Can your good skills be converted into income? A one-person company roadmap for veteran workers

✍️ This article was originally published in “Vista Newsletter” No.132, originally published in iamvista.substack.com (opens in a new tab). If you like this kind of content, welcome to free subscription to “Vista Newsletter” (opens in a new tab) and receive my observations and methods first-hand every week.

You may have asked yourself this question: I want to do my own thing, but what exactly should I do?

If you are in your twenties now, the answer is to learn a skill. But if you have been in the workplace for fifteen or twenty years, this question will turn into another more torturous version: Can my hard work be replaced with a stable income (opens in a new tab)?

To be honest, I’ve seen too many people get stuck here in the past. I am professional, my eloquence is top-notch, I do beautiful cases, and I have connections in the industry. But when I think of doing it myself, I fall into an endless loop: do I want to do courses or products? Do you want to run self-media first? Do you want to learn short video? Then time flew by, and a year passed in the blink of an eye, and nothing started.

In this issue of the e-newsletter, I want to interrupt this cycle with a Strategy (opens in a new tab). The structure is borrowed from Dan Koe, a representative of one-person companies in the United States, but the content is rewritten for Taiwan in August 2026: our financial flow, platform, and the starting point of our age.

I have to admit first that I am actually the one who paid a lot of tuition fees. After leaving the media circle, I took on cases, taught classes, and did a bunch of things that I thought were smart. At the beginning of this year, I was even able to make a new tool (opens in a new tab) every day because AI made development so easy. I was excited for a while. It wasn’t until I stopped to take stock that I discovered: There are very few people who actually use it and pay for it. The lesson I learned from that inventory is more valuable than any lesson: I don’t lack the ability to execute, what I lack is the ability to judge whether it’s worth doing, and the discipline to make things visible.

Therefore, I dare to say that every judgment in this guide was first obtained with my own money and time. It’s expensive and painful, but not shameful.

A business actually has only two places

Dan Koe (opens in a new tab) In one sentence, the whole thing is explained:

All successful businesses have two things in common, one is where traffic is generated and the other is where money is collected.

That’s it, no third thing. You don’t need to register a company first, you don’t need a beautiful brand identity, and you don’t need to accumulate 10,000 fans first. What you need is: a place to be seen (Threads, e-newsletters, blogs, or your industry network), and a place to collect money (a one-page sales page plus cash flow, or even just a bank transfer plus a labor remuneration slip at the beginning).

Hmm, sounds too simple? Look at the people who run these two parts to the extreme.

Eight cases, three cultural circles, the same skeleton

Looking at Europe and the United States, Dan Koe’s one-man team has achieved annual revenue of more than US$4 million by relying on e-newsletters and courses; Justin Welsh started by relying on LinkedIn and a weekly newspaper after leaving a senior executive. The public cumulative revenue exceeds US$7 million, with a profit margin of 90%. He has a saying worth copying on the table: the system is more reliable than inspiration. Engineer Pieter Levels (opens in a new tab) alone wrote products such as Nomad List, and all revenue dashboards were made public. He made dozens of failed products, and the few that survived supported them all.

In Japan, psychiatrist Shion Kawasawa has written more than 50 books, with global cumulative sales exceeding 2.7 million copies. She updates YouTube every day, demonstrating the safest path for professionals: not losing their profession and translating professional knowledge into popular content. At its peak, Ryohiro Nishino’s online salon had tens of thousands of members, each with a few hundred yen per month, proving that a small annual fee from a group of people who agree with you can help creators live more like individuals than a one-time big case.

As for our Chinese community, “How to Make Money” (opens in a new tab) has more than 80,000 paid members and has ranked first in the power list of Knowledge Planet for many years; Taiwan’s Waji was originally a TSMC engineer, and spent his off-duty time writing reading notes to build a “reading outpost”. He only left his job when the numbers could support it; Raymond Thirty has been operating as a one-man company for six years, polishing a course to the extreme, and offering it several times a year, which is a good business.

Eight cases, three cultural circles, the skeleton is exactly the same: a place to be seen, a place to collect money, plus continuous delivery for many years.

