If you subscribed since my last update, I worked for myself for two years before closing it all down to join another startup as their first marketing hire. I spent my entire career in startups, most recently at Loom before they were acquired by Atlassian for ~$1B, and I was getting a little bored of my freelancing work and a little worried that I would miss the AI boom.

So, what’s my life like now? Different in every single way possible.

First, a note on Profound

Profound is unlike any company I have ever worked at before. I thought Loom’s growth during Covid was crazy when everyone transitioned to remote work but Profound is next level.

If you haven’t heard of Profound, we help brands understand and control their presence in AI search. We give them tools to track their visibility in ChatGPT and other answer engines and then create and optimize content workflows to ensure they’re always listed in the answers when you ask ChatGPT “what’s the best men’s running shoes for a 36 year old man who is more of a weightlifter than a runner living in Brooklyn who wants to run in Prospect Park 3 times a week?”

I joined Profound when we were around 15 employees and we’ll approach 100 employees by the end of 2025. We announced our Series A in June and our Series B two months later in August.

That kind of growth, especially as the first marketer, makes my time at Profound very unique. I planned our Series A marketing announcement mostly by myself, and then two months later 3 other marketers helped plan our Series B announcement. We’re still at four total marketers as of writing, and we just wrapped up our second major user conference, Zero Click London, which had almost 500 attendees and was planned just five weeks after our first user conference, Zero Click New York, which had over 300 attendees.

If Loom was a hyper-growth company, Profound is a warp-speed company.

What have I been doing?

I sometimes struggle to articulate exactly what I do at Profound because I touch so many areas of this business. I’ll try again here:

Marketing:

• I built and executed our marketing strategy, which involves sharing original research on LinkedIn to establish us as a market leader.

• I organize, schedule, and sometimes sit for interviews, podcasts, and webinars. Mostly I schedule them with someone else because he is our primary external voice.

• I’m the primary user of our own Profound account and I use it every week to dogfood our product and increase our own AI visibility.

• I organize, sponsor, and sometimes speak at industry events like brighton SEO. I’ve moderated two panels at both of our Zero Click events with Lily Ray, Mike King, and Aleyda Solis.

• I write content for our blog, external websites and partners, and I’ve been interviewed by the press (with excellent help from our Comms lead).

Sales:

• I have given about 50 sales demos of Profound, mostly when we didn’t have enough sales reps so I jumped in and took a bunch of them.

• I have personally closed almost a significant dollar amount of annual contracts and I’ve also influenced many more sales deals by leveraging my experience and existing relationships.

• I’m in sales retirement now that we have a much more robust sales team but I legitimately love assisting with deals.

Customer Support:

• I actively provide customer support to our customers via Slack and over Zoom. Most of the company does this though and it’s encouraged.

• I help new Profound customers get started with our product and I walk them through exactly how I use the product myself. This is one of my favorite activities that is nowhere in my formal job description.

Product:

• I’ve vibe coded new product features that are in active development right now by proper engineers and designers.

Ops:

• Until we hired a rev ops person, I was the primary owner of both our Hubspot account and our lead routing system. I was very happy to give this up to our expert RevOps lead now.

• I onboarded and built our first lead routing system which helped massively accelerate pipeline creation and meeting attendance for our sales team.

If you didn’t read all of that, the tl;dr is I have touched nearly every aspect of this business in the last 6 months. This is not a normal marketing job, Profound is not a normal company, and I am also not a normal employee. 10+ years into my career I have a pretty good idea of what I’m good at and I fully lean into my strengths here.

Differences between freelancing and full-time

With that additional context of Profound, my life over the last 6 months has been crazy. chaotic, and full of some unexpected events.

As usual, I will be as transparent as possible here with what is different. I figure it’s easier to lay out the themes in a table and then talk about them in more detail below.

Let’s start with the big one, working hours. I am putting in a ton of hours here. Working from 8am to 8pm is not abnormal, but nor is it every day for me. I occasionally go into the office on Saturdays, as do other people here, but I want to be clear: Profound is not a 996 company. Our co-founder Dylan wrote more about our working philosophy here.

Profound is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and that is still putting it mildly. Everyone who works there is pushing hard to thread this needle. We’re all a little bit crazy but no one is forcing us to be at our desks all the time. We all want this to work and we’re willing to do whatever it takes.

All of the fun benefits of a warp-speed company come downstream of the effort everyone is putting in. There is no time to waste.

I can confidently say that I have never had this much fun at work, nor have I been this fulfilled at work either. I work with 3 of the best marketers in the world and we have each other’s backs in a way that I’ve also never experienced before. We get to plan insane events and we punch significantly above our weight considering there is only 4 of us.

I’ve told this to all of my close confidants (and our CEO), but I can say with very high confidence that I would’ve regretted not taking this job. Profound is the perfect job for me, which I think is reflected in the kind of impact I’ve made across the entire business. No one asked me to help take demos or close deals, I did it because I wanted to and because it helps the business. No one asked me to vibe code a new feature, although I do expect that to become normal for marketers in 2026.

Freelancing gave me the opportunity to sit on the sidelines, build up a different skillset, and patiently wait for the perfect job. I don’t think I would’ve been presented the Profound opportunity (or been hired if I was presented it) had I not spent the prior two years freelancing. Everything in my life and career was training to set me up to be perfectly suited for this job. I truly believe that.

Looking ahead

If this all ended tomorrow, I would have no regrets about how I spent the last 6 months of my life. Running my own business for two years gave me extreme confidence in myself. I can always do that again. Saying no to my clients asks for two years gave me the muscle to (sometimes) say no to my new CEO too :)

My job at Profound in 2026 will be different than it was in 2025. We’re a much larger company now, and the things I did when we were 20 people were different than the things I’ll do when we’re 200 people. That is part of the fun. I’m working on a ton of different projects, hiring a team, and planning our next big user conference.

In the free time that I have, I’m continuing to prioritize my physical and mental health. I religiously go to the gym every morning before work and I’m in the best shape of my life. Over the last month I’ve caught up with 3 of my close friends who live in Toronto, San Francisco, and London because Profound travel took me to those places and I took a few personal days at the end to see friends I haven’t seen in years (or in one case, over a decade).

The intention of this newsletter was not to instagramify the highlight reel of my time at Profound, but overall things are going quite well. Sometimes the work is hard and the hours can be difficult, but it’s all worth it right now.

Life comes in phases, and this is my warp-speed phase. I won’t be sharing this newsletter on LinkedIn so if you have any thoughts or just want to say hi, please hit reply :)

Nick

p.s. Long time subscribers will have seen many photos of my dog, Vito. I said goodbye to Vito in August. He was a good boy, not always the best boy (so stubborn!), but he enriched my life in ways that words cannot describe and I miss him so much.

I’ve accepted a full-time job and I started last week.

I’m the first marketer at Profound. We help brands track and optimize their mentions in ChatGPT and other LLMs.

This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity and in this newsletter I’m going to unpack what led me to make this decision:

1. WTF???

2. Why this job?

3. What’s next for this newsletter?

Bonus: I share one tip that made be a super attractive candidate for this job and it’s something anyone can replicate.

Feel free to come express your emotions on LinkedIn.

Come Say Hi on LinkedIn

WTF???

I quit my last full-time job exactly (to the day) two years ago. A few weeks later I made a LinkedIn post that launched this newsletter and my consulting business — a decision that gave me infinitely more opportunities than if I had stayed at that job.

In hindsight it all worked out, but at the time that decision, to put it lightly, was scary as fuck.

Now that I’m going back to work for someone else, I felt similar emotions creeping up.

All the self-doubt and questions came rearing back:

• Are you sure?

• Why would you give up a good thing?

• This feels really risky, the economy is rough and the tech job market is pretty bad.

Then I remembered one of the first newsletters I wrote.

It’s is all about how our brains are great at making up reasons not to do something.

There’s always a reason to play it safe.

I found myself at that same crossroads again. I could play it safe and keep running my consulting business or I could take a huge risk by closing my business down and join another small but fast growing startup with the chance to redefine my career.

This decision was easily the most difficult career choice I’ve made (do they ever get easier??). Quitting my job seems like an easy choice in hindsight compared to closing down a wildly successful business I spent 2 years building.

Everyone I’ve told this to has asked me the same question: WHY?

The answer is both easy and hard to talk about. Something was missing in my consulting work over the last 6 months: excitement.

I resisted this idea initially, but y’all I was so bored. I was doing the exact same thing over and over again. I’m too damn young in my career and in my life to be bored at work.

Because I niched down I purposely wasn’t taking any work outside my core area of expertise. I still firmly believe this is the right decision for 99% of freelancers until you have a full client roster have the financial freedom to experiment more.

My problem with niching down over a long period of time is that I wasn’t growing or trying anything new.

Yes, the ad platforms themselves change and there’s always new tactics and strategies, but I’m still playing in the same sandbox.

And to be honest with you I was also scared. There’s part of me that was worried about losing my edge and of consulting my way into career irrelevance before I turned 40.

AI is the first truly disruptive technology for my generation. Failing to adopt AI now is equal to failing to learn how the internet worked 20 years ago.

Why this job?

There are 2 things I consider when evaluating any full time job offer:

1. The product (and it’s opportunity to win)

2. The actual job

The Product

The product is the single most important thing to me. If I don’t use or understand the product then I’ll never be able to market it well. I’ve tried before and it didn’t workout well for me.

This is what made the Loom job such a good fit for me: I was a super fan. Many people love using a product but never get the chance to actually build it and I’m lucky I was able to do that at Loom.

Profound is a product that I deeply understand that solves a very clear problem in the market.

Every single one of my clients have seen leads and new customers come from LLMs like ChatGPT and Perplexity. I’ve seen the data too, some of those deals are in the six figures.

No one has figured this space out yet. There’s a huge opportunity for a brand to own this category which is very exciting to me.

And while I can’t share exact revenue numbers, Profound is growing insanely fast.

This would be one hell of a ride if I said yes.

The job itself

I am the first marketer at Profound which is something I have never done before.

I’ve always joined an existing marketing team and reported to some kind of marketing leader.

This was a chance to come in and define the early marketing strategy at a fast growing company. I can quite literally do anything I want and it’s the most excited I’ve been about a job in a long time.

I don’t have a fancy title, either. My official title is just Growth Marketer. I no longer care what my title is, I care about the kind of work I get to do, where I get to do it, and who I get to do it with.

I also deeply know the type of persona that buys Profound because it’s me. Growth marketers, marketing leaders, and anyone with an SEO background are all getting questions about how to optimize for LLMs.

This is the perfect job to bring me back into the workforce, for potentially the last time ever.

Why they wanted to hire me

Solopreneurship is not a one way door, as Elena Verna said in a recent newsletter.

After having a few in-depth conversations with the Profound team, here is my take on what made me attractive to them. I’m sharing this because I know the job market is really tough right now, and if I had to give one piece of advice for job seekers now it’s to build your own software product, launch it, and then publicly talk about the process.

• I move extremely fast. Consultants don’t have the luxury of a 90 day onboarding plan. I’ve seen other consultants lose clients because they were too slow. I’ve practiced not only my ability to ramp quickly but also my communication on how and what progress I’m making every week.

• I have tons of social proof. I’ve worked with over a dozen companies, several of them in the AI space, over the last two years. Their logos and my tenure with them (some almost 2 years!) validate that I can make a long-term impact.

• I am AI-curious and I’ve built my own products. I can’t understate how huge it’s been that I can demo a product that I built entirely myself with AI code gen tools like Cursor. Build something, ship it, and talk about it in public!

  • If I could pinpoint one thing, this was the Aha moment that made Profound really interested in me.

• I’m local. More startups are shifting back to in office work, either hybrid or fully in office. Almost all of my current clients are doing this too and it’s increasingly hard to find fully remote jobs right now. My random move to NYC last year set me up for this opportunity.

What’s next for this newsletter?

Some of you have noticed that my activity here and on LinkedIn has declined over the last few months. Thanks to everyone who reached out, I appreciate you!

After launching my SaaS idea earlier this year I was honestly just burned out. I had enough energy to continue serving my clients but I had no energy to do anything extra.

I started sacrificing my health while building Adacadabra and I skipped workouts to code instead.

That was a mistake.

So over the last 3 months I’ve re-prioritized my health and my diet and I’m feeling a lot better as a result.

While I may occasionally write something here if I’m inspired, I think it’s time to temporarily close the Early Exit Club chapter of my life.

It means more than I can say that 2,000 of you chose to allow me into your inboxes. It’s not too late to buy a hat 😉.

