Last week, a thread on r/Entrepreneur titled “The Age of the Solopreneur” pulled 60 comments and a 90% upvote rate, which for that community is a strong signal that something hit a nerve. The post linked to a Stripe report showing more than twice as many solopreneurs crossed the $1 million revenue mark in 2025 as in 2023. Not startup founders with venture money. Not agencies with twenty people. One person. A laptop, a few software subscriptions, and the right automation stack.
The thread’s comments split fast. Half the responses were solopreneurs sharing how they were doing it. The other half were small business owners who employ people starting to feel the ground shift underneath them.
If you are in the second group, this is worth your attention.
The Threat Is Not AI. It Is the Overhead Gap.
A fully-equipped solopreneur today runs their entire operation for somewhere between $3,000 and $12,000 a year in tools. You are running yours for significantly more, across payroll, benefits, and the hours you personally spend managing people instead of selling. That gap is what a lean competitor uses to undercut your price, offer faster turnaround, or simply outlast you in a slow quarter.
Solo-founded businesses now make up more than 36% of all new startups, up from under 24% in 2019. That acceleration did not happen because people suddenly wanted to work alone. It happened because the tools to replace what a small team used to do got cheap, fast, and simple enough to use without a technical background.
The solopreneur is not better than you. They just have fewer activities that cost them money.
Replace the Activity, Not the Person
Here is where most business owners get this completely wrong. The point is not to fire your staff and go solo. The point is to look at every activity happening in your business and ask a serious question: does this need a human, or does it just need to get done?
Scheduling. Follow-up emails. Review requests. Job estimates. Invoice reminders. Customer intake forms. These are not jobs. They are tasks that, at some point, became someone’s job because there was no other way to get them done.
There is now another way. And it is inexpensive.
When you automate one of those tasks, you do not eliminate a person. You free up a person for the activity that actually grows your business. That is a meaningful difference, and it is the one most owners miss when they hear “AI automation” and immediately picture layoffs.
Even Plumbers Are Not Exempt
Before you decide this applies to tech companies and digital businesses but not yours, consider what a competing HVAC company looks like when they have automated customer follow-up, instant quote reminders, and a social presence that runs without anyone thinking about it. They are not necessarily doing better HVAC work. They are doing better everything around the HVAC work.
According to Salesforce’s 2025 SMB research, 83% of growing small businesses have adopted AI in some form. Among declining businesses, that number is 55%. The gap between those two groups is not talent, location, or product quality. It is whether the business is using tools to get more leverage out of the same number of hours.
Spoiler: “it doesn’t apply to my kind of business” is the most expensive belief in small business right now.
What to Do With This Starting This Week
You do not need to become a technology expert. You need to have one specific conversation with someone who is. Find someone who will show you what is behind the curtain, because most of what is back there is not as complicated or expensive as you think.
Start with one question: what does someone in your business spend time on that software could handle instead? Not handle better. Just handle. That is your first automation target. Pick something. Test it for sixty days. Measure what it frees up.
Do that twice and you will start to understand what the solopreneurs understand.
The Window Is Shorter Than You Think
The number of solopreneurs crossing $500K and $1 million in revenue has more than doubled in the last two years. The time between “starting a lean, automated business” and “competing directly with you” is getting shorter every year. A competitor who launches today and gets their automation right can be a genuine problem for your business inside of twelve months.
This is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to stop treating automation as something to get to eventually.
Somebody with no office, no payroll, and a $500-a-month tool stack is already looking at your market. They are not waiting for you to get ready.
If you want to know where to start in your specific business, reply and tell me what you do. I will give you three activities worth looking at first.