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Though I long resisted the label, I have been a solopreneur ever since I started working as a freelance writer in 2010. As the owner, manager, and only employee, all decisions about my solo freelancing business are up to mewhich continues to feel simultaneously invigorating and terrifying. But not all daunting solopreneurship decisions are the same. While taking creative risks and pitching big names continue to cause some minor fingernail-chewing even after all these years, investing in my business is the leading cause of second-guessing (and third-guessing, fourth-guessing) my own abilities as an entrepreneur. Many other solopreneurs share my lack of confidence about investing in a solo business. Not only do solo entrepreneurs tend to suffer from a kind money dysmorphia telling them they are one bad month away from everything falling apart, but the kinds of investments you make for a solo business dont typically offer a clear return on investment. While a factory owner can typically draw a straight line from their investment in newer equipment and higher output, a solopreneur generally cant know for sure that the social media ad buys, the coaching, the annual subscription, or the virtual assistant moved the needle for their business. So how do you decide when and whether to invest your money into your solopreneurship when you cant predict the ROIor even necessarily observe it after the fact? Build a firewall between your business and personal finances Reinvesting in your business often tends to be scary because solopreneurs have irregular income. It feels like tempting fate to drop a significant amount of your big payout this month on an investment into your solo businessbecause, our paranoid monkey minds tell us, doing that practically guarantees your clients will dry up next month. And then you will have spent your grocery money on a new business laptop that could have waited six months. This is why part of making solopreneurship sustainable is creating a financial safety net. Specifically, solopreneurs must put a firewall between their business and personal budgets. Though it may take some time to get there, your goal is for your solo business to pay you a salary. Heres how that would work: While youre in feast-or-famine mode, open a business savings account, and transfer any excess cash into it during high-income months. Even if you don’t have “excess cash,” commit to putting something aside, even if it’s just five bucks. This will create a habit that helps you build up a cushion for lean months when you dont have many clients or you have to chase the ones you have for payment. Over time, this savings account will begin to grow large enough that you can start paying yourself a biweekly salary. Once you have reached that point, you can switch to having your payments deposited directly into the savings account rather than the checking account. By then, your biweekly salary payments can be automated, so you can feel confident that your personal budget and expenses are covered. By setting up your business finances this way, you will have a better sense of how your business is doing and what kind of business cash flow you have without getting it confused with your personal cash flow. Earmark some money for business development In Vegas, its a huge mistake to gamble with money you cant afford to lose. The same is true with risking an investment into your solo businessor any business, really. (For every Apple IPO, there are hundreds more pets.com failures.) If youre a risk averse solo business owner (like yours truly), it can feel safer to simply clench your teeth and try to grow without spending a dime. (Trust me, its painful, slow, and kind of boring). But my years of avoiding the risk of investing money in the wrong business opportunity ignored the second half of the advice. Taking a calculated risk on money I can afford to lose is well worth it. Which is why, after eight years of freelancing, I started setting aside 5% to 10% of my income to reinvest in my business. Having this money specifically earmarked for business expenses and investments helped me feel more confident about potential development opportunities that couldnt promise a specific ROI. If these opportunities didnt pan out, I could afford to lose the money. Even if consistently setting aside a percentage of your income isnt possible, you can find potential business investment money in lots of other places, such as your tax refund, a gift or inheritance, or an unexpected bonus from a client. Act slowly and carry a big notebook Even the most decisive solopreneur can get stuck in analysis paralysis when it comes to investing in their business. You may worry that youre missing out on incredible opportunities, but you may also worry that youre throwing money away. Its in this state of indecision that were most vulnerable to the kind of high-pressure sales pitches that were most likely to regret latersince those pitches often come couched in the language of absolute certainty, whether youre talking to the salesperson at the Apple store who is trying to get you to upgrade to a more expensive laptop, or the marketing expert who wants you to commit to 12 months of one-on-one coaching for tens of thousands of dollars. To help you identify investment opportunities that are more likely to benefit you and your small business, follow these steps: Commit to at least a 24-hour period before buying anything. This protects you from your own enthusiasm and gives you a chance to let your cooler head prevail. Write down what you hope the investment can do for your business. There are no guarantees that youll get these returns, but the act of writing down your hopes can help you see if they are realistic or pie-in-the-sky thinking. Its even better if you share your thoughts with a colleague in the same or a similar field. Create a premortem. In business, teams will sometimes conduct a premortem before starting a major project to identify the things that are most likely to go wrong. If youre looking to invest a significant amount of money ito your solo business, create a premortem beforehand to identify what could go wrong with your investment so you can shore up those potential problemsor abandon the investment if the issues seem inevitable. The few, the proud, the solopreneurs Working for yourself as a solo business owner is not for the faint of heart. Not only do you have to deal with all the problems that come with entrepreneurship, but you also have to make all the hard decisionsincluding when to invest money back into the enterprise. While investing in a solo business will never be a clear decision, there are several things you can do to make the process feel less terrifying. To start, creating a firewall between your business and personal finances will help make your business decisions feel less personal. From there, earmarking some money for business development can help you feel more comfortable investing, since the money will be cash you can afford to lose. Finally, youll feel more confident about the opportunities you choose to put money into if you commit to a waiting period before making any purchases, write down what you hope to get from the investment to check that your expectations are realistic, and conduct a premortem to identify likely problems.
