Get Started with the Solopreneur Business Model

Understanding the solopreneur business model and how to get started

By Brooks Patterson

Everyone who starts their own business is an entrepreneur, but those who go at it all alone are known as solopreneurs. This single-staffed business model is a great way to make a living doing what you love.

Many are solopreneurs without even realising it. Freelancers who manage their own clients are technically solopreneurs. Someone who creates and sells digital courses is a solopreneur. Even self-employed fitness coaches are solopreneurs.

The solopreneur business model means you can start your own business, often on a budget. How do you get started? You’re in the right place.

What is the solopreneur business model?

A solopreneur is simply an entrepreneur who works alone. Solopreneurship has been around for decades, but it’s surged in recent years. A QuickBooks survey found that 56% of current solopreneurs started their businesses after 2020. You don’t even need to quit your day job to become a solopreneur, with many taking the role on as part of a side hustle.

It’s also never been easier to become a solopreneur, thanks to digital tools like event tracking. What is event tracking? It’s the system that keeps track of a user's every click, every submission, and every interaction, which in turn can make it possible to:

Offer personalisation
Track marketing success
Understand product usage
Provide an excellent user experience

Add in automation software, gen AI tools, and the sheer power of social media, and you can get a taste of just why solopreneurship is on the rise, either as a part or full-time gig.

Examples of solopreneur businesses

Here are just a few examples of solopreneur businesses you could start:

Freelancing specialist
Online course creator
Blogger/vlogger
Podcast host
Photographer/videographer
Craft seller
Accountant
Consultant

Essentially, as long as the workload remains manageable, you can turn your skills or expertise into a business, especially if you use AI productivity solutions to help offload your workload.

What you need to start a solopreneur business successfully

When you’re a solopreneur, you wear all the hats. This means you need to handle all this by yourself:

Marketing
Lead nurturing
Sales
Delivery
Customer Service
Admin
Strategy and planning
And more

To help ease that workload, you must get the tools that can support you. For example, you can use lead tracking tools to help you identify potential customers, clients, and business decision-makers to automatically create a list of possible business opportunities.

How to get started

AI and automation will help make your solopreneur dreams possible, but that doesn’t mean they can do all the work for you. To get started, use these steps:

Define your business

You need to clearly understand what your business is, what you have to offer, and why people should choose you. If you are a consultant or freelancer, often your USP is simply your expertise and portfolio.

If you want to sell courses or run a podcast, however, you’ll want a more unique hook. Why should someone buy your course specifically? You can use your qualifications as the hook, your personal brand, or a unique approach to convince people to choose your course over others.

Understand your audience

Once you have your unique selling point, you will need to discover who your audience is. What do they want? What are their values? Their needs? If you can understand that information, you’ll then be able to identify ways to solve their problems.

You can investigate on your own by creating polls and running surveys on your own. Alternatively, you can use industry trends and reports to help you. Either way, know your efforts are not over when you launch. It’s a long-haul process of continual refinement.

Identify your needs

You should know exactly how you want your business to operate by this point. Next, you’ll need to find the tools and platforms that will help support you best. If you plan to open an online store on your own, for example, you’ll want to assemble a list of eCommerce platforms and compare your options to find the best choice.

The same applies to AI, automation, analytics, and design tools. Explore your options, compare the features and costs, and create a complete list of what you need to launch. This is also a good way to budget for your business launch since it can give you a better understanding of the costs involved.

Provide value

It can be hard to win trust, which is why the next step is to provide your audience with value. You could start up an industry newsletter, for example. You could publish case studies of previous clients you’ve worked for to showcase the type of problem you can solve (and hints for how to do it).

Providing value means drawing in your audience and impressing them with your knowledge or skillset. You don’t need to push for a sale or hire immediately. Focus on the soft sale. Try to get people to sign up and follow you so they continue to hear from you and grow to trust your brand.

Understand where your business is doing well (and where it isn’t)

Getting your business up and running is a lot of work, but you aren’t done yet. In fact, you’ll never be done. Fine-tuning your operations and understanding what’s working, what’s not, and what’s next is how you can continue to move forward as a solopreneur.

It’s also how you can focus your efforts. Take freelancers, for example. As a freelancer, your time is finite, so you need to focus on the most profitable clients available to you to increase your revenue and profits. You can do this with a profitability analysis, which will help you understand exactly how much profit each client brings in, especially if costs are involved.

With a complete understanding of which clients are the most profitable, you’ll know which ones you’ll want to focus on continuing a relationship with and which ones you’ll want to move on from after your contract is finished.

Top takeaways

Solopreneurship can be a powerful approach towards starting your own business, but only if you fully understand your business, your target audience, and the tools you’ll need to bring your idea to life. Automation and AI have made solopreneurship more accessible than ever, but you’ll still need a sharp eye and a strong strategy to stand out from the crowd and succeed.

About the author

Brooks leads Product Marketing at RudderStack and has a strong background in content creation and product marketing. RudderStack simplifies customer data collection, enabling businesses to build complete profiles and activate them in real time. As a leader in warehouse-native CDP solutions, RudderStack continues to drive innovation in the space.