TL;DR: The landscape is ripe for solo companies, owing to a confluence of current trends. Key among these are technological advancements, particularly in AI, which are enabling this shift. The rapidly expanding digital economy, increased democratization of knowledge, and wider access to AI technology play pivotal roles. Furthermore, the NoCode movement is making software development more accessible to non-programmers, increasing the pool of it-entrepreneurs. Just as mobile technology once disrupted the business landscape, AI is now forging a new wave of opportunities for entrepreneurs.
Technologies and Trends enabling the rise of 1 person companies:
- Growing consumption of native digital products
- AI enabling end-to-end automation for digital products
- Rising interest rates prompting less risky and more productive investments
- AI bringing productivity quantifiable value through automation
- Increased adoption of data-infused decision-making
- Cheap access to knowledge and technology/ AI for everybody with internet
- A larger pool of remote workers and laid-off developers venturing into solopreneurship or side hustles
- No-code movement allowing more people to participate in Software development processes
The Era we live in
We’re traversing a period where the boundaries of streamlining and automation are continually expanding, particularly within the digital realm. Here, processes occur electronically, eliminating the need for physical interference, making them ideally suited for optimization.
Companies producing digital products, like SaaS, platforms and services dealing with data, design, or content, are increasingly using AI for their processes rather than relying on humans. This transition facilitates the movement to more automation. People using automation agents and software such as Zappier to automate workflows is a growing trend.
Simultaneously the amount of time people spend using electronic devices is increasing, resulting in a growing demand for purely digital products. This has led to a flourishing digital economy, which provides entrepreneurs with the motivation to create within this field, and also increases the size of the digital economies making more of $100M companies possible.
What are companies really?
Companies are in their fundamental layer a node of skills and knowledge that are engaged in the production of products or services for the purpose of making profits.
A single person can now operate a combine harvester, performing tasks like cutting crops, threshing, cleaning, and discharging it in a ready to sale form.
In the past, it took hundreds of people to carry out these operations.
When we talk about purely digital products the production of which can be largely automated. Value can be added end-to-end through the whole value chain in an automated way using APIs, LMs, workflows and so on.
Just 1 person orchestrating and building the workflows, like the person in the harvester combine.
AI a new innovation platform to build upon. – disruptive as mobile
The introduction of these AI technology can be seen similarly to the introduction of the mobile which gave the ability for new products and business models to be unlocked.
The mobile phone with its internet connectivity and features made it possible for entrepreneurs to create dynamic on-the-go and everywhere-to-be-reached experiences. Suddenly we did not need maps and we could reach to people all the time. It made us more connected and more engaged.
The AI on the other hand is supposed to make us less engaged, relieve us from mundane repetitive tasks and enhance our capacity to derive value from big amounts of data.
ChatGPT, Midjourney, and other AI-powered technologies are just scratching the surface, but they are already demonstrating how they can replace skilled human labor in the processes necessary for creating products and services
The Entrepreneur – 1 man and the AI
AI is just a tool (for now 😐 ), thus it comes to the entrepreneur to implement it as a technology. Automating processes is bringing productivity and cutting costs for a company and these are legitimate goals of a company. – and the entrepreneur by extension.
And how cool would be to create self-operating automated machines serving the society for profit – definitely an entrepreneurial goal.
We can already see these 1 person operated AI technologies being implemented to create market-research or content services . With the development of more tools and bettering up the AI technology even more would be possible.
We are also seeing a larger pool of potential entrepreneurs as the NoCode movement gives more people to work with software without being programmers. Also, many laid-off recently software engineers will be contributing to the area.