I have worked independently since 5 November. On my own, there is no sales team and no account manager. The work that brings in the next client has to come from me, and it competes for the same hours as the client work.
What the survey says
Lettuce, a company that sells accounting and tax services to solopreneurs, surveyed about 600 of them for its Emotional Economics of Independence report. Income unpredictability was the most cited source of anxiety (58%), followed by uncertainty about finding clients (51%).
The same Lettuce report found pipeline anxiety among 61% of newer solopreneurs and 37% of more experienced ones. A single survey cannot say why. Experienced people may have built habits that keep work coming in, or the most anxious may have stopped working alone before they could be counted. Either way, the worry is most common early on, and it is about the pipeline.
So I am building a routine around that worry.
Three habits I am working with
Pipeline work gets the first hours of the day. Client work starts easily, because someone is waiting for it. Outreach, follow-ups and proposals have no one waiting, so they slip. My rule is that the morning goes to work that could bring in a signed client this month.
I have scheduled runs on Claude that deliver reports from lead gen the previous day, follow ups from the previous week, new companies that deserve my attention and need to be added to my target list, as well as a reading list (listening list in case of a podcast) that is delivered to my Deck (second screen helper on my iPad) every day. I also get these updates on Telegram, so on days that I am NOT on my laptop, I still see the reports, and can work on them remotely.
The pipeline lives somewhere I can see it. My leads used to sit in a spreadsheet. When replies moved to my own mailbox, the sheet could no longer see half of each conversation, so I built my own CRM with a follow-up date on every lead. A notebook would do the same job if you open it every day. The point is that nothing depends on remembering.
Once a week, I answer three plain questions. What signed last week? What is waiting on whom? Which one conversation will I push this week? The answers make a short list I can act on.
What a routine cannot fix
Habits keep the pipeline moving. Demand depends on the offer. If what you offer is hard to explain, a disciplined morning sends out more messages that are hard to explain. I wrote earlier about the assumption senior professionals make about going independent, and the same applies here: the routine works on top of an offer people can repeat in a sentence.
Everything needs a close eye on them. Systems that need updates, platforms that need money, features that need refining, messaging that needs defining, social posts that need comments, and reading material that needs, well, reading. I also plan and deliver weekly classes for Chanakya, so that keeps me on my toes. Thinking of weekly assignments, the larger project work, and the assessments that need to go into it. I also realised that I need to pace myself on Claude, because I BURN through my weekly credits quite easily! Things get out of hand when you are in the zone building and working on AI things.
One thing I am very pleased with is the website I rebuilt (using Claude, and my custom CMS) for Aarti! Check out aartikrishnakumar.com and let me know what you think.
If you have worked on your own for a while, which habit made the next client depend less on luck?
