Thread by @izzydoesizzy

1/ I don’t have many people I know who are at the same stage of early entrepreneurship as I am but Twitter friends, I have you, so I wanted to share a bit about my story of the early stages of building @joinclearcareer, as well as some of my biggest fears and recent milestones 🙌

2/ As I’ve mentioned before, a few years ago I started a Facebook group called the ClearCareer Peer Mentorship Community (well originally a Slack group actually but that didn’t take).

3/ My aim for the group was to create a community where job seekers would share resources, ask for help, celebrate wins, share their struggles and more.

4/ Over the past few years the group grew to 900+ members. Something I never expected at the start.

It was so awesome seeing people connect and share their experience and reach out for help.

5/ In 2017, I started the Entry Level Jobs Newsletter, where I vetted a number of jobs that were suitable for new grads with little to no experience, and that was a big hit. Starting from 0, I quickly amassed over 800 subscribers by posting regularly on other Facebook groups.

6/ The problem was that all these were jobs that were on job boards like Angellist and others, and the competition was so high.

In addition, it was hard for me to track whether people were applying/getting interviews/jobs etc.

There were a few anecdotal instances of this.

7/ I soon realized that this wasn’t the right way to go about things. Although it was a great way to build a following and a newsletter and share career tips at the same time, my newsletter was essentially a curated and regurgitated job board.

At the end of the day that sucks.

8/ Job boards statistically are extremely ineffective for applicants. They’re advantageous for employers because they’ll get lots of applicants. But your chances of getting a job are next to zilch.

I didn’t want to give my people false hope and compete against hundreds.

9/ I started writing articles about how to target specific employers, and use a set of email tools to find people and connect with them (and track email reads) to give people more hope, and data in their job search.

10/ Every time I worked with somebody and walked through the process with them, it was like seeing a little mind explosion.

11/ It went like this:

- Me: Ok let’s find someone and email them
- Them: I’m scared and shy
- Me: We’ll do it together
- Them: Ok

12/ Then we’d write an authentic email together to connect with a specific person at a company they want to work for.

[Almost every time]
Them: Holy shit they emailed me back!

[Sometimes]
Them: Holy shit I got an interview!

But every time their mind was blown.

13/ To many people, “networking” is a dirty word that brings up mental images of people in business suits, shaking hands and giving each other business cards at events.

But really it’s just connecting with people and hitting it off. It’s really just building relationships.

14/ Back to the story, so from then until now, I’ve had a few small mini side hustles outside of my full time job.

2012- A photobooth business
2013 - Some freelance work
2015 - Collector bitcoin coins
2018 - Unlock China
Today - ClearCareer

15/ Although helping people get jobs and undergo job search makeovers was always the most fulfilling thing I could do, I was always terrified to start.

My fears:
- job seekers don’t have money
- I don’t have accreditation
- it will be hard to scale
- I suck at selling stuff

16/ In 2019 I started getting obsessed with building an online course and launching on @teachable.

Over the past few years I had developed tons of resources and written out a bunch of parts of a curriculum.

But again fears got the better of me.

17/ Come pandemic 2020, I was helping a few people with their job search and it finally just clicked that I had to finally pull the trigger and put something out there. But I had no idea how to start.

I was afraid of a chicken or the egg problem.

18/ I was afraid that I’d invest a ton of time filming a course that nobody would buy.

I was also afraid that it would be hard to pre-sell a course I haven’t built yet.

19/ Finally, one night at 3am (when my inhibitions are taken over by my woozy tiredness, and I actually pull the trigger on things I’m scared to do) I posted the first outline of my curriculum on my Facebook group.

The CTA was an interview call with me.

20/ With the help of some suggestions from @MauryRubin, @BGroat and @AverySwartz I started to conquer my fears of selling by reading things like:

- Never Split the Difference
- The Challenger Sale

21/ Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a number of free discovery calls to learn about some prospective clients and their job search, to understand where they were getting stuck, and to tell them about how I think my upcoming course could help them.

22/ After talking to a few people, I found out that Saturdays seem to work for a lot of people so I set some dates and a price for the course, and decided to make the first cohort a live class to experiment and coach myself.

5 weeks, every Saturday morning.

23/ I built my own website at courses.joinclearcareer.com with my mad coding skillz and threw it up.

24/ I made my first ever sale on August 4th, 2020, which was such a huge milestone for me.

I did a little happy dance that day and it was hard to contain myself.

25/ I then started thinking about how to gain more traction. I designed and made a cool little Job Hacking 101 Toolkit using @canva 🙌

Got some leads from that.

drive.google.com/file/d/1l3tSjU…

26/ I created a job seeker survey where I ask a number of questions to job seekers which led to more leads and posted on a few Facebook groups including my own.

forms.gle/hYheab9JQm6w3p…

27/ I tried my hand at Facebook ads (which have always been HELLA COMPLICATED and confusing). Can we make this a little bit more user-friendly for people who want to spend money on ads please?

So far a couple of leads, but a lot of inexperience and wasted money mostly.

28/ I’m so proud to say that I just landed my 3rd student signed up today. Which may not seem like much but from the start I was hoping to get about 5. And was going to limit it at 10.

I’m confident now that I’ll meet my goal of 5 students in my first cohort, which is exciting!

29/ Since then, I’m so happy to have friends like @AashniSShah who redently invited me to an awesome accountability and entrepreneurship Slack group. So I’m so thankful to have a group I can celebrate wins and share low points with for support.

30/ All in all, in the upcoming year my goal is to turn this from a side hustle into my full time gig.

Once I get to a point where I have a sustainable regular stream of students, I’ll be filming an online course and focusing on the group in-person calls for accountability.

31/ My stomach has been in a knot for the past few weeks, and I’m so happy to see my first couple of students legitimately stoked to start, and have offered some free 1on1 coaching sessions to get the ball rolling until the course starts on Aug 29.

32/ For anyone else interested in joining our group, please check out courses.joinclearcareer.com and I’d love to hop on a call and see where you’re struggling with your job search.

I’m confident they joining the first cohort will really change the nature of how you job search!

@threadreaderapp unroll