The 3 Paths of a Soulpreneur
Many of us have tried the marketing tactics the “experts” swear by: funnels, ads, maybe even five or fifteen thousand (!) dollars handed to someone who promised you clients on autopilot…. 🧐
And yet here we are: lighter in the bank account… heavier in spirit… wondering whether it’s really possible to build a solopreneur business at all… without betraying who we are.
I’m with you. I’ve spent tens of thousands. Done the funnels. Ran the “high converting” ads. Most of it wasn’t profitable. All to realize that it is not a system I wanted to keep going. It’s not the authentic business I was meant to run.
What I’ve come to see is that there are really only three paths for us soulpreneurs… and one of them is truly sustainable.
Path one: waiting to feel “ready”
The most common trap? Waiting to feel ready enough.
So many of us keep waiting — for enough inspiration, enough preparation, and just one more training! — before we’ll show up publicly and express what we know. The waiting, the preparing, can look like diligence. But underneath, it’s avoidance…
It makes sense, because showing up in public is overwhelming! And, confronting to one’s self-esteem. So we keep preparing, instead of expressing… and “I’m not ready yet” slowly, over time, hardens into a permanent verdict…
Some of us wait in a more spiritual costume: we wait for word-of-mouth to find us, or we trust that “I’m a good person, I help people — surely the universe will send me clients.” (I love the heart in that!) And… it’s the same avoidance, just dressed in nicer clothes. Karma doesn’t always pay out in our timeline… and in this waiting-to-be-ready path, maybe not even in this lifetime!
So our business stays at hobby level. A few clients a year, if we’re lucky. It can take ten or fifteen years to build “enough” confidence this way… or until we get so tired of waiting that we swing hard to the opposite extreme.
Which is exactly when the funnel hustlers find us…
Path two: funnel hustling
Let me define the terms:
A funnel is a carefully constructed sequence of steps designed to move an unsuspecting person toward a purchase. To hustle is to push and persuade, or to make money by unscrupulous means.
So funnel hustling is working hard to build a manipulation engine, one that’s supposed to get clients easily and make money fast.
Maybe you’ve seen the pitch: pay us thousands of dollars, and we’ll build the funnel, run the ads, field the calls. You just sit back! Don’t worry, it’ll work like an ATM machine!
What it involves underneath: audience “personas” reverse-engineered down to your buyers’ emotional triggers, persuasive copy and branding built to make people salivate, fake-”live” replay webinars (now with AI chatbots playing along), plus a roster of expensive consultants and software.
The whole approach is extremely insincere. It’s straining to be instantly impressive. It comes from a fixed mindset, and it’s enormously costly, not just to your finances. It carries huge risk, and tries to force people to take action, rather than honoring the client’s own timeline.
After hundreds of conversations with people who’ve tried it, what I’ve seen, almost entirely, are costly failures. I can’t recall a single person who told me it worked well, consistently for years. What I hear instead is some version of: “I really wish I hadn’t wasted all that money and time. I did get a few clients… but they weren’t even ideal clients… and I’ve run out of money to keep it going.”
Many have paid around $10K or more for this “lesson”. Sit with that number for a moment. Ten thousand dollars of funnel hustling. That equates to roughly four years of my highest level of support (around $2,500 per year.) Four years that could have gone towards building something authentic.
Then there’s the deeper bargain, the one people make inside their own heads: “I’ll manipulate a little in my marketing… and then, once they’re my client, I’ll be authentic.” So the deal is: be unethical first, then a good person later. But life doesn’t work like that. Treating anyone as a means to an end, is the beginning of wrongdoing — and a funnel, by design, treats a human being as a number to move through a machine.
So here are my three reasons to stop using funnels:
- It’s too much work!
- It doesn’t work.
- And most importantly, it’s not good for the soul — both the soulfulness of your brand (how your audience feels you), and the way you start to see other people.
Most soulpreneurs with slick websites and polished “brands” are really building a wall: something to hide their authentic expression safely behind.
Path three: the middle way
This is the one I finally learned to choose. I wish I knew about this in the beginning.