I will leave all of my content up so you can continue to reference it. You’ve now seen the full lifecycle of someone going from job → freelance → job.

Our careers, much like our lives, are not straight lines. Detours happen. Thanks for coming on this detour with me.

If you’re interested in monitoring your brand’s mentions in ChatGPT and other LLMs, try giving Profound a shot.

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

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Consulting wasn’t supposed to be a long-term thing for me.

It was supposed to sustain me in the short-term while I built something else. Except the short term was more like 18 months and counting.

This is ok!

Throughout that time one principle has always guided my decision making. It’s a strong conviction about what I didn’t want to do.

I did not (and still don’t) want to manage full-time employees.

That statement is a north star for my business. If I stay true to that then I know I’ll be in a good place.

But it’s so tempting to break from that north star. The amount of potential clients I’ve said no to because I didn’t have capacity means I left 30-50% more revenue growth on the table last year.

So today I wanted to talk about finding your north star and provide a framework for how I think about finding your next act.

My framework for finding your next act

The below graphic is from one of my earliest newsletters about building your exit plan. I wrote this 2 months after quitting my job when I wasn’t even making enough money to cover my living expenses.

Even back then I knew that I had to stay true to my north star.

This is a deceptively hard thing to narrow in on. It’s a combination of:

• What makes you truly happy? What gives you energy?

• What do you absolutely hate doing? What drains your energy?

• What does your life look like if you’re following your north star?

Here’s how that looked for me:

• I love running paid ads and having autonomy in my job.

• I hate endless meetings, corporate politics and structure, and directly managing people (I mean, who doesn’t?)

• I want to own my day, never wake up to an alarm clock, and live wherever I want.

While those seem obvious now, it wasn't always easy to see them in the moment. Our brains are good at deceiving us, convincing us to take that one client that doesn't quite fit into our best fit criteria.

Finding Your Next Act

Where are you now? Where do you want to be?

I know freelancers who just took a full-time job again because they wanted stability.

I know full-timers who flirt with the idea of freelance only to take another full-time gig. I've taken coffee calls with many of you over the last year 😉

And I know people who have been happily freelancing for 10 years.

You can't map out your next steps if you're not honest about where you are now and where you want to be in the future.

Here are some options for your next move.

Services-based

Freelancer

• Best for: Anyone not currently freelancing who wants to stay close to the work and have more control over their time and income.

• Stakes: Relatively low. You're only supporting for yourself (and your family), not other employees who depend on you. If you land multiple clients you instantly have more income diversity than full-timers.

• Startup costs: Low. You sell the thing your best and most experienced at. You don’t need to build something else to sell (e.g. coaching, products, software)

• Who does the work? You! You'll be in every client call and submitting every invoice.

• Who do you sell to? Other businesses. Average order values are higher if you do it right (and avoid the trap of hourly billing)

Agency Owner

• Best for: Freelancers who want to keep growing their business and who want to move away from the work over time.

• Stakes: High! You'll need to hire or at least sub contract out, which can be a plus if you find the right person. Then you’re on the hook for financially supporting them (and all the people management that comes with it)

• Startup costs: Starts small but grows over time. The time commitment, software, and focus areas start to change. You start to have opinions on which HR tools like Gusto or Rippling are better.

• Who does the work? Not you over time, if you do it right. You will slowly need to delegate and step away from parts of your business.

• Who do you sell to? Other businesses. Average order values are high.

Many of the agency owners I know, including the one I interviewed last year in the above newsletter, didn't go from 0 to 18 people over night. It slowly evolves over years until suddenly you're in a zoom call with 10 other people.

Coaching & Communities

• Best for: Anyone not interested typical consulting work but who wants to share their experience with other people instead of businesses.

• Stakes: High! You’ll need to sell a lot more $25-$50 products to make a decent earning.

• Startup costs: Low on financial costs, high on your time. Making a course, class, or product takes time even before you start marketing it.

• Who does the work? Not you over time, if you do it right. You will slowly need to delegate and step away from parts of your business.

• Who do you sell to? Other people. Average order value is low.

Two of my dear friends run very successful paid communities as part of their solopreneur business.

Tamara Grominski runs PMM Camp — a community for(and by) product marketing leaders with hundreds of highly engaged paying members. This is where she spends the bulk of her time and she’s done a great job of nurturing the community and building up her free newsletter to support it. She also consults for about 1 business at a time and has done 1:1 coaching in the past.

She also just re-positioned her community (literally a few weeks prior to me writing this) and her insights here are worth reading for anyone who is interested in starting their own community.

Rachel Meltzer runs Pop Club — a community for current and aspiring freelance writers. She also runs amazing free programs to help you find more clients and get your money right.

She was one of the freelance writers I hired at Loom when I ran their SEO content program (and she’s fantastic, you should hire her too)

Start A Different Business

Hey, it’s me. I’ll continue writing more about my journey as I transition into a software founder, but it’s a huge time commitment. I put hundreds of hours into my startup Adacadabra before I launched into beta. It could be years before I see any meaningful return.

Do All Of The Above

The beauty of this is that you don’t have to pick just one. There’s a growing trend of solopreneur’s building a portfolio career where you have multiple income streams.

Anyone curious about this should look into The Portfolio Collective.

Trust Your Instincts

Whatever your choice, there's no wrong answer. It's ok to fail. Failure is growth. Startups pivot all the time when their first ideas don't work out.

But I firmly believe that doing nothing, taking no risks at all, is the worst choice of all.

I'm in the middle of trying something new. It's scary as hell and I have no idea if it'll work out.

But I got this far by trusting myself. And even if it doesn't workout, what got me here can also get me there. The skills I'm learning (so much about AI coding tools) will help propel me into the next thing.

As long as I stay true to my north star.

See you all in 2 weeks,

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

Subscribe now

When I quit my job in May 2023 to start freelancing I thought finding clients would be the hardest part.

That was fortunately not my biggest challenge. Instead, it was accepting a surprising truth: I'm good at what I do. Not just good—really freaking good. Here's what my first full year of freelancing looked like by the numbers and how it absolutely smashed the very real imposter syndrome I had coming out of my last full-time gigs.

Sponsored By: Adacadabra 🪄

Over the last three months I've spent nearly every free hour building my PPC budget tracking startup, Adacadabra, and I'm finally ready for beta users.

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• Connect your PPC accounts (supports Google Ads, LinkedIn, Bing, and Meta) and group them together.

• Input budgets and get email alerts if you're over/under spending

• Track performance and budget pacing for This Month, Last Month, and This Quarter (based on your fiscal quarter)

Instead of logging into four different ad platforms and switching between accounts, Adacadabra helps me quickly check the performance of all of my campaigns in just a few minutes in one app.

I'm asking for a few beta users willing to hop on a call with me to try it out.

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2024 in Numbers

Client Overview

• Served 15 different clients

• Average client value: $30,000

Where The Revenue Came From

• Referrals: 37%

• Network: 36%

• LinkedIn: 15%

• Outbound: 1%

What I've Learned

1. Your Network Is Everything

73% of my revenue came from my network and referrals combined. My clients have come from every stage of my adult life, from people I met at college, to former colleagues at all of my prior full-time gigs.

Building your network is deceptively easy:

1. Put yourself out there. Don't be a lurker. Engage with other people in meaningful ways. Say yes to things and go to in-person events.

2. Give freely without expecting anything in return.

3. Repeat

I've written a lot about how I approach this:

• Stop networking and start making friends instead

• The secret to finding more clients

• Building your personal community

2. Competence Is Rarer Than You Think

In every single client engagement this year I replaced either another freelancer or an agency who was underperforming. The bar for being “great” is so low.

Nearly every marketing leader I’ve spoken with knows how easy it is to get burned by a shitty SEO or PPC agency.

But for me to do really great work, I need to work with the right clients who have specific problems. I don’t say yes to everything.

Over time I've developed a specific criteria of the type of work I want to do and the type of client I want to take.

When all the boxes are checked I know that I can come in and absolutely knock it out of the park.

I wrote about this process in my most popular newsletter ever: A masterclass on personal positioning.

3. Long-Term Clients Are Gold(en handcuffs)

The four clients who stayed with me all year provided a stable foundation for my business. But it's not all good news.

All of those clients are now at the bottom of my rate table. If I replaced any of them I would instantly double my billable revenue. But because this is my business and I don’t have employees, I can make sub-optimal revenue decisions.

Why do I keep those older clients? Because I like them! I like working with them and they’re also some of my best performing clients. I’m not going to throw that away for a few more dollars.

I talk about my new pricing strategy here: Why hourly rates are killing your business.

What's Next in 2025

Launch Adacadabra out of beta 🪄

I'm planning to publicly launch Adacadabra out of beta by late Jan / early Feb. This brings a whole host of new problems:

• Billing (I haven’t even setup Stripe yet 😅)

• Marketing

• Customer support

• Continue building new features

Thanks to everyone who has booked an onboarding call so far. When it launches out of beta anyone will be able to signup for Adacadabra without seeing my face, which is probably a good thing 😎

Bring back the income reports!

I publicly shared the income from my consulting business for my first 12 months. I stopped in May 2024 but I will bring them back with a twist.

I'll focus on only my software revenue which is starting from $0.

I'll talk about exactly how I'm building my apps, how I get ideas, and how I'll be marketing them.

Find the right balance of software / consulting work

This is the big one. How do I balance consulting (which is my primary income source) with software development (which makes $0)?

The honest truth is that I can’t build Adacadabra, or any good software, without intimately understanding the problems it solves for people.

I'll need to be even more selective of the type of work I take going forward and continue guarding my time well.

Wrapping Up

Whether you subscribed yesterday or in 2023, thank you all for coming on this journey with me.

Looking back at my corporate self from May 2023, I wish I could tell him: “You're not just capable of this—you're going to excel at it.” The numbers prove it. Freelancing didn't just give me independence; it gave me confidence backed by real-world results.

2024 was the best year of my life and we’re only getting started.

Sponsored by Wispr Flow — Use your voice to type 3x faster than your keyboard.

Try Wispr Flow For Free

Thank you all so much for supporting the launch of AdAcadabra last week. Your emails, likes, and comments on my LinkedIn post absolutely made my day.

I am spending quite literally all of my free time working on this. Here’s my timeline:

• Oct/Nov: Launch a beta version to my waitlist and collect feedback

• Nov/Dec: Make improvements based on feedback

• Jan 2025: Public launch

This is super ambitious and accelerated roadmap that can only happen because I made insane progress on my own thanks to the 4 AI tools I’m going to show you.

The AI Tech Stack

There are main tools I use:

1. Wispr Flow

2. v0.dev

3. Claude

4. Replit

I’ll explain how I use each one below.

Wispr Flow

Wispr is my favorite way to interact with AI and LLM tools because I can just use my voice.

It’s easier and faster to talk through your ideas instead of sitting down to write. Especially when you’re trying to verbalize complex ideas like, I don’t know, building your first startup.

Here’s how it works:

• Download and install Wispr Flow

• Set a hotkey to trigger it

• Navigate to your favorite LLM (more on that in a sec)

• Press a button, speak, and watch just how fast Wispr Flow accurately transcribes your voice into text

I only promote tools that I know and use myself so I was super excited when the Wispr team reached out. Seriously, give them a shot when you’re using the AI tools I’m about to cover.

v0.dev ($20/month)

v0 is like ChatGPT for front-end design.

You ask it to build something, it writes code, and then runs it right in the browser window.

This has been a huge help for me as I brainstorm and take my idea into something that I can actually play with.

I’m a terrible designer. I have no ability to take the idea I have in my head and shuffle the pixels around to turn it into reality.

But v0 fixes this for me in a way that just makes sense to my brain: I can design things with words.

The first screenshot is literally my first attempt at building AdAcadabra. You can see I gave it a pretty detailed prompt with specific metrics and instructions on what I wanted it to do.

Want to move something around? Switch a component out? Add a color scheme? Just type it out.

Even if you had no desire to use the code that v0 provides, the ability to design a user interface this way has skyrocketed my ability to iterate through ideas for my app.

I used v0 to design literally every part of AdAcadabra

• My Login / Signup Pages

• My main dashboard

• My onboarding flow

• My settings pages

You could then take these mockups and send them to an actual designer to polish if you wanted, or you can drop them into a code editor and start building.

Claude ($20/month)

Generative AI tools are great sounding boards for your ideas and can help you turn an idea into a structured problem that you can tackle step-by-step.

When I had the idea for my app I spent days in conversation with Claude to brainstorm what I could call it.

Claude also helped refine my idea and map out an action plan of what I could build.

