Money Is Not the First Goal of a Fulfilling Business

Chasing money made me and my business miserable. Here’s what worked instead.

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Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I’ve been running online businesses since 2010. I can confirm: it’s a rollercoaster.

Many successes and failures, often by chance (2020, anyone?). Now, I can see my mistakes clearly, like a hiker at the summit.

I always ask myself: what were the worst mistakes? How can I avoid them in the future?

At the top of this sad ranking is chasing money. When it became my North Star, it led me away from my values. And, ironically, earnings decreased.

Here’s how it happened. And how I made things better.

It started well

My first business started with fireworks. By the end of the first fiscal year, I even had to stop selling to remain in my tax bracket — Italy's heavy taxes make leaving the lowest bracket risky unless you double your revenue.

My business model was stupidly simple:

• share what I learned about photography with two SEO blog posts per week,

• turn readers into email subscribers,

• sell guides,

• earn affiliate commissions.

It was the dream: working from home, learning and teaching, growing fast, using my talents, talking about my passion.

Too good to be true. Why not shake things up a bit?

Self-discovery has its own will

After a few years, I got distracted. Or found a better passion.

Digital entrepreneurs’ stories mesmerized me. I was a digital entrepreneur, but most people in my country totally ignored this opportunity to take maximum control of their life.

I’ve always felt the call to be an evangelist. I feel the urge to share. (If you pictured an annoying advice giver, congrats: it’s me!)

There were no independent interview podcasts at the time in Italy (it was 2013), especially about digital entrepreneurs. So, an idea lingered in my mind for months, growing like a seed underground, until it just had to pop out. I wanted to launch my own interview podcast, in Italian.

I found another guy who already published a few episodes emulating a popular business podcast at the time. It was like meeting a fan of an obscure TV series you love.

Competing in our tiny market would have been silly. And after three years working alone, I was eager to share the adventure with a like-minded person. I became his co-founder.

Wrong expectations

I expected the same growth curve of my photography site. We were both excellent students. Together, we knew every marketing strategy. And our work ethic was unstoppable.

We did everything by the book:

• published regularly,

• created extremely valuable content,

• offered interesting lead magnets to entice email subscribers,

• launched products similar to what worked for our virtual mentors with similar audiences.

Our followers loved the podcast. Our clients left enthusiastic testimonials. But the numbers were disappointing. It was like pushing against rubber walls: no tactic brought enough growth.

Now I know the niche was simply not large enough. But it wasn’t clear then.

Other supposed competitors were making boatloads of money. What were they doing right? After a while, we realized the difference. They sold dreams (and they were not completely honest).

They offered the usual “blueprints to riches”. We knew those couldn’t work and refused to do the same.

Our down-to-earth advice was far less exciting, though. It capped our potential and we knew it. But we didn’t realize how low the cap was. We kept looking for new growth tactics and doubting ourselves.

Trends wreck you

One day, my business partner comes up with an idea out of the blue: “Let’s start talking about Messenger chatbots: they’re the new marketing frontier”.

In a frantic search for growth, he thought the trend could help. I've felt the same urge: when things stagnate, chasing innovation seems perfect but is often costly.

If you are a solopreneur, or a 2-men team, you rarely have the resources to steer so fast. And you can never distinguish a fad from a mainstay at the outset.

Had I been running the business alone, I would have simply ignored that trend, as many others before. But I was too afraid of conflict at the time. So, I simply said yes.

It was hard and unpleasant from the beginning, and it never improved. Crafting copy was hard because we couldn’t find a specific problem this technology was solving. The only conversion lever was novelty.

When you aren’t solving a problem, you don’t have a business. You’re just taking money from people.

This was the canary in our coal mine. But we ignored it. We were too committed. We were too desperate for revenue.

More than a year went down the drain. We revolutionized all our content and products, we sold courses and consultations. But our numbers didn’t skyrocket.

And guess what? It was a fad. No one is talking about Messenger chatbots now.

This U-turn pushed away many engaged followers, as I later came to know. And, worst of all, it was draining. I couldn’t care less about the topic. That time would have been better invested in many other “boring” ideas.

Is Facebook the root of all evil?

Messenger Bots proved too new, too nichy. So we did the opposite. Italian digital marketers and entrepreneurs just wanted the push-button strategy. They didn’t care about content or email marketing.

They wanted the golden goose:

• launch an ad campaign,

• inject money,

• earn more than you spend,

• repeat,

• become rich from your sofa.

We started running Facebook Ads together with chatbots. So, it seemed natural (and smart?) to sell Facebook Ads consulting and coaching.

Attracting clients with content is a generous act. You give freely and inspire reciprocity. And it perfectly matched my teaching and communication talents. Ads instead interrupt people. They try to force them to take your offer.

It was another totally misaligned experience. But I had the copywriting skills and the analytical skills to create and optimize campaigns. So I sacrificed, chasing earnings.

Self-doubt is the worst counsellor

After a while, it was evident that the quality of the subscribers collected through Facebook Ads was terrible. So we stopped wasting money. And we stopped consulting on that topic. We needed a new idea.

Comparing ourselves to our competitors and virtual mentors, my business partner said “we need to be more assertive. They have their own ideas and they spout them with confidence”.

Time for another overhaul. We spent days:

• developing new ideas out of thin air,

• revising copy,

• building new lead magnets,

• creating content around those ideas.

Still crickets. We were looking at the wrong competitors. They could just show off their 6-figure launches and Dubai mansions we didn’t have. And their confidence (arrogance?) attracted a kind of weak-minded follower we didn’t want.

Coming full circle

My photography site worked because it played on my strengths: I was teaching and helping with generosity, both in my content and my products, and inspiring reciprocity.

The second business started growing again when I finally started doing the same. I invested more time in our YouTube channel and chose topics interesting for a broader audience.

Now we have more monthly views, more monthly email subscribers, and even organic consulting requests. (Read this article for the details on how we resuscitated that business)

Business is a fine balancing act

Low earnings kill businesses. But money as the first priority does it, too:

• you lose sight of your audience’s needs,

• you lose sight of yourself,

• you usually don’t even make the money you want (especially in the long-term).

I didn’t want to hit publish on this article. Sharing these embarrassing blunders with you makes me want to hide forever in a comfy, anonymous, brainless job.

My laughable self-confidence led me there. I attributed my early success to just luck. I forgot about the endless stream of thank you messages and compliments I received on my tutorials. I forgot about the people buying my products only to reciprocate. I forgot about the photography schools asking me to use my material in their courses.

A business is an ultramarathon on a bumpy mountain road. You will fall many times. You’ll have the willpower to carry on only if it’s aligned with your purpose and your strengths. Creating formative content that helps people is perfectly aligned with my purpose and talents. Running Facebook Ads isn’t.

If you want to avoid at least some of my mistakes:

• Start experimenting. Learn tactics and strategies, test them, but don’t marry them until you see fit.

• Listen to yourself: how do they make you feel? Do you wake up eager to work on them? Do they make you grow?

• When you find something that works for you, turn to your audience: are they giving you positive feedback?

• Finally, think about money. Does the positive feedback turn into paying customers? Do earnings keep growing?

• If growth stalls, you are probably addressing a small market. Don’t chase shiny tactics. Find a way to broaden the market without sacrificing yourself.

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