How to Solopreneurship in 2025
Going where AI can't.
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I’ve been a full-time solopreneur for almost 2 years now, but started to advise and create optionality for about 4 years in the product & growth space for myself. It has given me an unparalleled freedom and financial independence, which is the nice, glossy side you see everywhere on LinkedIn and Substack.
Remember the “Van Life”? You drive somewhere with your motorhome, work remotely, and can see the sunset while sipping on your matcha latte. Be a high-paid tech vagabond.
Perfect. Except for all the hardships that you pay for. The lack of space, amenities, and simplicity of a more grounded life.
That’s a bit how solopreneurship is as well. It sells really well to the outside, but as with everything in life, it’s complicated.
Complicated, but can be worth it.
Here’s how I would get started in 2025 again and how I think about the business as a whole, especially as everything is shifting now.
Let’s dig into it by looking at it like a typical business:
Demand
Offer
Monetization
Demand - Your clients
Knowing how to get clients is the beginning and end of it all. Let me start with what I definitely would not do to get paying clients:
Registering on Upwork or similar freelance platforms like TopTal, where other solopreneurs get connected with clients.
For one, you will be in direct competition with a very undifferentiated field of others, which puts your price under pressure and gives you probably just annoying work. The problem with these platforms is that they definitely get you started with some basic work, but they don’t get you anywhere that scales.
This is a painful lesson that I had to learn quite early:
A cheap client will bring you more cheap clients. A cheap client is never worth it, even if you think you have time. It will distract you and you will learn more about cheap clients as projects with more value tend to be about completely different problem areas.
Aim in general for higher-value clients in smaller numbers, who pay more for your work.
A good solopreneur business is one where you have more demand than you can handle, which means you can justify your prices. In order to get there, though, you need to build a word-of-mouth/brand motion that already caters to the customers that you want in a couple of years’ time.
Let’s look at one of the Miro boards that I came up with after about one year in:
You can see that I thought about my two ICPs (Ideal Customer Profile), which I would like to reach and how well I did at the time (US VC’s being completely a mystery to me at the point), and the deliveries that I can offer to them (we will talk about them again later)
These ICP’s have changed a bit over the year, but overall, I was pretty much on the money for what I enjoy.
Now, when you’re doing something like this, you realize relatively quickly that you don’t want to talk to a Group Product Manager or someone who outsources problems on a freelance platform.
In my case, I wanted to talk to the founders, the CEO, the CPO, and the investors. I wanted them to talk about me and know me before they approached me.
The way I did that was over LinkedIn in pure product-led growth fashion, where I posted for free about everything I knew. Everything. I learned relatively fast that if you’re open and giving with what you have, people still want to work with you. It’s not about what you know, but what your mind does with it.
I’m not sure whether I would advise someone to do the same game again on LinkedIn, as it’s getting extremely crowded, but whatever channel you choose, always be clear about your ICP and follow this simple rule:
If what I’m writing/producing right now is not interesting for my ICP audience, I should probably not write it
Whether it’s lighthearted memes, practical tips, or facilitating discussions… stay on brand with your end vision.
I would also encourage people who have not done any consulting/advising work yet to dream big. You don’t need to go just for clients/audience that you have the skills/network for right now.
Anything that you can potentially learn is good enough. Even if you don’t know how at the moment.
For instance, in mid-2022, I had a goal in my personal yearly plan to get in front of 10 VCs just so they hear me speak and see how I think about Growth, a topic that I’m deeply passionate about.
Back then, I didn’t know a single VC, nor was my network well established with them. But I did go to people that were close to them… the CEO’s that I worked with at the time, and I seeded with them the idea that I would like to understand better what was happening in these board meetings.
In the process, I learned how the financials work, how M&As function (simply by showing interest in what’s happening at Smallpdf when we acquired another company), and how typical board meetings in tech are structured. (Which is where Investors typically sit)
All it took was an uncomfortable persistence and admitting that I had no idea about how any of it worked.
I slowly built my network out as a result, was able to look over the shoulders of incredibly talented people, and by mid-2023, I officially announced that I was part of Notion Capital’s portfolio Advisors in residence. A VC fund I got to know and loved working with when I was the Head of Product at Jua.ai while we were seeking funding at the seed stage.
This obviously helps me to get credibility in the market, and it’s a win-win relationship between them and me. They are the first ones I ask for advice on investment topics, and I’m sometimes on their call list when there’s a PLG problem coming up.
The network and word-of-mouth side of your business is equally, if not more important, than the number of followers you have on LinkedIn. It takes time and consistent effort to facilitate relationships with people.
Have friends. But different ones
A “mistake” I made back then was to focus too much on product people and CPOs to build my network.
It turns out that they were more my competition, which had little to offer that interested me. The true leap forward for me came when I started to learn and connect with cross-functional talents like salespeople, CMOs, CS leaders, and CEOs.
