So. If there’s so much in the way of a successful and less harmful launch process, what—if anything—could ever work?

Here’s what has worked for me instead, perhaps it will help you find your own new process:

Accept + acknowledge, clarify and accommodate.

Accept and acknowledge:

Sometimes I wish I had more than I do. Sometimes I forget about what I already have. When I’m most in flow, I can both accept my current reality and make grateful use of what I have to work with.

Where I am is where I am. What it is, is what it is. What I have is what I have. And those things may not look the way they do for you or anyone else.

Acceptance of my position, my circumstances, my capacity, my resources—regardless of whether any of it is fair or not, equitable or not, abundant or not—allows me to create a plan for myself within at least a closer approximation of my true reality.

On the other side of acceptance is acknowledgement. It is gratitude for what is and grounding for what’s being built.

It allows me to consciously approach my possibilities at any given time. Change is always possible, but what that change looks like isn’t going to be the same across the board—not from person to person (and not even from instance to instance for the same person.)

The resources you have might not be the same as someone else’s. They might not be the same as they used to be. Here’s the biggest “productivity” spoiler alert and self-loathing’s best kept secret: That’s actually, honestly, so totally ok.

Accepting that you have what you have for right now, acknowledging the blessings of already having those things, and using them to move you forward, is way more powerful than pretending you’re working with what you’re really not or waiting around for things to look different.

Accepting and acknowledging that what counts as a baby step for someone else might count as a giant leap for you is powerful.

Accepting and acknowledging that you might not make seven figures by next month, but you could make three to four pretty good figures (especially considering that we built businesses out of literally nothing + our imagination and skills, and “in these unprecedented times” no less,) is pretty fucking powerful.

Don’t let the shiny shit distract you from the fact that accepting and acknowledging your resources allows you to act with intention. Don’t let compare-and-despair rob you of the power you do have in this moment.

Clarify:

While creating your marketing requires you to, well, create, we often forget that marketing isn’t really about displaying creativity. In the end, it has a job to do.

Whether you’re building your audience, raising awareness and educating people about your solutions or straight selling an offer, you need to get people to do something specific.

Approaching a launch as a small business owner can feel tricky sometimes. We need a lot of different things to happen in order to reach success.

We need our audiences to grow, we need to educate people about how exactly we can help, we need to establish a brand and we need to sell our offers to make money.

But, in order for our marketing to succeed—whatever phase we’re in—we’ve got to put our sense of pressure aside and let clarity and intention drive our actions.

You’ve accepted and acknowledged your specific set of circumstances and resources, and that has to include the fact that your foundation is still in progress. You may be in a state of building and growth that requires you to use your resources in the most strategic way possible.

That’s totally ok. We all start in that place, and we go back to that place every time we start a new phase in our businesses too. The most important part of getting real, practical clarity no matter where you’re at is to be able to ask yourself:

• What’s actually possible within this environment?

• What do you want to make possible in this environment?

• What would be most beneficial to you in this moment, with these resources, in these circumstances?

Clarify the job for your launch marketing and let it do just one job at a time, and do it well.

Remember to clarify your metrics too: how will you measure whether your marketing is effectively doing the job you assigned to it?

I’m sure you’ve realized by now that a lot of the metrics we end up directing our attention to aren’t actually the most helpful ones for us to track. Keep in mind that your metrics also don’t need to be numbers-based.

Beyond tracking numbers and percentages that indicate engagement or sales, you can also measure things like:

• Your energy levels in brainstorming, creating and executing pieces of marketing.

• How good (or bad) you feel about a certain style of post or particular platform.

• The depth of the connections you’re making (versus just the number of total connections.)

We’re not robots, and having complete clarity on what works for us and what doesn’t is a key piece of having a successful launch.

Accommodate:

You can always tell when a business switches into “launch mode.” All of a sudden there’s a fucking firehose of content coming at you on every single platform of connection possible.

I see so often with launching (and marketing in general) that people go in with a preconceived notion of what they must give in order to feed this beast.

