Pulling Out of a Revenue Nosedive with Chris Ferdinandi

What do you do when your consistently growing revenue suddenly takes a nosedive—and your peers are feeling it too? Soloist Chris Ferdinandi walks us through the experience and the experiments he conducted to start lifting himself out of it:

Why he built his business as a side hustle and didn’t go solo until he matched his corporate salary.

The financial and emotional hit of a 50% revenue drop—and how to experiment without morphing to panic.

What to do when you’re “too feral” to go back into Corporate: the experiments that failed and those that gave hope.

How selling to a 640-person email list outsold the results from a 14,000 list—by over 3X (hint: the new sale was in his genius zone).

Two moves to make when your revenue is tanking—and one surprising upside.

 

LINKS

Chris Ferdinandi ADHD Tips | Mastadon

Rochelle Moulton Email List | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram

BIO

Chris helps people build a simpler, faster, more resilient web.

Early in his career, he felt like he couldn’t get anything done. Since then, he’s discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that let him turn his ADHD into a superpower. His ADHD tips newsletter is read by hundreds of developers each weekday.

He creates courses and workshops, publishes several daily newsletters, speaks at events, and has advised and written code for organizations like NASA, Apple, Harvard Business School, Chobani, and Adidas.

Chris loves pirates, puppies, and Pixar movies, and lives near horse farms in rural Massachusetts.

BOOK A STRATEGY CALL WITH ROCHELLE

RESOURCES FOR SOLOISTS

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The Authority Code: How to Position, Monetize and Sell Your Expertise: equal parts bible, blueprint and bushido. How to think like, become—and remain—an authority.

TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – 00:20
Chris Ferdinandi: I also feel very positive about my ADHD. Much in the same way on your episode, the phrase like ruthless self-acceptance or there was something along those lines kept coming up. Yes. And I believe that with my whole being, right? That I am great the way I am and that a lot of my challenges are just being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world. Yeah.

00:25 – 00:38
Rochelle Moulton: Hello, hello. Welcome to the Soloist Life podcast, where we’re all about turning your expertise into wealth and impact. I’m Rchelle Moulton, and today I’m so happy to welcome soloist Chris Ferdinandi to the show.

00:38 – 00:42
Chris Ferdinandi: Rochelle, thank you so much for having me. It’s really great to be here.

00:42 – 01:25
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I’m excited about this, Chris. So Chris helps people build a simpler, faster, more resilient web. Early in his career, he felt like he couldn’t get anything done. Since then, he’s discovered a bunch of systems and strategies that let him turn his ADHD into a superpower. His ADHD tips newsletter is read by hundreds of developers each weekday. He creates courses and workshops, publishes several daily newsletters, speaks at events, and has advised and written code for organizations like NASA, Apple, Harvard Business School, Chobani, and Adidas. Chris loves pirates, puppies, and Pixar movies, and lives near horse farms

01:25 – 01:27
Rochelle Moulton: in rural Massachusetts. Chris, welcome.

01:27 – 01:34
Chris Ferdinandi: Rochelle, thank you so much for having me. And can you tell that I’m a big fan of Jonathan Stark given the multiple daily newsletters.

01:36 – 01:42
Rochelle Moulton: I stopped for a second. Just the thought of doing multiple dailies just kind of makes me break out in a hive. But good

01:42 – 01:44
Chris Ferdinandi: on you. I know that’s your personal hell, but yeah.

01:45 – 02:10
Rochelle Moulton: Good on you. So I love how this interview happened. I mean, you responded to my just checking in email I send to newish subscribers and you had a lot to say. So many of your recent experiences were 100% relatable for soloists. So I had to ask you to come on the show and dish because I just know that your story will inspire a few people who are struggling.

02:10 – 02:12
Chris Ferdinandi: Awesome, yeah, I happy to be here.

02:12 – 02:22
Rochelle Moulton: So let’s start with how you got into your business initially. So you started as a side hustle, teaching developers to code about 10 years ago, is that right?

02:22 – 02:53
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so I am actually have a whole previous life as an HR pro taught myself to code became a developer. And a couple of years into that journey, realized that I at some point wanted to have my own my own business. I wanted to work for myself. And I know this came up in a recent episode you did on people with ADHD. So, and how they often tend to work for themselves because they have very low tolerance for the nonsense of corporate life. So I always knew that was something I wanted for myself, but I also

02:53 – 03:23
Chris Ferdinandi: didn’t want to just jump out there without any safety net. So I started by very slowly kind of building this side hustle, teaching people how to code. It was 1 of these things where it started off as like, you know, like beer or movie night money, and then turned into like, oh, I can get an extra nice Christmas gift this year, which then morphed into, oh, I can go on a vacation with this, which eventually became like, oh, wow, like we could, we could remodel something in our house or like buy like a little something like

03:23 – 03:55
Chris Ferdinandi: fancy. And then at some point, I want to say about 3, maybe 4 years ago, it hit the point where it was basically on par with my day job, just as a side hustle. And because I had all this money coming in and the day job, we had built up a really nice savings cushion. And despite being surprisingly risk averse for someone with ADHD, I decided to, as you describe it, hang up my shingle and try the soloist thing for a bit. So that’s kind of how I got to a roundish where I am now.