I found some of them through my podcast, who have now become genuine friends simply because we helped each other out. That became an unexpected source of networking power.
When you network, don’t ask others “Can I help you with anything ?” but rather ask them what their current challenges are, and if they have something that you can help with do it, or refer them to someone you feel like could even if it’s not going to be you in the end.
In summary, for the demand side:
Don’t gatekeep your knowledge.
Know where you want to go, even if you have no idea how. Tell everyone you know what you want. Doors will eventually open.
Don’t try to sell over your network, help it. Money follows as a consequence, but should rarely be the primary ask.
Offer - Your skills
What you offer as a person sometimes feels like a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. You can’t get all the experience without having some of the experience already. While that is true to some degree, I would encourage you to dig into what fascinates you and keeps you explicitly motivated.
I have a weird obsession with data, product & growth problems, and I know that because I don’t get tired of reading and listening about companies that deal with them.
It’s infinitely easier for me to learn about skills that are connected to that. And while all of this is a job at the end of the day, you will be tested in your endurance over time, and passion always sells over those that don’t have it.
It happened to me in the offer stages, and it was a big wake-up call to not even pitch for stuff that I’m not excited about.
Figuring out your gaps
Let’s look at the bottom part of that offering above:
I tried to sketch out what the knowledge is that I need in order to serve my clients well in the future. The colour tells you how confident I was at the time in my individual skills, red being bad.
This exercise turned out to be extremely helpful:
My experience was just limited in some of these areas, but I felt it they were important to serve my ICPs well. This was helpful because through the network I started to build up, I asked dedicated questions about these weaknesses of mine.
“How can I learn about this? How did you learn?”
Sometimes you get book recommendations, podcasts… blogs.
If someone recommends a great book, get a 2nd recommendation from the same person, if that one also hits you know where to go from now on.
Stick with people who make you smarter, who have the same taste, and try to help them as well. It doesn’t always have to be transactional; a ton of people in this industry are just glad to help out. In any case, don’t be shy to take them up on that offer.
It goes without saying that you should always hone your craft. Especially now, as everything gets shaken up, it’s important that you remain curious.
For instance, if you don’t use AI almost daily in some form or another, you won’t be able to know its limitations and useful applications, which will show in your advising work. And this particular topic will come up sooner or later.
Free mentorship/coaching
When I started out, I wanted to challenge myself (while suffering from an impostor syndrome) and offered free mentoring and coaching to select people on Reddit and platforms like Mentoring-club.com. It’s important that you’re not charging any money for these, so you can detach the personal skills that you need for them and any complications that come from money.
I realized quickly for myself that the type of problems I thought others had were very rarely what they actually struggled with. It gave me confidence in some areas that I didn’t have before, but also laid bare some clear skill gaps. (For instance, Team building, Strategy, Business Casing)
The cool thing is that there’s simply value in looking inside other companies and how broken they are. You can do that without talking to the CEO, just coaching a Senior Product Manager already gives you quite a lot of insights.
With time, you’ll start to get a feeling when it’s time to think about monetization and how much you should charge.
In summary, for the offer side:
Position yourself with your skills where your passion lies
Double down on people who make you smarter
Actively figure out your gaps by offering free services first
Monetization
How much you can and should charge is dependent on two factors:
Market supply, the rate ceiling
The inherent value of what you offer, your leverage.
Your time
Market Supply
It’s important that you understand, as a solopreneur, exactly who you are serving and who you do not serve. If you are a generic “product consultant,” you will always lose out against one that is well-positioned:
“Product IC consultant, for AI-Seed stage companies who are selling to Microcompanies”
Be a specialist in your positioning as much as you can. Most people think they cannot get paying clients because the market is not big enough, and then they make the fatal mistake by opening their definition up too much.
The truth is, you’re not getting clients because you’re not differentiated enough, and that market (and your network!) doesn’t perceive you as such.
Especially as companies pay more money for bigger problems, they need to have the immediate feeling that you are a specialist for them, not a generic run-of-the-mill person.
“Oh yeah, I can do all of that too if you want!” is not the sentence you want to be saying.
“That’s what I specialize in,” or “I can’t help you with that,” should be your go-to phrases.
Why?
Because if you’re interchangeable with another random LinkedIn bro, you will compete with their rates.
It doesn’t matter how good you are in that case, because the customer won’t be able to decide which person is better than the other one, and they don’t care either. They just take the cheaper one.
A specific example: a car mechanic is entrusted with one of the most valuable things you have to your name: your bodily safety while you’re driving a car.
The only reason why we don’t pay generic car mechanics the same exorbitant rates that we growth advisors in tech are because you could simply go to another one that will offer a comparable service. Even though a mechanic is probably responsible for more “important” work than a growth advisor.
