An Update on the female.liberation Strategic Planning Process

See You In The New Year Sisters!

Dear Sisters,

I’m in the midst of my annual strategic planning and vision board processes for my personal and professional life. I already completed my vision board back in September and now I will be taking a break for the next few weeks for the second female.liberation strategic planning session. The first session happened two years ago when I started building female.liberation. Now I’m in year two overall, and year one of using Substack as my writing platform. This past year on Substack has been a trial-run to see if this is in fact the best space for me. I love making, and writing is one of my artistic tools. Bigger than that, writing is how I work through my thoughts and sharpen my root-cause analysis. I have been writing my whole life, and started writing in a professional capacity on and off since 2009, when I created my first blog on Wordpress. Most of my writing has been to support others’ goals, particularly in the grassroots and nonprofit sectors. I created female.liberation so I could have full creative control and not be beholden to any institution or funder. I’m of course still beholden to the marketplace and the rules of these platforms where I rent space. I’ve enjoyed this freedom of writing without so many additional considerations. It has allowed me to take the thinking that happens in my private writing space to a public audience.

I’m a jill of many trades, and have been an independent contractor for the past five years+. Being self-employed means I look for contracts for short-term work in visual art, writing, community organizing, education, and design technology. Even when I worked as an employee for others, I rarely have had just one job. The past three years or so, I was working a contract position for a technology job building SharePoint sites and training workers on using the Microsoft ecosystem. It was the first time in a long time where I had mostly one job, and it was also the most money I’ve ever earned from a job/contract in my entire life. It was that contract that allowed me to create and slowly build female.liberation at a loss over the past two years. In business, it is more common than not to operate at a loss for the first few years. The average business fails to turn a profit because it’s a huge undertaking to fully employ yourself and possibly others, particularly when you don’t have access to enough capital to help you to reach a point of stability. Many businesses are just barely making ends meet, and are perpetually trying to stay afloat. The fact that I could rely on certain gigs to cover the cost of doing free labor is what drew me to the technology field. I was exhausted and burned out working at unfair wages in the grassroots/nonprofit, education, food service, and retail sectors. Sadly, over the past year I lost that tech gig, and the client it was connected to (which was 99% of my income). I was also dealing with another health flare up, which happens at times due to having chronic health struggles. It meant I had an even more limited number of functional hours. The only thing that allowed me to ride this particular wave successfully is that I managed to save so much from my last project. I used the free time that came up due to losing my job, to recuperate and stabilize my health, as well as write, make visual art, and start the process of building the female.liberation online store. Though the money from the tech contract I had was amazing, all of the time and energy my brain was giving to other people’s businesses and goals meant I didn’t have much left for my dreams. Even though tech work was not draining on the level of community organizing and teaching, it still left me with so little brain power. Working in the for-profit, corporate sector was an important reminder that I would rather not have to be in those environments if I can manage to earn an income in other ways. I also refuse to get further enmeshed with Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models, which is rapidly taking over the tech sector. The bind I find myself isn’t unique, and I’m hopeful of finding solutions. The audience for female-focused businesses doesn’t have the same access to money and capital as there is for male-focused businesses or businesses that are generically focusing on both sexes. There is very little money to support women who try to run female-focused businesses, and the more niche that business is, the harder it can become. Labor focused on female separatism, gender abolitionism, and radical feminism doesn’t have a lot of investors. Labor focused on any aspect of feminism or women barely has investors. In general, my target audience of women doesn’t have enough income to be able to support non-essential goods like female-focused writing, visual art, etc. This was partly why I decided to invest my own money into my business at a loss, so that I could push my ideas forward, regardless if the marketplace could financially contribute to my work or not. My savings allowed me to offer free content during my one-year trial run on Substack and build up an archive of free resources for readers.

Now I will take all the market research I have done over this year to come up with this next year’s strategic plan. I’m both excited and nervous about what I will learn. I want to thank all the women who subscribe to my work and a special thank you to my three paid subscribers. I look forward to returning with fresh perspectives and a stronger strategy. Please expect updates to my “About” section and my subscription plan, as I figure out my next steps. Please feel free to share any constructive feedback on what has drawn you to my work and what you gain from it. I will take your feedback into consideration during my planning. See you sometime in 2026 sisters.

Sincerely,

Preeti Pathak
female.liberation
femaleliberation.net