We almost always forget to ask: What can I give right now?

If you understand your current capacity, how then can you structure this launch to function well within that capacity?

Now that you’ve accepted the realities and the possibilities of your situation, clarified your objective and how to measure success, you can accommodate all of it.

• You don’t need to be on every platform ever created. You can choose one or two.

• You don’t need to put out a fuck-ton of content at once. You can drip it out over time.

• You don’t need to do it in such a short amount of time. You can set your own timelines and they can be as long as you fucking want.

• You don’t need to use a content-creation style launch, you can leverage your relationships instead.

• You don’t even necessarily have to do this online, you can use in-person and local opportunities to your advantage.

Consider, as you figure out what you actually need to accommodate, that you are making change. Change always requires us to create extra blank space for it to fully unfold.

Doing something in a new way can take trial and error. It might take time to find the way of working that actually fits for you and whatever the reality of your situation is. You’re asking yourself to stretch into a new way of being, valuing and measuring.

You can accommodate for what you actually need in order to make quality connections with the people your offers are built to serve so you can give them what they need.

In the end remember this: your launch is yours.

It’s in the interest of the unjust systems woven into the fabric of our current society that you stay distracted from how big of a difference you can make with something as seemingly “small” as a single offer-launch.

But change happens when change happens. And it’s individuals like you and me who create that change. The more of us who make those changes, the bigger those changes get.

You may be a small business now without a whole bunch of buying power or a big team (or any team at all—hey, fellow One-Person Show!🤩) but what you’re building now is part of the future of a global economy.

You have so much more power than you might think you do, and I know you’re here because you give a fuck.

I can’t wait to see what kind of change you create with your next launch.🩵

Thanks for reading Part Three of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!

If you’re enjoying this series and find it valuable, consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5/month.

Your subscription supports my independent research, writing and podcasting and helps me keep giving you my very best.💛

Become A Paid Supporter for $5/mo

Can’t do a recurring subscription right now? No worries! You can also leave me a one-time tip:

Leave A Tip

About The Author:

Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.

If you’d like more personalized help with:

• building your next launch

• reworking your business processes

• strengthening and clarifying your offers

for a less harmful, more human business, join me for a 1-on-1 intensive and lets make it happen.

For any other inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com

What kind of harm are you perpetuating for yourself in creating timelines that force you to overtax yourself in every way?

And what oppressive systems are you upholding, whether you want to or not, by staying overtaxed?…

Ignoring reality at a huge cost.

There’s a very special brand of pink-washed, girl-boss feminism that’s taken over the online business world.

Much of the advice and education we receive on how to launch comes from celebrity coaches and “patriarchy-smashing” mentors who are essentially telling us that the road to equality lies in you being able to make a whole bundle of cash.

The idea here is that if you have money, you have the power to affect change. It seems like a logical solution to a glaring lack of societal balance, right?

The only problem is that this solution only works for a very specific type of person. Remember that “fully able, slim, white, conventionally attractive, cis-hetero woman” I mentioned earlier?

Yup, that’s the one.

The non-solution being sold to us as both the justification for and end result of the standard online launch is nothing more than the polished turd that is white feminism.

Anti-Racism Coach Alyssa Hall recently put out a newsletter (which you can subscribe to here!) on the issues with white liberal feminism, (about which she insightfully notes “Btw, you don't have to be white or a liberal to follow this particular ideology.”) :

It tends to ignore the societal structures at play and focuses on very narrow (individualistic) solutions.

If we solely focus on gaining capital and power as a way to uplift and liberate women, we ignore the fact that there are actually more structures at play. Mainly because the method of gaining power and capital is exclusionary at its core.

In other words: white feminism doesn’t change anything for anyone except straight white women with access to certain resources.

The only real “change” that occurs is in who holds the power inside of the same problematic systems already in play. The people being left behind already just get left-behinder.

In an NBCBLK article from 2021, (also featured in that kick-ass newsletter from Alyssa Hall,) author Koa Beck was interviewed following the publication of her book, White Feminism: From The Suffragettes To Influencers And Who They Leave Behind.

