Personal MBA

Silver now trades at ~65:1 to gold despite being only 8x rarer above ground.

If 1,000 people are willing to pay $30–$100 a year for clarity, the business works.

Over time, many founder stop making single bets and start building portfolios. Multiple small tools in adjacent niches. Some resonate. Some don’t. The learning compounds. Judgment sharpens. Distribution strengthens.

Large organizations still excel at scale and

Monetize after the magic

Value first, price later.

Freemium → instant output → emotional “wow” → habit → conversion.

Tips for implementing:

• Delay paywalls until after the “aha moment.”

• Charge only for meaningful upgrades (collab, export, brand control).

This breed of company will never spring from the mind of a committee; it would never have been permitted to endure in its current form, with thousands of employees organizing themselves around problems at hand, if we had submitted to the conventional managerial model in American corporate life.

The only 2 steps for asymmetric upside:

1. Identify someone else’s bottleneck(s)

2. Solve and provide uncomfortable amounts of free value to them

There are a few key variables to a repeatable Foot-In-The-Door offer:

1. Pick something your ideal prospects have a problem with.

2. Pick something that requires little of them.

3. Pick something that’s easy for you to do but hard for them to do.

Simplicity is velocity.

• 1 Specific Problem

• 1 Specific Person

• 1 Specific Way

The way you maximize Units in your 1-person business is by reducing the number of “different” things you have for sale, and the different types of people you help.

Midjourney built its business with 40 employees and earned $200 million in revenue for 2023.

I’ve met with dozens of these companies now, and the story is the same. They make a great product and nail their positioning—and then they’re off to the races.