How To Make Your First $1 Online | #05

How To Make Your First $1 Online

No. 05 — read time 7 minutes

Welcome to The Soloist, a weekly newsletter where I share timeless ideas and insights about life, business, and art.

Last Sunday, I launched a micro-SaaS product. It did $11,074.51 so far this first week.

My goal for 2023 is to be self-reliant through a portfolio of one-person businesses and calm niche software products—a Personal Holding Co.

In today’s issue we get into what that means, and why you should think about self-employment in a different way than conventional wisdom.

Why A Calm Company

Calm companies are usually bootstrapped and don't set out to dominate the market. There is no winner-take-all strategy. No grow at all costs.

It's deliberate, intentional, serves a small group of highly passionate users, and doesn't have to be overly complex.

​Tyler Tringas, Founder of Calm Fund, describes calm companies as lean, capital efficient, software companies that maximize optionality for founders.

That’s exactly the type of business I want to add to my portfolio.

I don't care about building a billion dollar company. I want to maximize life, spend time with my daughter, answer to no one, and build and sell interesting things to people, and with people, I like. Permissionless.

Which brings me to the larger point for today's letter.

Self-employment.

I’m a big believer that making your first $1 online changes how you view the world, and employment.

Making money is a skill that can be learned.

But most people never make it to the first step—putting something out into the world.

Some of the obvious villains:

They have too many ideas

They think they need to be technical

They discount the power of service revenue

They’re afraid their boss/company will find out

I know this because I used to think like this.

There is a way to solve all of these issues and it starts with deciding, today, that you are a person of action.

Let’s dive in.

Step 1: Get ideas out of your head and onto paper.

Writing things down helps clear your mind.

It also helps you begin a process of scoring and improves your odds of getting what you want.

Henriette Anne Klauser, author of Write It Down, Make It Happen, agrees. “Once you write down a goal, your brain will be working overtime to see you get it.”

The act of writing stimulates the Retircular Activating System (RAS). RAS filters everything your brain needs to process allowing you to focus on whatever you're doing at the moment. That's how powerful the first step is.

We want action, not thinking about action.

So grab a pen and paper and think of skills you have that you can sell to someone as a service.

Think of problems in your life that you can’t find a solution for.

Think of new solutions brought to the market and what type of second order and third order problems arise from those new solutions.

Ooh, now we're talking.

There’s a million ideas out there and I’m sure you have many you’ve been sitting on. Everybody has that million dollar idea.

Get them down on paper, now.

Here’s a Google Doc to get started.

Don’t overthink this, just start.

Step 2: Pick one and test

99% of people never make it past this step.

They don’t have a way to score ideas and if they do, they never make a decision.

The goal is action.

Here's a scoring sheet to get you started. Don't overthink this.

Since you’re reading this letter to understand how to build income online I assume you’re serious about making your first $1 online. You’ll have to choose.

Still stuck?

Fine, let’s do this.

Choose the one that if you were fired tomorrow or you had to make $1000 in the next two weeks, you could reasonably pull off with all your energy and intensity.

In fight-or-flight situations, our brains switch from slow, deliberate, analytical reasoning to fast, gut-based instinct.

I’m a big fan of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In it, he describes the two parts of the brain that are in constant battle for control of our decisions.

System 1 is our ancestral instinct based part of the brain. You jump out of the way to avoid a car hitting you.

System 2 is conscious and logical. And slower.

System 2 is great for long-term strategy, making big decisions about life, and avoiding cognitive biases that can harm us in the long-term.

But for today, if your goal is action, we want to trigger System 1 deliberately.

Next, for most people, if you’re not technical and don’t want get to get bogged down with no-code tools just yet, then focus on service.

The reasons are not why you think.

Yes, service based revenue is trading time for money.

“But Tom, I don’t want to trade time for money”.

I get it. I do. But let’s face it, if you’re working a 9-5 you’re already trading time for money. Except here you'll get to do it on your terms, and more importantly...

You get to learn.

Learning is the best part of this entire process. Here's why.

People fail to take action on becoming, and staying, self-employed because they secretly fear the thing they need to embrace most—failure.

A bit counterintuitive.

When I say failure, I don’t mean financial ruin. I mean learning that the market does not value what you are offering.

You want to set yourself up to run as many experiments as possible and treat each idea with as little emotion as possible.

Be the Venture Capitalist with many investments, not the VC-backed founder going all-in on one idea.

The other benefit of learning is that over time as you build service revenue, you start to find commonalities in what buyers value.

If you find enough commonalities you have the makings of a product business.

Step 3: Time to test

You’re one step closer to making your first $1 online.

Remember, the moment you do will change your life forever.

Let’s go over what you should have decided at this point.

A) Which idea

B) Service or product

C) Something that can be launched fast

You’ll need to craft an offer, put it up online, and begin making noise.

Here’s a great tutorial on using Carrd (free) to build a landing page in minutes:

Here’s a great explanation of what goes into a landing page (that converts).

Next you’re going to need to collect money.

You can use Gumroad, Stripe, or Square.

Don’t get hung up on this. Just choose one that you can send.

Last, you’ll need to make some noise to drive traffic to your offer.

Your choices are basically:

Do it under your name

Do it under a pseudonym/alias

If you go for it under your name and are still working a 9-5, please be responsible and talk it over with your boss. Let them know you want to moonlight doing some consulting, that it won’t distract from your day-to-day, and that it’s really important for you in order to scratch an itch/keep your skills sharp/etc.

If that's not feasible, do it under an anonymous account.

This will break the mental model for many of you, especially if you’ve only considered working at large companies up until this point.

There are accounts like Cold Email Wizard and The Real Estate God which are completely anonymous and make a killing selling services and digital products.

The first one teaches people how to cold email, that’s it. Not overly complicated but a useful skill the market values.

The second one account uses his/her skills from their job working in Real Estate Private Equity to teach people how to analyze deals.

Both started with a service, found some commonalities, and started productizing.

The thing to keep in mind is that service or product is not binary. It’s a spectrum.

A quick thought exercise—what is a completely pre-recorded course that you sell which also offers some 1:1 coaching directly with you? Is that a service or a product?

Does it matter?

So much of learning to make an income online is unlearning years of what you believed to be true about employment and income.

The quicker you put yourself out there and see if anyone is interested in what you have to offer, the faster you'll learn.

Learn by doing.

Final Note

Lastly, if you are technical or you have resources to help with a technical product, launch the product fast and validate. Forget overly fancy UI and a long list of features. Keep it simple and build just what is needed for it to work and nothing else.

Take these lessons from today and apply it to your product.

While you're building, or even before you build, get feedback fast from potential customers. Schedule 5-10 calls with potential customers. Slide into DMs on LinkedIn, Twitter, or wherever your target market is hanging out.

Speed and action.

The more you realize that in life, and business, randomness plays a huge role in outcomes, the more you’ll learn to detach your emotions from the process of making money and just focus on experimentation.

The more experiments, the higher the chance that one will hit.

And you only need one to convince yourself that you can do this.

Have a great Saturday.

-Tom

P.S. Whenever you're ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1. If you save a lot of bookmarks on Twitter (like me), try dewey. —
   the easiest way to organize Twitter bookmarks (I'm one of the makers).

2. If you're looking for coaching on audience growth book a slot here.

3. I’m putting together a course on how to network online to grow faster. If you’re interested sign up here.

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