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From 3,000 Wasted Hours to Success in 7 Days
How I Launched My One Person Business the Right Way (Finally!)
Lennox Saint
March 22, 2024
Prefer to learn by listening? Check out the podcast episode of this Lesson here.
Stop being a perfectionist in your one person business.
You spend months, even years, crafting the perfect product, only to realize... nobody wants it.
This happened to me. I spent over 3,000 hours and $80,000 building a course I thought would change lives. But guess what? It flopped.
There's a better way to launch your one person business.
If you stick around, you’ll be clear on exactly what that is so you can turn your passion into profit FAST.
You don’t need a fancy degree.
But you need to avoid this.
Product Perfection Paralysis
The Business Equation states that a successful business is a balance of a valuable product and the people it serves.
i.e. The Business Equation = product + people
Product Perfection Paralysis (PPP) is when you obsess over perfecting every little detail of your product, and ignore the people.
This is why PPP is fatal:
Encourages self-delusion
Perfectionism is a story you tell yourself to avoid sharing your work.
You’re just self-conscious of what others will think of it, so you create excuses to continue perfecting.
Wastes time and money
When you’re a victim of PPP:
You delay how long it will take to make money (because you haven’t put anything out there).
The longer you delay that, the more time and money you’re wasting.
While you’re building your product in isolation, you’re stuck in your head. It’s very easy to start doubting yourself.
That’s what I did as I spent 3,000+ hours and $80,000 over 18 months building my online course.
There were MANY dark days.
Website crashes, delayed deadlines, disappointments from Fiverr freelancers, assuming the foetal position in the shower — you name it, I felt it.
Ignores early feedback and neglects user needs:
When you’re a victim of PPP, you:
assume users will value all the features you’re obsessing over
never ask for feedback
neglect user needs.
It’s kinda like hosting a party, making ham and pineapple pizzas, and then assuming everyone likes pineapple on pizza.
This is not the way.
Just ask your guests!!!
Product Perfection Paralysis will destroy your one-person business.
This is what will save it.
The Community-Focused Prototype
The Community-Focused Prototype (CFP) approach is where you build a product based on feedback from your audience.
Why CFP is right:
Promotes a positive mental shift
The CFP approach helps you enter the right frame of mind due to its two main elements:
Community-Focused:
A community = your people. They share your interests and represent your future prototype’s target market.
These are the people you want to serve. Not the people you think you should serve.
Trust me, you want to get this right.
An audience = a larger group of people. An audience is a circle. A community is a small circle within it.
Prototype:
Words matter. Notice the difference in the following:
“I’m going to build a product.”
“I’m going to build a prototype.”
“Product” sounds scary. It implies a finished thing that should be perfected.
“Prototype” sounds better.
A prototype is just an initial version of a product.
Everyone knows an initial version isn’t the best version. This puts less pressure on you and tells your community you’re still working out the kinks.
When you blend these concepts of community and prototype, something magical happens.
I realised this when I created a Threads account in July 2023 and started engaging with people online daily.
I was just being myself and — as a result — attracted people like me.
6 months later, I’d built a community of 3,000 thriends (or Threads friends).
For the first time in my life, I saw how powerful the ‘people’ side of The Business Equation is.
Saves time and resources
When you make micro-improvements to the prototype based on feedback, you save LOTS of time and money that would otherwise be wasted on unnecessary perfectionism.
This is what’s discussed in The Lean Startup. It’s essential reading for anyone starting in the online business space.
Here’s my mental model of the entire book:
Your prototype = a piece of chicken thigh (or ficken if you’re into that).
Unnecessary features of a prototype = fat on the chicken thigh
Best features of the prototype = the actual chicken thigh — the protein. This is where the gains are made.
Your goal in building a CFP: trim off all the fat.
If you do this, you have a Lean Prototype your community loves. It has everything they want and nothing they don’t.
I’ve recently felt this.
I ‘launched’ an online community called Saints College following the Community-Focused Prototype approach on 15/03/24.
I spent about 10 hours and $150 over 7 days creating the basics of the community.
Compare that to 3,000 hours and $80,000 over 24 months on the online course I created.
The results?
Saints College has already helped more people than the online course.
Emphasizes community engagement
What is “community engagement”?
Posting on social media
Replying to comments
Hopping on calls
Why is “community engagement” good?
Enhances user commitment and loyalty to the prototype.
