If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve been following my journey on Linkedin.
After years of posting about my learnings on #efficientGrowth, I’ve taken all of my learnings and combined them into a new project, which I’m excited to share with you today.
That project is #soloCapitalism.
What The Heck Is Solo Capitalism?
Solo Capitalism is a new approach to entrepreneurship and achieving financial freedom.
The idea is that we now have the means to make an individual founder SO EFFICIENT, they can operate multiple businesses without needing any outside capital or employees.
This massively changes the entrepreneurship equation, making it more accessible to millions of people due to:
- Less risk (more diversification)
- Less effort (no more 100 hr workweeks)
- Less capital (no more VC funding)
- More competitiveness (erodes ‘big company’ feature/resource moats)
Why now?
At first glance, you may not think that Solo Capitalism is “new” – there are already solo founders who’ve bootstrapped SaaS businesses to $XXmln.
What’s new here is how several trends are changing:
- How these companies are built.
- How fast these companies are built.
- How many of these companies are built.
While these successes were ‘exceptional’ a decade ago, the new tech landscape will make this the ‘expected’ case over the next few years.
Trend #1: No Need For Venture Capital
There was a time when you LITERALLY couldn’t start a tech company without putting money into the business.
20 years ago, “you had to raise $25M to start your internet business, and $20M of that would go straight to Dell and Sun Microsystems on day one just to serve your website”.
Ten years later in 2013, it was possible to start a company with 1/10th that money thanks to cloud companies like AWS. The overhead of hardware had been abstracted away, but you still needed engineers to build the product and server capacity to keep ahead of demand (aka ‘overhead’)
Today startup costs is down another 10X thanks to serverless computing. No longer do you pay/scale per server, you literally pay PER MILLISECOND of server use (and only when you use it). Similarly, you no longer have to pay engineers ‘by the hour’… you pay generative AI models PER TOKEN on demand whenever you need them.
What does this mean?
It means that there is today a path to be profitable on day one!!!
And that means, you can grow without VC money OR massive personal credit card debt (like those founders from the 2010’s loooove to talk about on stage at TechCrunch disrupt 😝)
Trend #2: No Need For Employees
At least, “Full Time Employees”…
When I started my last business in 2013 I was proficient at writing code; I wrote the prototype of our software, which got us our first ten customers, which then led to us raising our Seed round.
But while the software worked, it really sucked, partially because I was inexperienced but mainly because I had to cut so many corners due to lack of time.
>> Enter ChatGPT.
I’ve experience over the past year just how much generative AI changes this equation — I’m shipping code at a quality and rate that’s at least 5x higher than before, and although there are lots of caveats/tradeoffs (more on that in a future post), I’m able to deliver huge value to customers by myself.
But wait… what about selling/supporting customers?
Without going into too much detail (I’ll discuss this in a future post), I’ve also seen how picking the right market/niche and the right product architecture can eliminate 90% of the sales/support work that burden most businesses.
And when customer support is needed, I’ve had enough positive experiences with AI chatbots (after a human rep had failed me) to know that this is going to take over things we use ‘smart’ people for today (eg: sales engineering, csms, etc)
TLDR; AI bots aren’t going to take over everything tomorrow, but there is enough whitespace to build meaningful businesses with the tools we have available today.
Trend #3: A New Generation of Entrepreneurs
Demand for financial freedom has never been higher among top-talent. In the last 15 years, my millennial peers have seen multiple market crashes, stagnating wages, and layoffs at companies that are PRINTING money (ahem – Google).
The reason this talent worked for companies was the ‘safety’ of knowing where your next paycheck is coming from and a clear ladder to climb. It’s super clear now that this is no longer what big companies are offering, so we’re seeing a flux of talent going into niche business building right now.
This is creating a fertile ground for new content, new communities, and new best practices that will all contribute to Solo Capitalism
What is The Solo Capitalist?
The Solo Capitalist is a holding company that I’ve set up to build hyper-efficient businesses under the Solo Capitalism thesis.
The thesis is built on “first principles” learnings from my last company, which I’ll be sharing in a blog series on our site (you can sign up to receive updates at the bottom of this blog post).
Under this brand, we’ll be:
- Building new companies under the Solo Capitalist thesis
- Creating and sharing content that enable Solo Capitalism (follow the blog)
- Building a community of aspiring and practicing Solo Capitalists (sign up for the slack community)
eroltoker
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