And it’s not because people aren’t ready for them. It’s not because you’re not good enough.

The reason is much simpler.

There are two parts of your solo business:

The core value you offer and marketing.

For solopreneurs, it’s important to stay focused on delivering their core value to the best of their abilities.

That’s what will keep you in business, will get you recommended, will get you great reviews, will help you command higher prices.

To be able to do that though, you need to make marketing easy.

If marketing is hard, you’ll be stuck in that loop and won’t have the energy to deliver quality. Which means that all marketing efforts will lead to clients who leave feeling meh. They won’t come back. They won’t recommend you. They won’t leave reviews or will leave bad ones.

I know everyone is telling you to focus on marketing but Jeez! Don’t!

Only focus on it long enough to make it easy.

A crucial part of making it easy is understanding that…

Attention and value are governed by completely different rules.

Attention is about recognition — the familiar framed slightly differently, the promise of resolution to a problem your audience already feels.

It’s neurology.

Value, on the other hand, is built through depth, nuance, earned trust, and repeated demonstration of expertise. It accumulates slowly.

And it requires the audience to already be present.

Hard to deliver value when there’s no one on the other side.

So how do we get people to pay attention?

Simplify.

This is the lesson, in a word.

Simplify your marketing. Whatever you want to say, say it simpler. Make it shorter. Think upstream.

People took Britain out of the EU by saying “Take back control.” That’s it, that was the official Brexit slogan, and it did most of the heavy lifting.

Did you know that the day after the referendum “What is the EU?” was the second most searched question in the UK?

And you sweat over how to explain your offer?

Now, if you can take this advice and run with it, go! Go simplify. Enough reading.

But here’s what I’ve noticed happens after I give this advice in 1-1 conversations.

People say:

• Yeah but what I do is too complex and oversimplifying it will make me look stupid.

• Yeah but I will sound stupid to the people who really know what it’s all about (including my former boss and colleagues).

• Yeah but HOW? I want examples.

• Yeah but even if I do simplify it, will people get it? Will they buy it?

The answers to these questions below.

Subscribe now

Read more

If you’ve ever wondered why some people have wildly successful solo business without ever posting on social media, this is for you.

If you’re tired from hustling and want to feel more like a craftsman, this is for you.

In the Distinctly Better webinar I talk about:

• How focusing on quality will change your business.

• What is qualit…

Read more

It's another thing entirely to sit inside a dip — revenue falling, pipeline empty, confidence eroding — and trust that something useful is happening.

Feast and famine is one of the most talked-about fears in solopreneurship. The common experience is exhausting: you’re either overwhelmed with work or watching the pipeline dry up, and even the quiet periods offer no real rest because anxiety fills the space that clients left behind.

But looking back at my own business, every significant leap forward came after a deep dip. And I’ve stopped believing that’s a coincidence. It’s a pattern.

Most business consultants treat feast and famine as a problem to be solved: fill the pipeline, stay visible, and ideally engineer yourself permanently into feast mode.

Functionally, the cycle exists because your attention is the single constrained resource — when you’re serving clients, you’re not finding them, and vice versa. So it makes sense to schedule LinkedIn posts.

But optimising that system means staying perpetually busy which leaves no room for the question that actually matters: is this still the right direction?

After burning out on Fiverr and nearly walking away, I restructured the entire offering and came back with dramatically higher prices and better clients. After Fiverr’s algorithm shifted and income collapsed, I rebuilt my sales and delivery process for copywriting from scratch, which opened the door to multiple five-figure deals.

After my Medium readership fell to a tenth of what it had been, I stopped trying to recover what was lost and pitched Business Insider instead. After a $40K writing project ended and left a significant gap, I moved into real estate and made $100K on the first deal.

None of these were obvious next steps. They only became possible because the dip created the space and the pressure to think differently.

But that’s the critical condition: famine only works this way if you know how to read it.

Read more

11 years without a day job. Multiple business models, multiple industries. 5-figure months. Near-zero months. The full spectrum.

I’m in a good place now, but here’s what bothers me: I could’ve gotten here much sooner. The early signals were all there, I just didn’t know what I was looking at.

published my contribution to his “First Digital Dollar” project yesterday — the story of my very first digital dollar, what it was quietly telling me, and why I didn’t listen.

Read it here. Learn from my lag.

You can also join our live talk that starts in about an hour (8am Los Angeles; 11am New York; 4pm London).

To doing it your way,

Maya

Well, why does any business exist sustainably?

Because someone specific wants something specific and believes a specific person or thing can give it to them. That's it. Every dollar ever exchanged happened because of that alignment.