If people suggest a feature, they’re likely to use it because of the Consistency Principle — as discussed in Robert Cialdini’s landmark book, Influence.
Provides indirect or direct feedback.
Indirect feedback: your community impliedly tells you to do something.
e.g. You read the following reply to one of your posts on Threads:
“Community’s so much better than being overwhelmed by content.” → focus on creating a community feeling instead of creating shitloads of content.
Direct feedback: your community explicitly tells you to do something.
e.g. I asked my community which title they liked best for this Lesson. Initially, I was going to title the Lesson: The One Person Business Trap: Why You’re Struggling & How To Escape it (Fast!)
The CFP approach makes online business easier than ever.
And if you follow these 3 things, you can launch your one-person business without failing as hard as I did.
The 3 Laws of a One Person Business: How I Launched Mine the Right Way
The 1st Law: Build a community before you build a product
Why?
For every reason we discussed in the previous section.
TL;DR: you build a prototype based on what people actually want rather than what you think they want.
Sidenote: how to build an audience and community is worthy of a whole other Lesson.
The SparkNotes version is this:
Build an audience by posting and replying on Threads or X every day.
Then build a community with a small percentage of that audience on a separate platform.
The 2nd Law: Emulate before you innovate
I.e. do what works before you create what works.
This has 2 sub parts:
Emulate: Immerse yourself in a course or community with people a few steps ahead of you and copy exactly what they’ve done to get there.
This is what I’m doing in Kortex University at the moment. It was co-founded by Dan Koe, Joey Justice and Matthew Ao.
And it lays out exactly what you need to build a lucrative one-person business.
Innovate: Once you’ve developed an understanding of what works, you start innovating by adding a personal touch to your content.
At the start you copy methods to understand principles.
Once you understand principles, you use them to create your own methods.
Why you should emulate before you innovate:
As a one-person business, time is your greatest asset.
You don’t need to spend so much time validating an idea — i.e. innovating — if you simply emulate and do what works.
People have already validated the idea for you.
This means you have more time to focus on pulling the big levers — the small inputs (tasks) that generate the big outputs (money).
The 3rd Law: Become the niche
Target the only niche you can REALLY relate to: you
One of the many things I’ve learned from Dan Koe and Kortex: you are the niche.
Why you should become the niche:
Remove communication barriers
e.g. In my tutoring business, I second-guessed every form of communication I had with 17 year old students and their parents. Whether it was a DM, email, post in a community, a Zoom call, anything.
If that’s the mental resistance I faced with tiny actions, imagine how that resistance translated to big actions.
Now — with Saints College — I share a Daily Learning with my community each day.
This is something I would’ve overthought when I was targeting the wrong niche. But now it’s fun because I’m just talking to people like me.
You understand your niche’s pain points
Pain points = problems.
If you’ve solved a problem for yourself, you can solve a problem for your niche — because you are the niche.
If you solve problems, you add value. If you add value, you have a profitable one person business.
I got this wrong in my tutoring business.
The course was built to help students pass and was entirely self-directed.
But most students who need help passing aren’t motivated enough to self-direct their study.
They need external accountability. But I didn’t understand this pain point of lacking motivation, so I built a course assuming students were self-motivated.
You end up saving a lot of time (your most valuable resource)
More time means more freedom to do whatever the fuck you want during the short period of time you have on this little floating rock in the middle of nowhere.
To me, that’s what it’s all about.
Simple Summary
The Business Equation = A successful business is a balance of a valuable product and the people it serves. i.e. Business = Product + People
Product Perfection Paralysis = The fixation on perfecting a product to the extent that neglect its people.
Community-Focused Prototype = An approach where you build a product based on what its people need.
The 3 Laws of a One Person Business
Build a community before you build a product.
Emulate before you innovate.
Become the niche.
The Lesson
Overcome Product Perfection Paralysis by using the Community-Focused Prototype approach and The 3 Laws of a One Person Business.
Cya
A quote from the man who popularised the one-person business:
Results are determined by behavior change. If your customers don’t use your information to better move within the world, you did not do your job. — Dan Koe, The Art of Focus
Taking action is what really matters.
And that’s what I want to help you do.
So, if you’d like to chat about how you can use The 3 Laws of a One Person Business, join Saints College.
You get free weekly calls and accountability from a bunch of other people starting out.
It’s free forever for the first 100 people; the first 40 spots were taken in the past week.
Get in before the price goes up!
Anyway, that’s it for this lesson.
Keep it simple until the next one.