I know that the signal was going in and out so I wanted to highlight some of the things I presented that you didn’t hear.

The big thread we keep coming back to is trust: people can like what we’re saying, resonate with our ideas, follow along for a while, and still not be ready to hire…

Read more

Someone contacted me through my website recently and requested a free Business Check-In. I have an automation set up that emails me whenever someone requests one, partly because follow-up is something I’m actively working on.

So I saw the email and, for about five minutes, I was excited.

Then I opened the contact request and my excitement faded and morphed into annoyance. I realized it was fake and actually disrespectful and rude. I realized they were probably a troll or maybe a bot or scammer.

I’m not going to share what they wrote or the fake email they used, because that part really isn’t the point. So I walked away, it was time for dinner anyway.

When I revisted, at first, I was aggravated that they’d managed to take up even a little of my time and attention.

Then I zoomed out.

And I realized: this is actually a boundary lesson and I realized this is where systems are important and boundaries remain central.

So yes I worked on my system, with a purpose, I added reCAPTCHA to my website and started looking more closely at my Cloudflare settings so the right bots can still find my site, while the wrong ones are more likely to get turned away.

Then I started thinking about something I learned much earlier in private practice.

Around 2015, I was nearly the victim of a scam targeting private-practice therapists. Someone tried to overpay me with fake funds and then get me to send some of my real money back. I didn’t recognize the scam at first. I’d spent most of my career working in community agencies, where I hadn’t really encountered that kind of thing.

Over the years, I’ve seen other scams aimed specifically at therapists, often exploiting urgency, responsibility, fear, or our desire to help.

I’m continuing to hone my anger-at-the-scammers to help other therapists and coaches protect their time, their systems, their super valuable assets: themselves.

And that gets me fired up.

It’s part of why I care so much about helping therapists, coaches, and other helpers protect their time, energy, and capacity.

Because the most valuable resource in the business is still the human running it.

This recent situation wasn’t exactly the same.

Nobody was trying to take my money.

But they were taking something.

My attention.

And that made me think about a distinction I’m still learning:

Not every person, request, message, notification, or problem deserves access to your time.

Yes, I struggle with follow-up.

But that doesn’t mean every request deserves a follow-up.

Sometimes I need to respond or in some instances, I need to delete.

Sometimes I might even need to report.

And sometimes a boundary isn’t any of those.

Maybe instead it’s a system or delegating a task.

Sometimes it’s saying, “not now.”

Sometimes it’s a decision you make once so you don’t have to keep making it over and over again.

Sometimes it’s a canned email that you can take and edit so you don’t have to keep rewriting and overthinking.

I delegate some of the tasks I have difficulty focusing on to my assistant, and I am deeply grateful for her.

That’s a boundary too.

Good boundaries aren’t only about saying no.

They’re also about designing our work so fewer unnecessary things get close enough to drain our attention in the first place.

And there’s a funny tension here.

Earlier today, I posted in the Business for Nerds chat about how I sometimes get caught in the systems-building spiral.

I’ll build or tweak a system when the real next move is to follow up with the human.

But both things can be true.

Sometimes systems are the spiral.

And sometimes systems protect us from the spiral.

Part of the work is knowing the difference.

So a question for you: how are you doing with figuring out when to build, and when to stop tweaking the website, social media, or whatever other spiral that might be vying for your attention?

I think part of it is noticing that not every demand on our attention deserves a response.

What has helped me zoom out?

The normal things in life, like working with my hands, going for a walk, riding my bike.

What helps you zoom out to reflect?

Thanks for reading!

-Dr. Brie

One of the biggest things I took from this conversation is:

Sometimes we are circling for a reason.

I really liked what you said about intuition and self-reflection. That maybe we need to face a part of ourselves that …

Read more

And Tiny nerd note: In the video above, I use the word “talent” while talking about the parable. In that context, a talent was actually a unit of money, not a personal gift or skill. But my brain immediately grabbed the modern double meaning too. Because I think there is something interesting about both: what happens when we bury the resources, abilities, ideas, or work we have been entrusted with instead of putting them into circulation?

