A Journey Beyond the 9-to-5 Grind

Check out how to get started with Solopreneurship, in addition to a few tips and tricks that worked for the successful ones.

People opt for solopreneurship to have more control over their lives (34.35%), enjoy greater financial rewards (22.58%), or simply follow their passions (22.01%).

Whatever may be YOUR reason, you can’t deny it’s a journey filled with countless moments of tears and joy. But it’s clearly more than an emotional rollercoaster, as you will be “solo” to face the unpredictable business landscape.

While the exact journey depends on your domain, I have prepared this informational piece to help you with the basics, some important skills, and their pros and cons.

Finally, we will take a look at a few successful solopreneurs. This will give you a clear glimpse into their journey to take pointers for your solo venture.

Let’s begin already.

What is Solopreneurship?

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Except for the beach, the above picture roughly depicts the life of a solopreneur.

According to the textbook definition, a solopreneur is an individual who runs a business with ZERO employees and may engage in the venture either as a side hustle or as the primary source of income.

In other words, solopreneurship is when you engage in planning, executing, marketing, customer support, and other business-related activities all by yourself.

You do all the work and take all the profits (and losses). That simple!

Importance of Solopreneurship

In the US, small businesses constituted 43.5% of the entire GDP. Out of those, a remarkable 81%—25.7 million out of 33.1 million—were solopreneurs.

And that’s just the US, with a rising worldwide solopreneurship trend.

Consequently, besides personal ambitions, solopreneurs make up a significant chunk of the global economy.

Characteristics of a Successful Solopreneur

Being a one-person show, solopreneurship isn’t as easy as it might look from the outside. One needs to be highly dynamic and multi-skilled to pull off a successful solo business venture.

Therefore, it’s critical we know what makes a good solopreneur.

Self Motivation

This is seriously the most vital aspect of this journey, especially at the beginning when profits will be a distant dream. There is no one to work with or anyone to tell you to start every single day, which makes self-motivation a must-have quality in all solopreneurs.

Strong Time Management Skills

For the majority, solopreneurship will be a side hustle at the start. This means it will eat from your personal/family/leisure time.

I was a solopreneur for two years, and time management felt really tough with close to no weekends for months. However, too much work can quickly burn you out, and one must really pay attention to their mental health.

Consequently, finding the right balance and taking some time off is essential.

Adaptability and Flexibility

Conventional businesses have dedicated people looking after marketing, competition, and research. But for solopreneurs, it’s just one person taking care of such aspects and realigning strategies whenever needed.

For that reason, solopreneurs have to wield adaptability and flexibility as their primary weapons.

Passion and Commitment

I have searched multiple times about why small businesses fail since 70% of them don’t last a decade, with 20% shutting shop within a year.

Surprisingly, lack of passion and commitment wasn’t listed as the reason behind premature closure. Instead, most “experts” were talking about the obvious ones, such as going bankrupt, the absence of a clear blueprint, misunderstanding market demand, etc.

I mean, yes, they are the “major” ways to fall. But how someone is supposed to succeed in a solo venture without being super-passionate about it. The competition is always breakneck, the budget mostly tight, and with no one to help them, I would rate commitment as the number one quality no solopreneur can survive without.

Networking

Doing a solo business doesn’t mean a journey without connections. Networking opens solo-doers to new collaborations, opportunities, referrals, investments, mentorship, and more.

Bottom line, solo or not, one can’t afford to avoid connecting to others.

Solopreneur vs. Entrepreneur

While these terms may sound similar, their inherent differences set them apart by a significant margin.

The primary differentiator is the team size which is exactly one in solopreneurship and has no limitations for entrepreneurship. This one factor brings in more dissimilarities, as listed in the following table.

Features	Solopreneur	Entrepreneur
Objectives	Autonomy and freedom	Growth and profits
Human resources	Manage every aspect of their business alone without any employees.	Typically manage a team of employees. Besides, they may have co-founders or business partners.
Financial resource	Mostly self-funded, but external resources can be there.	Can be bootstrapped, but external funding is commonplace.
Delegation	Usually, don’t delegate work. However, they may hire freelancers, but they won’t have anyone on a fixed payroll.	Takes higher risks to achieve bigger gains and aim for future expansion.
Business size	Prefer to keep it small and self-manageable.	Scaling up is the ultimate goal.
Risk Tolerance	Generally takes lower risks, relying on own skillset and expertise.	Takes higher risks to achieve bigger gains and aiming future expansion.
Decision-making	Makes all major decisions themselves. May consult with mentors or friends.	This process normally involves the senior employees and the founder.
Growth Potential	Less, due to limited resources in terms of workforce and funds.	More, owning to team size and big financial buffer.
Lifestyle	Greater flexibility and work-life balance.	Longer hours and more pressure due to managing a team and greater risk exposure.

