One-Person Business Examples That Actually Worked

These aren't hypothetical. Every name on this page is a real person. Every dollar amount is what they actually reported. They all come from the 1,500-person study behind The $100 Startup, which I spent years conducting.

Started from nothing

Not everyone plans to start a business. Some people get pushed into it. A layoff, a dead end, a moment where the old path just stops working. These are people who didn't have a five-year plan. They had a situation.

Naomi Dunford — IttyBiz (~$200K/year)

Naomi was a teenage mother and a high-school dropout. By the time she was pregnant with her second child, she lived in a homeless shelter. Making it out by working odd jobs, she determined to improve her circumstances however she could.

Despite the obvious disadvantages, she had a few things going for her. Her dad had built several businesses from scratch. Her mom was a marketer. Her grandfather was in advertising. Marketing was in Naomi's blood, even if her circumstances didn't look the part.

Without sharing her background with potential customers, Naomi opened a consulting company called IttyBiz. Tagline: "Marketing for businesses without marketing departments." She started with a single service: brainstorming. For $250 an hour, she'd evaluate your marketing ideas and tell you what to do differently. Nothing more, nothing less.

I met her in London and asked for her advice on a situation in my own business. She listened for two minutes, asked a few clarifying questions, and without much of a pause said, "Here's what you should do." I frantically wrote down her list of specific actions. I made at least $15,000 more over the next year because of that conversation.

At the end of her first full year, Naomi published a video explaining she'd earned almost $200,000. This came as a surprise to a lot of people, because she wasn't well-known. She wasn't an internet celebrity with a million followers. In fact, many people who stumbled on her website were immediately turned off by the coarse language and her "call it like I see it" style. Article titles included "What to Do When You're Scared Shitless" and "Moral of the Story: Topless Edition (With Photos)."

But here's the thing she does better than almost anyone I know: she reminds her clients that the goal of business is profit. Not being liked, not having a huge social media presence, not having a beautiful website. Profit. As she puts it:

The CEO doesn't get away with saying, "But look at all these people who like us on Facebook!" Shareholders will not accept that. You are the majority shareholder in your business, and you have to protect your investment.

Nev Lapwood — Snowboard Addiction ($30K → $100K → $300K)

Classic ski bum in Whistler, BC. Nev worked "off and on" in restaurants at night and snowboarded during the day. Life was basic but good, until the limited employment ended when he was laid off.

He started offering snowboard lessons in person, but that had built-in limitations. Lots of competition, few clients, limited season. What if he could teach virtually, to people all over the world?

He created Snowboard Addiction with a couple of close friends. Worldwide series of snowboarding tutorials, available online to anyone with an internet connection. It was an instant hit, drawing customers from twenty countries.

Year one: $30,000 in net income. Since Nev had never been that focused on making money, that was the highest annual income he'd ever had. Year two: he scaled up with affiliates and a broader range of products, hitting just under $100,000. Then he added foreign language translations in nine languages. By year three, the business was on track for $300,000.

Frankly, starting this business after being laid off has been the best decision of my life. The greatest benefit has been the freedom and ability to do what I like. My plan is to travel for six months of every year and run the business for the other six months.

An untrained and accidental entrepreneur, Nev had to learn strategy, accounting, and marketing on the fly. Stickers ordered from China arrived months late in unusable condition. But the numbers kept going up.

Kyle Hepp — worldwide wedding photography ($90K/year)

Originally from Michigan, Kyle relocated to Chile with her husband Seba. She was doing side projects for AOL while looking for a job in sports management. Then Seba's construction company started to go under, and one Friday afternoon his salary was cut 20%. He declined the new contract and was immediately let go.

Two days later, Kyle was out jogging when a pickup truck ran into her at a crowded intersection, sending her flying a hundred feet. Her injuries weren't life-threatening or permanent, but she was badly hurt. After a week in the hospital and several more weeks unable to walk or even type, the AOL gig was gone too.

"Between my husband's layoff and getting run over by the car," Kyle told me with a straight face, "it was kind of a bad weekend."