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E-Commerce
Listen, I dont know about you, but Im generally not so big on listening. I tend to be more of a words in front of my eyes kind of guy when it comes to taking in information (which, as Ive come to learn, also means Im an old person by modern-day standardshey, Im okay with that). Sometimes, though, theres something to be said for sitting back and enjoying an aural experienceor, as the cool kids call it these days, a podcast. Whether youre seeking out important info or just casually checking out a conversation about tech, comedy, or whatever floats your dinghy, oceans of options are out there that exist only in the form of audio. But what happens when you hear something especially noteworthy and you want to remember itmaybe even have it in writing as words in front of your ever-blinky eyes? Thats where todays tool springs into action. And lemme tell ya: Its simple, smart, and something youll absolutely appreciate having available. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Your 2026 savingand sharingsupertool The next time youre listening to a podcast and want to make a note of something youve heardto share, revisit, or even just save for future referenceremember a handy-as-can-be resource called Podcast Magic. Podcast Magic is positively brilliant in its simplicity and effectiveness. In fact, you dont even need to open the websiteor any special app, ever. Heres how it works: You snap a screenshot of your full-screen podcast player at whatever moment you want to remember. On Android, the easiest way to do that is by pressing your power and volume-down buttons at the same time. (But youve got plenty of other options.) On an iPhone, youll press the side button and volume-up button togetheror the side/top button and home button, if youre on an older model. You send that screenshot in an email to podcastmagic@sublime.app. You can use your phones built-in sharing command, if you see that pop up on-screen after you snag the screenshot. Just share it over to whatever email app you use, then type or paste in that address in the To field and hit Send. It doesnt matter what the subject is or if theres any text in the body of the email. Within a few minutes, Podcast Magic will respond to that same email with a complete transcript of the very same moment you just heard. So, for instance, I sent over this screenshot: Just a regular ol’ screenshot, captured mid-listen. And I got back this transcript and direct link to the moment Id heard: Podcast Magic’s transcriptions really do feel like magic. The whole thing takes maybe 20 seconds to do. And its free for a while, though if you use it enough, the service will eventually prompt you to pay $20 once for lifetime unlimited access. (Although, if you really wanna be wily, you could always use the + sign to change to new and different email addresses endlessly in Gmail, thus making the system see you as a new and different user every time you do so.) Now, technically, Podcast Magic is meant to work with Spotify or Apple Music. But Ive been using it with both YouTube Music and Pocket Casts on Android, and it works perfectly well with those, too. As long as the name of the podcast, the name of the episode, and the specific time youre at in the timeline are all visible on your screen when you capture your screenshot, it doesnt really matter which specific app youre using to listen. With YouTube Music, though, you do have to watch for the way the title of the episode sometimes scrolls to make sure its mostly visible when you capture the screenshot. Otherwise, Podcast Magic has no way of seeing what youre listening to. Even if you just rely on it once in a great while, its a cool tool thats well worth keeping around for anytime the right moment arises. Podcast Magic works entirely via email, simply by sending screenshots to podcastmagic@sublime.app. Its free to use with any given email address up to a point, after which youll be asked to upgrade to a premium plan for a onetime $20 fee. The service doesnt require any downloads or sign-ins, and the company behind it says it never shares the limited amount of info (essentially just your email address) that it does see. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
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E-Commerce
