Throughout my life, I’ve tried dozens of different business models. Completely offline businesses like a flower shop or a guesthouse in Bali. Classic online stores, dropshipping, online courses – basically everything that was trendy when information about that business model was spreading across the internet.
I’ve even run development agencies. It’s something I’ve been doing for many years, but I don’t consider it a business because I don’t have a working mechanism that brings me new clients. All the clients I have come through word of mouth – they’re recommended by previous clients. And honestly, I don’t do absolutely anything to develop this as a business. It’s more of a supporting mechanism that allows me to earn additional income, but it’s not my main source.
And yes, I’ve tried various methods that should bring in clients: advertising, agency branding, cold emails, and other approaches that should theoretically attract clients somehow. But for various reasons, none of them worked.
The main reason was a lack of clear motivation and understanding that this was, first, a working mechanism, and second, something I could do constantly, regularly, and with pleasure. Typically, everything boiled down to the fact that I needed to force myself to do it, to put it on like a straitjacket. But it felt artificial, a tortured process, a necessity.
And they left me feeling that something wasn’t right, and so everything turned into, or rather, ended in self-sabotage. I would simply stop before achieving results.
According to a 2023 creator economy report, this experience isn’t unique – 46% of independent content creators say it’s hard to be successful, and 41% struggle with burnout when trying to force themselves into business models that don’t align with their natural interests.
What if there was a better way? A business model that feels authentic, that aligns with who you really are, that doesn’t require you to become someone else just to make money? I’m about to show you how the multi-interest personal brand business can provide exactly that – a way to build a sustainable future-proof business around the real you.
Why Traditional Models Never Quite Worked
It was like that picture where a guy with a pickaxe is carving his way to wealth, and there’s just one centimeter left to the coveted crystal deposits, but he gets discouraged and leaves. That’s how it often turned out for me.
I’m aware of this pattern, but I truly don’t have that inner feeling of wholeness with these processes, with these approaches. They don’t seem genuine somehow.
I feel like it should happen differently, that something should occur in a way that aligns with my personality, with what I enjoy doing, and with what brings me pleasure, with some internal feeling I have.
Maybe I’m getting too philosophical here, and many seasoned business people would say that business is absolutely different – there’s nothing irrational about it, everything is very simple and mechanistic.
And many do business that way. You just do what you need to do, hire a team of marketers who do everything for you, handle advertising, hire other people who deal with promotion, client acquisition, and so on.
But I’ve never been able to take my projects to the stage where I had enough money to hire a team, so I had to do everything myself. And doing it yourself is okay up to a certain point and time – when you’re learning a skill, when you’re studying something and performing the first iteration, it’s quite normal. But then, when what you’re doing doesn’t bring significant results, you hit a wall: either you need to spend more resources on it, and again, the question arises of human, financial, or time resources.
It’s a question of all three. Most of them are covered by the resource of money – when a business brings in money, you can spend it to buy other people’s time and free up your own, but none of my projects have yet brought me enough money to afford that.
There were other projects that should have brought in much more money, with high margins, like SaaS projects, various tools that were supposed to sell themselves.
In the end, they all led to debt because, again, I had to pay the team that created these products and handled development. They didn’t bring in money, so funding came out of my own pocket, which led to negative income – I took out loans and then had to repay them.
And it all boiled down to me getting a job to pay off the debts I incurred after trying to do business.
But there’s a blueprint, right?
My last such project was another startup where I invested $25,000, which is a classic amount by startup world standards. And in this story, everything was actually done according to the canons of launching startups – $25K in investments from “friends, family, and fools.”
The fools in this case were ourselves, the partners who covered each other’s weaknesses. I was the technical founder, we had a founder who was the face of the brand, then a business development person and an operations director.
So we had everything we needed – money, resources, we built a product that constantly pivoted. We did continuous market research, talked to users and customers, flipped the product several times, but after several years, having spent all the investments made in this project and not finding product-market fit, we successfully, or rather, unsuccessfully, just folded the project and parted ways, recording the losses.
But it’s supposed to be different, right? After all, we did everything by the playbook, according to what others had already done, and it seemed like nothing could go wrong.
People had already walked this path. They laid it all out in a book, saying, “Please, do it by the book, here’s a blueprint, just plug in your values, and you’ll get a business.”
Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in life because reality is something with a huge number of variables that can’t be accounted for in any book.
A book is written at one moment, read at another, when even the environment in which you’re doing business has changed beyond recognition. And the book actually needs to be rewritten.
There are some books that, of course, can live forever, describing some universal principles that will probably only change over millennia, when humans evolve and noticeably differ from, say, our current model of thinking, behavior, and body.
That is, maybe, I don’t know, we’ll grow into some cybernetic bodies, and we’ll have a completely new structure of values.
But while we’re in our current state, these things don’t really change, so in our current state of consciousness, these universal principles work.
