The Fastest Way To Build A One-Person Business (Beginner Guide)

I’m going to give you a 60-day action plan to make your first $1,000.

This graphic is what you will learn how to master by the end of this letter:

This letter is for beginners, as I feel $1,000 in 60 days is more than reasonable, but if you aren’t a beginner, you can make much more than that in 60 days with what you will learn.

I will attempt to make this as concise and zero-fluff as I can. But understand that mindset advice is not fluff. Belief and clarity come before skill and confidence.

If I do drag on, it’s because what I’m writing is absolutely necessary for you to know. If you think it’s boring, that’s probably the part you’re going to skip over and complain when you don’t get results.

If you can make $1,000, you can make $100,000.

As you get better at this process and learn more, it will take you less time to earn $1,000+ at a time.

We are going to do this in the most streamlined way possible.

You don’t need a large audience.
You only need to learn the basics of 2 high-income skills.
All of your actions compound, and nothing goes to waste.
If you stick with it, you will earn more than $1,000 every time you do this.

But first, a disclaimer.

If you came to this video because you want a quick way to spam a “give me $1,000” button, you will probably fail.

Leave the get-rich-quick mindset at the door.

If you want to be in control of how much you make, you need a business. Plain and simple. Unarguable.

If you start a business, it demands a much different character than a 9-5 job. You are responsible for everything. You must manage yourself, develop yourself, and learn to love the emotional highs and lows that come with business.

You will be rejected.

You will question if you should quit and go back to your just-comfortable-enough-to-survive-and-just-painless-enough-to-stay-the-same life.

Please, for the love of all things holy, commit to the one thing you know you need to do to take control of your life.

This is your way out.

Here’s what we will discuss:

The importance of building an audience in a world of freelancers and agency owners.
What to talk about and what to sell.
The micro skill stack – how learning 2 high-income skills can set you up for a profitable future.
The micro offer – how to start landing clients today, without taking months to build your product or service.
The only 2 ways to land clients so you can focus for the next 60 days.
The $1000 challenge. Exact steps to take every single day to turn this into a business.

This letter is a mini-course, so it’s a bit long.

Let’s get started.

Set Up Your Digital Storefront

You’re going to build an audience on social media.

That’s lesson one of business: you need traffic to send to your product or service. Building a website or designing a logo is not a productive use of your time right now.

You don’t need a million followers to start, but I guarantee you will want a growing audience for the future.

Cold email and paid ads are great, but there are much better ways to achieve the same result and avoid not having anything to show for it.

You can send 10,000 cold emails and spend $10,000 on ads, but where do the people go after that? By building an audience with content on social media, you accomplish a few things:

You keep access to the people that follow you.
It’s free to start, you don’t need much skill or permission.
Every piece of content you write warms up your audience to buy.
You can build new products and increase profitability.
People follow you for you. You aren’t trapped in a specific business model or skill.
When your audience is large enough, you can leave client work or build that startup you’ve always dreamed of (you already have customers potential candidates for your team and don’t need to spend hundreds of thousands on marketing and hiring).

With that said, let’s set up your social profile quick.

Deciding What To Teach And Sell

I’ve taught this in many different ways before.

Most of the time it involves creating some kind of topic tree.

That is still useful, and I encourage you to use it, but I want to make things a tad bit easier.

You are going to join the niche that you are already in.

Answer these questions and choose the 1-3 topics that satisfy the most of them:

What valuable content is in your search and YouTube watch history?
What do the accounts you follow talk about? Do you feel like you have a similar level of knowledge?
If you were to buy a new book right now, what topic would it be on?
When you buy an educational or behavior-improving product (like a planner, software, or health supplement, not a new article of clothing or other necessities), what do you buy?

The key to success in most areas of life is intelligent imitation.

We all imitate. Our minds are a complex amalgamation of the information we’ve been exposed to so far.

People truly overcomplicate business.

They think that if everyone else is doing it, it’s saturated.

No.

Not even close.

If everyone else is doing it, that means it’s profitable. It means people actually want it.

So, your job is to do the same thing, but make it just a little bit more unique.

My startup, Kortex, isn’t anything revolutionary or new.