Being a Solopreneur

Who doesn’t want success? Especially in solopreneurship, one wants to nail it on the very first attempt. Except for negligible cases of sheer luck, this is done with extraordinary planning and superhuman execution.

Let’s make a generalized blueprint for getting started in this eventful business adventure.

Find the Gaps!

You must fall into one of these two conditions to begin successfully.

First, you have got a product offering you’re confident will 100% outshine the current competition. Like, what the iPhone did to its competition.

No! Okay, the other one is where you have done deep-dive market research and found what’s not there–the gaps.

At an early stage, building something stupendously brilliant can be tough, especially when the budget is tight, and expertise is building up. The other option, while not as easy as it sounds, can be more doable for certain market domains. All you have to do is thorough market research.

Evaluate Yourself!

Since we are talking about solopreneurship, the entire responsibility lies on your mighty shoulders. You must be at mid or expert level at everything your business needs at the start and in the near future.

Self-evaluation is the key to ensuring you have the necessary skill set for a fruitful solo business outing.

If you lack anywhere, make sure to upskill at the right time to avoid any possible bottlenecks.

Plan, Plan & Plan!

Well, not indefinitely. But jumping in a river only to say hi to a dangerous reptile 🐊 isn’t exciting at all. Similarly, business planning should be as detailed as possible to avoid unnecessary surprises while you’re already “in the middle.”

You should start with a straightforward strategy outlining your goals, target audience, competition, operating methodology, and, most importantly, financial projections. In addition, keep revisiting the business plan and go back to the basics whenever required.

Test run 🏃

Getting in the field with all guns blazing. Sounds poetic, but real life begs a different and smarter route sometimes.

With a test run, I mean, try solopreneurship as a side hustle before treating it as your primary source of income. This is a safer approach, which allows you to judge the conditions better with negligible chances of possible regret if you dive in full-time upfront.

A successful test run means you’re ready to transition into it completely.

Evolve!

While solopreneurship has tight boundaries about delegating work, you shouldn’t be shy about employing the people you truly need. At least you can bring in freelancers to free yourself of the super obvious things.

This will help you take some time off your routine so you can think about expanding or shaping your personal venture into a better value proposition.

Besides, transitioning into entrepreneurship isn’t bad if growth has become your ultimate objective. However, a few solopreneurs prefer to keep it to themselves, valuing their extra personal time over everything else, and that’s perfectly okay.

Pros and Cons of Solopreneurship

A glass that is half full is also half empty. Over here, every solopreneurship strength is also its weakness.

Check this assessment to see if you’re ready for the other side of solopreneurship as well.

Pros ✅	Cons ❌
Can turn passion into profession.	Not all passions are as profitable as some skills one can use to get high-paying jobs.
Ultimate freedom to steer the business in the direction you consider best.	Isolation and risk of going wrong with minimum guidance or support.
Flexibility in choosing the preferred working style and setting schedules.	Can easily fall prey to over working, leading to burnout.
All profits are yours to take.	Losses can eat up from personal savings and can result in insolvency.
Higher adaptability to adjust as per market conditions because of no administrative back-and-forth.	Absence of anyone else can result in business setbacks in times of personal emergencies, such as illness.
Minimal overhead as there is no one to pay salaries and provide benefits to.	The absence of anyone else can result in business setbacks in times of personal emergencies, such as illness.

If you’re still up for solopreneurship, here are a few domains to look into.

Solopreneurship Ideas and Examples

I’ll highlight several solopreneurship domains and showcase thriving individuals within each.

Specifically, I’ll try to keep this section free of those solopreneur “gurus” who became rich by selling courses to people trying to become rich. Instead, this section will feature individuals selling real products or offering services that “really” fill a market void.

#1. Designing

Designing as a business is an extremely common stream many people opt for. It can be web designing, brochures, photoshop content, and whatnot.

As someone doing it successfully, Brett Williams from Designjoy.co makes $1.3M/year working alone and hiring some freelancers occasionally.

Based out of Arizona (the US), Brett started as a web designer in an unconventional way. You can pay him monthly for unlimited design requests with an average 48-hour delivery promise per request.

Also, one gets unlimited revisions, and Brett guarantees client satisfaction each time.

Interestingly, one can pause the subscription and get back to Designjoy anytime in the future to avoid wasting the remaining quota.

Brett’s expertise is spawned across designing a ton of things, such as websites, mobile apps, icons, logos, infographics, business cards, blog graphics, and more.

Notably, Brett jumped into Designjoy full-time when he was already making about $80k/month as a solo business: something he started in a day with just $29.

