As an aspiring Solopreneur here are the seven most important things to consider about your new business

As an aspiring solopreneur, there are a lot of things to consider when starting your new business. I will give you my view of the seven most important of them.

The seven most important things to consider as an aspiring solopreneur are: What kind of business do you want to start, How much time do you have to work on it, Your niche, What are your strengths and weaknesses, Planning, Cheerleaders, and What to pay for.

1 – What kind of Solopreneur business

What kind of business would you like to start? From a very young age, I knew I wanted to have my own business, but did not know what in the beginning. To save you both money and energy, I recommend that you start by figuring out what kind of business you want to start.

This can be a brick-and-mortar store, a webshop, a consultancy, a coaching business, etc. The most important thing is that it’s something that fits your personality, time, and your passion. To make sure you are willing to put in the time and effort it requires.

Here you can learn more about finding your passion.

2 – How much time do you have as an aspiring Solopreneur

It might seem like a strange thing to consider, but it will be of benefit to you to know how much time you specifically can allocate to your business each week.

Time flies by fast, and things often take longer than we anticipate.

There is a huge difference in the time you might have for your solopreneur business if you are starting it full-time vs. starting it as a side-hustle. Also, some people have no other obligations whilst others have a family to allocate time to as well.

This is why I suggest making a weekly schedule, and see how much time you have to put into building your business. Are you willing to stop watching your daily tv-shows, haning out with your friends or family every night, or would you rather prioritize this. This is not a question of what is right or wrong, just a question of having decided what kind of time and effort you are willing to put into your new business.

You can find a simple weekly template to get you started right here!

3 – Your Niche

This is probably going to seem counterintuitive – but you need to niche down to really get going.

One of the things a lot of starting solopreneurs think is that their product fits everybody. They are most likely right – BUT, and that’s a big but, choosing everyone as your target audience will leave you with a very small number of customers if any at all. This is because you cannot market directly at them.

I started out just wanting to help people in general, no matter the problem – That is not very efficient when needing to market myself as a coach and hypnotist. So now my niche is female solopreneurs who feel stuck and overwhelmed as business owners.

The benefit here is that when choosing your niche and finding your Ideal Client Avatar (I will explain this further in another blogpost coming soon), you can market much more direct and much cheaper towards your ideal client.

This does not mean that you cannot serve other types of clients, it just means that you only market towards them.

4 – What are your strengths and weaknesses

It is always a good idea to know your strengths and weaknesses, even more so when starting a small business as a Solopreeur. By knowing this, you also know where to focus in your business (hint – it’s on your strengths), and what to let others handle.

By being very clear about this from the start you have an idea of what tasks to outsource when you have the opportunity. Often it’s better to outsource early because using a lot of time and effort on stuff that drains you for energy and that you do not like to do is just a bad idea. The time, and mental efforts going into such tasks, could be spent earning money somewhere else in your business so that you can pay someone else to do the tasks. As it is their key competence, they are probably also faster than you in solving the task.

5 – Planning

Planning out your business goals, setting deadlines, milestones, and action items will help you a lot in your journey.

Planning will help you stay focused on the tasks that are important to reaching your goals. It will also help you utilize your time the best way possible.

To get inspiration on planning, you can read my article on planning and goal-setting here.

6 – Your Cheerleaders

As a Solopreneur, you are by definition, most often, working alone. Some people also lack support from their family and friends. This can make the new life as a business owner really hard.

One of the most important things to succeed as a new and aspiring Solopreneur is support and people who believe in you and your ideas.

This is why creating your own squad of cheerleaders can have an enormously positive effect on your business. This can be through accountability partners, a mastermind group, or a network.

You can read more about my future network for Solopreneurs wanting to connect personal values and business values here.

7 – The cost of being an aspiring Solopreneur

As an aspiring Solopreneur, there are lots of things to spend money on. From developing your new business to educate yourself, and the tools you use in your day-to-day work.

I have already touched upon this topic a bit when relating to tasks in your business. I do want to go a bit deeper, as there are many ways to spend money, especially on software.

A lot of the software you will use today in a small business is subscription-based, meaning that you will pay a fee for access every month or year.

The trick here is to keep track because 10$ a month for a product might not be a lot of money, but if you have 12 different subscriptions it adds up fast. A lot of software has free versions that are great for starting out. I recommend Canva for your graphic work for social media and MailerLite for building your e-mail list, for example. Both these tools have a free version where there are some limitations, but most often they are fine when starting out. (These links are affiliate links – learn more about affiliate links here).

Always remember – Have fun and Get Shit Done!

Diana Lund