This blog post has been authored by Stand Out Online Member Kristy Ting, compulsivemom

As a pharmacist, I had a good, stable job, with a good, stable income. If anyone had told me one and a half years ago that I would be chucking everything one day and going online, I would have laughed out loud — it was such an inconceivable notion.
I had been designing online, not because I needed money, but because I enjoyed designing. Months (yes, months) after I started designing on Figma (which is free), I invested $997 into a course that taught me how to design on Clickfunnels, and I enjoyed it so much that I started doing it more seriously as a part time.
Hold up. Do you know what Clickfunnels is? It was all French to me 1.5 years ago. It’s a software that helps you build funnels. Do you know what funnels are? No worries. Let’s get on with my story first. I’ll tell you about funnels one of these days.
The pandemic landed, and the retail pharmacy I was working at (thanks to good foresight) started selling lots and lots and lots of face masks. We had the 3plys, the 4plys, the N95s, we had everything.
Everyday, crowds of people descended on us as if we were going out of style (or rather, the masks were). It was good to have such sales, but at the same time, it was exhausting. There were no males in the pharmacy, and all of us girls were carrying cartons and cartons of masks from morning till night, lugging them, opening them, bending endlessly to take the masks out and displaying them.
One year into the pandemic, one day, as I was scrambling to open yet another carton of masks for a host of impatient customers, a thought popped into my head — “How long are you going to do this for, Kristy?”
I did not plan it, it just came. It came amidst the crowd of people surrounding me with their hands stretched out, taking the masks from the carton. It was the loudest voice I’d ever heard my entire life. It was strange, because this is the kind of thing one reads about only in books. Voices, premonitions, never had I taken any of them seriously, but this time, it hit me like a ton of bricks.
It wasn’t about the masks and the physical work. It was about the fact that I’d been working 13 hour shifts, 5 days a week, for the past 14 years. I was but a fresh graduate when I joined, and now I am a mother of three amazing kids. These kids were struggling with the onslaught of online learning, because their school was closed due to the pandemic. They’d been struggling for the past six months, but my partner (in the same company as I was, albeit at a different branch) were working so hard that we’d completely left out the fact that the expensive Ipads, headphones and stationery that we bought our kids had no way of helping them concentrate, focus, and learn.
For months my husband and I have come home, picked them up from the babysitter’s, gone through their Google classroom homework just to find out that they had done everything wrong. We would ask them what they’d been taught that day, and none of them could tell us. They were so used to physical classes that online learning was a culture shock to them. (To their teachers too, I believe, for they were teaching as if they were in a physical classroom). For months we came home from work exhausted at 11pm, and sat down to teach our kids their homework and revise with them what they’d learnt that morning. It was wearing all of us out. We were tired out, and so were they. We were stressed out, and so were they. I think my subconscious must have been screaming for release, just that I just never bothered listening to it.
It is strange how the most impulsive decisions feel so right. I made my way through the crowd of customers, strode to the dispensary where my computer was, and all this while thoughts were running in my head — my kids, my work, the stress that I had been laboring under — something had to give. I had a sudden moment of clarity — I saw my life as it was — stressful, exhausting, a bunch of neglected kids, and a family heading towards a breakdown.
I sat down at my PC, drafted a letter of resignation, and emailed it to HR on the spot. After I did it, I felt a stab of fear — what the heck did I just do? Here I was, earning 5 figures monthly, resigning without advanced planning. However, what I did felt right. It just did. And that was that.
The next month, I took a full month’s worth on unpaid leave (while serving my resignation notice) to try to get more clients for my designing job. I thought perhaps I should build the foundation first, so to speak — by trying to get more clients and leads for my business before I left the workforce for good after 90 days of notice. It was not as easy as I expected. It was an uphill battle — maybe because I wasn’t good at it at all. There were so many late nights prospecting to no avail — people would tell me that I shouldn’t be asking for so much because I was Asian (we’re talking $300 bucks for a full page of design), they would either bargain halfway and ghost me, or expect me to start a project without giving me any deposit; and when I asked for a deposit upfront, I would never hear from them again.
Through it all, not once did I consider going back to work or taking back my resignation letter. There were days, however, of mental exhaustion and physical fatigue. Prospecting is hard work when you go about it wrong. Cold pitching and cold emails did not work for me, despite the effort I made to check out every company’s background, figure out what changes they can make to their pages and then email them about it. I never heard from any of them.
I did not do too badly. In that first month of cold prospecting and awful leads, I managed a $2400 revenue. It was enough to give me hope and keep me going. My children were seeing more of me. I was able to guide them during their online classes. Despite the vast difference in how much I was earning versus that I used to get, I felt, for the first time in a long time, imminently fulfilled.
One of the things I learnt from this was — people were awful to me, because I was awful to myself. I suffered from Imposter’s Syndrome, and felt that I had not enough social proof and testimonials to back myself and my work up. I felt that I was asking for too much when I requested a mere $200 to design a very, very long sales page (the owner made off with my designs without ever paying me).
When you lack confidence in yourself, you are doing yourself a disservice. Your lack of surety and fear will show in your tone of voice, your gestures, and your mannerisms. It translates onto your audience. They can feel it even if you’re not on camera — they feel it all the way via DMs and emails. The way you answer their questions and their demands are so important that the moment you let some uncertainty through, you become fresh meat to opportunists.
Here are some things I’ve learnt along the way:

