#245: "It's working"

Finding fuel that keeps you going when starting something new.

I bumped into someone at a new event, he told me he’d found out about it because of my work. “It’s working” he said to me.

“I do feel a bit more informed you know”

“Reading The Knot makes me proud to be from Stoke”

This is my fuel. When you’re starting something new, if it’s not money, you need to find your fuel so you don’t burn out. 

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Starting stuff is hard. 

A lot of the time you feel like you’re shouting into a void, hearing nothing back, just your own voice echoing. 

You know what you’re doing and why. Sometimes with so much passion that it hurts. 

Yet you wonder if other people do. Am I deluded? Am I wasting my time? Is what I’m doing making a difference?

If you’re making money it helps, it’s an exchange, a sign of value. 

That’s why getting to revenue fast helps in your art, business or craft - it’s validation that what you are working on is valuable to someone. 

Not all creations can be monetised straight away though. If you’re nurturing a community, product or audience then introducing money straight away can be damaging. Or, you have a bigger vision and there are bigger points to prove.

When starting businesses previously I wanted to get to revenue very quickly to prove to myself that I could make money.

In mental health and proactive mental health support it was important to me that I validated my assumption that people would invest in themselves and pay for coaching, or group coaching initially. 

Yet for my current venture, The Knot, which is news and media. I don’t feel like I need to prove that it’s worth money. The unknown for me is can I grow and cultivate a large audience? That’s my edge. 

Yet that leaves with me some subscriber numbers on a screen and not much else. 

Every like counts. Every open means something. 

The real gold though is in-person feedback. 

“Thank you”

“It’s working mate. Keep going”

“I ate out at this place the other night because of you!”

Seeing the expression on people’s faces. This is my fuel. More than money. More than followers. More than likes. Helping real people in the world. That’s what matters to me and this is what gives me energy.

Wherever you are on your entrepreneurial journey. You need fuel. In Sanctus I lost my fuel. I stopped connecting with the people we were serving. I stopped meeting customers. Our users were in anonymous coaching sessions and all I could do was read their feedback in typeform. 

I don’t know how The Knot will evolve and change. Yet I know that right now, pre-revenue, before any money changes hands - the energy is in the people and it’s in their eyes. That’s enough for me right now, enough fuel to keep my fire burning. 

“It’s working” is all I need to hear.

I’ve burned out a few times in my career already. Many different factors come into it. Sometimes the fire just burns out, the passion dissipates, we change and we betray what we once said we’d love forever. We lose our source and we literally run out of fuel. 

Sometimes we expend too much energy, there’s no discipline, no self-care and even if we feel passionate and purposeful it’s not enough to protect our bodies from saying “stop”.

I’ve experienced many different forms of burn out already and I know that in the early stages of a new project you can burn out and run out of steam when you don’t feel like what you are doing is worthwhile. 

Find your fuel.

“It’s working”

That’ll keep me going for another month.