If you don’t tell the market what you are, they’ll assume they already know.

And they’ll assume the most boring version of it.

Position. Then you won’t have to compete on “valuable content.”

The “be specific” advice sucks.

It implies that you’re not specific and it’s difficult to become something you’re not.

But you already are specific.

Every solopreneur already has a specific history, way of thinking, clients who've loved them, problems they solve faster than others.

Positioning isn't manufacturing something new. It's excavation. It's to name what's already different and stop hiding it behind vague language designed to appeal to everyone.

There’s a reason solopreneurs resist this work, and it’s not laziness. Positioning requires a kind of commitment that feels threatening. To say “I serve this person with this problem” is to implicitly say “I do not serve everyone else.”

That triggers scarcity fear — what if the niche is too small? What if I’m wrong about who I’m for? What if I close a door I’ll need later? The vagueness is protective. Keeping the positioning fuzzy feels like keeping options open. It feels safe.

But here’s what’s actually happening psychologically: the solopreneur who stays vague is also protecting themselves from a different vulnerability — the vulnerability of being seen clearly and still not chosen.

If you’re specific and people don’t want you, that’s a more pointed rejection than if you’re generic and people scroll past. Specificity raises the stakes of being ignored. So the resistance to positioning is often, underneath it, a fear of full visibility.

What will help is understanding the process behind positioning.

Because in solopreneurship the product is entangled with the person offering it, positioning seems more personal than it needs to be.

When something feels personal and overwhelming, giving it a structure is genuinely liberating. The process creates distance — not emotional distance from your work, but cognitive distance from the chaos. Instead of sitting with a vague, anxiety-producing question like "who am I even for?", you have a sequence of smaller, answerable questions.

Read more

Is posting content on social media still worth your time as a solopreneur?

Because the decline is stark.

And it’s not just Twitter.

This means people consume content on social media and move on to consuming more content on social media. They rarely click through an external link or accept any invitation for a deeper connection to a brand or a creator.

What does that mean for solopreneurs who use social media as a part of their marketing mix?

Social media was never really "free" distribution. You were paying with time, creative energy, and psychological wear.

Now, you’ll be required to pay even more for less. Reconsider the conditions of that deal an only take it if you genuinely like social media.

Enough with “post 8 times per day” advice. Focus on your offer instead.

A remarkable offer travels. A mediocre one needs a megaphone. Solopreneurs have been trained by the content marketing era to be better megaphone operators. The first principle says: be worth finding instead.

What guarantees invisibility for a solopreneur?

Posting consistently about something undifferentiated, in a voice indistinguishable from a hundred others, on platforms that now actively deprioritize unpaid reach, while hoping volume compensates for lack of distinctiveness.

Success doesn't need more steps. It needs better questions. Subscribe to Smarter Solopreneurs: the solopreneurship newsletter that's built around what to think about so you’re ahead of the curve.

Subscribe now

Social media now prioritises content from friends & acquaintances over anything else.

That’s not a bad thing. You just need something people talk about unprompted.

Paid ads are still an option (perhaps a better one).

But the failure mode of paid ads is buying attention for something not yet worth the attention. Before you go there, clarify your offer. You must be committed to it.

talked about how he used social media advertising to grow his newsletter here.

Solopreneurs often resist paying for ads not just because of budget but because it feels like admitting defeat, like the work wasn't good enough to earn attention.

Instead, allow yourself to reframe it as a mature, intentional distribution decision, which it is.

The real long-term edge is not any particular channel but the capacity to keep evolving your distinctiveness faster than the market commoditizes it.

Commoditization happens fastest to people who are producing content from a fixed worldview. The people who stay distinctive over time are genuinely curious — they're reading outside their field, having conversations that challenge their assumptions, doing things that aren't directly productive. The distinctiveness is a byproduct of a living intellectual life, not something you manufacture for publication.

This is also why follow your passion is underrated advice: genuine interest drives the kind of sustained attention that produces original insight.

As social media expert put it: “The future of marketing belongs to those of us who are boldly, unapologetically ourselves. We should be using smart tools to handle the busywork only so we have time and energy to be creative and innovative in our own specific ways.”

What seems like it’s still working well for driving traffic is the short video format.

But consider this: users trained into short attention spans through short videos aren’t primed to read long-form content. Anything you offer them should be just as short & clear.

I don’t know about you, but this doesn’t really fit what I do.

There are two theories in marketing: the broadcast theory, where success is a function of reach and frequency, and the resonance theory, where success is a function of fit between offer and audience.