Since they were both out of work anyway, Kyle and Seba decided to finally take the honeymoon they'd never had. Before flying to Italy, Kyle updated her wedding photography website and announced she was accepting bookings. A request came in right away.

When they returned to Chile, they decided to try photography full-time, "at least until the bookings stopped coming and the money ran out." To their surprise, request after request arrived, and the schedule filled up. Two years later: $90,000 a year, fully booked another year in advance, doing weddings in Argentina, Spain, England, and the United States.

Why do clients fly her from country to country when there's no shortage of local photographers? "They know that the world is a small place," she says, "and they like our work because we build relationships over time."

Franchised themselves

These people didn't invent something new. They took skills they already had and applied them in a different context. The book calls this skill transformation, and it showed up everywhere in the research.

Nathalie Lussier — Raw Foods Witch → tech consulting ($60K+)

Nathalie was an up-and-coming software engineer from Quebec. She'd interned in Silicon Valley and had the chance to take a big job on Wall Street. Her family said it was the job of her dreams. But as she thought more about it, she realized it was the job of someone else's dreams.

Turning down the offer, she returned to Canada. She'd dramatically improved her own health after switching to a raw foods diet — lost more than ten pounds in the first month, suddenly had energy throughout the day. As a natural evangelist (not pushy, just helpful), she started sharing tips with friends.

Being a software engineer and self-described geek, Nathalie programmed a database, set up an app, and built her own website. The first incarnation was Raw Food Switch, which correctly represented the concept but seemed boring. One day she noticed the same URL could be rendered as Raw Foods Witch. She dressed in character with a pointed black hat for photo shoots and rebranded the whole business. Raw Foods Witch grew into a $60,000 business in the first year.

But here's the twist. "From the outside," she told me at a vegetarian restaurant in Toronto, "it looked like all I talked about was raw foods. No one realized I had done all the programming and really enjoyed the intersection of business and technology."

Her raw foods clients started asking for tech help. So she created a second brand for tech consulting under her own name, restructured Raw Foods Witch to run on 80% autopilot, and effectively franchised herself. Same person, two businesses, two audiences.

Brooke Thomas — New Haven Rolfing + Practice Abundance ($70K+)

Brooke founded New Haven Rolfing, a holistic health practice in Connecticut. Her clients are people who want to address chronic pain and mobility problems — nobody comes to see Brooke when they're feeling great. By the time they find her, many have gone through a long list of treatments that haven't helped. Brooke herself became pain-free through Rolfing after living her whole life with problems from a birth injury, twenty-three years of it.

Before Connecticut, she'd run similar businesses in California and New York. Each move taught her something new. After opening in New Haven, she filled her client list within four weeks and recently took on a partner. A single mother with a young child, Brooke works part-time and still earns more than $70,000 a year.

The interesting part is what came next. She noticed that some fellow care providers were more business-savvy than others. Based on her real-world experience running the same business in three cities, she created Practice Abundance — a training program for other wellness providers. As she put it, other resources "assume that everyone wants to get an MBA, when the reality is that most of them just want to run their practice better."

Brooke found a way to serve two groups: her individual clients, and her fellow caregivers who needed non-MBA business advice. Her story is a good example of how a side hustle grows into something bigger.

Erica Cosminsky — transcription service (Murfreesboro, TN)

Erica was an H.R. professional for a pharmacy chain in Tennessee, parent to two-year-old Riley. She worked long hours during the day, trading off childcare with Riley's father. When she was unexpectedly laid off, the shock gradually turned to relief — she'd been thinking about starting a service company but never had the time.

She wanted to run a transcription service for conference calls, interviews, and meetings. Her first idea was to attend live conferences and transcribe in real time. She was good at it, but the work was scarce and interfered with childcare.

So she found a different angle: she added basic formatting and a clean layout to every transcription she delivered. Most competitors refused to do any design whatsoever, making clear that their job was just to transcribe. Many of Erica's clients were small businesses without a graphic designer. The differentiation worked. Within three months, she could no longer keep up.