03:55 – 04:08
Rochelle Moulton: And 1 of the things that’s interesting, everybody has a different approach to this, is that you built up your savings first. And for you, it sounds like that crossover point was when you could make as much in your side hustle as you did in your day job.

04:08 – 04:38
Chris Ferdinandi: Yes, it’s 1 of those things where like given the house that we lived in and kind of the lifestyle we were used to, I absolutely could have done it sooner if we were willing to make some changes or some sacrifices, but I didn’t want to ask that of my family just because I didn’t want to work for the man anymore. So no judgment on people who do it differently or don’t, but like I love my Disney vacations. I did not want to give those up. That’s serious. I’m not just being sarcastic. I’m a Disney addict. So.

04:39 – 04:58
Rochelle Moulton: Got it. So I think what’s part of what’s interesting about that is that everybody has this different definition of risk and comfort level. And there’s no 1 right answer. I think it’s different for everybody. And it sounds like you figured out what would work for you and your family. Absolutely. So how long did it take you to hit your first $100, 000?

04:59 – 05:36
Chris Ferdinandi: So because the ADHD, I’m not great at record keeping, so I’m just ballparking here, it took about 6 or 7 years to hit that $100, 000 mark. And just for context here, my business model is entirely products. So this is not a service based business where I’m building websites for people and doing like advisory consulting and the kind of stuff that a lot of folks on your show often do. For me, this was nearly a hundred percent. I’m putting out courses on how to build websites and write code and built up a, like an email list

05:36 – 05:39
Chris Ferdinandi: of about 14, 000 folks that got me to that point.

05:39 – 06:00
Rochelle Moulton: And I don’t want to gloss over this because this is actually big because it would be easy to say, oh, it took 6 or 7 years. Well, it took 6 to 7 years as a side hustle selling products. And we all know that unless you’ve got products with a huge price tag, you need a big list to be able to get that. And it takes time to develop that list.

06:00 – 06:31
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah. So I started with like I had an old newsletter that had like 38 people on it that I sent out like maybe once a month. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Jonathan Stark. He used to be on this really great podcast. He was a business coach of mine for a little while, but he was on me all the time about publishing daily and I really resisted. And I attribute that more than literally anything else to the success of my business. I know it’s not for everybody, but the daily writing, I saw an instant

06:31 – 07:01
Chris Ferdinandi: growth in my business. I went from that stagnated 38 subscribers to 100, 400, 500. I hit a thousand in like 3 or 4 months and then it just kept growing from there. And it was the weirdest thing I really thought for sure no 1 is going to want to read that much from me. I’m never going to have that much to write about, but I’ve been doing a daily newsletter on code for 6 years now, maybe more, and I thought I would have quit long ago. I have no idea how I’ve kept it up for as

07:01 – 07:01
Chris Ferdinandi: long as

07:01 – 07:29
Rochelle Moulton: I have. Yeah, well, whether it’s daily or something else, but a regular habit and consistent output of publishing your writing, it makes you think. And it forces us, you know, after the first, what, 10, 20 things that you write? Like, you’ve got to dig a little deeper, right? Most of us can write 10 or 20 things without thinking too much. But when you do more than that, you really have to start to think deep and start to develop your point of view.

07:30 – 08:03
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, there’s this really nice flywheel effect that starts to happen where the more you publish, the more people start to respond back to you with questions, comments, ideas, which a lot of times, like I would, 1 of Jonathan’s other students used to call it turning sawdust into furniture. We’re like, I would write a response, take it, and then publish it as an article. So, like, the more you do it, the point now where my list of articles is longer than I could ever possibly write in my lifetime. The ideas just keep coming in, and the toughest

08:03 – 08:11
Chris Ferdinandi: part is figuring out which of them I want to write that day It gets bigger every year, which is the exact opposite problem of what I thought was gonna happen for me

08:11 – 08:22
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, well and I think that you also in that scenario You’re getting feedback Like you feel like you’re not sending this out to the ether, but to real people who have real responses.

08:23 – 08:47
Chris Ferdinandi: And regardless of your cadence, whether it’s daily, weekly, whatever, like the most important part is the feedback. I’m refining my thinking. I’m not just writing a whole course or a whole book in isolation. Most of my courses actually started off as articles that then interacted with real people, got real-time feedback, and got cleaned up in some form and eventually became courses.

08:47 – 08:58
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, this is a success story by any definition, especially because you were able to do this as a side hustle and with relatively low risk. But then came the reckoning.