The last decade of content marketing was largely broadcast theory dressed up in authenticity language — post more, be consistent, optimize for the algorithm.

What I’m pointing toward is a genuine shift back to resonance theory, where the quality and differentiation of the offer does the distributional work.

This connects to ideas in product strategy (be 10x different, not 10x better), in network theory (ideas spread through strong-tie trust networks more durably than weak-tie broadcast), and in the economics of attention (scarcity changes the value of quality relative to quantity).

There's a cultural fatigue with performed authenticity. Audiences, especially the kind that solopreneurs are trying to reach — educated, discerning, time-poor — have developed very good filters for content that is optimized rather than felt.

The rise of Substack, the loyalty of tight podcast audiences, the surprising staying power of newsletters with strong voices: these are all symptoms of a cultural appetite for things that feel genuinely made by a human with a specific perspective, not produced to a content calendar.

The marketing that works in this moment is the marketing that doesn't feel like marketing.

Consider this a prioritization framework at a moment when you’re overwhelmed by conflicting advice:

1. Make the offer genuinely differentiated

2. Choose distribution channels where you have a natural edge (interest, existing audience or something else)

3. If you want social media scale, use paid

“Be different” is easy to say and hard to do. You can read more about how to do it here.

Substack is uniquely positioned in this situation: it has both monetization and audience growth features.

Based on reports and personal experience, it’s effective for selling not just newsletter subscriptions, but also services and products.

It’s one of the few platforms I recommend you continue to take seriously (or start, if you haven’t).

This is a transition problem.

You built your mental models of marketing during an era when platforms offered social reach to grow their own audiences, and you’re now operating those models in a different economic environment.

The answer is to reduce the cost of distribution by doing less of it more intentionally.

Those who do will have compounding independence: attention you get through genuine relevance is attention that turns into a relationship.

Maya

Subscribe now

First, let’s define what a thinking problem is.

A thinking problem is a problem that can’t be solved with more execution.

You could drive all day in the wrong direction, and driving more won’t take you “there.”

Now let me tell you why I think marketing is a thinking problem.

It’s because I talk to you and keep hearing the same thing: “I’m doing a lot and not getting enough in return.”

You say it in different ways.

• I’m posting daily on Notes but I’m not growing.

• I’m getting readers but not clients / paid subscribers.

• I’m sending cold pitches but get no responses.

• How do I get more clients? I’ve tried everything.

In short, you do a lot of marketing, yet you can’t solve the problem of producing revenue in a sustainable, predictable way.

Speaking of revenue, it doesn’t help that most marketing advice you hear is geared towards building a presence, not a business.

A presence is a public thing that exists on platforms and can be impressive to look at. A business is a system that reliably produces revenue from a group of people who value what you offer. The two can coexist, but the strategic intention behind each is different, and conflating them is the source of most of the pain you’re feeling.

Read more

Subscribe now

If you treat metrics as an identity, every result redefines who you are. A bad week = you're bad. You optimise for the next dopamine hit.

But in the first 3–12 months, your metrics mostly reflect how well you've copied the platform's current grammar — the posting time, the hook format, the topic trend — not whether your actual perspective is connecting with the right people.

And even after that, surface-level self-trust ("I know what I think") is common.

Operational self-trust ("I act on what I think without needing external approval first") is rare.

The diagnostic is not what you believe in principle, it's what you do under pressure.

It’s those rare creators that stand up for something they believe in that we end up looking up to. Here’s what they do (instead of watching the results of every post) & how to become one.

Like many creators, Bo Kevin, a film-maker, reached a point of burnout where his worth was tied to the performance of his last post.

Read more

The solopreneur market is growing fast, which means more competition for the same clients.

In a system where everyone is trying to optimize marketing and content, the highest-leverage intervention is actually the one nobody is working on — the conversation.

When supply of skilled independents increases, differentiation becomes critical, and the sales conversation is one of the last places where a solopreneur can differentiate in a way a portfolio or proposal simply cannot.

Gartner predicts that by 2030, 75% of B2B buyers will prefer sales experiences that prioritize human interaction over AI.

What’s curious is the direction of the trend — after several years of increasing interest in self-serve and AI-driven sales, we're now beginning to see a reversal, with more buyers expressing a desire for authentic human engagement.

I know what you’re tinking.

“How could people possibly want sales calls? Who likes to be sold to?”

But your potential clients aren’t avoiding calls. They’re avoiding a specific type of call they’ve been on before: the 45-minute discovery call that's really a monologue about services they didn't ask about. Or the "free consultation" that turns into a soft close.

