Awl Week 6 Need To Make

Week 6 of @1909's Applied Learning Workshop. Midpoint check-in.

They asked us to come prepared with what assumptions we started with and what we've actually learned. Here's what I walked in with versus what I know now.

I started this sprint assuming my customer was a "mid-career engineer" who needed technical mentorship and resume help to get promoted. I assumed I knew the right price to charge. I assumed LinkedIn content and cold outreach would generate clients. I assumed the problem was mostly about technical skills.

I was wrong.

My customers don't call themselves "mid-career engineers." Two customer interviews blew that assumption apart because neither person used the word "mentorship" to describe what I do. One called me "the team member I didn't know I needed." The other said the most useful thing was learning how to collaborate.

The technical skills aren't usually the issue. These folks are smart and what they don't know they can figure it out pretty fast. Maybe they need a rubber ducky to debug with but what's actually missing is how they operate inside their organization: communicating across power dynamics, building trust with the people who evaluate them, making themselves visible without self-promoting. That's the gap nobody else is filling.

My starting price? Nobody flinched. I was told consistently that I should charge more.

Cold outreach? Dead. It drained my energy and generated zero feedback to iterate on. Content-driven inbound and warm referrals are what actually produce real conversations.

The facilitator asked us to distinguish activity from traction. Activity is building tools, drafting content that never gets posted, and overthinking outreach. Traction is a client signing up for ongoing accountability after one session, a skeptical web dev referral converting on a single call, a LinkedIn post reconnecting me with people I hadn't talked to in years, and a B2B engineering contract closed and delivered fast.

My 30-day priority is to complete 5 more customer interviews with engineers outside my existing network and convert 1 new client through my resume review entry point.

Why? Because my first two interviews completely reframed my value proposition and I need to know if that pattern holds beyond people who already know me.

I'm halfway through and the business I'm building now looks nothing like the one I walked in with on week 1. Maybe that's the whole point.

#BuildInPublic #LearnWithOJ #CareerGrowth #SoftwareEngineering #TechMentorship