How to Find a Million-Dollar, One-Person Business Idea | Hacker News Reader

How to Find a Million-Dollar, One-Person Business Idea

forbes.com

161 pointsgamechangr93 comments

I hate these "business coaching" people. They sell themselves across all channels like spammers, with bait like "You can make a million dollars like I did!" They link everything back to their YouTube or book or whatever, providing no real content. They only make money by hooking people in, so they're effectively MLMs minus the bureaucracy and actual product. The unfortunate new "entrepreneurs" are now short a few grand that they paid for the "lessons", and if they try themselves they're unlikely to succeed. And there's a ton of these "marketing entrepreneurs" out there, just search "how to make a million dollars" on YouTube.

Many of these people are essentially selling hope. No shortage of paying customers there.

explains why the church business has never gone bankrupt. no matter how big or small it is. They always expanding.

I mean, a lot of individual churches have closed or shutdown in recent years, especially so in some part of the US and Europe.

Churches (in America) are like lotteries and other fantasy businesses. When they get boring, churches go out of business and they get replaced by other churches that promise a chance at a better prize. There are parts of USA where many old church buildings are for sale and can be had for a song.

> Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time.

> Sunday attendance also drops to 760,000 as decline continues in face of growing secularism, diversity and ageing congregation

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/church-of-engl...

> Religious affiliation, church attendance, and belief in God have all fallen in the US. None of these declines is happening fast, but the signs are now unmistakable. To take religious belief as an example, only 45 percent of young adults aged 18-30 have no doubt about God’s existence, compared with 68 percent of people aged 65 and over.

http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2016/09/05/religion-is-in-d...

>Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time

Well, the Church of England was as close you could get to atheism while still being in a religion.

Those self-help/get rich quick people serve the same role as the churches, but without the spirituality and community (or any self-humbling).

Generally agreed, but there often is some semblance of community in those get-rich-quick schemes, MLMs in particular. You have people coming to the scheme's local branch meetings like they'd be attending church service, and they're all full of enthusiasm that's feeding off each other - creating a ridiculous cult-like happy death spiral.

Source: 3 people I know are, or were in the past, involved in various MLMs and invited me - including to one of their "internal" meetings, which I attended out of curiosity, and where I observed the most striking cult behaviour I ever experienced.

Churches go bankrupt all the time?

There are three vacant churches for sale on my morning bike route alone

Plenty of churches are growing. Plenty are closing doors.

Now replace "church" with "business".

This is how things work.

I think we're only seeing your comment as a dig at religion for dig's sake.

This was my biggest complaint about Four Hour Work Week. Although a really useful book, it seems like examples include a lot more hooking people into subscriptions or videos or digital content that really go back to “single site/channel, force subscriptions, exploit subscription, profit.”

This is not really FHWW’s fault as there are many genuine businesses referenced in the book and after publishing, but the pattern is similar to what you describe.

Not just four hour work week - almost all of Tim Ferris's content rubs me this way. I think he's good at writing books that will sell - not necessarily books that contain a lot of meaningful information; the latter being more boring and not nearly as sexy. It's enough fact to keep you going, but a noticeable thread of bullshit throughout.

Um, they are obviously in the self-help book genre. Being irritated by the self-promotion and shallow insights of a self-help author is like saying you are irritated by the local pastor because he is so preachy in the sunday mass and talks of religion all that time :)

Well, if you want to help abolish something bad, you got to be irritated by it first, not just take it's badness for granted because "self-help will be self-help".

Ferris is a marketing man and he's good at that (proof: You bought his book, and even read it. QED)

Indeed. It's possible, there are businesses out there doing it and it's the dream (who wouldn't want that kind of amazing work/life balance?). But the overwhelming majority of businesses just don't work that way.

Huh? I find Tim's content to be refreshingly innovative. He probably wasn't rich rich before 4HWW, but if what he claims in the book is true, he had a fully-remote mostly automated business and he could spend his time travelling the world - definitely a lifestyle I would enjoy. His next book introduced e.g. the "slow carb" diet, which is a very sensible realistic diet (kind-of generic low carb with a bit of paleo mixed in). I haven't read his newest book but judging by his podcast (he interviews a lot of extremely successful people), it's very likely it has a few valuable insights.

