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A question I've been thinking about a lot recently is how do you build a one person business in 2026? If you followed me last year or the year before, you know that one person businesses were very popular and my videos on those did really well. So did anything change from those videos? AI is taking over everything. Agents, new features are launching literally every day on Twitter. What's changed? How do you actually use this stuff if you're going to use it? And just what does the one person business landscape look like now? So to get straight to the point and answer the question, how do you build a one person business in 2026? You do the same thing that you would have done before, but now you use AI to enhance that process, right? You don't really need a course or a coach anymore. Although those things are still valuable because they're specific knowledge that you probably wouldn't think to look up with AI or even do with AI. And the AI probably isn't going to give you that out of the box. So courses are still going to be a thing, coaching is still going to be a thing. Just because the default response of the AI usually isn't that good. Getting specific knowledge from the source of someone who's done something is still superior. And if it costs 25 to 100 to 200 bucks, big whoop. So to build a business with AI, you just implement AI in the correct places so that you can do things faster with higher quality and without less guesswork. AI in this sense is a catalyst to avoid a lot of trial and error. So you can still build a business the old way. That's fine, it's. It'll just take a bit longer. Especially if you're not a person who is high agency or knows how to iterate or refine or not just accept the output of AI as law. So what will you still do to build a one person business? You will still generate traffic, you still write content, you still write emails or newsletters, you still create a product or service, you still create a customer avatar, you still formulate a compelling offer, you still, you still build a landing page, you still write persuasive copy for that page, you still put the offer in front of people and see if they buy and then you iterate from there. After all of that. Now that's a lot of stuff, right? As a one person business, you are the marketing department, you are the sales department, you're the product lead, you're the project manager, you're the content writer, you're the social media strategist. You have to learn so many things and you have to become a generalist. Even though people tell you to niche down, you still need the general skills to build the business. But that's just the thing. Before AI social media was the technology that allowed such a one person business to exist. But you could create a comfortable lifestyle business, you couldn't build some crazy insane super high revenue business. You would eventually have to hire a team. The thing there is that the bar has been raised as to how much you can make because you can do more as one person with AI. But the barrier of entry to starting a one person business is now lower than ever. Anyone can do it, right? You can ask AI. Hey, help me build a one person business. Hey, this agent go and write content every day for me and spam every platform. So anyone can try to build a one person business. Meaning there's more competition. But most people don't try beyond a certain point. 95 plus percent of people hit one failure and then quit altogether. And then the other people that don't want to learn, they Download something like OpenClaw and buy a Mac Mini and start running all of these agents to do things for them. But then you look at them two, three months from then and they have nothing to show for it. They just like looking at an agent doing things and they don't understand what quality is. They don't understand when something doesn't work, you change it. They don't understand that spamming every single platform, that doesn't mean you're going to grow on social media, that doesn't mean you're going to make any sales either. When I actually talk to a few other of my business friends, some very high up in the business world, they try that stuff. They try the openclaw and I'm not saying that it's bad at all. We're actually introducing a very similar feature where you can chat with an agent on Telegram into Eden, which is a software that we're building, it's in beta, you can sign up if you'd like. But what I'm saying is that most people just get a dopamine hit from it. They have this curve where it's like, oh, this is so awesome, I'm going to have it do everything. They waste 200, 300, a thousand dollars on AI credits and then it collapses and then they have nothing because they don't what good looks like. They don't have the skill or the knowledge to do the thing in the first place. So how are they going to be the manager or the CEO of the agents. Now with that rant out of the way, for the sake of this letter, we're going to set the goal of $1 million. Making a million dollars with a one person business just so we can frame it right. I'm not saying you're going to make that. I'm not saying you're going to make anything. There's no amount of knowledge that I can just give you right now that will immediately make you a million dollars. It doesn't work like that. Stop looking for videos like that. So we're just using the one million dollar goal to make tangible so we can actually break it down. I'm going to share exactly what you need to learn how to use AI almost better than everyone else. And prompts that'll give you that will allow you to really start your business today if you actually go through the prompts, which most people won't take the time to do that because it'll take about an hour to go through all of them. They're that comprehensive. Now as a note, before we get started, we're not going over crazy agent workflows here. We're just going over normal AI use. And I know that sounds boring, but you need to learn the fundamentals before you can actually get into the crazy AI agent stuff. Which we'll talk about in a future video. If you'd like that, like, comment, subscribe. So section one of this video. How do you actually make a million dollars as one person? Because to a lot of people that just sounds insane. And we need to break this down because you need to at least believe it's possible before you can do it. And a lot of the people that don't believe it's possible will fall off of the video right now. So quick math, let's do this. A million dollars divided by 12 months is $83,333 per month. That number divided by 30 days is $2,777 per day. Now there's a few ways to actually achieve that. Per day or per month. You can sell 18 $150 products a day, like a course or whatever other product can cost $150. You can sell one one 25 subscriptions a day. So if you're starting on substack, that's something you could do. Or you could go the freelance route and land 15000 client every other day, which is a pretty high price point for just starting out in freelancing. But it illustrates the point if you go the coaching or consulting route or just service based business in general, you can land one 10000 