Once you have a breakdown like this, you can start building your app idea one step at a time, and I’ve found this back and forth really helpful in refining my ideas.

The AI isn’t perfect which is actually a feature for me. It’ll inevitably do something I either didn’t expect or didn’t want which forces me think deeper about the design of my idea.

You can have Claude help you with coding and this is actually where I’d recommend most people start. Ask Claude to walk you through building a simple app idea using Replit.

Replit ($20/month)

Replit is a browser-based code editor that can also run your code at the same time. Replit saves you a lot of headaches with managing your own developer environment, which can be really tricky for people new to programming.

Start by asking Claude a question and asking it to show you how to build this in Replit.

One major caveat with LLMs is that their training data is outdated, which can make a surprisingly big difference if there’s been a new feature release recently that the LLM doesn’t know about.

If you’ve never touched a code editor before, this is the place to start!

Wrapping Up

These tools are the only way I’m able to take my idea and build something usable in less than 6 months with little prior experience coding.

1. I brainstormed the idea for my app and named it with an AI.

2. I sped through the design and UI process by chatting with an AI.

3. I took the code from step 2 and started building my app with an AI

Your initial ideas don’t have to be complicated. Build a simple tool that can save you time on a repetitive task you do right now. Start small!

See y’all soon for another update on my startup is coming.

Nick

p.s. My consulting business continues to do well but AdAcadabra is so much more exciting to me right now so that’s likely where my content will skew towards!

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

Join the waitlist

It’s been a while. How have you been? Good?

Real talk: I have been thriving over the last few months. The weather is starting to dip here in New York and hoodie season is in full swing.

But I’ve also been obsessively building my next thing, and I’m excited to finally talk about it.

Introducing AdAcadabra 🪄

AdAcadabra will be the easiest way to monitor, manage, and optimize your paid ad campaigns.

When it launches later this year, the first version of AdAcadabra will have two core features:

• Budget tracking and forecasting for Google, LinkedIn, Bing, and Meta Ads

• Proactive alerting when you’re over or underspending according to your budget

But that’s only the beginning.

The ultimate vision for AdAcadabra will not only help optimize your campaigns and catch issues before you do, it’ll magically surface revenue-driving insights direct from your CRM like:

• Which keywords are great at opening opportunities but terrible at closing them into deals?

• Where should you spend extra budget to drive the most pipeline?

I am really excited to bring this to life and I’d love for you to join the waitlist so you’ll be the first to know when we launch.

Join the waitlist

But why am I building this thing at all?

The Backstory

Many of you will remember my original 3-part plan after quitting my job last year.

• Drive short-term revenue from consulting

• Grow recurring revenue streams from digital products, courses, and affiliate programs

• Start a software company or build a community

Great plan that I absolutely failed at.

I abandoned my first idea to build a software company because learning to code is hard.

But over the last 16 months, generative AI has lowered the barrier of entry for people like me. I don’t need to spend years learning how to code anymore, I can build useful apps in weeks(if not days) instead.

I’ll write more in upcoming newsletters about how I’m actually building my idea, what tools I’m using, and the mistakes I’ve already made.

I am so bullish on how AI can empower individual people to go from ideas to execution. It’s never been easier to build tools that solve unique problems to you.

And after the last year and a half of slinging millions of dollars of ads for kick-ass software companies, I kept noticing the same problem over and over again.

The problem of misaligned incentives

Every ad platform is incentivized to take as much of your money as possible. In return you get access to their userbase, but only on their terms.

However, if you’ve created a new Google Ads account recently then you’ve seen all of the landmines that Google puts in their product that will devour your budget.

Or if you’ve launched a new LinkedIn Ads campaign and noticed how they hid the option to turn off Audience Expansion behind another toggle, making it easier to miss.

Google and LinkedIn aren’t the only bad guys here. Every ad platform is adding more dark patterns into their UI because they want you to spend more.

And they’re not incentivized to protect you when things go wrong.

One thing the ad platforms don’t do? Send you a nice email when your spend skyrockets overnight.

Why would they do that? The longer you don’t notice that your spend is out of control the more money they make.

This is just one of the problems AdAdacabra will solve.

How you can help

If you’re actively managing paid ad campaigns, please sign up for the waitlist. I’d love to give you early access and get your feedback!

If you’re just here for the vibes, can you like and comment on my LinkedIn post today? And if you know anyone who runs paid ads please introduce us, I’d love to meet them.

Over the next few weeks you’ll get more details about how I’m building the first version of AdAcadabra and how I’m partnering with someone with way more experience building software to help me build this right.

See you soon,

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

• Last time: Building an AI tool to automate my business

Throughout this post I quote from the book Win Without Pitching which I wrote a short review of a few weeks ago.

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We sell our thinking but we do ourselves a gross disservice in selling it by the hour. The surest way to commoditize our own thinking is to sell it in units of doing: time.

Blair Enns. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

What is the hardest part of freelancing?

Every freelancer will give a different answer to this question depending on what stage their business is.

If you just started out, the hardest thing is often finding clients, but your bottleneck shifts as your business matures.

After freelancing for the last 16 months, running this newsletter, and speaking with dozens of other freelancers, I’ve found that the next hardest part is nailing your pricing rate & structure.

• If you price yourself too low, you’ll attract the wrong type of client and you need more of them to sustain yourself.

• If you price yourself too high, you’ll struggle to get any clients at all (and losing one becomes that much more painful).

And if you screw up how you price, you’ll only compound those problems.

Moving to retainer pricing was the single most impactful choice I made to grow my business to those $30k/months I used to write about

This post is a long time coming and will outline why I prefer this pricing structure, how I implement it, and how you can too.

Hourly pricing humanizes your business (this is bad)

When we charge for this thinking by the hour we undo much of the work of the previous proclamations. “How much an hour?” we hear the client think. “How many hours?” When we employ commodity pricing we invite commodity comparisons, regardless of the value we deliver.

Most freelancers get stuck in hourly pricing due to some combination of:

• It’s the only way they know how to bill

• It’s easy and safe

• It’s the only way the client has worked with freelancers

Hourly pricing invites a negotiation. Hourly pricing humanizes you and your services which is bad.

You’re a business. No one negotiates the price of their Big Mac. You either pay the price on the menu or you don’t eat McDonalds.

This is only the beginning of the problems with hourly pricing.

Why Hourly Pricing Sucks

There are many negatives to hourly pricing:

• Hours don’t correlate with value delivered

• It creates misaligned incentives (and punishes you for getting faster at your job)

• You’re too reliant on your clients for work

Hours spent don’t correlate with value

I opened almost $7 million dollars of pipeline for one of my clients last quarter. It was their best quarter ever from digital marketing and also the quarter that I worked the least amount of hours for them.

We barely had any meetings. Between my move to NYC, my contact taking a vacation, and a company-wide kick-off, we met maybe 4-6 times all quarter.

That record didn’t come from me putting insane hours, it came from the compounding effects of us working together through the last year to experiment, nailing the right message to the right audience, and then doubling-down on our best performing campaigns.

The amount of hours you worked on a project doesn’t matter to the client.

They don’t care if it took you an hour or 10 hours, they’re paying for results and a specific outcome.

Hours are your problem, not theirs.

👉🏻 Hours are only the input metric to what you deliver and you should be incentivized to minimize them.

Misaligned Incentives

Hourly pricing incentivizes you to take longer at tasks because that’s how you get paid.

As you get better and more efficient at tasks, which you will, you’ll get paid less for completing them.

If you’re a new freelancer, you have a ton of newbie gains ahead of you.

You’ll start out with a bunch of baggage from your previous 9-5 job. You’re learning how to run your business, how to communicate with clients, how to create and send invoices, and a million other things.

You will suck at a lot of things.

But good news: you’ll eventually get better! And it’ll happen faster than you think.

And as you get faster about doing client work, you should reap those rewards.

If a task that previously took you 2 hours now only takes you one hour because you made a sick macro in Google Sheets, then congratulations you screwed yourself out of an hours worth of pay.

But if you don’t charge hourly, then you just gave yourself a couple hours back in your day.

👉🏻 You should be motivated to work as efficiently as possible.

Worst case scenarios can crush your business

Imagine you have a contract with your client for 20 hours of work a month.

You have a meeting scheduled with your client to kick things off, but they cancel. No problem, we’ll reschedule (do you bill them for this?).

You eventually meet with them and setup next steps. Your client is going to send you a report on the last 6 months of their business. Once they send that over, you can get to work.

Except they take two weeks to send it to you, so you don’t have anything to do.

This goes on and on.

You end up having to pull work out of them, because if you don’t then you don’t get paid.

This is a real story.

I know someone who had this exact problem. Their client never gave them any work so they couldn’t bill any hours.

This is a worst case scenario. You’re reserving time on your calendar for a client that isn’t delivering work to you, and they’re not incentivized to give you work because it doesn’t cost them anything to delay.

You can’t allocate that time elsewhere, because what if the client finally gets off their ass and gives you some work. Now you’re double-booked.

All of this can be solved with a different pricing structure.

Retainer Pricing 101

So, what is retainer pricing?

Retainer pricing is like having a client put you on speed dial with a monthly subscription. They pay you a set amount each month, and in return, they get a certain number of your consulting hours or deliverables, plus the peace of mind that you're always available when they need you.

Retainers are best paired with a tight scope of work that defines what you’re doing and what you’re not doing.

Retainer pricing can also be useful if you have specific knowledge or domain expertise and your client wants to guarantee that you’ll pick up the phone in an emergency or that you’ll provide ongoing maintenance of a project (e.g. if you built a website for a client on a project-basis, your retainer fee could cover monthly maintenance and changes within a certain scope).

Do you guarantee a set number of hours?

The strength of our strategic processes, rooted in our deep experience and systematic thinking, is what ensures our high likelihood of a high-quality outcome. This is the basis of the premium we command, therefore we should not be charging for it in units of time.

None of my retainer agreements mention hours.

Instead, they focus on outcomes like driving $X amount of pipeline or completing XYZ Project. That works for my type of work as someone who manages paid ads on behalf of my clients — it’s very easy to tie the value back to my work (and my cost) — but often doesn’t work with more project-based work like Marketing Ops or Product Marketing.

Even though my clients only receive access to part of my time, they get access to my entire career experience.

I get questions like these all the time:

• Are your other clients seeing a slowdown right now?

• How’s this working for your other clients?

• What ad formats are working best for you?

This is a massively underrated value of any freelancer with a decent book of business: pattern matching across your clients.

Retainers come with the understanding that some months might require less of your time, and some months might require more of your time. This is certainly true for my business.

That same client who I helped drive a record amount of pipeline for? We’re about to increase budgets and add new channels to the mix which will take up a ton of my time.

When a client asks how much time I’ll commit to them, I tell them the truth.

I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure we hit our goals.

This is a dangerous commitment because it theoretically allows uncapped hours. None of my clients have abused this yet and luckily I’ve helped many of them drive record amounts of revenue.

Use that line at your own risk 😇.

It’s also a good filter to use for prospective clients: is this a person I want to commit to working through challenges with?).

How To Set Your Retainer Prices

I completely made up my retainer prices in the beginning.

My first retainer client was $4,000/month to run Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads for a late stage B2B SaaS company.

I was stoked at that amount!

And then I talked with another consultant who charged $6,000 for the same service.

Shit.

But here’s the secret: we all just kind of make the numbers up.

This is not uncommon, other consultants I’ve talked with also just make up their numbers or base them on a number they got from someone else (who probably made it up too).

I try to benchmark my prices less than the cost of a premium agency. I’ve hired a few agencies in my full-time days so I had a decent idea, but even agency prices can vary by a large margin.

After signing a new client I increase my prices by about $1,000 for each subsequent client.

And last month I closed a client for 3x the amount of my first client.

My advice for picking your rates

Pick a number that makes you nervous to say out loud. The number you say should feel like too much.

And then add 20% to it to account for you sandbagging your value, because humans are really bad at valuing themselves.

I promise you that the right client’s won’t think twice about it.

I’ve hired marketing agencies that cost $36,000 a MONTH.

Your $5,000 retainer is nothing in comparison (and 3 x $5,000 retainer clients is $180,000 a year).

How I set my rates now

This is specific to my business but I’ve slightly changed how I set my rates now.

I used to bucket all of the currently scoped work into one price. That worked great, until the client wanted to expand the scope of work and I didn’t have a mechanism for increasing my rates.

I’d still do the extra work, I just wouldn’t get paid for it.

