The Confrontations of Flying Solo
Image by Bruno Nascimento via Unsplash
After two years being a solopreneur, I’ve gained a new understanding of how my past experiences and expertise have impacted my approach to business. I’m reframing my relationship to research and sales, and I’m giving credit where credit’s due to the bad tech economy. To delve deeper into these insights, read on.
For two decades, I’ve researched experiences, which means I uncover people’s needs, motivations, and pain points. If I’m fascinated by it, I research it. In my career this has encompassed political identity to last statements of death row inmates to dating app users to bicycle couriers. My brain does a happy dance when I can approach a problem in a structured way and share the process and its challenges with others. I love research.
An integral part of my childhood was sales. I was raised in an evangelical community where we were encouraged (obliged, even) to convert non-Christians. When I met someone new, say at a sports camp or a community event, I always felt anxious, wondering when and how I would bring up their lack of faith. At the age of 18, I changed my major from business to psychology because I realized I couldn’t spend the rest of my life selling stuff to people. I loath sales.
Particularly in the past two years, I’ve had to come to terms with these entangled parts of my identity.
Acknowledging my siloed research expertise
After 15 years in the academic world, first as a PhD researcher and then an Assistant Professor in a digital communications department, I pivoted to leading UX research practices. In the companies where I worked, research as a practice was new, and I began with discovery research in the form of internal stakeholder interviewing.
Product managers wanted to build at top speed even though there might be little to no data to back up their convictions. They often operated from assumptions about what customers needed or wanted. My challenge was to demonstrate that research could help them better understand the problem space and move toward the best solution with more confidence.
I went out on my own, certain I would never start from assumptions. Before I launched my offering as a fractional research leader, I had scores of discovery conversations with product and design leaders tasked with introducing research to their organizations. I knew that companies hiring their first researcher or scaling their research teams had only a tentative understanding of what the job entailed. They were enthusiastic about bringing someone like me in to create a vision and strategy for research to succeed. Based on these insights, I concluded there was an appetite and a market for fractional research leadership.
Before I launched my coaching offering, I had countless conversations with researchers. I knew researchers — and especially solo researchers and research managers — needed support. They felt overwhelmed, underappreciated, and alone. I recruited pilot coachees and ran multiple sessions with them, getting their feedback on the process. I concluded that researchers crave additional support to thrive in their roles — support that I could provide.
If I’d been an in-house user researcher, these insights would have been enough to bring back to my product stakeholders. Depending on the organization, I might then co-create solutions with them, using my expert knowledge of the problem space to offer advice.
But ultimately, I’d pass the baton: It was product’s responsibility to own the solution. It was marketing and sales’ job to package and sell those solutions. Now, as a solopreneur, I had to take that responsibility.
Understanding “assumptions” in a new way
Going solo has made me realize the nuances in that word “assumptions.” As a user researcher, I used that term to talk about the lack of quant/qual data or using intuition to make decisions. But I didn’t question what I might be missing by focusing on problem understanding.
In a recent LinkedIn article, Dr Debra Dupree wrote, “The danger of assumptions isn’t in making them…The real hazard arises when we act on these assumptions without verifying their accuracy.”
It took me some time to realize that I’d launched services still heavily based on assumptions. For example:
I assumed companies were willing and able to pay (what I was charging) for fractional research leadership.
I assumed researchers had development budgets or personal funds they are willing and able to use for coaching (at the rates I was charging).
I knew my audience, I understood their pain points and their needs, but I didn’t talk to them about pricing or budgets. In retrospect, I probably avoided it because it was the first step toward sales.
Let’s break this down.
Embracing pricing research
I did my user research. What I did not conduct was buyer research. I did not investigate or understand my potential client’s willingness to pay (WTP) — whether they would be able to pay me to fulfill those needs.
It doesn’t matter how well you know your users or potential customers. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are about the solution you are proposing to them. What matters, at the end of the day, is whether or not they will pay you to solve their problem.
Coaching or working with pilot clients who provide glowing testimonials doesn’t count as pricing research if I didn’t ask them about pricing (note: people aren’t going to bring up money if you don’t). They loved the work we did together — but how much was it worth?
I did talk about pricing with other consultants. But having peers tell me what I should be charging for consulting work isn’t enough. Your peers might think you’re a great person but you do not have the same experience as they do, you probably don’t live in the same geographical area, and you won’t necessarily have clients with the same expectations about cost.
I stand humbly before all the sales and marketing folks, and acknowledge the important customer research they’ve used to bring in the revenue. I’ll always advocate for user research, but it took the solopreneur route for me to grasp the importance of understanding the full journey a potential customer must go through — from being an expert in their problem to understanding if and when a solution is financially viable for them. All that expertise is necessary when you’re running your own business.
Despite what in-house researchers sometimes preach, user research is not the thing that will make our companies successful. It is necessary, but not sufficient. We are part of a complex process.
