In 2018, I sat in a glass-walled office in downtown Chicago and realized I was paying $6,000 a month for a ‘Growth Lead’ who spent most of his day adjusting the padding on our internal slide decks. I had four employees back then. We were doing okay—maybe $400k in revenue—but after payroll, rent, and the endless software seats I was forced to buy, I was taking home less than I did when I was a junior analyst. I felt like a total fraud. I was ‘the boss,’ but I was the poorest person in the room when you factored in the stress and the debt.
I fired everyone. It was a Tuesday. I felt like a monster, but the moment the last person walked out the door, I felt this massive weight lift off my chest. I realized then that I didn’t want a ‘startup.’ I wanted a business. Specifically, I wanted a business that made a lot of money without me having to manage anyone’s dental insurance or emotional well-being. Since then, I’ve crossed the $1M annual revenue mark twice, completely solo. No contractors, no VAs, no ‘team.’ Just me and a few scripts.
The day I realized employees are a trap
Most people hire because of ego. They want to tell their parents or their friends at a bar that they have ‘ten people under them.’ It sounds impressive. But here is the truth that nobody tells you: every employee you add increases the complexity of your life exponentially, not linearly. You don’t just add a person; you add their bad moods, their slow internet, their misunderstandings, and their need for ‘sync meetings.’
What I mean is—actually, let me put it differently. You aren’t hiring help; you’re hiring a management job for yourself. I used to think I needed a team to scale. I was completely wrong. Scaling with people is the most expensive way to grow. Scaling with systems is free. I remember spending three weeks trying to explain a specific SEO workflow to a contractor. I eventually gave up, spent four hours writing a Python script to do it, and it worked better than the human ever did. Total lie that you need ‘human touch’ for everything.
I know people will disagree with this. They’ll say you can’t build something ‘great’ alone. Maybe they’re right if you’re trying to build the next SpaceX. But if you’re trying to build a life where you make $80k a month and wake up whenever you want? A team is a boat anchor. It’s a trap.
The math of a one-person million
Let’s look at the numbers because people get weirdly vague about this. To hit $1,000,000 a year alone, you basically have three paths. I’ve tried all of them, but only one actually works without causing a nervous breakdown.
- High-ticket consulting: 10 clients at $100k/year. (Impossible to scale, you just own a high-paying job).
- Low-ticket digital products: 20,000 sales at $50. (Requires a massive audience and a constant content treadmill).
- Productized Services: 20 clients at $4,200/month. (The sweet spot).
I tracked my focus for 14 months using a physical stopwatch on my desk and found that every ‘quick’ Slack message or ‘check-in’ email from a client cost me exactly 23 minutes of deep work. If you have 50 clients paying you $100, you are dead. If you have 20 clients paying you a premium for a specific, automated result, you are a god. I currently run a specialized data-cleaning service for mid-sized e-commerce brands. I charge $4,500 a month. I have 19 clients. I spend about 15 hours a week on ‘work.’ The rest is automated.
The goal isn’t to work more; it’s to make your work more expensive.
I refuse to use an agency to manage my brand or my outreach. I think anyone who uses a ‘personal branding agency’ is a fraud who deserves to fail. If you can’t speak for yourself, why should anyone pay you? It’s lazy. It’s transparent. Avoid it.
The tools I use (and the one I absolutely hate)
My ‘office’ is just a MacBook and a very expensive mechanical keyboard. (I use a Keychron Q1 with Gateron Oil King switches, which sounds like rain on a tin roof and makes me actually want to type. I know, it’s nerdy, but the tactile feedback is the only thing that keeps me focused when the afternoon slump hits. Anyway…)
You don’t need a complex stack. You need tools that stay out of your way. I use Carrd for landing pages because it’s $19 a year and doesn’t have the bloat of WordPress. I use Stripe for everything money-related. I use ConvertKit for my email list. That’s basically it.
But I have to say this: I hate Notion. I know everyone on Twitter treats it like a religion, but it is a slow, cluttered mess. It’s a ‘productivity’ tool for people who want to feel like they are working without actually producing anything. I spent 114 hours over three months A/B testing my landing page headline only to realize the original one I wrote in five minutes converted 2.1% better. Notion is the same thing—you spend all day ‘organizing’ and zero hours shipping. I went back to a plain text file and my revenue went up. Use simple tools. Don’t be a tool.
The boring secret of productization
If you want to hit $1M alone, you have to stop selling your time. Selling hours is for suckers. You have to sell a ‘box.’ People buy the box, you deliver the box, and the box contains a result. My ‘box’ is a cleaned-up customer database that increases email deliverability by 14%. I don’t tell them how many hours it takes. I don’t tell them I use a script I wrote in 2021. I just sell the 14% increase.
This requires a level of discipline that most people don’t have. You have to say ‘no’ to every request that isn’t the box. A client asked me last week if I could help with their Facebook ads. I could do it. I know how. It would have been an extra $2k a month. I said no. Why? Because then I’d have to think about it. I’d have to manage it. I’d have to hire someone to help. I’d rather have the $2k in free time than $2k in my bank account at the cost of my sanity.
I might be wrong about this—some people love the variety—but for me, variety is just another word for ‘unpaid overhead.’ If you want to be a solo millionaire, you have to be okay with being a little bit bored by your own process. The process is what pays for the life. The work is just the engine. Don’t over-engineer the engine.
Is it lonely? Yes.
I’m not going to lie and say it’s all sunshine and high-fives. There are days when I haven’t spoken to another human being by 4:00 PM and I start to feel a bit like a ghost haunting my own house. There’s no water cooler. No one to celebrate a big win with except my dog, and he mostly just wants a treat. Managing a solo business is like a sharp knife; it’s dangerous if you’re clumsy, but it cuts exactly where you want it to. Sometimes the edge is a bit too close for comfort.
I actively tell my friends to avoid starting ‘agencies.’ I’ve seen so many smart people get swallowed by the ‘scale’ monster. They start with a dream of freedom and end up as a stressed-out HR manager for four 22-year-olds who don’t care about the business as much as they do. I’ve bought the same $120 pair of boots four times because I know they work and I don’t want to think about new ones. I treat my business the same way. I found a model that works, and I am sticking to it until the wheels fall off.
I still don’t know if I’ll be doing this in five years. Maybe I’ll get bored and decide to join a commune or something. But for now, the silence in my office is the sound of freedom. And the bank alerts aren’t bad either.
Just build the box. That’s it. That’s the whole trick.