Why now

First, it becomes cheaper to make. In the past, if you wanted to sell a course, you had to first learn how to set up a website and edit videos; now using AI tools, you can create the sales page, registration form, and first draft of the textbook in one afternoon. Let me give you my own data: I launched the new website (opens in a new tab) this month. From buying the domain, writing the copy, creating the discussion board to going online, it only took me one day to collaborate with AI. My friend “Mr. Innovation” Chen Jianming (opens in a new tab), an innovation consultant with 27 years of experience, has never written any procedures. After attending the workshop, he used natural language to talk to AI and made a game app online.

Second, senior people are more popular. When AI turns the output content into something that everyone can master, the market will be flooded with elementary teaching, and what is really scarce is the judgment gained in one or two decades of actual combat. AI cannot give you the intuition to tell where there are problems with the proposal at a glance in the conference room (opens in a new tab).

Third, Taiwan’s traffic dividend is right in front of us. The organic reach of Threads (opens in a new tab) is still in the bonus period: in March this year, I left a long message under a certain YouTuber’s post, which received more than 70,000 views and more than 1,000 likes, without spending a dime. This dividend won’t last forever, but it’s there for now.

Three chairs: three roles that one person has to play at the same time

A person has to support himself professionally and play three roles at the same time: the person who decides what to do, the person who makes the thing, and the person who makes it sellable. Most people are only good at one.

**First chair, pick a topic: Make your first 30,000 yuan. ** Don’t start with online courses. Courses are mature products. The starting point is a micro-solution: small enough to be produced in two weeks, cheap enough that the other party can decide without a meeting, and real enough to solve the pain points that you have seen with your own eyes. Take a piece of paper and answer three questions: Who has asked you about what in the past six months? What’s something you’ve done hundreds of times in your industry that’s so familiar that it’s boring? Can the intersection of the two be packaged into something with clear delivery? Then use a sentence to test: I help so-and-so, use a certain method to solve a certain problem, how much will I charge.

**Second chair, make it: the smallest payable version. ** One sales page, one payment method, and one delivery skeleton, all completed within two weeks. The biggest enemy of this step is “waiting until I’m ready.” My advice is simple: set a delivery date first, and then start working on it.

**The third chair makes it sellable. ** The three actions are in order: make a regular appearance every week (choose a platform and post your true observations at the work site), turn the people you have seen into a list (social reach is rented, the email list is yours), and sell honestly (don’t force orders, don’t count down, and don’t pretend to be scarce). Most people fail by only doing the third step, selling to strangers.

Three pits, almost everyone has fallen through them

Looking over the past few years, almost all the people who got stuck have fallen in these three places.

**The first pitfall: wait until you are ready to start. ** Take another license test, take another class, and revise the presentation again. The truth is that market feedback is the only preparation; anything else is an advanced form of procrastination. None of the dozens of failed products from Pieter Levels were ready to go online.

**The second pitfall: the first product is too big. ** I want to create a complete online class, membership platform, and series of services. You haven’t accumulated the trust that big products require, so you need to exchange trust for small ones first. If Varkey had impulsively resigned and started classes in the first step, you might not know his name today.

**The third pitfall: just make but not sell. ** This is an occupational disease among professionals. We are trained to let our works speak for ourselves. But the reality of a one-person company is: the moment you open your mouth, you start doing business.

A plan that can be completed in seven lines

Who do I help, what do I solve, what do I deliver, how much do I charge, where do I get seen, how do I get paid, first delivery day. If you can’t fill out any row, that’s where the stuck point is. These seven questions are probably more accurate than any diagnosis.

You can do three things today: answer the three questions (fifteen minutes), fill in the fourth line of the seven-line plan, and tell the one-sentence test to a real person.

This is the roadmap I wish someone had given me when I left the organization more than ten years ago. I put the complete guide (including details of eight cases and all links) here: Complete guide to one-person company: Taiwan roadmap to 2026 (opens in a new tab).

Finally, let’s talk about the current situation: The project mentioned in this article is an online salon that I plan to open for professional workers. The advice is only one sentence: a one-person company should not have only one person. It itself is run using the method of this guide. If you are interested, you are welcome to come and have a look and register as a founding member (opens in a new tab). You will be the first to know when it goes on sale.

See you in the next e-newsletter!

Vista