Issue #004 | Move Forward Every Week
Helping people discover practical opportunities in a rapidly changing world.
I spent twenty minutes this week trying to remember the name of someone I met at a conference two years ago — someone I probably should’ve stayed in touch with. Turns out that’s a pretty common problem, and the data behind it this week surprised me a little. Let’s get into it.
Trend to Watch: The Highest-Earning Solopreneurs Are All-In on AI — And Still Show Up in Person
A new report from Lettuce Financial found that 89% of solopreneurs have now embraced AI in their business, mostly for content creation, marketing, and admin work. But the same report found that 80% still rely on in-person networking to grow — and among the highest earners (over $150k in revenue, five-plus years in business), that number climbs to 77% who say face-to-face connection is a priority, not an afterthought. The split shows up in stability, too: only 10% of top earners depend on a single client for most of their income, compared to 38% of solopreneurs overall. AI is handling more of the busywork than ever. The relationships that actually move the needle are still being built the slow way, in a room, with another person.
Opportunity of the Week: Become the Person Who Makes the Introduction
With this many people building solo and networking harder than ever, the shortage isn’t more events — it’s someone actually connecting the dots between people who should know each other. Once a month, go through your contacts and send exactly three short emails, each one introducing two people you think should meet: a referral source and a service provider, two solopreneurs who could send each other work, a client and a specialist you trust. It costs you fifteen minutes and nothing else, and it compounds in a way ads never will. You become the person at the center of other people’s businesses, which is the highest-leverage kind of networking there is — and it’s the opposite of a cold pitch.
Tool of the Week: folk
If you’ve ever left a conference or a coffee meeting with a stack of business cards or LinkedIn connections you never actually followed up with, try folk. Install the folkX browser extension, and every LinkedIn profile you visit gets pulled into a simple contact list with one click — no manual data entry. Then let its Follow-up Assistant do the part everyone skips: it reads your email and message threads with each contact, flags who’s gone quiet and worth a nudge, and drafts a personalized note so you’re not starting from a blank page. The trend above says relationships are still where the money is. This is the tool that keeps you from losing track of the ones you’ve already started.
Money Move: Nobody’s Tracking What’s About to Expire
Every small business is quietly juggling a pile of dates: a business license renewal, a liability insurance policy, a professional certification, a domain name, a handful of software subscriptions on auto-renew. None of it is exciting, all of it causes a real problem the day it lapses, and almost nobody owns a calendar for it — it just lives in someone’s inbox as an email they’ll “get to.” Offer a simple renewal-tracking retainer: you build the client a master calendar of every recurring deadline, and once a month you send the reminders and, if they want, actually handle the renewal yourself. It’s not a service anyone brags about hiring, which is exactly why nobody’s built a business around it yet.
Resource Corner: Deep Work
Deep Work by Cal Newport makes the case that the ability to focus without distraction is becoming rare and valuable precisely because everything else pulls in the opposite direction. If you’re the kind of person building the three steps below into your week already, this is the book that helps you protect the hours you’re building them in — not with more willpower, but with actual rules for when the notifications, the group chats, and the “quick questions” get let in, and when they don’t.
Forward Momentum
- Send three short “you two should meet” introduction emails this week, and don’t expect anything back.
- Install folk’s browser extension and import the last ten people you meant to follow up with but didn’t.
- Write down every license, policy, and subscription in your business that renews on a date you’re not tracking anywhere.
Final Thought
AI will keep getting better at the parts of your business that don’t require another person in the room. The parts that do — the introduction, the follow-up, the thing you can only do because someone trusts you — are turning into the actual differentiator, not the fallback plan for when the tools run out.
See you next week.
— Ron, Northbound Weekly
Leave a Reply