They've learned, correctly, that most sales calls extract their time and attention and give back very little.

That’s why my belief is that the sales call as a persuasion event is largely dead for solopreneurs.

Yet, a sales call as a consultation (a real consultation) can be an insanely valuable experience on its own. It can be the best 45 minutes that have happened to your potential clients, even if they don’t buy. In fact, that should be the goal.

Because:

• Even if they don’t buy, they’ll recommend you to someone who will.

• If they do buy, they’ll be willing to pay a premium.

• They’ll be far more invested in your work together.

• They’ll leave great reviews and keep talking about you years later.

I was always better at sales than I was at marketing. I don’t have huge social media followings or fancy portfolios, but I close 80% of the calls I make. And I don’t do calls for less than $2000.

Want to know my secrets?

Most sales call advice you hear is wrong. Let’s start by eradicating ideas that don’t work for solopreneurs.

Read more

But no one tells you there are different types of engagement.

There’s a real difference between subscribers who engage because they love free content versus subscribers who engage because they’re evaluating whether to pay. Even if both groups open every email, the people who convert are thinking differently from the start.

It’s not about optimizing for engagement. It’s about optimizing for the right kind of engagement.

Lenny Rachitsky spent 10 months building his product management newsletter to 10,000 free subscribers with strong engagement. When he launched paid subscriptions in April 2020, something unexpected happened: his free subscriber growth accelerated.

“I found I got a big bump in free subscribers from that same time,” he wrote. “I got a few hundred free subscribers coming in the day I launched paid, and I think it’s because you convey value, and it’s like, ‘this is really good, I guess, if people are paying for it.’”

He converted 486 people to paid in the first six weeks. Within three months, he hit 1,000 paid subscribers. By end of year: 3,000 paid.

If you look at the numbers closely, impressive as they may be, it took him a month and a half to get to 486 paid out of 10K free—and then he more than doubled that in another month in a half without doubling the free subscriber base.

Why? The engagement metrics that looked impressive before he launched paid weren’t what drove conversions. What drove conversions was strategic scarcity—putting 75% of content behind a paywall.

The subscribers who engaged with everything weren’t necessarily the subscribers who converted. The subscribers who converted were the ones who saw the paywall and thought “I need access to all of this.”

The most critical trend for newsletter monetization over the next 1-3 years is the shift from Engagement Optimization to Subscriber Quality Filtering, where creators move from maximizing total engagement to attracting subscribers who actually convert.

To build a newsletter business that generates revenue, you don’t need viral growth. In fact, analysis of 40 million newsletters shows that newsletters optimizing for engagement convert 60% worse than newsletters optimizing for clarity.

So what do you need to convert subscribers? How do you filter for quality and how difficult is it? What’s most important and what’s noise?

Read more

I even stopped selling my Fiverr course last year. It’s not that you can’t do okay there, but I don’t think it’s the best use of your time anymore. And it used to be, trust me — there are many millionaires on Fiverr, probably more than there are on Substack.

But the numbers don’t lie. Fiverr ended 2025 with 3.1 million active buyers, down 13.6% from the year before. The low-cost gig economy — the one built on volume and cheap execution — is being replaced by AI.

And instead of struggling now, when everyone else is complaining their work is down, I’ve already moved on.

Last year, I started a property flipping business. I started it in a moment when the real estate market was calming down, on purpose. As a flipper, you're both a seller and a buyer. In a calm market, you have more time to think about what to buy and at what price. Then what to do with it. It's an excellent opportunity to learn how to build this business before the market goes crazy again. That's when I'll already have a decision framework and will have learned the tricks that will keep me on top of the wave.

I frequently do these weird, counterintuitive things. I have off months and sometimes I get scared I’m wrong. But my yearly income has quadrupled over the past 7 years, and I haven’t had a day job in 12.

So, big picture considered, I must be doing something right.

Today I share my predictions for solopreneurship in the next 10 years. What will change in each type of solo business? What will matter and what won’t? Where to focus to keep succeeding even in turbulent times.

For content creators.

Insane humanity is in style.

Big online writers used to advise new ones to “sound confident.” Say “this is what’s happening” instead of “I think this is what’s happening.”

But you know who else sounds confident? AI.

I tested including my normal human doubts in a few pieces and they all ended up getting paid subscribers. Not saying my doubts were the reason — but they didn’t stand in the way. And I think they might be a reason for people to trust you more going forward. To trust your humanity and your judgment.