There are note-taking and second-brain clones popping up everywhere.

What sets us apart are the little features we’ve added to make it just a tiny bit better based on the experience we have in that domain, which most people don’t have. We also have distribution. Competing with something like Notion isn’t too large of a task for us over the next few years. Other apps may or may not stand a chance.

Even if we don’t get to Notions level, we have a fraction of their team size and costs, we didn’t take any VC money, and we can still reach 8 figures ARR with the small market we do take.

Back to the point.

Write down 1-3 topics you already read about. This is where your content ideas will come from.

Write down 1-3 courses, templates, or products you’ve already purchased. These are the starting point of your offer that you will reposition.

As you actually write and sell, only then will you have the ideas and feedback to make those things truly unique to you.

Read that last sentence again and hammer it into your head.

It’s not just a random sentence I put in to be forgotten. It’s the one thing that will determine your entire journey.

Creating Your Profile

A good social media profile is a small feat.

You need to understand design and/or photography for a good profile picture and banner.

You need to understand copywriting for a bio that makes people want to follow you.

You need to understand awareness and funnels for the link you put in your bio.

You need to understand social media and writing to have an authoritative pinned post with decent engagement (that also plugs the next step in your funnel at the end).

Now, you shouldn’t use this as an excuse to go off and procrastinate in tutorial hell. No, you don’t need to take a design, copywriting, and funnel course. You need to create a profile fast and start testing. That’s the only way to actually learn these skills. Courses help with techniques to test. Skills are groups of techniques that you’ve tested and filtered for maximum results.

Here’s the fastest way to do this:

Watch 1-3 YouTube tutorials on how to take a headshot photo or create a profile picture. Create yours along with it.
Write your bio using what we talked about earlier. Your topics and the offer you want to build authority in.

I’ve done the testing for you. Use this bio template.

I write about [topics]. [Results they will get from your offer].

If my topics are productivity, writing, and self-improvement and the the thing I want to sell revolves around writing, my bio would be:

I write about productivity, writing, and self-improvement. Learn to write as a high-income skill.

Then, I would link the first step of my offer which we will talk about in the Micro Offer section.

If you don’t feel like your bio is good enough, that’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Start writing content with it as it is. Your bio doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. People see it once or twice and forget about it. Your content is what leads to the most followers and sales. Your job is to write content so good that it doesn’t matter what your bio says.

Lastly, a question to guide your profile creation:

Does it look like it should have 1,000,000 followers?

If not, slowly improve it over the next 6-12 months until it does.

You can still gain followers and make an income if it doesn’t.

The Micro Skill Stack

As a one-person business, you need to eventually learn every single skill that allows you to run a full-fledged business (aside from physical distribution and commercial real estate).

The “Micro Creator” we are talking about here is just a way to get started. I’m assuming this will be your life’s work, so don’t cheap out on your long-term potential by continuing with the get-rich-quick mindset that brought you to this letter.

Now, in order to start making an income, you only need a few things:

A traffic source
A product or service to sell

So, the two skills that simplify that process are writing and sales.

Writing is accessible. You don’t need design or video experience. You don’t even need to write well, you just need to write with impact. All social media content starts with writing (yes, even video scripts).

Sales is how you turn the people who view your writing into customers.

Let’s learn the basics of both.

Writing To Build An Audience

There are 2 types of social media content:

1) Short Posts

This includes tweets, reels, shorts, TikToks, posts on Instagram, and really anything that’s under 300 characters or 1 minute.

My favorite way to write on any platform is to write a tweet, then copy/paste that tweet into an image template in something like Figma or Canva (look at my Instagram page to see what writing looks like in image form). No, you don’t need to post anything other than writing to build an audience on any short-form platform.

Short posts are good for staying top of mind, attracting an audience, and testing ideas.

Short posts are your base. You should post at least 1 a day. On X you can post 2-3 a day to test which ones you should post to other platforms or turn into a long post.

2) Long Posts

This includes X threads, threads on Threads by IG, Instagram carousels, long LinkedIn posts or carousels, or what I call “micro articles” that have been doing rather well recently.

