Most of you are treating solopreneurship like a smaller version of entrepreneurship. And it isn’t.
For the past two years, I’ve had a growing sense that something needs to change in the way we teach solopreneurship.
After the wide-spread adoption of the work-from-home culture during the pandemic and the consecutive rise of AI, it feels silly to continue this madness.
The gurus and the algorithm hacking. The hustling. Always doing more, trying more, throwing more on the wall to see what sticks and then exploiting that as much as possible.
It’s time to stop.
If you look closely, everything’s telling us that in the next five years (2026–2031), solopreneurship will transition from a “gig economy sideshow” to the structural backbone of the job market.
And it’s different from both employment and entrepreneurship.
Why this shift matters (especially for experts).
The biggest risk facing skilled professionals today isn’t exploitation.
It’s irrelevance.
Yuval Noah Harari has argued that as AI accelerates, the danger isn’t that humans will be underpaid, it’s that many will no longer be needed. Not unemployed, but unemployable.
Or what he calls “The Useless Class.”
Adam Grant adds an important layer: when high-performing professionals leave traditional employment, they’re rarely chasing more money. They’re chasing control—over their time, output, and where their effort goes.
Put those two together and a pattern emerges.
The solopreneur.
The one who refuses to be a part of the useless class.
The biggest problem with solopreneurship is…
That we don’t know how to do it yet.
(Outside of money-making, platform-hacking, attention-grabbing courses).
We don’t know how to do it in a logical, systematic way.
We don’t have a playbook for solopreneurship, so our brains default to what they know and treat it as small entrepreneurship.
Which becomes problematic because:
You overbuild and overthink (as if you’re managing a 100-people team and answering to investors).
You look at the wrong metrics and panic when early signals are subtle.
You take on commitments that exceed your personal capacity (because you’re used to being part of a team).
You treat exhaustion as a motivation problem instead of a structural one.
You treat marketing as a volume problem. You feel pressure to be “on” everywhere.
Sounds familiar?
Understanding the two foundational ways in which solopreneurship is different from entrepreneurship will save you time, pain and help you transition your expertise to solopreneurship seamlessly.
If you’re considering going paid, here’s what we’ll be talking about in Smarter Solopreneurs in 2026.