Marie Solis, the author of the article, wrote:

This ideology is fundamentally exclusionary, [Beck] says, functioning to keep women of color from enjoying the benefits of any feminist gains or otherwise enlisting them in creating the illusion of equality for their white counterparts, such as by performing the domestic labor that allows white women to succeed in the workplace.

White feminism, however, is not exclusive to white women, Beck says. Because it is so pervasive, people of other racial and ethnic backgrounds often buy into the promises of white feminism, believing that if they work hard enough, they may be able to reap its alleged rewards.

In the interview, Beck explained further:

White feminism as a practice and ideology aspires to those things rather than interrogates them…

There’s this idea that you should look inward, rather than looking outward at systems and examining the way those systems treat you, me and people we’ll never meet. White feminism casts you as a revolution in and of itself…

There’s something so easy about it, and it fits within the rhythm of the shows and media we consume. You can basically identify as a “feminist” without really challenging power, and that’s very satisfying and welcoming to a lot of people.

The promise of “reaping white feminism’s alleged rewards” means that many of us are essentially operating on bad intel.

We assume we’re working within a certain set of conditions which actually don’t exist.

And, I’d argue, these imaginary conditions have been further sold to us as a distraction from the reality that allows people in power to continue profiting from our false assumptions.

Not only do these false assumptions hold us back, they can cause many of us to put ourselves, and be put, in situations where we end up making rash, half-baked decisions based on incomplete information.

We base our decision-making within concepts like manifestation, positive thinking, belief in a meritocracy, etc. because we’ve been taught to believe that everyone is working within the same set of conditions.

So, if something ISN’T working, it must mean there’s a deeper, more personal, maybe more intangible reason.

Once we’ve decided all of the responsibility for our own failure or success is squarely and solely on our own shoulders, the logical next step can only be a serious doubling down on the strategies we already know, come hell or high water, because we’ve been told they “work”.

Except by now, you know that most of these strategies are not only unhelpful-and-harmful to us—they’re also harming our audiences and clients, which ripples out to their audiences and clients…

We dismiss our own realities based on blind trust in someone else’s idea of what reality even is. We dismiss our clients’ realities because we’ve been told that anyone’s reality can only look one way.

Ultimately, we’re removing our agency within our own lives by making someone outside of us the actual expert on our existences, and then we do the same thing to our audience.

How often have you heard (or maybe said them yourself, we’re all learning…) things like:

• “Is it that they can’t join the program, or is it a mindset issue?”

• “Learn how to address objections and turn a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’.”

• “Where people will get the money from isn’t your responsibility—just price yourself at what you’re worth.”

• “It didn’t happen because you weren’t all in.”

• “Coaches aren’t responsible for their clients’ outcomes.”

The definition of the term “spiritual bypassing” as described by the dude who coined it, John Welwood, goes like this:

Spiritual ideas and practices to sidestep personal, emotional ‘unfinished business,’ to shore up a shaky sense of self, or to belittle basic needs, feelings, and developmental tasks.

There are entire business coaching empires that have been built on selling and using intangible concepts that rely on manipulation and gaslighting dressed up as “gut-feelings” and “intuition.”

It feels extremely important for me to point out that I am writing this as a professional Intuitive who uses Tarot in her own business practice and with her clients. I believe in the power of intuition and forces outside of ourselves that we can’t always see and touch.

But any spiritual practice that is not firmly grounded in the realities of the world we all live and operate in is a scam.

Using intuitive tools does not entail perverting them for your own gain, using them to manipulate other humans or placing responsibility where it does not belong in order to make a profit.

Spiritual bypassing forces people to take responsibility where they cannot, then blame themselves for failures that weren’t their fault to begin with. We try to exert control where we don’t have any and dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole of desperation.

That desperation just re-primes us for another round of ignoring reality at the cost of our own businesses and wellbeing. The cycles repeat and we’re no closer to our goals than when we started this thing.

