Solopreneurship is the future of work. This is the thesis I will explore and defend in this article.
In part one, I will define solopreneurship as a kind of entrepreneurship, asserting that freelancers and consultants cannot be considered solopreneurs. In part two, I will survey the brief history of work, showing the forces that make a compelling case for solopreneurship as the future of work. In parts three to five, I will invite the reader to indulge me as I share my solopreneurship journey and the emerging philosophy, tools, and guiding principles. Finally, I will close with a summary and recommended next steps for anyone who wants to be a solopreneur.
In blogging terms, this article is the length of three or four blog posts — about 20 minutes read. Therefore, do not feel compelled to read everything in one sitting. As always, I look forward to having vibrant discussions by phone, online, offline or by email.
Freelancers are not solopreneurs. Consultants are not solopreneurs. Solopreneurs are entrepreneurs building alone.
There are many definitions of entrepreneurship, ranging from what they do, how they do it, and the attitudes they embody. I will ignore all these definitions and focus on the financial aims of entrepreneurship — the telos. Entrepreneurs build assets that yield an extraordinary return. Indeed, this involves risk-taking, tenacity, strategy, leadership, and so on. However, it all comes down to creating wealth. Good entrepreneurs create wealth. Bad entrepreneurs destroy wealth.
It is worth exploring, briefly, what I mean by wealth. A philosopher might argue that true wealth consists of intrinsically valuable things like health, happiness, relationships, or the cultivation of good character. I agree with these definitions of “true” wealth. However, I will set them aside for this article and focus on the financial definition of wealth.
We live in a monetary system that evolved over centuries and compels us to use money to buy goods. Some of these goods, like education, property, healthcare, travel, and experiences, have a big impact on the quality of life. To be wealthy is to be able to acquire these goods at will, in quantity and quality to a satisfying degree. To be poor is to be unable to do so. In this regard, wealth is the means to acquire valuable goods.
The means to acquire valuable goods comes from productive assets. First, I will explore what I mean by asset, then, in the next paragraph, I will deal with productivity. An asset, in this sense, is a good that produces other goods. For instance, a juicing machine converts fruits (a good) into fruit juice (another good). For people who value juice more than the fruit, a juicer is an asset. An entrepreneur is typically a person who makes or finds a way of making assets for the people who value them. This disqualifies freelancers and consultants from my definition of entrepreneurship because they do not make assets, they make goods — they themselves are the asset. An entrepreneur in the freelancing or consulting space would be the one who assembles them and puts them to work to produce another good.
This leads us to the topic of productivity. To be productive is to actively produce a good. Some assets are not productive. For example, empty land may be an asset insofar as it has the potential to produce a good, but it is unproductive insofar as it does not produce a good. An entrepreneur would typically use the land as part of the process of creating another good, i.e. use it as an asset or an input for a larger asset. This ties back to my definition of entrepreneurship as the creation of assets for extraordinary returns.
The second part of the definition, i.e. yielding an extraordinary return, refers to taking extraordinary levels of risk for an extraordinary return compared to, say, remaining in employment. I cannot say that risk is by itself a sufficient qualifier. However, I aim only to indicate that its careful consideration is a precursor to extraordinary returns. Indeed, entrepreneurs pay attention to reducing risk. In fact, one of the halmarks of excellent entrepreneurs is their ability to create and exploit asymmetrical risk-and-return situations, where returns outweigh risk. What matters in terms of my definition is that entrepreneurs care about extraordinary returns — often, far greater than other income-generating vehicles like equities, bonds or employment.
To summarise, an entrepreneur builds assets for an extraordinary return. A solopreneur is an entrepreneur who does this alone, typically without employees, cofounders, or investors. In the next section, I will unpack the benefits and advantages of solopreneurship, beginning with a brief history.
About two hundred and fifty years ago, people made a living by subsisting on their land, trading as merchants, or by making things as artisans. Smallholding farmers produced goods and sold them at the market. Merchants travelled hundreds of kilometres, buying and selling goods between distant towns. Artisans spent years mastering a craft, often passed from parent to child, and making things for fellow townsmen or merchants. Then the industrial revolution came.
