The $100k One-Person Business: How To Package & Market Your Specific Knowledge.

You’ve got a 6-figure business trapped in your head.

I started my career begging for money.

I worked as a government policy wonk in the Charity and Community sector. While I loved it, it wasn’t sustainable. Our work followed the cycle of donations, government funding, and random grants from philanthropists.

At any moment, the money could dry up.

After a few years, I got tired. I didn’t want to keep laughing at bad jokes. I got sick of the industry-wide woke ideology. Random ‘diversity & inclusion’ events. The office politics. The bad bosses. The incompetent colleagues.

I got what the cool kids call the ‘ick’ and I couldn’t ignore it.

I wanted to build my own product. Become financially sustainable. Live life on my own terms. And not have to report to anyone or anything. I wanted to be able to take time off when I had children and a wife.

In 2022, I quit my six-figure Director role and dived headfirst into solopreneurship.

Here’s what I’ve learned in 3 years.

Every skill can be repackaged and resold.

We live in an amazing time.

Any high-value skill can be:

1. Fractionalized

2. Productized.

This includes:

• Writing.

• Coding.

• Data science.

• Operations (HR, etc).

• Project management.

• Software development.

You don’t need to rely on any gatekeepers, ask for permission, or have start-up capital to get started.

With the internet and your beautiful brain, you can start tomorrow.

You’ve got everything you need.

If you already have a 9–5 job, even better champ.

You already have a one-person business.

You’re just selling to one customer:

Your employer.

Stop being a wage slave.

Start being a part-time solopreneur.

Stop outsourcing your ability to survive.

Start taking responsibility for your survival.

Stop walking the 9–5 slow lane to poverty.

Start running the solopreneurship fast lane to wealth.

Take your high-value skill and fractionalize it to sell to others. You can do this by offering a consulting package that requires 1–2 hours of your time per week.

Or, productize your knowledge.

Put everything you know into DIY products such as e-books, courses, or YouTube videos. Depending on the platform, you can resell this knowledge on platforms such as Gumroad, Kit, or Stan Store.

There are no limits. The only constraint is your creativity.

Start an educational product

You are a micro-education system.

There are skills, knowledge, and mindsets that you have access to that someone else wants. Anything that seems ‘easy’ and ‘common sense’ is a good place to start. Trust me. Most people don’t find it as easy as you.

Now, you just need to sell them access.

I work with a lot of data scientists, coders, and software developers. Naturally, they want to build an app, SaaS, or scalable solution. I get it.

But you can’t optimize what isn’t established.

I met an ex-Amazon software developer in Bali. He was building a meditation app for high-performing athletes, entrepreneurs, and executives.

For 3–6 months, he worked relentlessly.

I watched him for most of that time. But when it came to launch? He barely made any money. He couldn’t get any customers. But the bigger problem? Retention. Users churned.

From a distance, I could already see it would fail.

Why?

He didn’t have the sales, positioning, or marketing skills to make it work. Building a networked product that people need to integrate into their lives is incredibly difficult.

The odds are close to impossible.

When you get it right, you get an Uber. But even Uber went through a decade of being unprofitable and burning venture cash to get as many users as possible.

Instead, I would have built an education product first.

I would start with coaching people 1:1. Think of this as paid market research. You get to understand the problem intimately. And you can test whether your solution is effective.

Once you clarify the problem and validate the solution, aim for one-to-many.

Build a small community where you can take what you did in the 1:1 coaching sessions and put it into a repeatable system for others. Instead of doing 1:1 calls. Sell cohorts of 3–4. You get more data and feedback.

Over time, add even more leverage.

Create self-paced content in the form of video, audio, or text. Put it behind a paywalled community platform like Skool. Sell memberships to that knowledge. At this point, I would turn this into a SaaS.

Yes, this process is longer.

But way less risky.

You’ll be able to make money AND validate your solution. My mate from Bali with the App returned to working a 9–5 job. The App is effectively a dead product. That’s six months of effort down the drain.

Avoid this pain.

Start education first. Community-second. Software last.

Mimic a marketing strategy that works.

“I just need a killer idea, and I’ll start.”

No. No, you don’t.

Stick your hand in the money river that’s already flowing. If someone is selling a product you buy, recreate a version of it for yourself.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Every product on earth is an iteration of another product. That’s literally how evolution works. We are iterations of our ancestors. Even the best inventions come from evolutions, not revolutions.

The iPhone didn’t create any new technology.

All the underlying technology existed. Apple brought all these technologies into a design that was intuitive and user-friendly.

Take Apple’s strategy for yourself.

Look at 3–4 products you’ve bought for yourself.

• What worked well in all of them?

• What didn’t work so well?

• What can you improve?

Now, make those adjustments in your own version.

Add in:

• Your origin story.

• Your hero’s journey.

• Your authentic experience.

And bing, bam, boom. You’ve got a entirely new product.

Now, look at the sales and marketing of the products you bought. Incorporate aspects of the influence and persuasion tactics of why you bought into your own marketing.

Don’t plagiarize anything. But get inspiration from what already works.

Never stop improving.

I turned one Medium article into a $100k service.

By writing online, I validate a concept.

• After the idea works, I create a lead magnet.

• My lead magnet becomes a paid low-ticket product.

• My low-ticket product becomes a service.

• Once my service is efficient and effective, I make it high-ticket.

But everything starts with writing.

Writing forces you to articulate value. It reveals gaps in your knowledge. Makes you painfully aware of the shortcomings in your ideas. The random hateful comments I get give me good feedback to improve (thanks, haters).

Naturally, you start to build an audience. This is the real gold.

I met someone at an event in Singapore a few weeks ago.

I told them about my sales and marketing business. Skeptical, they asked me for case studies. I showed them all my client results. But the thing that tipped them over the line? I had built a 100k online audience for myself.

I was my own walking billboard.

When I hear someone is a sales, branding, or marketing person but doesn’t have a personal brand online, I get a bit skeptical. If they don’t do it for themselves, how can they prove they can do it for me?

My old business hired a business development person who was hopeless.

She didn’t understand modern sales and marketing online. She lasted six months. Brought in a few leads. Closed zero of them. And cost the business her salary. They ended up letting go of her.

My point? Keep iterating. Keep improving.

Solve a problem for yourself first.

And then sell the solution. That’s exactly what I did.

The roadmap to a $100k one-person business:

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Pick a combination of skills and knowledge you can resell (fractional or productized).

2. Start an education-based product. I recommend 1:1 coaching first.

3. Mimic the marketing strategy of the products you buy.

4. Start as quickly as possible. Validate. And improve.

You are 1–2 hours per day and 12 months away from your $100k one-person business.

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👉 I’ve previously sold a one-person business and I’m in the process of scaling another one to $20k per month. If you want my one-person business growth system, I’ve created a FREE email course for you to get started.