Early Exit #49: I have a 'normal' job now

The Early Exit Club is on pause.

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.

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.

Early Exit #4: Playing It Safe

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