The introduction of machines, like steam engines, meant that for the first time goods could be mass-produced and distributed over vast territories by ship or rail. Slowly, people migrated from their smallholding farms and left their crafts for the cities, where they worked in factories for better income and living standards. Merchants, by and large, became industrialists and colonial masters, building large companies and amassing serious wealth. In this arrangement, bigger was always considered better. However, things began to change in the late 20th Century — about 30 years ago.
If you were born in the 60s, your outlook on life was to get a good education and build a career, often remaining at one large company until retirement. Indeed, there were small businesses, smallholding farmers and artisans, akin to the good old days, but the big cheese worked in large companies. If you were born in the 80s, like me, you are caught in a tension between job security and the increasing rate of change that undermines this sense of security. If you were born in the 2000s, serving 30 or 40 years is likely absurd.
In the same way that steam technology changed the 1800s, the internet has profoundly changed the past thirty years. Whereas the industrial revolution encouraged the concentration of production, hence people left the countryside for opportunities in the city, the internet did (and is doing) the opposite. With the internet, we no longer get our news from national broadcasters; we get them from the internet where everyone is potentially a journalist. Central bankers are scratching their heads as blockchain and cryptocurrencies, which are part of a decentralised monetary system, challenge their dominance.
Moreover, recent technologies like 3D printing, AI, and SaaS platforms have been pushing the decentralisation agenda even further, creating serious cost advantages for companies and individuals. For example, among the reasons we have Starlink (internet everywhere) is that SpaceX was able to reduce the cost of rocketry by up to 70% (Nasa,2020). In addition, the International Working Group (IWG, 2023) reported that as many as 59% of city dwellers migrated back to the countryside to enjoy clean air and healthier lifestyles, living off the ground, while remaining productive and connected on the internet. This is only possible because of modern technology and its contribution to cost-efficiency.
This cost efficiency, however, also translates to mass layoffs and intense competition to retain jobs. In the technology sector alone, about 150,000 jobs were cut across 549 U.S. firms in 2024 (Forbes, 2025). Where there have not been layoffs, employees are fighting tooth and nail to keep their jobs amidst rising inflation, resulting in fierce competition and what is now “the toxic workplace” phenomenon. Employees are in a pressure cooker with no guarantee that working harder will retain their jobs.
The rise of technology has also disrupted many companies. An article by The Economist (2020) shows that 80% of companies that were listed in the 70s no longer exist. Moreover, a company in the 70s had a 92% chance of surviving the next five years. The survival rate for listed companies is down to 63%. The geopolitical environment is also in turmoil, with wars erupting and disrupting the global economic order.
With all this considered: (i) hyperproductivity tools now in people’s hands, (ii) a volatile trading environment, and (iii) an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment, many people are looking for alternative ways of creating and retaining wealth. They are using technology, including Software as a Service (SaaS) products, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other tools to become hyperproductive and, in some cases, compete with large companies while remaining nimble and offering superior customer support.
More and more people are becoming the artisans of old, building products for a small circle of people they care about. Unlike the old artisans, however, their circle of influence grows by word of mouth through the internet, which creates tremendous demand. This is where freelancers and consultants get stuck. For them, this would imply working harder because they are the assets. Solopreneurs, however, rise above this growth problem by creating new assets (systems or tools) to respond to the demands.
Solopreneurs are rising because of growing decentralising trends, due to increasing global economic volatility and emerging technology like robotics, AI, blockchain and SaaS products. They adopt these tools to realise one-person businesses at scale — serving thousands of customers autonomously.
I was a corporate executive from 2017 to 2022, leading an investment group of R150 million as an executive assistant in the chairman’s office and later as the group’s chief operations officer. However, the corporate world became untenable for me. I left in 2022 and took a sabbatical. In April 2023, I pursued a dream of cycling from Musina to Cape Town, solo. I coupled that dream with the goal of raising money for 10,000 school shoes. I raised funds for ±1,100 pairs by the time I reached Cape Town, which has continued to approximately 3,500 pairs today.
Looking back, that solo journey planted the seed of working alone. In corporate, everything was about the team and about strategy. However, my cycling journey was quite the opposite; it was about showing up and allowing the grace and humanity of strangers to carry me to the next stage. I will talk more about how this applies to the solopreneur later.
When I finished cycling, I had to figure out what to do next. I settled on a seven-year plan: (a) complete a PhD in philosophy, and (b) build a generational business. However, I had a looming financial problem as well. I had run out of savings and had a family to feed.