Instead of hiring employees, she built the team entirely with contractors. From November to May in a recent cycle, she had seventeen transcriptionists serving 180 clients, plus a virtual assistant. In summer, when few businesses need transcription, the team shrank to four. The contractors understood that work was cyclical.

These days Erica manages the business without doing any transcription herself. When Riley contracted a bad flu and Erica spent three weeks as a full-time caregiver, most clients didn't even realize she was gone. The model she'd built just kept running.

The digital nomad

A description of Bernard Vukas's workspace is typical of the roaming entrepreneurs in the study: "I work from anywhere, anytime. Time zone and location are irrelevant. All my property fits in a single backpack, including the laptop." He told me this from a beach in Koh Tao, Thailand, where he was living on an indefinite basis.

Bernard Vukas — spreadsheet developer ($720/day from Thailand)

Bernard is from Croatia. He helps companies that use Microsoft Office applications to process large amounts of data, creating or modifying extensions that make it easier to manage. He started by pricing at a decent wage by Croatian standards, but much lower than what North American companies were used to paying. That worked well for building a client base and reputation.

The best business decision came when he tripled his rates for new clients.

One day, Bernard made $720 on a single project. Reflecting on what that meant, he wrote: "Many people on a minimum salary in Croatia are getting this amount in one month. People who get double that amount are considered well paid. To have it all come in on a single day is unheard of."

Croatia has nice beaches of its own, but Bernard wanted to see more of the world. His business doesn't require him to be anywhere in particular. So he isn't.

What all of them have in common

After interviewing hundreds of these people, I kept coming back to the same pattern. I call it convergence: the overlap between what you care about (or what you're good at) and what other people will actually pay for.

Nathalie Lussier loved raw foods and knew how to code. She combined them into a $60K business, then franchised her tech skills into a second one. Nev Lapwood lived for snowboarding and realized he could teach people worldwide. Naomi Dunford had marketing in her blood and charged $250 an hour to prove it.

Two circles. One overlap. That's the whole model.

Here's what else they shared:

• Low startup costs. Most of these businesses started for almost nothing. A website, maybe a business license. The average across the whole 1,500-person study was $610.60.
• No special credentials. Kyle Hepp was dabbling in photography. Nev Lapwood was a ski bum who worked in restaurants. Erica Cosminsky's edge was adding a clean layout to transcriptions. None of them had a degree in what they ended up doing.
• They started before they felt ready. Kyle updated a website while recovering from being hit by a truck. Nev was a self-described "untrained and accidental entrepreneur." Naomi launched without telling customers about her background.
• They solved a specific problem for a specific group. Brooke Thomas didn't open a generic wellness center. She focused on chronic pain. Erica didn't compete on price with other transcription services. She added design. Bernard didn't offer general IT support. He did spreadsheet extensions for companies processing large data.

That's it. Convergence, low cost, no waiting for permission, and a specific audience. If you want to turn that into a plan you can act on this week, the one-page business plan takes about 15 minutes.

Frequently asked questions

Are these real people or made-up examples?

Every name and dollar amount on this page comes from the 1,500-person study behind The $100 Startup. Real people, real businesses, real income figures they reported directly. Nothing's hypothetical.

Do I need to quit my job to start a one-person business?

Most people in the study didn't. Some kept their day jobs permanently and ran the business on the side. Others waited until the new income clearly exceeded their salary before making the switch. Build first, leap later — or don't leap at all if the side business is already working.

How much money do I need to get started?

The average startup cost across the full study was $610.60. Many started for under $100. Nev Lapwood had nothing. Kyle Hepp updated a website and started taking bookings. Naomi Dunford started with a single consulting service. Money wasn't what held any of them back.

How long before I can earn a living from it?

Depends on the model. Naomi Dunford was earning close to $200,000 within her first full year. Nev Lapwood hit $30,000 in year one, $100,000 in year two, and was on track for $300,000 by year three. Services produce income faster. Digital products take longer to build but scale better once they exist.