About Getting Your Offers Out Into the World

We can research it, refine it, redesign it, rename it, build a prettier checkout page for it…

and still never really offer it.

I recorded a tiny podcast episode about that this morning because I think community is part of what helps us cross that gap.

I keep thinking about how much easier it is to work on an offer than to actually invite people into the offer.

Also, what is an offer anyway?

In my opinion, an offer is simply a way to share something useful with another person.

Some offers are free. Some are paid. Some are somewhere in between.

It might be a session, a group, a course, a podcast episode, a resource, or something else entirely.

The point is not the format.

The point is that eventually, the thing has to leave your head and come into contact with an actual human.

How to share our offers

I have been thinking a lot about what actually helps an offer make it out of our heads, Google Docs, Canva folders, half-built checkout pages, and the approximately 47 tabs we opened while “working on the business.”

Because apparently an offer can become extremely sophisticated while still never technically being offered. 😅

I know this because I am very good at the parts that happen before the vulnerable bit.

I research, then write.

I study and then build all the frameworks.

I make the framework prettier.

I can make a meme about the framework.

I can probably build an entire workshop explaining why I haven’t shared the framework yet.

What is harder?

Letting another human see it and experience it.

Talking about it before it feels completely finished.

Sending the payment link.

Asking someone if they actually want the thing.

This is Why Community Matters

And I am starting to think this is one reason community matters so much when we are building offers.

Not because we need a cheering section telling us everything is brilliant.

Sometimes we need someone to say:

You have enough information. Send the email.

Or:

That is three offers. Pick one.

Or:

I think the part you keep “improving” may actually be the part you are afraid to test.

That is a lot of what has been happening inside Offer Lab.

We bring in the real thing we are working on.

The half-formed offer.

The invitation we are avoiding.

The payment link sitting in drafts.

The question we keep circling.

And instead of turning it into another six-week curriculum before anybody sees it, we work with what is actually happening.

One recent conversation started with marketing feeling “cringe.”1

But underneath that?

She already had interested people.

The payment link already existed.

The hard part was pressing send.

Because once somebody says yes, the offer is not theoretical anymore.

You have to show up.

You have to deliver.

You have to let the work become what it becomes instead of keeping every possible version alive safely inside your head.

That is vulnerable.

It is also where the business starts becoming real.

I think a lot of us have been taught to treat business growth like an information problem.

• Learn more marketing.

• Fix the funnel. Study SEO and AI SEO (or whatever it’s called).

• Post more consistently.

• Make the branding clearer.

And sometimes, sure.

But sometimes you already know plenty.

Sometimes what you need is a room where somebody notices that you are hiding behind all that knowing.

That is part of what Offer Lab is becoming.

A working room for people building thoughtful businesses who do not want to shapeshift into some strange internet-sales version of themselves just to make money.

We look at the offer.

We look at the person you are trying to help.

We look at what is actually stopping the invitation from happening.

And then, ideally, we make the next move small enough that you actually make it and then get feedback.

There is something different about doing that with other people in the room.

You get to see someone else wrestle with the exact thing you thought was uniquely weird about you.

You hear a question you did not know you needed to think on.

Someone’s messy middle helps you understand your own.

And sometimes watching somebody else finally send the thing can help make sending your think a little easier because you know you aren’t alone.

So here is the question:

If that question annoyed you a little, excellent. It annoys me too.

Offer Lab is where we work on that stuff together.

If you are curious about joining us, reply with OFFERS and tell me what you are working on.

No elaborate explanation required.

A sentence is enough.

Let’s see what is actually in the way.

-Dr. Brie (nerding out about offers)

I keep coming back to this question:

Why on earth are follow-ups so hard for me?

I’ve received coaching about it and counseling, lol.

