My Solopreneur Story
and Why I (Eventually) Started an Online Business
This year I turned 52. Yep, I’m gonna say it right up front. ’Cause in the world of entrepreneurship, longevity is a thing.
Unlike most people my age, I’ve worked as someone else’s employee — well, I’m not even sure for how many years total. Two? Maybe three?
And that was just a couple of different stints in retail the Summers before college and briefly more full time after.
College was an interesting side trip — I had a full 4 year ride to Hampshire College in Amherst, MA.
Cool school, offered me tremendous thinking-for-myself-skills — I seriously came away thinking SO very differently than I went in.
In an outside the box, cross discipline sorta way… a way that would eventually serve me perfectly in my online endeavors.
But I was miserable. It was cold. I was lonely. I didn’t know what I wanted to study — really.
Lasted two years and then I handed them their scholarship back.
Who does that??
LOL … Andrea does that.
Here’s What Happened Next
I headed home to NYC. To a boyfriend if you wanna get specific about it.
Worked those retail jobs for awhile.
- A jewelry kiosk in 1 World Trade Center (11 years before there wasn’t a 1 World Trade Center)
- A bicycle shop
- A boutique on the Upper West Side
Then my boyfriend took a stained glass class.
Random, right? How could a stained glass class — taken by somebody else — have any bearing on me eventually starting an Online Business?
And yet, everything always seems to happen for a reason.
That class played a pretty important role. See, he came home and taught me. We set up a studio in our apartment and I began to make stuff. All manner of stuff from the most beautiful patterns of swirly glass I could get my hands on.
Boxes, kaleidoscopes, frames, doo dads to hang in the window to catch the sun … this and that typical Stained Glass.
(And, a single barrette.
See at that time, I was wearing my hair in two braids down the sides of my head — always had since High School — and there weren’t any cool barrettes being made commercially.
Only those silly hold-no-hair flat plastic kind that’re only suitable for babies and the great big kind that people were perching on top of their head. I had a lot more hair than a baby and less than a whole head full.
So I had to make my own.)
And I became obsessed with glass.
We began to run out of space to put the things I was making. So to clear some space and pay for materials (and hopefully then some), I started doing flea markets and local craft shows.
The craft shows were mostly on college campuses. I was also still working in the boutique.
Eventually the jobs got old, the boyfriend got old and I realized that NYC in general wasn’t a happy place for me. It was dirty and crowded and expensive and still too cold.
Where I really wanted to be was with my cousins in Maryland. Every happy school break memory was attached to being with them. So I hatched a plan.
The Next Chapter: Migration South to Freedom
I headed South.
Remember those college campus craft shows … and that barrette? Well those are what carried me for the next few years.
My table full of stained glass this and that, swiftly got replaced with barrettes only and then eventually jewelry … ‘cause that’s what they wanted — NOT the stuff on the table. They wanted the clip in my hair.
Also spent a couple years making goat milk soap, which always sold out.
That was my first experience in meeting the wants of an appreciative audience. Repeat buyers became a theme. Saturday market on Capitol Hill. Juried craft shows here and there.
But Then … Babies
After all was said and done, we had three.
Number One wasn’t to tricky — she quickly became “The Market Baby”. From the minute we arrived, till the time it was time to pack up — she got passed from stall to stall. Loving every minute of it.
Number Three never got to market… because of Number Two.
Number Two changed the game.
Social butterfly from the get, she was also a runner. It quickly became clear that I couldn’t manage keeping track of her and my wares. She won. We went home and stayed there.
Somewhere between Number One and Number Two … something else was born.
The Internet.
That ultimately would change the game again … completely.
The World Wide Web & Possibility
If you can believe it at first we thought it was so cool to spam and be spammed.
Literally.
We joined these things called listservs essentially so we could advertise our opportunities to each other. This was the mid ’90s.
It would take another 10 years before the WWW was ‘fairly’ regular-people friendly for creating income online — if you worked hard and learned a bit of coding. The blog softwares came online and got de-teched around 2005.
2008 a friend and I launched our first membership site in 10 days — that worked out well for about 12mos.
Still a couple more years before it was really a viable place for the rest of the world to get any real traction though. By now I’d discovered that online product creators and service providers would pay for customer referrals.
Long story short, in 2012, thanks to a very specific business model.
I went, the coveted:
Full. Time.
Been working from — wherever — ever since.
* PS. If you purchase anything through a link in this article, you should assume that I have an affiliate relationship with the company providing the product or service that you purchase, and that I’ll be compensated in some small (or even large) way at no extra cost to you.