If these are the thoughts from which all of our actions are originating, it’s too easy for us to keep harming ourselves while using the same tactics within our own business processes to harm our audiences and clients.

“Manifesting success” should not require you to make a drastic, completely foolhardy play in order to pull off some eleventh-hour-Hail-Mary on your fucking livelihood.

Calculated risk is great. Desperation and operating on a hope and a prayer and someone else blowing smoke up your ass without knowing and acknowledging the reality of your business, resources, circumstances, needs or goals is the literal actual worst possible thing you could do.

Not only does it hurt you, it keeps the web of lies intact so that others continue to be caught in it. It undermines the integrity of entire industries and makes sure the changes that take us to a more equitable future never fucking happen.

Believing the lies keeps ALL of us stuck - you AND me AND everyone else.

The flash in the pan wins.

I was talking to some friends and fellow small business owners about the nonsense of one-size-fits-all launch strategies and in the middle of our discussion, one friend said “OR, it works once and then never does again.”

It turned on such a huge lightbulb for me that I fully gasped and shouted “OH MY FUCK, YOU’RE RIGHT!”

In science and other disciplines where theories are tested before being proven or disproven and accepted as either fact or fiction, outcomes are required to be repeatable based on conditions that are either able to be replicated or will naturally reoccur.

If you don’t have complete knowledge of and control over the conditions in which you’re launching, and a certain strategy works—was it the strategy? Or was it something else?

You might argue that it doesn’t matter, because a win’s a win, right?

But what happens when you go to use that strategy again and it doesn’t fucking work?

First off, correlation does not equal causation.

Just because something worked once doesn’t mean it’s a great strategy. It could mean that.

It could also mean there was a person in your small audience who was already ready and waiting for your offer.

It could mean you were able to capitalize on the conditions of a currently-common sentiment based on news cycles and where people’s attention was in that moment. (”Recession-proof your business!” ringing any bells?…)

It could mean someone signed up because a mutual friend told them about it and they never even went through your sales funnel.

There’s a misconception that pro-coaches, manufactured confidence and all, really seem to enjoy operating off of:

It’s the idea that we have more control over things than we really do.

Can you recreate the conditions you need in order to replicate that last outcome? Do you even know for sure what those conditions were?

How do you troubleshoot something you don’t control? Or something you don’t know will ever “naturally reoccur”?

This not only brings up the fact that the way we’re taught to set launch goals in the first place is flawed (ie: “I will sell five spots in my program.” You don’t have control over other people’s actions and without enough of the right kind of data, you won’t be able to predict the number of sales you make…)

It also brings up how little of that right data we’re able to collect.

Having the right kind of data means understanding the environment of the experiment you're undertaking well enough that you know you’re measuring the right variables.

As entrepreneurs who are coming up in the ever-increasingly fast-paced environment of manufactured urgency and “just do it” and “start before you’re ready,” we’re often not following a strategy enough times in a row, or measuring our progress by the most important factors, to have any real proof that they actually work.

By the time you come back to that celebrity coach you learned from to report your first win, they’ll already be selling you on a new strategy anyway, because “trends and algorithms,” etcetera.

The combination of all these factors means that ultimately launches-as-we-know-them are unpredictable, unwieldy. It means using a monstrous amount of resources in order to potentially gain absolutely nothing. It means cruel self-talk and emotional ups-and-downs that exhaust the nervous system. It means we ignore our intersectionality in favor of the unmessy aesthetic of white feminism and spiritual bypassing.

It means, in a word, destruction:

Of self, of a sound business foundation, of future security and growth, of safety—of everything that launch strategy was supposed to get you in the first place.

So. If there’s so much in the way of a successful and less harmful launch process, what—if anything—could ever work?

Here’s what has worked for me instead, perhaps it will help you find your own new process:

Accept + acknowledge, clarify and accommodate.

Thanks for reading Part Two of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!

If you’re enjoying this series and find it valuable, consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5/month.

