The first sign it was working
It wasn’t what I was looking for. It never is
When I started my first business, ten-ish years ago, I was obsessed with the numbers.
Follower count, likes, comments - I tracked and refreshed them constantly. Had excel sheets tracking everything, projecting forward, trying to find the pattern that would tell me something definitive. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly. I just had a feeling that if I watched the numbers closely enough, one of them would eventually tell me it was working.
It never quite did. Not in the way I expected.
The income target was the clearest thing I had - I needed to eventually replace what I’d left behind, and ideally then some. Beyond that, I honestly couldn’t have told you what “it’s working” looked like. A specific follower count? A particular kind of brand deal? I had vague ideas but nothing I’d have staked anything on. I was tracking everything and certain of nothing.
I watched those numbers for about eighteen months before I noticed that none of them were what actually told me it was working.
The real first sign was much smaller.
A person I’d never met - someone who had been following me for a few months - messaged to say they’d tried something I’d suggested. They’d gone out and taken photos in the specific way I’d described in one of my posts, and they’d come out better than anything they’d taken before. That was it. Not exactly groundbreaking or curing cancer.
I remember sitting in the kitchen reading it three or four times. Because it was the first time something outside the spreadsheet told me I was on the right track.
What I didn’t clock at the time - and this is the part I wish someone had pointed out to me - was that the business was already working in other ways too. I just wasn’t measuring the right things.
By that eighteen-month point I was making good money. From brand collaborations, photography commissions, styling work. I had a portfolio career before anyone was really calling it that - different income streams, different kinds of work, all flowing from the same creative presence I’d been quietly developing. It wasn’t passive and it wasn’t scalable, but it was real and it was mine, and it had come entirely from showing up consistently in a space where the right people could find me.
What I didn’t have - and what I wish I’d created much earlier - was anything that earned when I wasn’t actively working. Every pound I made required me to be somewhere, doing something. On a shoot, on a brief, on a deadline. The moment I stopped, the income stopped too.
A digital product would have changed that. Something I made once, that people could find and buy whether I was at my desk or not. I didn’t create one for years, and honestly I can’t fully explain why. I think I just didn’t see it as something that applied to me - I thought of digital products as belonging to a different kind of business than the one I was running. I was wrong about that, and it’s probably the single thing I’d go back and do differently if I could.
It’s also the exact reason I’m putting together The Digital Product Weekend - a structured system for creating, pricing and launching a first digital product, specifically for people who already have the expertise and have just never quite got round to packaging it into something they can sell. It isn’t open yet, but if that sounds like where you are, you can join the waitlist below.
Join the waitlist for The Digital Product Weekend
Back to the signs
The thing about waiting for the big one is that you miss every small one that comes before it. And the small ones matter - not because they’re proof that you’ve made it, but because they’re the early signal that something is actually landing, before the numbers catch up to tell you so.
A few signs you might already be getting and not counting:
Someone who comes back the second week without being reminded
A reply that quotes something specific back to you
A message that doesn’t ask anything of you - just says thank you
Content you posted months ago still being found by new people
Someone who signed up because another person told them to
None of these feel like enough on their own. That’s not the point. They’re not the destination. They’re the evidence that something is working, arriving quietly before the big moment you’ve been waiting for.
My first brand collaboration - the one that made it feel real - was Wagamama. £50 food voucher and £40 actual money, which I spent on the same trip I was collecting the food. On a pair of Sweaty Betty yoga trousers if you must know, and yes, they were more than £40.
I remember thinking: I am now officially a person who gets paid to do this. Not a lot. Not enough to tell anyone about with a straight face. But paid, by a real company, to do something I had made up and decided to do on my own terms.
It wasn’t a milestone number. It wasn’t proof of anything beyond that one moment. But it was the first real external sign - the outside world saying, in the smallest possible way, that what I was doing was worth something to someone other than me.
The small signs are always the first ones. You usually only know they were signs when you look back.
If you’re in the early stages of something right now - whether that’s this newsletter, a social account, a business that’s been going for six months and feels like it’s going nowhere - the sign you’re waiting for probably isn’t here yet. And you’re probably already surrounded by smaller ones you’re not counting.
Count them. Not because they’re everything. But because they’re what keeps you going until the bigger ones arrive.
Susanna xx
P.S. Taking a summer break, so there’ll be a pause on the usual posts. While I’m gone, if you want something to read, my other substack - Year in the Cotswolds - is worth a look. I’ve just unlocked the full archive so everything is free to read. It’s quieter than this one - more about the house, the seasons, life here - but I think you might like it: