Aggressively Human

What if the answer to growing your business wasn’t building a funnel or crazy AI workflows, but being human, and building discernment and relationships?

In this episode, we talk with Shannon Mattern, founder of the Web Designer Academy, where she teaches web designers how to package, price, position, and sell their services. She came up through freelance web design herself—undercharging, over-delivering, treating clients like bosses—before closing that side of her business and pivoting to teach others what she had to learn the hard way.

We talk about what’s actually driving undercharging, how AI is a repositioning opportunity when seen strategically, and why the real value of a web designer has never really been the design itself.

* Why web designers undercharge—and why the root cause runs deeper than mindset or confidence

* The codependency cycle: from people-pleasing freelancer to the same patterns showing up in her own business

* Building a business through referrals and word of mouth instead of paid ads and growth hacks

* Why hiring people different from yourself actually improves the business (even when it's uncomfortable)

* Why competing on price is a trap, and what to position on instead

* Why AI tools like Wix and Squarespace aren’t the threat most designers think they are

* Repositioning from “I make websites” to “I’m a business strategist and growth partner”

* How AI is actually a reason to charge more—not less—if you reposition around strategy and business impact

The truth is, designers hear me when I say this or anybody doing anything where like [00:30:00] part of your business relies on a piece of software that your expertise is not knowing how to manipulate that piece of software to. build the thing. It's the fact that you can even translate what a client's needs are something that's going to them the outcomes and results that they want.” - Shannon Mattern

Register for the Simply Profitable Designer Summit, March 16 - 20, 2026.

The way people find and use websites has changed. Learn how to design for conversion in the AI search era.

About our Guest

Shannon Mattern is a Pricing Strategist and the creator of the Package Matrix™. She is the founder of Web Designer Academy, where she spent a decade helping women web designers move from undercharging to premium pricing - and where she developed the Package Matrix™ framework now used by service providers across industries. Learn more about the full framework at https://shannonmattern.com/package-matrix

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Jessica Lackey

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The narrative surrounding self-employment is often binary: you’re either running a full-time business or you’re not. But is that the reality? What would be possible if we treated self-employment as a spectrum? And what do we face as we move across the spectrum in terms of time, money, and momentum? For this discussion, we’re welcoming back Softer Sounds founder, Off the Grid host, and author Amelia Hruby.

In this episode, Amelia shares what led her to a significant decision at the end of 2025: scaling back her podcast studio Softer Sounds dramatically and putting herself on a six-month sabbatical for that side of her business while investing in the creator-style side of Off the Grid. We dive into the idea of self-employment as a spectrum, the many forms it can take across a career, and why moving along that spectrum is a feature, not a flaw.

Hear from all three of us how we cobbled work together to build the income we needed across the years — the bridge jobs, the clients who weren’t the dream but paid the bills, and the years of audience-building that often preceded any real traction. This isn’t a conversation about how to build a six-figure business. It’s about what self-employment actually looks like at different stages, and what we’d do differently if the goal is to simply stay self-employed.

* What Amelia’s six-month sabbatical actually looks like — and why she chose a third option instead of hustling harder or closing the studio

* Self-employment as a spectrum: from side contracts and bridge jobs all the way to full-time business ownership (and back again)

* How Meg, Jessica, and Amelia each cobbled things together to get started — and what cobbling it together still looks like for established businesses

* The role of bridge work in creating the time and mental space to build what you actually want long-term

* Why Amelia chose to focus on Off the Grid and The Interweb instead of doubling down on Softer Sounds

* What publishing books (Amelia’s and Jessica’s came out within a week of each other in October 2025) has to do with long-term business strategy

* Hitting your capacity ceiling — and the different forms it takes at every stage of growth

* Authority building: why showing up consistently before a trend breaks is what actually creates leverage when the trend arrives

* The privilege question: how partner income, healthcare access, and life stage shape what risks you can realistically take

* When and why to go back “in-house”

“The only consistent business models you can count on are being a CPA or owning a funeral home. Otherwise it’s gonna change all the time. If you wanna be self-employed long-term, you have to love the ride of it. You have to love that it changes all the time. Do you enjoy every moment of it? No, I do not relish in the fact that AI perhaps stole half my business. I don’t have to love that. But I have to love dusting myself off and doing something new again.” - Amelia

About our Guest

Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media

Off the Grid

Self-Employment is a Spectrum

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Jessica Lackey

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Every business owner hits that point where the thing that used to light them up now feels like a slog — and it usually happens right when the work matters most. Whether it’s February fatigue, launch number seven, or the creeping suspicion that you’ve said everything you have to say, the impulse to burn it down and start fresh is real. But is it burnout, boredom, or just a season?

