Hey, starter! Read on for…

—Danny (tell me your biz dreams: [email protected])

👋 Thousands of business-builders around the world read For Starters every Friday. Thanks for being one of them. Learn more.

A quick note before today’s issue.

I launched For Starters 15 months ago, and since then the mission has stayed the same: inspiration, ideas, tips and tools for the next generation of small business owners, every Friday, for free.

The free part is a conscious choice and one I plan to keep. While I’ve got juicy plans for a very cool paid membership down the line (👀), I’ll always maintain a free tier. New biz owners need every cent they can save.

But making this thing each week takes real time and money. So, to keep it sustainable, I’ll soon be working on some highly-curated brand partnerships across the year.

This is an exciting moment for For Starters. Keep an eye out for partnerships with brands I’d genuinely recommend: products, tools and services that actually help new business owners thrive.

Partnership slots will book up fast. Want to get in front of thousands of highly engaged starters who are building their dream businesses? 👉 Fill out this form and let’s collab

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A uniform for the playfully employed. Austė Skrupskytė Cullbrand, founder of Stockholm’s studio playground (and a longtime For Starters reader 👋), has just had what she’s calling the studio’s biggest week yet. The headline act is Everyday Uniform, a limited-edition workwear set made with kidswear label OXOX CLUB. Jacket, trousers and utility play bag, all in recycled cotton, made in Lithuania, with oversized pockets. Tons of fun.

I love it because it started as a casual chat between Auste and OXOX CLUB’s creative director Agne at a design festival in Copenhagen last year… and then they just sort of made it happen! It’s cool when an idea gets put into the world through sheer curiosity and willpower.

Dropping alongside it: Issue 5 of Playground, their excellent twice-yearly print mag, and Playbook, a new (!) 56-page puzzle mag with 60+ games. Buy ‘em all here. Man, I gotta start doing stuff like this… 👀

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A corporate career gives you solid skills. But it also gives you habits worth unlearning. Just look at Lucy Werner.

Lucy’s pivoted, many times. From corporate PR to running her own agency to becoming a Substack bestseller with her paid newsletter community. Oh yeah, and then she accidentally deleted the whole publication and had to rebuild on Ghost.

She’s also swapped a busy life in east London – with husband Hadrien and young kids – for a quiet, rural corner in the south of France. It hasn’t been easy, but it’s definitely been worth it.

→ Lucy’s got plenty of lessons for starters: on unlearning corporate instincts, building a paid community, and finding an audience you didn't know you had. Here she is in her own words…

Back when I was in the corporate world, I did PR for things I didn’t care about – e-cigarettes and poker and 5.5% summer wine with celebrity spreads in Hello Magazine. None of that did anything for my soul. I wanted to help small business owners who have great stories but didn’t have the big agency budget to get it out there… 

I set up my own PR agency, but I inadvertently replicated my corporate PR mentality. For lots of small business owners, it’s really hard to create your own blueprint. Because my business mentors were from the corporate world – where the mentality is all scale fast and fuck your maternity leave because you need to work on your business pipeline for Q1 – I ended up steamrolled into an agency growth path.

I went freelance – and I had to unlearn everything I’d learned in the business world. I stopped having full-time employees, I stopped taking annual retainers, and instead I worked on projects. Fee-wise, way better. Team-wise too – I brought in people who were better fits for the client. More often than not, projects would roll over into more projects. But it’s hard not to get distracted by how other companies do things and think that’s how you need to do it too.

Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I pivoted to online courses. But it never felt right. PR and promotion is a long game and a lot of it is psychological. You can’t fix that in a one-hour session or a short course. People need ongoing support to be reminded it’s okay to get yourself out there. It’s okay to sell. It's okay to keep talking about what you’re doing. 

Four years ago, I resigned from all my clients and we decided to test out living in France. Being in France and having so much space, literally and figuratively, I didn’t know if I had the same ambitions as before. It wasn’t to grow an agency. And it definitely wasn’t to keep doing online courses. By chance, literally the day I got out here, I was approached by two brands to create content. A few years earlier I had written a book and I’d been posting free content on Instagram every day since then. I didn’t have a huge audience. Despite that, brands pointed out to me that I had a really engaged audience. That’s a big lesson. You might think, ‘Oh, my audience is small; I’m not valuable.’ But actually, engagement is more important than list size.

Ever since I was a kid, I’d always wanted to be a writer. My dad was a builder and had a binding machine for his invoices – really old school. I used to write stories and my dad would bind them with the machine. My first ‘published’ books, under the age of 10! I ended up writing two more when I was an adult. When I came to France and I was unpacking all my stuff, I was like, What are my hobbies? Who am I when you take London away? So I just started testing out writing on Medium. I decided to write 100 articles in 100 days. And I discovered it wasn’t the PR content that was taking off; it was the articles about moving to France, or the different ways I’ve made an income, or the things that I’ve tried and failed at in business. It was like, Oh, this is really resonating!

At this point, I was making no income and I was on maternity leave, so I needed to cut all my costs. I decided to take 3 months off social media. I needed to go dark and really think about what I wanted to do. I wanted to be paid as a writer, and I could write more books, but it’s not the most efficient way – I’ve made maybe £15k from my books over four years, and I know firsthand how much promo you have to do to sell one. So I was like, I’m going to gamble everything. I shut down my agency officially, I started writing on Substack, and I gave myself 3 years to turn it into a part-time business. You need to give yourself a few years to actually launch something. You can’t just give it one and call it a success. But also, that was the time constraint I had with my daughter before she went to school full-time. At that point, I’d make the call about whether it was generating enough revenue or not.

