🍊Content Quick Start: I get by with a little help from my friends

Entrepreneurship can be a lonely road

Real talk: entrepreneurship has sometimes been harder than I was expecting.

I mean, I was expecting things like sales and accounting and business management to be hard.

What I wasn’t expecting is how hard it can be to carry it all by myself.

See, I’m relatively introverted. While I always liked my coworkers, I thought working on my own, no distractions, master of my own schedule, would be a dream.

And often, it is.

But sometimes, you just need another person to talk to. And not just any person; a person who understands.

There aren’t a lot of small business owners in my personal circle. My family and friends are as supportive as they can be, but sometimes I just need to talk to someone who gets it.

I had to go out and build my support network from scratch. Had I started a few years later, I could have skipped right ahead and joined a community like Forge.

Forge is an online community for creative entrepreneurs, run by my dynamic friend Darnell Brown.

Darnell’s made a new addition to Forge: Snacks, a free space within the ecosystem. So even if you’re not a paying member you can still get support, inspiration, and practical strategies for growing your business without it eating you alive.

Articles and videos inside Snacks cover such diverse topics as bridging art and AI, moving past price haggling, and getting out of creative ruts. Here’s a sample post Darnell shared about charging what you’re worth—a challenge for all us service-oriented entrepreneurs.

This is the stuff you wish you could talk over with someone, dished up as plain talk by people who get it. Check out Snacks here and see what it’s all about.

Social media’s fine for what it is, but as business owners, we need to remember that what we post there reflects our brand. You can’t treat it like a support group.

This is my fifth year in business, so I’m by no means an old hand at this. But I will say things get exponentially better when you find or build a group of people you can lean on when you need to get out of your head.

Start conversations in the DMs. Connect in networking groups. Book coffee chats, not just to find customers, but to find friends.

Join an online community. Find yourself some people to support you when you feel like your business is swallowing you whole.

Where have you found your support squad? I’d love to know; maybe a future newsletter can offer suggestions for where folks can look.

P.S. I don’t know if Darnell is planning to keep Snacks free forever, so be sure to check it out before the deal ends!