In this episode, we talk about the difference between being tired of something in your business and being done with it. We dig into the natural cycles of building — preparing, planting, harvesting, and resting — and why the reinforcement phase (the one that actually creates momentum) is the hardest to stay motivated through. Jessica shares what it’s like to be in the “hardening the cement” stage while wanting to chase something new, and Meg talks about her experience running Social Slowdown for 100 episodes and knowing when it was time to hand off the torch.

This isn’t a pep talk about pushing through or a permission slip to quit. It’s a conversation about learning to read the signals your energy is sending you.

* Why the repetition phase of your business feels boring but is where the real traction happens

* The seasonal cycles of energy and creativity (and why Meg doesn’t launch anything in February)

* Jessica’s harvest-to-reinforcement arc — and the tension between solidifying old work and chasing new ideas

* The green light / yellow light / red light framework for deciding when to push, pause, or stop

* Why your audience hears your message differently every time, even when you’re saying the same thing

* How Meg knew it was time to retire Social Slowdown after 100 episodes and a book

* The difference between reinforcing, repurposing, remixing, and just regurgitating your content

* What to do when you still need to market but have nothing new to say

* Why your best referral partners being in the same slump at the same time is a real business risk

How relationships and referral networks carry your message when you can’t

"Reinforcing is going back in and putting more infrastructure in place to make it stronger. Repurposing is, or rehashing for that example is taking the same information and pushing it out in a different place. Remixing could be finding new ways to explain something." — Meg

Mentioned

Amelia Hruby/Off the Grid

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Most podcasts don’t make it past episode 10. But somewhere around the year mark, something shifts—what started as exploring ideas and meeting people can quietly become something bigger, with more weight and more responsibility than you signed up for.

In this episode, we explore the difference between hosting a podcast and leading a movement. We talk about the three types of motivations for a platform: the desire for fame, the intentional choice to lead with a platform, and the moral imperative—when you have something to say that no one else is saying.

This is a conversation about the reluctant responsibility that comes with showing up consistently, having strong points of view that shapes the discourse, and being willing to change your mind as you learn more.

* The three motivations for creating a platform: fame, leadership with a platform, and moral imperative

* What we can learn from Hamilton and Burr, especially why “I want to be in the room where it happens” is different from creating the authority to create the room.

* Creating into the void—the lag time between creating content and seeing its impact

* What changes when people start quoting your work back to you

* Why reluctance to lead (because you want to get it right) is an act of integrity

* The responsibility of being a standard bearer when people you looked up to aren’t active in the space anymore

* How compounding authority works over time

* The difference between selling services directly vs. articulating a point of view

* Why having strong points of view while staying open to changing your mind is so hard

“I think that when you’re a movement leader, you have to be willing to walk on the ledge more publicly for much longer. With less feedback than you anticipate.” - Jessica

Resources Mentioned

Antimemetics

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Social media in 2026 is definitely not the same as before 2020—and not even the same as it was last year. And for our “Aggressively Human” take on how social fits in your marketing stack, we’re bringing on our favorite Mindful Marketing mentor and return guest Andréa Jones.

In this episode, we’re talking about what’s actually happening on social platforms in 2026, especially for expertise-led businesses that don’t want to become full-time media companies.

We talk about the TikTok effect, discovery-driven algorithms, and why entertainment now beats education on most feeds. Andréa shares how she thinks about social media today, how she uses it in her own business, and where it fits alongside other channels like podcasts, newsletters, websites, and SEO. We also talk about why viral content often fails to translate into clients, and how people really decide who to hire.

This episode is an honest discussion at where social media sits now in a broader marketing mix—and what expectations make sense to have if you’re still showing up there.

* Why social media feels louder, faster, and less useful than it used to

* The “TikTok effect” and how it changed every platform

* Discovery algorithms vs. follower-based feeds

* Why entertainment content outperforms educational content

* How engagement has declined across most platforms (and what that means)

* Why viral posts often don’t translate into revenue

* What Andrea puts in place before social media matters

* The role of podcasts, newsletters, websites, and SEO

* Local vs. national businesses and how discovery actually works

* Why repetition builds trust (for humans and AI)

“It takes a lot more effort for someone to leave that video or leave that post and go somewhere else to then do something else, like sign up for a newsletter or purchase something. So that sales cycle has gotten astronomically longer.

And so I'm not saying social media isn't important. Especially for me, it's a great networking tool. However, it's not, and as far as the hierarchy goes, it's just not as important as other marketing assets. And so I had to shift the way that I think about that.” -Andréa

About our Guest

Website

OnlineDrea on Instagram

Mindful Marketing Podcast

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Jessica Lackey

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Lately, a lot of well-known course creators have closed their flagship programs or shut down their podcasts. Other online course creators who will “never again sell live training”…. well, they’re back with live training.

