Entrepreneurship is dead!
Once mainstream media and startup culture started selling the idea we should all become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, entrepreneurship was doomed.
I loved entrepreneurship at the start of my working life, I vowed to work for a few years as an employee to gain knowledge and experience then focus my saving on building a startup that can employ 50+ people. I thought I was next in line. The dangerous ego of entrepreneurship had kicked into my life.
I eventually walked away from it all. And I was left with a dark mental illness that took months to heal from. Deserved.
In life, once an idea dies it’s reborn again in another form
Entrepreneurship has changed. Here’s what has replaced it that is far more reachable to us normies
The exciting secret of Solopreneurship.
Solopreneurship is the new entrepreneurship.
It’s the idea that anyone can be a one-person business if they want. A fancy way of saying “Making money online”.
This new idea grew exponentially with the great dawn of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic when people learned that you can have a job today and tomorrow it’s no more. Maybe it’s not that fancy to be employed.
Solopreneurship is not about quitting your job today for some grandiose fantasy like entrepreneurship is promoted, it’s about careful risk management.
Work on your Soloprenuership idea as an after-hours side hustle. Learn what works and what doesn’t. Build on it slowly.
The transition happens when your solopreneurship career makes you more money than your 9–5 job.
For some this will happen fast, for others it will take time while others might never fully transition. The motto is whatever keeps you happy
The enablers of Solopreneurship.
A one-person business used to be near-impossible until automation and productivity apps went mainstream.
Apps like Zapier, allow you to automate the entire process without much effort and with zero code. Zapier is the digital employee working around the clock for you.
Virtual assistants allow you to employ remote workers to look after time-consuming tasks — emails, customer support, research etc.
Look at virtual assistants from places like UpWork. Many solopreneurs use virtual assistants that live in the same country as them.
Digital operations systems software like Notion remove layers of complexity and humans to juggle tasks
With automation, digital operations, and virtual assistants a solopreneur creates leverage. Same amount of effort and time, but exponential results and growth as years go by. Something you can’t achieve in a regular job.
The Pillars of Soloprenuership
To make solopreneurship work for you, it requires the following
– Build an online skill
– Build distribution through social media content to share your ideas
– Build a product or service around a skill(s)
– Create systems to support what you’ve built
– Automate as much as possible to leverage and gain traction
– Make data-based decisions to iterate your creations
– Become a good storyteller so people will listen to your ideas
– Work on yourself so you can deal with any success that might happen
The sweet feeling of soloprenuership
The challenge with traditional work is you feel like you are building someone’s dream. As you get older, and you realize you are going to die one day, this idea starts to feel ancient
There’s nothing better than building your own thing the way you want and the best part is you keep all the rewards if it works.
If it fails, then you go back to your full-time job as you wait for another idea you are passionate about enough to go again. It remains a blast in the process.
The advent of social media and influencer marketing has also aided the growth of solopreneurship. Many social media influencers earn more than full-time job employees and do all this solo.
Today when you think about Entrepreneurship, think about going at it solo.