I recently saw a lifestyle influencer arrive at Milan Fashion Week and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Said influencer showed up with:
→ A photographer
→ A videographer
→ A make-up artist
→ A stylist
→ A hairstylist
→ A VA
→ 2 other people whose job description I’m unsure of.
Eight people! There are Fortune 500 executives who move through their day with fewer people supporting them.
Think it’s excessive? I beg to differ. Every one of those people exists to turn a single appearance into dozens of pieces of content across platforms, formats, and timelines. Because that’s what this job looks like right now.
This dynamic isn’t confined to influencers. It’s leaking into the expert economy almost imperceptibly, but consistently enough to change how businesses are built.
Everywhere I look, in every community or private chat, solopreneurs ask the same questions:
- Am I lagging behind on AI?
- What could I automate?
- Should I learn Claude Code?
- I need to get better at delegating
- I’m looking to hire a VA/social media assistant/YouTube producer/community manager
People are looking to clone themselves in every possible way.
What happened to “People buy from people, not faceless brands”?
You’ve seen this adage online, I’m sure. It is good advice too. If you look at the internet trends timeline, you’ll see that creators/influencers and even one-person B2B businesses got their moment in the sun because they were the opposite of soulless corporations.
They were human. Working with them never meant sleazy sales cycles and endless customer support calls. And that’s why people trusted them more, because they looked like them.
But look at how businesses actually operate today, and you’ll see a different pattern emerge.
The “person” at the center becomes the interface. Behind that interface sits a growing system of people, tools, and processes that keep the machine running.
From the outside, it still looks like a one-person business.
From the inside, it starts behaving like a small production company.
This is why I’m happy to tell you about today’s partner, one of the very few people in this industry who doesn’t peddle the “scale or perish” advice. Maggie Patterson is one of the best people to learn how to run a truly solo business from.
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Listen, I know that we all run a media company, whether we like it or not. We all resist it at first.
That shift doesn’t happen overnight. It builds gradually through small, reasonable decisions. A freelancer here, a VA there, a designer to make things “look more polished,” someone to help with video because video is now mandatory if you want reach.
At some point, the business crosses a threshold: you’re no longer just doing the work. You’re coordinating the work.
Did I fall for it?
The process above feels very familiar because I think I just went through it. I’ve been resisting doing video for years now.
Plot twist: here’s my new YouTube channel.
(Bet you didn’t see this one coming.)
See, I was feeling the pressure to do video. And it started small: recording a couple of dozen podcasts, doing LinkedIn lives, doing some masterclasses in gated communities, and so on.
Yet, nothing that required me to edit videos, publish them, and worry about effin’ thumbnails 🤯.
I started with a short trailer for The Council, then I recorded a video about State of Solopreneurship, and, long story short, I now have three scripts sitting in my Google Docs, and I am scrambling to find the time to record and edit them.
For now, I’m calling this an experiment. I don’t know if I’ll keep doing YouTube. Candidly, I like pushing myself to learn new things. What I don’t like is feeling like I need to outsource some of my work.
Right now, I only work with a single contractor (a web designer). Everything else is done by me, and I’m comfortable with that — I never liked managing people.
But should I be? Here’s me thinking in public.
The pressure is real (and measurable)
Let’s look at a few numbers. According to Orbit Media’s 2025 Blogging Statistics Report, the time spent creating a blog post is decreasing thanks to AI: 3 hours 25 mins in 2025 versus just over 4 hours in 2022.
But that decrease is minimal and likely not compensated for by the need to push more content.
Now layer in format complexity.
- Omnichannel marketing amplifies content; 75% of marketers use 5+ channels
- 53% of marketers struggle to differentiate their content in an AI-saturated market
- Video (especially short-form) has an insane ROI.
(Source)
Then there’s repetition. “Customers need roughly 3 exposures to notice you, 7 to remember you, and 27 to trust you.” (Source)
This goes well with my take on why it feels like too few people are buying from you and why you shouldn’t quit too soon.
And, lastly, we have referral traffic from major platforms continuing to decline as platforms prioritize keeping users inside their ecosystems. Consequently, publishers and creators are seeing reduced outbound clicks despite stable or growing impressions.
Translation: visibility doesn’t convert the way it used to.
Put all of this together and you get a structural shift:
- More effort required to create
- More formats required to compete
- More touchpoints required to convert
- Less efficient distribution
That gap has to be filled somehow. Most people fill it with people or AI.
The bar is rising in multiple directions at once
It’s not just that expectations are higher. They’re also more fragmented.
You’re expected to:
- Write with clarity and depth
- Show up on video with confidence
- Translate ideas into visual formats
- Adapt your message to platform-specific dynamics
Each of these used to be a specialization, and now they’re bundled into one role. When one role expands like this, it rarely stays a one-person job for long.
So what’s the play?
There are two viable directions.
