You don’t need investors, a big team or an ad budget to build a real business. Here’s proof, from a teenager who did it on weekends.
Jason Ruiyi Chin, known online as Easlo, started selling templates for Notion when he was 19. Notion is a popular app people use to organize notes, tasks and projects, and a template is a ready-made setup you copy into your own account. He built the business while serving his required National Service in Singapore. No staff. No ads. Weekends only.
Business Insider reported that he made $239,000 in template sales in 2022, a number it says it checked against his records. That’s about $20,000 a month. Two years later he told the website Indie Hackers he was still averaging around $20,000 a month.
I’m Damon Nelson. I have built marketing software for more than twenty years, and I sell digital products myself. Easlo’s model is one of the cleanest one-person playbooks I’ve seen. Here are the seven rules behind it, in plain English, and how to use each one in your own business.
Rule 1: Build your audience before you sell anything
Most beginners do it backwards. They spend six months building a product in secret, launch it to nobody, and quit.
Easlo started by giving things away. For about two months in the summer of 2021, he offered simple Notion trackers and dashboards for free on Gumroad, a website for selling digital products, with an optional tip. As he told Indie Hackers, he started with free products because nobody knew who he was.
Every free download came with something valuable: the person’s email address. By the fall, some people were sending tips as big as $100. That told him strangers were getting real value from his work.
In November 2021, he started charging for new templates and emailed everyone who had downloaded the free ones. By his own account, his first paid month brought in more than $3,000. He didn’t spend a dollar on ads. He just had a list of people who already trusted him.
How to use it: Make one small free thing that solves a real problem, like a checklist, a calculator or a template. Ask for an email address to get it. Your social media followers belong to the app. Your email list belongs to you.
Rule 2: Sell the finished setup, not the idea
You don’t have to invent a brand-new method to get paid. Plenty of famous methods already exist. Getting Things Done by David Allen is one. Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte is another.
The trouble is what happens after you read the book. You open a new, empty app and stare at a blank screen. Setting it all up yourself could take hours, and most people give up before they finish.
Easlo saw that the money wasn’t in the idea. It was in the setup. He turned the Second Brain method into a ready-made Notion dashboard that buyers could copy into their own account with one click. According to Business Insider, that one product brought in more than $100,000 in sales.
How to use it: Think of a popular method in your field that people love but struggle to put into practice. Build the done-for-you version: the template, checklist, spreadsheet or tool. Name it for the result it gives, and check the original author’s trademark rules before you borrow their method’s name.
Rule 3: Give buyers a next step up
If you only sell one thing, you have nothing to offer a happy customer next. Easlo built a ladder of products, where each step leads naturally to the one above it. Here’s how it looked, using the prices Business Insider listed in 2022:
- Free: simple starter tools, like a basic habit tracker. They make no money, but they bring in email addresses.
- Small, easy buys: single-purpose tools, like a goal tracker, that people grab without much thought.
- Bigger problem solvers: setups for one specific job, like a $20 bullet journal or a $40 finance tracker.
- The main system: his Second Brain, which pulls projects, tasks, notes and money into one place. It was listed at $130.
- Teaching: a playbook on how he built the business, for people who want to do what he did.
Picture a student who downloads the free habit tracker and loves it. Two weeks later they buy the $20 journal. A month later they want everything in one place, so they buy the Second Brain. Each step made the next one an easy yes.
How to use it: Write down your free offer, your main offer, and one thing in between. That’s a ladder. You can add more steps later.
Rule 4: Keep your costs close to zero
In a normal store, selling twice as much means buying twice as much stock and hiring more help. Costs grow right along with sales.
Digital products don’t work that way. A template costs the same to make whether one person buys it or ten thousand do. There’s nothing to ship and nothing to restock. Almost every new sale is profit, which is how one person can earn what a small company does.
How to use it: Favor products you build once and sell many times, like templates, guides, courses and software. Be careful with anything that needs your time for every single sale.
Rule 5: Make your brand simpler, not fancier
Easlo’s templates are known for a plain, minimal look. That’s the idea behind branding by subtraction: you stand out by taking things away, not adding more.
When everything you make looks clean and consistent, people recognize your work at a glance. It also saves you time, because you aren’t reinventing your style for every product.
How to use it: Pick two or three colors, one font and one style, and use them on everything. Every time you’re tempted to add something, ask whether it actually helps the buyer.
Rule 6: Use your limits as an advantage
Easlo only had weekends. That sounds like a handicap, but limits force good choices. When you only have a few hours, you stop doing busywork and only do what moves the business forward.
How to use it: Set a fixed weekly time block for your business, even a small one, and protect it. Then ask one question at the start of every session: what’s the single most useful thing I can finish today?
Rule 7: Don’t depend on one platform
If your whole business sits on one app, one store or one social network, that company controls your future. It can change its rules, raise its fees or shut off your reach overnight.
The safest one-person businesses spread out before they’re forced to. That might mean selling on more than one store, building products for more than one app, or showing up on more than one social site. Above all, it means owning your email list, which ties straight back to Rule 1.
How to use it: List every outside platform your business depends on. For the most important one, write down what you would do if it disappeared tomorrow. Then take one small step toward a backup.
Start with the first rung
Easlo didn’t start with a big plan. He started with one free template and one email list, and he kept climbing.
That’s the real lesson here. You don’t need money, a team or a full week. You need one useful free thing, a way to stay in touch with the people who take it, and the patience to build the next step. Do that, and your business starts working for your life instead of the other way around.
This breakdown is based on Zack Liu’s Solopreneur Lab breakdown of the Easlo blueprint, which goes deeper on each rule. The sales numbers are the ones Business Insider and Indie Hackers reported, not mine.
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