Solo service businesses that stayed a company of one: what they sell and how they price

Five solo service businesses that publish what they sell: a freelance writer in France ($125 blog posts, $400 articles), an SEO trainer with $400/month coaching, a Raleigh interiors photographer who quotes per shoot, a resume writer moving toward ~$1,000 packages, and a South African coach with ICF PCC credentials. Three of the five list no prices at all. Founder-reported revenue — where it exists — is self-reported in Starter Story interviews published between April 2019 and December 2022, so read it as a historical snapshot rather than a current number.

Here is what each one actually sells, what it charges, and what staying small means for each.

Daniel Waldman Writing (writer, based in France)

Daniel Waldman is a former marketing and PR agency owner turned freelance writer living in France. He writes blogs, articles, whitepapers, case studies and video scripts (Daniel Waldman Writing).

Unlike the other businesses here, he publishes a full starting-price list in USD:

Service	Starting price
Blog posts	$125/post
Website copy	$250
Press materials	$250
Video scripts	$125
Ad copy	$125
Articles (interviews & research)	$400

Putting the prices on the page does two things a solo operator needs: it lets weak-fit enquiries filter themselves out, and it puts the first negotiation in writing. The trade-off is that per-post pricing invites line-by-line comparison, so the $400 tier has to be visibly a different product — one that includes interviews and research — rather than "a longer blog post".

In an interview published 10 April 2022, Waldman reported earning about $4,000 a month on average, and said he was not hiring: "Nope, I like working for myself, by myself." That figure is his own, from 2022.

1ON1 SEO Training (Bruce Jones)

1ON1 SEO Training offers personalised weekly SEO classes for small business owners and entrepreneurs, delivered online. Its pricing page lists USD rates:

Weekly customised SEO coaching: $400/month
One-off focused consulting: $150/hour
Google My Business training: $200 for 2 hours
On-page SEO training: $200 for 2 hours
Free 1-hour intro class

That is a deliberate ladder. The free intro class is the entry point, the $150 hour handles people who want a single answer, and the $400 monthly retainer is the recurring core. Teaching rather than doing is what makes this viable for one person: the weekly slot is repeatable, and the client's own site does the work.

Bruce Jones reported in a 30 June 2022 interview that he was making over $10,000 per month and doing all the key work from a home office; Starter Story listed the business as 1 founder and 1 employee. Again, a self-reported 2022 figure.

Catherine Nguyen Photography (Raleigh, United States)

Catherine Nguyen is a Raleigh-based advertising and editorial photographer specialising in residential and commercial interiors and architecture (about page).

She publishes no price list. Her FAQ explains the model instead: there is a creative fee plus a per-image licensing fee, quoted in advance, and "image use" is the largest component of a shoot's price. So two clients shooting the same room on the same day can pay different amounts — the variable is what the images are licensed for, not how long the shoot takes.

The practical consequence: her sales process has to begin with a usage conversation, not a rate card. In a September 2021 interview she said she had grown the freelance photography business to six figures a year; Starter Story listed 1 founder and 1 employee. No further pricing figures were published, and none should be inferred from that headline.

Mike McRitchie / Critical Path Action

Mike McRitchie sells resume writing, LinkedIn profile makeovers and career coaching, plus small business and side-hustle strategy coaching. His services page lists what he offers with no prices attached.

That absence is informative. A resume rewrite is bought once by a person under time pressure, price-sensitive and shopping on turnaround; a career-coaching relationship is bought over weeks. Publishing one number for both tends to undersell the second and over-explain the first, so the price appears only in the conversation.

In an April 2019 interview he reported that the side business did about $30k the previous year with about $15k of expenses, and that he was moving toward job-search packages of around $1,000. Bundling individual documents into a package is how a per-hour solo service becomes a per-outcome one — useful context for anyone deciding what to put on their own services page.

Blue Sky Coaching (Carly Kay, South Africa)

Blue Sky Coaching offers leadership, corporate and Enneagram-based team coaching, starting with a free discovery call (Blue Sky Coaching). Carly Kay lists an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) credential among her qualifications (about page).

Corporate coaching does not lend itself to a public rate card: the buyer is an employer, the scope depends on team size and the length of the engagement, and the credential does part of the qualifying work before the first call. Hence free discovery call, no published prices.

In a December 2022 interview she described leaving the corporate world to start a $40K/year coaching business begun in March 2020; Starter Story listed 1 founder and 0 employees. She also reported the start-up cost of coaching certification as R250,000, which she wrote as about $14,700. Both figures are self-reported, and the R250,000-to-$14,700 conversion is hers, at the rate she used when writing in 2022.

What patterns show up across the five

Only two of the five publish prices. Both sell repeatable, discrete products — a blog post, an SEO class — where the scope is the same for every buyer. The three that don't publish prices all sell something whose scope depends on who is buying: image licensing, a job search, or a corporate coaching engagement.

Their entry points differ accordingly. Free first contact — the intro class at 1ON1, the discovery call at Blue Sky — is how you sell a relationship whose length nobody can quote in advance. A rate card only works when the first engagement is small enough to be self-explanatory.

Staying one person also limits what each can sell upward. A monthly $400 coaching retainer is an hour or two of attention per client; several dozen of those is a full calendar before any delivery work is counted. Licensing fees and packages are responses to that ceiling — ways to earn more from the same hours rather than adding headcount.

Note what none of this supports. Every revenue figure above is self-reported by the founder in a Starter Story interview published between 2019 and 2022, and each may have changed since. Two businesses were listed as 1 founder and 1 employee, one as genuinely solo; none of these numbers is a promise of what you would earn, and every pricing decision here belongs to a specific country's market, tax and invoicing rules.