What one person can actually build in a year, and what to leave out

In January you wrote the plan. A course in the spring, a membership by summer, coaching alongside it, a community for the members, a couple of webinars to bring people in, a physical thing for Christmas, and a bundle to tie it all together. It is a good plan in the sense that every item on it is a sensible idea. It is also, if you are one person, roughly three years of work compressed into twelve months, and the way you will find out is in September, when you are maintaining six things badly and building nothing.

Building is the cheap part

A course takes six weeks to make and then takes something from you forever. Questions arrive. A module goes out of date. A buyer cannot find the login. None of these is difficult, and all of them are permanent. When people plan a year they count the building weeks and forget entirely about the tail, which is why the plan looks feasible in January and is visibly impossible by August.

The tails are also wildly different in size. A digital download has almost none: it delivers itself instantly to a private order page, and if you improve the file, replacing it updates the version for everyone who already bought. A membership with a feed has an enormous tail, because the feed has to be fed every single week or the thing dies loudly in front of the people paying for it. These two are both "a product" in the plan and they are not remotely the same commitment.

The honestly hard part is that you cannot know a tail's true size until you are six months into it. You can estimate, and the estimate will be low, because the failure mode of every solo plan is assuming that the version of you in November will have more energy than the version writing the plan in January. She will not. She will have less, and she will be maintaining everything you have started between now and then.

The year you planned and the year you can staff

Same ambitions, different arithmetic. The right-hand column is not a smaller business, it is the same business with the maintenance counted.

Choosing your four

Work through this in one sitting. The aim is not to find the four best product types in the abstract, it is to find four that fit together and fit you. The full set is on the features overview if you want to see what each one involves before you choose.

1. 1Start with the free one. A lead magnet at £0 costs almost nothing to maintain and adds every downloader to your customer list. This is your first of four and it should not be controversial.
2. 2Add one thing that delivers itself. A digital download or a small course. This is the engine, because it earns while you sleep and its tail is short.
3. 3Add one thing that involves you directly. Coaching calls or a webinar. It pays better per hour, it teaches you what people are actually confused about, and it caps naturally at the availability you publish.
4. 4Add one binding product. A bundle of what you already have, or a membership if and only if you already publish on a weekly rhythm and would carry on doing so unpaid.
5. 5Now write the maintenance hours per week for each of the four, honestly, and add them up. If the total exceeds a third of your working week, remove one.
6. 6Assign each of the four a launch month, with at least ten weeks between them. Anything you cannot fit does not go on the list for next year, it goes on no list at all until it displaces something.
7. 7Write down the six types you are not doing this year, and next to each one write why. This is the document you will reread in April when a good idea arrives.
8. 8Set a review date at the end of each quarter, where the only question is whether the last thing you launched is still good.

What four looks like across twelve months

A plausible shape. January to March: build and publish the lead magnet, and let it run for a full quarter while you write. April to June: launch the digital product it feeds into, and spend the quarter sending traffic at it rather than building the next thing. July to September: open coaching, capped at four calls a week, using what the first two quarters taught you about where people get stuck. October to December: bundle the download with a recorded workshop, and let the existing catalogue do the Christmas trade.

That is four launches, four maintenance tails, and roughly ten weeks of genuine build time in the whole year, which sounds thin until you notice that the remaining weeks went on selling the things you built, which is the part everybody skips. Nobody can tell you what that year earns; it depends entirely on your audience and your niche. What can be said with more confidence is that a four-type year is one you can still be running in December, and a seven-type year usually is not. For how the types stack into a sequence, ten product types on one ladder lays out the ordering.

The mistake most people make

They add the fifth thing in month seven, when the first four are finally running smoothly. It feels like capacity. It is not capacity, it is the temporary absence of fires, and it is exactly the state in which a well-run four-product business is supposed to sit. The fifth thing consumes the slack, and then a normal bad month arrives, and now everything is slightly late at once. If you genuinely have room in month seven, the higher-value use of it is to make one of the existing four better, raise its price, or send more traffic to it. New product types are the most expensive way to grow and the most satisfying to plan, which is a dangerous combination.

Having ten product types available is a good thing, in the same way that a well-stocked toolbox is a good thing. It does not follow that you should use every tool on the same job. Choose four, write down the six you are not doing, and spend the year that follows selling rather than starting. December will tell you whether it was the right four, and December is the only reviewer worth listening to.