Your Bootstrapping Questions (E)

0:00Last week, our episode about bootstrapping came out on Labor Day. And I challenge you to submit your questions, and you took me up on it. And we got five great ones, and we're going to answer them today. Salut, c 'est John, de Glasgow en Écosse, et vous écoutez un épisode spécial des archives d 'Akimbo.

0:23So many good questions from last week's episode. Thank you for taking the time to reach out. I'll try to answer each one in turn. Hi Seth, Jeremiah from Lincoln, Nebraska. You gave a few examples of bootstrappers and it seems like the general theme is people that want to orchestrate multiple things or others together in order to create a bigger organization or company. And I wonder about people who might consider themselves artists or makers or craftsmen. People that mostly just want to do their creative work in order to produce something and send it out into the world to provide value. Should these people consider themselves bootstrappers in the way that you've presented it?

1:07And if so, how do they fit into the context of the bootstrappers workshop? Thanks, Seth. This is something that we've been hearing again and again since the dawn of the internet, which is that we have a craft, We have a passion. There's a thing we make. And here, here's this wide open territory where we can finally get past the gallery owner, the retailer, the choke point that keeps us from having our work be found by someone who wants it. And so we end up with things like Etsy or eBay or even Udemy. Here, the thinking goes, Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Creator, come on in. Show us what you got. The world will find you and you can get back to work making what you make.

2:00This is why self-publishing on the Kindle seems so compelling because writers can go back to writing. But what is actually happening is that you need a publisher. You need a publisher, somebody who is going to do the hard work of helping you be found, of dancing with the potential customer, of treating that customer with respect and care, of earning permission, engaging with people who want to be engaged with, telling them a story that resonates with them, creating tension that moves them forward so they will raise their hand and engage with you. Now, that publisher might be a business with a fancy office in New York City.

2:48That publisher might be a gallery owner. That publisher might be somebody who hires you to do this work. But it could just as easily be you. Now, you might not want to be a publisher, but you need a publisher. Sure, you can get lucky and maybe self-publish The Martian or Fifty Shades, but that's unlikely. It's unlikely that you will be found at the level you deserve to be found because there are too many people, too many creators showing up in the long tail saying simply, here, this is the best I could do. I made this. Want one? Because the bazaar is too crowded. You will not be found more than your fair share on Etsy.

3:34You will not be found more than your fair share on Udemy. That something else has to happen for you to be able to do the work that you really want to do. And so what it means to be a bootstrapper is, yes, that you have a craft, a skill, a passion, a way of making change in the world, but also that you are committing to putting in the time and the energy and the resources to publish yourself, to add the business element to what you're doing. I remember when I was starting out as a book packager and book publishers would once in a while buy one of my projects. And I said to more than one of them, look, let's just skip all this.

4:18I write proposals. I shop them around. I sell them to the highest bidder. I make them, you publish them stuff. Why don't you just let me make things for you? I could make four times as many books if I didn't have to spend all my time finding the right partner for the right project. You'd save a lot of money. Everyone would come out ahead. But what they said to me, and they were honest and kind in their honesty, is we don't know how to do that. We know how to do what we know how to do, which is pick and choose and then be the publisher. And so over time, on many projects, I made the choice to publish it myself because I cared enough about the work to understand the market and the marketplace and the way marketing worked so that I could bring the work, the right work, to the right people in the right way on the right day.

5:10So yes, the gatekeepers are leaving the building. The bazaar is wider and more open than ever before. But we still need publishers, people who will spend time and energy and money to bring interesting intellectual property and craftsmanship to people who don't know it exists yet. Hey Seth, it's Nate from Salt Lake City. So as a bootstrapper, if your goal is to change the culture, if you want to transform and improve how things are done, you've got to create some sort of value for the people you're trying to serve. I noticed in your last episode that this usually comes in the form of relieving some sort of pain or discomfort or inconvenience.

5:53So what would you do if the people you're trying to serve are still a few steps away from the pain that motivates them to seek out a solution? If they're doing okay, they're not hot or thirsty enough to buy the bottle of water at the park yet, but they're one or two mistakes or bad decisions away from some real trouble. How do you help those people to address the pain before the pain really hits? Or do you just have to sit around and wait for someone to get overheated and dehydrated before they buy the water? It's true. Most people aren't hot enough or thirsty enough to buy the bottle of cold water in the moment.