Here’s an example of a micro-article:

The beautiful thing about images for short or long posts is that you can post them to any platform. Just be sure the image’s dimensions are 4×5 so they fit on Instagram.

Long posts are strategic. They can go extremely viral if they are based on a validated topic (like one of your best short posts). They tend to pull in more followers.

The thing is, they take longer to write. You should aim to write 1-2 a week and make sure you are able to get them shared so they have the potential of being seen by more audiences. Don’t rely on the algorithm to help you grow. Read my letter “How To Build An Audience With Zero Followers” to learn how to do this.

Make sure everyone in your network shares your long posts each week. This is how you grow.

You can also learn the entire process inside of my 2 Hour Writer course (with templates).

To recap:

Write 2-3 short posts a day on X.

Write 1-2 long posts a week on X.

When you get to 50,000+ followers, then consider starting to post on other platforms.

Why X?

The people on X are higher quality than those on most platforms aside from YouTube.

People don’t log onto Instagram, LinkedIn, or TikTok to be educated.

X is like Reddit, but just a tad less toxic, and you can follow actual people.

You often go on Reddit to learn something you didn’t know before.

And, all you need to do on X is write out your ideas.

Then, take your best ones and make growth easier on other platforms.

Turn an idea into a thread, a thread into a newsletter, a newsletter into a YouTube video, that video into a free download, that free download into a product. That’s your validation process for a good idea.

You can learn about this entire process in Digital Economics.

Now, what do you actually write about?

Take the topics you chose earlier and do the following:

Break them down into common pain points and write about how to solve them.
Research other accounts’ top tweets with a tool like the TweetHunter X Sidebar and rewrite them from your own perspective.
Read books and use social media as your place to take notes – but write those notes with a hook, body, and conclusion.
Go to your favorite YouTube channels and filter their videos by most popular. Then, use their titles as starting points for your hooks and posts.

Now, start writing.

The Sales Process

Sales is storytelling.

You are showing someone where they can be, making them aware of the pain points of their current situation, and offering them a path to get from point A to point B.

Pain point
Desired outcome
Path to get there (preferably your unique way of doing it)

That’s what sales is.

That’s what content is.

That’s what a landing page is.

That’s what all good and persuasive anything is. This isn’t just a lesson on sales, but persuasion in general like we talked about last week.

Practice sales in every situation you are in. Writing, conversations, and when attempting to earn an income.

We aren’t going to go too deep into the process of something like a sales call, because in all honesty, you don’t need to worry about it.

As a creator, 90% of your “selling” is done through content:

Making people aware of their problems / pain points.
Giving them solutions to test and experiment with.
Illustrating their future life so they have a desired outcome.

Most business owners don’t have the luxuries that come with building an audience.

The Micro Offer

To the point:

A micro offer is a service where you don’t need anything built yet.

All you need is:

A social media profile as your public resume.
Content that displays your authority (by illustrating problems and giving solutions – AKA “giving value”)
The ability to message people that like, comment, share, or DM you asking questions about your posts.
A questionnaire for people to fill out if you don’t message them first so they can show interest.

A micro offer is a way of testing what you should turn into a full-fledged product or service before you spend time doing so.

The best way to create a micro offer is simple.

You offer a pack of 4 weekly one-to-one sessions for $1000.

This does a few things:

$1000 is a solid price. If people pay for it, it means others will pay $3000-$10,000 for a more fleshed-out offer depending on your target audience (entrepreneurs and business owners often don’t flinch at such high price tags… $1000 is something most people can afford if they really want to (don’t let limiting beliefs and your lack of experience take over right now)).
4 weekly calls is enough time to get results for your client.
Only a few people can benefit from you doing the work for them (freelance work). Anyone can benefit from you teaching them over a call. You can call this coaching or consulting if you want.
You can identify what should go into a full product or service after selling a few of these.

Now, what do you include in these 4 calls?

The Micro Offer Framework

We need a starting point.

Something that you feel confident in delivering.

Step 1) Identify A Big Problem

Relating to the main topic you have some experience in, what is a big problem people face?