Your subscription supports my independent research, writing and podcasting and helps me keep giving you my very best.💛

Become A Paid Supporter for $5/mo

Can’t do a recurring subscription right now? No worries! You can also leave me a one-time tip:

Leave A Tip

Click here to read Pt. 3: Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My! (How can we make this better?)

About The Author:

Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.

If you’d like more personalized help with:

• building your next launch

• reworking your business processes

• strengthening and clarifying your offers

for a less harmful, more human business, join me for a 1-on-1 intensive and lets make it happen.

For any other inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com

A launch is like the most concentrated possible version of an organization’s marketing processes. Seeing how companies launch says a lot about what values are being upheld within their work—regardless of whether those are the values they actually want to uphold or not.

In my agency days, “launch” meant a fuck-ton of late nights, weekend work, weeks of forced business travel and cancelled PTO.

Now in entrepreneurship, I associate it with a different kind of exhaustion, burnout, grief, confusion, disappointment, shame and working really hard for REALLY free.

Every time I talk to a friend that’s working on a launch, they’re tired as fuck. Every client that talks to me about launching is anxious. Every coach I see selling a course or program on how to launch is promising ways to “make launching not suck.”

Here’s what I think: traditional launches are not an effective business or marketing practice for microbusinesses and solopreneurs.

Even once (and maybe especially once,) we’ve begun establishing ourselves—all a traditional launch really does is burn you out, drag down your self-esteem, and recycle harm for you and your audience.

For those of us who are in the space where we are no longer business newbies, but neither are we super-profitable, go-to pros, we need marketing strategies that look like something else.

Think about all the work it takes to put a launch together:

The email sequences

The freebies

The webinars and challenges

The landing pages to create

The copy to write

The graphics to make

The BTS tech and admin that makes it all work

And you're supposed to do it all while also “just” continuing to do the everyday tasks it takes to maintain your business.

AND, this process requires us to do this REPEATEDLY in order to continue making sales??

For this to be the expectation from a single human being for marketing and acquiring clients is laughable. It's not sustainable and it's not effective.

When I was figuring out “how to business” I thought launching was something tangible. I thought there was a set system or a trick I didn’t know yet.

As I struggled my way out of figuring out how to run a business into actually running a business, my sinking-feeling assumption became that maybe I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

And the coaches I was following throughout this shift all seemed to be telling me that my assumptions were true:

Learn my foolproof launch system, they’d say.

A lead magnet, then a free challenge, then a webinar, then a pitch then a sales email sequence, they’d say.

What they neglected to say was:

• “I already have an audience well into the tens of thousands, so if even one half of one percent of this group of people purchases during a launch, I will have made more in a few weeks than you made last year.”

• “I am a fully able, slim, white, conventionally attractive, cis-hetero woman, and am therefore already the standard of trustworthiness and desirability—people are more likely to buy from me in the first place because I am the current societal standard of womanly success.”

• “I am already wealthy, and much of that wealth may not have come directly from my online business. I would never tell you if that were the case, but it does allow me to resource myself in whatever way is needed.”

• “I have a dedicated full-time team to create, fine tune and/or execute all of the required launch materials for me. That’s how I can put out a full-scale launch while also having time to ideate, coach clients and take care of myself.”

• “I started my business years ago in the wild west of online business, when my competition was negligible and the market was up for grabs—a completely different environment than the one you’re building in.”

• “I am out of touch and have forgotten what it’s actually like at the beginning of business growth because I’ve been here for years - whatever struggle I went through has now become a (anywhere from slightly embellished to grossly misrepresented) story I tell in order to market my current offers.”

This may sound like a defeatist whine-fest, especially when we’ve been sneakily conditioned to think that if something doesn’t work for us, we didn’t work hard enough or do it right (certainly not because our circumstances have created conditions in which these “systems” will not work, or because intersectionality means that things work differently for different people for different reasons…)

Regardless of your opinion of me and my attitude, the fact remains:

The point of marketing your services is not for you to have the most complex sales funnels possible. The point is for you to help more people with those services, get paid for doing so and grow your business.

