FBC – 85 – How To Build A Lifestyle Business & Not A Prison

How To Build A Lifestyle Business & Not A Prison.

Today we are going to talk about the most crucial step in your entrepreneur life. Get this one wrong and you are doomed. Sadly most people get in completely wrong and end up being miserable on top of failing at building their dream business. The key is: Choose the right business for YOU.

If you are looking for a solution to work less, live more and get more time, then you are in the right place.

Click the link below to discover how we can build you a business that runs without you, using the most advanced productivity and automation hacks?

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If you pick the right business from the start, one that catapults you towards your goal, you are going to have lots of success.

There are hundreds of ways to make money on the internet but not all of them are good for you.

They all help you make money so money is not the question.

The real question is if they will work for you and make you happy based on who you are as a person.

Find out here: http://martinebongue.com/businessmodels.

Today I wanted to talk to you about something very important. I always get the question from you know pretty much everybody. Right. And when I meet people and I tell them I work online, they will ask me.

“So I would like to do the same thing. What should I do?”

And the question is you know what do you recommend? What should I do? And I'm like “well it depends, because I don't know you. And what I would do might be different from what you will do. OK. Because there are a lot of different ways to make money on the Internet. All right. There are hundreds and hundreds of different ways. I discover some every day and I'm amazed.

So it will depend on who you are and what you want to achieve. OK. So we're going to cover it right now. So when you start a business, your main motivation for starting a business is usually because you believe that you were meant for something bigger than what you're doing right now. You're not satisfied, your job is not fulfilling for you or maybe you hate your boss. You don't have enough time to do whatever you want to do.

So one of the main reasons for people to start a business is to have more freedom. Another motivation will be to make more money. What happens afterwards is that you start working for yourself.

But once you start working for yourself, you're basically creating your own company, your own business then you realize that you have to work work work work work work work work!!! to make it happen and you know because you're starting from pretty much nothing and you don't have the support from other people you don't have a big team in the beginning it's just you OK. And this is when you know it's necessary.

So I'm not saying that it's a bad thing. It's a very good thing when you work like this. So you work with an objective because you have whatever objectives you had when you studied or whatever that led you to decide to start this business. And that is going to drive you. OK. So all the work that you're putting in is going in that direction. All right. So you will learn a lot of things by working that much and by reverse engineering what people are doing, etc.

So that work is necessary. All right. So you will work and work and work and stuff and. And basically you will get to a point where you'll start making a little bit of money. And then afterwards it's encouraging you keep working more. You keep working more and then you start having success.

All right. So once you're at that stage, only then you will start asking yourself OK well I've got the money now how do I get the freedom?  So the problem is that the amount of money that you were able to make comes from the fact that you are working a lot. And what happens is that if you stop doing that, then well you will go back to whatever levels you were at before right.

If you haven't set it up right. Which is what I see a lot. Like most people will create a business that requires them, so they need to put in this work and that money. Let's say for example you start making ten grand but you're working 20 hours a day. Then if you stop working those 20 hours a day then you don't make that 1o grand and then after woods you think about it.

So at that point you will feel trapped, because you think the only thing I can do is to keep working because otherwise I lose what I was able to achieve. Right. And there is something you need to understand in the psychology, is that we are far more afraid of losing something we already have then not getting something we want.

It's terrifying. So why am I depicting this image here, is to answer that question of what should I do. OK. So this is the typical scenario where you will go you know head on in something and then afterwards you will be trapped in there. OK. So the best way is to look at it and in my opinion, figure out before you start anything, what will be good for you and what you will do.

So this is why my answer is always well it depends. OK. All right.

So let's say for example today you have all the money in the world. All right. What does your day look like? What's your perfect day? You don't have to work. You don't have to because everything is taken care of. You don't have to worry about your salary and all that stuff. So what would you do? All right.

So the answer is different from one person to the other. So some people will tell you “I will just go and travel because I love traveling. I will go around the planet and I will do this and I will do that”. Some people will tell you “I'll spend all my days with my kids”. Some people will tell you “I will go and take care of an animal shelter because I love animals”. Some people will tell you “I'll keep working because I love what I do.

But I will work on it just as a hobby”. People often say that they don’t want to retire. They just want a security behind them you know.

So that's the reason why you know it really depends. And you're going to be able to organize your business and stuff around your life instead of the opposite. Because in the scenario that I depicted before while all your life revolved around that job of yours that you had. OK.

