Our journey began in 2010, when we, like most, believed that to run a successful startup it required lots of funding and an awesome business idea. Long story short, like 99% of startup founders, two years later, we found ourselves broke and exhausted from having to run the business at the same time juggling with the demands of fundraising.

In 2013, the company restarted with just one person and learning from a company with a product we use till today , we decided to do this without any funding. After much fumbling and working with clients and partners who have helped us along the way, we achieved our million dollar revenues in 2017.

Not every one wants to run a venture-funded startup and aim for a billion dollar revenue, and like us, not everyone wants to manage the pressures of being a CEO of a billion dollar unicorn. However, becoming a million dollar business is well within reach if you are looking to build a business that provides for you financially while allowing you to pursue your purpose and passion in life.

In this article, we'll share a few pointers from our journey that can help you get there.

No surprise. The first step to your million dollar one person business is to identify a business that best suits your experience, skills, and interest, which also solves a pain point for others . Our first learning in 2013 is that in the digital age, having the right tech solutions in place was a pain. Outsourcing companies and agencies were often failing to deliver. Hosting servers going down. Constant updates to open source codes. Most of these were technically complex and the information from different providers were conflicting and confusing.

We found that many were providing technical advisory and selling solutions but no one was providing the non-technical client with answers. As startup owners ourselves, we were good with finding answers. We built a business that provided the right answers to the non-technical guys.

Business model is all math. If you sold a service/product that is low revenue, you would need a large quantity. If you sold one that is high revenue, you would only need a small quantity. For one person businesses, the need for a small quantity is essential. This is because it is unlikely that you will be able to manage the large quantity for quite obvious reasons.

At 8 Connect Consulting, you will not find us doing template cutting and other similar low value component level jobs. There are companies that we relied on to do these parts of the work while we focused on finding the right solutions for our clients. Doing this also allowed us to align our interest with our clients where we were both seeking the most cost efficient method to delivering the end outcome.

Price = [resource taken (cost) + required earnings from you (margins)] . If the resource taken is high and your required earnings is also high, this will result in a high price that you would need to convince your client of.

In our earlier years, even with open source, our costs of delivering good solutions was relatively higher than today. Hence we needed to charge our clients more by convincing them of the quality and reliability of our developers.

As the landscape of the industry and our business evolved, we have come to observe that many businesses had common digital needs. We translated our quality and reliability to ready built solutions that were more robust and contained best practices that businesses could just adopt. By using  and creating ready made solutions that were faster to deploy, reliable and performed better, we were able to get to our million dollar revenues in 2016 by delivering a faster better cheaper solution than traditional IT companies.

If you are unable to reduce cost and need to reduce on price, it would mean that you would eventually be working harder for less.

Leverage. You'll hear this a lot but what does that mean? In short, work with/use others who are are good at what they are doing.

In our experience, while we are good with technology, we are not good with designs, content writing, and other creative work. As a business model, we partnered with creative and digital agencies who used to have to juggle unreliable technology outsourcing providers. As a partner, we did joint pitches and provided the technical edge to their business. They were good with creative and pitches, we were good with technology.

In another instance, our travel partner provided us inventory of airlines and hotels and we provided the right digital platforms and search for this inventory, forming JetnRoom, a meta-search for flights and hotels.

Another partner was an established mortgage agency who provided us knowledge of mortgage rates and application, jointly we developed BestRate.ai, a solution that finds the best approved mortgage rate from across all the major banks and mortgage financiers in Singapore for home owners.

There are many other parts of our business that we leverage on eventhough we have our own infrastructure. For example while we have our own hosting business, we leverage on Amazon Web Services for FirstSite, to ensure even better reliability for our client's websites.

One person business owners will need to rely on others to reduce cost, reduce risk, and most importantly reach more customers.

Besides leveraging the expert abilities of others, automation is a huge time saver and also allows your business to continue operating while you take time off. To operate a 24/7 helpdesk with 15 mins response time on EliteWebAgents, we built an automated ticketing system for our help agents to manage the ticketing 365 days 24/7. If we had to rely on our own response on a chat system, this would have been impossible.

With Award Winning Products FirstSite, FirstCommerce, FirstTouch, we automate things like beating the competitors on SEO, making sure that you are ready to sell Online Offline and on Social Media with one click, and appointment bookings and payments anytime anywhere on any device.

It is quite rhetorical to say that automation will save you time and at the same time creates a better customer experience.

This sounds kind of obvious but many business owners, especially if they are agent representatives of a larger corporation, such as financial advisers, property agents, consultants, lawyers, recruiters rely on tools provided by their principal provider. Not having ownership of your customer's data is not having ownership of your customer. When an insurer decides to stop their agency operations, agents could be left in a difficult predicament. In 2013, HSBC insurance shut down their agency distribution channel, agents found themselves in a tough situation with the new insurer taking over ( news).

Besides efficiencies and contingencies, having your own customer data management platform will allow you full control over your business. If you are unable to move your customers whenever required, you could be missing out on million dollar opportunities.

You don't have to quit your job to start your business. If you are already spending time providing expert opinions about something you feel passionate about, you could start today. Here's how

1. Make a list of things you are passionate about and figure out which ones you can start selling as a service/product
2. Make a website and start selling the product/service
3. Share the website on your social media profile and find friends/relatives who might already be in need of your expertise
4. Find partners who can help you make this a million dollar business

• How to Build a Million-Dollar Company in 1 Year--With No Funding - Inc.com
  
• 5 Steps To Building A Million-Dollar Business With No Employees - Forbes
• The Future of Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: The Lucrative Exit - Forbes