I probably have followup hang-ups from all sorts of things in my past, but you do not need the whole backstory.

What I think finally helped was not another explanation.

It was following up with people, noticing where I froze, and then sitting with what was actually happening.

And I think I am very comfortable teaching something I know.

I like answering questions. I like researching when I do not know the answer yet. I like making things for people. Especially memes. I could make memes for hours.

Here’s looking at you METs competition from 2024.

Anyway, I like connecting ideas. I can write the post, make the video, share the resource, explain the concept, make tons of memes around the concept or disappear happily into a rabbit hole for three weeks and not talk to anyone (unless they are family or my clients, lol)

I am very comfortable saying:

Here’s something useful I made.

That part feels generous.

It feels safe.

It feels like me.

The harder movement is looking at an actual person and saying:

Here’s how I can help you apply it.

That is where marketing can start feeling cringe.

And sending the payment link, forget it.

We are no longer simply educating someone from a comfortable distance.

We are saying:

I see what you are working through.
I think I may be able to help.
Here is a way we could work on it together.

That feels much more vulnerable.

And then there is the even sneakier question.

What if they say yes?

Because rejection is uncomfortable, obviously.

But yes has consequences too.

If somebody pays us, the thing becomes real.

We have to show up.

We have to make room in the calendar.

We may need more capacity. We might risk overgiving. We might over build.

We may have to deliver the thing we have been thinking about, tinkering with, or talking about for months.

Sometimes a payment link is not just a payment link.

Sometimes it feels like commitment, responsibility, visibility, and a tiny identity crisis sitting inside one innocent-looking URL.

In a recent Offer Lab conversation, Dr. Angie and I ended up right in the middle of this. She already had people who had expressed interest. The payment link existed. The harder part was sending it, because sending it meant stepping into the work for real.

And I recognized a lot of myself in that. More on that later in the post.

The safer parts of marketing

There are parts of marketing that are easier for me.

Teaching.

Posting clips.

Podcasting.

Writing.

Sharing thoughtful ideas.

Making something useful and putting it into the world.

All of those things matter.

But I am starting to see how easy it is to stay there forever.

In an excellent article, talks about the difference between marketing and sales and also Exposure, Proximity, and Access.1

Exposure is where people discover us.

Proximity is where trust starts to build through closer interaction and conversation.

Access is where we actually show people how to work with us.

And I think I have spent a lot of time getting very good at Exposure.

Meanwhile, someone can be standing on the other side of the bridge thinking:

Okay. I like this.
Now what?

That is the part I have been working on.

Not posting to the void on social media, not tweaking my funnel or website, not creating 5 substack posts (even though Substack is pretty cool), just getting better at helping someone see the best next step.

Read more

This conversation started with one word that Dr. Angie had used earlier:

Cringe.

Marketing can feel cringe. Following up can feel cringe. Asking someone to pay us can feel especially cringe.

I talked about this a bit in the chat today:

Marketing may feel cringe sometimes but I don’t think it’s always cringe. Sometimes it’s just a conversat…

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I almost turned one question into an entire launch

Angie asked me about email marketing and podcasting, and my overbuilder brain immediately wanted to invite 100 people, create slides, set up systems, charge for a workshop, and build the whole thing before I had even tested whether the teachings were useful.

But.

This time I stopped and did something smaller: I started with the person who asked.

I wrote the first version for her, brought it into Offer Lab, and used the conversation to see what actually resonated.

That choice led into a bigger lesson I am still practicing:

I used to blog, podcast, and then share those posts everywhere, hoping something would land. A throw-spaghetti-at-the-wall strategy.

Now I am trying to be more intentional: starting with the people already in my world, sharing around specific ideas, and building gravity instead of blasting content into the void.

The first part of the above clip is open to everyone. The second half, where we get into the clarity hierarchy1 and how I apply it to content and email marketing, is for paid subscribers.

The full replay and deeper conversation live in Offer Lab.

