#016: How to Become a Solopreneur

Creator Economy, Inflation, solopreneurship

A solopreneur is a combination of the words ‘solo’ and ‘entrepreneur’. Popularized by Justin Welsh, the concept is attractive for many reasons: less stress dealing with employees, more autonomy over your work, and the promise of ultimate freedom over one’s time and money.

In other words, a solopreneur is a 1-person business. Before we get into how, let’s talk about why someone might want to become a solopreneur.

Why Become a Solopreneur?

There are a few trends over recent years that has caused solopreneurship to become increasingly popular:

  • The Creator Economy is becoming more and more real. More tools exist today to help individuals grow their personal brand and turn it into a profitable business.
  • Inflation is destroying more and more of our purchasing power. Meanwhile wages struggle to keep up. Achieving financial freedom via a 9-to-5 is becoming increasingly difficult.
  • The risks of raising VC money are becoming more and more apparent. Tech companies are currently in a recession, and reality is setting in.

Do you want to work on what you want, where you want, when you want, and with whoever you want? Do you no longer feel like you can achieve your financial goals through W2 income? Do you want to build a business on your terms, without being beholden to VC investors?

If you answered yes to all of these questions, then solopreneurship might be for you.

Here’s your 5 step guide on how to become a solopreneur:

Step 1: Discover Your Passion

This sounds cliche, but it’s critical to solopreneurship. If you’re going to become a 1-person business, you’re going to spending a lot of your time focused on this one thing. Choosing the wrong things is a recipe for failure. Find what you love and excel at, and focus on that.

Ask yourself: What could I work on for the next 10 years of my life, and not get bored?

Step 2: Nail Your Niche

Focus on a specific, profitable niche. Your passion will give you the longevity to keep pushing, but finding a profitable niche will ensure that your passion becomes a business and not just a hobby. What problems are people willing to pay for solutions toward?

You might be concerned that by niching down, you are limiting your growth by not thinking big enough. While there is truth to this, there is also a huge risk to aim for a giant market too early. Peter Thiel explains well in this lecture he gave at Y Combinator in 2014:

“The business school analysis of Facebook early on, or of PayPal early on, or of eBay early on, is that the markets were perhaps so small as to have almost no value. And they would’ve had little value had they stayed small, but it turned out there were ways to then to grow them concentrically and that’s what made them so valuable.”

– Peter Thiel, “Competition is for Losers” – Y Combinator Lecture 2014

Nail your niche, then expand to larger markets.

Step 3: Build Your Brand

This is where this guide will depart from most guides or business books you’ve read before 2023.

Creating a strong online presence is critical to business success in the modern age. And with the advent of social media, you can now create your brand and attract an audience before you have a product or service.

This is essentially backwards to most business self-help books of the 20th Century. Because in the past, you needed a product or service before you could attract customers. In the modern age, this order of operations has flipped. As Sahil Bloom noted recently after going on a retreat with multi-millionaire founders and entrepreneurs:

“Owned distribution is a cheat code. All of the entrepreneurs realize what a massive business advantage it is to own your distribution via a personal platform and audience. They are building it into the fabric of their businesses. Everyone views it as a cheat code—a way to do business on easy mode.”

– Sahil Bloom, Founder, Creator and Solopreneur, Source Tweet

Find out where your ideal customer spends time online. Go there, and start providing value for free. Write Twitter threads / X posts, share Instagram photos and reels, post YouTube videos and shorts, and so on. Own your distribution channel.

Step 4: Sell a Product or Service

Once you’ve built an audience to a sufficient size, then build and sell a product to them. And now that you have an engaged audience that is interested in your niche, this becomes much easier than starting from ground zero. Market research, product launches, advertising, and prototyping all become a breeze when you have an engaged audience of potential customers.

Step 5: Action Customer Feedback

Once you have a product or service, start listening to your paying customers. Again, this sounds straightforward, but so many businesses fail to do this – either partially or entirely. Your paying customers will literally tell you exactly what they need, where your product and services are missing the mark, and what they would pay for next. This provides an infinite wellspring of inspiration, product ideas, and ways for you to improve your business.

Here’s Steve Jobs answering a savage question from an upset developer at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference, where he shares his perspective on listening to the customer:

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re gonna try to sell it.”

– Steve Jobs, 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference

There are surely more details than what you’ll read in a guide online. But these 5 steps will provide you with the building blocks to go from “interesting idea” to “solopreneur business”.

To your prosperity,
Wealth Potion