Learnings from building IMMA Collective - part 1

I sat down to reflect and capture five learnings from weaving together our community on Circle.

This week, I'm reflecting on the past five months of building IMMA Collective. Why? Because, as the saying goes, 'You don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on it.'

I've captured ten key learnings. In this first post, I want to share what I've discovered about myself and what's currently on my mind. Next week, I'll delve into insights about building a community.
Additionally, I'd like to offer some question prompts to spark your own reflections.

A Little Context

Since January, we launched the community. Currently, we have 54 members from across Europe and the US. They are all solopreneurs, founders of boutique consultancies, or aspiring freelancers—individuals driven not just by building a profitable business but by making an impact. That’s why we are called IMMA—it stands for Impact Maker.

1. Simplify your offerings

At first, I thought I'd create three memberships for different business seasons: Seed, Nurture, and Grow. However, building something great takes time, so simplifying is always wise. Now, I’m all for doing one thing well rather than adding new offerings, even if they seem small. They never are.

A question prompt for you: How can you simplify your business or offering?

2. It always takes longer than you think

You’ve probably heard this before, but you don’t truly understand it until you experience it firsthand. Yes, prototyping and experimenting early on are crucial. The saying goes, ‘move fast and break things’. But when you are building a relational business, what you break is people’s trust. And that’s a hard no-go.

So, I took a different, more thoughtful approach. It took me more than a year before launching the community on Circle. Constantly changing your mind is disorienting, and while building trust takes time, it can be shattered within seconds.

A question prompt for you: What is at stake when you experiment? And what low-risk experiments can you run to test your ideas?

Slow down to speed up

3. The challenge of bootstrapping a post-growth business

Bootstrapping isn’t easy.

In building IMMA, I decided to pause my goal of buying a tiny flat and instead invest my money in bringing to life a dream I had. Some days I wake up asking myself if this was stupid. But the only way to know is to find out.

Given that it is taking longer than expected, I need to find ways to stay in the game. Because it’s only a failure if you stop trying. And to continue trying, I need to make enough money without compromising the values I’ve set for this initiative.

I often wonder if I should spend my time finding money through grants or figuring out quicker and better ways to make money through IMMA Collective. For now, I have been continuing to do consulting on the side to pay the bills and to take the pressure off IMMA to be immediately financially sustainable.
This gives me permission to focus on quality over quantity. But juggling two businesses is hard, at times overwhelming and exhausting. This makes me slower, tired, and questioning if:

• Should I downsize my life to reduce costs and extend my runway?

• Should I downsize IMMA to make space for more paid consulting work?

A question prompt for you: What would you do when money gets tight?

Jamie Prow shared a personal reflection on a similar topic recently. He has been bootstrapping his post-growth business for the past years and is finding ways to meet his financial needs while staying true to his values and asking the community for help.

Click to read the full LinkedIn post

4. Learning how to promote and sell your work

If you work for yourself, you know it’s not just about how good you are at what you do. It’s about how well you communicate, promote, and sell your work.

While I learned how to sell to businesses, I never learned how to sell to individuals. It’s a different ballgame. But instead of saying I’m not good at it, I say I’m not good at it yet. It’s hard and a learning journey, but it’s a core skill that I want us all to learn. IMMA should equip you to find and attract your own work rather than keeping you in the ‘reactive’ job seeker dynamic, like most marketplace platforms.

A question prompt for you: What is your relationship with marketing and sales?

5. Struggling with rest

A week ago, Tricia asked in one of our sessions, “When do you sleep, woman?” When people get a glimpse of all the thinking and work that went into IMMA, they are astonished at what I accomplished alone in one year. I suddenly realise it too. Those are the moments I feel most tired.

When I give space to the exhaustion that comes from doing something so absorbing, I find that space uncomfortable; doubts creep in, and I find solace in doing. That said, I rationally understand the power of rest, but I don’t enjoy the ‘opening act’ of rest. The guilt, anxiety, and doubt it brings. It’s white supremacy culture and internalised capitalism at its finest.

I’m getting better at it, but I’m far from where I want to be.

A question prompt for you: What is your relationship with rest?

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These are five insights into the process of building IMMA:

1. Simplify your offerings

2. It always takes longer than you think

3. The challenge of bootstrapping a post-growth business

4. Learning how to promote and sell your work

5. Struggling with rest

Next week I’ll share five learnings from trying to weave together a community of independents. We will cover:

1. Building a collective

2. Experimenting with different business models

3. The scrutiny in the impact space

4. The capacity of being in community

5. Enabling contribution

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Interesting opportunities for you

We comb through numerous job boards to find freelance opportunities, saving our members hours of time. Here is a selection of 10 opportunities for this week.

Chief Executive Officer - The Consortium for Street Children (CSC)
💰£64K GBP
🤝Part-time
⏰June 9, 2024

Sustainability Operations Lead - Kerry
📍Remote (USA)
💰$105,129 - $159,134
🤝Contract

Global Events Coordinator and Host- SafetyWing
📍Remote
🤝Contract
⏰June 7, 2024

Communications Expert - Women Win
📍Remote
🤝Contract
⏰June 10, 2024

Advisor in Residence - Elemental Excelerator
📍Anywhere in the U.S
💰$150 per hour
🤝Part-time

Design and Development of Funder Learning series - Partners for a New Economy 
📍Remote
🤝Contract
⏰June 20, 2024

Event logistics consultancy - Open Ownership 
📍Remote
💰$450 per day
🤝Contract
⏰June 9, 2024

Freelance Analyst - ACT Climate Labs
📍Hybrid, London
💰£200 – £250 per day
🤝Part-time
⏰June 7, 2024

Camp Sustainability Specialist - Burning Man Project
📍Remote
💰$35 - $45/h
⏰May 31, 2024

Freelance Grant Writer - Comic Relief US
📍Hybrid, New York City
💰$5,000 - $7,000/month
🤝Contract

Bonus 🎁

List of Scholarships in Social Impact

25+ Fully-Funded Fellowships Open to All Nationalities

Found something interesting for a friend. Share the newsletter with them.

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Behind the Scenes at IMMA:

• I’m in Amsterdam this week, staying and meeting with our members. There's something magical about meeting people for the first time in person but feeling like you already know them, and having hours of interesting conversations.

• There are a few spots left for our next Seed programme. If you're curious, here's a short video. Registration closes on Sunday, and I'll likely run the next one only in September, depending on my consulting engagements.

• Next week, our free networking event - Impactful Connections - is coming up. Join us if you want to meet other like-minded professionals.

Thanks for reading,
Take care,
Lilli

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Whenever you want to stop working by yourself and want to build your purpose-driven solo business together, consider joining IMMA Collective.