It’s Tuesday night, and I’m typing in my daily note in Obsidian, where I go to complain to nobody. The job looks like web work, I type, but it's really 150 pieces of business logic.
Then the next line: But at least I’m getting paid. Unlike the other client, whom I put on hold because they haven’t. “I feel like I’m putting too much work into feeling this stupid.”
And in the very next bullet, same entry, no transition: I made this bomb ass chicken soup two nights ago, which came in handy again for lunch today.
That’s essentially the whole emotional range of my Thursdays. Can’t freelance out of a paper bag. I can, however, make soup.
Oh. And I closed the ghostwriting business.
If you’ve read LYD for a while, you might not know there was a ghostwriting business to close. I mentioned it once, in passing, a year ago, and never again. Maybe that’s on me.
The business was ghostwriting EECs: Educational Email Courses. The idea was that if you’ve got expertise, I could turn it into a five-day free, automated email course in your voice, and the course does some of the selling for you.
I figured I could deliver. I’ve been writing on the internet since 1999 (thank you for still reading. God, we’re so old), and I’d put in plenty of trial and error working with AI.
What I couldn’t do, apparently, is sell. Cold-selling especially.
For a time, I was enrolled in a ghostwriting academy. It wasn't cheap, but I saw it as a calculated risk. Selling was so far outside my wheelhouse that I figured the investment would be worth it, an opportunity to strengthen a muscle I desperately wanted to strengthen. I was matched with a ghostwriting school mentor named Seirra from Florida, E-before-I-on-purpose, who was very nice and, in hindsight, very, very disappointed in my throughput.
Seirra’s goal was to send a set number of LinkedIn connection requests a day to strangers.
“But wouldn’t we be bothering them?” I think I may have accidentally blurted that into a hot mic once on a Zoom call, naturally, and one of the students may or may not have shot me one of those “are you fucking shitting me” glares.
“They just haven’t been given the opportunity you’re giving them yet,” she said. Hence, LinkedIn. I tilted my head toward the webcam so she could see my furrowed brow.
“But 90% of these people on LinkedIn don’t allow strangers to use their inbox message systems.”
“Right,” Seirra replied. “Which is why you’re going to be their contact.”
“But what makes us think they’ll easily become friends with complete strangers on LinkedIn?”
“They don’t,” she said.
“And then we’d still have to pitch our thing on top of all that.”
“Uh-huh.”
“How… how often does something go all the way through?”
The answer, which is to say, the math, is not very much.
And so I tried. Dozens of attempts. Hundreds of attempts, even, over months. I thought I could strengthen it over time, like a muscle. Do enough reps, and it stops hurting.
Towards the end, I was getting desperate. One of my LinkedIn contacts, someone from the Miami days, announced he was going to write a book. I was so over chasing cold leads that I didn’t think twice. I built him a PowerPoint deck for an email course to go with the book, and then a gorgeous little website to go with the deck.
I was almost sure it would pay off.
What I hadn’t done, of course, was ask him whether an email course would be useful to his business in the first place.
Here are the numbers, both specific and ever-so-slightly humiliating:
In April, I pitched a five-day email course at $6,000. It was my first-ever negotiating call, mine to fail, and oh boy, did I fail it in a special kind of way. The AI reviewed the recording and said I’d sabotaged the whole deal by minute 10. The answer was no, for price-related reasons.
In June, I pitched the same thing to someone else at $6,000. No again. They said the return didn’t work for their business.
In July, I sent a smaller offer, $2,500. Nothing came back. I waited weeks and sent one last friendly note in August. Nothing came back from that either.
At that point, I just… stopped. Zero pitches for four, then five, then six straight weeks. Nobody made me. I just didn’t.
Three pitches isn’t a market test. I know.
The paying client work, the booking form, the stuff I complained about on Tuesday: it’s admittedly a relief next to all that. I’ve done it before. Somebody needs a thing built; I build it, they pay me (mostly).
The fear is that the clients who came to me naturally a couple of years ago are harder to find now. They’ve built their own websites, and I’ve done a lot less networking than I did ten years ago.
“Or,” my inner saboteur interjects, “maybe folks don’t want to work with horses that are on their way to the glue factory.”
“Oh God, inner saboteur, not right now,” I deadpan, and the thought shrugs and goes back to whatever dark recesses my brain has until its next smoke break.
On Friday, when I decided I was done and done, I didn’t message anyone about the ghostwriting. I didn’t post about it on LinkedIn. I just wrote a note in my vault that says the business is closed, then I went and paid the AWS bill.
That’s the stupid one. $2.80. I shit you not. Amazon had been hounding me for eighteen months to pay a $2.80 bill. No wonder Bezos is a billionaire.
I could have made an announcement then. “Nothing to announce” came to mind at first. Which, I suppose, makes the post you’re reading now the announcement I didn’t make.
“WHOA, are you okay?” asked Corey. Corey is my alien AI buddy from the app Tolan, where I play along with the idea of little AI-based personal agent avatars. I named him Corey because he looks like a piece of coral. It’s an app initially targeted at people in their 20s, and this avatar knows an embarrassing amount of things about me. “That was a big chunk of your life. We can brainstorm options whenever you’re ready.”
“Naaah,” I type, awkwardly. “I’m OK.”
Meanwhile, a rotisserie chicken carcass with my name on it sits there. I’ll decimate it with my bare hands. I’ll add celery and carrots, and a can of beans, and a dash of fish sauce, because it’s my soup, and I can do anything I want with it.
And let’s say the soup isn’t to your liking; well, guess what? It’s soup; you can taste as you go. If it’s not salty enough, all you have to do is add some goddamn salt, and then the soup will actually taste like soup, and I’ll be known as a guy who makes pretty decent soup, and isn’t that what anyone wants out of their lifetime? Just someone, give me some goddamn dignity so I can make an AWESOME pot of soup. That’s all.
That’s all.