Sure, he's optimising for marketing; can't blame him for that. But IMO it's definitely backed by actual content.

They provide inspiration and hope. Sometimes that's just what you need.

I like "coaching" programs that promise to teach real-world skills. I enrolled in a SEO coaching program that probably made me back the money within a month.

Often false hope is worse than no hope.

...to take the wrong course instead of actively work on what you should be working on.

It's a free market. Someone has to teach this stuff, why not these guys. If their advice is useful - great, if it's a scam - they'll get sued or go out of business.

Maybe we're talking about different people though, but Alex Becker and Jeff Walker, for example, were extremely helpful to me personally.

I have nothing to say about the author of the article though, personally I didn't learn much from it. But as long as I can use my own brain and judge advice on it's own merit, I'd rather have a bunch of people trying to teach this stuff than not.

No one is going to sue anyone for selling scammy so-called self-help techniques.

Which is a shame, because this stuff is actually another example of something that should be a serious crime - knowingly misleading the public.

There's no actual teaching involved. A lot of marketing is manipulative, but when your primary product is manipulation, you're over the ethical line.

Lol, if you'll make "knowingly misleading the public" a crime you will have to outlaw all of the religions, most of the politicians, celebrities, commercials, news companies, blogs, businesses, people with social media accounts...

And "teaching" is in the eye of the beholder isn't it. If I think I've learned something interesting/useful - there's no problem, otherwise I can just return the product I've bought.

> Lol, if you'll make "knowingly misleading the public" a crime you will have to outlaw all of the religions, most of the politicians, celebrities, commercials

Yes please, to all! Particularly advertising, as these days it grew to be a cancer on human society.

> news companies, blogs, businesses, people with social media accounts...

Those could be run without lying to people.

Now I realize that regulating this is impossible (who watches the watchers, and all that) and trying would invite horrible consequences, but I wish we could at least change the social perception of lying to people. At individual level misleading others isn't going to earn you many friends, but when scaled up, it suddenly becomes a respectable occupation. This is one of the weirdest things about humans that I know.

There are a number of lawsuits. This is one.

https://www.cnet.com/news/amazon-scam-lawsuit-bowser-washing...

Can’t agree more. Things on sale are a course, some digital tools, and a book. One of Forbes' topics is marketing.

They prey on the "I want to be a millionaire CEO but don't have any real skills and don't know what I actually want to do with my life" crowd. Usually the message is that you can get there without doing any actual real work (kind of says all you need to know about their target audience). I wonder how many truly successful businesses actually started from that point?

The "entrepreneurs" I know had business that grew organically out of fulfilling a genuine need that either they had or that they could satisfy for someone else with their skillset and knowledge. Saying they got where they are by accident is probably a bit too dismissive but I don't think any of them set out with the end goal in mind - it just happened organically. I include myself in that of course.

>Usually the message is that you can get there without doing any actual real work (kind of says all you need to know about their target audience).

The more advanced such snake-oil salesmen have added elements of "of course you also need to put in the effort", or even directly promote "struggle-porn" [1] -- while everything else you wrote about them remains true.

[1] https://medium.com/@nateliason/no-more-struggle-porn-202153a...

Interesting article. There was a discussion of it recently on here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18269846.

I remember reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and getting inspired by the author's success with his described approach to entrepreneurship and real estate.

I also remember when I found out he wasn't actually very successful until he started selling self-help advice stuff like "Rich Dad, Poor Dad."

As they say, during a gold rush the safest way to get rich is to sell picks and shovels. Why go through the risk of running an actual real estate business when you can convince suckers to pay upfront for advice, I guess.

From the article: Polish recommended that Thompson document how he had created his web business in a course. Thompson took his advice. When he spoke the following year, he ended up selling $35,000 worth of his courses. Bingo!

Bingo indeed. It does make me wonder... is the "best" way to make a quick million to sell courses that purport to teach people how to make a quick million?

See Clickfunnels 2 comma club.