Read more

Your questions, insights, and willingness to think out loud genuinely enriches this space. Without that, I’d mostly be talking to myself.

More importantly, your participation helps me build this without burning out because we are building together, not in isolation.

That is becoming one of the clearest purpo…

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In this first clip we are talking about the developmental stages I realized through my own experience as a therapist turned business nerd who started as a therapist working for other companies, building my own company and then wanting to diversify income beyond therapy.

, is such an amazing person and has helped me grow in understanding my own offers too.

Here are the pages we were talking about:

• https://www.compassionresetquest.com/careermap and

• https://www.compassionresetquest.com/careermap2 (the second page shows the growing beyond therapy stages I realized)

So… I’ve been catching up on editing the Offer Lab replays, and something unexpected happened.

I had to keep stopping the recording, not because I needed to edit it (well I needed to do that too), but because I needed to write something down.

There were moments where I found myself thinking,

“Oh...I didn’t fully understand that when we talked about it live but now I see it”

Listening back after actually trying to build my business made the conversation land differently.

often says, “You become the thing by doing the thing” and “different person, different river.”

The full replay lives inside Offer Lab, where we build and test these ideas together in real time.

I knew one angle of what those phrases meant but now I’m seeing the deeper layer.

A few moments that stood out:

• We talked about building businesses that reflect the philosophy and principles that we resonate with.

• We explored why worrying too much about what other people think sometimes keeps us from following up, making invitations, and showing up authentically. Thinking about how our raving fans will interpret the content is a better reframe.

• We discussed intuition, shiny objects, and why sometimes the “rules” don’t fit the business we’re actually trying to build.

  And winging it for the win!

Read more

I’m finally catching up on editing this replay, and something unexpected happened.

I kept stopping the recording, not just because I needed to edit it, but because I needed to write something down.

I needed to reflect.

And I’m noticing something:

I am growing in Offer Lab, too.

Your reflections and my reflections are helping me see things more c…

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Finishing things is hard for me when they matter.

A final chapter involves a little grief because it means something is done (or at least done enough to become something else).

I’ve always struggled with finishing games and shows because I don’t want them to end. I’m working on that. Last week, I finished something I had been avoiding. It was personal, but it’s done.

How do we really finish things?

Yesterday, I finished Fallout: New Vegas.

Can you ever really finish an open-world game? Not really.

But you can finish a main quest.

And maybe that’s what this chapter is about.

Not finishing everything, nor resolving every loose thread.

Not making the whole thing perfect.

Just choosing the main quest, crossing a threshold, and letting the work become what it has been becoming. Finding the threads and what is actually resonant.

This final chapter came from stepping into my “new1” creative project, Night Ibis.

I had taken out all my beads and supplies and needed to see all of them to be inspired. I needed to be able to take in the textures, the colors, the threads between them to see how to use them.

It looked messy.

But the mess was necessary.

Sometimes we need to make a mess before we can make it “pretty”

The first podcast episode you share probably won’t be great. Even great podcasters had a first episode. That’s how they learn.

My first blog post for my therapy practice was only a few paragraphs. It was messy, but it resonated.

To finish my dissertation, I had to take out summaries of the research, the themes I saw across participants, and the pieces that did not yet make sense. I had to put them where I could see them before I could find the threads.

To clean a house, we often have to take things out before we can organize, release, donate, keep, or repair.

Some of my favorite green spaces are not perfectly manicured. They are overgrown in places, with hidden flowers, tiny creatures, and unexpected life between the edges.

I had to create several websites and spaces to share my work before I could finally see that the system was too complicated.

I learned through the mess.

The point is to stop pretending the mess means failure.

Stuffing the mess in the proverbial closet doesn’t delete it, it just helps us forget.

This is avoidance

And avoidance can look productive.

It can look like:

one more website.

an offer tweak.

the “perfect” page.

the “just right” platform.

another system.

and on and on.