I was lucky to get consulting jobs, but they were barely enough, which forced us to downsize. Nevertheless, I continued with my master’s in Applied Ethics at Wits and achieved an 86% average in the first semester and 80% in the second. I also built skybookings.com, which has now been live for a year and has grossed over R500k in revenue with no employees or investors. I took a year off from my studies to address personal challenges and focus on skybookings. I will complete my master’s and pursue a PhD in philosophy from next year (2026).
Initially, skybookings was meant to be a traditional SaaS company with a large, vibrant team. However, circumstances proved otherwise. Since I had no money to hire people, I did everything I could to cut costs and keep going. In the madness of building, surviving, and studying, I discovered solopreneurship.
Initially, I thought solopreneurship was another internet fad. However, I kept seeing it over and over again. I started following a few notable figures like Justin Welsh, whose journey was similar to mine, i.e. left corporate to build alone. A lot of what he said made sense, and over time, I warmed up to solopreneurship as a viable philosophy.
Today, I am a proud solopreneur. I was ashamed of saying I work alone and telling people that my business does not have employees. In the traditional business world, working alone means you are an upstart, wet behind the ears, and still smelling of milk. However, this is now a badge of honour and a testament to ingenuity in a fast-changing world, as I look forward to reaching R1 million in revenue with no employees.
To an onlooker, solopreneurship is doing everything by yourself, or a recipe for burnout. However, here’s the insider’s look — I will address strategy, marketing, and management tools, drawing from my experience.
There are many parallels between my cycling journey and skybookings. For instance, a few days before leaving home, I called a few friends to tell them about the journey. Some of them called their friends and arranged accommodation for me throughout Limpopo. When I reached Mpumalanga, more people got involved, and I eventually arrived in Cape Town by hopping from one town to the next, following a social network of friends, cousins, and friends of friends.
My journey with skybookings was similar. I started the business in 2016 as an RSVP management platform, built the traditional way: with employees, investors and partners. (I should mention that I am a software engineer.) However, the business did not make it past COVID. So, by 2022, when I quit corporate, it was not only an old, clunky platform, but it was pretty much dead. Nevertheless, I kept the platform online, and one or two customers used it without my support.
One afternoon around May 2023, I received money from skybookings — it must have been R1,000 or something — and then it hit me that there was something there. It was like looking at a dry patch of lawn that I had neglected for years and finding one green sprout. That single sprout changed everything for me. It gave me hope.
STRATEGY: I did not have a big insight, but a Google search showed that most independent event organisers struggle with cash flow. When I asked around, this was indeed the case. Moreover, independent event organisers usually work alone or in small teams. To improve productivity, they subscribe to SaaS tools, which frustrates them because they have to make monthly cash commitments, whereas events are occasional and their income is intermittent.
This gave me enough of a hunch to pivot skybookings from RSVP to ticketing, focusing on independent event curators (as I call them) and offering (a) weekly ticket sales payouts, and (b) a beautiful, modern platform that does a lot more than a typical ticketing system. I captured this strategy using The Business Model Canvas (by Alex Osterwalder) — a one-page tool to visualise and engineer your business, which remains invaluable.
In short, a strategy begins with an educated guess and is refined over time with feedback. A good strategy identifies and addresses a need. A good strategy is easy to articulate and hard to copy. A good strategy must be written down and monitored for change. I am on version 3 of my strategy, as captured on the business model canvas.
MARKETING: I started building skybookings 2.0 in June 2023 and launched it in June 2024. I called a few friends, and they called their friends — again, it was a lot like the cycling journey. Within a month, I had five customers. Today, we have 30 customers, and the platform is growing every week.
I saw many sunrises and sunsets while building skybookings, often without sleep in between. However, I also knew that the time spent was not lost — it was contributing towards an asset that would later work without me. I also spent (and still spend) hours and hours on the phone with customers, not for customer support, but to talk about their events, how they plan to sell tickets, and what keeps them going. These conversations often became product ideas, and sometimes it took a few days before I called them to log in again, at which point they were pleasantly surprised to see the new features from our conversation. This approach was inspired by the Japanese philosophy, Kaizen, which loosely translates to small continuous improvements. All the small improvements created a sense of camaraderie among my early customers, who gained confidence in me and the platform and therefore told their friends, growing by word of mouth. We also have a WhatsApp group for my customers and friends-of-skybookings. It is fast becoming a community where clients collaborate on marketing and cut deals among themselves.