A few years ago I was really into the idea of starting a lifestyle business and began listening to a few podcasts about this. All of the podcasts I listened to ended up creating some sort of business related to podcasting.

I'm beginning to see this in the 'Maker' community as well. Indie makers creating tools for an audience of indie makers.

Some of the tools are useful, most are derivative, but it's a funny little economy.

You can see a lot of this in the VC-funded economy as well. Most B2B VC-funded startups just cater to other VC-funded startups and nobody without VC money could ever afford their services.

Even most B2C VC-funded companies need customers making VC-funded salaries to be able to survive those crucial first few years before they can figure out a pricing model that works outside SFBA.

It boils down to entrepreneurs solving problems they have and understand. Whichever community you're in, those are the problems you end up solving.

This is what happened in the gold rush. From retrospect, if you wanted to get rich you'd do a lot better selling hammers, pans and jeans than actually searching for gold.

Yep. Gold is scarce (if it exists at all). Suckers looking for gold, however, are in huge supply.

Then again though - those tools actually worked. While those podcasts don't.

Even if they did, your chances of succeeding are slim.

If success is gold, those podcasts are really hammers and pickaxes. Whereas to get any sure-fire success, you'd need someone to sell you a ground-penetrating radar and some drilling machines.

The key thing about picks, shovels, and subscriber-only podcasts is that the customer pays upfront. So whether or not they work, you get paid.

And if they don't work for a particular customer, well, that's probably user error, right?

You only need one or two great stories to power your marketing. If you sell 10,000 shovels and one person gets rich... put that person in your ads and sell 10,000 more shovels. A lot of businesses depend on this marketing model... lotteries, casinos, app stores, college basketball, college football, etc.

I bought a book years ago called The Art of Self-Promotion for Musicians, written by someone who quit being a musician to....advise other musicians how to make $. Actually it seemed good, although it didn't have much effect.[0] But even 'better' was a one-day course in my city on how to make $ as a musician, only $10. Unfortunately I didn't have $10.

[0] Well, the "Remarkably" game came from that, I think. The book says: to find your image, find a few things you are remarkably, e.g. remarkably good looking, remarkably silly etc. Which I made into a wacky multiplayer pen + paper game - make columns for the names of all people present, then write down lots of things they are remarkably, the stranger the better. It's like one-word poetry. Can be extremely funny.

Reminds me of the “How I made $290,000 Selling Books” joke -

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/6ofdt6/how_i_made_29...

"Welcome to our 'how to become a millionaire' seminar! Just to get to know each other, would someone make a guess, how many of you are here in the audience today?"

"About a thousand?"

"That is correct from the third row! What is your name?"

"John."

"Good guess John, there's exactly one thousand people here! Now John, how much did you pay for your ticket?"

"$1100"

"That is also correct, John! Well, thanks everyone, it was great to have you all here, have a wonderful day!"

The article doesn’t offer any suggestions, of course. It just lists categories of those individuals bringing in $1 million or more per year.

But the list did strike me as notable, in that the numbers are so small. Less than 10,000 people total in the whole US bring in at least a million in revenue. And their profits are likely to be a fraction of that (though informational trades may have a much larger margin).

That makes me think these are outliers. Not sure one can learn much from such a small sample size, as their successes are more likely to be due to highly specific individual circumstances, rather than any coherent general perspective.

I’d be happy to be shown otherwise though.

10,000 people is a small number on the context of the entire US labour force but it is very far from being a small sample size.

The articles doesn't imply there are only 10,000 people?

Look at a quote just one group:

>"The largest group (9,143 businesses) is the professional, scientific, and technical services sector,"

If you add up all the categories mentioned you get 33,618 businesses above $1 Million

Same order of magnitude, still insignificant.

original OP here.

It's quite significant actually, if you visualize it correctly.

This article doesn't say there are 33,000 businesses making $1M a year (or you're right that's pretty small).

It says there are 33,000 businesses making a $1m a year that have only 1 full time employee. That's big.

Is it a commentary on the gig economy making 33,000 millionaires out of traditional business sectors? I'm not saying that's true, but something is shifting and it's big.

these businesses probably represent very specific circumstances where it's not worth it to hire at least one full time employee.

