What We're Good At and Love - Business Plan Part 2

On Tuesday, we began dropping this playbook series with part one. The questions we're answering? What the heck is Hey Rebekah and what are you doing?

If you haven't skimmed that drop yet 👆🏼, now may be a good time to get the gist 👇🏼.

🤖 The gist by ChatGPT: We've been in the digital marketing space for a while now, helping companies gain superpowers. But when we took on a new client in 2020, we realized that our business model was not scalable. So we did some research and broke things down to first principles to discover a new value proposition different than what we thought it was, focusing on our success as self-employed professionals. 🤯

What we're good at x What we love

Once we understood what we were good at, we shifted our attention to what we love. Given our recent client experience, doing meaningful work at scale was something that was important to us.

But first, so we're all on the same page, let's summarize what we're good at. Our planning started with an endless list of specific topics we've excelled at. Hey, look, we're flexing! 😇

That grueling exercise—somehow made even more mysterious by hidden columns to be revealed later—proved to be a real eye opener for the things we do—that we're good at. But it didn't necessarily explain who we are. So we modified our thinking and landed on:

We're successful self-employed professionals who are good at X.

Remember those stories of colleagues we shared? Well, that's basically what we love. After another few days of wiping the crappy dry-erase ink off our hands from white-boarding, we determined:

We're successful self-employed professionals who are good at X who love helping people become successful self-employed professionals who are good at X.

Hah, but will it scale?

The hardest part was now past us, or so we thought. Next, we had to gather some benchmarks on scalability. We didn't want to run into the same plateau we met earlier. So it was time for some sodium, coding, methodic research, and melodiIc background noise.

Hey reader #177,306! Give us a minute, we're almost done, promise.

We started by exploring the Total Addressable Market which indicates the maximum opportunity size we could theoretically address. Here's a snapshot of those findings based on 2019 data from the ILO and World Bank:

• There's roughly 3.3 billion full-time working professionals globally
• With a CAGR of 15.3%
• Of which 49% identify as self-employed
• 1,617,000,000 seemed super high, so we cut it in half 🔪
• 808,500,000 was still incomprehensible to us, so we chopped it in two again 🗡️
• 404,250,000 self-employed professionals globally, a number we could live with

So this initial exercise produced one component of our TAM that was brain-numbing, even after slashing the figures down to numbers we could pronounce. We now had some initial validation that achieving scale was possible. More up-to-date analysis by the smart people at Exploding Topics reinforced our own.

Alright, we know how captivated you are by all of this and hate to burst your bubble, but we're going to continue the adventure on Tuesday in part 3.