08:58 – 09:33
Chris Ferdinandi: Yes, and that’s why we’re here. So the first year was awesome after I went fully solo. And then I hit kind of that dreaded $100, 000 plateau. So like I hit the $100, 000 mark, quit my day job. And I was just really enjoying being able to do just the tech education stuff full time and not not have to deal with all the corporate stuff. But then despite it had grown like 50%, 25% year over year, every year since I started, but then things started to like suddenly it wasn’t growing quite as much. That first year

09:33 – 10:05
Chris Ferdinandi: didn’t grow with the similar, I want to say exponential, but like that similar kind of hockey stick-ish growth that I had been experiencing. Still grew a little, not as much as I had hoped, but this was with me working on it full time. I’m like, wow, how is this possibly doing better as a side hustle in a full time? That doesn’t make sense. And then the following year, my sales started to decline rapidly, like not just not grow, but trend very strongly in the wrong direction. And this was like the panic moment for me, because now

10:05 – 10:39
Chris Ferdinandi: I’m, this is my only job. I don’t have, it’s not a side hustle anymore. And I went from having a second full-time income to now like my sales are 2 thirds, half of what they had been the year before, I reached out to a bunch of my other tech educator friends to try to figure out like, is it something I did or are other people seeing this? And nearly universally, I was hearing similar things from everybody else I know in this space, regardless of the programming language they focused on or who their specific audience was. Anybody

10:39 – 11:14
Chris Ferdinandi: who sold courses on learning code was seeing the same thing. And so there’s been a lot of speculation amongst my fellow tech educators about whether it was the economy, you know, kind of all the layoffs that were happening in tech more generally. So people have less disposable income, corporations aren’t spending money on like education for their employees anymore. If it was more people leaning on AI instead of courses, I know that’s been kind of a frequent topic on this show. If it was something else, like there’s so much great content on places like YouTube and in

11:14 – 11:24
Chris Ferdinandi: blog articles for free now, like do people not feel like they needed courses anymore? My speculation is it’s probably some combination of all 3 of those things. But nonetheless, my business was in a freefall.

11:24 – 11:26
Rochelle Moulton: What year was this, Chris?

11:26 – 11:53
Chris Ferdinandi: It started not this year, last year. So this would have been around like February 2023 is when okay, panic for me started to really sink in. Where like, hey, I had this great savings account and it’s getting smaller instead of getting bigger, which is what I’d wanted to have. I knew we had some like I had to ramp up some more growth to stop that from happening. But now it’s starting to like, not just take a little bit out here and there, but like starting to go in the wrong direction. That was my panic moment. That

11:53 – 11:55
Chris Ferdinandi: was like, all right, I need to, I need to reassess.

11:56 – 12:08
Rochelle Moulton: And you, you stated you’re risk averse or, or at least you’re, you’re not the most risky guy. So having money come out of the bank account without seeing more come in has got to be that deer in the headlights moment.

12:09 – 12:42
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, I did not love that. And my other thing that I was really like kind of cognizant of was Running a business and feeling desperate is kind of a bad place to be because it causes you to make dumb decisions, right? You make drastic decisions. ADHD folks in general have kind of this, let me just blow it all up and start over kind of impulse that you have to fight on a regular basis to begin with. And like doing that with a business that is your primary income because you’re panicked about how it’s going can be

12:42 – 13:02
Chris Ferdinandi: catastrophic. So I was really, really aware that I shouldn’t try to do too much too fast. And so I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how I could salvage the business I already had. We can talk about some things I tried if you want. None of them worked. So it’s totally up to you, which Which kind of avenue we go down here?

13:02 – 13:13
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I’m just curious about something. I mean, like, did you immediately figure, well, I’ve got this valuable skill coding, I might as well sell that work again, you know, to like corporate audiences. Like, did you go there?

13:14 – 13:42
Chris Ferdinandi: Not eventually, because I didn’t want to do that. I had done that before I started my course business. I started off doing a little bit of freelancing and I did not have a great experience with it. It’s 1 of those like, this came up on the ADHD episode that you did, but like the kind of like know yourself and how you work best. Like for me, that kind of work is not my genius zone. It’s my excellent zone, but it’s not my genius zone. And I know that’s a really dangerous trap. Like I didn’t want to

13:42 – 14:01
Chris Ferdinandi: fall into, oh, I could do this really, really well, but it’s not where I thrive. That eventually became what I did because I need to pay a mortgage, I need to put food on the table, and that does pay the bills, but I view it as a temporary transition into the next thing.

14:05 – 14:07
Rochelle Moulton: Well, I love when in a private note you sent me, you said that you’re too feral to go back to working

14:07 – 14:08
Chris Ferdinandi: for the man.

14:09 – 14:20
Rochelle Moulton: That immediately struck all kinds of cords. Yeah. So you were, shall we say, highly motivated to find something else versus continuing to code. So what did you do first?

14:20 – 14:42
Chris Ferdinandi: Where’d you start? Yeah. So within the existing business, I ended up basically like, I have an entirely different like platform and product now. The old tech education business is still there. I continue to run it, but it’s now like, basically I have another side hustle that I’m trying to build up into my full-time thing. So do you want me to focus on what I tried with the coding business first or what the new thing is at a bank?

