💡 The Lightbulb
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.
💡 Mountains and Mexican food
I’m on my way to my Ortega family reunion in Ruidoso, New Mexico — an enduring family tradition since I was a kid. (The picture above was at the reunion in 2022 — I have twice as many nieces/nephews now!) As I headed to the airport this afternoon, it occurred to me yet another profound shift that comes along with the solopreneur’s journey. The work-day leading up to a vacation used to include: Crammed day of meetings Delegate some key things that need to keep moving while I'd be out Set away...
💡 Learning from 'wrong' turns
A few days ago, I shared some new research about the ‘pivot penalty’, proving the decreased probability of success when straying from your expertise. User research coach Stephanie Wu wrote in about a recent pivot of her own, asking: It sounds like you’re generally not in favor of pivots. Have you ever seen cases where they’ve been successful? I probably should have been more clear — I’m not against pivots. In fact, if you’re getting crickets from your chosen ICP, some sort of pivot is likely...
💡 Q&A: My inbounds are healthy, niche further?
I had a great question come in re: yesterday’s nudge about niching: I’ve got a wide range of clients in a broad range of industries.I’m niching by platform (Wix) and have been doing well with leads.Do I really need to narrow more? So, I like to think about niching or specialization as simply the “who” and the “what”. Who do you help, and what problem do you solve? The narrower you get on one or both of these, the tighter your specialization, and the faster you can accelerate acquisition,...
💡 Nerd out on your niche
“I don’t want to go too narrow.” It’s one of the most common fears I hear from NicheFinder clients. Sometimes it’s the fear of picking the wrong niche and ending up with a dry pipeline. Other times it’s the worry that doing just one kind of work will get boring. Either way, these fears block the beauty of deep specialization. Not just “the riches are in the niches” but the creative joy that lives there. The never-ending layers you can actually sink your teeth into. And the magnetic pull of an...
💡 The pivot penalty
“Pivot” can be a loaded term. To some, it means admission of hitting a dead end. To others, an opportunistic leap toward something new. Either way, it’s a constant temptation for us soloists. Customers aren’t biting? I need to pivot to finally find some traction. Some influencer or peer seems like they’re printing money? I need to pivot to get in on that. A new technology or trend purported to be flipping an industry upside down? I should pivot to stay ahead of the curve. Some of these are...
💡 My summer selling diapers
I got my first corporate job very young. The summer before college, I was only 17 when I started my first of four internships in the sales org at Procter & Gamble. Over those summers, I got a front-row seat to what it really means to move a product, even when you think the product would sell itself. Think about it - you think Walmart, Albertsons, or Target are going to not carry Tide, Pringles, or Pampers? Of course they were going to buy. So what were we doing exactly? Staying top of mind?...
💡 A *real* designer has entered the chat...
Visual designer and close friend of The Lightbulb Chloe Ith chimed in to reinforce the encouragement to pick up the pencil, and offered a recent client experience that traveled in the reverse flow of my verbal ➡️ visual distillation framework. Chloe says it was iterative visuals that drove her client's verbal clarity, not the other way around: That's such interesting insight-- that people need to "muster the courage" of picking up a pencil and sketching it out. It's such a normal thing for me...
💡 A reader's sketch: a visual syllabus
Last week, I shared a framework on distilling ideas from verbal to visual, and I casually challenged you to sketch out something you’ve found hard to explain. I didn’t expect anyone to send theirs my way. But Lightbulber Leslie Forman did! Leslie is a UX research consultant, advanced workshop facilitator, and an adjunct professor of design at California College of the Arts. She sent me this Headshot-style sketch that she made for her students that maps out the flow of her course this...
💡 The Sales Prevention Department
Above is an ‘intellectual headshot’ created with my client Mark, a fractional lawyer for B2B SaaS companies. In creating his portfolio, we wanted to start with the elephant in the room: 🐘 Most people (including Mark’s buyers) see Legal as an unwelcome obstacle to business deals. So I brought in the metaphor of a ski jumper hitting a brick wall. Mark asked to swap the brick wall with the Grim Reaper. And few iterations later, we landed here. Yes, it looks shockingly simple, but that’s exactly...
💡 LISTEN/WATCH: Teardown of the Headshot process
Lightbulber Matt Krause hosts a fantastic, long-running podcast called The White Rabbit, all about presentation skills for entrepreneurs and corporates. Recent guests include Alex Smith, Geraldine Carter, Jonathan Stark, Brad Farris, just to name a few. Last week, Matt and his co-host Alper Rozanes invited me on to talk about visual clarity, and the process of building ‘Intellectual Headshots’ with my clients. Even better, we recorded in audio and video, so I could share some real examples of...
A daily email about monetizing your corporate expertise. Give me ~1 minute a day, and I'll help you turn what you know into your most differentiated and lucrative asset.