When I started out on my own, I have to say that I underestimated all the things you have to do as a solo founder. I gave up my job, and thought that being an expert in the field was enough to get me an assignment. And surprise surprise, the assignments did not come my way by waiting. There are a lot of things you have to take care of as a founder, and marketing is one of them.
What I did underestimate is that as a founder, you need to act like a founder. No really, this seems obvious, but it's not. I hear a lot of other founders who are dealing with the same thing as they start out. We all have to learn, right? So I'll say it one more time: being an expert in one field is not enough.
You need to become a sales representative, a marketing expert, online and offline, a developer, customer support, accountant, projectmanager, the one chasing invoices. You name it. All next to the product and services you are selling.
And one of the things I totally forgot was the importance of marketing. While this was a continuous thing, it was my goal, to upload every week on LinkedIn. Comment one other peoples socials. But I almost failed on a weekly basis.
I've been building workflows for the way I work, but marketing never got the same treatment. While it was supposed to be as regular as the rest of my things. I always planned the "content stuff" on Friday, while all the other work kept grinding into me. So I think you can guess what happened: it did not happen, Friday after Friday.
I started to create a workflow around my marketing activities as well, which is bigger than content by the way, and here is how I did that.
Introducing workflows, the layer where execution happens.
My definition of a workflow is a fixed way of getting a recurring job done, within a timeframe. It says what the steps are, in what order, and what comes out at the end. So you don't have to decide all of that again every single time.
So before I make any workflow, I think about the recurring jobs and where they belong in the workflow. Otherwise it will become a folder with skills that I will never use. So I always start by mapping out the areas and the actions they take.
In this case, my marketing became multiple areas with audience and research, positioning and messaging, content management, distribution and channels, funnel and conversion, and metrics..
I write those areas down in marketing.md. This is more of a description of the process of the discipline. This means you can have multiple files, like [discipline].md.
A discipline file captures how you approach the work, which areas it covers and in what order you work through them. Without it, that process only exists in your head or scattered across old chats, and you rebuild it from scratch every time.
And if you are starting to create workflows for yourself, I would highly suggest you map out the areas and actions first. Because otherwise you are going to generate new ideas that are not part of your workflow yet.
I turn the work into skills
My ground rule for filling in areas or phases: do it while you execute it. I've tried building everything up front in one go, but you're probably going to miss certain details that are important.
If I do something repeatable in the area, I note down what the process looks like, what I expect the goal to be, and the constraints.
After that I create skills based on my needs.
Access the full workflow through my workflow documentation: grimoire.esmeepeters.com