Life Update (September 2024)
Reflecting on the last 8 months of my solopreneur journey and quick personal life update
It’s been a little while since I published here. As you’ll read in the post - things have been good and very busy.
Also - welcome to the 100s of you who are hearing from me for the first time since subscribing. I’m glad you’re here 👋
Before we dive in…
I recently opened enrollment for the second cohort of my Maven course (I share a lot more about my course in this post) and spots are filling up. If you're gearing up for PM interviews with big tech companies like Meta and want to ace their Product Sense and Analytical Thinking interviews, my course is for you 🫵
Subscribers of my newsletter get 10% off with promo code `substack` (auto-applied on the course page here). If you know someone getting ready for these interviews, feel free to share my course with them. Would mean a lot 🙏
Fractional Work & Solopreneurship
Earlier this year I left my full-time role at Continuum and began exploring a new phase of my career: fractional work. Some also call this solopreneurship.
What is fractional work, you might ask?
It’s not one thing, but rather a spectrum of non-traditional ways of working together. Imagine a sliding scale of commitment levels that starts at “zero working relationship” and goes all the way to “full-time employee”. The points along that spectrum are what I’d consider fractional and include (but are not limited to) the following:
Product Advisory: 2-3 hrs per month
Fractional PM: 15-20 hrs per week
Interim Product Leader: 25-30 hrs per week for multiple months
I’ve experimented with all three models over the past eight months, which has been super interesting and full of learnings. Active engagements have helped me to learn what I like vs dislike, where I’m stronger vs weaker, etc.
Here are some examples of active engagements I’ve had so far:
Joined a stealth startup as an interim product lead for four months, got their product in the hands of the first users and onboarded the full-time product leader.
Drove major 0->1 project for a Seed-stage startup which has now raised a Series A.
Advised a pre-seed founder for a few months on her startup’s product direction to accelerate design iteration and improve the clarity of their v1 mobile app.
I’m excited to do more of this work for the rest of this year and have room for another client or two if you know early stage founders who could use help on the product side.
The Realities of Self Promotion (i.e. Content)
My biggest learning from building relationships with hundreds of fractional executives during my time at Continuum was the importance of getting good at business development (i.e. finding clients). So when I started this phase, I knew that for me to have a chance, I’d have to up my content game and figure out how to be top of mind for my target audience - early stage startup founders.
This means a key aspect of fractional work is getting comfortable promoting myself, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people I know who are exploring fractional work. Many people want to use their skills and experience to do the work; they don’t want to ramp up content on social media, build a personal brand, etc.
The problem with avoiding the cringey work of promoting yourself is that nobody else is going to do it for you. So if you don’t do it, your “business of one” won’t have any marketing touch points with your target audience. And any business with no marketing motion will struggle.
Here are some of the highlights on the content side of things:
Launched a podcast called Supra Insider with Marc Baselga (founder of Supra, an invite-only community of product leaders) and we’ve published 26 episodes, hitting 1.2k subscribers and 5k downloads. It’s a ton of fun.
Increased my presence on LinkedIn, more than doubling my follower count from ~4k to ~9k. Feel free to follow me there if you want more content 😜
Published a guest post on Lenny's Newsletter, the largest newsletter for the product community with over 700k subscribers (one of my LI posts is actually what prompted that guest post, so you can see how the content adds value).
In addition to the fractional product work and content, I also decided a few months ago to run a course on Maven to scale my one-on-one interview coaching business:
I ran my first Lightning Lesson on Maven, “How To Ace Product Sense & Analytical Thinking PM Interviews”, resulting in 700 signups (120 attended live and 60 stayed 30 min extra given the engaging Q&A). You can access the recording for free in that link.
I launched my PM interview prep course on Maven, Product Sense & Analytical Thinking PM Interview Bootcamp, and ran the first cohort with 15 enrolled students, netting out at 4.5/5.0 rating on the course page. I wrote a post about my learnings from the first cohort here and discussed with Marc on our podcast in further depth here.
I recently announced enrollment for the second cohort of the course, which will be even better than the first. Subscribers of this newsletter get 10% off with promo code `substack` (auto-applied on the course page here).
Here’s what one student from the first cohort had to say - this makes me happy 😃
"𝘉𝘦𝘯'𝘴 𝘤𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴 𝘪𝘴 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭, 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘨𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘦 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘱-𝘣𝘺-𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘱 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘳𝘭𝘺 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘥. 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘨𝘦𝘵 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘦𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘦𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘥𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘺 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬, 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘻𝘦 𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘧𝘧. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝘩𝘰𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴—𝘐'𝘷𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘤𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘴𝘰 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘯𝘦𝘸 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘥𝘯'𝘵 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘦.
Family & European Summer
Way better than all of the professional updates has been my ability to be extremely present with my family throughout this period. Our daughter Gaia will be turning two in January and I’ve really enjoyed spending time with her every day, noticing every major milestone of her development. I’m grateful that my current lifestyle has allowed me to not miss anything big. It’s a gift.
My parents both visited us in NYC over the last few months and got to spend time with Gaia, which made me (and them) really happy.
Lastly, we recently got back from spending a month in Europe (🇫🇷🇵🇹), visiting my in-laws on the west and east of France and spending a couple weeks exploring the broader Lisbon area for fun. It was intense traveling this much with a 1.5 year old but I was able to fully disconnect from work for a full month and enjoy European summer.
My podcast co-host Marc was also in Europe visiting his family in Spain and then taking time off in Greece so we recently published our 1:1 conversation about the benefits and challenges of taking time off in episode 25 here.
Note: last year I was working for the majority of our Europe trip (newsletter post from last year) and while we had a great time, it was insanely stressful to work 4-5 hours per night after full days. This year I worked harder in June and July so that I could turn off work 100% to be present in August. One of the benefits of fractional work is the flexibility to make that tradeoff.
That’s all for now, this was a dense one but that’s what happens when I don’t publish for several months. Thanks for reading!
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