6:29It's true that the medical profession has figured out that if they could just work with people before they get to the emergency room, they could save people a lot of pain, a lot of suffering, and a lot of money. But here's what we also know. We know that it's extremely difficult to sell water to somebody who doesn't know they're thirsty. It's really hard to sell education to someone who insists they already know everything. That what it takes to get someone to take action is the tension of, here I am, but I want to be over there. That disconnect between where we are and where we want to go, that is what moves us forward.

7:16So the only choice we have, if we want to change the culture, and we don't have unlimited time or unlimited money, is to change the culture. To start with the early adopters, the people raising their hand, the people who are thirsty or hot or eager or ready, to go to them and be welcomed by them, to be embraced by them, to have them say, yep, thanks for coming. because then sometimes they tell their friends. They model a behavior. They say, people like us, we do things like this. And that shift, that's how the culture changes. So if you think back to all those years ago when no one had a personal computer or no one had a pair of good running shoes or no one thought to limit the amount of meat that they were eating every day, the people who went first weren't the masses.

8:13They were the people around the fringes. They were the geeks or the nerds or the people who were thirsty for the next thing. We have to begin with those people because those are the only people who are paying attention. Those are the only people who know they have a problem that we are here to solve. Hi, Seth. This is David from Vista, California. I'm an executive coach and organizational consultant. And as I was listening to your Labor Day episode on bootstrapping, I was having a hard time figuring out where I fit into the four categories that you described. Could you say a little bit more about someone doing the kind of work that I do can connect into and relate to your ideas around bootstrapping?

9:06Thanks so much for all you do. I love this question, and it's a very common question. And the core of it is this, that coaching, things like coaching, even therapy, are solo activities. Not only are they solo activities where we do them by ourselves, but generally we don't talk about them a lot. And so, of course, we have to reference Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is that we don't talk about Fight Club. Well, in many cases, the first rule of coaching is that we don't talk about coaching. So is a coach a bootstrapper? No, she's not. The coach is a freelancer, always hustling for the next client.

9:48And the problem with getting coaching clients is there's only two kinds of people in the world. People who have a coach and people who don't. And people who have a coach have a coach and they don't need a coach. And people who don't have a coach don't know they need a coach. And so they're not looking for a coach. And so if you're a coach looking for new clients, you've got a problem. Because either you need to find people who are trying to get rid of their old coach and find a new one, or you need to find people who just realized they need a coach and you're the one. A big challenge. So how to get around it?

10:20Well, one of the big ways to get around it is to do group coaching. Group coaching, the idea that you will find five people who have something in common and coach them together, changes the conversation. It changes it to people like us do things like this. That when you are able to be the coordinator, the impresario, the person who organizes people to be at a certain place at a certain time for a certain reason, you are creating a shift in the microculture. People like us, we're going to be at a thing like this. There's a reason to talk about it. It's happening now. It's happening tomorrow. Are you going to be there?

11:08Everyone else is going to be there. This idea of circles of interest coordinated by a coach, the multiplier effect is huge because now instead of serving, I don't know, 10 clients, 20 clients, you can serve 100 clients, each one of whom is way more likely to talk about what happens inside your group. Hi Seth, this is Joey Wright from Central Virginia. I'm an educator and more and more my time is being squeezed and systems are being set in place in order to streamline the educational system. It seems to me that jobs such as education, teaching are generally valued for their emotional labor, but more and more are being forced to become automated and seems like less skilled in many ways.

11:59I believe in the institution of education and the emotional labor that I'm doing, but my superiors seem to be moving away from that idea. So my question is, what should those of us lucky enough to work in a field that is valued for emotional labor due to keep from being corrupted by corporate culture, if you will. Love the show. Thanks. The frustrations from educators are real because what's happened to education, as I've written about in Stop Stealing Dreams, is that we've mechanized it. We've tried to make it into a factory. Why? So that we can churn out kids who will work in a factory. Why?