This is my rough-around-the-edges marketing and customer management system that works. To summarise: (a) Tell people about your product while you are still building it, beginning with friends in your phone book; (b) find a way of getting them to talk about your business to their friends; (c) build a community of customers and friends around the product. I experimented with social media advertising, but soon cut it off and focused on adding value to the few customers we had. I once read that the customer you want is like the customer you have. Therefore, serve the customer you have and let them find you the customer you want.
This brings our discussion to the tools I use to keep my sanity, since I work alone.
TOOLS & PRODUCTIVITY: I once listened to an interview with Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s Chairman, who was asked which car he drove. He said he owned over 20 cars because he needed to know what the competition was doing. I am similar. As a software engineer, I try many tools and spend a lot of money on them. However, I hardly stick around these platforms for long. I am not a loyal customer to Software as a Service (SaaS) products except for a few.
My approach is to use as few tools as possible to maximise reliability — above all, to keep things simple and to automate as much as possible. Skybookings, for instance, is 90% autonomous. Clients find clients who onboard themselves, sell tickets online, and the platform pays them every Wednesday for ticket sales, leaving behind commission, which is collected by debit order and card subscriptions to cover overheads. These are the tools I use to keep it going.
This brings me to the philosophy of solopreneurship, which I will summarise below before closing.
Why do we work? We work to make a living and to create meaning in our lives. There are countless ways of achieving these two aims. However, solopreneurs have three attitudes:
(a) Build equity: Do not sell your soul to make a living. Selling your soul means waking up when you do not want to, doing work you do not believe in, with people you would not vouch for, and collecting a cheque to pay for things you do not like. While I understand why many of us get caught up in this system, solopreneurship offers a way out by building an asset that yields an extraordinary return in dividends or, later, in the sale of shares. Ultimately, solopreneurship is about turning time and labour into equity. Every productive hour spent today is an investment in an asset that will yield a dividend in future. Think of soloprenurship as solo-farming — planting today to harvest tomorrow. This is different from consulting and freelancing, where the work done for clients is not captured in an underlying asset — it is consumed and therefore does not become equity. Freelancers, therefore, need an investment strategy to preserve and grow their wealth. On the other hand, as a solopreneur, the work you do is the investment strategy.
(b) Build alone, but not alone: In the past, the only way to be competitive was through scale in the industrial complex. Working at scale meant hiring people, leading and managing them. Today, machines, robots, and AI can do as good a job if not better than people. They are both effective and efficient. In other words, the idea that people are necessary in a production process is a fallacy. For the most part, people were used as tools, which itself draws ethical concerns and is the reason many feel trapped and stuck in a hamster wheel. Building alone means stripping out all the tedious work and delegating it to machines. However, solopreneurs also know that they are in community with their customers and friends and are therefore not alone.
(c) Create meaning and take responsibility: I do not believe in the pursuit of happiness. I believe in the pursuit of a meaningful life. We draw meaning from life when we choose an identity, adopt roles, and assume values and responsibilities to realise the chosen identity. This is not to say we will achieve the ideals of the chosen identity. However, the struggle and pursuit of that idealised person is what creates meaning. In light of this, solopreneurship offers the most transformational path to self-realisation by forcing each individual to take responsibility for their lives. In an interview at Wits Business School, Dr Mark Lamberti, a celebrated South African entrepreneur, said, and I paraphrase, there comes a time when you have to say This is my life and so take charge of it. Solopreneurship brings this declaration into sharp focus and leaves nowhere to hide.
My dad loved cars. In high school, I asked him why he liked cars so much. He told me about growing up in the villages, herding my grandmother’s goats, and fetching water kilometres away, and the hardships that came with that life. He vowed to show his children that “it’s possible” to become something and that we are not prisoners of circumstances.
His teaching has been a treasured gift, cherished above all. However, I am not into cars, and I am tired of the relentless hedonistic treadmill of City Life. I am a solopreneur because I am investing in the freedom to live and work anywhere, possibly on a farm, surrounded by nature and sprinkled with occasional travel to see the world.
If you need help exploring solopreneurship or refining your business approach, you may want to attend one of my private seminars, by invitation only. Here’s a link to get onto the invitation list.
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