I’m on my fourth out of five weeks in Sicily and, if you know Southern Italy, you know one thing: it’s the perfect place for reflection.
Among the gloriously decrepit but bustling with life buildings, some of the most important (and annoying!) questions seem to arise.
I’ve been spending many of my evenings on streets like this one, where people take at least two hours to enjoy a spritz, a light dinner, and, of course, conversation.
Pic taken on a Wednesday, at 11pm. Such is life in Mediterranean cities.
When I tell waiting staff that I’m here for a month, they think it’s a holiday, so I have to quickly add that I can work from everywhere, so I do exactly that: spend most of my days working, then enjoy the afternoon and the weekend flâneur-ing.
Wanna know why I tell people that I’m not on a month-long holiday as fast as I can? Because I have a reputation to uphold and I absolutely don’t want them to think I’ve mastered the art of passive income and that I can sell my recipe.
I’m only half-joking.
You may already know that I have an ax to grind with snake oil passive income dreams sellers. And with everyone and their emotional support AI wrapper now convinced that the future of solopreneurship is micro-SaaS and cute little apps built over a weekend, I think it’s time to revisit that particular fantasy.
I think we’re entering an era in which it becomes easier to start a solo business, harder to build a defensible one, and increasingly important to have something going for you beyond the ability to produce stuff.
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Somewhat ironically, I think some of the biggest winners in this industry of ours will be the people selling the least scalable thing of all: their expertise.
In the 2026 edition of the State of Solopreneurship report, most people said that services were still the strongest revenue source, even among people who also sold digital products.
So here’s my first prediction:
1. Services will remain the backbone of solopreneurship
For years, the standard advice for anyone selling services has been to productize their expertise, build passive income, and eventually escape the terrible burden of having clients.
Apparently, the ultimate reward for becoming good at something is never having to do it again.
Yet services keep paying the bills (see chart above. This report also supports this finding.)
I expect services to remain central for three reasons.
- Services give you direct access to problems people will pay to solve. You learn what buyers need, what they’ve already tried, and what makes them open their wallets.
- They can generate meaningful revenue with relatively few customers. A consultant selling a $3,000 engagement needs a very different customer acquisition machine from someone selling a $29 template.
- Services can evolve much faster than products. You can change your approach, customize your delivery, or move into an emerging market without rebuilding an entire product.
None of this makes services automatically profitable, of course. Plenty of consultants are underpaid, overworked, and trapped in businesses that depend entirely on their availability.
But I suspect the most promising service businesses will become smaller, more specialized, and significantly more productive.
Which brings us to AI.
2. AI will make it harder to build a lucrative product business
This is probably my least popular prediction.
AI is dramatically reducing the time, cost, and technical knowledge required to build apps, software tools, automations, and other digital products.
Someone who couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag a couple of years ago can now build a functioning prototype with AI assistance.
That’s a remarkable development, indeed. But it’s also creating a problem for everyone who hopes to make money selling software.
When almost anyone can build something, the fact that you’ve built something becomes increasingly unremarkable.
Think about the explosion of small SaaS products, AI writing tools, GPT wrappers, and other software products designed to solve one narrow problem.
Some will become excellent businesses. Specific problems, proprietary data, existing customer relationships, integrations, and strong distribution can still create considerable advantages.
More on distribution later.
3. The premium on judgment will increase
AI can already produce a great deal of what knowledge workers traditionally charged for. It can write a reasonably good blog post, analyze data, generate campaign ideas, draft a positioning statement, and put together a marketing plan.
The quality varies. Some outputs are surprisingly useful; others are the intellectual equivalent of reheated airline food.
Either way, customers now have alternatives for many routine tasks.
Upwork’s 2026 Future Workforce Index identifies a growing premium on judgment-driven work, alongside pressure on execution-oriented tasks.
This is the distinction that can make or break a business led by consultants, marketers, coaches, and other experts.
❌ If your primary value is producing something that AI can generate reasonably well, I expect pricing pressure to increase.
✅ If your value lies in understanding a complex situation, identifying the right problem, making difficult decisions, and helping a client achieve a specific outcome, there’s considerably more room to defend your price.
For instance, a client can ask AI to produce a content strategy.
They can get a beautifully structured document with target personas, content pillars, posting schedules, and enough marketing jargon to sedate a small elephant.
What they may still struggle to understand is why their current content attracts competitors instead of potential buyers, why their offer isn’t converting, or whether content is even their biggest growth constraint.
Those questions require context, experience, and judgment.
4. AI adoption will stop being a meaningful competitive advantage
Here’s another finding from State of Solopreneurship that deserves more attention: 92% of respondents were already using AI last year.
That’s an extraordinarily high adoption rate within this particular group.
And more recent research suggests extensive usage elsewhere in the independent-business economy. In Kit’s 2026 AI Creator Economy survey, which surveyed 550 creators, 57.3% said they used AI daily.
More interestingly, 89.2% said they always reviewed and edited AI output before using it.