And the spiral was back

This ultimately leads to one more private spiral where we keep thinking about the work instead of letting the work meet the world.

Maybe that’s what this whole Quest has been doing.

Taking everything out so I could see it more clearly:

• The burnout.

• The systems.

• The grief.

• The business ideas.

• The neurodivergent rhythms.

• The helper wounds.

• The overbuilding.

• The half-finished projects.

• The desire to make work that actually fits.

Not to leave it all scattered on the floor.

But to finally see how it all works together.

The mess itself was not the failure

The stuckness came when I used more sorting, building, and thinking to avoid applying what I was learning.

That’s why I keep coming back to movement.

’s latest posts about solving by walking, that we can think through the ideas and ground with walking and today’s “keep your philosophy on the ground” really resonated in that walking is not just walking to think about the philosophy, it’s about doing the thing we were thinking about and testing it.

Mindful walking helps us think through the philosophy. Walking forward helps us cross the gap and apply what we’ve learned. This is like “engaging the field” by Nic Peterson.

We don’t just think our way into clarity

We actively walk, test, talk to people.

We make something and notice what resonates.

Then we prune and we try again.

The Clarity Hierarchy from Lukas Fisher helped me see this too: philosophy and principles come before strategy, tools, and tactics. The trouble is that many of us start at the top. We grab tactics before we know what they are supposed to serve.

But the Quest has been teaching me to start at ground level: with philosophy, principles, and what I actually believe.

What do I believe?

What principles hold when everything else gets messy?

What kind of business am I actually trying to build?

What kind of life does this business need to fit?

Beginning and ending with Philosophy and Principles

After all the building, pruning, spiraling, rebuilding, deleting, relaunching, walking, writing, and starting over, these are the principles that still hold for me:

1. Networking with Intention — build genuine relationships with people who get you.

2. Seeing Through Your Client’s Eyes — speak the language your people actually use.

3. Owning a Niche — deepen your craft until it becomes your thing.

4. Boundaries that Protect — say no, carve rest, and structure the business owner-first.

5. Preventing Business Burnout Early — better positioning reduces emotional fatigue.

6. Design Around Your Rhythms — build around your best hours and your unique delivery.

7. Create Offers You Love — build work that feels like co-adventure, not obligation.

8. Pricing with Confidence — sustainable rates, not guilt rates.

9. Marketing and Sales That Fit You — choose channels aligned with your strengths and market in a way that does not require shapeshifting.

10. Staying Aligned Through Growth — prune systems and expand only in ways that match your values.

These are not just business principles.

They are Compassion Reset principles.

They are how we build without abandoning ourselves and how we stop confusing exhaustion with failure.

They are how we stop calling ourselves broken when the system, structure, or strategy simply does not fit.

The Compassion Reset Quest began with burnout, compassion fatigue, overbuilding, and the ache of trying to do meaningful work inside systems that often drain the people who care most.

But it does not end there.

It begins and ends with movement.

With sorting.

With choosing what still holds.

With making the mess visible enough to finally work with it.

With remembering that clarity is not always clean at first.

Sometimes the beads have to come out.

The notes have to cover the wall. The website has to burn down. The old system has to get messy enough that we can finally admit it no longer fits.

And maybe the final chapter is not an ending at all but actually both the beginning and the ending

It’s a threshold. A place to stand, to survey and to continue stepping forward into the somewhat unknown.

If you are building something meaningful and it feels messy right now, maybe that does not mean you are doing it wrong.

Maybe you are finally seeing the material.

Start there.

Sort gently.

Keep what holds.

Let the rest teach you what it came to teach.

Then take the next small step forward.

Dr. Brie

The thread we kept circling was simple:

How do we build and share offers without shapeshifting into someone we’re not?

There’s a point where adding more, stops helping.

We often don’t need:

• More curriculum.

• More platforms.

• More pages.

• More pathways.

• More offers

• Or posts.