Paid newsletter subscriptions grew 138% in 2025 and this confirms the idea that people trust other people more than institutions now. They’re paying for a specific mind, with a specific perspective, on a specific problem. The more human and particular that perspective, the harder it is to replicate.

Read more

All digital courses I have ever bought were based on the idea of doing more. Publishing more online, on more platforms. Sharing more ideas, reading more, collaborating more, offering more.

It’s deeply engraved in us. Doing more. Busyness. Up until a few hundred years ago, working a hundred hours per week was normal. It was survival.

And it’s that same survival mechanism that makes you anxious when you’re not busy.

That’s why the transition from thinking in terms of more to thinking about the system level work will be a difficult one. Some won’t be able to do it at all. I want you to be among the ones who thrive.

Nobody has made this transition more visibly than Michael Simmons. Here’s what he writes in the latest issue of Blockbuster Blueprint:

“In 2016, I wrote a business plan for my company called Seminal. The vision was to break down the article creation process into its primitive components (research, angle development, writing, editing, distribution) and systematize each one so thoroughly that quality would no longer depend on any single person.

For years, I sacrificed thousands of hours I could have spent writing to instead work on the system that produces writing.

(…)

Then came Claude Code and Claude Opus 4.6 this year

Suddenly, the system I’d been building for a decade had the missing pieces.

Over the last few months, I’ve written a weekly 5,000-word article that I’m proud of. As a result, the average engagement of my posts has been steadily increasing. All of these articles were AI-generated using my Blockbuster process.

Not only that, rather than feeling replaced, I felt profoundly empowered. Working at the system level still requires all of my taste, judgment, and intellect, just applied at a fundamentally higher leverage point.

Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, says over 80% of people who make this transition end up loving the new baseline. Daniel Gilbert’s research in Stumbling on Happiness suggests we’re terrible at predicting how we’ll feel about the future, and that the best predictor is looking at people who’ve already crossed the bridge. If that holds, this bodes well for those willing to fully commit to promoting themselves to the systems level.”

Below:

• How to redirect effort in service work so you become irreplaceable (or very, very difficult to replace).

• Content creators need to put more effort in this (now more than ever).

• The future of solopreneur marketing.

Read more

The three-point seatbelt was invented in 1959. By the early 1960s, the data was unambiguous: it saved lives, dramatically, in almost every type of accident. Yet less than 15% of Americans used seatbelts regularly as late as 1983.

Some drivers were so hostile to the idea that they cut the seatbelts out of their vehicles entirely. One reader wrote to the New York Times that mandatory seatbelts violated "the basic rights of individual freedom."

Think about what that means. The technology existed. The data was overwhelming. The law eventually followed. None of it was enough.

Because the problem was cultural. People didn't feel like wearing a seatbelt was something people like them did. It felt uncomfortable, bureaucratic, vaguely insulting.

Today, 91.9% of Americans wear seatbelts in the front seat. Buckling up is what responsible people do. Enough people modeled the behavior and normalized it.

But it took decades.

If you have genuine influence on culture — if you change what feels normal, what feels possible, what feels worth wanting — you are doing something more powerful than most politicians, executives, and even institutions ever manage.

Cultural systems are among the most complex, resistant structures human beings have ever created.

They move slowly. Governments fall faster than cultures change. Technologies diffuse faster than values shift. You can pass a law, build a product, win an election and the underlying culture-led behaviour will outlast all of it.

If you wish you had a smart, capable cofounder to help you figure out what to do next, I had a few breakthrough moments talking to aicofounder.

Not only did it change how I see my business, it documented my processes and created a plan for me. (And it has a generous free plan.)

You don’t want to be the person who takes forever to start putting on a seatbelt. Try aicofounder now.

For most of the 20th century, culture came from institutions. Television, magazines and record labels told you what people like you did, looked like and listened to.

Things are different now.

When Gallup began tracking Americans' trust in news media in the early 1970s, attitudes were overwhelmingly positive. By 2024, only 31% of Americans said they had a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in mass media, while 36% said they had no trust at all — the highest level ever recorded.

So who do people trust now?

Henrik Karlsson lives on a small island off the coast of Sweden with his wife and two daughters. He homeschools his children. He thinks slowly. He writes occasionally about the texture of his life.

He does not post daily. He has no content calendar. He has never, as far as anyone can tell, studied what performs well on any platform.

He has 47,000 subscribers. A significant portion of them pay.

His readers don't just think differently. They start to live differently. They slow down. They reconsider what they're optimizing for. They start to identify with him and to behave like him.