#2. E-commerce

E-commerce is one of the best ways to a profitable solopreneurship because of the global online shopping phenomenon, which isn’t going to slow down anytime soon.

It can be challenging in the beginning for the non-tech-savvy because there are a ton of things to manage. You have the web designing, marketing, search engine optimization, inventory management, packing, delivery, returns, refunds, and not to forget–manufacturing or sourcing the products.

However, platforms like WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, etc., make it easy so you can focus on the core business aspect and let them take care of the rest.

Another attractive platform to start selling online is Amazon. They have flexible tiers, including their fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program, where they pick, pack, ship, and process returns, providing the most hands-off experience for the sellers.

But when you grow big, it’s quite common to have a website of your own.

And you know, if this guy (Davie Fogarty)👇 can sell oversized wearable blankets (theOodie) to turn $500 to $500 million in just five years, everything can sell. Hear it from the man himself, the complete story (you can start at 9 minutes for his e-commerce journey, but the entire video is worth every second):

#3. Affiliate Marketing

This form of business is where we promote other businesses via links. Affiliate marketers essentially act as marketers, promoting built-by-others products to their own audience.

Online publications (like us) and influencers are the best examples of affiliate marketers. One can run it as a team or act solo.

While it may sound easy to get an audience and link to your business partners to earn a commission, every step involved is hard work. In addition, many affiliate marketers fall flat after getting early success because they go on a spree of promoting products without having any personal experience or expertise in that specific domain.

This is not to discourage, but to make aware of the strategies which worked in the past but are almost useless in the present situation. Moreover, this is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

If you’re interested, here’s a wholesome guide on how to make money with affiliate marketing.

#4. Consultancy & Coaching

Successful solopreneurs not only bring cash by selling products and services, but their expertise in itself is a valuable asset many seek to benefit from.

For instance, Charmaine Pocek started as a resume writer on Fiverr, a freelance services marketplace. Initially, she would do resume revamps for $5 in 2011.

Slowly, she raised her rates and began to offer additional services like LinkedIn profile overhauls. In her interview with Forbes in 2016, Charmaine revealed that she made $800 per senior-level resume and a total of $320K in 2015 as yearly revenue.

Currently, she is a top-rated Fiverr professional with 4.9 ratings earned from 22.8k reviews. Though she still writes resumes, career coaching is an excellent addition to her services.

#5. Dropshipping

Dropshipping is the “easiest” way of doing eCommerce. The seller, someone with an online presence, takes the order and passes it to the supplier, which ships it directly to the customer.

Consequently, a dropshipper is only responsible for displaying products and attracting customers. Behind the scenes, the actual business, including the storage, packing, delivery, and returns, is run by the other party.

Like other online businesses, dropshipping isn’t a piece of cake either. You need to study your audience, build an attractive online store, find a winning product, and continue the grind, as explained by Andreas Koenig and Alexander Pecka.

Their partnership (duopreneurship, eh?) has endured two dropshipping setbacks before finding success in a pet accessories store.

They credit their thriving venture to the extensive YouTube learning, product testing, strategic advertisement, and their current 70 hours/week schedule. Not to mention, they emphasize building a brand strategy for a loyal audience.

As of January 2019, they were netting around $41,000 per month. Here’s a podcast where they share their dropshipping journey:

#6. Virtual Assistant

Virtual assistants offer to do administrative tasks and support functions for other businesses or individuals while being remotely stationed. The work can be anything, and that’s why one should be careful when choosing clients with straightforward discussions upfront.

With in-demand skills, a decent client acquisition strategy, and strong time management skills, it’s not tough to make a living as a virtual assistant.

As someone who has done it, Kayla Sloan built her virtual assistant business by taking her income from $2k to $10 per month in just 14 months.

She explains it’s up to the person to offer as many services as one is good at. And that there are agencies that can find clients for a commission, or one can also act as an individual to keep all the profit to themselves. Plus, there are freelance marketplaces like Upwork where you can list yourself as a virtual assistant.

It should be clear by now that we have also covered a little bit of freelancing with solopreneurship when both of these are slightly different. In a nutshell, freelancing is about contributing to other businesses on a pay-per-project basis, and solopreneurship is an entirely independent venture.

FAQs

Solopreneurship: The Way Ahead!

Solopreneurship is only going to get big. Undoubtedly, being a successful solopreneur is more complicated than it sounds. However, the satisfaction and financial independence it offers is priceless.

To reiterate, do it on the side to see if it really suits your personality and if the domain is profitable. Once stable, one can move to being a full-time solopreneur without any second thoughts. And if it feels really big by then, hiring employees and transitioning to entrepreneurship is always on the cards.