This newsletter, Strategic AF (formerly known as Ideas to Power Your Future), turns three today 🎂. If you’re new here, welcome!

If you’ve been here for a while, thank you for being part of this journey and for supporting me along the way — it means more than you know!

I decided to celebrate by working A LOT on putting together an industry report, The State of Solopreneurship.

I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything this hard and this fast in my entire life. I hope all this hard work will be useful to you. The link to download it is below.

    I spent over 100 hours 😳 putting State of Solopreneurship together. As I was telling my friends yesterday, I don’t think I’ve ever worked this hard and this fast on anything else in my entire life. Well, perhaps my master’s dissertation, but that’s another story altogether.

    So I can’t wait for you to dig into it!

    Why State of Solopreneurship exists

    Most “creator economy” reports benchmark everyone against influencers, YouTubers with teams, or agencies. That’s useless if you’re actually running a solopreneur business: audience-led, offer-first, selling services, digital products, or strategy.

    I asked 153 solopreneurs and tiny teams how they made money in 2025 and what they’re doubling down on in 2026. You get 36 charts with clean correlations: revenue ↔ time in business ↔ channels ↔ newsletter ↔ market focus.

    Key findings

    • Services still pay the bills. When people ranked revenue, 1:1 and DFY rose to the top.
    • LinkedIn + email is the most common “increase” combo for 2026.
    • Six-figure businesses show up after year 3 for most; $250k+ clusters later.
    • Newsletter presence over-indexes in higher revenue bands.
    • AI is a time dividend (research, outlining, editing), not a new business model.

    Solopreneur businesses at a glance

    Most respondents run an actual solopreneur business, where they handle everything. There is a slight correlation between the size of the team and revenue but it’s not enough to be definitive.

    Most respondents work full-time on their business. As you’ll see below, there is a significant correlation between the time spent on the business and the revenue generated.

    This is a B2B-first cohort. That’s why services, consulting, and LinkedIn show up so strongly later. If you sell to consumers, you can still use the report, but read pricing and channels through that lens.

    North America and Europe are heavily represented in this report. This is one of the findings that are congruent with most other reports — purchasing power is a determining factor.

    Grab the full report

    There are 30+ more charts inside: which channels convert, where people will spend time next year, and how time in business/newsletter/market focus aligns with revenue.

    You are also free to screenshot and use the information in this report on your own channels. But please don’t send the PDF or the full report to anyone else — this is for your eyes only. Send people to ​this page​ instead, so they can download their own copy.

    Download State of Solopreneurship 2026

    Last but not least, I’d love to hear from you — did you find anything interesting in this report? Does it help you plan for next year? Reply and let me know; any feedback is more than welcome.

    Also, are you interested in how I put the report together? If so, I can do a Strategic AF issue on it.