It’s easy to talk about independent work as freedom, flexibility, and designing something that fits your life. And all of that is true.
But there’s another side of it we never want to gloss over: working for yourself can be really hard. Not just in the obvious ways, like inconsistent income or building a pipeline. But in the silent spiral ways. The timely moments where you don’t have someone to sanity check an idea, or gut check your proposed price. When you’re navigating a tricky client situation on your own. When you’re doing good work but wondering if you’re doing it right because no one is there to give you a gold star.
No one hands this to you. And without the right people around you, everything feels heavier and harder than it needs to.
That’s why we keep coming back to chosen colleagues: the people who make the uncertainty easier to navigate and the wins more meaningful. The people who get it.
We wanted a place to keep building that.
Introducing The New HQ Slack Community
We’re opening up The New HQ Slack community to help you find your people. Because care deeply about making the on-ramp to working for yourself easier, and to making it more sustainable to build your business in the long term. And because success (however you define it) feels a lot better when celebrated together.
As we’ve talked with so many people over the last year, we’ve realized that we have some strong beliefs about the world of independent work. And we want to bring together a group of people who feel the same. If these sound like you, you’ll feel at home here:
Work should fit real life.
Not perfectly, not always. There will still be busy weeks, and (very) stressful stretches. But your goal is different now. You are allowed to be a full, multi-faceted human, and to build work that supports that.Success is self-defined.
No one is handing you one single definition of success anymore. You decide what matters. Which sounds freeing until you realize there’s no title to point to, no salary to anchor to, no one telling you on a performance review that you’re doing a great job. So yes, it’s more responsibility. But it’s also entirely yours.There is enough work for all of us.
More people doing this well makes it better for all of us, not worse. We’ve heard the counter argument that: when more people work independently… won’t it get harder? We’ve seen the opposite. When someone does great work as an independent, it makes it easier for the next person to be trusted. It builds credibility for all of us. It raises the bar. We believe there is plenty of opportunity, plenty of roles, and a place for each of us to build our own businesses to match our definition of success.This isn’t easier. But it’s yours.
Working independently means more ambiguity, more responsibility, more ownership. It can also means less stability, less structure, less clarity. That’s the trade. We don’t believe in pretending it’s all effortless, but we do believe there’s power in choosing your version of hard. (Hat tip to Erin Leigh Patterson for clarifying this for us).Working for yourself doesn’t mean doing it all alone.
The best version of working for yourself isn’t the one where you’re doing it solo. It’s having people in your corner who understand the highs and the lows and the weird in-between parts. People you can show up to as you are, not as the polished version of your LinkedIn profile. It’s easier to keep going when you don’t feel like you’re the only one figuring it out.
The invitation
We’ve loved connecting with so many of you in notes and comments and emails and office hours. But sometimes you don’t need a newsletter or a calendar invite. You need to connect with a real person. Right… now. A quick gut check. A sounding board. A “has anyone dealt with this before?” A place to celebrate the tiny win no one else would understand.
That’s why we chose Slack. For the in-between moments where you need an honest conversation and real-time support from smart people who’ve been there. A place where insight matters more than status. Where you don’t have to prove how great everything is going. Where being in the middle of figuring it out is not a liability, it’s our shared reality.
It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, how your business is structured, or how many minutes or years you’ve been on the independent path.
What matters is that you share these values and are betting on the business of yourself.
If you read this and think: these are my people…
You’re right.
Come join us.
P.S. We thought this was hilarious and made us both laugh out loud. So yeah, Slack.