Now I define everything up front:

• Google Ads is $X, If you want to add Bing, it’s $Y

• If you want to add LinkedIn it’s $Z

• Prices increase after you spend $100k in each channel

That’s all I do. I only do those three channels which is why this works so well for me. My scope is still limited and is much better defined.

The key here is clear expectations from the beginning. And it’s not just beneficial for pricing, you can do this for every aspect of your engagement:

• How many meetings you have (and how frequently you have them)

• How many people you interface with (e.g. all communication must be funneled through one person)

My average price per customer is way up since I implemented those changes, and as long as I continue to provide tangible value then everyone is happy.

Set Your Rates on Easy Mode

If you want more help to determine your rates, I made a free calculator you can use.

It’s a simple Google Sheet that you can duplicate and play with, starting tops-down (what your desired income is) or bottoms-up (how much your monthly expenses are).

Download My Rate Calculator

FAQs on Pricing Yourself Fairly

We all go into the world woefully underprepared to think and talk about money.

We’ve been told not to talk about money with our peers, friends, or even family.

I have bucked this trend from day one when I told everyone how much revenue my business made, and I’ll continue to do that here.

Here are the most frequently asked questions when I talk to other consultants about pricing and retainer models.

I’m afraid I’m charging too much — what if they can’t afford me?

Then they can’t afford you.

You should have a minimum price that you absolutely cannot go under. Doing so is a disservice to you and the unique value you bring.

And in my experience client’s who are price sensitive are often not the best clients to work with.

👉🏻 If someone is sweating my fee then it’s likely not a good fit.

This is primarily why I only work with B2B SaaS companies. I tend to avoid local businesses unless I have a previous connection with them.

We should charge based on the value we are providing the client. Larger clients receive larger values from us and they also have the ability to pay more.

Smaller clients receive smaller values from us, but we have to enforce a minimum price for us to be profitable as a business.

I’m afraid of saying no to work

My biggest mistake as an early freelancer was saying yes to everything and tailoring my offers to best fit the client’s needs. This is not a winning strategy.

You need to have a specific, focused offering that leans into your deep expertise. Only then can you command a price premium and speak from authority, which helps you find better clients and command higher prices.

Here’s how it plays out:

• A prospect comes in and needs help with something outside your core area of expertise, but in an area you’re familiar with.

• The new consultant will pride themselves on being flexible and will adapt their offering to help this new client out.

• The new consultant does this for many reasons, but somewhere deep down is a fear of turning down money.

I’ve been there, I’ve taken those clients, and I’ve always come to regret it down the road.

If you have an established client roster then I would strongly recommend declining to work with this newly out of scope client.

If you have nothing else going on, take a risk and use this new client as a learning opportunity.

Every time I’ve said no to work a better client has come around that I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to say yes to.

Say no and refer that work to someone else (preferably without the expectation of a referral fee because relationships are not transactional).

Wrapping Up

Moving to a retainer pricing model and slowly increasing my rates for each new client is the single biggest driver of my financial success.

It’s how I can afford to move to Brooklyn and pay silly amounts of rent every month without freaking out (too much).

Finding a way to incorporate this into your business will:

• Help stabilize your income every month

• Build resiliency from clients not sending you enough work

• Help you achieve your financial goals

If you enjoyed this, here are 3 of my past newsletters you’ll find helpful:

Thank you for subscribing. It continues to mean the world to me.

See you all next week.

Nick

Did someone send this to you?  First, tell them thanks. Second, maybe you should subscribe too?

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You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

• Last time: The book every freelancer should read

• Soon (I promise): My Retainer Pricing Manifesto

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  Hello from Brooklyn! I’m all moved into my new place and eating more carbs than any one person should. Reply if you want to grab coffee!

The vast majority of AI features that tech companies are building right now are vastly overrated.

Some companies are nailing this tops-down approach (like Clay), but I’m becoming more interested in bottoms-up approaches.

People like Dan Shipper who start with content first then build AI tools on top.

AI is the most powerful technological change of our lifetimes and not learning how to use it will be like not knowing how to use a computer or a smartphone. And I refuse to be the technologically inept old person.

It has never been easier to build your own tools that are purpose built to solve your unique problems.

Service providers will continue to differentiate themselves on their deep expertise, but also on the quality of tools they have access to.

Consultants with a tech stack of purpose-built tools for their niche will be able to take more clients and command higher rates because they’re more effective at literally everything they do. This is especially true for the stubborn anti-agency freelancers like me where my biggest bottleneck is my time.

But maybe I’m a bit biased because I spent my entire weekend doing exactly this. Here’s what I built, why I built it, and a little about how you can build stuff too.

Introducing Nick’s Analysis Bot

I run Google and LinkedIn ads for B2B SaaS companies. Every week I make changes to those accounts, and over the long run it (usually) adds up to increased revenue for my clients.

To give my client’s confidence in my work I try to proactively share what I’m doing every week to build towards our goals.

Sounds simple, right? In practice it’s harder because I make a lot of changes and I don’t always take notes. Sometimes I get too busy to proactively share as much as I’d like.

Thankfully Google tracks every single change I make to the account and I can export it into a spreadsheet (LinkedIn doesn’t do this, unfortunately).

I used to spend a few hours combing through the change history and my shitty notes into a short Slack update, but not anymore.

After a few late nights and early mornings and one major de-scoping of my project, I have something that works really well for my exact use case.

Nick’s Analysis Bot is a simple interface to upload a CSV, select an analysis type (this changes the prompt I send to Claude), and send it to Claude’s API for analysis.

In 3 seconds I get a pre-formatted response back that is ready to paste into Slack.

You might look at this and think the actual coding was the hard part. You would be wrong.

Hey Claude, teach me how to code

Claude, ChatGPT, and other gen AI tools getting better at walking even the biggest noobs through complicated coding problems.

The code isn’t the hard part. The hard part is the prompt engineering.

The difference between a great output and a shitty one is the quality and depth of the prompt you provide.

You need to tell the AI exactly what you’re looking for.

A good prompt starts with a system prompt. This gives it a broader context to how it should behave. Here’s an example:

You are a digital marketing expert specialized in running Paid Search campaigns via Google Ads. You look through complex data to spot trends in performance like clicks, impressions, conversions, and revenue and make changes to help grow the business you support. You frequently review changes in the account and summarize what happened to your clients every week. When analyzing data, your response should adhere to the following guidelines:

1. It should be casually written and free of fluffy, overly descriptive language.
2. When you reference broad changes in performance or keywords, you should always include 1-2 examples.
3. Tell me if you don’t know the answer or if you’re unsure about a result

After that you need to define the prompt in clear, direct language where you tell it what to do. Here’s an example from one of my prompts:

Please analyze the following Google Ads change history data and create a summary in the specified format:
            {{csv_data}} <-- This is where I send the CSV file to Claude
            Format your response as follows:
            1. Start with a brief, casual 'Quick Heads Up' section (2-3 sentences) that outlines the main changes in plain English.
            2. Follow with a 'Detailed Summary' section, categorizing changes as follows:
            - Campaign Strategy Changes
            - Keyword Management
            - Ad Copy Updates
            - Regional Bid Adjustments
            - Device Targeting
            - Ad Status Changes
            - Any other relevant categories based on the data
            3. Use appropriate emojis next to each category in the detailed summary.
            4. For each category, provide concise bullet points describing the specific changes made.
            5. In the Keyword Management section, include two specific examples: one added keyword and one removed or paused keyword.
            6. Exclude information about who made the changes and the exact times they were made.
            7. Skip any conclusion about the account's strategy.
            8. Keep the detailed summary professional but easy to understand.

            Please ensure the summary is concise yet informative, focusing on the most significant changes that could impact campaign performance.

All of that seems long and complicated, but getting to that point is easy.

The best way to generate a prompt

Look, I’m no expert prompt engineer, but here’s how I arrived at that long prompt I shared above.

I started by chatting with Claude asking it to perform an analysis. Once it gave me a result I would give it feedback.

Do this differently. Don’t use that word. Be more specific in this section.

I did this over and over again. I honestly spent more time doing this than anything else.

At the very end I asked Claude to write a prompt so that I could get exactly the same output again from a different file.

How much did this cost?

I paid $20 for a month of Claude Professional because I was running into my free message limit. I also had to fork over my credit card for access to the Claude API.

The API is where you can rack up a gnarly bill if you’re not careful. Claude, like ChatGPT, has different models you can use. Models vary in complexity and cost.

For my use case I picked Claude’s fastest and cheapest model, claude-3-haiku.

I’ve run dozens of queries to the API and here’s how much it cost me: 42 cents.

This could increase if my usage increases or if I need to use a more powerful model, but for literal pennies I can save hours every week.

Getting started with Claude

I chose Claude because I had never used it before and some light research told me that it’s better at coding tasks than ChatGPT.

So I started at the very beginning: telling Claude about an app idea I wanted to build (in hindsight my first idea was way too ambitious, I later scoped this down).

Soon Claude was giving me code and walking me through how to run it in Replit which is a web-based platform that makes writing software easier than doing it on your local machine.

When I got stuck, which happened often, I had to stop myself from Googling my problems. That isn’t the winning strategy.

If you’re stuck, just ask the AI.

You can upload screenshots or entire sections of code to see what’s broken. And often times it’ll help you fix it.

What can you automate?

What repetitive, soul-crushing tasks are you spending way too much time on?

What stuff do you hate doing?

Those are all great things to take a pass at solving for yourself. $20 and a few hours of your time could help you make a huge leap forward in your business.

Thanks for reading and see you all next week,

Nick

Recommended Reading

Here are some earlier newsletters you may have missed!

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You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business your dream life by Nick Lafferty.

• Last time: A Notion Template to help you plan for time off

• Soon: My Retainer Pricing Manifesto (it’s getting long!)

These are Amazon affiliate links that will help support the Early Exit Club if you choose to purchase something 🙏

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Hello from the laundry room of the glamorous Residence Inn in Nashville, Tennessee! I’m nearly halfway through my cross-country move to Brooklyn and trying to carve out time for a newsletter before getting on the road again tomorrow morning.

I started reading a new book recently and after only two chapters I’m convinced this will become the first book I recommend to all of my freelancer friends.

What follows are my notes from the first two chapters of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns and 3 other books that helped me become the freelancer I am today.

Win Without Pitching by Blair Enns

I highlighted so many things from the first two chapters of this book that I had to share them with y’all. Everything in quotes is pulled directly from the book.

1) The Power of Specialization

My most referenced and second-most popular newsletter is a Masterclass on Personal Positioning in partnership with my good friend Tamara Grominsky, founder of PMM Camp and A+ human.

Tamara helped whip my positioning into shape and now I preach it as a must-do to every Solopreneur. This is one of those “sounds simple but is actually complicated” things.

I knew my positioning sucked when I pitched myself to a PMM friend of mine and it turned into a 5 minute long ramble where even I was confused.

One of my former colleagues and newly minted consultant, who shall remain nameless, wrote this in their newsletter a few weeks ago when they were diagnosing how they went 0/9 when pitching to prospective clients:

My positioning and messaging sucked. As a marketer, this is embarrassing - much of my job is figuring out how to concisely communicate how my clients’ products/services will change their customers’ lives for the better, and yet I didn’t do the same for my own services.

Blair recommends making a “Very Difficult Business Decision” and picking one area to specialize in.

This is hard for anyone to do because we’re good at many things!

The difficulty of deciding what business we are in is made harder by our inclination to preserve our options, to pursue something we’ve never done before, to reserve the right to do it differently next time.

I used to offer everything from SEO, Paid Marketing, and Affiliate Marketing services to my clients. But offering everything doesn’t differentiate you from everyone else.

What the world needs, what the better clients are willing to pay for, and what our people want to develop and deliver, is deep expertise.[…] If we are not seen as more expert than our competition then we will be viewed as one in a sea of many, and we will have little power in our relationships with our clients and prospects.

You should be different. Once you’ve identified your true expertise it’ll come across in how you communicate with prospects.

Our goal when endeavoring to position ourselves against our competition is to reduce or outright eliminate them.

Because if we’re different, we have two advantages

• A Sales Advantage: When and where we choose to compete, we win more often than not.

• A Price Advantage: When we win, we do so not by cutting price, but while charging more.

In Blair’s words, if you want to win and charge more then you need to walk through that Difficult Door and never took back:

If we are to drastically reduce our competition and benefit from the resulting power shift, we must pick one door, walk through it and never look back.

2) Presentation is pain

Part of the reason I joined Loom is that I always hated presentations, where one person talks for a long time and a bunch of other people listen.

What a colossal waste of time most meetings and presentations are.

