A year of the podcast - my four biggest business lessons from this year

So let's go back to a year ago.

I was actually in a really uncomfortable place [laughs] in my business.

I had pivoted my business around, like, six months earlier, and I've told this story in the podcast before, but I had gone from working with all kinds of different small business owners.

I had a lot of product sellers in my audience, a lot of beginner business owners, to really focusing on service providers, coaches, and experts.

And while I knew that that was the right move for me, my online presence had not caught up yet at all.

And what that looked like in practice was even though I had over 10,000 followers on Instagram at that point, so many of those people were, like, my, my new offers were not relevant for them.

And it's not that I didn't love working with them, but I just didn't have the offers to support them anymore.

And I shared a couple of episodes ago that I had deleted 90% of my email list.

I talked about that in episode 50.

So I went from go, [laughs] so I went from 3,000 subscribers to 300, and because I had this misalignment in my audience, my engagement was down, my reach was down.

I had a load of, like, ghost followers basically who had maybe been following me for years, but they weren't engaging because nothing I was sharing was, was relevant for them anymore.

And the thing that w- really felt the hardest was I felt really disconnected.

Like, I had one foot still in my pre-pivot era, and I was still getting loads of inquiries for the work that I used to do, and then I had this one foot in this new phase, and it really felt like, the best way I can describe it is just, it just felt like I was trying to make fetch happen and no one cared.

[laughs] Like, it really felt like, uh, people only wanted to learn, like, Pinterest from me, for example, 'cause that was one of the things I used to do, probably the thing that I was most known for.

Like, everyone wanted that from me, and no one seemed to want what I was doing now, and it just felt like the audience wasn't quite there for what I wanted to build.

So practically, a big thing that I knew I was missing was long-form content, and I had co-hosted a podcast with my pal Ellie for years before that, and maybe some of you might have listened to that podcast.

I absolutely loved that, and I'd seen firsthand, like, how much of a massive difference it makes in building trust and closeness with an audience.

And short-form content, as much as I love it, it just doesn't give you the space to really explore ideas, and I knew that a massive gap in my content ecosystem at the time was trust-building.

So that was part of the reason why I started this podcast at that time.

So that's the context.

That's where I was when I started this podcast.

[laughs] So it was a pretty low point, I would say, in my business.

It had been a bit of a rough ride in the first half of last year.