client every four days or you can have a combination of both. So like one to two clients a week and a few other product or subscription sales a day or just whatever other combination and price point there is to hit a million dollars. Now if you go the client route, I recommend doing that as a beginner because some people still don't believe this. This was a limiting belief for myself as well. It just feels weird charging such high prices, especially if you work. When I worked at a web design agency I was making like $60,000 a year, which isn't insanely good, isn't insanely bad. It's not that great. I was still living with four other people paying a very low rent. I still felt like I had money problems even as like a single person at the time. But it's much easier to sell a 1,000 to 5,000 doll, one person than it is to sell 100 to 200 Substack subscriptions to 100 to 200 people. Because where are you going to find those people and how are you going to convince them that's what the social media audience is for? Or other traffic mechanisms. But you absolutely can send a hundred DMS today, Ask AI how to send a good dm and if you have a decent offer that people want, they may be willing to pay you. And if you aren't a business owner, you may not understand that yet because you don't understand that businesses are want to grow and if you can help them grow or make more money, they're going to want to pay you. The amount of people that I have hired for 1,000, 5,000, 10,000, $50,000 after starting a business is absurd. But if the ROI is there, the ROI is there. So as a beginner you don't really have an audience yet and you may not be building one, but that's what I recommend doing as well because that's also going to prove that you know what you're talking about. When you reach out to clients they're probably going to look at your social media profiles and, and building an audience is leverage. So why wouldn't you do that? Why wouldn't you write content? And once you're writing content, once you're actually growing, then if you want to transition out of client work into something like a product that can sell while you sleep, so to say, based on the traffic that you generate, then you'd go to the product route. So the question there with the product route, because that's usually most people's goal is like, I don't want to do client work. I didn't, I hated client work, but it was a necessary step for me. But when you go the product route, how do you actually get enough traffic to, to the product so that you can make that many sales to make a million dollars? So let's do more Math. At a 2.5% conversion rate on a landing page, meaning 2.5% of the people that go to the landing page actually buy the thing that you're selling, you need about 720 people to visit that page a day to make 18 sales on a $150 product. Or you need something like a post to go viral once or twice a month, which I wouldn't bet on, but is becoming more and more of a thing as the social media platforms are becoming more interest. Algorithm related, right? Really? Anyone? Even if you're just starting off, if you can create good content, you can post your first reel, it'll go mega viral. But most people don't know how to create content, so that's usually not going to happen unless it's based on luck. So the bet that I like to take is continuously building an audience, putting out content, iterating, refining and improving your skills over time so that your audience growth kind of reflects the growth of your skill. So getting 720 people to a landing page a day to make a million dollars, where does that actually come from? It can come from social media, it can come from ads like Facebook ads or Google Ads. It can come from SEO, it can come from influencer partnerships, it can come from podcast sponsorships, newsletter sponsorships. It can really come from anything. But you are one person. And if you're like I was when I first started out, you don't have that much money and you don't want to spend that much money. So what are you going to do? You're going to do social media and you're going to get really good at capturing attention, delivering value, delivering substance, not just copying templates, not just following the trends, but getting very good at what you do and showing other people that you're good at what you do. So if we assume that you start on social media, you start writing content and you become skilled at that thing and you continue to refine your skill, that means you're not stagnating, you're constantly learning. It's actually a baked in portion of your day of studying other people's content, implementing, implementing what you learn in your own and improving over time. Because social media, yes, it's a skill. It's not completely based on luck, it's partially based on luck for actually growing, like getting the traction started. Once you have a base audience, then you have a base level of engagement and you're more likely to go viral over time. So you have to get through that beginner hell, but you absolutely can. So if you become skilled at it, then you can get 10 to 50,000 views per YouTube video and you can also get 500,000 to a million impressions on social media per month. And yes, it will take some time to do that. If you're not immediately good at the thing. Shocker. You actually have to get good at something in order to see results. Crazy. You can't just go to a school, get a degree in social media and immediately have 50,000 followers. No, this is based on real world feedback. This is based on skill. But the thing there is, is even if you don't get 10 to 50,000 YouTube views or 500,000 to a million impressions, even less than that, it's not like you're making $0 if you actually do this stuff. Many people would be very happy with less than a million dollars per year. So if you think about it, you need 720 people a day to the landing page. And if you're getting that many impressions, 720 people is a challenge for sure. But it's not too much to ask for. Now, the objections in your mind that are probably happening right now of like, oh, I can't do this, oh, this sounds unfeasible. It's because you're probably stuck in the old paradigm. You're stuck in the my time equals how much I earn rather than my how much I earn equals the value that I provide. If the only life you've known is go to school and get a job, then you are, that is your mindset. That's what you are wired to believe. That's what you're wired to do. If you want to make more money, you have to get a better job or you have to get better schooling. You don't understand that if you're an entrepreneur, you hunt for your better job, you hunt for your gigs, you hunt, hunt for your customers and you self educate. You don't need to go to an institution to get a credential in order for someone to hire you. It's all in your own hands. And that's a great thing for many people who actually want that. But a lot of people aren't Willing to deal with the uncertainty that comes with that. So that's another skill that you have to learn, is just tolerating and mitigating the risk of starting a business. So to actually get started on this stuff, it takes about two to five years to get really good at the.