We often need to listen better.

In this paid field note, I’m pulling out a few pieces from the conversation around resonance, overbuilding, free versus paid support, and building with people instead of alone in a cave.

This is also where the “Mouthwatering Mangos” idea started to take shape.1

The full working session lives inside Offer Lab, the founding tier of Business for Nerds. This paid version is the distilled lesson.

Read more

How do we market without shapeshifting into someone we’re not?

That question matters because many of us don’t struggle with having something useful to offer. We struggle with what happens when it’s time to invite, follow u…

Read more

Okay, maybe not hating it.

More like: deeply suspicious, immediately overwhelmed, and mildly convinced we were entering a “Skynet, is overtaking but no one is telling us,” era.

When I first started learning about AI a few years ago, I was terrified. I had already watched social media get weirder and weirder. My posts would get blocked for no apparent reason on Meta. Strategies that used to get posts seen, stopped working. Bots seemed to be everywhere and they were blocking my posts or putting me in FB jail.

The whole thing started to feel like shouting into the void, with bot gatekeepers that may or may not decide to let another human hear me. Ugh.

So when AI started showing up everywhere, my first reaction was not, “Yay, innovation!”

It was more like:

Absolutely not. The bots are alive. I knew it.

After that incident, I met some cool people who were using AI in thoughtful ways.

They were using it as a tool, not a replacement for their judgment, voice, creativity, faith, discernment, or care.

And I sorta softened.

Then, because I am me, I swung a little too far the other way.

I became sort of obsessed with AI.

Enter the AI Spiral Era

At first, AI felt useful.

Then it felt really useful and I started seeing it as a solution to alot of my disorganization (neurodivergent person over here).

Then I had a GPT for blogging.

One for organizing.

One for marketing.

One for fixing websites.

Multiple ones for different projects.

One for helping me think through the GPTs I had already built.

You see the problem.

The tools were helpful, but all together they turned into another form of clutter.

I had too many conversations and ideas and got pulled in multiple directions in my business. That was the chaotic, creative Brie phase. Business for Nerds got more fun and more imaginative, but I was missing the point. Eventually, I realized I had not escaped the social media spiral.

I had once again become caught in it because it was wearing a different hat.

The story was familiar, I started losing my own voice and became overwhelmed and started dreading posting, dreading working on my business, and eventually dreading alot of things in my life.

I eventually noticed that this was not working for me any longer.

The Recalibration

Through alot of self reflection, realizing that my businesses were unbalanced, I was spinning out and overwhelmed, I decided to stop. I stopped overfunctioning. I stopped creating for a while. I slowed down my posting, my podcasting. I grounded to the now and worked on being present again because things were spinning out of control.

I eventually realized I was in another form of compassion fatigue again, something I teach on, but this time it was a tech fatigue of sorts.

My posts were getting seen and people liked them but it wasn’t moving the needle. Discord was growing but it was just a social space. I was making memes but not selling anything. I realized something had to change.

Enter the Compassion Reset Quest-the Recalibration.

I write about balancing the inner creative and professional selves in this post.

I also write about the tech spiral in my chapter in AI Everywhere, Vol. 1: How Women Are Changing the World with Artificial Intelligence.1

AI, Burnout and the Compassion Reset

In the chapter, I write about the places where AI and algorithms collide with compassion fatigue and burnout:

Convenience that quietly becomes substitution.

Feeds engineered to hijack empathy.

The fear that “efficiency” might eventually mean replacement.

That matters for therapists and helpers.

It also matters for business owners, writers, creatives, and anyone trying to build meaningful work in a noisy, automated world.

You can read more about my chapter here:

The TLDR is this:

We need to stop checking in with AI before posting, if that’s what we’re doing.

We are the ones who created AI. We don’t need its permission before we speak.

Our posts are written by intelligent human beings whose brains are far superior to AI, because AI is a massive collection of human voices, ideas, patterns, and work.

