- Big Cash Money
- Posts
- No one is paying attention, churn vs. growth quadrant, + more
No one is paying attention, churn vs. growth quadrant, + more
I don’t think there has been a single week in the last year when I haven’t told someone in my orbit about the spotlight effect - it feels so central to the struggles of professionals with multiple side hustles, and it comes up in so many of my conversations with members of DiscoLink Club.
I don’t think there has been a single week in the last year when I haven’t told someone in my orbit about the spotlight effect - it feels so central to the struggles of professionals with multiple side hustles, and it comes up in so many of my conversations with members of DiscoLink Club.
Officially, the spotlight effect is defined by psychologists as a cognitive bias that causes us to assume others pay greater attention to what we do, what we look like, and what we wear than they actually do.
The reality is: we’re all just walking around with spotlights on our own selves. You’re the main character in your own show, and no one else’s.
Most people don’t remember what we said, what we wore, what we did, or what we said we would do. Research proves it.
Depressing? Maybe.
Liberating? Absolutely.
This means you can experiment with nearly reckless abandon, and pivot all you want until you find what sticks and what lands. There’s truly no one sitting with a clipboard taking notes on what you said you would do a few months ago.
It also means you should absolutely post that tweet promoting your service at least 10x more than you think you should, and send at least 10x more emails promoting your new service. No one is reading every word of their inboxes for news from you. And no one is mad that this is your 3rd LinkedIn post about your new product. They’re busy with their own spotlights over their own lives.
So use the spotlight effect to your benefit.
Try, experiment, pivot, and assume no one is watching. Because they’re not.
And when you’re ready for them to be watching, know that you need to shout louder and harder and more often for them to notice, to cut through their own spotlights and land a spot in their show.
Just something to try on for size as a slight but powerful paradigm shift - let me know how it goes ❤️
— Irina, Saron, and the team behind DiscoLink
Hot off the press from DiscoLink 🪩
In case you missed last month’s AMA session with Cassidy on how to navigate getting paid for your side projects, it’s officially live on our DiscoLink Youtube channel!
Be sure to check it out here, and let us know what you think 🪩🧡
On Thursday, September 26 at 5 PM PT/2 PM ET/6 PM UTC, Nadia Odunayo will be diving into her playbook on picking and developing a good idea into a fully bootstrapped start-up.
Nadia Odunayo took her reading side project and turned it into The StoryGraph, a thriving, growing startup with almost 3M registered users. But perhaps more impressive is the fact that she did it fully bootstrapped, using her personal savings to fund her runway, and built it to be a profitable company. She’s learned a ton along the way about how to build fast, lean, and with a practical perspective on money.
And now, she wants to break down that process with you.
Join us for a journey of bootstrapping a startup idea. We’ll start with a basic app idea and we’ll go through the multi-step process that teaches you how to research and validate that idea, talk to users and gather real data, and synthesize and turn that information into features so you know exactly what to build.
In this workshop, we’ll cover:
Ideation
Research
Rubric for evaluating startup ideas
How to find users to talk to
How to conduct a helpful user interview
A script you can use when talking to users
Synthesis of user interviews
Turning your synthesis into features
The costs that come into play when bootstrapping
How to allocate your time, especially as a side project
and more
Nadia Odunayo is the founder of The StoryGraph, a book tracking app that reaches millions of people per month. She’s also a developer, speaker and avid reader herself.
This Masterclass is produced by DiscoLink and is free for members of DiscoLink Club.
Membership is free, apply today.
Don’t Miss Out
Our bookmarks from the week - good reads, listens, and general inspo from all around.
📲 How to get intentional + experimental with your marketing channels (& scale what works).
🧭 Client’s don’t care about code. Here’s what they’re truly paying for + how to utilize that.
🗺️ The pursuit of getting paid for your projects can be tough. Here’s how to navigate it.
🔋 SaaS product metrics that (actually) give you the insight you need – Churn vs growth.
Live from DiscoLink Club
DiscoLink Club is a community of professionals in tech who are building side hustles.
📆 Next Tuesday, Saron and Nadia are sitting down for an AMA on growing a bootstrapped business. Free and open to the public - RSVP here.
📫 Applications for new members to DiscoLink Club are open and admission is rolling. Apply.
🤩 DiscoLink Private Beta is ready for users - check out what we’re building and get a spot on the waitlist here.
Want to join DiscoLink Club? Membership is free and we review applications on a rolling basis. Apply here.
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