14:42 – 14:52
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, let’s start with the coding business because I think this is what a lot of people get stuck in. Like something happens like it did with you and they just don’t know where to start. So I think it’d be helpful.

14:53 – 15:16
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so for that 1, my primary audience for my tech education business was individuals. So like I know there’s a lot of folks who focus on selling to companies, like I will teach all your developers. Reuven Lerner immediately comes to mind. My friend over in the UK taught Mato, who does that with great success. But I am not great at B2B sales. It is just not my strong suit by any stretch.

15:16 – 15:17
Rochelle Moulton: Gotcha.

15:17 – 15:47
Chris Ferdinandi: So I knew I didn’t want to do that, but I initially explored it because I’m like, all right, these folks all seem to be doing a lot better right now than I am. Let me kind of go down that path. That went nowhere. I also explored, like, oh, could I do advertising? I looked into that and decided it was, it requires a level of trial and error that I just didn’t want to throw money at. Like, it’s an expertise in and of itself. And 1 that I didn’t really want to cultivate. Like, I just don’t, It’s

15:47 – 15:56
Chris Ferdinandi: not my jam. And I probably could have hired someone but I was feeling particularly like spending money averse at that particular phase. So I didn’t want to do that either.

15:56 – 15:56
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah,

15:56 – 16:31
Chris Ferdinandi: I started exploring, Like instead of just the newsletter, what are some other media channels that I can reach people on? So I started making videos on YouTube. Jonathan, you and Jonathan have talked about this before, like I hate making videos. People love it. Like the young developers just love learning by video. I hate making them. I did it and I got a bit of an audience there. I didn’t see it translate into core sales the way I had hoped it would. So I really slowed on doing that. 1 other thing I tried to do was I

16:31 – 17:02
Chris Ferdinandi: had all of my courses were like stand-alone kind of offerings, right? So you buy once, own forever. Half of them were evergreen. The other half were cohort based, similar to the kind of things that Jonathan does with like the pricing seminar and stuff. Seth Godin has some, you know, some things like that where you sign up and you go through with a cohort. Those had been my biggest money makers historically and they were also the ones that took the biggest dive. So I tried turning those into evergreen courses to see if maybe people were like, not

17:02 – 17:33
Chris Ferdinandi: buying it because they wanted it right away and it wasn’t available when they wanted it, so they just went to something else. So I just, I opened that up into Evergreen. I saw no growth in sales there. And then because all of my stuff was standalone one-time sales, I was constantly chasing new customers. And so I started kind of contemplating this idea of, okay, what if I turned it into like a subscription learning platform where you get access to everything. And we also do like a every other week kind of coaching thing where you can jump

17:33 – 18:02
Chris Ferdinandi: on a call and talk with me and a bunch of other folks about whatever you’re going through. My biggest fear with that was with subscription things, you tend to need to price them a lot lower than you would a standalone thing. And you’re really banking on people sticking with them for a long period of time. So I knew there was a possibility that I could completely cannibalize what remaining sales I had and end up worse than I was beforehand. But I tried that anyways, and that’s kind of what happened at first. And then it ended up

18:02 – 18:25
Chris Ferdinandi: growing back into a place where it’s now about equal to what my sales had been when they were at their like decline point, but I don’t have to try to sell them anymore. Like I just get renewing subscription revenue from them. So I’m, it’s, I’ve been no better or worse of a spot than I was before, but I don’t have to market it as much anymore. And that’s kind of nice.

18:25 – 18:46
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s, that’s what struck me is that if you’ve got the big list and they’re buying it, it’s much more of an ongoing, non-high-touch offering. But would it rollercoaster ride to think about potentially cannibalizing your source of income as it’s declining and wondering how that experiment

18:46 – 19:18
Chris Ferdinandi: is going to go. It was a last ditch effort, not going to lie. It was 1 of those, like, I’ve tried everything else, nothing else seems to be working, let me do this. That still obviously was not enough revenue for me. So the last thing I did was I’d seen a handful of folks experimenting with the idea of a like a subscriptiony kind of developer like it almost like a fractional CTO but as a developer kind of offering with different programming languages and I decided to give that a shot that worked really well for me again

19:18 – 19:41
Chris Ferdinandi: it’s my excellence zone not my genius zone So I don’t want it to be a forever thing. But that bridged the gap between where I had been and where I ended up when everything started to go in the wrong direction. So that was my stopgap measure that actually finally worked. Not what I want to be doing in the long run, but it got me at least, okay, the ship isn’t taking on water anymore. We’ve plugged those holes.

19:42 – 19:46
Rochelle Moulton: Did you see that as a B2B sale? CTO usually makes me think of B2B.

