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This entire issue is about automating systems within your one-person-business to allow you to create “passive” income. Besides running your own business which will always be my go-to, the best way to grow your wealth continues to be value investing in my opinion. I have written issues on value investing in the past and believe me, mine don’t compare to Value Investor Daily’s issues. Make sure to subscribe to them by clicking the link below!
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The current state of affairs
I’ve written extensively about the one-person-business model and why being a creative entrepreneur is the final step in the self-actualization journey of humanity.
In those writings, I have mentioned how AI is rapidly changing career trajectories while ending entire professions in its wake. In today’s issue, I want to get more practical on harnessing some of the cool tools that are available out there and really open your mind up to the possibilities of exactly how much just one person can accomplish by leveraging technology.
AI vs Automation
While AI has grabbed all the headlines in the past few years, I’d like to talk a bit more about non-AI automation tools allowing smaller teams to do the work that would require dozens.
I’ll start with myself, as a product, I run a premium newsletter using Beehiiv, which automates the order in which the members of The Premium Circle receive their newsletters based on their individual skill level. I don’t have to manually copy and paste their specific newsletter to each premium subscriber nor do I have to track their progress manually. Beehiiv does it all for me.
Another example which is actually what prompted me to write this letter :
I was paying a freelancer $80 per month for a simple data entry task which took him 2 hours per day to do. This was a mindless task which I chose to delegate so I could focus on higher leverage creative tasks instead. Recently, I sat down with my friend Eshaan who’s the automation expert I know and asked him if this task could be automated.
Without going into too much detail, the task itself required a few different actions performed hundreds of times a day, the complexity of it never led me to wonder if it could be automated at all. However, when I explained it to Eshaan, his eyes lit up and he assured me that the task could be automated easily! We even ended up brainstorming other tasks that we could automate to save time/money/effort and came up with a lot of ideas! Sponsor outreach, marketing, etc. Truly try to do the same for your business, brainstorm creative ways where you can save your time to focus on higher leverage tasks
My premise here is to open up your mind to the possibilities that automation can offer in a one-person business and once again reduce the mental barrier of entry inside your mind so that you finally take action and start building your brand online (btw if you want a free consulting call to see what you can automate in your business/life with Eshaan, you can book one here).
Don’t make the same mistake I did, set out a day to check out tools like Make, BardeenAI, Zapier and the other vast array of automation tools out there and brainstorm ways where you can save time/money/effort in your business. Always remember, the job is to be a creative, not a task monkey.
The $1 million solopreneur is everywhere
Once you start to play around with automation toolkits and start plugging time leaks in your business, you start to get a sense of the what the solopreneur game is all about - leveraging pre-built tools to create a presence in the digital economy and sell a product that solves a problem in people’s lives. This problem can also be another tool that solves a problem that no other tool currently out there does. Are you starting to get a sense of why I call the digital economy is a self-sufficient utopia?
There are solopreneurs making $1 million per year all over the world. Don’t believe me? Start reading The Starter Story, an average issue of their newsletter almost always features at least 1 solopreneur who has hit this milestone and they send out an issue every week!
What you’ll see in basically all of these stories is what I recommend in every newsletter : Build distribution via social media or a newsletter, do high ticket client work to replace your income, slowly replace client work with a productized version of your knowledge, then do whatever you want.
While even I can’t claim the title of a $1 million solopreneur, building this newsletter to 21,000+ subscribers, alongside The Digital Economy to 10,000 subscribers, I have created an independent income source of thousands of dollars per month, alongside owning a percentage of other newsletters as well as being offered partnerships in companies and even an acquisition offer. Do the steps I laid out for you above and you can achieve the same results in less than a year (teaching more of this in my premium letters)
The first step to entering the digital economy is growing your social media following on any platform.
I recommend X or LinkedIn for text-based and Youtube for video-based content.
Regardless of the platform, the name of the game remains the same. Leverage bigger audiences, combine that with great content and you WILL grow on these platforms, especially on X which is my current favourite to use.
I initially started out by leveraging bigger LinkedIn audiences, infamously, one of my earliest newsletters was shared by a Harvard professor which helped me gain my first few hundred subscribers. What often gets left out of that story is that I had messaged almost 20 people at Harvard’s Belfer Centre to ask them what they thought of my upcoming newsletter issue on US-China relations.
The next issue will focus more specifically on how to grow a social media audience but for now here are some pointers
Write posts on people with bigger audiences and hope they share it
Create natural friendships on social media and you’ll inadvertently end up boosting each others accounts with engagement
Pay a small fee to bigger accounts to share your posts (paid but can potentially results in a massive ROI)
For now, enjoy the rest of your week!