A serious post to make $1,000,000 in a year.
No clickbaity titles to content, let’s take an actual look. The last post was a parody, let’s look at it seriously this time.
A million Dollars, a million Pounds, a million Yen (that’s only ~$9k btw), it doesn’t matter what denomination it is, your local currency will mean something to you. I’m in the UK so it’s good old Sterling for me.
One Number To Rule Them All
Let’s call it the Bell Number, as I’ve always wanted something named after me.
The Bell Number = 0.031709792
This number represents what you need to make every second to achieve your million. Now there is one parameter to keep in mind, this is working on the theory whatever it is you are offering is available 24/7 for 365 days of the year.
Finding Your Metric
Content Creators
In the land of content creators the metrics change again. Gamers, chatters and ASMR suppliers on Twitch are interested in subscriptions. In the UK they are £4.99 a month. The more subs, the more money. So, 200,401 subscriptions during the course of the year, there’s your million pounds. That might be a healthy 16,700 a month. A loyal audience will gladly pay to see you do what you do best.
Software as a Service
This is one of the reasons I use a baseline of per second billing, with software as a service (SaaS), if you can work out the most granular costs like hosting and all the tooling from cloud providers, then you know what you need to break even.
It might be a per model run if it were a data science service. Time and complexity = revenue.
An API may work on subscription, or per call. API business models are certainly worth investigating as there are numerous approaches. Take a close look at how travel companies operate.
Service Based Companies
If you were to want to only work a five day week, 9am-5pm (seven working hours) and give yourself four weeks off a year then the value will change.
48 weeks x 5 days a week x 7 working hours x 60 seconds = 100,800.
Your goals change immediately, a million is now 9.920634 every working second. Slightly different.
If you are a service business then the billable hours are more important to you than seconds. A daily or weekly divisible works better, so 20,833.33 per week or 2739.73 a day if you only want to work 240/days of the year.
The main thing is to define your core metric of measurement. “I need to make [monetary value] amount per [unit of time]”
It’s Not All Yours
What I’ve spoken about so far is how to make a million of something. Here’s what I’ve not covered but you should really keep in mind.
- Income taxes
- Corporation taxes (if you are a company)
- All your overheads.
- Paying other people you may hire along the way.
A Handy Takeaway Table
$1,000,000 =
$83,33.33 per calendar month or
$19,230.76 per week or
$2,739.72 per day (365 days a year, not a leap year) or
$114.15 per hour or
$1.90 per minute or
$0.0031709792 per second.
