Personal MBA
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:
Identify someone else’s bottleneck(s)
Solve and provide uncomfortable amounts of free value to them
Die With Zero
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.
... See moreTo keep it low risk, I reached out to the only other person I knew running a ghostwriting business.
They gave me a freelance role at their company. So I started getting the reps in. At the same time, I also committed to the craft of writing:
Minimum of 500 words per day (hit this for 660 days in a row)
30-minutes of daily copywork (hand-copying great
Figure out what is your core required achievement at this point in time — writing, building a data set, whatever — and do it first thing in the day no matter what.
... See morePretend The-All-Knowing-Writer-Gods said, “If you reach 10,000 hours of ‘getting good’ at writing and 10,000 hours of ‘getting good at monetizing your writing,’ you will make millions of dollars. Guaranteed.” Pretend the outcome is fixed, objective, and measurable. Then, it’s just hours. Things like talent and creativity are irrelevant. (You can de