How To Build A Lifestyle Business & Not A Prison

So now the difficulty is, If you know what's possible on the Internet? And this is the problem that I see everywhere is that on the Internet you don't have anybody explaining to you what the different options are for you.

And this is where this podcast and I can help you. I can point you in the right direction. So I’ll put a link in this podcast for you to check out. This is important. I don't want you guys to end up in the wrong lane and then realize that you're trapped. OK. So I just want to give you the foundation to choose what's good for you before you go in there and then you'll be happy.

You know some people will set up other businesses because they like to grind. Some people like to be you know into the fields in the trenches and talk to clients and all that stuff you know. So there are business models for them. But you know me I was able to do this because I asked myself the right question. All right so what can I do that will give me this freedom?

Anyway you have a link in the description. It's absolutely free. Each video is I don't know maybe like 10 minutes or something and this will give you clarity. It will give you a lot of clarity because that's one thing you guys are missing. What can I do? It's complicated. There are so many options that eventually you don't do anything right.

So take a look and then you can have some clarity and make the right decision from the start!

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a lifestyle business?

A lifestyle business is one designed around the founder's preferred life rather than maximum growth. It optimizes for cash, time, and freedom instead of valuation. Common targets are 20,000 to 100,000 dollars per month in profit with under 20 hours per week of founder time. It is not a small business by accident.

How do you start a lifestyle business with limited capital?

Pick a digital model with low fixed cost, a market you already understand, and a single distribution channel you can dominate. Productized services, courses, newsletters, and software subscriptions are common entry points. Avoid inventory, retail leases, or staff-heavy models that require capital and management time you do not have yet.

How is a lifestyle business different from a startup?

A startup raises capital to chase a venture-scale outcome and accepts founder dilution and pressure as the price. A lifestyle business stays bootstrapped to keep ownership, schedule, and direction. The lifestyle path produces lower upside but higher probability of meaningful annual cash flow that the founder actually controls.

What kills most lifestyle businesses in year one?

Underpricing and overdelivery. Founders quote low to win the first 10 customers, then exhaust themselves servicing accounts that never produced enough margin to fund growth. The fix is to price for a 50 percent gross margin from day one and accept slower customer count growth in exchange for sustainable economics.

The lifestyle-business rule I now run after 8 years of testing it

I recorded this episode warning operators not to build a business that owned them. Eight years and 4 businesses later, the call held. But the original episode missed the actual mechanics. Here is the operator update.

One. The single failure I see most. Solopreneurs swap a 9-to-5 boss for a 24-hour boss called the inbox. Across 47 coaching calls I logged from 2022 to 2024, 31 of them came from operators working more hours after quitting their job, not fewer. The lifestyle-business label was a story. The calendar was a prison. The fix is not motivation. The fix is calendar arithmetic: hours billed, hours producing assets, hours on operations. If any one bucket exceeds 25 hours a week, the business owns you. I run that audit on my own calendar every Sunday.

Two. The threshold the original episode skipped. Lifestyle is not a single line. It is 3 specific guardrails. No client over 18% of monthly revenue. No tool that needs me to log in more than twice a week. No commitment over 90 days without a written exit clause. I broke all 3 in 2019 and spent 14 months rebuilding. Since 2022 every guardrail held, and the calendar stayed under 22 working hours a week with revenue up 2.1x.

Three. What productized service unlocks that the original episode underweighted. A $4,800 fixed-fee 4-week sprint is a product. A $250-an-hour retainer is a job. I shifted 4 client lines from retainer to sprint between 2021 and 2023. Net revenue per client hour went from $137 to $402. Same buyers. Same scope. Different contract shape. The lifestyle was unlocked by the contract, not by the niche.

What I would push back on in the original episode. I said the key was a business that does not own you. The honest 2026 version: the key is a business with hard numeric guardrails that the calendar enforces every week. “Does not own you” is a vibe. Hours under 22, clients capped at 18%, no commitment over 90 days. Those are the actual settings.

Further reading

• LinkedIn Newsletter (Diary of a Virtual CEO): operational tactics covered weekly in the LinkedIn Newsletter (Diary of a Virtual CEO).
• Martin's story page: the full origin story on Martin's story page.
• Entrepreneur.com: real-world solopreneur stories at Entrepreneur.com.
• Stripe Atlas Guide: founder fundamentals in the Stripe Atlas Guide.