As we've just moved into the last quarter of the year, it's time for another quarterly update. Q3 has been interesting, to say the least. What was supposed to be the smoothest quarter of the year turned out to be a hell of a rollercoaster ride.

What follows is the recap of a quarter packed with conflicting emotions and tons of learnings.

The not-so-short history of what happened in Q3

Q3 can be summarised into three main phases:

• An exciting start

• A peaceful middle

• A terrifying end

This is an obvious oversimplification, as things started moving very differently in the second half of September.

A more accurate illustration of Q3 would be the following:

An exciting start, a.k.a The Summer is Magic

The summer quarter kicked off with a great month of July.

Despite only working for about 20 days before being on holiday, this month saw a record in B2C revenues from individual coaching and mentoring sessions. On the B2B front, things were slowing down, which was expected. Some companies were already heading into the summer break, and the main project with one of my biggest clients was ending.

Things looked great compared with June. Considering that I had worked about 2/3 of the time and things were expected to slow down, July's total revenue still represented about 60% of what I made the prior month.

That overall number, combined with the record on B2C revenues, which accounted for an impressive 27% of revenues in July, contributed to a feeling of accomplishment and excitement for the future as I prepared myself for spending four weeks enjoying the family, reading, and being outside as much as possible.

One of the last things I did before disconnecting was to promote the idea of the Group Mentoring and Coaching sessions to a small group of people who had benefitted from free sessions with me in the past.

That was the first step in validating interest in such a product, and by the end of July, I had three people already signed up for it.

Another data point hinting at a bright future.

I remember those days as being in peak optimistic mood, which felt genuinely good!

A peaceful middle, a.k.a The Calm Before The Storm

Between the end of July and roughly the middle of August, I've been off with my family, traveling with our motorhome between Italy and France to visit our respective families.

That was a time dedicated to enjoying family and friends, engaging in outdoor activities, visiting new places, and reading and thinking a lot¹.

Little happened on the business side besides the first group mentoring call.

I remember that the first call didn't blow me away, as people didn't know each other yet, but it went well: good engagement from all participants, insightful discussions, and some important takeaways.

Most importantly, we broke the ice on something that just a few weeks earlier I thought was a stupid idea.

After returning from the holidays, one of the first things I did was open a subscription to the group mentoring and coaching membership for my newsletter readers². As more people signed up, I saw some initial traction.

But as the summer holidays ended and I was switching back to work mode, I started noticing the early signs of something I wasn't fully prepared for.

Having worked for my entire career as an employee, I got used to seeing activity picking up very quickly after the summer break. I have been through my fair share of chaotic September months, with people rushing to close the quarter after the holiday break, looking ahead at Q4 with its usual amount of We're behind targets, we need to figure something out, and all the dance around planning the upcoming year.

Being used to that, I was expecting to find myself in the middle of the action and quickly switch from the slow pace of holidays to the high pace of intense work periods.

But that's not what happened. Not at all.

A terrifying end, a.k.a Wake Me Up When September Ends.

This is how I'd summarize the period between the end of August and late September if I communicated via meme like a gen-z’r.

If I'd stick to the more traditional written word medium, I might go for crickets.

On the B2B side, things weren't picking up. A few discussions I had initiated for deeper collaborations with one client were pushed to January. My proposal to increase cooperation with another client took longer than I hoped due to budgeting constraints.

The partnership with the primary client was on life support.

If things didn't look great on the B2B side, they looked more like a disaster on the B2C front.

I wasn't worried about only having three sessions in August as I was off most of the month, and many of my clients were still on holiday.

What worried me was that I had no session booked for September.

I have not had a single paid coaching session in the whole month of September.

Although every single one of my clients had a different and very plausible reason for choosing to skip one month, when looked at in aggregate, this seemed like a total disaster.

Going from your all-time high to the lowest you can go in two months hurts.

I've heard or read entrepreneurs talking about their dark moments hundreds of times when they felt on the brink of seeing their business collapse. It was my moment of finally understanding what they meant.

My two business lines struggled simultaneously for a few days at a time of the year, which usually brings extra expenses: tuition, back-to-school equipment, etc. It was a perfect storm. I felt like this might be the end of it.

I even flirted with the idea of looking for a regular job for about 15000 milliseconds.

I would love to say that I just rolled up my sleeves, made a couple of phone calls, and everything was back to normal, but that's not the truth.

Apparently, life is not a Pixar movie.

I was in a weird situation: I suddenly had much more free time than I had expected, yet I lacked the mental state conducive to finding smart solutions. I took a lot of long walks, reached out to people in the network, sent reminders to my B2C clients, and became creative in suggesting collaborations with existing ones.

Some of it worked, some didn't.

Things started to pick up again during the second half of September.

I landed an agreement with one of my B2B clients to increase my engagement with them at least until January, with the plan to expand further after that. I also helped another one of my clients see that they needed help with one problem in their organization, and now I'm working on it.