19:46 – 20:15
Chris Ferdinandi: Kind of sort of. Yes. And I’m not great at that. Most of the folks that end up coming to me are either like, not necessarily soloists, but almost right. So it’s like a 2 or 3 person organization that needs an extra set of hands or, you know, like a startup that’s just looking, they don’t have the expertise in house and they just want someone who can like pop in for a few months and then bail, but they don’t want to go like, we hire a contractor. I’m technically, I am a contractor, but like It’s a little

20:15 – 20:44
Chris Ferdinandi: bit different than that. And because it’s a productized offering, like you get these things at this price, it takes all of the like back and forth, putting together a proposal, like that all just goes away. They tell me what they’re looking, like we most, I think I only had 1 person actually just buy it, sight unseen, or without talking to me first. But usually I have a quick half hour call. People tell me about their project. I say, yes, that’s in my wheelhouse. They ask a couple of clarifying questions about how my service works. And then

20:44 – 20:53
Chris Ferdinandi: they sign up for this, it recurs every month until you cancel it kind of thing and we start working together That that took the sales process out of the picture for me, which is why I liked it so much

20:53 – 21:02
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. It feels like you know, if your audience has small enough organizations It’s like a hybrid between B2B and B2C.

21:02 – 21:18
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, okay So this was the point where I was like, all right, the ship isn’t leaking anymore, but it’s also not really seaworthy anymore. So I need to figure out, sorry for all the nautical references, I love pirates and it’s just, they come very naturally to me.

21:18 – 21:20
Rochelle Moulton: I’m feeling I’m waiting for the puppies, you know

21:20 – 21:50
Chris Ferdinandi: hazard is a hazard of being like you didn’t hear him barking a few minutes ago. Yeah, he’s he’s downstairs being himself. But I at that point was like, okay, I need to figure out a different business because like I’m not going to blow this 1 up. It’s income. That’s good. But basically I had 2 choices. I could either just keep it in limp mode and hope that at some point whatever caused it to end up like this changes and things turn back around or I could find something else. And so this was, I had a lot

21:50 – 22:19
Chris Ferdinandi: of conversations with fellow entrepreneurs, with folks like Jonathan. I actually emailed you a few months back to ask you about listening tours because that was a big part of the process for me. Reaching out to basically I did like the throw spaghetti at a wall kind of thing where I picked a few different markets that I might want to kind of dive into and did listening tours with a bunch of them to try to figure out like this might work for me this might not work for me and kind of see eventually where I might end

22:19 – 22:23
Chris Ferdinandi: up. So I can talk about that process if you’d like. It was painful. I did not love it.

22:23 – 22:32
Rochelle Moulton: But yeah, I’m thinking the guy who says he doesn’t like to market might have a little trouble with the listening tours. But yeah, I think it’d be helpful. What did you learn from those listening tours?

22:33 – 23:02
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, so the biggest listening tour I did was with animal rescue organizations. So I, my biggest success as a web developer was actually with the animal rescue org that we adopted our last 2 puppies from when I first connected with them really early in my career. They were doing this awesome work and they had a website that looked really dated and super unprofessional. And I was like, hey, I can just fix this up for you for free if you want. Like I’m looking to get more experience anyways. This would be really helpful for both of us.

23:02 – 23:33
Chris Ferdinandi: And I did, and their donation revenue ended up doubling in a year. And I was like, wow, that is, that’s awesome. Okay, and then it continued to grow after that by quite a bit. I’ve always had that in the back of my head, and I had kind of put it off because nonprofit space, like my brain was like, you can’t really make money in nonprofit. And I would feel guilty if I did. But new 10 years later, me was like, let me give this another try. So I did a whole bunch of informational interviews with folks

23:33 – 24:04
Chris Ferdinandi: listening to her. There was a few learning things for me. The first was it was really hard to set them up. I would send a lot of emails. I had contacts in the space. A lot of them were with smaller organizations who didn’t have the kind of budgets that my target audience would. So the kind of problems they would have would be different than the audience I wanted. So I went on places like Charity Navigator and looked up animal rescue organizations within that economic range and started cold emailing them. And that went nowhere. I got no

24:04 – 24:34
Chris Ferdinandi: responses back, except for 1, who then didn’t show for 2 scheduled interviews, and I just let that 1 go. What did end up working was starting a podcast, right? I reached out, hey, I’m starting an animal rescue podcast. I’d love to talk to you about your organization. And then I asked them all the same questions I would have asked in the informational interview, except we recorded it. And I learned a fair bit from those. The biggest thing that really kind of shook out of it was that this was not going to be a great fit for

24:34 – 25:06
Chris Ferdinandi: me. So like the big thing that I kept finding with this specific audience was that their needs and my skill set, I shouldn’t say their needs and my skill set didn’t line up. Like, many of them had bad websites that could really use some work. But what they valued in my skill set didn’t line up particularly well. And I often hear that TBOA, you and Jonathan used to often talk about like, if you have the audience, but you don’t have the skills they need, you can learn those skills. I didn’t want to, right? The things they

25:06 – 25:20
Chris Ferdinandi: needed were not things I was particularly interested in. And just the difficulty of connecting with them made me feel like marketing was going to be a real slog. Even though I still believe in my heart, I could do really great work for them. It’s just that that product market fit was just not there.

