretty — functioning as the prime home where pretty content could live. It has, however, now evolved into a platform where you have to be pretty and have brains to stand out.

You have to be witty, funny, influential, inspiring, or entertaining or you’ll exit out of someone’s attention while they’re on their daily scroll. …

If you’ve been a business owner for a couple of years now, you may have gone through the frustrating experience of your bread-and-butter marketing channel disintegrating in performance.

You may have consistently relied on referrals to fuel your income, or Instagram was absolutely killing it for you in making monthly product sales.

Then something happened.

You hit referral fatigue within your professional network, or Instagram changed its algorithm and you’re seeing a noticeable drop in your sales. …

Here’s the truth: predicting the success of a product or service launch based on opinion (no matter how informed) is a fortune-telling exercise, not a reliable green light.

I’ve seen a lot of successful and unsuccessful launches throughout my career, so I get asked about my opinion on whether a new product or service will tank or not.

When someone asks me this question, I always say: it sounds good but, you’re not going to know until you sell it.

Good and bad launch knowledge isn’t helpful in determining success because:

1. Consumer preferences are now shifting rapidly (think of pre-covid and during-covid shifts as a great example) so what didn’t work a few years / months ago may thrive now with better execution or marketing. …

Pricing — it’s either a friend or a foe to you.

When it’s a foe, it’s a stressor, an annoying bug you can’t seem to get out of your head. You waver back and forth on being priced too low but are fearful of raising that price because you don’t want to lose any customers.

When you nail it, you hit it at that sweet spot where your prices are high enough to make you happy and your customers are willing to pay that price. It feels great when you hit this pricing nirvana.

The journey to pricing nirvana is riddled with challenges, confusing contradictions, and analytical spirals that’ll make your head spin. There are plenty of opportunities where you’ll be tempted to fall off course. …

There’s a lot of chest-puffing that happens in entrepreneurship.

For most, the chest-puffing still happens when things are truly going like sh*t for the entrepreneur.

It even happens when there’s complete chaos happening behind the scenes in the business.

To everyone watching, it seems like things are flowing superbly from the outside. It gives the impression to other entrepreneurs that it’s easy running a business, or that things will get easier for the business once my business looks like that person’s.

There are many wonderful aspects and benefits to entrepreneurship, but there are equally pretty unsavory truths about becoming a successful entrepreneur that not many people talk about. …