For service-businesses, presentations are not only a waste of time but they’re also a poor selling strategy.

We must move away from the place where the client sits with arms crossed in the role of judge, and we take to the stage with song and dance in the role of auditioning talent. Stars do not audition.

Blair takes issue with both the word pitch and presentation.

Instead he suggests the wild idea of replacing them with conversations.

Through the former**[pitching]** we try to convince people to hire us. Through the latter**[conversations]** we try to determine if both parties would be well served by working together.

I have never formally presented my services in front of any client. I don’t have a pitch deck and I don’t sell anyone.

Instead I start every discovery call by interviewing them to understand:

• Their problems

• What they’ve tried before

• Where they want to go

I first want to see if we should even work together and only then do I build a scope of work around that, send it over email, and answer any questions.

My hatred of presentations drove me towards this strategy without really giving much thought to it, but I’m glad Blair backs me up here. Because..

It is not our job to convince the client to hire us via presentation or any other means.

Other Impactful Books

The Pathless Path by Paul Milerd

This is less of a how-to book and more of a “show you what’s possible” book. Paul writes about about his journey from highly-paid yet unfulfilling full time work into a less common and more difficult path of self-employment.

He also has a wonderful newsletter that I enjoy reading.

This book found me at the right time and helped propel me into self-employment. Thank you, Paul 🙂

Buy The Pathless Path on Amazon

Die with Zero by Bill Perkins

After spending 9 years on the express train to Financial independence, this book helped me realize that I had saved more than enough money and it was ok to dial it back in favor of choosing happiness in other areas of my life.

Bill argues that we should shift some spending from our retirement years to our younger years so we can enjoy more of our healthy years and maximize our life experiences. The ideas here are largely why we’re moving to Brooklyn right now.

Buy Die With Zero on Amazon

The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins

This is the book I recommend to people looking to get their money and investments on the right path. Smart investing is not complicated and this book is the roadmap on how to do it right.

Despite hopping off the express train to Financial Independence, I still follow many of the investing principles today:

• I max my Solo 401k (read my newsletter on this)

• I max my IRA

• I shove any leftover money in a Brokerage account

I invest everything in broad-market index funds like VTSAX (Vanguard) or FSKAX (Fidelity). Do this for long enough and you’re well on your way to a comfortable retirement.

Buy The Simple Path to Wealth on Amazon

Wrapping Up

I’m not finished with this book yet but the first few chapters helped confirm so many things I’m doing now that I needed to stop and share with y’all.

Don’t wait for me to finish part 2, cough up $10 for the eBook and crank through it in a weekend.

Buy Win Without Pitching on Amazon

See y’all next week,

Nick

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On July 6th my wife and I will pack our most valuable possessions (our 15 year old dog and four favorite house plants) into a rental car and make a 6 day drive from Texas to New York.

Taking time off as a solo freelancer is HARD.

❌ There's no one to back you up while you're out
❌ Some work literally pauses while you're gone
❌ It's not a long enough time period to bring in outside help (1-2 weeks max)

This is a good test of your current systems. Can your clients operate if you’re unavailable for a week?

I’ve found the key to success here is documenting and communicating ahead of time.

I put together a free Notion template that you can grab here to better plan your next out of office time.

Duplicate The Notion Template

How to handle planned time off

Start asking questions

This is a great time to step back and review the state of your business.

During one of Loom’s Funkey Monkeys (aka their all-hands meetings with a more interesting name), our CEO Joe Thomas got a question about what types of questions Loom’s investors ask him during board meetings. Here’s what he said:

Our investors are there to hold a mirror up to us and our business.

I really like that description because when you’re on the inside it can be hard to see the full picture like an outsider does.

I wrote a bunch of questions that I asked myself out loud. I’ll include them 3 of them below and the rest in the Notion template.

• Are you happy with your current clients? Should you drop any high maintenance or low paying clients?

• What needs to ship before you leave? What’s your plan for getting this over the finish line?

• If you get a lead on a new prospective client, when can you start working with them?

Try and anticipate the types of questions your clients will ask when you communicate your upcoming plans with them.

Create a document

Nearly everything I do for my clients comes in the form of a document.

• Need me to build a new campaign? I create a document

• Asked me to research something? Document

Going out of office is no different.

Documents are great because they’re one place that contains all the information about the thing you’re doing.

You can and should pack way more information in a document than you send in a Slack message.

I’m partial to Notion but you can do this anywhere you’re comfortable. The tool is less important than the content.

Use my OOO Template

I spent time creating an Out of Office (OOO) Document for my clients and wanted to share it with you lovely people.

To me, a good OOO Document answers the following questions:

• What are the dates?

• What happens if something breaks? Who should they contact?

• What’s the status of current projects?

• Who’s the DRI (directly responsible individual) in my absence?

I created a free Notion template with two sections:

• A client-facing page you can complete with all the relevant information

• An internal checklist to keep you on track

Grab it below.

Woo, freebies!

Wrapping Up

This move is the culmination of a year-long process that I navigated entirely as a self-employed person.

I don’t have a team to back me up while I’m gone. My clients depend on me continually providing peace of mind despite major changes going on in my life.

Each of these challenges is an opportunity to evaluate your systems and improve another aspect of your business.

We’re all figuring this thing out as we go.

See you all next week,

Nick

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• Last time: My last finance update (May 2024)

• Soon: My manifesto on retainer-based pricing models

Thank you to everyone who replied, commented, and texted me after my update last week! Your support means a lot 🤗.

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After spending months agonizing over my decision to quit my job, I finally did it in May 2023.

But I did something embarrassing on day #1 of self-employment.

I applied for another job.

That job at Notion was interesting for reasons that made sense at the time but now looking back it was a horrible miscalculation.

• I thought it was a good fit for me (it wasn’t: too SEO focused)

• I thought it was the only way to achieve my dream of moving to NYC

I was wrong on both counts. The best path for me to achieve my dream was the one I was already on.

A Song of FIRE

In my very first newsletter I wrote about how the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement (FIRE) drove my money mindset for the first 9 years of my career.

It started at my first job where I took the bus to work in downtown Austin. I’d spend my commute devouring FIRE content on Reddit and dreaming about my financial future. FIRE is all about minimizing your expenses and maximizing your income so you can retire as soon as possible, sometimes as early as 30 years old like the OG FIRE blogger Mr Money Mustache (yes, that is real alias).

But many people who pursue that path make a critical mistake: they’re so focused on leaving their jobs that they forget to live in the moment.

This was poetically coined in a phrase that’s now famous in the FIRE community: Build the life you want, then save for it.

I look back at the past few years of my life and at my bank account and I would gladly give away a hefty chunk of it and work longer if it meant I could have experienced more of the world and found more passions I could have for the rest of my life, especially with someone I had loved so much. I built my savings, but I never built my life.

While I think I did a pretty good job of building my life, I never built the career I actually wanted. I was chasing a Director title full of the work I hated doing: managing people, building presentations, and navigating corporate politics.

That Director title was just a means to accelerating my goals of retiring early, but it took me down a path that was not rewarding or fulfilling.

So while part of my reasons for going solo were based in realizing that I hated the work, it was also based on wanting to build a more fulfilling life.

Retiring, and quitting, towards something

One thing I’ve learned in my nearly 9-year long content binge on Financial Independence is that the happiest retirees are people who retire towards something instead of just retiring from their job to watch TV all day.

My sense is that it’s crucial […] to have some idea of where you’re going to land before you yank the handle on the professional ejector seat. — Wall Street Journal

That quote was taken from an article about retirement but it’s equally as true for anyone who wants to quit their full time job or move to a new city.

In the case of retirement, the absence of work itself is not a path that leads to long-term happiness and fulfillment if your time isn’t filled with something else that provides meaning.

In the case of working, quitting a shitty job by itself is not a happy path either because guess what? There’s a lot of shitty jobs out there.

Sometimes a good job turns into a shitty job when you get a new manager.

Quitting is only half the equation here.

You need a destination.

Quit towards your goal of building a solo marketing agency or that startup idea you’ve been obsessing over.

Retire towards a life where you get breakfast with your friends, play golf, and volunteer at a local garden.

Here’s the good news: you don’t have to wait until you quit something to take action.

Start building the life, and career, you want right now.

Build the life you want by doing the work you want

I am far more successful on my own than I ever was at a corporate job. You’ve all seen the finance updates.

But I am also genuinely happier too. My last ~6 months at Loom were rough. I’d close my laptop and sprint to the gym to workout whatever bullshit happened that day so I could leave my feelings at the gym instead of bringing them home.

Because I’ve built a business around only doing the work I want to, my days are filled with activities that are fun and energizing to me.

I spent the last year networking like crazy which also brings me a lot of joy. Consulting and freelancing is also a cheat code to building your network because every client you have is another VP or Director-level person who gets a first-hand look at your skills and experience.

I’ve met and proven my skills to 10+ Founders & VPs of Marketing in just over a year. Those people are now referring me to other potential clients or bringing me with them when they changed jobs (this has happened once already!).

Doing the work I want to do has enabled me to build the life that I want.

What’s getting in your way?

• Need help finding more clients? Here’s my best secret for doing that.

• Not charging enough? I built a free rate calculator for freelancers.

• Want to niche down? Follow this guide on personal positioning.

Want to make a friend? Reply and say hi 👋

See you all next week,

Nick

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• Last time: April Finance Update

• Next week: Building the life you want (lessons from early retirees)

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Welcome to my last monthly finance update for the foreseeable future. After sharing my income with y’all every month for the last 12 months it’s time to wind down this series.

Don’t worry, the Early Exit Club will continue but the monthly income series has run it’s course and I’ll explain why below.

First I’ll share more about where I’ve been and why you haven’t heard from me in the last four weeks.

I don’t believe in gating my content archive behind a paywall so feel free to browse my previous finance updates which document my journey from quitting my job to earning $40,000 in April.

Where have I been the last four weeks?

I spent the month of May searching for an apartment in Brooklyn and hanging out with my buds like Francis (pictured below).

Francis writes the very good Creator Spotlight interview series for Beehiiv which features behind the scenes stories from the creator economy and tactics that you can implement to grow your own newsletter. My favorite is about how the Cheapskate London newsletter gives away free bottles of gin to their subscribers 🎉.

I didn’t plan to take a break last month but I gave myself permission to put other things aside while I averaged 15,000 steps a day bopping around Brooklyn and making more in-person connections in a month than I’ve made in the entire last year.

And after spending the last year slinging Google & LinkedIn ads for some really cool companies, taking you all on the journey with me by grinding out tons of LinkedIn content, publishing 35 newsletters, and taking more networking calls than one person ever should, it was time for a break.

I needed to prioritize myself. Here’s how I’m doing that.

Work as a means to a dream

As I spent the last month walking around my new neighborhood, I realized I was living a real-life version of the fisherman and the businessman story.

A few months after quitting my job I was a happy fisherman working for myself and building a comfortable life earning $20k/month. That was more money than I ever made as a salary man and it came with less working less hours (and less BS).

But my silly monkey brain kept pushing me to be the businessman in that story. It wanted me to hit even bigger monthly numbers: $30k. $40k. $50k.

Those are shallow goals. Past a certain point more money doesn’t make you any happier.

If I wanted to keep growing my business then I’d need to go into agency-mode by taking on more clients and hiring people to help me. Long-time readers know how I feel about this. Yuck.

So the monthly finance updates end because I’ve reached the point where I don’t care about them anymore. The finances aren’t the goal anymore.

So what is the goal? It’s far more qualitative than my previous goals.

I just want to earn enough to live a comfortable life in Brooklyn.

I want to see my friends every week and give them a hug.

I want to do my networking in-person instead of behind a computer screen.

I want to coordinate events here in NYC for the freelance community (reply if you live here and this sounds cool?).

My work is now just a means to live my dream.

Here’s how much revenue I made last month:

Next week I’ll share a story about how the FIRE community coined one of my favorite phrases, build the life you want, and how I’m applying that to my freelancing business.

Cheers,

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

• Last time: What happens if I lose all of my clients?

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Welcome to all the new subscribers from the Old Girls Club Slack community. Huge thank you to Via for sharing my content there!

Welcome back to my monthly finance update where I transparently share my income to help unmask what it takes to build a $20k+/month business.

This month I broke $40k in total income thanks to finally getting paid for some affiliate deals from the last two months and retaining 100% of my existing client base.

However, my income will decrease over the summer months for a few reasons:

• I will stop working with one of my two hourly clients.

• I’m pausing work with one of my retainer clients over the summer

I’ll unpack both of those reasons below and talk about how I’m learning more about Angel investing.

