The Saturday Solopreneur

What they built

Justin Welsh (@thejustinwelsh) runs a business with one employee: himself. He writes a free weekly newsletter, The Saturday Solopreneur, to over 180,000 readers, and he sells two flagship self-paced courses, one on building an audience on LinkedIn and one on content systems. That is the entire company. No team, no office, no venture funding. The product is digital, so once a course is made it sells again and again at almost no extra cost, which is where the 90% margins come from.

How they did it

Welsh spent years in startup sales leadership, burned out, and rebuilt around a simpler model: publish daily, build an audience, and sell your own knowledge products to that audience. He posted consistently on LinkedIn and later X, packaged what worked into courses, and let the free content feed the paid ones. His advice is deliberately anti-scale. He argues that once you can clear $1M a year solo, the smart move is to hold there for a decade rather than hire and complicate it.

The numbers

• Over $12.5M in cumulative revenue at 90% margins from a solo business over about seven years. source
• States he clears $1M+ in profit per year, which at his margins implies roughly $1.1M in yearly revenue, about $92K a month in recent years. source
• Two courses plus a free newsletter to 180,000+ subscribers, run with no employees.

Welsh's model is the cleanest version of the creator business: build an audience with free writing, sell your own high-margin products to it, and refuse to scale past what one person can run.