Early Exit #47: Kicking Imposter Syndrome's Ass
2024 was the best year of my life and we’re only getting started.
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.
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.
Here's how it works:
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.
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:
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.
Give freely without expecting anything in return.
Repeat
I've written a lot about how I approach this:
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.
Adadadabra solves a real problem. Excited for you to bring it to market!
Boom - I can't wait to see what 2025 has in store for you, Nick!