“It's a marathon not a sprint!”

In mid-January, I decided to make my site multilingual, as for the moment it only existed in English. After a long search, I finally found what I was looking for and translated the site into French, Italian and Spanish.

It was an exciting time! I was managing my first orders, with all the logistical problems that entailed, and making prototypes to improve my products. As soon as I woke up, I'd watch hours and hours of videos on marketing, branding and design techniques in general.

Even before lunchtime, my mind was SA-TU-RA-TED! The more I watched what others were doing, the more I listened to the marketing gurus, the more stressed I became!

I was having more and more problems with my application for my multilingual site; I had to repeat the same corrections over and over again. For weeks I didn't dare make the slightest change to the site. I was physically and psychologically tired, I couldn't draw any more, I didn't have the strength, I had to sit down and think...

Since I'd become self-employed, I'd been making countless decisions and my brain was running at full speed!

I slowly began to get back on track, and my nocturnal ruminations provided me with the solution. If I made a clone of my site, but this time in French, it would cost me much less than the current solution. So I put my plan into action, took the opportunity to gather my products on a single page and felt liberated after cancelling the multilingual site application.

I tried to remember why I had decided to work for myself. I wanted to be able to make decisions that didn't come out of the blue and that I understood what was at stake; I didn't want to have to justify all my decisions and I wanted a job that suited me.

My honey rightly reminded me that the world had only known about my business for a very short time, and that it was normal for things to move slowly.

Once I'd integrated this reality, things went much better, and my mind was calmer because I'd understood that growing a business takes time, you have to build a community, give people confidence, be part of their daily lives. In short, I understood that this job was a marathon, not a sprint!