B2C clients are returning, and I already have several sessions scheduled through October. I even converted two new clients, though their first session won't technically happen until Q4.

The small and shy product for Group Mentoring and Coaching Sessions is slowly maturing into something serious. We're now settled at eight active members after peaking at ten subscribers — the maximum number of seats I intended to open initially.

With all that, September closed with revenues in line with July.

If you only looked at the numbers, you might think it was just another typical month, but those numbers can't tell the story I shared in the previous lines. This is another reminder that revenue numbers often tell you little about what is happening behind the curtains.

Other noteworthy events in Q3

Besides the significant business events described above, a few other noteworthy circumstances occurred this last quarter, and they all deserve their own space.

First-time CTO free mentoring and coaching

In Q3, I continued the tradition of offering a certain number of hours of free mentoring and coaching sessions. As I planned to be off for almost a month this time, I decided to take on a single person and focus on a first-time CTO.

I'm still waiting for the formal feedback to be shared, but once again, this has been a great experience for me.

I've met and know someone I would have otherwise never crossed paths with—someone smart, driven, likable, and motivated to grow.

They are working on a very early-stage startup—pre-Seed—and we spent most of our discussions on how to get the product off the ground, clarify the hypothesis to validate, interpret the data, etc.

I will keep following their journey no matter what, and I'd be delighted if given an opportunity again to provide my support.

Book reviews

I've been publishing my book reviews for a while now. For those unfamiliar with them, I publish an article every month where I review the books I read during the previous month. The primary motivations are to keep entertaining my passion for reading by adding peer pressure and forcing me to write down my notes after finishing a book. I must admit that I had minimal expectations with that exercise, as I did it primarily for myself. I even considered stopping the monthly column at some point, as those are rarely my most popular articles.

But then a couple of things happened in September.

The representative of an editor reached out via LinkedIn, asking me if I'd be willing to review a C++ book. They aren't offering compensation, but they sent over a PDF copy of the book. Though it's been over a decade since I last put my fingers on a piece of C++ code, I found this request so positively surprising that I've accepted it. I'll read that book in October and publish a review sometime in November. I'm curious to see if this was just an isolated event or if it might be the beginning of a trend.

Secondly, I read one of my favorite books of 2024 in September: The Engineering Leader by Cate Houston³. Usually, I would have just read it and recommended it to people I know. But thanks to this self-proclaimed status of book reviewer, I reached out to Cate on LinkedIn and shared the review with her one week before publication. As I loved the book so much, I wanted to ensure my review would give it justice and that she appreciated it, which she did. The conversation we started might lead to a collaboration or die there; who knows?

In both cases, those book reviews that began almost as an exercise are now evolving. I don't know what they will lead to, but I'm curious to see it happen!

Meeting the revenue targets for 2024

Despite the ups and downs of Q3, I still hit a pretty significant milestone.

When I set out to become a solopreneur at the beginning of the year, I wanted to protect myself from the pernicious influence of the sunk cost fallacy. In essence, I wanted to be sure that I'd be able to make a rational decision at the end of the year on whether or not to continue down this journey. I wanted to avoid looking at an underwhelming business at the end of the year and being influenced more by the effort put into it rather than its results.

That's why I set clear revenue goals for the first year: if I could not make at least half of my last salary during the first year as a solopreneur, I'd declare failure, give up, and move back to a regular job. Half of my previous salary is not my long-term goal, and even a short-term one might not sound exciting, but I wanted to set a target that would be both ambitious and tractable.

Well, I'm glad to report that during Q3, I've already met that yearly target. And if the original intention of setting that goal was to prevent me from persevering in a dead end, it turned out to have the opposite result.

During those famous 15000 milliseconds during which I considered switching back to a regular job, I reminded myself that I'd hit the goal for the year. I owed it to both my former and previous self to not give up.

Getting back to building software

I like not having anything to do, but I don't like doing nothing.

This might not sound very clear, so let me elaborate.

I like having periods during which I don't need to deal with too many commitments and obligations. But whenever I'm offered that opportunity, the last thing I want to do is sit on a beach with a cocktail. Maybe for a couple of days, but that gets boring very quickly. I must work towards some goal and keep my mind, hands, or both busy.

That's why, during the challenging month of September, when I had more free time than I'd hoped, I started on a side quest. I know these are potentially dangerous, as they could often lead to productive procrastination. At the same time, I needed to allow myself a bit of slack to cope with the challenges I was facing, and after a few weeks of toying with the idea, it started turning into something potentially serious.

I now find myself hacking together a prototype for a SaaS solution to facilitate the daily life of engineering leaders, a target segment I'm decently familiar with.

I'm still at the very early stage, but beyond the crucial chasm between I'm entertaining myself and this could be serious.

