everyone who doesn't have money says they want a million dollars.
it's the default answer. the round number you pull out of the air because it sounds like "enough." like "made it." like "i don't have to think about this anymore."
so i ran the math. not because i have it figured out — because i wanted to see what the dream looks like as a spreadsheet.
the math
price × volume = revenue.
that's it. that's every business model. here's what a million dollars looks like from both sides.
one-time sales
1 × $1,000,000
10 × $100,000
100 × $10,000
1,000 × $1,000
10,000 × $100
recurring (12 months)
84 × $10,000/mo
834 × $1,000/mo
8,334 × $100/mo
83,334 × $10/mo
833,334 × $1/mo
same number. completely different lives.
selling one thing for a million dollars and selling a million things for a dollar are both "a million dollars." but they require different skills, different systems, different tolerances for pain.
pick a row. that's your business model.
what the rows actually mean
$100,000 × 10 — you need 10 clients who trust you with six figures. that trust takes years to build. you're selling transformation, not deliverables. probably 3-5 years before you can consistently close at this level.
$10,000 × 100 — the sweet spot for serious service businesses. 100 projects at $10K. close 2 a month and that's $240K/year. time to $1M: ~4 years. but 100 projects means 100 relationships, 100 scopes, 100 invoices. the math is simple. the logistics aren't.
$1,000 × 1,000 — digital products, courses, workshops. a thousand sales. at a 2% conversion rate you need 50,000 visitors to see your offer. where do they come from? probably 1-2 years of content before you have the audience to even try.
$100/mo × 834 subscribers — recurring revenue. 834 people paying you monthly. this is the one that compounds — year two, year three, the math builds on itself instead of resetting to zero. but if 5% churn monthly, you lose ~42 people every month just standing still. churn is the tax nobody puts on the vision board.
$10/mo × 83,334 subscribers — volume play. easy yes, massive audience required. you're not building a product at this point. you're building a media company.
every row works on paper. none of them are easy in practice.
what the math doesn't include
the equations are all technically correct. the arithmetic checks out. it always checks out.
but the spreadsheet doesn't have columns for:
- the 6 months where nobody buys anything
- the client who ghosts after the deposit
- the product launch that gets 12 sales instead of 1,200
- the subscription you build for a year that nobody wants
- the burnout that hits in year two when the math hasn't caught up yet
a million dollars is a math problem the same way a marathon is a distance problem. technically yes. but the thing that stops you isn't the distance.
the real question
the number "a million dollars" is so vague it paralyzes you. it floats in aspirational fog where it feels both impossibly far and somehow inevitable — and neither of those are useful.
but when you break it down — 100 projects or 834 subscribers or 10,000 sales — it stops being a dream. it becomes a task list. a long, boring-in-the-middle task list. but a list.
and then the question changes. it's not "how do i make a million dollars." it's "which row do i want to live in."
that's a much better question. because every row is a different life. different work. different problems. different version of you on the other side of it.
i'm still picking mine. but i'd rather be running numbers than daydreaming about one i pulled out of the air.