Pricing research — doing research on what things should cost — is not my forte, but I’m reading up. Dr. Andrew Muir Wood prepared a short but informative case study write-up of how to explore pricing models from a qualitative research perspective. I’ve also turned more classic advice from this Harvard Business Review article, which points out how a pricing policy gives customers a sense of a company’s philosophy.
My learning: Whatever the reason, it’s pretty simple: if people won’t pay for what you’re selling, you won’t make money. And if you don’t talk to them about pricing, you’re probably not in a great position to sell to them. I shied away from the pricing conversation, and I dreaded the next step: sales.
Reframing sales dread
Earlier I mentioned that my dislike for sales started in my childhood, but it continued into young adulthood. When I moved to Amsterdam at the age of 23, I wanted to earn some extra cash, but fluent Dutch was a requirement in most places.
Then I got connected with a popular English-language comedy cafe called Boom Chicago. They were looking for people to hand out magazines to tourists on the streets of Amsterdam. We were meant to strike up a conversation, encourage them to come to the show, and in the best case scenario, get them to sign up then and there. Cue the commission.
We worked on commission. If we didn’t sell, we made no money.
I did not make a cent at that job.
To say I dreaded approaching people is a huge understatement. To this day, I’ll walk a wide berth around anyone I see coming at me with a pitch. I cringe at sales emails and their repeated follow-ups.
I never want people to feel like I’m selling to them. That, my dear readers, is a problem for a solopreneur — if I won’t sell my services, who will?
Antonia Landi, a Product Operations Coach & Consultant, recently posted on LinkedIn about this topic. She said, “I thought of my freelancing research as an act of good product discovery: I was following best practices, how could it possibly be bad? But the reality is that hiding under the guise of ‘doing discovery’…allowed me to hide from what I was truly fearing: Action.”
When I read this post by Antonia, it made me realize that although I had been busy creating content, growing my network, and — of course — doing research, I was avoiding a crucial step to becoming successful. I was letting my misconceptions about sales dictate how I spent my time.
I have done a lot of soul searching on this topic and received invaluable advice. I worked with a business coach last year named Tara Butler Floch, and she helped me reframe the “I’m tricking people into spending money” perspective into one of “I’m helping people solve a problem.” I’m approaching sales as a skill set I need to learn, and have found great resources like Rochelle Moulton’s The Soloist Life podcast, which explores topics like Selling For Soloists with Shannyn Lee.
Still, the life-long associations are deep, and take time to surface. Another positive point to addressing my resistance has helped me better understand the complexities facing my prospective clients, for example:
A prospective client may have a pain point, but that doesn’t mean that they are ready to pay to relieve that pain point
People may articulate a pain point, but this is often a moving target — and bigger pain points (like losing job security) can arise in the meantime
Just because people have access to a personal training budget doesn’t mean they’re using it
Just because people had a budget for consultants yesterday doesn’t mean they’ll have it tomorrow
Identifying my weaknesses and making a plan to turn them into strengths has been a key step along the way. But there are external threats that can derail the best-laid plans: Cue the economic crisis.
Master research, master sales — but you still can’t control the economy
I used to teach a job market preparation class for undergraduate students. One of the first things we did was conduct a personal SWOT analysis. This consisted of their personal strengths and weaknesses — things they could potentially improve or at least be aware of — and the opportunities and threats present in the external world. These could include, for example, upcoming legislation that could impact their industry, or, you know, a total economic crisis in an industry.
I started my solopreneur career the month before the tech layoffs began, which has ultimately decimated the research industry and plunged a generation of UX researchers into a professional identity crisis.
Obviously this wasn’t the plan.
In November 2023, I read an article by Lawton Pybus that detailed the present and future of the economy and the research discipline. I clicked on a link to a graph from TrueUp, and let my cursor hover over the date that I registered my company: April 1, 2022.
I remember myself at that time, fully confident that my new (and massive) monthly income was about to materialize. Janelle in early 2022, smugly declining job offers because “Hey, if this doesn’t work out, I’ll just go back in-house!”
Then I let my eyes wander down that plummeting graph, and realized my reflections aside, there’s nothing I could have done to change the economy.
For those of us riding out this storm, I know it’s grim. But it’s given me the life-changing opportunity to address my growing pains now, at the beginning of my solopreneur journey. And that has been a worthwhile experience.
(Credit: TrueUp)
How I’m moving forward
Look, I’m writing again! More procrastination? This time, I’m not viewing it that way. Instead, I’ll be doing a lot of writing that falls under the category of building in public, a concept I first came across when reading Kevon Cheung. Think transparency about my experiments, challenges and successes including my new pricing and sales strategy.
I’m still coaching research leaders, but I’m expanding my client base to teams and other professionals who are looking for guidance, particularly in stakeholder management. I’m reinventing my key offerings, and am currently diving into how strategic research thinking can facilitate organizational transformation.
In the world of solopreneurship, iteration and reinvention are constants — not just for the services you offer, but for yourself, as a professional and a human being.