I’m talking about classic books that have lived not just for decades but for hundreds of years and still remain relevant.
But business literature doesn’t fall into this category. It becomes outdated very quickly, and I’ve actually read an enormous amount of business books throughout my life – literally everything that caught my eye, or any recommendation related to business immediately went on my reading list.
I would download the book, buy it, or find it, or borrow it from friends, and devour it eagerly, leaving no remnant.
And I always tried to apply this knowledge because each time it had profound meaning, and I understood that it’s all applicable, it’s all relevant, and there are a huge number of examples where it worked.
But for some reason, it didn’t work for me.
The Multi-Interest Advantage: Building On What Makes You Unique
Now I’m at position zero, where I have a source of income – freelance web development that helps me keep my pants up and not starve to death.
But it’s not super profitable, it doesn’t scale – or maybe I just don’t know how to do that. Again, it probably leads in the direction of an agency, which I don’t understand how to scale, develop, and make into a reliable business.
Or I need to do something else.
What’s missing in my current business to develop it as a business, one you can rely on, one with a flywheel that spins and continues moving due to the inertia it has already gained?
I’ve already talked about this in my previous article ‘The Only Digital Business Skill I Wish I’d Mastered Earlier’ about distribution. Roughly speaking, it all comes down to product distribution, because as a technical person, I can build almost any product that’s needed, and I have enough experience to do it now.
I’ve built a huge number of different services and systems for other people. I’ve done it on commission. I’ve communicated with Chinese suppliers and ordered customized production for products that are sold in online stores, and so on.
So it’s all a matter of technique for me now. But how to sell it at scale, how to distribute the product, that’s a question that’s currently a skill issue for me.
I don’t understand how to do it. This is precisely the knowledge and skills gap I’m going to close.
And everything starts coming together when I dive deeper and deeper into building a personal brand.
One person business model
This is where everything starts falling into place. First, I see a huge number of examples of personal brands that earn enormous amounts of money.
So it’s not, let’s say, survivorship bias, if you do everything according to common sense and certain rules of the game that can be mastered, because it really is a game that’s subject to certain laws, rules, if you know them, then you can quite succeed in it.
And secondly, it all fits into that very puzzle and contains all the elements that I’ve been missing until now.
That is, for example, that very distribution appears here in an absolutely natural way, and questions don’t even arise about how to distribute your products.
You have an audience, all you need to do is let people who trust you, who listen to you, and whose eyes are directed toward you, that is, their gaze and attention are now on your side, and offer them the product you want to sell.
This, in principle, is that very one person business, or a personal brand, call it whatever you want, it doesn’t change the essence.
You have an audience, these are real people, we’re obviously not talking about bots, not about various scams, these are real subscribers and followers who are on the internet, in various social networks, this is the place that serves as a platform, a gathering of people or a place of their attraction, and you, accordingly, can interact with them.
Interact how? In this case, we’re talking about offering some kind of product, and if you’re building your brand, if any business offers its brand online, then its next logical step will be to offer what it has to offer to this audience at a given moment in time.
And then the person makes a choice whether to buy or not, it already depends on a large number of factors too, but, as a rule, everything comes together here, that is, the more subscribers, naturally, the more likely it is that among them there will be someone who needs the offered product right now.
Research from Mighty Networks in 2023 found that creators who built community platforms retained audiences at rates 3x higher than those relying solely on one-way content feeds. Additionally, conversion rates for membership or courses can be 5-10% of an engaged community, versus less than 1% of a general social media following.
Business within a narrow niche
Now, how is this different from other business models I’ve tried before? Because it seems like it’s the same, for example, online business, the same online courses that everyone is already sick of, it’s online stores and so on.
But I want to draw one important distinction. When you build, for example, an online store, typically building such a business starts from understanding what product you’ll be selling.
Here, the question of niching comes first priority, that is, choose your niche. And it seems a bit strange if you go to some specialized store and find cosmetics products there, and suddenly find computer hardware products.
I came here for cosmetics, for example, it’s a brand of some celebrity who advertises it, and it would be strange to see the sale of motherboards, which doesn’t seem to match either the brand, or the theme of the store, or that very celebrity who promotes the store.
And here we begin to unravel this whole thing, of course, everything should match. When we talk about some niche store, when people launch it on various marketplaces, on Amazon, or build a Shopify store.
As a rule, this is done from the premise of immediately making money, not building some brand. There’s nothing wrong with that, because business – its primary goal is to make a profit. This is built into the definition of business.
But the fact is that the market is a very inconstant thing, and people’s interest, demand for certain products is constantly changing. Now it’s like this, tomorrow they don’t need these products, it’s inconstant.
And most of the products, what can already be sold, or what people need, is what satisfies their needs, is already on the market. That’s why the market offers solutions to current human needs.