Karlsson isn't teaching anything, exactly. He is simply living, visibly, in a way that is coherent and specific and genuinely his own. And it turns out to be profoundly contagious.

Increasingly, people trust people.

There’s no time like the present to be a content creator. Any type of content creator: a teacher or someone modelling their life for others; a writer or a video maker.

This is your moment to define culture. To be what you want to see more of.

I know AI is trying to hijack content right now, but you must remember that content creation is a business-to-consumer venture. And while companies are fast to adopt anything that boosts productivity and cut costs, consumers (aka humans) will always crave other humans. It’s cultural.

The only question is how do you become the kind of creator who makes culture that magnetises an audience.

And the answer is rather clear, if you really look at the patterns.

Keep reading for the full analysis.

Read more

But the obsolescence timeline matters.

There’s a real difference between skills becoming obsolete in 2 years versus 10 years. Even if everything eventually gets automated, the people who position themselves correctly in the next 3-5 years will have accumulated enough capital, reputation, and client relationships to adapt again. You’re not solving for forever. You’re solving for the next viable chapter.

So what’s the next viable chapter according to the reports of Microsoft, Gartner and McKinsey?

Tim O'Brien spent four years at the University of Virginia learning to write code. His engineering program was rigours but “CS programs across the country treat writing as a soft skill, an elective, something the humanities people worry about. The implicit message is clear: your job is to write code. English is for emails, and emails are overhead.

Nobody made me read literature. Nobody taught me how to build a sustained argument across ten paragraphs. Nobody explained that clarity is a structural achievement that requires crafting a narrative — that it comes from understanding your own thinking well enough to sequence it for someone else.”

Or for AI.

The most critical trend for experts over the next 3-5 years is the transition to Human-AI Agent Teams, where professionals (including solopreneurs) shift from performing tasks to designing and managing AI-driven workflows, as outlined in the Microsoft 2025 Work Trend Index.

This sounds technical but it isn't. To be able to build a highly productive and competitive solo business in 2026 and beyond, you don’t need technical skills. In fact, 70% of the top skills needed in the workforce today are human-centric, not technical.

So what do you need to adapt and thrive? How do you work with AI Agents and how difficult is it? What’s most important and what’s noise?

Read more

I just tried an AI tool for solopreneurs and founders to see if it’s a fit for a sponsorship. Turned out, I’d recommend it even if they weren’t sponsoring my newsletter.

Here’s the message I sent the founder after trying it:

It’s called aicofounder, and it’s the business partner you didn’t know you needed. At least, I didn’t, until I tried it.

You get a generous amount of free credits when you sign up (enough for me to have a massive breakthrough), but I’m planning to upgrade anyway.

You can check it out here.

The acting industry has a perception problem. The movie star — the $30 million per picture, the red carpet, the cultural mythology — is so dominant an image that it distorts the judgment of everyone trying to build a real career in the industry.

The numbers behind the dream are brutal. Only 12% of SAG-AFTRA actors earn more than $1,000 in a year. Around 90% are unemployed at any given moment. The blockbuster career isn’t a long shot — it’s essentially a mirage that a tiny fraction stumble into, usually after years of doing something else entirely.

The something else is where the actual careers are. Broadway performers earn a union minimum of over $120,000 a year for a full run. Soap opera regulars make $3,000 to $5,000 per episode on a stable, consistent schedule. Voice actors average around $100,000 a year doing work most people don’t even think of as acting. The actress who plays Flo in the Progressive commercials reportedly clears over a million dollars a year. These aren’t consolation prizes. They’re careers — built on steady, expert, in-demand work rather than on winning a lottery.

Solopreneurship has exactly the same problem.

Every solopreneur wants to build the thing that makes money while they sleep. The digital product, the paid newsletter, the YouTube channel that compounds while you live your life. And yes, some people get there — just as some theatre actors make it to Hollywood. Hugh Jackman started in musical theatre.

But the State of Solopreneurship 2026 report surveyed 153 solopreneurs — people three or more years into their businesses—and found that 1:1 and done-for-you work was still their highest revenue source. Not as a stepping stone but as the actual business.

The problem isn’t that products don’t work. The problem is that you’ve been conditioned to see service work as something you tolerate until you graduate to something better. So you underprice it, underinvest in it, and treat every client engagement like an unfortunate detour from your real business — when the data is telling you, clearly, that it is your real business.

You just need to make it more efficient and more profitable.

Paid subscribers get the complete system: the delivery leverage point that makes your service measurably better (with 5 real examples), and the sales process that moves clients from $500 quotes to $40,000 contracts without sounding desperate.