Reducing my client workload

Every month I’m faced with the same two choices:

1. Say yes to more work that comes my way and bring on help to build a marketing agency

2. Continue being selective with the clients I take on and willingly cap my earnings

And every month I choose option 2. I am still not willing or frankly interested in the work or stress that building an agency would create.

Here’s how I’m operationalizing that.

Stopping some hourly work

I am selectively reducing my current client roster to give myself back some time by managing one of my very first clients out of my business. They received a sweetheart deal and are one of only two clients I bill hourly instead of on a flat monthly retainer.

My net billables to them every month hover right around $1,000. I’m more than willing to trade $1,000 for more hours back in my week, which is a privileged position to be in.

Pausing over the summer

Over the last 3 months I’ve been working with the co-founder of early stage startup on their LinkedIn ads strategy. We’ve quickly iterated through many different combinations of ad formats + messaging + target personas and found a winning combination that works to not only generate leads but open pipeline.

Those three months just ended and I’m building a roadmap for what comes next. One thing I’ve learned in the last year is that I am more successful when I can work directly with a marketer instead of a founder/co-founder.

I’m going to pause working with this client while they hire a full-time marketer and hopefully reactivate towards the end of summer.

This also coincides with a major move I’m doing over the summer, so I feel good about freeing up more of my time 🙂

Angel Investing

I recently joined Angel Squad, which is a community of aspiring and current Angel Investors. It’s built by the VC firm HustleFund and it allows people to invest in super early stage startups for as little as $1,000.

I am fascinated with the world of venture capital and private equity. I’ve seen first hand what happens when you have equity in a startup that gets acquired and nearly all of my clients are venture-backed software companies.

I am joining Angel Squad to fast-track my knowledge of angel investing, grow my network (potentially meeting some prospective clients along the way), and to invest very small checks into companies and teams that I believe in.

This isn’t a sales pitch but I promise to keep y’all updated on how my Angel Investing journey goes!

Wait, before you go

Can you engage with my LinkedIn post today?

Every newsletter I write has an accompanying LinkedIn post which is my way of reaching new potential subscribers.

Dropping a like and a comment here will take 10 seconds and is the best way you can support me right now.

Like this on LinkedIn

Thank you in advance and see you all next time.

Cheers,

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

• Last week: I was at a marketing conference in Austin meeting some of you!!

• The week before: March Finance Update

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What if you woke up tomorrow and lost all of your income?

Poof. All of your income disappears overnight.

If you’re a full-timer, you’re going from 1 income source to none which scares the absolute shit out of me. That fear is my primary motivator for building a diversified set of income streams.

If you’re a consultant, you’re going from many income sources down to none, which isn’t as unrealistic as it sounds.

In the 11 months I’ve been solo, I’ve slowly lost all of my recurring affiliate income. My income now is weighted all towards consulting, and while I have many clients, it is possible that over time that number starts to dwindle as well.

Does that also scare the shit out of me? Hell yeah it does.

So today we’re going to talk about that fear, what it actually means, and why it’s not as big of a deal as you think.

So what if it does?

Let’s look at two examples of losing your income:

• Losing a full-time job

• Losing affiliate income

In my affiliate example it all came from one place: my website which has been crushed by Google algorithm updates in the last year.

And while it seemingly disappeared overnight, it actually died a slow, painful death over 12 months.

That income also didn’t appear overnight either.

It took me years of writing, optimizing, and doing other activities to grow my website into an income producing asset, which is what makes losing it (and any income source) so painful.

I may have lost that income, but I didn’t lose the knowledge that got me there in the first place.

I could take that knowledge and try again. I could take a course and expand on that knowledge to fix any mistakes I made.

I could look at joining another company with a similar business model (fun fact: I once talked to a company about acqui-hiring myself and my website).

Here’s my point: The knowledge and skills it took to build my income stream is super valuable.

But don’t just take it from me.

Take It From Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is a productivity Youtuber with with ~3 million subscribers. Well, he was a Youtuber.

He stopped uploading on his channel for nearly a year and instead pursued a business that only sold Notion templates (you can see why I like him..).

That business generated over a million dollars in sales in 2022.

He talks about this exact topic on a recent video with Ali Abdaal (also another productivity Youtuber)

Ali asked him this question: Are you worried about tying your future to Notion’s? What if Notion stops growing, does that mean your business will stop growing too?

You get to space with a rocket ship. And you eventually have to jettison parts of the rocket. Whereas if you have one bicycle, and you never replace any parts on the bicycle, you’re never getting to space. You can travel forever on a bicycle but you’ll never have that huge burst required to get to space.

His point is that your business will need to evolve over time. Your focus will need to change if you want to keep growing.

Maybe Notion does stop growing one day. But it’s not a dead end.

Thomas is known as someone who can translate complex ideas into simple formats. If he stops teaching people how to use Notion, he can teach them something else.

He’s proven that he has those skills and he can pivot into something else.

Those skills give him endless amounts of opportunity

There’s always opportunity

If you’re focused on growing then there will always be opportunity for you.

I’ve grown so much over the last year, but I’ve done two really big things:

1. Built a consulting business that grossed $34k last month

2. Built a newsletter approaching 2,000 subscribers

But those things are way more interesting if we abstract away all the details.

In my consulting business, what I actually do is:

• Identify founders and companies that need marketing help

• Coach them on the right and wrong ways to grow their business

• Help generate millions of dollars of new business

Wait, that sounds cool as hell. Where else could I apply those skills?

• A venture capital firm could hire me to exclusively help their portfolio companies grow (hint hint, anyone?)

• Another agency hires me to help them find more clients.

• I could, gasp, take a full-time job.

Let’s talk about the newsletter. When I show up mostly every week in y’alls inbox, what I’m actually doing is:

• Finding an opportunity in the market for authentic content

• Creating a brand and that people seem to enjoy (thank you all ❤️)

• Writing content that is genuinely helpful

• Building an audience without any ad spend

Where else could I apply those skills? I could:

• Help other founders build an authentic brand on LinkedIn (there are legit businesses doing this already)

• Help other companies grow their own newsletter or community

• Help a VC firm tell their unique investment story how they help founders grow

So even if my consulting business and newsletter falls apart tomorrow, the skills that got me here will help me pivot into something else.

What got you here can get you there

You’ve also done some really cool shit.

You have lived a vibrant, unique, and interesting life.

Your work? It’s cool as hell.

Start abstracting away the details of your life and summarize it like I did above.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What have you learned?

• Who have you met?

• What have you built?

The skills that got you here can also get you there.

So if it all falls apart tomorrow? Who cares. You’ve got all the skills you need to start over.

See you all next week,

Nick

You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.

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Hey folks,

Welcome back to my monthly finance update where I transparently share my income dollars and sources to help unmask what it takes to build a $20k+/month business.

Last month I changed formats to share my high level thoughts on what’s working for my consulting business, what isn’t working, and what’s next.

The feedback on that was really positive so I’m going to do it again, but here’s a quick look at my finances before moving onto that.

Revenue Breakdown

My income stayed over $30k for the second month in a row powered entirely by my consulting business. More on that below.

But what happened to my affiliate income? I didn’t get paid from my main affiliate source last month so I’m not counting it. I’m expecting some revenue, but for now it’s missing.

What’s Working

Here’s what I wrote last month:

• Client Retention

• My Niche Offer

• My Pricing

I’m happy to report that those three things are still working.

Client Retention

I retained all of my clients this month! However, I don’t expect to retain all of them through the end of the year.

Every month I grade my clients on a stoplight score (🔴 🟡 🟢). I have two clients in the red right now that I’ve flagged for a few reasons. I’ll go into my scoring methodology in a future newsletter.

Niche Offer

I sent out one proposal last month that was not accepted, partially due to timing (I’m not booking new clients until after I move in July) and partially due to my PPC offering not including design work.

I’m ok with this and have no intention to change my offering to add design into it.

My Pricing

Prospects are not balking at my new prices and I’m about to go through my first 1-year renewal with my first retainer client. I’m following the exact process I outlined here, wish me luck :)

What’s Not Working

Here’s what I wrote last month:

• Too much client work

• Too much networking

Networking:

I offered my time to marketers who were recently laid off and many of those calls were held in early March. Those were great conversations and I genuinely enjoyed talking and helping those people, but I seriously overextended myself. I promised to reduce the amount of time I spent doing this and here’s what that looked like:

• March 1 to 15: 8 networking calls

• March 16 to 31: 2 networking calls

I am very happy with that and I’ll continue to be very picky about saying yes to networking calls from now on. I have not started charging for calls yet but it’s coming.

Client work:

As long as I retain my current client roster, this won’t change much. But I made one small change: I started spending less time with one of my hourly clients.

They have an incredible sweetheart pricing deal that is becoming a drain on my available time each month.

I’m working on redoing this contract to either make it more favorable for me (like moving them to a retainer with defined deliverables every month) or managing them out of my client roster.

Better newsletter content

Having more time directly contributed to creating better content last month. I wrote some of my favorite (and IMO, best) newsletter content I’ve put out recently:

• Hiring my 1st virtual assistant

• Interviewing the founder of an 18-person marketing agency

• I released a free product to help freelancers release their own free products (so meta)

Writing this newsletter is an important part of my business as I talk with freelancers who continue to struggle with aspects of their business. It’s my goal to give back to the community and provide as much free value as possible.

What’s Next: Travel

I’m going to my first in-person event as a freelancer: Spryng in Austin, TX (Apr 9-10). Come say hi if you’ll be around next week! I’m looking forward to finally meeting a bunch of my internet friends in person.

I’ll also be in NYC in May. Hit me up if you’ll be there too :)

See you all next week,

Nick

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Giving away a free playbook is one of the best ways to grow your consulting business.

Just ask Jordan Brunelle. Jordan is a PPC consultant who released a free product called the Ultimate PPC Lead Generation Playbook on LinkedIn. He received over 1,000 comments from people asking for access.

And that was just the first post! Jordan promoted that same playbook again a week later and netted another 300 comments.

But here’s the best part: he started booking meetings every day with new prospects for his consulting business.

This all happened about 3 weeks ago. I recently caught up with Jordan to understand how he did it and what the results were (spoiler: more clients at better prices).

Oh, and I spent the weekend creating a free Notion template to help you create and share your own free playbook too.

Let’s go 😎

The Backstory

Last year I released a paid product called the Competitive Conquesting Playbook. I wanted to productize the knowledge I’d gained from consulting and share one of the most successful plays that I run with my consulting clients.

I brain dumped everything into a Notion document, organized it into four sections, slapped a price on it, and shipped it to the world on LinkedIn and on my (much smaller) newsletter.

That playbook made around $900 which is awesome! Jordan was one of the people that kindly purchased it.

While Jordan wasn’t super familiar with Notion, my template helped give him the basic structure to start making what became his Ultimate Playbook.

But Jordan took a different approach to releasing it: he gave it away for free on LinkedIn.

When I spoke with Jordan last week, he said:

I’d rather get one client every 6 months instead of making another couple hundred dollars right now selling a course

He is totally right. If I could go back in time, I’d also release my playbook for free on LinkedIn to attract new clients for my consulting business.

But how did he actually build his playbook? How much time did it take him?

Building the playbook

Jordan spent 10-15 hours building his playbook over the course of a week.

While that might sound like a lot of time, think of it a an investment that will pay dividends down the road. Here’s why:

• You can repurpose small chunks of that content into LinkedIn posts over months

• You can send it to anyone who is curious if you really know what you’re talking about

• It pre-sells prospects on your skills and abilities. Prospects come into a discovery call ready to buy from you

And if your playbook blows up on LinkedIn like Jordan’s did? That’s just extra validation that you know what you’re talking about.

How to release your own playbook

Jordan used two tools to create his playbook:

• Notion (this is an affiliate link)

• Gumroad (this is not an affiliate link)

The world of Notion templates is huge. I’ve helped sell over $100,000 of Notion templates and I used to have a podcast where I interviewed Notion template creators.

When I was making my playbook, Notion was the natural choice based on my experience with it.

Gumroad is also the distribution channel of choice because:

• There are no monthly fees (they do charge 10% of every paid product you sell)

• It lets you collect emails

• It integrates with Zapier so you can build automations

Launching a product on Gumroad is as easy as making a cover image, writing up a description, and pasting in your Notion link.

Then when everything is ready? Post it on LinkedIn, Twitter, or anywhere else you have a following,

Jordan’s Results

In total, Jordan’s two LinkedIn posts received over 1,300 comments. However, some of those comments were him responding to people, so the number of unique comments is around 700 which is still a huge amount of interest.