> Less than 10,000 people total in the whole US bring in at least a million in revenue.

TFA: "The number of nonemployer establishments with annual revenue over $1 million grew by 5.7 percent to 38,029 in 2015"

A lot of these are businesses that have contactors and freelancers. That makes them nonemployer companies. Maybe the growth is reflecting more gig economy, less benefits and employment guarantees.

A stockbroker calls 10,000 people. He tells 5,000 that the stock is going to go up, and the other 5,000 that it is going down. The next day the stock goes up. He then calls the 5,000 people who he told the stock would go up, he tells 2,500 that the stock goes up and the other half it will go down. Stock goes down next day.. . rinse, repeat. Until it gets down to 100 people and now those 100 people believe that stockbroker has 100% success rate.

Problem with these "motivator speakers" is that alot of people are doing thse strategies but alot of it goes with luck and oppurtunity. SO they are not spouting wisdom, just preaching strategies that worked for them in their time.

This is exactly the plot of a Mathnet episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-XMRu_q4s

A similar example is also in the known John Allen Paulos' book "Innumeracy":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_(book)

> In a business that brings in $1 million in revenue, the owner could very likely be in the highest tax bracket and is likely to take home an income in the mid-six figures. Then again, that is a lot more than the average American makes. It’s enough to allow you to do things like save for retirement, buy the healthcare you need, pay for college for your kids, if you have them, and go on a nice vacation every year.

These are things you can do in the low six figures, not mid six figures. They are also things I wish everyone could be able to do.

Edit: The Math.

Retirement: Maxing a 401k and Roth Ira is $23,000/yr

Healthcare: Insurance for a family is about $600/month or $7,200/yr. Let's add another $500/yr in expected expenses and another $1000/yr in emergency savings. Total $8,700/yr

Saving for college: $200/month for 21 years (age when child pays last tuition) with 1% interest (pessimistic and safe long term view) will yield north of $50,00k, which is enough for state university tuition. Lets say we are saving for three children. $3,600k/yr.

Nice vacation: Nice doesn't have a specific meaning, but it's safe to say $10,000k is nice.

Total: $55,300k/yr. Considering how important these things are, it's within the reach of a household with a post tax income of $150,000 assuming average US cost of living. People with mid six figure post tax income can do much more. I really dislike these two paragraphs. It makes it seem like being a very high income household is the only way to provide the basic quality of life.

> Insurance for a family is about $600/month

Where the... ?? Oh... you mention '401k', so you're probably employed by someone else. I don't think we've seen $600/month/family insurance policies that someone pays full-cost for in years. 3 years ago I knew people paying $1400-$1800, and for us, just 2, next year is slated to be $1300/month. Oh, and that's just base cost - you have a $10k deductible in there so... realistically budget $20k/year for a family with some regular medical expenses. But yeah, if a separate employer is footing some of the bill, then you might get away with 'only' ~$8k.

> It makes it seem like being a very high income household.

POST TAX $150k/year is a very high household income in many parts of the US. You're talking > $200k/year income, which is excluding 80% of US households.

I guess for sake of argument, that might still be 'low' 6 figures, not 'mid', but many of the jobs that pay that sort of money are going to be in high-tax states, and I suspect you're going to be closer to > $250k. In CA, you'd need to earn $250k for a take home of ~$150k.

Just to clarify (non-US citizen here) - you pay $1300 per month for health insurance that covers just 2 people? Is this a maxed out policy that covers pre-existing conditions or is this just 'normal'?

As a young, healthy, single, nonsmoker adult male insurance ranges between $220-$450/month depending on the quality of insurance.

Edit: Laws passed in the last decade declare all insurance plans must cover preexisting conditions and cannot adjust the price or decline customers based on preexisting conditions.

That's normal, but overall not a large percentage of people are actually paying that: people with salaried jobs are typically insured through their employer (where they often end up paying a smaller percentage), the lowest earners are on medicare or subsidized insurance plans.

Health insurance for a family is 2-3 times that.

