The 3-lever framework
Simple model for solo operators
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Most solo businesses have dozens of things they could improve. Better website copy, new lead magnets, a referral programme, a podcast, a rebrand. The list grows faster than you can work through it.
This is the wrong way to think about growth when you’re one person.
A solo business has three main levers. Price, distribution and retention. Every improvement you could make falls into one of these categories, and at any given time, only one of them is the bottleneck. Pull the wrong lever and you waste months. Pull the right one and the business shifts.
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Price
Price is how much each customer is worth to you. This includes your sticker price, but also upsells, payment frequency and whether you charge once or on a recurring basis.
Most solo founders underprice. They set prices based on what feels comfortable rather than what the product is worth to the buyer. A $29 product and a $149 product often require the same marketing effort to sell. The difference in revenue is 5x for the same number of customers.
If you’re getting consistent sales but revenue feels flat, price is your lever. You don’t need more customers. You need each customer to be worth more.
A few ways to pull this lever:
Raise your base price by 20-30% and see if conversion drops. Often it won’t.
Add a premium tier. Some percentage of buyers want the expensive option. Give them one.
Switch from one-time to recurring pricing if your product delivers ongoing value.
One of my products sat at $19 for over a year. I raised it to $49 with no change to the product itself. Sales volume dropped about 10%. Revenue more than doubled. I should have done it six months earlier.
Distribution
Distribution is how many of the right people see your offer. Not traffic in general. The right people, in the right context, with enough information to decide whether to buy.
If you have a good product at a reasonable price and you’re getting almost no sales, distribution is probably the problem. People aren’t saying no. They’re not seeing you at all.
Solo founders tend to spread their distribution efforts across too many channels. A bit of X, some LinkedIn posts, an occasional blog, maybe a newsletter. None of these get enough consistent effort to compound.
Pick one channel. Work it for six months before judging whether it’s effective. For most solo businesses, the best options are:
SEO content that answers questions your customers are typing into Google. This is also feeding into LLMs nowadays
A weekly newsletter in your niche
Direct outreach to potential customers (especially for B2B)
Each of these compounds over time. SEO content written this month brings traffic next year. Newsletter subscribers accumulate. A direct outreach system gets more efficient as you refine your messaging.
The mistake is switching channels every few weeks because results feel slow. Distribution almost always feels slow at the start. That’s normal, and it’s why most people quit before the compounding kicks in.
Retention
Retention is how long customers stay or how often they come back. For subscription businesses, this is churn rate. For product businesses, it’s repeat purchase rate and referrals.
Retention is the lever most solo founders ignore because acquiring new customers feels more productive than keeping existing ones. But the maths is stark. If you lose 10% of subscribers per month, you need to replace 10% of your customer base every month just to stay flat. Growth means replacing that 10% and then adding more on top.
Improving retention by even a small amount changes the economics of everything else. Lower churn means your distribution efforts accumulate rather than refill a leaking bucket.
Ways to improve retention:
Talk to customers who cancelled. Ask why then fix those problems.
Deliver value early. If a customer doesn’t get a win in the first week, they’re likely to leave.
Send a regular email showing what’s new or reminding them what they’re getting.
Diagnosing your bottleneck
At any point, one lever matters more than the other two. A quick way to find it:
Getting traffic but few sales? Price or offer problem. Your distribution is working but the conversion isn’t. Revisit your pricing, your landing page, or the product itself.
Getting sales but revenue is low? Price lever. You’re converting well, so raise the price or add higher-value options.
Low traffic, few eyeballs on the offer? Distribution. The product and price might be fine. Nobody is seeing them.
Customers buying but leaving fast? Retention. Fix the experience before you spend more on acquisition.
Work on one lever at a time. Give it four to six weeks of focused effort. Measure what changes. Then reassess which lever is the new bottleneck.
A solo business doesn’t need a complex growth strategy. It needs the right lever at the right time, and the discipline to leave the other two alone until the first one moves.
Which lever are you struggling with at the moment? Let me know in the comments below.
Until next week
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