You can find this in a few ways:

Writing content about different problems and seeing which gets the most engagement.
Researching YouTube videos about the topic, seeing which ones get a lot of views, and watching the video to identify the problem they are targeting in that video (all content targets a problem).
Following social media accounts that talk about that topic and seeing which of their problem-related posts do best.

Big problems should fall under the health, wealth, and relationships eternal markets. Your job is to target one of them and position your interest around it.

If my interest is productivity, a big problem is not having the time or energy to make their spouse feel loved (relationships) and make progress in their career (wealth).

You can dig deeper by illustrating what those problems lead to in people’s lives. In this case, their relationship can grow stale and boring, causing unnecessary stress and little problems that stack up into mental chaos. The better you can illustrate what’s happening in someone’s life, the better.

(Use all of this for content).

If my interest is programming or writing, a big problem is not having a skill set that allows you to make more money. You slowly get prodded along by the school system into a career that isn’t relevant to your skill stack. That path saps your energy to do more with your life and ties you down with responsibilities.

Notice how I’m not only illustrating the problem, but amplifying it? That’s important. Probably the most important part of your marketing emails, landing pages, and content.

Don’t think of the problem as something directly related to the topic or interest you choose.

The problem is a pain point that people are already experiencing in their life that your topic or interest solves.

What is a big problem in someone’s life, and how can your interest help solve that?

Step 2) Illustrate A Desired Lifestyle

What is the opposite of the problem?

What is the goal they want to achieve?

What does their life look like once they’ve reached that goal?

Write down 3 aspects of their ideal day.

For something like productivity, that could be:

Wake up and do work you enjoy
Stop feeling tired and groggy after noon so you can get work done
Sleep well knowing you don’t have a list of spill over tasks that cause stress

You can map out more of these if you’d like.

Step 3) Create A Unique Process

Now, what is your actual offer?

What are you going to walk people through in your sessions?

What will you eventually be able to turn into a product or full fledged service?

You need your own unique process or system that you can continue improving.

For my 2-Hour Writer course, it’s the 3 Point Content Ecosystem.

How do you come up with this?

Write out every step someone needs to take to get from step 1 (the big problem or where they are now) to step 2 (their desired lifestyle).
Look over the steps and polish them up a bit. Create a system that you believe will work for people you help.
Slap a compelling name on that process. This is what sparks desire in your potential customers. I’ve created so many names that have led to the audience I have today like The One Person Business, The 4 Hour Workday, The Mastery Method, and more. I practice naming things by doing it in most of my content (this one is the Micro Creator, and I bet most of you are here because of it).

Let’s not make it any more complicated than that.

Over your 4 sessions with your clients, you are going to split the steps you wrote down to be manageable within those 4 sessions.

As a bonus, you can create a project for your client to work on that guides them through those steps (like a productivity planner, fitness program, writing a newsletter, or programming a small app).

That’s your entire offer:

Problem you solve
Desired outcome
Unique process to bridge the gap

As you work with people, your focus should be on improving your offer and collecting testimonials.

Create A Qualifying Questionnaire

Most of our clients will come from content.

But, we need somewhere for people to express interest in working with us.

Usually, this would be a landing page or even a full website that illustrates your product or service.

For now, forget about that. It’s not necessary.

Put the name of a form as “Work With Me 1 on 1”

Put the description as “Implement the [your unique process]

Include these questions relevant to your offer:

Name
Email
Social media handle (so you can reach out to them)
What are your biggest struggles? (have multiple choice answers relevant to your topic and offer)
Where do you want to be 30 days from now? (have multiple choice answers relevant to your topic and offer)
“This is not a free service. Are you serious about working together to [desired outcome]?” (yes or no options)

Short, sweet, and to the point.

Question 4 makes the prospect aware of their problem.

Question 5 sparks desire to change.

Question 6 plants the idea of payment in their mind.

You are going to be plugging this questionnaire under your content and in your bio link.

But what do we do after? And how do we land clients that don’t fill out the questionnaire?

The Art Of The DM

When you start watching online business tutorials, you will almost always be told to cold email or cold DM people to land clients for a skill you barely have any experience in.

We already have an offer that you at least have some knowledge in.

Now, we need to DM people that already like you, want to talk with you, and are potential candidates for your offer.