Your unique voice matters.

Don’t drown it out with the mass collection of voices, we are not the Borg, lol.

If we delete our voices and make them more “appropriate,” more polished, more palatable, or more algorithm-friendly, we are erasing ourselves again.

Humans have been writing, creating, doing business long before all of this tech.

I think that using AI as a mirror, is a better way with writing. We don’t need it to take over the writing, because if we’re not careful, it can edit out the humanity, the empathy, and the tension.

But if we have an idea, to flesh it out more, we might use it as a reflection tool. We could use it to help with minor typos or to help point out if sentences aren’t landing or making sense.

The Reset

Then we step back, look around, and ask:

Am I using the tool?

Or did I just get caught in another spiral?

That’s the reset for me.

Use the mirror.

Keep your voice.

Signing off,

Dr. Brie

If this resonates, you can learn more about AI Everywhere, Vol. 1 here:

Get the Book

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, I may earn from qualifying purchases.

This conversation was about marketing without shapeshifting.

What is Marketing without Shapeshifting?

What is it you ask?

This was prompted by a conversation I had with Dr. Angie and a question I keep hearing in the larger business nerd community:

Read more

I’m finally letting those parts of myself work together. I still nerd out, but I typically nerd out with a purpose and I have a clear lane for my creativity experiments.

As I’ve found clarity over the last few months, my business and substack is much clearer now.

So I am going to reintroduce myself.

I’m Brie…

Read more

One of them ended because someone showed up live — and I usually don’t record what people share inside Finish Hour because privacy matters.

The best convos I think happen live and in the room.

You get to learn from others, our circling patterns, and from seeing how the messy middl…

Read more

websites.

Not just “what platform should I use?” or “how many pages do I need?” but I’m hearing something underneath it:

What if I build the wrong thing?

So I wanted to answer a few of the website questions I hear most often, especially from people who are transitioning into new offers, diversifying their income, or trying to build a business that actually fits their life.

• Do I need a website?

• What should I include in my website?

• Do I need a starter guide?

• What platform should I use?

• How many pages do I need?

• Shouldn’t the website be pretty polished?

My answer to all of these isn’t really based on a tool or tactic. Tools matter less than whether the page helps the right people recognize themselves and take the next step.

I recently burned down both of my main websites1 and rebuilt based on the current clarity I’ve found. I’ve grown and changed and my website grew with me.

Websites are emergent properties. We start with a simple offer and a simple website. Then we test by providing services, paying attention to what people respond to, and seeing whether the page helps people take the next step.

Social media can point people toward the website, but the website does not need to send people in ten different directions. Ideally, your site acts like a clear front door: it helps the right people recognize themselves, understand the next step, and move deeper if they’re ready.

Want to zoom out before rebuilding your website again?

Start with the free Marketing Map Reset. It will help you see where your website fits in your larger business ecosystem — so you’re not trying to make one page do every job.

Take me to the marketing map!

Do I need a website?

The answer to this depends. Are people able to find you and purchase what you’re selling on the platform you are currently using? For instance, Substack itself can be used as a website. You don’t necessarily need Substack and a website. I want that because I use it in my marketing map and because in case a platform goes down, I still have a space to share my work. Substack and my website are kind of on equal footing on how important they both are in my own marketing map.

Paid members can keep reading for the full website Q&A — including what to include, whether you need a starter guide, a discussion about platforms, how many pages you actually need, and how polished your site really needs to be.

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A quick update for paid subscribers:

Offer Lab has officially left beta and has become a deeper support tier inside Business for Nerds.

Your current paid subscription isn’t going away. That will continue to be the writing, reflection, and resource layer.

Offer Lab is the next level for people who want more proximity and support moving their wor…

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What is Finish Hour?
Finish Hour is a focused work session for people who are circling something that matters. Bring the thing you’ve been avoiding, overthinking, or not finishing, and use the hour to move it forward with structure and support.

You can join …

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