25:20 – 25:29
Rochelle Moulton: Well, you use the word value. I mean, that’s the thing. They have to value what you want to offer. And if that doesn’t work, there is no match.

25:29 – 26:02
Chris Ferdinandi: Right. Even if I know I could move key metrics they care about forward, it was going to be a battle. And I didn’t want to… Playing on hard mode is just not my thing at this point in my life. I’d rather play on easy mode. So 1 of the other side hustle things that I experimented with was I have ADHD, I’m a developer, it can be hard. But I also feel very positive about my ADHD. Much in the same way on your episode the phrase like ruthless self-acceptance or there was something along those lines kept coming

26:02 – 26:02
Chris Ferdinandi: up.

26:02 – 26:03
Rochelle Moulton: Yes.

26:03 – 26:34
Chris Ferdinandi: And I believe that with my whole being, right? That I am great the way I am and that a lot of my challenges are just being neurodiverse in a neurotypical world. So I started writing about my challenges, some of the things I’ve done with them, how I overcame them, and it took off way more than I expected it to. So I very quickly grew an email list from 0 to, it’s about 830, 840 at the time that we’re recording this, and I’ve been writing it for about 2 months. Now, I have an unfair advantage here because

26:34 – 27:02
Chris Ferdinandi: my target audience is developers with ADHD, and I used to teach developers, teach developers code. So I cross-marketed to my existing audience and siphoned a bunch of them into this new thing. So I had like a real, real head start on this business. But there was a couple of times I actually shared like, you know, here are the different things I’m considering, blah, blah, blah. And I got this email 1 day from this guy who was like, let me make this easy for you. Your future business will be ADHD for developers. You are helping people more

27:02 – 27:17
Chris Ferdinandi: than you realize, you need to double down on this.” And I was like, oh, that is the smack in the face I needed to start doing this. I’m so grateful that he sent that email because it was like, I felt like I was shouting into the void. And then I got that like that reassurance and I was like, okay, cool, let’s do this.

27:18 – 27:43
Rochelle Moulton: This guy deserves a dinner. I mean, this guy deserves a dinner. Well, and the other thing I heard you say that caught me was unfair advantage. And there’s no unfair advantage. I mean, this is your audience. These are people you’ve developed and you’ve nurtured. And you’re using all of your talents, right? And the way that you’re wired in service to your audience. So…

27:43 – 27:59
Chris Ferdinandi: I don’t feel bad about it. I’m using it in the Philip Morgan context of like, it’s an area where if someone else were to come in and try to do the same thing, I have a head start because of 10 years of groundwork I’ve already laid. Yes. So I don’t really think it’s unfair, it’s just, I have a head start.

27:59 – 28:25
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, head start. And I think 1 of the things that happens is, to all of us, is that we don’t see the things where we have the head start, because the things that come naturally and easily to us, a lot of times we think, oh, somebody’s not going to pay for that. Everybody does that. Everybody knows how to do that. Well, they don’t. We all have our superpowers, the things that we’re really, really good at and that we love to do for the right kinds of people.

28:25 – 28:57
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, absolutely. And so the kind of the impetus for all of this was when I talked about some of this in another Slack I’m in, 1 of the people there shared that my options were to basically sell different stuff to my existing audience, sell the same stuff to a different audience, or use the skills I have making courses for different type of content in an adjacent niche. And I experimented with all 3. I eventually ended up in that last thing where I already have all of the systems in place to make courses, to market courses, to

28:57 – 29:32
Chris Ferdinandi: distribute. I’ve got all that in place already. It’s different content for a slightly different but adjacent audience. So I have a huge running start there in terms of numbers. So I’ve been doing the newsletter for the ADHD folks. I wasn’t sure how I was actually going to turn it into money because or build a business around it, because I can talk about code all day long, but like the squishier productivity space kind of stuff felt really like awkward and uncomfortable to me because it’s so like, I’ve been doing productivity stuff for myself for years, but like

29:32 – 30:02
Chris Ferdinandi: it’s, it’s a weird thing. Like it was uncomfortable for me to teach because I’ve never done it, but I decided to pilot a course just to see what would happen. Right. So it was a course on getting stuff done with ADHD and it was literally just me documenting my own system for getting things done. Because a lot of productivity advice just doesn’t work for neurodiverse folks. It’s built for neurotypicals and it doesn’t work for my fellow ADHD brethren. And so I pre-sold that before I built it. I always do that with my courses just to see

30:02 – 30:41
Chris Ferdinandi: if they’re gonna stick before I like put in the work Mm-hmm. So at the time I had a 640 person email list and I did $7, 000 in sales on that pre-sold course at 40% off, versus I was averaging like 2, $3, 000 a month on my more recent course offerings for tech education to a list of 14, 000. So Just the striking difference in audience size and income level was enough to make me like, yeah, sit up a little bit straighter and be like, okay, this is the thing. This is, I can, I can really

30:41 – 30:57
Chris Ferdinandi: double down on this now? So this is where I am now. I’m relatively new in this transition. I still have my other business that is a big majority of my income and all that, but most of my time and energy is focused on growing out this new side hustle as quickly as I can.

