Pivoting is hard

These past couple weeks, I’ve been having really helpful conversations with @Adam French about GigLoft’s present and future.

As he does with all his social impact clients, he’s been generously helping me work through:

• What GigLoft currently is
• What I want it to be eventually
• What our ideal students need it to be right now
• What I’m best able to teach
• What’s realistic to take on as a side project right now

and more.

The other night I was admitting my confusion around who our target student should be. While stirring the stir-fry that would become our dinner, he turned slyly to me and said:

“Bro, you already know who it’s for. Freelance writers.” 

And he was right.

By far the greatest percentage of our roughly 5-10 new top-of-funnel leads each week are aspiring or practicing freelance writers. (Over other trades like designers, developers, etc.) On top of that, PubLoft still gets many times that number in writer applicants every month, recently 50-100 applications per month.

Now, something to know is that, as I was winding down PubLoft in January to go full-time at Career Crash, I had started laying the groundwork for a new type of content marketing that I’d hoped to implement through PubLoft: collaborative curriculum marketing. (You can read the theory and approach for yourself if you’re interested.) And, of those 50-100 writer applicants each month, a handful of them research PubLoft enough to realize it’s not a content mill.

So, really, pivoting to serve freelance writers seems like the smart thing to do.

We’ll see if it pans out.