The ways we’ve been told to launch don’t actually get us all there. In fact they don’t get us even close to “there” and often set us further back. Starting with…

Working for free

Working without being paid is a thing to be expected when you’re starting a business. But working for free now without any real return in the future either is a seriously steaming load of shit.

If we are all operating under the belief that our labor deserves to be compensated in some way, why then are we so content to expend all of our own resources without any payback whatsoever, monetary or otherwise?

What the traditional online launch (a la Jeff Walker’s PLF, etc.) ignores is that there are specific conditions that need to be in place in order for that launch to succeed:

• A relatively large audience.

• A fine-tuned and clear offer complete with a fine-tuned and clear sales page

• The willingness to show up in specific ways on specific platforms (even if that puts you out of your integrity.)

• The physical, mental and emotional capacity to brainstorm, create and share all of these materials.

• The systems and tools in place to physically execute all the content, challenges, webinars, etc.

• The capacity to then immediately, if not in the very near future, deliver the actual offer for this influx of new clients, (which might require a whole OTHER set of content creation, tech, tools, resources etc.)

The effort we make to market our services is meant to pay off through the actual exchange of money for those services, right?

The reality is that if all of the above conditions do not yet exist within our businesses, going through the exhausting motions of executing on a launch like this is very literally a waste. The return we see on our investment of resources doesn’t balance out.

We all know that putting all of your money into a single stock trade is a recipe for disaster. The recommendation is that you invest consistently over a period of time across a number of different stocks that make up your portfolio. And whatever money you invest does not include the money you need for things like housing, food, transportation or other short term spending.

Putting all the resources you’ve got—time, energy, money, attention, creativity—into building and executing a launch is like spending your rent on a hot stock tip from your idiot cousin. (We all have at least one, and I know you just thought about a very specific person as you read this.)

What would it look like for a launch not to commandeer all of your resources, but to use just a fraction of your resources so you still have room for the rest of your business and your life?

The idea then is not “don’t spend anything.”

It simply becomes: “don’t spend it all in one place.”

OVER-working for free

Remember those nights and weekends I mentioned? The exhaustion and burnout? Yup. Here it comes.

We keep trying to shove all of this work into the tiniest amount of time. My question is: why? When we are literally the ones setting these deadlines, why would we create situations like this for ourselves on purpose?

What sadistic game is this?

Do we momentarily forget that there are more weeks in the year to come? Do we just not understand that time passes but our measurements of that time are a human construct? Do we actually not want to build a business, and instead just build a series of life-or-death situations that may or may not result in an influx of cash?

And then somehow, all of a sudden, we’re “behind” on our launches?…

Surprise! It’s your corporate trauma and societal conditioning coming back to bite you in the ass!

When you remember:

• that capitalism runs on your desperation for more resources and fabricated urgency,

• that social injustice runs on you being so distracted by your own perceived lack and inability to slow down that you can’t give it any meaningful attention,

• that the patriarchy runs on you being “superwoman” and “doing it all” with a smile on your face—

it really starts to make sense.

Here’s where you aren’t even working for free anymore - you’re paying with your life so you can work more. That doesn’t seem like a sane tradeoff to me.

And, what happens if you have processing differences? If you’re chronically ill? Already suffering from burnout? If you just had a major life event like a loss, a cross-country move, a new addition to the family, surgery?

What kind of harm are you perpetuating for yourself in creating timelines that force you to overtax yourself in every way?

And what oppressive systems are you upholding, whether you want to or not, by staying overtaxed?…

Thanks for reading Part One of Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!

If you’re enjoying this series and find it valuable, consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $5/month.

Your subscription supports my independent research, writing and podcasting and helps me keep giving you my very best.💛

Become A Paid Supporter for $5/mo

Can’t do a recurring subscription right now? No worries! You can also leave me a one-time tip:

Leave A Tip

Click here to read Pt. 2: Why Launching is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My! (The scientific method, the toll of ignoring reality and gaslighting for sales.)