1. Hop on a call
You may feel super nervous about it ( I know I did ) but 10 calls, whether you close them as clients or not, are bound to loosen you up. After 10 calls, you start to feel more relaxed, and more sure of yourself on camera. You will learn to anticipate the questions that will be asked, and you will be able to have ready, professional answers for them. You will learn to lead the conversation and have them talk about their businesses and what they’re currently struggling with, and reiterate how you can help them when they most need it.

2. Niche Down
Don’t run around offering your services to everyone that comes your way. While you may think it is more lucrative to be a jack of all trades, remember that you will be master of none. Figure out what you can do well, and how you can do it. Initially I was offering my design services to everyone on the market, but after a while I realized that there were so many new things I had to learn, and I was not getting to be an authority on any particular design. My peers would be designing specifically for coaches, or for personal trainers, and on the other end I would be asked if I had experience designing for a construction company, a product launch, or a summit. It made me really nervous each time because I would not know what was coming next. In the end I had to research all the different niches that my prospects were into, and of course, I did not do well, because the flow of design, the style and the pictorials were not what they should be — they differed with every niche. It was a total disaster. When I finally niched down — it was a big relief. I would only need to focus on one type of design, and could only get better and better at it.

3. Do Market Research
Sure, you’re freaked out by this. It sounds cheesy, but it works. I’ve done market research myself when I decided to niche down. It was tougher for me than my counterparts, mainly because I was outside of the USA. The time zones were a challenge, and also I wanted to give out $10 Starbucks gifts cards to those who were willing to hop calls with me. I failed to buy Starbucks cards from Walmart, Target or even Starbucks, because they would not accept Paypal transactions that originated from outside of the USA. I persevered anyway — I had some friends help me buy and emailed them to me, so I could email them to the people I’d talked to.
It’s amazing how interviewing different people (purely for information, and not for pitching) gave me so, so much insight and offered so many ideas that would never have had occurred to me. Instead of trying to guess what people wanted, I was actually talking to them and asking them what they needed when it came to designs and funnel building. A side note that these was the crowd that I’d niched down to. Once I knew who I wanted to talk to, I just went ahead and did it. I prepared a script, started posting in Facebook groups about how I’d trade a $10 Starbucks card for 15 minutes of their time, and that was it.
From all the information I gathered, I crafted my offer, emailed those who’d talked to me my offer and they’d give me more feedback, and I’d refine the offer a bit more, and I was good to go. The level of confidence I gained and the amount of friends I made were amazing.
For mothers who are in the 9–5 and who are looking to go online, and start a business of your own — or even if you’re aren’t ready to leave but you want to start a side hustle — you can always download my free checklist that allows you to get a head start on how you can do this without going through the trials that I did. I’ll be sharing more about my journey as I transitioned from a full time professional to a near-jobless mother, to an online entrepreneur.
Get your free cheat sheet now, and remember to follow my blog for more sharing sessions!


Kristy Ting
Pharmacist, Breastfeeding Counselor, Online Entrepreneur