Read more

When you give marketing advice, it’s easy for readers to see instant results. And humans live for instant gratification. That’s why we like sex, sugar and makeup. That’s why we live on social media.

You are terrified of being invisible, I get it.

But you know what’s another way of being invisible? Marketing a beige, average, meh offer that you know could be a lot better. You know that you can be a lot better. And then probably you wouldn’t need so many marketing hacks.

I think a lot of you are tired of being ‘hustlers’ and want to be ‘craftsmen’.

But if you put in the effort to make the offer better, will it really make a difference?

The right questions to ask.

Let me repeat that question because many of you have this running in the background.

“If I put in the effort to make the offer better, will it really make a difference?”

Will you really get more attention and close more sales if you’re better and your competitors are louder?

That’s the thing everybody focuses on. What will be the obvious external result of me being a better fill-in-the-blank and when will I see it?

For solopreneurs, that is the wrong question to ask.

Here are the right questions:

• How much longer will I be able to sell an average product? It’s the age of AI. The average is collapsing and quality becomes an urgent survival mechanism.

• When will the burnout of chasing marketing hacks (that are always changing) kill what I’m trying to build? The marketing gurus won’t tell you about Deming’s Pride of Workmanship concept because it doesn’t fit their message. It focuses on removing barriers that deprive people of taking joy and pride in their work, and I’d argue extensive focus on marketing has become such a barrier.

If you ask these questions, it becomes obvious you need to stop everything you’re doing and focus on improving quality.

But what is quality?

The definition of quality.

A lot of serious people have done serious research to define quality—from Aristotle on excellence, to Robert M. Pirsig on the philosophy of Quality, to Joseph M. Juran and W. Edwards Deming on modern quality management.

After 11 years as a solopreneur, I will spare you the academic reading and give you what I find is the most useful concept of quality for solopreneurs.

It’s also the model we will use below to help you massively improve the quality of your offer through business model based analysis that differs based on whether you offer services, products or content.

Taguchi’s definition of quality.

Genichi Taguchi was a world-renowned Japanese engineer and statistician, regarded as the“Father of Quality Engineering”.

He said that quality is the minimum “loss imparted by the product to society from the time the product is shipped”.

Here’s what this means.

Right now, you’re treating quality as a footballer: as long as the ball goes inside the goalposts, you get the point. A goal is a goal.

The problem is that a product that barely passes the mark is usually much worse than one that is perfect for the client’s needs. In fact, the market is flooded with products that barely pass inspection, and the creators of such products are precisely the ones that put a lot of effort into marketing.

Because how else do you get attention for something that barely passes the mark?

Taguchi said quality isn't about just being "in or out." It’s about hitting the absolute center of the bullseye or as close to it as you possibly can. Every millimeter you miss the bullseye by costs someone money, time and/or comfort.

Quality = Smaller Misses

Traditional quality asks, “Is it good enough to sell?” Taguchi asks, “How close did we get to perfect?”

Perfect is what markets itself, or at least requires a lot less marketing. Perfect is what people share and talk about. Perfect is what goes over the chasm that exists between the early adopters and the early majority.

So how can you get closer to perfect in your solo business, based on whether you’re in a service, digital products or content business?

Here are the practical steps.

Read more

I am nervous about saying that but I say it because I’ve lived it.

The truth is, you trying to become the next Dan Koe (±$5 million per year as a solopreneur) is like a startup founder trying to build the next Uber or Airbnb.

Possible but doubtful. And an aspiration that shouldn’t necessarily be achieved for you to be a success & live the life you want.

As a solopreneur, you’ve been handed an entrepreneurship map and told to navigate a completely different territory with it.

Solopreneurship is NOT small entrepreneurship. Solopreneurship is a craft-based model and as a craft-based model, it’s all about what you sell.

And then there’s marketing.

First, what you sell. Then marketing, visibility, tooting your own horn.

The Internet tried to flip that.

Become famous, become viral, then start selling the same shit everybody else does because the “getting viral” part took all your time and you never gave the “what am I selling” question enough thought.

You’re a solopreneur, remember? No need to scale infinitely. No need to get ALL the clients and ALL the readers.

But you do need to do something you fucking believe in. Now more than ever.

(Woof, I’m a bit rough around the edges today. Sorry, just coming down of the emotion of reading another marketing guru.)

If you’re with me so far, let’s talk about what solopreneurship business model is best for the age of advancing AI so you know what to sell and how to sell it.

The 3 business models of solopreneurship.

