The Path to Solopreneurship: Where to Start

One of the more frequent questions in my inbox is about the path to solopreneurship and creating your own business. Here's how I think about it.

***

“How to Make Millions With Your Ideas” is the title of a book published in 1996 by Dan Kennedy.

27 years later the advice is more relevant than ever.

If you want to own your own business, create your own schedule, be your own boss, and generate income to provide for your life, there’s an alternative path to becoming an entrepreneur.

- You don’t need to sell a physical product
- You don’t need to write code and build software
- You don’t need to buy a storage facility
- Your don’t need to get into real estate

Those are great paths.

But there’s a different path. If you have expertise in an industry, you can build an information business. A knowledge business. You can “make millions with your ideas.”

In 1996 people we didn’t have the tools we have now. Today we have digital platforms like LinkedIn, X, a website, and a podcast to share knowledge and ideas with the world.

Over time sharing that knowledge can spread and lead to building an audience, and an audience matters because if you have something you want to sell, people need to know who you are first. They need to know you exist. And they need to believe that you are a trusted authority on that topic.

You can get customers other ways too of course, but it’s a lot easier this way.

The other way is like going door to door. You might have to knock on 100 doors to get your first customer.

But with an audience you can reach your ideal customers directly. They will start coming to you. And there’s nothing better than inbound opportunities.

It’s not going to happen overnight. But it might go something like this:

You might write for months online and see nothing. Then one day, you get a DM from someone who’s been following your writing on SEO. They want to know if they can hire you for a quick SEO project for their business. That’s how it starts. You do a great job for them and get a referral from another business, and a testimonial to back it up.

You might get an invite to go on a podcast in your industry and share some of your lessons with someone else’s audience. That interview brings more people back to find you after online. More people begin to see your message and your audience and opportunities grow.

After a year you’ve picked up a few side projects. But the hours are tough. Then you realize that you keep getting the same 5-10 questions over again. You realize that people want this information that you have. So you decide to spend a weekend mapping out all your answers, writing, and creating a video course on SEO. You set up your website and promote the SEO training on LinkedIn where you’ve built a small audience. You get your first five customers.

That’s how it can h...