Anyone wanting to get their TikTok fix in the United States recently had a rough time. The app went haywire, kicking off early on the morning of January 25, due to a power outage at a key data center that knocked out services nationwide. Users reported the app crashing, with videos getting stuck and refusing to play, upload, or even hit a single view. The apps vaunted For You page turned into a glitchy mess, looping stale old clips and throwing out thoroughly non-personalized recommendations, while some users struggled to log in or comment on and repost videos. People searching for the latest videos about ICE raids and murders in Minnesota were shown zero results. Ditto if they sought out information on Jeffrey Epstein through TikToks search bar. Something was up, users felt. The reason behind the issues is prosaic: A power outage, likely caused by weather, knocked the app offline for a while. With the horrible winter storm in the U.S. this weekend, it wouldnt surprise me if that was the cause of some of these data outages, says Jessica Maddox, an associate professor of media studies at the University of Georgia. TikTok clarified in a public statement that it faced outages. Since yesterday weve been working to restore our services following a power outage at a U.S. data center impacting TikTok and other apps we operate, the TikTok USDS Joint Venture, which was established this month to oversee the U.S. arm of TikTok following the deal to onshore ownership of U.S. user data, posted on X. Were working with our data center partner to stabilize our service. Were sorry for this disruption and hope to resolve it soon. The company declined to comment on the record about the issue. Fast Company understands the outage was at an Oracle data centerthe company that now oversees the apps data on U.S. users after the deal earlier this month to establish the joint venture. That joint venture, which has American firms owning around 45% of the newly formed company, was pushed through after political pressure from Donald Trump. Oracle declined to comment. So far, so simple. And yet, when faced with a malfunctioning feed, users didnt chalk it up to the snowstorm or inclement weather. They pinpointed the apps recent divestment to a U.S.-centered coalition of investorswhich has been seen as a way for Donald Trump to try and allow U.S. companies to muscle in on the first major social media success story outside the United Statesas evidence that something more malign was going on. I knew they were gonna nuke tiktok but I didnt think it would be this quick. jesus christ, posted one user. Another said that the apps inability to serve views to videos, including those criticizing ICE activity in Minnesota, was down to a tone shift brought about by new ownership rather than a run-of-the-mill outage issue. What was striking about this TikTok outage was that users didnt experience it as a technical failure at all, says Tom Divon, a digital culture researcher and TikTok expert at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Many were carrying the political event narrative around it. That fear isnt entirely unfounded, reckon the experts. The U.S. president has previously said that he distrusts traditional media, and even set up his own platform, Truth Social, in response to issues that he perceived with existing social media. I think the reason people are so upset and thinking this could be a large-scale suppression is because its not out of the realm of possibility, UGA’s Maddox says. We know for a fact that platforms do suppress certain topics from time to time. She points out that the political backdrop, coupled with the conspiratorial nature of trying to unpick the whims of social media algorithms, makes it easy to indulge in the idea that something more deliberate is going on with TikToks performance. Social media activity is often thought of as conspiracythinking that blocking certain accounts changes your algorithm, or that theres an invisible hand controlling what we do or do not see at any given time, Maddox says. Because people dont fully understand how social media works, theres a turn toward conspiratorial thinking. That conspiratorial thinking isnt entirely unfounded, Divon says. That reaction did not come out of nowhere. Because just months earlier, TikTok went dark for around 14 hours during the temporary ban scarean episode that already taught users that access to the platform could be switched off by political decision, he says. Theres also a sense of inevitability, says Catalina Goanta, associate professor in private law and technology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The U.S. takeover of TikTok has been received with a lot of pragmatism by many of its users, who had already collectively anticipated that algorithmic changes were to be expected.” Goanta believes that users expect meddling in the algorithm, so they see it even if its not actually happenedyet, or ever. Theres another reason why people are worried: It could affect their livelihoods. Given the massive change in ownership of the platform in recent weeks, people are on edge about the impact it could have on them. TikToks own lobbying against its attempted ban by the Trump administration in recent years suggested that the app supports 4.7 million U.S. jobs and contributes $24 billion annually to the U.S. GDP. The notion that might go away, or be materially changed under a new owner, makes people panic. Trust has to be earned, not freely given, Maddox says. And the new TikTok joint venture has not yet given us a reason to trust them.
Category:
E-Commerce
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