I was really honest with my Substack audience. I said ‘I’m on mat leave, I’m going to test out paid subscriptions on a pilot price, and feel free to sign up if you found my work useful over the years.’ I’d been emailing my list once a month for free for years. Many people had bought my book or had been reading my newsletter for free and wanted to support my work. Once they saw that I was selling a paid membership and that it was affordable, they started buying. I got around 35 paid subscribers in the first weekend. I wanted to go for a hundred because then I’d technically be a Substack bestseller. So every day I’d put the baby down for a nap and do Instagram Stories. Within six weeks I hit bestseller status. By six months I was up to 300 paid subs. And in a year and a half I was up to 450.

Then… I accidentally deleted my entire publication. I’ve written extensively about how that happened and also talked at length about what I’ve learned from the experience. Since then, I’ve moved my newsletter business to Ghost. The move’s been hard because it’s a new platform and I’m a bit ‘VHS’ in terms of tech! So I’m having to upskill and learn in a completely different way. 

After four years living in France, I’m revisiting the lessons I learned when I first started my business. Back then, I didn’t have many clients or contacts. I’d start with one client, do really good work, and the next would come via word of mouth. I then started working on my personal brand to sell my books, and I tasked myself with writing for one other newsletter, getting on one podcast, and doing one speaking gig a month, for six months. When I moved to France, I’d almost forgotten all the craft I’d learned building my profile as an author. Then I realized, almost by accident, that people were interested in stories of my daily life here. When I said I’m hosting an event in Nice, people would want to attend.

For instance, I launched my VIP subscriber day at my house. I put it up on Instagram Stories over Christmas, and I sold out all the spaces in five days. I’ve got people coming from Portugal, from the UK, from Paris. Before that, if you had said to me, “You’re going to sell it out in a week with an international audience,” I would have laughed in your face!

As I’ve grown my audience, I’ve inadvertently picked up a lot of other midlife ‘re-locationers’. Not just in France, but across Europe and the US as well. When you relocate and you're self-employed and you have kids and you don't know the language… sometimes I joke that I should make the newsletter exclusively for those people! It’s such an underserved space.

One of the things I’m planning to do is start teaching local businesses in the south of France how to hype themselves. I’ll do it for free, once a month, at my house – and entirely in French. It’ll be free because I’m still learning the language!

→ Between May 12-16, Lucy will be teaming up with Lex Roman from Revenue Rulebreaker to offer a 2-for-1 subscription bundle on their excellent newsletters. You get access to both their communities for a discounted price. Learn more and subscribe here. (Not an ad; just a fan!)

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The false urgency myth 😰 → A false sense of urgency pushes us to treat every task as critical, even when it isn’t.

How to get what you want ✍️ → Stories beat arguments – and doubling down on your position never works.

Stare at a wall 👀 → It might just improve your focus and productivity.

Ecuadorian food 🍽️ → The next big cuisine in the US?

Embrace the edge! 🧗 → Brilliance and kindness shine brightest when far from the comfortable centre.

Vibe deletion 🤖 → An AI agent accidentally deleted the entire database of car rental software company PocketOS.

The Whole Earth Catalog aesthetic 🌍 → It’s become the new Corporate Memphis.

Leadership cowardice 🙄 → The unwillingness to do the hard work of explaining, protecting, or saying “no.”

Microshifting 🏃‍♀ → Doing work in short, productive bursts, rather than spreading it across a 9-5.

Sucking at your hobby 🙅 → It’s good for you!

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How to Influence a Generation — A new weekly newsletter on youth culture and influence by FS subscriber Stephen Mai.

LOOK-UP.WORLD™ — And a great-looking new newsletter about growth from Morwenna White-Thomson.

Hyde & Larkin Ventures — Atlanta-based FS subscriber Wade Burrell has launched a new consulting and investing firm that will write small checks at pre-seed and seed stage. Check it out.

Slop — 37 patterns that mark an interface as AI-generated.

Awesomemarketingwebsites.com — Does what it says on the tin.

FontCrafter — Turn your handwriting into a font.

How to respond to the AI job apocalypse. Rosie Spinks

Why I burned everything to the ground, restructured my company and started over. Emily Oberg

That cool girl from India. Ssense

Papermakers of the Lake District. Nation of Artisans

How brand trips became immersive campaigns. Signals

How Paynter made the most coveted jacket in menswear. Sprezza

What I ate as an unpaid intern at Noma. A Food & Culture Namifesto

29-year-old spent $1,000 to launch a wedding camcorder business – it brought in $1.7 million in sales in less than a year. Make It

How I Bet On Clay (And It Bet On Me). First Round Review

I want to live like Costco people. Taste

61 years old → The average age of an American CEO; a decade older than in 2000. “Executives are starting in the top job later in life than they used to. The average age at appointment is now 55 years old, up from just under 48 years old in 2000.”

1/3 → A third of all new websites are AI generated, according to a new study.

Look at this olive oil bottle from Ya Albi, a brand founded by Palestinian-American designer Yasmeen Abouremeleh and her mother.

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Fun news in For Starters world. Two FS interview alumni, Ariel Altman from Figa and Brandy Cerne from O Portalzinho, connected after reading about each other here, and now O Portalzinho is the first hotel in Brazil to stock Figa. Ariel wrote in with this photo and to share ‘the power of the For Starters community’. Woo hoo 👏👏👏

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