Solopreneurship. Solopreneurship who?
From being a difficult-to-pronounce word to something that you must already know about and talk about to fit in the GenZ criteria of being a person with a ‘cultured’ intellect, Entrepreneurship has come a long way. But is that the only buzzing thing we have in the gig economy? I think not.
In this era of “keep yourself to yourself” and “mind your own business”, people have really started minding their own “Businesses”. And it’s peaking dramatically. The old working model of “being your own boss” together with the idea of “being your own business”, is what the new working model is all about, and preferably so, it’s called Solopreneurship.
So what does a solopreneur do?
Everything. A solopreneur has to gather proper resources, organize them, design an executable plan, execute them, manage the process and test the quality of the product or service traded/provided by the organization. To boot up, they have to assume the risks in the business or service provided, plan and engage precautious reinforcements and control decisions for the success and prevention of failure of the business, while being entirely accountable for every choice made.
As prodigious as it features to be, looking from a solopreneur’s perspective, it is far more challenging and exciting. Challenging, because every fragment of work requires its own plethora of skills along with patience, perfection and passion to not let obstacles shadow the yielding potential of the solopreneur, as well as the business. Exciting, because the challenges and hustle to get through them, form the nitty-gritty of solopreneurship.
Who can be a solopreneur?
Solopreneurship businesses include creativity, passion, inspiration and aestheticism. If a business idea can commemorate the above calibres, one has the assured potential to be a booming solopreneur.
However, some of the most-sought-after solopreneurship workforces include: Blogging, Content Creation, Graphic Designing, Photography, Copywriting, Pet Grooming, Consultancy, Personal Training Business, Web Development, Software Development, App/Mobile development, Virtual Assistance, Event Planning, Dropshipping, e-Commerce Businesses, and well, to sum it all up, YouTube-ing. One with versatility, wins the race!
Why is Solopreneurship becoming a buzz-space?
What FireBird is to cars, is solopreneurship to the youth. We keep looking for the Lookout Mountain, and this is where we land. While it offers a spectrum of Tim advantages like Independence, Flexibility, Lower overhead costs and Decision making efficiency, it also adds a sense of satisfaction and achievement to the hustlers and gives them something to flaunt about, consequently making them more virtuous and influencing than the others. Afterall, it’s all about being an ideal, isn’t it?
The rewarding capacity of this model averages between 100K to 300K, enough to make a person “pockety”, which only keeps growing eventually, giving it an upper-hand financially.
Gone are the “uncle” days where people would consider financial-stability limited to a just-enough-to-survive paying job. We want everything and all at once, something well-served by solopreneurship. What else could we possibly ask for?
Is it a culture or a need?
The ideology sprung out of the need to digitize every part of a business, as a precautionary measure to prevent the spread of COVID-19, when the world was locked-down into tiny rooms and rectangular screens. From education to technical industries and basic necessities to luxurious amenities being traded online, rose the culture of solopreneurship.
However, since people had most of their time spent on the Internet, either scrolling on the ‘gram or YouTube, or on any other social media platform, the concept managed to have its way to the-highly-glorified-and-self-indulging “Hustle Culture”. While myth-busters usually call it a concept of “Toxic Individuality”, there are many that would call it otherwise.
Now the thing about Hustle Culture is, while it may sound highly promising, it’s highly idealistic, something that may not have all the dots matching the real world, precisely why as minimal as a percent of the population actually makes it to the success arena, which manages to modify the opinions of many solopreneurs into solopreneurship being a fickle and toxic working model. While they are not completely wrong, it is also worth highlighting that not everything will forever be comfortable, and so not everything shall forever be uncomfortable.
As the industry grows, there will be a gradual increase in the resources required to be a successful solopreneur with comfortable and affordable efforts.
Another aspect of judging the situation would be to realize the fact that the economy is under a revolution. The outcomes of which, still remain largely unknown. It may boost exponentially or it may crash to the rocks. This is where most people would predict a deprecating storm. If everyone starts indulging in solopreneurship, there would hardly be anyone interested in using the services or products provided. This would lead to a dead-locked economy, with immense potential but rare kineticism.
In my personal opinion though, it is still fair enough to confine this limitation to the bubbles in our head because everyone starts at zero. The existing services and products will be utilized by those still under the cocoon phase of learning and exploring, which should be enough to sustain the business, without creating havoc.
To substantiate it more, there’s a very live instance of Artificial Intelligence – ChatGPT. ChatGPT may provide us with just-what-we-need, it still cannot cross-over the purpose of Google, thanks to the wide-spread and well-provided services Google has. Revolution may thus, be limited to increasing efficiency and not a shady threat to the existing resources.
Another undermined fact that one only realizes while standing in the shoes of a solopreneur is that solopreneurship is an application of the Law of Diminishing Returns, which is a principle stating that profits gained from something will represent a proportionally smaller gain as more money or energy is invested in it. As quoted earlier, we all start at zero. If one compares zero to a million dollars, it’s an obvious kicker. But what’s another million to a million? Just something-more-than a million.
These things matter in entrepreneurship, where the modus operandi is to be a unicorn company, unlike solopreneurship. Most of the solopreneurs opt for comfort and happiness, plainly because, well, material things are just materials. The catch is, this is actually more sustainable than the capitalist ideologies of an entrepreneur. At least economically. It allows everyone in the work pool to have an equal share, worth their effort, consequently making it possible for everyone to experience a fruitful life and happiness.
Morally, it creates mutual respect amidst the people towards all sorts of services and products, ending social disparity to an extent that governments have been promising about. Mental peace, sense of purpose, satisfaction, happiness, self-awareness, gratitude, respect and well, a couple of millions too, too good to be true?
Many people claim that solopreneurship gets lonelier and depressing, but let’s face it, is it really the job’s fault that one could not manage their personal lives? Yes, it will get busy for one to not be able to spend quality time with loved ones, even murkier when one might have to cancel most of their plans, but is it too busy to even try to make a small phone call once in a while?
What most forget is solopreneurship is totally about the solopreneur. The time one wants to spend, the thing one wants to do. The efforts one wants to put in. A solopreneur definitely and totally has the right to control everything. Everything has consequences after all. Adjustment, if made at the right places, fruits better with time, while aggression has the ability to cause turmoil. Yet again, the bottom-side’s up, it’s still a choice for the solopreneur to make.
To conclude, as independent and scattered solopreneurship sounds, it is equally vulnerable to the varied opinions of whether it’s a culture or a need. The more sustainability one seeks, the more of a need it becomes, the more of a lifestyle one chases, the more culture it becomes. It’s a once in a blue moon day phenomenon, that there exists something that has the potential to provide the best of both worlds, simultaneously and beautifully.
Does that inspire you enough? To me, it does.