The middle way is simply choosing to bring a growth mindset into your marketing. Your potential is unlimited, so you do two things: you practice intentionally, and you show up consistently. Over time, you become more skillful in your creativity and more useful in your service.
Staying on this path for years asks for one ingredient: joyful productivity — consistent effort infused with your deeper values, held with a gentle attitude toward the results.
When you walk this way, a lot of things change. Your growth becomes manageable. You can keep the promises you make in your marketing, because you built the skill to back them. You get to choose who you take on. And you’ll find yourself with more inquiries than all that waiting-to-be-ready ever produced.
Some of us fear that structure will smother the soul. The disciplined hippie knows otherwise: you get to be soulful and consistent, at the same time! Discipline and systems aren’t a betrayal of your heart — they’re what set you free. The real enemy was never structure. It’s our own illusions, and the patterns that no longer serve us.
And these structures I teach? Take them and remake them. Think of them as Play-Doh, or building blocks I’m handing you. Rearrange them into your own castle, your own garden, whatever shape is authentic to you.
How the middle way works, day to day:
So what does this path look like, day to day? Mostly, you’re living inside two questions:
- What content am I putting out that my ideal audience finds genuinely interesting?
- What offers am I putting out that my clients find exciting and helpful?
Content and offers, both, consistently. (I sell or pre-sell something most Wednesdays on my FB business page, because selling isn’t the enemy here. Manipulation is.)
Even my paid advertising is simply content. I spend money on ads every month, and nearly all of it looks like what you’re reading right now: no pitch, no pop-up, no sequence engineered to extract. It’s an organic discovery system, where people find me, look around freely, and decide for themselves.
Your job is to find your own rhythm — not mine — a structure that activates your consistency in service of your creativity and your clients’ growth. (If you want a simple way to organize, this is the system I use: Capture → Categorize → Calendar.)
And then you keep practicing. Keep showing up, and eventually, your presence becomes so resonant, and the word of mouth so strong, that they have to stop and take a serious look.
“But I have too many interests…”
“But George, I have too many interests — won’t people get confused about what I’m even about?”
It’s a worry I hear a lot, and the middle way has plenty of room for it. You don’t have to flatten yourself into one tidy thing to be consistent and clear. I’ve written more about that here, so I won’t repeat it: should you niche down?
Being realistic about the long haul…
There’s a tradeoff here, and I’d rather you see it clearly.
The middle way asks for patience, especially in the early days. It isn’t as glitzy or as exciting as the funnel promise. It’s not an ATM machine ;-)
But the middle way compounds consistently. Year over year, you build conscience, integrity, generosity, and skill, and from those grows a reputation, with your network and with everyone who follows your work. It gets a bit easier over time. More importantly, you grow stronger and wiser with practice.
A soulpreneur walking this path said to me “It takes stamina… but I can see it’s so worth it.”
My own path
Since I went full-time in my business back in 2009, I’ve walked all three of these paths myself. Early on, I felt the strong pull of the funnel hustle, so I learned and tried it for a while. And burned out by 2012. Gradually moving into the middle way is what built a thriving soulpreneur business within a few years. And in about 10 years after the middle way, I’d built a kind of financial freedom I once only dreamed about.
What do I treasure most? I’ve built a rhythm of work I still deeply enjoy today, after 17 years (thus far!) full-time in my business, because I still believe with my whole heart in the mission of helping soulpreneurs.
That’s what the middle way is about: not just the income, but the long-term love of the work itself.
Start where you are…
So wherever this finds you — disillusioned, or cautiously hopeful, or somewhere in between — you can begin from right there.
You don’t have to keep waiting until you feel ‘ready.’ And you don’t have to keep paying marketing “experts” to manipulate your audience. The middle way is open to you now, today… step by step. With each step you become a little stronger, a little more resilient, a little more of a master of your own authentic business.
I’d love to hear from you. Of the three paths — waiting to be ready, funnel hustling, the middle way — which one do you recognize yourself on right now? And what’s one small step you could take today, toward the middle way?
Share it in the comments, and let’s keep walking this path together. 🙏🧡
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Originally written in 2023. Updated in 2026.