The respondents were a mix of creators and independent business owners, including coaches and consultants. It’s a different sample from mine, but the findings point to widespread AI use and continued human oversight.
The implication is fairly straightforward: knowing how to use ChatGPT is becoming about as distinctive as knowing how to use Google; the advantage will increasingly come from how intelligently you integrate AI into your business.
For example, two consultants might use the same AI tools.
❌ One uses them to generate more social posts, write more proposals, and produce an impressive quantity of content that nobody particularly wants to read.
✅ The other uses AI to analyze customer interviews, spot patterns in sales conversations, reduce administrative work, prepare better client deliverables, and free up time for business development.
Same general technology. Very different economic impact.
Of course, your competitors will have access to similar tools, which means efficiency gains alone won’t guarantee better margins. Some of the resulting cost savings will almost certainly be captured by customers through lower prices and higher expectations.
5. Distribution will become the biggest bottleneck
Everything above points toward one direction: the internet’s next overcrowding problem, this time fueled by AI. This is why I expect distribution to become one of the biggest constraints on solopreneur growth.
Having something worthwhile to sell will remain essential, but connecting that offer to people who are willing and able to pay for it may become even more difficult.
This is where independent experts with established audiences have an advantage.
They already have relationships, recognition, and some degree of trust. They understand the problems their audience cares about, and they have a way to reach potential buyers without starting every conversation from zero.
Do you know Casamigos, George Clooney’s tequila brand?
Take Casamigos, George Clooney’s tequila brand. It benefited from his celebrity, relationships, and visibility long before Diageo acquired it in 2017 and added its global distribution network to the equation. It still does fairly well, despite the controversy surrounding it.
Now imagine launching a tequila brand with neither George Clooney’s reach nor Diageo’s infrastructure.
That’s roughly what you’re up against when you launch another generic AI app into a market overflowing with alternatives.
The same goes for any celebrity-supported brand: unless it’s complete and utter shit, the distribution power will carry whatever you launch, be it great or mediocre.
AI is lowering the cost of creation. It isn’t lowering the cost of earning trust at the same rate, though.
Thinking about building an app or any vibecoded product? Assess your distribution first and foremost. And if that assessment doesn’t produce convincing results either way, ask yourself this uncomfortable question:
What makes this valuable enough that people will continue paying for it when creating an alternative gets easier every year?
6. Hybrid businesses will become more common
Many respondents in State of Solopreneurship sold several things. They might offer consulting, a course, templates, and a membership, while earning most of their money from services.
I think that combination will become increasingly common. And I can see why:
- Services provide revenue and close contact with customer problems.
- Digital products allow people to access some of your expertise at a lower price.
- Communities, retainers, and other recurring offers can add continuity to the customer relationship.
Put those elements together, and you have the potential for a resilient independent business.
The danger, of course, is ending up with seven offers, five channels, and an administrative workload that makes corporate employment look like a wellness retreat.
Diversification only helps when the pieces reinforce one another.
I suspect the strongest hybrid businesses will have a clear economic center, typically a high-value service or flagship offer, with complementary revenue streams built around it.
For a consultant, that might mean client engagements supported by a newsletter and a few carefully chosen educational products.
For a coach, it might mean private coaching, a group program, and a recurring community that serves people at different stages.
There’s room for product-led businesses too, particularly those with a specific market advantage.
What I expect to lose ground is the idea that every solopreneur should aspire to become a software founder or build an elaborate passive-income empire.
Sometimes a great service business is already a great business.
7. Smaller businesses will be able to achieve more, but the bar will keep rising
This is the trend I’m most optimistic about, with a fairly substantial caveat: AI gives individuals access to capabilities that previously required more people, more money, or more technical expertise.
That can create enormous leverage for solo business owners.
You can research faster, test ideas more cheaply, automate parts of service delivery, and build internal tools for problems you previously had to tolerate.
But those capabilities will spread throughout the market.
Clients will become accustomed to faster delivery, better reporting, more customization, and more sophisticated work.
Some will expect to pay less for tasks that AI has made easier. Others may be willing to pay more for someone who can combine AI, expertise, and accountability to achieve results that were previously out of reach.
I expect both things to happen simultaneously — and this is where business strategy becomes even more important.
Solopreneurs will need to decide which tasks to automate, which capabilities to develop, which markets to serve, and which parts of their work justify premium prices.
Simply doing more work with fewer resources won’t be enough if the additional work has little economic value.
Two things I’d start doing right away (in this context):
Build a bigger table, not a higher fence
If distribution and trust become harder to acquire, the relationships you’ve built will become increasingly valuable.
I’ve seen incredible results from people in The Council who decided to collaborate and share their expertise with each other (and with the world) without any expectation of quid pro quo (The Principle of Reciprocity in action!).
Build your network, reinforce it, and champion your peers. It’s much easier and more lucrative than trying to go viral on social media.
Choose your hard
Everyone uses AI, yet everyone works just as hard, if not harder, than they did before AI. Again, this is not a moat.
A moat should be something hard to get by design. I wrote more about this here.
