This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Today on the podcast we're talking with Nina from Fresno, California. She has spent the past year pouring her energy into an online store that sells fashion badges, patches, and stickers. Now, despite her dedication to marketing and engagement, the business is not gaining the momentum she expected, and it's kind of starting to weigh on her. She's thinking, "Maybe I'll do something different, but what if success is right around the corner? What do I do?
How do I handle this situation when you've been excited about something for a while, you've actually put a lot of work into it, and now you realize maybe it's not the right thing. But how do you know, right? Do you push through? Do you move on? There's definitely some tips we can give her. Should she keep pushing this line of fashion badges, patches, and stickers, or is
it time to consider something new? How long do you stick with a losing project? Let's talk about it and perhaps give her some guidance. Maybe somebody else out there as well. I always want to encourage you listeners to take action to move forward on projects, but sometimes moving forward means moving forward with something different, right? So I want you to take positive
action. So let's talk about it. How long do you stick with this project? Shout out to our sponsor and then Nina's question. I'm Nina from Fresno, California, and I've dedicated the past year to building an online store specializing in fashion badges, patches, and stickers. Despite my efforts
in marketing and community engagement, the business isn't picking up as I had hoped. It's becoming a financial strain. How do you decide when to persevere with a project versus when to let it go? Are there specific indicators or metrics I should be looking at to make this decision? Additionally, how do I balance the emotional attachment to my business with practical considerations? Nina, I really appreciate your courage in voicing this question,
both to us here publicly, but also just for thinking about it yourself. A lot of us just keep going with things without really addressing, are they working? Might there be something better out there and so on? So I think it's a great start to be in that place of like, let's actually look at this as objectively as possible. And there are a couple of different ways to do it. We've talked about them before on the podcast, we've talked about some approaches,
but ultimately, I think one thing that's helpful is to consider your other ideas. At this point, after operating this business for, I guess, the better part of a year, you probably have other ideas or you have things that you have not been able to do because you were doing this, or maybe your research through the e-commerce experience has led you to think about something else you want to sell, or maybe you just want to do something that's not e-commerce. I would say you always want to consider your current project versus your new ideas. And you could flip that and say you want to consider your new ideas versus your current project. For somebody who does a lot of projects, maybe the reverse is almost better because you keep starting things. And you might want to look and say, actually, I've got a really good thing here,
I should invest more in that. That's some advice that's probably more helpful to me because I keep starting new projects and such. And sometimes I don't support the existing ones as much. And so I try to think about that a lot. But in this situation, I think a financial health check is really important. And it sounds like in this case, it's not doing what you want it to do.
So is there a way that that could change? When you think about how could I turn this business around? If I had to do nothing else, if I knew I was going to stick with it, what would I do to create change here? And if you have an answer, if you're like, oh, here's a strategy, here's something I should be doing differently, then that's one thing. And that might lead you to say I'm going to actually going to stick with it for a while. But if you're not sure what that would
be, well, that's kind of a sign of maybe it's, I'm not just going to keep doing the same thing, expecting different results. So think about those things, compare your current ideas to your new ideas, do that financial check, ask yourself, how could I grow this business? And if you have some clear answers, that's great. And you still have the question of whether you should stick or quit, but at least gives you some information. And if you don't know a great way to grow the business, then that really kind of points toward doing something different. So lots more we could say
about that. But there it is in a nutshell. Nina, good luck. Listeners, good luck. sidehustleschool.com resources, notes for every episode. And of course, new episode coming out
tomorrow. This has been number 2611, 2611. Thanks for tuning in. My name's Chris Guillebeau. This is Sidusleschool. From the Onward Project.