Jordan asked people to leave a comment on the post to request access to the playbook. This is smart for a few reasons:

• Comments = engagement, which the LinkedIn algorithm likes

• More engagement helps reach more people

Jordan then manually messaged the Gumroad link to everyone who commented on his post. From ~700 unique comments about 400 people actually downloaded it for free (which is a ~60% conversion rate).

Gumroad automatically sends the download link after purchase. Jordan also used Zapier to drop everyone who purchased into his Mailchimp account to jumpstart his newsletter.

Here’s the most impressive part: Jordan’s had dozens of of calls with prospects since releasing his playbook and he’s in the final stages of closing three new clients on a new pricing model.

All because he released something for free!

Have I convinced you to try this yet? Good, because I built something that will make launching your own playbook super easy.

Introducing the Playbook Builder

I spent the weekend making a Notion template that makes creating your own free playbook super easy.

It’s called Playbook Builder and it’s 100% free to download for Early Exit Club subscribers.

Playbook Builder is the fastest way to create your own free playbook.

It includes:

• Pre-built shells to drop in your content (so you don’t waste time building it yourself)

• Free Canva templates (so you can make your Notion and Gumroad store look amazing)

• A fully-built reference playbook (so you know if you’re on track)

Try it out and tag me in your LinkedIn post when you release it!

Get The Playbook Builder

Cheers,

Nick

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I recently posted on LinkedIn asking if people have used a virtual assistant(VA) before, and if so what was their experience?

This question was prompted after I had two separate networking calls where people mentioned using a VA to help manage repeatable parts of their business.

I’ve thought about hiring a VA in the past but I struggled to figure out exactly how they would help me. I thought all VA’s did was manage your email inbox and schedule appointments for you.

Until I had my aha moment, one Monday morning.

This is part one in a series on finding, hiring, and managing a virtual assistant.

My Aha Moment

My Monday mornings are exactly the same:

1. Look through every ad account I manage to find anomalies to further investigate

2. Build and update reports on my client’s ad performance

3. Build an action plan for my week on where I should focus, based on #1 and #2.

What if every Monday I woke up to an email from my VA with those first two items already done?

I could get right into where I add the most value to my clients: building and executing a plan to improve their ad performance.

This not only saves me time, but will lead to a better client experience.

But there’s no way that happens overnight. Finding and training a new person takes time, and I needed to be patient. More importantly: I want to find someone who is driven to learn more about digital marketing.

I’m betting that a highly motivated person will have the soft skills to help make this partnership a success for both of us.

But how do you even find a VA?

How to find & vet a virtual assistant

I tried finding a VA three ways:

• Asking publicly on LinkedIn

• Asking privately for referrals

• Sourcing one myself from a marketplace

As expected, asking on LinkedIn brought with it a flood of messages and connection requests from VAs offering their services. I had a few conversations but didn’t pursue anything due to timing.

Asking for referrals introduced me to WingAssistant, a $600/month subscription VA service with questionable reddit reviews from the actual VA’s who work there.

I thought I could do better.

Finally, I found OnlineJobs.ph which is a marketplace for Filipinos to list their services.

I liked this option the best because I could take my time and look for VAs who had what I was looking for: digital marketing experience.

Here’s an example from a profile I found (although this is not who I ended up hiring).

This website is free for anyone to use, but you have to pay $69 for a 1-month subscription before you’re allowed to contact anyone.

I spent a few hours one night going through the website and building a short list of VAs to reach out to. I then pulled out the credit card, paid my $69, and fired off some messages.

Setting them up for success

Before I sent my first message, I spent some time building a Notion hub that detailed the initial tasks I needed help with.

It starts by defining two short-term goals I want to focus on. For me, these goals center around exposing my VA to a core part of my demand generation consulting business. I’ve allocated some billable hours to have them go through free LinkedIn Ads courses so we can start to speak the same language before I start throwing acronyms like CTR at them.

The document also includes more information about me and my business, with links to my website, social media, and newsletter.

This is a lot of work, but I think it’ll be worth it. The more time I put into this in the beginning the more successful this person will be at helping me.

I’m treating this like I would any business partnership: I want to set us both up for success.

And by communicating my expectations up front, I’m treating them like I’d want to be treated.

Want a copy of my Notion template? Just hit reply and let me know, I’ll send it to you for free.

Now the work starts

This is an experiment! I’m betting that a little time investment in the beginning will payoff in time savings down the road.

I’ve spent probably 10 hours on all the work you’ve seen so far and some things I haven’t talked about like figuring out how to pay them (Payoneer is very popular).

By the time you receive this email my VA will have officially started working for me. We were communicating via email before moving over to WhatsApp on their request.

If done right, this will make my consulting business better because it frees myself up from tedious tasks so I can focus more on big picture, higher impact work.

Have you hired a VA before? Send me your tips!

I promise to keep you all updated on how this goes.

See you next week,

Nick

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I have no desire to start a marketing agency or hire people to help support my client roster right now. I never enjoyed people management and I want to stay as close to the work as possible.

But maybe you want to start an agency! Or you’re curious to peek behind the curtain of a successful agency.

Today’s newsletter is for you because I sat down with Nigel Stevens from Organic Growth Marketing (OGM).

OGM’s past and present client roster is a who’s who of successful SaaS brands like Ramp, Twilio Segment, Hotjar, and Intercom.

OGM now has 18 employees supporting 10+ active clients. His business model is focused on having a few people go really deep on a small number of companies, where each person helps with no more than two or three clients at a time.

Nigel gave advice for anyone who wants to start an agency today:

• The importance of nailing your first hire and what he looks for when hiring right now (hint: it’s not extreme SEO experience)

• Accepting uncertainty in balancing the supply & demand of your business

• Finding product-market fit

Everything in quotes is Nigel’s advice from our call and the rest is my commentary 🙂

Advice for future agency owners

1. Finding your product-market fit

Charge enough so that when you learn a lesson, you learn it while getting paid well.

Every consultant I’ve talked to has eventually narrowed the focus of their business.

When you start out, you’re often trying a bunch of things to find your own product-market fit.

You might think you know what skills you want to offer your clients, but you don’t really know until you do it. Maybe some work is more fun to talk about than actually doing it.

In Nigel’s case, one of the first things he did was sign up to recruit freelance writers for a client.

He immediately found out that he hated that process and never wanted to do that again, but that hard lesson informed how he approaches this with new clients:

I signed up for something and I learned I didn't want to do it. And then when somebody else asked me, I could say confidently: here's why we're not a good fit for this, and here's how to best solve this problem.

You should be saying no to things.

I felt this pressure to say yes to everything a client asked for, because when people ask for stuff, you say, oh, I guess I'm supposed to be able to do this. But what you learn is that your job is to say no to almost everything. And if you just say it confidently, and you can explain a reason, it will generally resonate with people. And if they really want you to do that thing, it's not a fit anyway, so why try to fight it?

Your personal positioning statement, which is your filter for determining who’s a good fit for you and who isn’t.

My experience matches Nigel’s. I’ve found that the more upfront you are about your work in the beginning the better, because it prevents scope creep and confusion down the road.

Here are some things I don’t do:

• SEO or content strategy (you should hire Nigel’s team at OGM instead!)

• Meta/Facebook/Instagram ads

• Graphic design

Takeaway: Figure out what type of work you don’t do and be upfront about it with prospective clients.

2. You don’t go from 0 to 18 employees overnight.

There's a middle ground between a solo consultant and agency.

Nigel first brought on a friend from college to help with some administrative operational work. That person wasn’t client facing for over a year

There’s no perfect order of operations here. Nigel just sat down and figured out what he needed to offload to keep scaling his business. Every time he hit a bottleneck he’d find a way to offload it.

Takeway: Understand what part of your client work is taking up a lot of your time and consider finding someone to help. It could be reporting, billing, or even organizing notes from your meetings.

3. Nail your first hire

Pick the right people, because I feel like I just got lucky. The first few people I had were very, very good. But along the way, there are some people that don't work out. And if those people that didn't work out had been towards the beginning, I think everything could have crumbled.

The first person you hire can have an outsized impact on the future of your agency.

But don’t limit yourself to only looking for someone who is a 10/10 in every area.

Understand where you need help today and then find someone who can plug the gap. Ideally this person is someone you already know and have dealt with in the past.

Hire people who don’t check every box

Most people look to hire someone who has done the exact thing before. But the best people are often only well-developed and experienced at certain aspects of what the job needs to be.

And they have the soft skills to cover everything else. They have a high degree of internal motivation to level up and prove that they can do the next thing.

When hiring for new roles at OGM, Nigel first defines two things:

1. Figure out what the most important aspect of the role is

2. Figure out what are the things you can teach

For us, the things that are hard to teach are general marketing chops and content marketing skills, EQ, and communication.

Takeaway: Most people aren’t a 10/10 across the board, so figure out what isn’t teachable and build systems to teach the rest.

4. You’re probably overrated

At first I was very hesitant to put anybody in a client-facing role because that person was representing me. But then I learned pretty early on that I'm kind of overrated across most things.

For example, I thought that I could never hand off doing content briefs. I thought I was special at it, but it turns out, no, I could just teach someone how to do it who actually has different skills than me.

You are not the only person in the world who can do things really well.

Accepting this mindset is key to finding good people to work for you and for growing your business.

I’ve also seen this described as giving away your legos.

You should give up parts of your job to people who are better equipped to do it so you can do things they can't, like finding and closing new clients.

Just be mindful of your reputation.

Your reputation is everything you have. And if you stick someone who isn't ready for prime time in front of a client, all it takes is one bad interaction for them to be able to tell somebody else. And then that's your reputation.

This is my biggest fear of hiring someone else for client-facing work.

My clients hire me. They want to work with me.

And ultimately it’s my reputation on the line. Nigel felt the same thing.

But reputation is a real thing, and my business is built on positive client referrals right now.

Takeaway: Find the right balance between giving away your legos and putting someone too junior in front of an important client. Giving away responsibility is the only way you can move onto bigger and better things.

5. Stay close to the sales process

I still haven't handed off sales because I've talked to a lot of other people about how that doesn't go well. And I just enjoy it.

Like Nigel, I also enjoy talking to potential clients, understanding their problems, and deciding if we’re a good fit to work together.

I would have a really hard time giving up this lego, because the potential risks of signing a bad client are too high for me:

• They churn early, messing up your supply & demand equation early

• Doing a bad job and harming the long-term reputation of the business

• Adding extra stress to the team and myself

Networking is the superpower of any good business owner because it keeps you current with trends and updated on what other people are seeing in the market.

The biggest strength I have is that I hop on a lot of calls with people in the industry. I'm talking to them about what's working and I'm across a lot of projects. So I have a unique perspective to have pattern recognition across conversations I've had with clients and across the whole company. No one else has that same perspective.

Takeaway: Be cautious about straying far from the sales process early on.

6. Perfect supply and demand doesn’t exist

You also never have the right balance between supply and demand, meaning available time and bandwidth of your team and clients. So you just have to be able to live with the uncertainty.

This is something I’m struggling with right now: what is my maximum client workload?

This gets even more complicated when you bring on additional people to help support your client roster.

There is never a perfect balance, you’re always out of sync on the demand side(too many clients) or the supply side (too many people).

Takeaway: You have to be able to live with the uncertainty of supply & demand imbalances.

7. There was no master plan

Throughout my conversation with Nigel, I kept assuming he had this big plan to start an agency immediately after leaving his full time job.

That was not true.

You're already giving me way too much credit. There was no plan. It just kind of happened. If I had left my job to start an agency and I lived in San Francisco, that would have been a lot of pressure. And the whole thing is I put myself in a situation where I had no pressure.

I purposely saved this last piece of advice for last, because it parallels my early journey.

When I quit my job, I had three things that massively decreased the amount of pressure on me:

1. Two paying clients

2. Relatively low monthly expenses

3. A large emergency fund

When Nigel quit his job, he moved to a lower cost of living country to remove a lot of the pressure on himself.

I was living in a cheap place. I left [my job] with a small contract that paid the bills and I had some money saved up.

And crucially, he was up for the challenge.

I was hungry to hack my career.
I'd never hired people, but I was up for that challenge.
I'd never done sales. I was up for that challenge.
I'd never managed people, but I was up for that challenge.

A lot of people are not cut out to be solopreneurs or business owners.

This stuff is hard.

But if you’re in the right place in your life where you can take some risk, then building an agency is a great way to grow your income beyond the $30k/month mark into six figures and beyond.

Wrapping Up

Huge thank you to Nigel from OGM for sharing his time and insights with me.

