Huge promise. $1M. Are you serious?
That’s what you’re thinking. I’m not here to disappoint or give you some recycled Alex Hormozi’s strategies. I’ve done what I’m about to run you through. I’m a practitioner, not a Harvard theory teacher.
If you want to make 6-figures then get a job.
This article is for those who want to go beyond average and transcend into mastery. Here’s the path to $1M online in 2024.
The biggest mistake solopreneurs make
Knowing what *not* to do is just as important as knowing what to do.
It won’t surprise you to know that making $1M as a solopreneur requires social media and an email list. You’ve heard that before, I’m sure.
Where nice, genuine, good-natured people go wrong is they want to get paid for writing words.
You’ll never make good money getting paid per word.
The incentives are messed up. If you get paid for the writing (content) itself, you become a commodity.
You become replaceable. And you become easy to manipulate, like a hamster on a hamster wheel thinking about s3xy time after a run. Social media content is a gateway. It’s a magnet. It’s an opportunity.
Content doesn’t equal money. Read that again.
Why? Selling content is putting up a paywall in front of a reader’s face and saying “pay me b*tch.”
When a friend sends you a New York Times article and you can’t read it because you’re not a paid subscriber, do you still try to read it? Nope. You see a paywall and click away…mayday, mayday.
Directly charging for content limits distribution. Give your content away for free and stop having a scarcity mindset.
Money is made on the back end of content. Read that again ten times.
You need a flywheel
Phewww…glad all that’s out of the way. Let’s get down to business.
A popular term online is “flywheel.” I only have 5th grade English skills so I didn’t know what this meant. Dickie Bush and Nathan Barry helped enlighten me.
Flywheels are growth loops that feed on themselves to create results.
I’ll give you a 7-figure example of a flywheel. Entrepreneur Sahil Bloom has a newsletter. He directs people from his Twitter/X to subscribe to it.
Nothing new there. When people read his weekly newsletter they are shown ads from the ConvertKit sponsor network.
Some people click the ads and Sahil gets a nice commission or affiliate cut if a sale is made. Nice. Here’s where the flywheel comes in…
Sahil takes the money he makes from newsletter ads and invests it back into the SparkLoop Partner Program. With this feature inside of ConvertKit you can pay to have other newsletters generate subscribers for your newsletter. There are plenty of copycats so do your research.
This setup is a flywheel. Charge money for ads, take money from ads and buy more email subscribers, therefore, increasing the size of your email list and how much future ad money you can earn.
It runs on auto-pilot with no intervention from Sahil. It got him to 600,000 email subscribers in a short time.
These flywheel growth loops exist all over the internet if you take your time to look for them. As soon as you can automate audience growth, you can set yourself on a path to earn $1M online in 2024.
Supercharging your most valuable hidden asset
The gurus all preach the power of an email list like it’s a god named Buddha. I think differently.
An email list is one of two valuable assets (I’ll talk about the second in a minute). To supercharge your email list you have to engage with people. The best way in 2024 is with an email course.
All this fancy term means is a person subscribes to your email list (newsletter), then they get a series of automated emails. 3–5 is the typical number that works the best.
In this automated sequence you teach one tiny thing you know. You don’t have to be a master, you just need to be ten steps ahead of a normie with this one skill.
During the email course you ask them to take action like this:
- Get email subscribers to click buttons inside your email that tell you about their problems
- Set a challenge for email subscribers. Example for a career coach: “I dare you to apply for ten job ads & send me the screenshots and results”
Once email subscribers are engaged, you have the first part of the $1M one-person business plan in place.
Before, I told you there’s a second valuable asset outside of an email list. It’s a community. And I segment community into two areas:
- A paid community who pay $5–$10 a month to join
- A mastermind full of high-end members who pay thousands to get personal advice from you and hang out with other high-rollers.
This is the step most people miss.
They never get into true community building. If you add this step, it’s much faster to ethically get to 7-figures, without selling your soul or feeling like a used car salesman.
The final part of a one-person business that’s easy to misunderstand
If you have an engaged email list & have seeded a community, you’ll be collecting lots of problems people face in your area of expertise or topic.
When people face problems they want help. This is where your one-person business can be helpful. There are two paths.
1. Offer a digital product to solve one specific problem
People overcomplicate this one.
I’ll give you a basic example. I saw a guy the other day offering Notion templates. He helps people build a daily schedule for their life. He has editable templates you can use to plan your day.
He makes 7-figures off this digital product.
It’s a common problem and people will pay to solve it. The time it takes to create Notion templates isn’t worth it for most people. They don’t want to watch hours of YouTube videos to figure out how to code a template.
So they pay to save time.
The best one-person businesses are run by people who aren’t that smart. They just know people want less complexity in their lives and want to save time. Makes sense.
2. Offer a high-end service to fix the problem for someone
The second path can be a do-it-yourself option, where you coach people to solve the problem themselves. It can also be a done-for-you option, where you do the work and fix the problem.
The price point of a service like this is typically between $5000-$10,000 per client. You can probably now see it’s not that hard to attract a few clients and get to 7-figures with this option alone.
An example is ghostwriting. People want books or social media content written for them. If you can write then you can fill this demand.
Another example is fitness. Some people want to build loads of muscle or lose a tonne of weight. If you can help them get this result, they’ll gladly pay you.
The key to this business model is to make an offer to the right person.
As crude as it sounds, it’s easier to sell to rich people than it is to sell to the average person. And because you don’t need 1000s of monthly customers, it’s not hard to find these rich people.
A mastermind can also be a great qualifier for a high-end service offer.
The skill stack to acquire
Every one-person business is built on a skill stack.
Each skill on its own is what I call a micro skill. These are small skills people dismiss that, on their own, seem silly. But when you build a skill stack of micro skills it unlocks money most people can’t see.
Here’s the 2024 skill stack to choose from:
- Offers
- Copywriting
- Ghostwriting
- Landing pages
- Self-publishing eBooks
- Social media content creation
- Running communities
- Basic email marketing
- Email automation
- Sales
- Newsletters
- Affiliate marketing
- Non-needy networking
If you can master some or all of these skills, you’ll be well on your way to a one-person business.
The only limit you have to making money online is how you think. All of the tools and information are available if you’re connected to the internet.
No more excuses. Build your skill stack. Build an email list. Build a community. Build a mastermind. Build your paid offers.
Build a one-person business after hours.
