The Quiet Game
If you've ever felt like the online business world was built for someone else, you're in the right place.
The Quiet Game is a podcast for established women entrepreneurs who are done with the noise. Done with the highlight reels, the hustle narratives, and the advice that sounds good at 9am and useless by noon. Done pretending everything is fine when it isn't.
Every week, your host Joana Beldade sits down for one honest conversation about what it actually takes to build a business that works for your life. Not someone else's life. Yours.
Jo studies what keeps people well in the most extreme environments on Earth, research that started with a master's thesis on isolation and confinement, and applies it to something nobody else in this space is talking about: the isolation of building a business alone. She calls it your business habitat, the space, the person, and the model, working together or quietly working against each other. She's also a business strategist with 8 years of experience across Portugal and North America, a certified yoga teacher, a former Air Force officer, currently completing a Psychology degree, and a single mum to a five-year-old boy. She launched a programme from a hospital bed at 29 weeks pregnant, hit rock bottom with thirteen euros in her bank account, and rebuilt. Slowly. Without anyone watching.
That's what this podcast is about. Building a business without the performance. Without the promise that it'll be easy or fast or linear. With the honest acknowledgment that life happens, that hard seasons are real, and that isolation has a real, researched cost on how you think, decide, and price your work.
No advice that ignores the human being behind the business. No six-figure promises. Just real talk about solo entrepreneurship, business isolation, and what it actually takes to build something sustainable, from someone who studies this for a living and has lived it herself.
New episode every week. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Episodes
16 episodes
Why Rest Feels Like Guilt
Why does rest feel like something you have to earn? In this episode, Jo traces the guilt we feel when we finally sit down, all the way back to a 17th century religious anxiety that outlived the religion itself. Along the way: a math...
Why Your Offer Isn't Selling: The Psychology of Perceived Value
Why does the exact same offer, at the exact same price, get bought by one person and ignored by another?In this episode, Jo breaks down the real psychology of perceived value, for anyone selling something a client can't hold in her hands...
Why Women Undercharge (and the Myth That Got It Wrong)
For twenty years, one book shaped how the business world explained the gender pay gap. Women Don't Ask, by economist Linda Babcock, argued the fix was simple: teach women to negotiate, and the gap would close. Millions of women, Jo included, ab...
Why Working Alone Wrecks Your Decision-Making
Ever notice how the same business decision can feel obvious with a friend nearby, and completely impossible when you're facing it alone? There's a real psychological reason for that, and it explains a huge amount about solo entrepreneur burnout...
The Three Layers of Your Business Habitat
The first business Jo ever built was as a yoga teacher, not a business strategist. And for almost a year, she ran it under a version of her name with no surname attached, specifically so the people who already knew her, from university, from th...
The Discount Nobody Asked For
Have you ever lowered your price before anyone said it was too high?In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo gets honest about one of the most expensive habits a solo entrepreneur can have: the pre-emptive discount. The one nobody asked for...
What Prisons, Antarctic Stations, and Working From Home Have in Common
What do prisons, Antarctic research stations, submarines, conflict zones and working from home as a solo entrepreneur have in common?More than you might expect.In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo goes somewhere she has never gon...
What Happens When You Build the Right Business and Then Walk Away From It
Disclaimer: This episode contains personal stories about pregnancy loss, a traumatic birth experience and postpartum depression. If any of these topics are sensitive for you right now, please take care of yourself first. It's okay to come b...
Why Your Business Feels Wrong (Even When It's Working)
What do you do when your business is working, the clients are there, the revenue is coming in, the strategy is sound, and it still feels wrong? Not broken. Not failing. Just wrong. Like you're wearing something that technically fits but that yo...
Followers Don't Pay Bills
How many followers do you need before you can launch? Before you feel legitimate? Before you give yourself permission to charge what your work is actually worth? If you've been waiting for a number on a screen to tell you you're ready, this epi...
You Don't Have a Discipline Problem. You Have a Design Problem.
How many productivity systems have you tried? Time blocking, batching, inbox zero, the four-day week, the morning routine with the lemon water that someone very shiny on the internet promised would change your life. And how many of them stuck?<...
The Sunday Feeling Has a Name. And It's Not Burnout.
Why does Sunday night feel so heavy, even after a weekend of rest?In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo explores why the dread many business owners feel before Monday isn't always burnout. Instead, it may be a sign that your bus...
The Clients Who Almost Made Me Quit
What happens when the work you love starts to break you? In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo shares three real client stories that she has never spoken about publicly before. Stories that left her feeling disposable, guilty, and so drained th...
Same Work. Four Times the Price.
What if you could earn four of five times more without working five times harder or even changing what you do? In this episode of The Quiet Game, Jo tells the story of a client who went from charging $60 per hour to $400 for the same work, simp...
You built a job, not a business.
If you're a service-based entrepreneur who is fully booked, exhausted, and wondering why your income has stopped growing no matter how hard you work, this episode is for you.In this episode of The Quiet Game, host Jo breaks down the diff...
I Disappeared. Here's What I Learned.
For almost two years, I was invisible online. No content, no launches, no presence. Just gone.It wasn't burnout. It wasn't a strategy. It was life arriving all at once and refusing to wait.In this first episode of The Quiet Game, ...