Even though building an agency isn’t in my immediate future, I wanted to share the experience of someone who has done it before.

Did you enjoy this post? Let me know because I’d love to do more things like this in future newsletters.

Nick

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Last time: Creating peace of mind for your clients

Next time: Growing an SEO agency to 18 employees

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Welcome back to my monthly finance update, where I transparently share my income dollars and sources to help unmask what it takes to build a $20k+/month business.

This month we bounced back from the negative growth last month to once again cross the $30k threshold.

I’m going to skip the individual channel breakdowns and zoom out to my high level thoughts on what’s working for my consulting business, what isn’t working, and what’s next.

Here’s a quick look at my finances before moving onto that.

What’s Working

Client Retention

My average client retention is 10 months and growing. To date, I’ve only stopped working with two clients and I’ve retained everyone else.

I’ve had many clients since the beginning of my freelance journey. We’ve grown through the first three phases I outline in most agreements:

• Audit & Research

• Test & Iterate

• Scale & Optimize

This is a huge milestone because it proves I can add long-term value to each of my client’s businesses and it’s validation that what I’m doing is working.

My Niche Offer

100% of my current operational clients are on my newly refined consulting offering that I outlined in my newsletter on personal positioning.

Having a niched offering helps me focus on doing my best work, minimize context switching, and retain more of my clients.

It also supports my pricing structure.

My Pricing

After signing my first two consulting clients on an hourly pricing model, I quickly pivoted into a flat monthly retainer pricing model which gives me guaranteed, expected income every month.

Retainer or project-based pricing is better in many ways, but the primary benefit is that it doesn’t punish you for efficiency. On hourly billing, if a task that previously took you two hours now only takes you 30 minutes then you lose 1.5 hours of billed time.

I talk to a lot of other consultants, and when I bring up retainers they always ask me how I back the retainer into a set amount of hours that I allocate for that client every month.

There are two answers to this question:

1. Meticulously track your time for current clients and use that to benchmark your retainer prices

2. Wing it and give yourself plenty of buffer

In full transparency, I opt for #2 with a few guardrails in place:

• I raise my rates for every subsequent client

• I set limits on the things that take up most of my time

As a freelancer, you can setup your contracts exactly how you want them. Here are some things that are completely negotiable for you:

• Meeting cadence (you could agree to only bi-weekly meetings)

• Communication platform (you could charge a higher retainer if clients want you in their Slack channel)

• Who can communicate with you (you can define how many people can communicate with you, and charge higher rates if the client needs 3+ people to talk to you)

Experienced freelancers are doing these things because they know the pain of not doing them and having clients overstep the boundaries.

From my experience, it is very easy for clients to start treating you like a full-time employee. It’s not uncommon for clients to ask me for same-day turnaround times or to attend daily stand-up meetings. It’s up to you how to deal with these and it’s much easier if expectations are clearly defined in the contract before you start.

If you have concerns on building a retainer pricing structure, put your concerns in the agreement. Protect your downside.

I interviewed the founder of a successful 18 person SEO agency a few weeks ago, and this was one piece of advice he gave me:

Charge enough so that when you learn a lesson, you learn it while getting paid well.

Even though I’ve stopped working with two clients, and I’ve stopped doing specific types of marketing work, I set myself up for financial success by wrapping those engagements in a pricing model that works for me.

It’s also never too late to raise your rates or even completely restructure your deal.

What’s Not Working

Too much consulting

I’m spending too much time on the consulting side of my business, which takes away time I want to spend on creating content like:

• What you’re reading right now

• My LinkedIn posts

• Interviews and content collaborations

• The community I continue to tease :)

The content is part of my longer term revenue strategy. It’s important and not getting enough of my time right now.

My goal is to slowly trim my client roster while increasing my prices so I can maintain a similar level of consulting income with fewer clients. Much like my goal of taking the entire month of December off, this is a work in progress with a lot of uncertainty around how I’m going to get there.

I’m building the plane as I fly it 🛫

Too much networking

I opened my calendar up to people who were recently laid off and many people took me up on my offer.

I started working through those people this past week and I had some amazing conversations.

But my calendar is so booked that I don’t have any availability until April.

So I’m going to stop booking these types of calls. This could take two forms:

1. Decline every networking opportunity

2. Charge a fee to turn this into an income stream

The idea of charging for these calls feels weird to me and it creates a lot of pressure on both sides, but I’ve also learned that for the right person I can provide enough value in 30-45 minutes to charge for my time.

I’ll commit to experiment with this and report back in a future newsletter.

What’s Next: Moving

My wife and I are in the final stages of a major move that has been in the works for over a year. We’re uprooting our life in Austin, Texas and headed for Brooklyn, New York by July/August of this year.

We have a very busy next few months that involves spending an entire month in NYC while we house hunt, putting our Texas house up for rent, and downsizing the frankly amazing amount of stuff we’ve accumulated over the years.

But this move, and all of the worry and stress that comes with it, is exactly why I’m doing this. We are building the kind of life that we want to live and our self-employed careers are enabling us to do it.

Tomorrow is not guaranteed. We may never have a chance to do this again.

We only have one life so let’s make it count.

See you all next week for my interview and insights with someone who went from solopreneur to 18-person agency owner in only a few years.

Cheers,

Nick

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This newsletter was written by a friend, former colleague, and someone who’s been a full-time SEO consultant for 2.5 years: Kelsey Reaves.

What I admire most about Kelsey is that she built a life around what matters most to her: location independence.

She’s traveled all around the world while supporting herself through her freelancing business. It is rare to meet someone who clearly knows what brings them happiness in life and builds their professional aspirations around that, and I’m lucky that we crossed paths back when we were both stuck at a desk in downtown Austin in 2015.

Her weekly newsletter, SiteSee, offers advice on achieving a location-independent lifestyle along with recommendations on the gear to get you there, and is 100% worth subscribing to for anyone with similar nomadic dreams.

Over to you, Kelsey!

When you’re a freelancer, your job isn’t just to complete a deliverable. 

Your #1 job (no matter the industry you’re in) is to provide peace of mind.

It’s taken me years to fully understand this (and I credit a lot of what I’ve learned from my previous boss at OGM).

Oftentimes when you’re brought on to help with a project, your client doesn’t worry too much about the details of the actual tasks you’re doing. In their mind, they brought you on to “take care” of something.

Whether that be:

• “taking care” of SEO

• “taking care” of PPC 

• “taking care” of the website redesign

They just want to know that out of the dozens of items on their to-do list, the one that has your name next to it is under control. 

So why is providing peace of mind so important? 

Because it ultimately means your client trusts you to produce good work that drives results. And for you, this leads to longer-term relationships with higher-quality clients that are willing to pay you the big bucks.

After freelancing full-time for 2.5 years, I’ve figured out a solid 4-step framework that you can use to consistently provide peace of mind to clients:

1. Present deliverables in a digestible format

2. Integrate into the client’s existing ecosystem

3. (Over)communicate like your life depends on it

4. Make your clients and stakeholders look smart

Now let’s dive into each.

1. Present deliverables in a digestible format

You can’t expect your clients to make the same leaps of logic that you do when you’re both presented with the same information.

A spreadsheet full of complex SEO data might make total sense to your, but to your client it might as well be Hieroglyphics.

Make it as simple as possible for your clients to comprehend your deliverables and take actionable steps based on your recommendations.

Before shipping off your deliverable, spend time anticipating possible questions your client will ask.

Nick’s recommendation: My former bosses were great at poking holes in my work. When I want to cover all my bases, I try to channel my former bosses and approach the document from their perspective. What questions would they ask me?

For example: In my technical audits, regardless of the recommendation, the inevitable follow-up questions I receive are, "Why does this matter?" and "How crucial is it to address this?"

To get ahead of these questions, I now include a section of why it matters in the supporting one-pager and list action items in order of priority. Here’s what it looks like:

For all of my clients, I’ll send over:

1. The deliverable (typically a spreadsheet) 

2. A one-pager explanation

3. A quick 5-minute video walkthrough on Loom

And I always keep my emails short, making it easy for them to locate documents:

I also try to do things as async as possible. If there happens to be follow-up questions that I can’t effectively answer via a short Loom video, then I’ll set up a Zoom call. 

But only as a last resort. 

2. Integrate into the client’s existing ecosystem

The last thing we all need is another project management tool. Your client feels the same way.

So instead of handing over deliverables using my preferred method, I ask my clients upfront what tools they’re using to manage tasks.

If they use Asana, then it's easy. I’ll just build out a workflow for SEO tasks into their existing account. Airtable? Cool, I’ll move my Excel spreadsheet over. Monday? No sweat. I’ll create a new board for my deliverables.

As freelancers, our goal is to remove any hurdle that may be in the way of sharing our work and getting sh*t done. Integrating into their ecosystem makes it that much easier for them (and for you!) to move things forward. 

Nick’s recommendation: Having broad experience across a variety of tools like this is super helpful! In your discovery calls, try asking what project management tools they use to see if you’re familiar with it. If not, bake in some more time to your proposal so you can get up to speed.

3. (Over)communicate like your life depends on it

If a client starts asking questions about performance, then that’s a clear sign that there’s been a communication breakdown. 

The solution? Bias towards overcommunicating.

In practice, this means actively calling out wins and preemptively communicating issues before they arise.

For most of my clients, I’m on a shared Slack channel where I can highlight achievements beyond monthly reports. So instead of solely relying on statistics like "traffic increased by X%," I emphasize tangible wins by sharing screenshots. It’s WAY more impactful to see results in the real world, versus just seeing numbers. Not only does it help keep clients engaged, but it keeps our work at the top of their minds.

On the flip side, if things aren’t looking good, preemptively call that out. 

For example, when core algorithm updates are impacting my client's sites, I don't wait for the monthly report; instead, I proactively send a report detailing 1) the details of the algorithm update and 2) our observations.

Nick’s recommendation: Sharing bad news sucks, but I’d much rather proactively share it myself instead of my client sharing it first. Proactively sharing bad news means you’re already a step ahead.

Even if the response is, "We’re not quite sure what the impact is yet, but we're actively monitoring developments," this action still reminds the client that you’re on it.

Finally, make it easy for clients to get the takeaways they need. 

While my monthly reports dive deep into specifics like traffic, clicks, impressions, etc. I'm aware that (more often than not) my clients never read past the executive summary.

I dedicate more time to perfecting these summaries than the rest of the report. Here are a few things I do in my reports to make sure my clients get the takeaways they need in less than a minute:

• Highlight positive numbers in green, and negative numbers in red

• Present everything in a positive light and provide explanations for the reasoning behind it.

• Harness the power of "threes" by incorporating three takeaway points as bullet items (something about it just looks good).

4. Make your clients and stakeholders look smart

The people you’re working with day to day typically aren’t the ones who are signing your contracts or paying your invoices.

Most of the clients you work with have stakeholders (like CEOs, CMOs, etc.) to report to.

In these situations, offer a helping hand.

When they need to put together presentations on strategies, results, wins, or other things, offer to help create the presentation. 

Because when you help make your clients look good, YOU look good. 

Recently, a client of mine was tasked with presenting the content strategy I developed to the CEO, aiming to secure approval from the rest of the team.

Rather than sending the usual monthly report I put together in a Google Doc, I transformed the strategy and key insights into a presentation deck that he could share with the CEO:

Not only did I help my client convey the overall strategy to executives, but the team was so impressed, that they decided to pour more resources into scaling our strategy.

Nick’s recommendation: I’ve done this for a client over Slack too. My client got a question from another part of the organization, and I drafted up a detailed reply for them to use. Saved my client time and made them look good!

Wrapping Up

Since transitioning to full-time freelancing in 2021, I've applied this framework to all my clients, and it has yielded more than just financial gains. This strategy has:

1. Led to longer-term contracts (a minimum of 6 months or longer)

2. Led to tons of referrals (my clients trust me and have recommended my services multiple times, resulting in a full client list for 2024)

3. Led to cool new ways to work together (for example, I run a weekly newsletter about living a location-independent lifestyle and have had clients contribute). 

Ultimately, freelancing goes beyond executing the immediate task; it's about offering your clients peace of mind. 

By doing so, you can undoubtedly expect an uptick in clients, longer contract durations, and an improved bottom line.

Kelsey Reaves is an SEO consultant who specializes in putting together inbound strategies for leading B2B SaaS companies. Embracing the digital nomad lifestyle in Cape Town, she manages a website and a weekly newsletter, SiteSee, offering advice on achieving a location-independent lifestyle along with recommendations on the gear to get you there.