According to Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, 75-95% of new products that established companies introduce each year fail to achieve significant success. For solo entrepreneurs, launching a product line means not only creating or sourcing the product but also investing in advertising, supply chain, customer support, etc., all with the risk that the market may not respond.
If, of course, you’re a talented inventor and can come up with something new, patent this idea, some product that solves a unique problem that until now simply couldn’t be solved in any way, then, of course, you have every reason to go down this path, and it’s quite possible to invent your product, and supply it to these marketplaces.
But again, this implies huge expenditures of resources, time, money, your personal strength and energy to invent all this.
Then no one cancels, again, marketing and attracting an audience to your product, and, accordingly, resources to explain why they need this particular product, why they can’t solve this problem right now with other products.
All this comes back, again, to the same distribution of this product.
Personal Brand within a narrow niche
Now let’s look at this picture from the perspective of a personal personal brand. And how it works.
First, let’s immediately agree that the advice of narrow niching, some assignment of a narrow niche to yourself, is outdated. Yes, it can play to your advantage, especially at first, when you’re just building a brand, and your word in a certain narrow niche will attract those people who are very interested in this narrow niche.
But at the same time, unfortunately, you deliberately or unintentionally close yourself in this narrow box of your one niche, which will be very difficult to leave, the more difficult the more time you spend in it.
If you have a brand that tells about fitness, and you’ve been doing this for many years, it will be very strange to hear gardening advice from you.
And for the audience, this will be, firstly, unusual, and secondly, it will be strange for you, and this feeling that okay, I’m going to lose my audience now, but I can’t anymore, I already sick of this fitness stuff, and I want to diversify my narrative a little bit, what I’m talking about.
This all immediately combines with the fear and the real possibility of losing your audience, accordingly, your influence online, and this is no joke. This is indeed a quite expected outcome in such a scenario.
But what if a personal brand is built precisely on personality, on your persona, which consists of multiple interests? This is a unique combination of experience, expertise, skills, knowledge that have been accumulated up to the current moment in time.
This realization is supported by marketing advisor Angela Winter who suggests personal brands can successfully encompass multiple passions if you “make yourself the brand” and highlight the common thread or values linking your interests.
You have multiple interests
It’s not just fitness. Besides it you have skills in preparing high-protein dishes, some knowledge in cooking or gardening, which you do in order to grow organic fruits and vegetables in your backyard, so you can use them in cooking those meals.
Besides this, in order to, for example, show your beautiful body, you understand that you need to dress appropriately, that is, you’re also interested in fashion, and you know how to select clothes corresponding to your personal style, which you have, again, developed over the years, and you know, for example, ways to combine these things, or buy them in a way that doesn’t hit your wallet hard or go beyond your usual image.
Everything I’ve listed are very different domains of life, and it seems that gardening, fitness, fashion, cooking are precisely those niches that are occupied by separate people, but that’s the salt, because most content creators on the network are engaged in working within one niche, and here immediately several advantages arise if you stop following this outdated advice of niching down, and tell about several of your interests.
First, you’re not sewn into this box, and from the very beginning you show that you are a person with diverse interests, and in fact they can all even be connected to each other. They can be less connected, but in the end you’ll understand that most of them are somehow intertwined at some point, which is called “ikigai,” if you build a graph where various interests of yours intersect, they can all be connected with each other.
Or if you build a graph with all these interests, connect those of them that somehow combine with each other, for example, as in that chain that I just told about regarding fitness, it turns out that they’re all interconnected, and this is quite a consistent logical chain.
Further, there’s no dissonance when someone reads you, because, again, combining all these interests, they get a complete picture of you as a person, and this combination of your different interests, it will each time be unique, because each person has their own life path, and different interests were acquired in completely different ways.
It’s like musical notes, there are only seven notes in the world, yet the number of melodies is infinite, there may even be a limited number of interests and topics in the world, although this is not the case, there are definitely more than seven, but their combination in various proportions, if we also pass this through the prism of life experience, and your application of all these skills in life, then each time a unique composition will be obtained, which is called a personal brand.
Now it’s not two dozen thousand influencers about sports, who, if you replace one with another, there won’t be much difference, and they’ll all talk about roughly the same thing, and then you just choose according to your intuition or because you like the voice or appearance of this content creator.
But in this case, you’re already choosing by a set of interests that suit you, maybe you don’t like the whole set, but some of them coincide with yours, and here’s where you can share these interests, learn something new about them.
Personal brand success stories like Marie Forleo (business coach, dance fitness instructor, spiritual advisor) and Tim Ferriss (lifestyle design, fitness, cooking, investing) show this approach works. Ferriss deliberately fashioned himself as a human guinea pig who deconstructs success in any domain, building a massive audience that follows him into whatever interest he tackles next.
This is a very long topic so I decided to split it into two pieces. The next one starts with the solving of content creation puzzle – the number one question of every beginner level creator.