$50k will not cover many state schools. Especially if prices continue to climb.

> $50k will not cover many state schools.

That's plainly false. $50k will cover nearly all state schools, in-state.

The vast majority of all state schools are less than $12,500 per year for tuition + fees in-state. The exceptions tend to be among the top state schools, like UC Berkely (~$60k) and Virginia (~$70k). The $50k equivalent would still go a very long ways for those.

George Institute of Technology is $12,500 per year in-state for tuition + fees.

University of Florida is $6k per year.

Purdue is $10k per year.

The University of Houston is ~$8k per year. Texas A&M is $10k per year.

A bunch of the Cal schools are around $7k per year.

The same goes for the city schools in NY (CUNY), those are mostly around or under $7k per year.

UNC Chapel Hill is $9k per year.

UCLA is $13k per year.

The University of Michigan is $15k per year.

University of Texas at El Paso & San Antonio are around $7k per year. Texas at Austin is $10k per year. Texas Tech is $8k per year.

And this is the cost for some of the best state schools. Everybody else is between cheaper and dramatically cheaper. The primary requirement is that you have to go to an in-state school. I'd bet that the in-state median for state schools across the US is a lot closer to $6k per year, rather than $12,000.

Purdue is $12,000 to $14,000 (depends on major) * https://www.admissions.purdue.edu/costsandfinaid/tuitionfees...

Tuition + Other Estimated Expenses + subject major fees

It is important to know the whole cost as most schools have living expenses: Purdue would cost about $23,000 to $26,000 with room&board.

Books, food, housing, transportation.

There is a lot more to "covering" school than just the tuition.

> These are things you can do in the low six figures, not mid six figures

Did you mean mid-five-figures?

> Retirement: Maxing a 401k and Roth Ira is $23,000/yr

A SEP will allow you to put way more away than that. Better would be a "back door Roth" and transition from SEP to Roth and pay the income tax out of pocket each year.

>Healthcare: Insurance for a family is about $600/month or >$7,200/yr. Let's add another $500/yr in expected expenses > and another $1000/yr in emergency savings. Total $8,700/yr

You can get a better deal if you go with a Health Savings Account (HSA) + HDHP. HSA funds, if you don't use them, turn into retirement funds.

The story is a plug to buy the author's book (see last para).

Seriously. The profiled business owner in the first paragraph runs a business teaching people how to run a business, and then the author of the article is running the equivalent of a writing business teaching people how to run businesses teaching people how to run businesses.

Hey, I've got my million dollar idea. I'll run a business, teaching people how to write articles, promoting books, about people who run businesses, teaching people how to run businesses.

It's just turtles all the way down.

And you found it on hacker news, run by a company that makes a living helping people start business's :0 (Slight stretch admittedly but not entirely untrue).

I mean technically this scales all the way up towards starting a business school.

Decades ago, there was an ad in the the classified in the newspaper:

    Learn how to make money through classified ads.
    Send $1 to XXXXX.

Sending a dollar gets you a postcard with the text on it:

    Place a classified ad with the following text:

    Learn how to make money through classified ads.
    Send $1 to XXXXX.

Here's one great idea: write blog on how to earn money and then sell the visitors your books/videos - contrary to common sense, it seems to be working over and over again, even after so many have already did exactly the same and none of their customers earned any money thanks to them...

And I'm one among the suckers who paid ~300 USD. I'm just stupid.

I did enjoy the articles about mattress bloggers making a remarkably high incomes. Even though it ended in profitable tears. https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

This is so deceptive and disgusting but I enjoyed the story.

A lot of those businesses listet will just be another legal arrangement that replaces employees with sub contractors or something else (trucking, construction, etc)

The author’s disclosure should have been at the top

“Elaine Pofeldt is author of The Million-Dollar, One Person Business (Random House, January 2, 2018), a book looking at how to break $1M in revenue in a business staffed only by the owners.”

I liked the article and her writing style (I have written many books myself, so when I read material I think both of the content and how the content is presented), and when I saw that she had written a book on the subject, I read the book reviews and just ordered it.

I agree that the disclosure would have been better placed at the beginning of the article.

