You can make millions of $$$ online.
But most won’t and that’s okay. We’re not here to shame anyone. I like the idea of helping people learn to make 6-figures instead. It’s more realistic and allows the average person to leave their job if they choose.
The point isn’t to buy a private jet and walk around butt-naked in a silk gown. It’s to make enough money so you don’t have to get told what to do and be stuck on Zoom for 8+ hours a day.
Ready? Let’s go.
The non-genius way to get started
Online income streams can easily become shiny clickbait objects.
That’s why I recommend you go the opposite direction and choose boring. Because boring is reliable and is more likely to work for you.
The best way to make 6-figures as a one-person business is by selling a service. I know, boring AF! But here’s why it works: to make money online you need a social media following that leads to an email list.
This isn’t easy for a lot of people.
What I did when I had a measly 100 followers was just convert 2 of them to customers.
When you do this you can typically charge $5000-$10,000 a month.
This strategy means you don’t need to become a bikini babe influencer and share cliche picture quotes. With fewer than 100 followers you can make 6-figures. Read that again.
So what service do you sell to two people?
Easy…the same service you do for your employer. Or you can sell a service based on a skill you recently learned.
Some services that are hot right now:
- Ghostwriting
- Copywriting
- Notion consultant
- Automation guru (Zenphi, Zapier, Mulesoft)
How to sell a basic service (even if you hate selling)
First, you get 100 followers on a social media app — X/Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram. Then you drive them to your email list.
Now all you do is send a weekly newsletter with your content or a list of other people’s content. At the end of the email you add a call-to-action that says “Book a 1–1 call if you want help with X”
See what I mean? There’s nothing hard about the one-person business model when you dumb it down and make life easy for yourself.
Formula: 2 x customers @$5000-$10,000 a month with ~100 followers
A one-person business model most people overlook
The hardest problem to solve for any business is getting customers.
Geniuses waste years creating products/services, or filming a movie, or writing a book and then finish their project. They walk out into the open market with their amazing creation and zero distribution and try to make money. Guess what happens?
Nothing.
They’re standing butt-naked in the street after years of work and can’t make any money. This isn’t uncommon. I’ve done this too. It’s the artsy-fartsy way fancy colleges teach us to behave. And it’s evil.
Stop building sh*t for people that don’t exist.
There’s a better way: build a small community first. For some of you, this idea will be life-changing. For the rest of you, I’m willing to bet you’re quietly saying “No sh*t, Sherlock.”
The thing is knowing what to do and doing what you know aren’t the same. Communities are the future of the internet. It’s how the next wave of one-person businesses will start.
The stupidly simple community model anyone can copy
I’ve made 6-figures with this strategy alone.
All you do is create on social media, funnel people into an email list, and then to put the cherry on top — you ask a small percentage of people to join your community for a fee.
How much? Typically $5-$10 a month.
This one-person business model works because finding information is easy, but finding people with the same goal as you is hard.
Joining a community is a way for people to save time, have access to a curated list of people, and get free help from people doing the same thing as them at roughly the same level (instead of only learning from people 10,000 steps ahead of them).
Does the value proposition make sense now?
Stop selling information — or worse — your writing. Start building a paid community. The beauty of this model is the community will also become the future customers of any product/service you create.
You can use the community to collect data (via surveys and polls) to learn what people want instead of guessing.
Dumb-dumbs guess. They build stuff they think people want because their grandma said “I believe in you Timmy.”
Don’t waste your time with luck or using lottery thinking. You ain’t gonna get lucky online or stumble on a Bitcoin jackpot. Nope.
Data increases your luck surface area.
Bringing it all together
Short and sharp, that’s all you need to do.
Create a service or community to make 6-figures online as a one-person business in 2024. Create both if you feel ambitious and want to make 7 figures (only for the bold).
This online game isn’t hard. People just complicate it so they can look smart and destroy their competition. Now go execute.