About The Author:

Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.

If you’d like more personalized help with:

• building your next launch

• reworking your business processes

• strengthening and clarifying your offers

for a less harmful, more human business, join me for a 1-on-1 intensive and lets make it happen.

For any other inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com

This series began as a very short newsletter to my at the time also very short email list in mid-2022 when I was reaching a boiling point about “what the entire fuck is going on with how shitty marketing is all the time??”

I wrote that newsletter and sent it off. It was less than 500 words and only barely scratched the surface of what I thought was broken and harmful about online marketing for small business owners and how we could start to make it better.

In that moment I didn’t think anyone would care to sit and marinate with me about the details of how and why the marketing tactics that have been sold to us are so deeply rooted in white supremacy, capitalist control and patriarchal standards.

But there was something about this topic that would. not. leave. me. alone. I needed to talk about it. I have a burning need for this to be a complete and full conversation.

See, the deeper I got into online business after leaving the ad industry in 2019, the more I saw that the same things that broke me in corporate were out here breaking entrepreneurs who really care about their work.

Not only was it breaking individuals who were trying to do meaningful work, it seemed to be breaking an entire industry. And the closer I looked, the further those cracks seemed to reach.

The simple act of marketing our offers can create a ripple effect of harm that shoots straight through our own lives into the lives of our clients, their clients and beyond.

Many of the collective tactics we’ve come to learn as “the way” to launch our offers and market to our audiences are built to uphold the inequitable systems we openly recognize as oppressive and rigged to cause harm.

Things like:

• overwork beyond the point of burnout

• working for free

• spiritual bypassing and gaslighting as sales tactics

• ignoring the importance of intersectionality

• white feminism as a gussied-up stand-in for real change

• one-time wins being sold as long-term security

There’s no way for me to single-handedly take down entire unjust systems, but maybe there’s a way for me to contribute in some small way to us changing our orientation to those systems, and then finding a way to restructure them together.

If there aren’t more of us talking about the collective harm being categorized as “normal,” how will we ever really create change?

So, I’m inviting you to join me in this conversation. I know I don’t have all the answers or the deepest, most profound insights, but I hope in creating this that we can start to find those answers together.

Originally, I had made Part 1 free for everyone, and Parts 2 & 3 were only available for paid subscribers.

I put so much thought, time, care and consideration into this series, I wanted that effort to be valued and known.

I still do—and-but-also: I want as many people to have access to this series as possible.

I want people to read it, think about it, share it with their friends, ask me questions about it, tell me their experiences related to the topics covered and beyond.

So this series is officially free and accessible to everyone, whether you’re a paid subscriber or not.

There will be more series like this one, and yes, some of them will only be available to paid subscribers.

But for right now, for this piece, the value and the payback for me is in sharing my thoughts and having conversations about this topic with you, my excellent and most awesome readers.

So click below to read all of Why Launching Is Broken—Funnels & Freakouts & Faking, Oh My!:

Part 1: We're doing way too much without any real payoff.

Part 2: The scientific method, the toll of ignoring reality and gaslighting for sales.

Part 3: How can we make this better?

And if you feel so-called: like, share, comment, reply and consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Become A Paid Supporter for $5/mo

It’s only $5/month, goes directly to supporting me and this work, and I’ve got some goodies coming soon just for paid supporters! Stuff like:

• Drawings for free Tarot readings

• Free monthly sign-ups for 5-minute coaching

• Subscriber-only posts

• My undying gratitude

I hope you enjoy this series and find it valuable in some way.

You can start reading Part One now and I’ll see you inside!

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About The Author:

Zoha Abbas is an Intuitive Tarot Reader, Business Coach and writer who aims to explore the small business conversations around doing business better, together, and in the grey-area of real life through data, divination and dismantling harmful systems. She is the CEO and Creator of The Ownership Method, a coaching practice where she helps fellow entrepreneurs and small business owners make change in their own businesses and beyond.

For inquiries, please email: zoha@theownershipmethod.com