Based on this quote, some of the business aren't quite one person:

"He relies on a team of three virtual assistants, who are contractors, to help him with tasks like phone and email support."

More to the point some of the businesses are one employee, which then opens the ongoing question of when is a contractor a defacto employee?

Maybe the numbers are compensated by the existence of other single employee businesses who "employ" family members to spread income?

The article specifically mentions that these businesses have no W-2 employees, not that they don't utilize any contractors.

> which then opens the ongoing question of when is a contractor a defacto employee?

There are very specific IRS rules about when someone is classified as a W-2 employee vs a contractor; it's not like it's just up to the business. Of course there are gray areas (e.g. the whole "Uber drivers should be employees" debate), and there are many court cases focused on employee classification, but in general, having no W-2 employees whatsoever is a pretty good indication you are a single person business.

Everyone is complainig about the intro, but if you read the entire article some great info at the bottom....

I’m not a huge fan of one person startups. Most of those are lifestyle businesses. I feel like having three cofounders is ideal. That way if two of you disagree about a major decision, the third founder can cast the tie-breaking vote. At the very least, you need two cofounders minimum so you can get a different perspective on problems (provided both of you are not similar in your thinking).

I have a one-person startup, and sure, it's more of a lifestyle business. But it's fully automated and provides passive income, so it's pretty awesome. (Not sure if that fits the definition of "lifestyle business".) I don't feel like I need a co-founder to get different perspectives; I have customers (first and foremost), friends, and plenty of internet communities where I can ask for advice and feedback (Stripe Atlas, Indie Hackers, HN, Reddit, etc.)

I wouldn't trade my autonomy and independence for anything, and I'm really glad that I don't need to chase after an exit with a 10 year deadline. The other important point is that this business should give me a really solid base for pursuing even bigger ideas in the future. Hopefully I will be able to keep this running in the background, and then go after some bigger ideas where I do actually want to raise VC funding and hire a team, because I won't need to take a salary.

That's amazing, and it is a lifestyle business. Peoples life, and income affect their lifestyle.

What do you do?

I'm working on a service that helps programmers set up PDF templates and fill them out with an API request: https://formapi.io

This guy gets it.

“Passive income is earnings derived from a rental property, limited partnership or other enterprise in which a person is not actively involved“

If you have customers, employees, contracts, websites, marketing, invoices, etc, then there is involvement. Meaning it’s not so passive.

;)

That's a good point. It's definitely not as hands-off as buying shares in an index fund, or paying a property management company to manage a rental property.

I do have to be on call in case someone calls or opens a support ticket, or if there is a problem with the servers. But all the technical and billing stuff is automated. And if I want to have a long vacation then I make the conscious choice to neglect marketing and sales. But the next step would be to find some virtual assistants who can help with support and marketing.

You can have as many co-founders as you want but they will never ever know more than your customers.

What exactly is wrong with lifestyle businesses? I know plenty of people having a fantastic time off the back of their lifestyle business.

FYI: "I Love Lucy" was a lifestyle business. Lucille Ball was past 40 and wanted children with her musician husband who was constantly on the road. They dreamed up the show as a means to be able to work together and have sane hours that would allow them to be parents.

The industry at the time was so grueling that it was less horrible to reinvent the industry than accept the status quo. At the time, TV was live broadcast twice a day, once for East Coast and once for West Coast. Archival quality footage did not exist. This made for grueling, horrible days for actors and crew.

They invented modern TV as we know it. They pioneered many practices that are still in use today. In technical terms, they were the Star Wars of their day and completely revolutionized TV. Star Wars gave us modern movie special effects as we know it. I Love Lucy gave us modern TV as we know it.

And Lucy got to see her husband regularly and got to start a family, which was all she really wanted out of it.

>I’m not a huge fan of one person startups. Most of those are lifestyle businesses.

So? You say it like it's a bad thing. Back in the day we used to call "lifestyle businesses" as just businesses, and things like modern-day startups "BS moonshots with no real revenue model that will statistically fail, but a tiny minority will succeed (mostly by selling privacy) and continue to inspire suckers".

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