30:57 – 31:11
Rochelle Moulton: I want to go back over the numbers because I want people to make sure that you heard this. So we’re talking about a list of 14, 000 people developed thoughtfully over 10 years, and you’re making about $2, 000 from selling a product.

31:11 – 31:15
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, create a new course, launch it, $2, 000, $3, 000, yeah.

31:15 – 31:36
Rochelle Moulton: Right. Versus a list of 640 people. I mean, you do the math of what percentage that is of 14, 000 and you’re selling, you know, 3 times as much, more than 3 times as much. Yes. And The thing is, when you’re doing this and you see that result, it kind of feels like magic, doesn’t it, when it

31:36 – 32:03
Chris Ferdinandi: happens? Yes. It was like a big, it was like a big aha moment for me. This clicked, right? I finally like figured out the thing. I feel good. Now, I’m hoping I can replicate it with like future offerings I’m still trying to figure out what the product ladder ends up looking like and I know that’s the kind of thing you build 1 Step at a time, but that’s the space I’m in now. So I’m working on I’m working on my next course I have an idea of what the 1 after that is going to be. And

32:03 – 32:18
Chris Ferdinandi: I have been having a lot of additional listening tours or just conversations with folks to try to figure out what this audience’s biggest challenges are and how they overlap with the things I’m good at and where there might be a good fit for future like value add there.

32:18 – 32:35
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. What happens when you get through this, you get to this realization, your aha, and then you start to experiment with that. It’s like a different level of experimentation. Because I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it feels like you’re feeling hope again.

32:35 – 33:07
Chris Ferdinandi: Yes, absolutely now there have definitely been even within this niche some things I’ve tried that just didn’t didn’t fit so like I I Initially went to like oh cool. Alright, So I’m going to spin up like a group coaching community kind of thing because I can do that really quickly and have some recurring revenue. So let’s do that. And I did a Baylor pilot with that. And it was like herding cats because you had a bunch of ADHD people on a call together, and I didn’t know what the structure of it should be. So it was

33:07 – 33:38
Chris Ferdinandi: just kind of like a, we were all over the place and it felt very unstructured and unproductive. I learned a ton. I really started to dig into like the areas where I felt very comfortable and competent giving assistance and advice in areas where I felt wildly out of depth. So I very quickly learned that like life coach style ADHD advice, I do not feel comfortable with. But career coaching style ADHD advice I could talk for days about Took a month or 2 of experimenting to figure out that’s more of my sweet spot. And if I really

33:38 – 33:46
Chris Ferdinandi: 0 in on that, I’m operating in my genius zone. Yeah. That was, even though it didn’t go anywhere, it was a really important learning process for me.

33:46 – 34:01
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah, and I love your use of the word genius zone because it does feel different when you have this zone of excellence, but you still feel like something’s missing. And then when you find it, that’s usually the genius zone, your genius zone, because it’s different for everyone.

34:02 – 34:30
Chris Ferdinandi: I keep using it because the literal instant I heard you use it on an old episode of TVOA, The Business of Authority, I instantly knew what you meant because I had experienced it at some point in my life. And it was like this big like, aha moment for me. It was, oh, that’s what I need. I need to be in my genius zone, not this other stuff. That episode that you did on that really clicked for me. So I appreciate you teaching me that term because it’s been a really important 1 for me as I go

34:30 – 34:30
Chris Ferdinandi: through this journey.

34:31 – 35:05
Rochelle Moulton: Well, you’re welcome. I love the concept. So Chris, I mean, you’re at this point, I mean, you’ve been through the messy middle. We think you’re coming out at the other end, certainly with a lot of hope and a lot of really good ideas that have been tested and some are working. What would you tell other soloists who are in the midst of this kind of scenario where your revenue’s nose diving? I mean, I’m not talking about plateauing. I’m talking about the scary kind of nose diving. You’re not sure why you need to pivot. Like, what would

35:05 – 35:07
Rochelle Moulton: you tell other soloists in that space?

35:08 – 35:39
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah. So at first I just, I want to recognize how scary it is because I’ve, I’ve been there. I guess the 2 biggest things, right, are don’t tank your existing business, right? Even though it’s, it’s going in the wrong direction. If you’ve got things that are currently still making money like resist the urge to just throw them out entirely because they’re your there you’re like your safety nets right like you know you don’t want to you don’t know about those mess with those too bad but also it’s a really good time to experiment because you have

35:39 – 36:12
Chris Ferdinandi: a lot less to lose. It feels like you have more to lose because everything’s in free fall, but you’re not. It’s 1 of those, like, what was working up to this point isn’t anymore and no amount of like trying to make it work again is going to work. Something has changed. It’s usually something external. So it’s a really good time to start experimenting with other options like finding new needs that like, it could just be that the audience you already have, their needs have changed because something bigger than you has changed, new technology, right? Things that