12:43So that administrators and bureaucrats and parents who would like a more convenient outcome can have an easy set of numbers to measure. That we like measuring things even if those numbers aren't actually useful. And so the triumph of standardized testing, the cycle of endless measurement, the idea that we have to centralize everything and churn it out flies in the face of what great teachers want to do. Great teachers want to connect with students as human beings, help those human beings connect with one another, cause significant changes to happen, things that aren't easy to write down in the curriculum, things that aren't convenient, but things that matter.

13:32Thank you for being one of those teachers. So there's a problem. And the problem is you are working in a system that isn't measuring that and that isn't celebrating it. And so there are a couple options. One option, one that a bootstrapper might consider, is starting your own school. It's easier than ever to start your own school, particularly with adult education, but even with education for kids. finding the dozen or the two dozen or the hundred people, depending on your level of engagement, who will happily pay for the transformation you seek to make. That's what the question we just answered about the coach was about.

14:12The alternative is that maybe you're not a bootstrapper. Maybe you're simply a subversive. Maybe you're someone who cares so much that you will please the bureaucrats at the same time you actually change the students who work with you. That what you're going to do is show up in a way that gives the bureaucrat, the system, the parent who's checking the boxes, just enough to say, yeah, keep doing your work. But you're not going to get the applause you seek from them because they're not buying what it is you'd like to sell. But those students, if you can get enrollment from those students, volunteer enrollment from people that want to go on the journey you want to take them on, that could be extraordinary.

15:00It's not easy. It wasn't easy even when they were supporting you, but now it's even harder. But my hope is that you care enough to figure out how to do that, how to plant the seeds, how to leave the breadcrumbs behind so that the right students follow you in the right way. And 10 years from now, or in my case, 40 years from now, they'll remember. They'll remember that teacher who showed up with their whole heart and their head and changed their life. Hi Seth, Matthew in Los Angeles here. In your Labor Day podcast, you lay out four kinds of bootstrappers, the jobber, coordinator, the organizer, and the person that owns an asset.

15:41But what about the person who is trying to translate, create, and disseminate knowledge, a person trying to build an audience and serve them to help them find answers to the problems. In other words, which category do you find yourself in? Is it one of these four or is it a fifth? Thanks for everything you do. This is a fabulous question and a great way to end these series of riffs. What am I? Well, sometimes I'm a hypocrite and I'm aware of that. There are times I'll make a universal statement and then later on do the opposite and I'll embrace that idea because overall I'm on a mission and that mission is about helping people level up and changing the culture.

16:20But in this case, what it means to be a bootstrapper is that you could have an asset, and that asset could be permission. The privilege of talking to people who want to be talked to, of working with people who want to be worked with. I was thrilled that in the first day of signing people up for the Bootstrappers Workshop, more than a thousand people signed up. That's a big deal. How did that happen? It happened because it took me 20 years to get to the point where there were enough people who I had access to, who I could talk to, who would miss me if I didn't post something tomorrow, and say to them, hey, I'm doing this thing.

17:02You want to come? And that idea that permission is an asset, an asset at least as valuable as bricks or mortar or oil in the ground. And it should be treated that way. That's a pretty new idea. Every day, there are huge organizations that just flush that permission down the toilet in a short-term hustle to win for the quarter. I don't think that's necessary. In fact, I don't think it helps. I think the big win is to realize what a privilege it is to be able to whisper to people who want to hear from you. And so we can invest huge amounts of time and patience in earning that privilege, not so that one day we can turn around and monetize it, but simply so that we can teach people, help them get to where they want to go, engage with them.

17:58Instead of racing around trying to find buyers for our products, we could think hard about creating products for our buyers that we could realize we don't need an infinite world, that the world right in front of us could very well be enough if we show up in the right way for the right people. So there we go, a whole episode's worth of Q &A. I really appreciate it. Next time, we'll be back with a whole new episode, and if you've got questions about anything in the last 30 episodes or so, go ahead and visit akimbo.link and press the appropriate button. and I'll try my best to answer them next week.

18:39Thanks for listening. Go make a ruckus.