Oct. 23, 2024, 5:47 a.m.
Do you think I'll ever be successful as an autistic business owner?
Could be titled - What does Elon Musk have that I don’t? Besides a penis, obvs...
Postpartum Matters
Just me and the cat working on our business success together, in our ideal environment - at home, with the cool autumn air keeping us calm, with no other sensory stuff to pile up on us and overwhelm us 😍
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So, what does Elon Musk have that I don’t?
I’ve just finished an eight week business boot camp thing for creative business owners. It was a lot.
Like 8+ contact hours a week, worksheets to complete for evidence and two in-person events bookmarking the hours of Zoom calls. One of which was eight hours long of pitching your business and networking. I may or may not have skipped that one.
I’m writing these things above assuming you feel the same sick dread reading that as I do.
And I think that’s maybe the main reason I’m stuck where I am in terms of business ‘growth’. (I use stuck in a very low key way - it’s just hard to see newer Instagram accounts/ newsletters/ businesses blow up and gain huge traction whilst yours is growing so slowly it’s hard to see in the day to day).
Because, as so many people keep telling me, the trick to business growth, to sales, to social media growth, to all that good stuff is to really know your reader/ your ideal client/ whatever.
And when you have a social disability that means your brain works very differently than the majority then it is actually really difficult to manage that task. Especially when you grew up without a diagnosis, therefore believing that everyone’s brains worked like yours and you just weren’t as good managing it.
That is unless your ideal client is also autistic. But limiting my ideal client to autistic folks - a minority community - then limits my growth/ my income/ my community. And it doesn’t help improve stuff for autistic women+ - which is what I truly want. To achieve that, I need to also be writing to neurotypical people.
But how?
And that’s just the ideal client task.
Then we get to the networking, the growing a community. I see this in all of the online spaces I have ever been in, too - you’re supposed to be of service, if you want support from a group you’re supposed to offer more support back. If you want people to subscribe to your stuff and comment on your stuff or buy your stuff then you’re supposed to comment and buy and engage with their stuff too. It’s exhausting.
Like I genuinely can’t do it.
It’s not that I don’t love connecting with other people, or that I don’t want to hear from you, or reply to messages and comments - but there is this weird, hidden expectation that you will do so in a certain time frame. One I can’t always follow. And the new notification button stresses me out and they all pile up and altogether, mostly, the internet ends up feeling like I’m sitting in a room with hundreds of people trying to talk to me at once and I just can’t do it.
To grow on Instagram, for example, you need to be ‘social’ - you need to spend lots of time on there, replying to peoples stories, commenting on peoples posts, sharing stuff - the algorithm genuinely doesn’t share your posts if you don’t do these things. And I often think how much that must negatively impact most autistic business owners who are trying to grow there.
It’s not that I don’t like you or respect your work.
It’s that I only have a limited amount of energy and most of it is taken up trying to navigate real life spaces that are physically hard for me to be in.
It’s that being online - being in front of a phone or a computer screen - trying to read between the lines of my own words to make sure neurotypicals don’t misunderstand my very direct (often termed ‘blunt’) natural way of communicating - worrying about the fact you’re going to reply and I’m going to need to do all that again later on - it’s all just a lot. It’s too much. On top all of the other things I need to juggle just to do the work I want to do in this world.
Over the course of this business bootcamp, I’ve been wondering a lot about ableism in the ‘business growth’ world. And if anyone is ever going to stand up and ask the much needed questions.
If we’re all being taught to only sell to our ‘ideal client’ - a person we can fully understand and who we know - then are we also only expecting people to buy from people who can understand them? And if people will only buy from people who understand them, and I have a neurological difference that makes this very difficult for me, will I ever be able to fully succeed as an autistic business owner?
If we only engage online with people - or consider people a part of our online community - if they have the capacity to like, share and comment on our things then who are we excluding there? If we wait for a biased, ableist algorithm to show us the work we want to see, who are silencing?
And is any of this actually okay?
When are we going to demand more of ourselves in terms of autistic allyship?
When are we going to start trying harder to read the words of people not exactly like us? To buy things - products and services - from people who can’t speak directly to our exact lived experience?
Because until we all do that then we’re just going to continue seeing the majority of successful people be those who have been unfairly placed at the center of our society.
I’d love to hear from you ❤️
Are you an autistic business owner - do you resonate with anything I’ve shared above?
Are you neurotypical - has this made you question any of your consumer habits?
Are you a business growth expert - do you think there is any of way of doing this thing without the ‘ideal client’ exercises and the endless networking?
Sending love & solidarity,
P.S. Did enjoy today’s newsletter? Know anyone who could benefit from reading it? I’d love it if you could share it and help spread the work I do here further, so we can positively impact more people 🙏🏻🥰
P.P.S. I wrote and scheduled this a couple of weeks ago but it is very inline with this recent post from . If you found this inciteful then definitely check her post out too 🌟