36:12 – 36:40
Chris Ferdinandi: they used to really, AI is a really good example. I’m very AI antagonistic, I don’t like it, but I’m 1 of those people that would be tearing apart the plow machines in the 1800s. But I can see how a lot of things are gonna be changed by that. And so it might be time for you to find new things that they struggle with and help them there. Or maybe the exact skills you have now could serve a different niche and you don’t really have to change much about what you do. You just need to connect with

36:40 – 37:15
Chris Ferdinandi: different types of people. Unfortunately for me, neither of those worked and you know, similar skills for a completely like different topic ended up being my thing. But it’s a really good time to try new things. It’s really tough to resist the urge to panic, but it’s also really important that you don’t Be urgent, but don’t panic. Because once you panic, you stop thinking clearly, and it becomes really, really tough to make good or do, like, your best creative work, right? If you’re in a state of anxiety, you can’t enter that genius zone even for things that

37:15 – 37:18
Chris Ferdinandi: you’re particularly good at. Like, your brain is just a mess.

37:18 – 37:44
Rochelle Moulton: You know, it seems counterintuitive, but it is a good time to find those things that are uniquely you that you haven’t been able to express. Because if revenue hadn’t changed, you might still be happily doing the stuff you were doing before without this new edition. So there is an opening in the dark, but that’s why I really wanted you to come on and talk about your experience, because I think this is so helpful to people in the midst of the struggle.

37:45 – 37:54
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you bringing me on the show. It was really great to chat with you. I’ve gotten so much from so many other guests who have been on the show. So I’m delighted to be here.

37:54 – 38:06
Rochelle Moulton: Well, then, you know, there’s still 1 question I have to ask you. Absolutely. Which is if you could go back to who you were when you first started your business way back when. What’s the 1 thing you’d advise him to do?

38:07 – 38:29
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, there’s a lot of them. For me, they’re 2 big things. 1 of them would have been start building an email list way sooner and niche down. Like I was so hesitant to pick a more narrow audience for years and it really like, it delayed the growth of my business by quite a bit.

38:29 – 38:38
Rochelle Moulton: It’s interesting because I was placing my bet to myself on whether you would say that you would have gone full time on your side hustle sooner.

38:39 – 39:16
Chris Ferdinandi: Oh, no, probably not. If anything, I would have, I think I left at the right time. For me, I think 1 of the other big learning lessons here was around the fickle nature of tech. So I wasn’t in tech during the last dot com boom or bust, I guess I should say the last bubble burst. And I didn’t have a good sense for how quickly things can go from like feast to famine. And I probably would have been a little less, a little less confident that my business would continue to grow the way it had been

39:16 – 39:26
Chris Ferdinandi: up to this point in the future, if I had maybe had that kind of past experience. So that’s another thing, that’s a good point, I actually, it’s not the 1 you were making, but.

39:26 – 39:33
Rochelle Moulton: No, yeah, I was just curious. And sometimes I make these bets with myself internally, like I wonder if they’re gonna say this.

39:33 – 39:59
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah, no, and it’s not that I would’ve stayed in my day job longer, but I certainly would have maybe made some different assumptions about kind of income and the way that was going to play out a little bit differently. 1 of the first things we did was buy a camper and take a 6 week road trip down to Florida and back, which was awesome and I would definitely do again. But there’s a part of me that wonders like, oh, should we have just rented instead of purchased? And the answer is no, by the way, we should

39:59 – 40:05
Chris Ferdinandi: definitely, but You know, there’s always those little like, you know, money decisions, things like that.

40:05 – 40:34
Rochelle Moulton: Yeah. At some point, you just have to say, you know what, it’s done. Going to move on to the next decision. I’m not going to worry about what I did in the past, but I can’t just can’t help myself asking those questions because so many people have such good insight after they’ve been, you know, through a cycle or 2 because You know nobody almost nobody just gets into this and it kind of stays the same and just a steady upward trajectory most people have these kinds of roller coaster rides at some point.

40:35 – 40:58
Chris Ferdinandi: Yeah. I saw someone on social media the other day talking about their biggest learning from working in tech was that you should bank as much money as you possibly can during the boom times because the bust times are really, really unpredictable in this industry, and they can last just a few months, or they can last years, and you never know which 1 it’s going to be. I feel that in my heart. I’m new enough to tech that I didn’t know that ahead of time, and now I do.

40:58 – 41:25
Rochelle Moulton: Now you know. And we can apply that data to soloists generally as well. Absolutely. So Chris, I just want to thank you so much for, first of all, sharing it all with me in that initial email and then agreeing to come and share the laundry out on the clothesline. It’s not dirty laundry. It’s laundry out on the clothesline with a group of people that I think will really get value out of it. So thank you.

41:25 – 41:27
Chris Ferdinandi: You’re very welcome. Thank you so much for

41:27 – 41:43
Rochelle Moulton: having me. So as we wrap up this episode, If you haven’t joined my email list yet, now is the time. Your soloist business and your future self will thank you. The link is in the show notes. That’s it for this episode. Please join us next time for the soloist life. Bye bye.