Avoid messaging random people. You will probably get roasted in the DMs and on the timeline.

Who do you direct message?

People who comment on posts that are relevant to your offer
People who repost or share your posts that are relevant to your offer
People who DM you first asking questions or saying “hi”
People who fill out your qualifying questionnaire

Before we understand what to say in the DMs, let’s understand what we will call Magnetic Content.

Magnetic Content is short or long posts that are written on pain points, benefits, the ideal lifestyle, quick tips, personal takes on common advice, rewrites of high performing content from other accounts, and actionable steps to overcome pain points… all relating to your offer.

Once you have your offer in place, writing content around it should be relatively simple.

The people who comment or share these posts are people expressing interest in that topic. They are perfect to reach out to on a warm note. They already know you and see you with some bit of authority.

(Side note: if you’re doing this on YouTube, you can’t DM people, so you need to tell everyone to fill out the qualifying questionnaire and email them or DM them on a platform like Instagram).

Now, what do you say in your direct message?

1) Pick up the conversation where it left off.

If they commented on or shared one of your posts, send them the link to the post and “respond” to the comment in their DMs.

If you are DMing them after they submitted your questionnaire, your job is to briefly walk them through all of your questionnaires questions again.

Start with “Hey [name], I saw you submitted the form to work with me. Can you tell me more about why you filled it out? What are you looking to get out of working with me?”

2) Ask them how their endeavors are going.

Assuming they are interested in the topic of the post they engaged with, ask them if they’re learning about it or how their progress is.

For something like fitness, “How’s the weight loss journey going? Is there anything I can help with?”

This both reminds them of their desired lifestyle and makes them aware of their sticking points.

If you are replying to their questionnaire, ask them what they’ve done to fix the problems they listed.

3) Give them novel advice and mention your offer.

By now you know if you can help them or not.

Start off with some free value and education. This proves your authority.

Give them advice for what they said in step 2 and try to make it non-basic. For something like fitness or productivity, telling them to “drink water” is going to make them think you aren’t worth working with. Prove you know your sh*t.

At the end of that message, mention “I actually offer a pack of 4 sessions to help with this. I help you implement [your unique process], which is just a fancy way of saying I make it a bit easier to reach [desired outcome]. The total cost is on par with a good personal trainer – $1000 for the 4 sessions.”

If you are replying to their questionnaire, exchange that last paragraph for explaining how next steps for your offer work. You can mention that if they’re interested, you will send what you will talk about in each session, how they will schedule calls, the projects they will work on, and the invoice along with it for $1000.

Yes, just state the price.

4) Handle objections, send the invoice.

A sales call can help, but you don’t need one. If they ask you to go over it on a call, that’s worth doing.

You will probably get quite a few no’s at the start. That’s fine. That’s how business is at the beginning.

Remember, we are aiming for $1,000 in 60 days. It will come a lot faster after you get the first client and testimonials.

At this point, answer any questions they have.

Once they’re done, send them a link to an invoice with Stripe or Paypal.

The 60-Day Action Plan

You are going to feel confused and overwhelmed.

That’s just how it is when you are learning something new.

Your mind is struggling to expand and grow. Like how you get sore after lifting weights.

Most of your results are going to come after day 30.

If you haven’t achieved anything worthwhile, you may not have realized that there is a natural filter for people who aren’t serious about doing this.

I had to post 80 YouTube videos before one went viral and I actually felt like my YouTube was growing.

With all things worth having, nothing happens, then everything happens.

You feel like you’re not making any progress, then your experience accumulates and compounds into one person saying “yes.”

Here’s what to focus on.

Whether you get immediate results or not (some will), stop being a dopamine junkie and give yourself the full 60 days to make your first $1,000.

1) Create a profile and stop worrying about it.

No, changing your bio isn’t going to help you magically make $10,000 a month.

Create your profile and forget about it.

2) Write 3-5 short posts every day.

Normally I advise 1-2 short posts a day, that’s what I do.

You may think 1-2 posts is easier, but it’s not. Ideas beget ideas. By writing more, you have more ideas, learn more, and feel as if you are making more progress.