Is the course bubble over? Will AI shut down courses? Or is this just an industry hot take to get clicks and views?

In this episode, we talk about what’s actually happening with courses right now—and what’s not. We look at why self-guided, evergreen courses worked for so long, why they’re struggling to convert and retain attention now, and how AI has sped up changes that were already underway. We talk about how this has shown up in the various evolutions of our own businesses. We also talk about where courses still make sense, where they don’t, and why people are increasingly unwilling to pay for information without context, support, or application. (A multimedia interactive experience as Jessica called it in corporate-speak).

This isn’t a declaration that courses are dead. It’s a conversation about saturation, economics, attention, and what people actually want help with in 2026.

* Why course closures are becoming more common

* The difference between a bubble bursting and a market maturing

* What made evergreen courses work in the first place

* How rising ad costs and shrinking arbitrage changed the math

* Why beginner-level education scaled—and why it hit a ceiling

* What AI replaced almost instantly (templates, boilerplate, generic content)

* How Meg and Jessica have both surfed the wave of courses, both as leaders and as students

* What people still pay for (and what they won’t)

* The problem with “lifetime access” promises

* Courses as one piece of a broader ecosystem, not the whole business

“If you have a giant course where you promise to do everything, then you can’t do all of it well. And I think people are getting a little bit tired of like the survey courses, like the freshman 101 course of everything, or maybe those still exist. And I’m just out of the world view where I’m paying attention to them. But anytime that you have an all in one solution, whether that’s a course or a piece of software, or a coach who says that they can help you with everything, that breadth is going to prevent depth.

And if you want to learn something deeply from a person who understands it and can answer your questions when things go wrong, then that’s when you want to find an expert who teaches one thing really well instead of 10 things mediocre.” - Meg

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In this episode, we talk with Lex Roman, founder of Revenue Rulebreaker, about why solopreneurs and micro-business owners are almost invisible in mainstream business media—and what happens when someone actually builds a platform for them. Lex shares how Revenue Rulebreaker grew out of a personal experiment in becoming a full-time creator and turned into an independent media publication focused on indie businesses, real revenue experiments, and work that doesn’t fit the venture-scale mold.

We spend a lot of time on what’s broken in business media: pay-to-play outlets, thought leadership that’s really just a sales funnel, and the absence of honest stories about what it’s like to run a small, durable business. Lex explains why journalists aren’t filling that gap, why solo businesses have a hard time surfacing interesting angles, and why so much valuable knowledge stays trapped in private conversations instead of becoming public learning.

The conversation also gets practical. We talk about subscriptions versus memberships, why Revenue Rulebreaker is a media brand and what does that mean, and how sponsorships, subscriptions, and community-adjacent networks can coexist with (or sit alongside) client work. Underneath it all is a bigger question: what would business culture look like if we treated podcasts, newsletters, and blogs as media—not just marketing?

* How Revenue Rulebreaker started as a personal experiment and became an indie media publication

* Why solopreneurs and micro-business owners are ignored by mainstream business media

* The collapse of traditional journalism and what it means for business coverage

* Why pay-to-play outlets distort whose voices get amplified

* Why having an “angle” is how stories get platformed

* The difference between thought leadership, marketing content, and media

* The problem with content that always has to sell something

* Subscriptions vs. memberships—and why Lex is intentionally avoiding a membership model

* How sponsorships and subscriptions actually fund indie media

* Why private experiments inside small businesses are some of the most valuable stories we never see

* The role of community, networks, and stewarded spaces in a post-algorithm internet

“Journalists previously who would have been sourcing those stories don’t know a lot of business owners, but they know the woman who started Spanx.

So they’re just not that working that hard to find stories. So if they don’t know any business owners, and you don’t pitch them a compelling story, that story’s not getting told. I think also business owners have a really hard time understanding what’s cool and interesting about their own business.

Like, you know, they’re like, “I’d like to have my business platformed.” Of course you would, but you don’t have an angle? What’s your perspective? Why are you doing this interesting thing? You have to really dig at them to find those interesting things.” - Lex Roman

About our Guest

Revenue Rulebreaker

Become a Legend

Lex Roman on LinkedIn

Mentioned Resources

Cal Newport - Can Substack Save Journalism?

Antimemetics

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Jessica Lackey

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com

The longer you’ve been doing your work, the harder it can be to explain it.

In this episode, we talk about what we’re calling the expert’s paradox: why people with real experience often struggle to publish clearly, while less-experienced voices seem perfectly comfortable shipping simple advice. We see the seven-part blog post that will take 21 hours to write, and know we can’t stop with the simple AI-generated “5 simple tips” framework. We look at how this shows up in content, marketing, and tool recommendations—and why experts tend to freeze once they can see all the nuance at the same time.

