What is best for email newsletters? For websites? For editing your video content? To publish your content on? Best platform for online courses, or payments, or booking, or invoicing, or video calls? What is the best when you are a truly solo practitioner?
You will hate my answer: Stop googling these!
When you use the search term for “best booking platform for solopreneurs“ You will only get a list of the top 15 companies with the largest SEO budget in that category on planet Earth.
”But aren’t the companies that have the most money the best? People spend a lot of money with them right?”
Wrong.
They are the best at tricking people into believing that. Or once they were the pioneers of their field, but then got sold out to a larger company and now they are used as abandoned cashcows.
Let’s take Mailchimp as an example. If you google whats best for newsletters it will come up. It used to bea pioneer in that field, the only option for a while. But then it got sold out. Now it’s a cumbersome, non user friendly, expensive, confusing, mess that you’ll hate using. Also it was never designed for solo run businesses. A marketing department with some extra IT people involved might be happy with it.
But you don’t have 4 people running it for you 8 hours a day.
99% of my clients have tried and then ran away from it as far as they could. Yet this is what you find with a google search for the best platforms.
The same example is true in all the other topics and fields I mentioned.
But what could we do then?
Asking your friends could also be devious, as the chance is high they also found theirs by google-ing… but! If you keep an eye out for traps like that, then you will find platforms that you could have never found through google. They are small companies, that create great products – and some of them even were created for freelancers and solo practitioners. (“designed for small businesses“ don’t mean designed for a business run by only 1 person! But that’s another topic I will talk about in a different post.)
Small companies run by people who do listen to their customers, and not only to their wallets. People who have seen the missing features and answers from big companies, so decided to create them.
An alternative to asking friends is Reddit and similar internet forums where real people share their experiences and not “top 10 lists“ paid for, by the biggest moneymakers out there.
But here comes a list of small, smaller, or usedtobesmallfewyearsago companies that I think design their products for true solo operations.
- Newsletters: Flodesk – although a bit expensive to start out with but the easiest user interface!
- Scheduling/Booking: Introwise – with built in video conferencing and a generous free tier
- Websites: Squarespace – I’ve been working with websites for 20+ years. Believe me. :DIf you tried it before 2022 and hated it, sending you a high-five, me too! But it evolved, and now it’s amazing!
- Audio/Video editing: haha got you… there is no such thing as easy video editing! Better delegate it, or record videos in a way that don’t need editing!
- Selling courses or digital products/recordings online: start with Gumroad, there is no monthly fee. they only earn when you earn. Change providers only when the percentage actually mathematically gets more expensive than a monthly fee. You’ll be surprised how far that moment is in a business’s life!
- Cloud storage: An a PC use dropbox, on a mac use iCloud – avoid GoogleDrive for storage, but their document editors are nice.
- Timetracking: Clockify
- Invoicing+Timetracking: Moxie – withmoxie.com – I run all the financial aspects of my business on this. Asking for billing details, tracking time worked, sending out invoices and reminders automatically, etc.
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