Option 1: Scale production
You expand capacity.
You bring in support and increase output with the aim of matching the market’s expectations across formats and platforms. This can work extremely well, especially if your goal is maximum reach.
It also shifts your role: you spend more time coordinating, reviewing, managing timelines, and aligning outputs. The work itself becomes one layer within a larger system.
Some people enjoy this transition.
Others realize they’ve built a business that operates very differently from what they originally wanted.
Option 2: Engineer asymmetry
This path requires more restraint, more intentional design, and, most importantly, more patience.
- Instead of increasing volume, you increase weight.
- Instead of spreading across channels, you concentrate on where your ideas have the highest return.
- Instead of matching the market’s pace, you build assets that outlast it.
I talk about this at length in my manifesto and I stand by it.
Let me be clear: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with creating and managing a full-fledged media company. However, I may be projecting here, but most of the people I speak to do not want that.
They still want a nimble business that depends on as few people as possible. If that’s you as well, let’s have a look at how you can achieve that.
How to build a lucrative business without cloning yourself (multiple times)
Remember the time when it was enough to show a resume or tell people you’ve been doing something for a few years to get a contract? Yeah, me too.
We’re no longer in that world, but that doesn’t mean that we have to build the same business Mr. Beast built.
So:
1. Build assets, not posts
A large percentage of content today is designed for immediacy. It captures attention briefly and disappears just as quickly.
When you focus on ideas that can be referenced, expanded, and reused, you create something with a longer lifespan. I call this creating passive value (NOT to be confused with passive income).
2. Treat content as infrastructure
When content is treated as output, the pressure is constant. You have to keep producing to stay visible. On the other hand, when content is treated as infrastructure, each piece becomes a building block.
A strong issue can feed multiple posts, inform a workshop, shape a product, and support your sales conversations. The goal is to improve the return on every piece you create, to be able to re-use, re-purpose, and quote yourself as often as possible.
3. Reduce surface area
The default response to declining reach is expansion: more platforms, more formats, more experiments. (Like me and my YouTube experiment.)
There’s another approach: concentrate effort where you have the highest leverage.
For me, that’s the newsletter as the core asset, supported by a distribution channel like LinkedIn. I still spend most of the time there, despite experimenting with new platforms every once in a while.
This is a hill I’m willing to die on: depth within a smaller surface area often produces stronger results than shallow presence across many.
4. Use support to remove friction, not to inflate output
Hiring isn’t inherently the problem; the role hiring plays in your system is what matters. When support helps you move faster through operational tasks, it preserves your energy for thinking and decision-making.
When support is used to increase volume without increasing clarity, it amplifies noise.
That distinction determines whether your business stays focused or becomes harder to manage over time.
5. Assess profitability, not just revenue
You could hire 5 people tomorrow and maybe 5x your revenue within a couple of months. But will this make your business more profitable?
This econ 101 but also very easy to lose sight of. Revenue scales faster than profit and teams amplify that gap.
I’ve seen people double their revenue and feel like they’re winning, only to realize at the end of the year that they built a more complex business and got a pay cut for their efforts.
6. Go to your peers first, then consider hiring
One of the reasons why I’m bullish on communities and why I built The Council is that, in the past couple of years, I’ve relied on peers heavily — and it paid off.
Before hiring someone, I asked around about better ways to do something. I asked for direct feedback. I brainstormed with people who had been in my shoes before.
I left with clarity and reduced complexity almost every single time. It’s easy to default to doing what the big voices online tell you to do when you operate all alone.
But you don’t have to do that. Speak to a peer before you launch a business that you won’t resonate with in a couple of years.
One question to sit with
If your current trajectory continues for the next 12 months, what does your business require to operate at that level?
In other words, how many moving parts does it have? And how much of your time goes into managing those parts versus doing the work you actually care about?
The answer should tell you whether you need to hire or stop spreading yourself too thin.
Final thought
The original appeal of solopreneurship was control: control over how you work, what you create, and how your business grows.
That control is still available. It just requires more deliberate design now, because the default path leads toward complexity.
You can build something bigger.
It will take more patience than before, though. Because, yes, things got harder, but not impossible.
I’m curious: do you feel this pressure too, or is it just me? Reply and let me know.
Need my help figuring this out? Book a clarity session with me and you’ll leave knowing what to focus on and what to nix from your tactics/platforms list.
The Council Bulletin
Right now, the hottest topic of conversation in The Council is LinkedIn and the new algorithm. We’re trying to make sense of it and figure out what’s hype and what’s worth considering.
Behind the scenes, I’m putting together the finishing touches on our outreach mini-sprint. We have 3 confirmed guest speakers who will lead sessions on sales processes, outreach, and Sales Navigator.
Peep inside The Council for a video walkthrough of what it feels like to be a member and join us, or reply to this email if you have questions.
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