We talk about the Dunning–Kruger effect, the difference between tutorials and diagnostic thinking, and how to deal with the pressure to finish the entire framework before saying anything publicly. We also talk about what helps: publishing before things feel complete, letting ideas change in public, and using content as a working asset rather than a polished performance.

And hear Jessica use the question “what’s the best CRM” to map out a content strategy in real-time, and Meg and Jessica compare chemistry (we think?) to your content organization philosophy.

* Why having more experience often makes it harder to say anything short, clean, or publishable

* How we can use our content for reinforcement, not repurposing

* A Clarion Call for Expertise with “Zippie Nickie and Gnarled Bart” from Corey Wilks, Psy.D.

* Why experts feel pressure to finish the whole framework before sharing anything

* Why tutorials are easy to ship and diagnostics are slow (and why that matters)

* How publishing your work and getting your language out there changes what people search for

* Why clarity wins out over volume in 2026

* How you can use blogs and long-form content as living, updateable assets

* Content architecture: collections, pillars, and making old work findable again

* Our voice choice and how does that influence your authority

“If you have something interesting to say that you feel is different from what else is happening in your industry, that is not a sign that you are outside of the norm; that is a sign that you see something that the beginners don’t. But you cannot be cited, credited, claimed, unless you put it out into the public sphere for indexing, for retrieval, for somebody else reading it. And you can’t change the discourse if you’re not part of the discourse.” - Meg

The Expert’s Paradox by Meg Casebolt

A Clarion Call for Expertise by Corey Wilks

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It’s New Year, New You Time - which means it’s time for goal setting! (Cue the cheers and the groans).

But we have thoughts on traditional goal setting. In this conversation, we talk about how outcome based goals are often ineffective (and the fast path to burnout), and instead focusing on what’s in our locus of control.

We talk about the difference between “bottoms up” and “top down goals”, and how your stage of business and business model informs what matters. You’ll get to hear Jessica get on her soapbox about “10x is easier than 2x” goal setting, and hear us talk about how physics informs our approach to goals.

Plus hear OUR goals for 2026 — and most importantly, what we’re not doing this year.

* Why we both hate most New Year’s goal setting advice

* Outcome goals vs. output goals—and why the difference matters

* How goals fail when they ignore where you’re starting from

* Why revenue goals aren’t fully within your locus of control

* The problem with “just do more” as a strategy

* Force, leverage, and friction: three ways to change results

* How vanity metrics create performative productivity

* Saying no as an essential part of goal setting

* What we’re each choosing to focus on—and what we’re actively letting go of this year

Resources

Jessica’s 4 Part Planning Series

Meg’s Consistency Beats Virality (even When You Go Viral)

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(FYI - the last 10 minutes has more f bombs than usual if you’ve got kiddos with you).

Who doesn’t want to fit in to their local entrepreneurial communities—but how many communities miss the mark, especially for solopreneurs and expert-led businesses? We’re joined by Raven O’Neal, co-founder of Startup Women NC and founder of Savvy Gal Media, to talk about what actually keeps a community alive once the initial excitement wears off.

We talk about what Raven has learned building a local community: how most ecosystems are designed for scalable startups, not people selling expertise; why solopreneurs often don’t fit anywhere cleanly; and why “more members” often makes things worse, not better. What surprised Raven most wasn’t a lack of resources—it was how fragmented they are, how little they talk to each other, and how much invisible labor it takes to hold people together.

This conversation also names the uncomfortable truth underneath community-building, both IRL and online: it’s real work, often unpaid, and frequently taken for granted. We talk about the politics of funding, the myth that collaboration is easy, and why intimacy, continuity, and clear leadership matter more than growth.

* Why most “community” spaces collapse once they try to grow

* How startup ecosystems quietly exclude solopreneurs and expert-led businesses

* What Raven learned building Startup Women NC—and what surprised her most

* The difference between social mixers and real, sustaining community

* Why fragmentation (not scarcity) is the real problem in local ecosystems

* The unpaid labor required to organize, host, and maintain community spaces

* How Raven’s work on Hacking the Patriarchy informs her approach to power, labor, and voice

* Raven’s word of the year and how that’s informing her building plans (PS - It contains a lot of cursing)

We actually had a meeting where we asked what does growth look like for this group? And a lot of our members said, one thing I love is how small it is. Like how much smaller it is and how intimate our meetings are and how much attention they get and how they’ve gotten to know each other.

About our Guest

LinkedIn

Savvy Gal Media

Hacking the Patriarchy Podcast

Fem Led News

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aggressivelyhuman.substack.com