I must confess it's a lot of fun being back to building software again, and it's also a recognition that modern GenAI tools are making that process more tractable. I don't think I would have found the energy to start learning React and modern frontend technologies without tools like Cursor to ease the pain of the initial steps.

Consequently, my code quality is likely average, but this is all potentially throw-away code. If the product gains traction, I know I want to rebuild it from the ground up with different approaches.

That also forces me to keep the product's first iteration as simple as possible.

The road until year's end

I learned the hard way that my business still lacks the resilience to keep pushing ahead during slow months, so I will focus on this for the remainder of 2024.

Launching the membership product to the general public

As mentioned earlier, I soft-launched this product during the summer. It has been evolving and improving through each session. I'm now running a cycle of feedback sessions with all the members in exchange for 30 minutes of individual coaching.

I expect to gain valuable insights from these calls, and I will make adjustments based on what will bring more value to the members.

At that point, I intend to open up the product to the general public, announcing it more broadly with early bird promotions and all the bells and whistles of a proper marketing launch.

I don't know precisely when that will happen, but I've set up a waitlist for anyone interested. Follow this link, share your email, and wait for an announcement.

I plan to gate access to the community by progressively releasing limited seats. Being on the waitlist is your best chance of getting in when that happens.

Pay It Forward: 2 free seats for the community.

I want to continue the tradition of paying it forward to the community while balancing that desire with the need to focus more on building products such as the community and the saas.

That's why I want to try something different for Q4 since I now have more than just 1-to-1 sessions to offer. I am giving away two Group Mentoring and Coaching community seats until the end of 2024. I don't want to target a specific population or segment this time, as I think diversity is one of the key value propositions of the product I'm building.

If you want to apply, please complete this form before October 20th at 23:00 CET. I'll review all the submissions and contact the people I select shortly after. The selection process will be subjective but based on the following criteria: motivation, perspectives the candidate can bring to the group, and their ability to afford mentorship.

This is an excellent opportunity for many of you to try something new for free. Hopefully, you'll discover the benefits of relying on others to help you grow.

Publish a Time-Management and Personal Productivity mini-course

One of my recent articles was surprisingly successful, quickly becoming one of my most popular posts.

The article focuses on my key principles for personal productivity and time management⁴. A few weeks back, I also ran a masterclass on the same topic with my community, with good results.

Given that I see a lot of demand for this content, that I have something to say about it, and that I already have some good material prepared, I’ve decided to turn it into a mini-course.

The mini-course will be included for free in the membership and offered for purchase to anyone else. Again, I don't know when it'll be published, but stay tuned for an announcement here.

The second reason I'm making this course is to build video recording and editing skills before moving on to more ambitious projects.

I’ve been working on the material for an opinionated course on nailing the transition from IC to EM during the summer. Still, I realized that while creating the material is relatively easy, recording myself is an entirely different issue.

Whenever we want to learn a new skill, we must start by exercising.

The mini-course will be my version of exercising in video recording and editing.

Open up the SaaS product to early alpha testers.

Finally, as the SaaS progresses, I plan to open it up for alpha testing relatively soon. I want to do it sooner rather than later to gauge whether there is an actual market for such tools. I already have more than enough people signed up on a waitlist to be the first to test the initial and genuinely embarrassing MVP in a few weeks.

It's entirely possible that after the initial tests, I'll shut it down or turn it into something completely different.

Yet, interest is an important data point I'd be stupid to dismiss.

That's why I'm inviting all my readers to sign up for the waitlist.

If you want to be notified when—and if—the product goes live in beta, please sign up for the waitlist at this address.

Conclusions

Q3 has been a fascinating quarter.

In hindsight, though I didn't like what was happening when I was in the middle of the perfect storm, I'm happy it did happen.

It helped me gain more clarity about what to expect in the future and how to build a business that will be more resilient when I go through the following summer break in about ten months.

I hope you found this article interesting, and I invite anyone going through similar journeys to share their experiences.

See you all next week!

If you found this valuable

If you found this valuable, here are other ways I can help you and your company:

1. Follow me on LinkedIn for regular posts on tech leadership throughout the week.

2. Contact me if you're interested in a Fractional CTO, Technical Advisor, or Board Member for your company.

3. Work with me 1:1 as your mentor and coach. I love working with driven and competent people in their specific situations and providing personalized guidance, insights, perspectives, and support.

1

In this previous post, you can check all the books I read between July and August.

📚 Books I read in July & August 2024 Sergio Visinoni · Sep 4 Read full story

2

In case you missed it, here is the post where I announced the new product.

Launching a new product for my readers! Sergio Visinoni · Aug 21 Read full story

3

You can read the full review in this article

📚 Books I read in September 2024: The Good, The Great and the Meh Sergio Visinoni · Oct 9 Read full story

4

In case you missed it, you can find it here

Timeless principles of Time Management Sergio Visinoni · Sep 18 Read full story