Building a solopreneur business

The shapes that work:

• Productised services with delivery automated or near-automated.
• Digital products (templates, courses, ebooks) sold via content.
• Micro-SaaS with low support burden.
• Audience businesses (newsletter, podcast, YouTube) monetised via sponsorship or premium content.
• Affiliate / commerce sites with strong SEO.

The shapes that don't:

• Anything where the founder is in every customer conversation.
• Service businesses with custom delivery.
• Anything with significant ongoing customer support.

Solopreneur leverage comes from four places:

1. Automation — every recurring task that takes >2 hours/week deserves a script or tool.
2. AI assistants for first drafts, research, summaries.
3. Asynchronous communication by default — Loom over Zoom, async docs over meetings.
4. Outsourced specific tasks (bookkeeping, video editing, scheduled posts) on a transactional basis — not as hires.

Solopreneur leverage = automation × judgment. Without automation, you cap at your hours. Without judgment, automation amplifies your mistakes.

The default trap: a solo founder gets one big consulting client, drops everything else, and becomes a one-person agency for that client. Six months later when the client churns, the founder has no business.

How to avoid:

• Never let one client exceed 30% of revenue.
• Always be working on the asset, not just the project. The asset = content, software, course, system that produces revenue without you.
• Productise as soon as you can articulate the repeatable 60%.

The shift from "consulting for clients" to "selling a product to a market" is the single biggest leverage step.