Here’s what to do:

Start building a swipe file of other’s content you love and want to recreate (save good tweets, posts, videos, etc)
Jot down ideas as you consume content, podcasts, books, or have conversations
Write about struggles, solutions, how-to’s, breakdowns, commentary on advice you disagree with, and more relating to your offer.

I use Kortex for all of this. I’ll show you my setup in next week’s YouTube video – or read last week’s letter / video to see the process.

Every day, remember to go through your comments and reposts to DM people.

Every day or every other day, include a link and call to action to your questionnaire to have more interested people to DM.

3) Write 1-2 long posts a week.

The longer you hold attention, the more people trust you and the more value you can deliver. This is why I write such long newsletters. People don’t need another reason to take my courses or try Kortex.

Newsletters aren’t a part of the “Micro Creator” workflow. Add them in when you have everything else down. You can learn how in 2 Hour Writer.

For long posts, you are doing a similar thing:

Take your best posts (or others best ideas) and expand on them in a thread, micro article (example), or long post.
Use the extra space to give away extra secrets. Try to include at least one thing that isn’t common advice or knowledge.
Plug your questionnaire at the bottom of each one.

I personally recommend writing threads. Threads are multiple tweets strung together. You’ve seen them before, just tweet after tweet as comments to one another.

They hold more attention by how they are structured (more readable), they guide the reader straight to the call to action (more sales), and they can easily be repurposed to a YouTube video, Instagram carousel, or LinkedIn carousel. And, each tweet within them can be turned into new tweets.

Long posts will be the main fuel for your growth and sales. Don’t neglect them.

But, long posts only matter if you get eyes on them.

4) Get eyes on your posts.

We didn’t talk about this much in this letter (because I can’t shut up about it in other letters), but the algorithm probably isn’t going to make you an overnight success.

Most people don’t realize that social media growth comes from manual effort and skill. Once you do realize that, you no longer see it as a game of luck for popular people.

You need to reply to big and small accounts.

You need to DM people to make friends with them and grow together.

You need to write threads that tag other people so they have a reason to repost your content.

You can learn how to do all of these in “How To Build An Audience With Zero Followers.”

Anyone who tells you you don’t need to do those things are probably just going to give you a method for being inauthentic and catering to the algorithm.

If you want to write about what you want, how you want, the algorithm probably won’t like it – or you’ll get lucky and catch a wave, then wonder why you stop growing when the platform changes.

5) Map out your micro offer.

You don’t need a solidified product or service yet.

You simply need something that (1) you are above average at and (2) helps people solve a tangible problem in their life.

Think about what you’re good at.

Do other people want to learn that thing? Are they already learning about it? Is there an industry built around it? Do you follow people who make a living off of it?

Great, you have everything you need to build a million dollar company. That’s not a joke. You are living through an active tutorial in how people make money.

I don’t sit around writing these newsletters for no reason. Yes, I like writing them, a lot (or else I’d do something even more profitable), but I write them because they contribute to my business making money.

Every piece of content you read, landing page you go to, email you read, book you read, etc has money attached to it.

You aren’t making money because you aren’t creating and selling those things.

All you need, right now, is a pack of 4 calls for $1000 to teach someone something that will benefit their lives.

Fitness, a skill, nutrition, programming, etc etc etc.

Pick something and offer to help people with it.

Once you start getting results and know what people want, invest more time into building a “real” business.

6) Send 30 DMs a week.

This sounds like a high number, but it’s extremely low and borderline pathetic.

Freelancers and agency owners who send thousands of cold emails a month would laugh in your face if you complained about sending 30 messages a month.

But, 30 DMs multiplied by 8 weeks equals 210 DMs.

You need less than 0.5% of the people you reach out to to say “yes” to a $1,000 offer. That’s more than possible.

But, what you may not understand is that even if you only land one client, you’ve built a massive network.

You have direct connections with 210 people. You’ve probably grown by a few hundred followers. Around 1000 people will understand your expertise. Each of them knowing 50-500 more people they can tell about you.

The longer you stick with this, the more people say yes, the more your audience grows, and soon enough you’ll have people popping out of the sky to work with you.

That’s it for this letter.

I hope it was beneficial.

– Dan Koe