Differentiation, therefore, raises the ceiling of your rates and what you can charge for your services at the max without getting underbid easily.
Leverage
Leverage is simply how much value you generate for your clients. I don’t target seed stages personally because the leverage that I can have in their companies is at that stage simply not big enough for the rate I want to charge.
A company needs to have a minimum size for me to have an outsized impact on all their teams.
For me, for instance, companies with less than ten million ARR are not able to pay for my services, even if they really want to work with me.
The business case they have to make internally to pay for my salary simply doesn’t pan out. A 10% uplift on a company with my PLG improvements in a 5 million ARR business is just 500k, whereas the same adjustments mean 5 million in uplift in a 50 million gig.
Time
You want to keep your time investment as low as possible while charging as much as possible. While that’s obvious, it’s easy to fall into the trap of negotiating your rates too much on your time side.
I have negotiated all kinds of terms with my clients in the last two years, but never the ratio between the amount of money I want and the time I offer for it. You can book my services for less money, but then my time will also be reduced.
Your rates have to pay for your entire top of funnel effort, the networking, and other things you do to handle clients. You also want to avoid that you become fully booked at bad rates.
It is very difficult initially to say no to things that pay well and trying to make them work, but it’s like when you’re dating. The honeymoon period will eventually end, and you’re in a situation where you're robbing yourself of your energy for other, more productive things (aka clients that fit you better, improving your skills).
Your “pricing page” & rates
The best way is to keep it simple and straightforward. Have simple, straightforward rates. (500$ / h is better than 238$ / h)
Retainers, so selling your availability to your clients per month, is superior to charging for every hour you invest.
It gives you more predictability and simplifies the relationship with your client by a lot. When you charge by the hour, you make your client think about interacting with you too much in ways that don’t really help.
However, depending on the work, clients might be interested in hourly pricing (or day rates). If that’s the case, it’s best practice to be extremely transparent and proactive towards your clients on what the agreed outcomes are, what your current priorities are at any time, and how much time has been used up already.
I use a Notion one-pager for that purpose, which I constantly update as the mandate goes on, so that the client can check up on me whenever they want.
Rate transparency, price negotiation
I started over a year ago to make (almost) all my rates transparent:
While it was uncomfortable in the beginning, I’m not looking back.
Since then, I refer people who didn’t see it to that page, and those who have seen it know exactly what it will cost them to engage with me.
At the very least, think about pricing beforehand, structure it in a clean and straightforward form as a handout, so you can send it out at any time.
The most basic engagement terms should include:
How much does a typical engagement cost with you
How long does a typical engagement last
What a typical engagement includes from your side (Advisory vs. coaching vs. interim)
Consider explaining whatever term you use, people have a different definition of all these terms.
Whether there is a minimum engagement time (I don’t have any)
Keep it simple, my first one-pager was chock-full of disclaimers and unnecessary stuff. No one cares about the details.
You work those out in conversations.
In summary, for the monetization side:
Say no to things you don’t specialize in.
Treat your time just as valuable as your rates.
Keep your “pricing page” simple
Outlook 2025 & AI
The playbook is still largely the same as it was years ago when you tried to become a solopreneur, with a few exceptions.
While you can still advise and be a solopreneur on a lot of classical topics, there are a lot of new topics and problems coming due to the current AI shift, for instance:
Monetization: Seat-based pricing used to be the gold standard for a lot of SaaS companies, but now they experiment with more outcome-based pricing, which is a largely new field in relation to AI-Agents.
AI-Disruption Business case: A lot of companies cannot afford to be disrupted by an AI incumbent that does what they do much better. Someone needs to help them figure out whether what they do is still defensible.
AI-ready products and data: Most companies have to be ready for other AI products. This requires their data to be clean and usable/accessible by these future products.
I don’t think it’s necessary to become extremely knowledgeable on the technical layer of AI, but there is definitely value in playing with AI products in depth as much as you can.
In general, the monetizable aspect of a solopreneur going forward will be where AI has little to no access and can’t automate it:
Anything that involves humans and qualitative customer insights
Obscure, specific vertical business problems
The value of your own network in bringing expertise to a business (hiring help, sourcing good candidates, etc.)
Further Reading
How I ended up with my specific rates and how it’s structured, I recommend this article:
My specific jump-off point to go full solopreneur:
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Well written and expressed Leah.
Working freelance more than 10 years, I can easily agree with your remarks. It is totally true and everybody who wants to enter Freelance or Entrepreneurship waters needs to hear your frank and professional advice's on this important topic
> Your rates have to pay for your entire top of funnel effort, the networking, and other things you do to handle clients. You also want to avoid that you become fully booked at bad rates.
I needed to read this when I started with solopreneurship a couple of years ago 😅 - thanks for sharing and being transparent on pricing, it's one of the most common questions people have when looking into solopreneurship!