The business models (or business pathways) in solopreneurship are:

• Service-based solo business

• Product-based solo business (this includes digital & physical products)

• Content-based solo business (not content as a marketing tool but content as the core business function)

You can read more about these business models, their advantages and disadvantages, and which one might be the best fit for you here.

Which business model is most resilient in a world of advanced AI?

Obviously physical products are safe, so I won’t be focusing on these for now. If you’re selling handmade something on Etsy, AI is a tool for you, not a competitor.

But what about the rest?

A few years ago, I started to move away from the services business model which made me a 6-figure solopreneur and towards the content business model (specifically writing) which has always fascinated me.

It is a very slow transition and I’m okay with that. My content business still isn’t my primary source of income, and it’s largely because I choose to build a foundational theory of solopreneurship—a model of work used by millions that differs from traditional entrepreneurship and employment, yet doesn’t have the intellectual structure to support its participants.

This builds slowly. I’m applying for masters in System Dynamics. I’m working o a book. I spend hours researching and talking to Claude about each piece I send you.

But I believe in what I build and if there’s anything you need to cling on for dear life during the AI age, it’s what gives you a sense of deeper meaning.

Yet, I’m worried. AI is smart and it can produce infinitely more content than I ever can.

So do I stand a chance? Or do I need to go back to offering services? Or do I need to start offering digital products?

I figured if I’m wondering, you’re probably wondering, also.

So let’s dive in.

Deep analysis & the answer.

Read more

(Everyone tells you the opposite, right? Let me explain.)

Every economy in history has been organized around human limitations.

Things that were hard, slow, or confusing created opportunities for experts like you to charge for navigating that difficulty.

The more difficult and important the task at hand, the higher the chance you outsource it to an expert.

Every time something is confusing, slow, or requires expertise most people don’t have, an economic layer forms on top of that limitation. That layer extracts value by solving the problem the limitation creates.

But AI is here. And I'm a writer, copywriter, marketer. An expert with a target on my back.

The more I read about AI and use it myself, the more I sense that this time, the monsters under my bed are real.

Charging for expertise is about to collapse.

AI doesn’t have human limitations. It has infinite patience with complexity. It doesn’t have cognitive bandwidth constraints.

So every service whose core value proposition is “I navigate difficulty” is exposed.

This represents most services, products and content solopreneurs offer: from high-level B2B consultants to lifestyle digital creators.

If what you’re selling is the solution to a specific problem, looking for more visibility and pushing your prices down is the wrong mid-term strategy.

So what is?

Change. But change is hard.

Look at this graph showing data centre construction has jumped so much, it’s now on pace to surpass the general office market.

The machines need more space. The question is whether you'll have made yourself irreplaceable by the time they take yours.

Or read this Citrini Research thought experiment on the “2028 Global Intelligence Crisis.” It dives deep into why the entire professional services economy was built on a foundation that's now being pulled out from under it.

Yes, right now, AI is a cool tool to use. Getting cooler and cooler. The AI conversation everyone is having is “how do I use AI better.”

That question is valid, but I don’t think it’s the most important question for solopreneurs. The most important question is what kind of human/solopreneur do you need to become.

Now that’s a big question. Let’s break it down to a few more specific questions:

1. Who have I become through my specific life?

2. What do I believe that my field that my field would push back on?

3. Who specifically needs to encounter the way I see things?

4. What do I need to stop selling?

5. What can I actually sell as a solopreneur in the age of advanced AI?

6. What person do I need to become to deliver this value consistently?

Below, I'll focus on two: what to stop selling, and what to sell instead.

What you need to stop selling.

What would happen to your value proposition if your ideal client suddenly had infinite time, infinite patience with complexity, and access to all the knowledge in your field?

If the honest answer is “it would mostly disappear”, the value was sitting on top of the client’s limitations, not on top of something irreducibly human about what you offer. You were selling solutions to problems, which (as a copywriter) I know everyone’s always told you to sell.

If the answer is “they’d still want me specifically”, then you’re in a different category. You’re selling something that isn’t a solution to friction. You’re selling judgment, relationships, accountability, presence, and a specific way of seeing.

Many solopreneurs are selling a mixture of both solutions and non-solutions. Some of their value is rent on human limitation. Some of it is genuinely irreducible human value. The AI transition is going to separate those two things violently and visibly.

The practical move is to deliberately identify which parts of what you do are limitation-dependent and start migrating away from them now, before the market does it for you under pressure.

The people who do that migration consciously, on their own timeline, are the ones who arrive at the inflection point having already built the other thing. Everyone else discovers the distinction at the worst possible moment.

What’s irreducibly human.

Read more