Building alone is hard. There's a better way.
I'm launching something brand new.
I spent the first few years of my solopreneurship convinced I had to figure absolutely everything out by myself.
Website, marketing, partnerships, invoicing, social media, the actual content. All of it. On my own, mostly at a kitchen table, mostly when I shouldn’t have been working, mostly wondering if any of it would even lead anywhere.
Nobody tells you how lonely that gets.
Not in the sad-violin sense. Lonely in the specific way where you share something online that you’re proud of, it does nothing, and there’s not a single person around who understands why it stings so much.
Your mates are lovely but they don’t know what a restack is. Your family thinks a good week online means “the internet was nice to you.” Nobody in your life can tell you whether what you built is actually good, or whether you’ve just spent four hours convincing yourself it is.
So you keep going anyway, because what else are you going to do?
That’s the bit that gets me about solo building.
It’s not that the work’s especially hard. Work is always hard, that’s just what work is. It’s that every single decision lands on you, and only you. Is this the right offer? Is this headline any good? Should I be doing video? Am I completely wasting my time?
You answer all of that alone, at your kitchen table, at eleven at night, with nobody to check your thinking against.
And nobody warns you about this bit. Being alone with your own thoughts for long enough starts to feel like clarity - it isn’t. It’s just repetition. Same doubts, on a loop, dressed up as deep thinking.
I know this because I did it for years. I built my first online business entirely on my own, and it worked, eventually, but it took a lot longer than it needed to. It wasn’t because I lacked ideas, either - I had plenty of ideas.
I lacked anyone to tell me which ones were worth chasing and which ones were just me avoiding the actual work.
Then a few years ago I ende+d up finding other people doing similar things for the first time. Nothing dramatic - just a window into how other folks worked, and what they worked on.
And it wrecked me a bit, honestly. In a good way.
Because within a few weeks of actively learning from others I realised how much time I’d wasted going back and forth in my own head on stuff that ten minutes of conversation could have sorted. Someone else had already tried the thing I was agonising over. Someone else spotted a blind spot their offer and it helped me recognise my own. Someone else had already blazed the trail I needed to follow.
It’s not just learning, either. It’s the accountability that comes for free when other people know what you’re working on. When it’s just you, missing a week is easy. Nobody notices. But when there are other people in your space, missing a week means something different entirely. The friends you make in your online community notice what you’re doing, care about your progress, and keep you accountable simple by asking how you’re doing.
I think about this a lot when I talk to people who are exactly where I was: genuinely good at what they do, sitting on real expertise. Trying to build something around it entirely on their own, because that’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? Bootstrap it. Get on with it. Work away in the background until it magically works.
Except being on your own is exactly the problem.
It’s not just the work - it’s being on your own with the work.
Every good decision I’ve made in the last while, the ones that actually moved things forward, came out of a conversation with someone else who was in it with me. It was never a course I took by myself, or another self-help book. It was an actual room (or even a virtual one) with other people who had skin in the game.
You can do this alone. Plenty of people do. It’s just slower, lonelier, and full of decisions you’re not really equipped to make entirely by yourself. Nobody is, if we’re honest.
There’s a reason nobody builds a business completely alone if they can help it. Even the most solo-looking creators you know have somebody: a mastermind; a group chat; a mate who also does what you’re doing and gets why a bad week as a creator feels like a personal insult.
It’s worth asking yourself who that person is for you right now.
And if the answer’s nobody, that’s worth considering.
🚨 I’m launching a brand new group coaching programme this July. Twelve months in a small group, weekly live sessions, 1-to-1 support, all built for people who’re done trying to figure it all out by themselves.
If that sounds like you, join the waitlist and you’ll be first to hear when it opens.
The cost of the twelve months coaching?