Author :
Diana Sharma
And why we think the one-person venture is the mostinteresting thing happening in tech right now
There's a conversation Alan and I have had at least fiftytimes over the past year. It usually starts the same way. Someone tells usabout an idea they've been carrying around for months, sometimes years. They'regenuinely good ideas. They've thought hard about them. And then comes the linethat ends it:
"I just need to find a technical co-founder."
That sentence used to make sense. For a long time it wassimply true. If you couldn't build software and you wanted to start a softwarebusiness, you needed someone who could, and you needed to convince them to workfor equity while you both lived on nothing.
We don't think that's true anymore. And we've built aprogramme around what replaced it.
The statisticians had to change their assumptions
Here's my favourite detail in all of this, because it tellsyou the shift is real rather than a LinkedIn mood.
Until 2022, the US Census Bureau assumed that any businessearning above a certain revenue threshold must have employees. If a businessdeclared itself a solo operation and then crossed that income line, the Bureauautomatically reclassified it as an employer. It simply did not believe oneperson could earn that much alone.
By the early 2020s that assumption had broken. The Bureaunoticed solo operators generating substantial revenue and pointedly not hiring,so in 2022 it raised the thresholds. The counts of high-earning one-personbusinesses immediately skyrocketed. They had been there the whole time. Themeasuring instrument was the thing that was wrong.
That's the moment I'd point to if someone asked me when thesolopreneur stopped being a fallback and became a category.
The numbers since then are the part that made us move
Stripe's economics team published an analysis in June thatwe've read more times than is probably healthy.
The number of solopreneurs earning over $1 million a yearmore than doubled between 2023 and 2025. At the $5 million and $10 millionthresholds, close to three times as many crossed the line. And critically, itisn't just the raw count going up. The share of solopreneurs clearingthose thresholds has also doubled in two years, which tells you this isn't aflood of hopeful experiments producing a few lucky outliers. The newer cohortsare genuinely better than the ones before them.
Underneath that, roughly four million Americans were alreadyearning their primary income as solopreneurs generating over $100,000 a year asat 2023, up from the mid two-million range in the early 2010s.
Meanwhile, new US business applications have beenaccelerating since late 2024, but almost none of that lift is coming frombusinesses likely to hire anyone. Traditional employer-business formation hasstayed flat. The entire surge is one-person ventures.
This isn't only an American story either. Since 2017, newbusiness registrations have risen roughly 40% in Australia, 70% in Finland and80% in France, with the sharpest acceleration in 2025 alone. In France, wherethe data breaks down further, it's driven overwhelmingly by solo foundersrather than traditional firms.
And the identity has shifted alongside the filings. LinkedInhas recorded a 69% jump in people adding "founder" to their profile.Forty-seven percent say AI makes them more likely to start a business.
Closer to home
New Zealand's version of this is quieter but it's the sameshape.
Stats NZ counts around 422,751 self-employed New Zealanders,about 15.2% of the workforce, and 74% of our 617,330 enterprises have no paidemployees at all. The Self Employment Report from Hnry and the SimplicityResearch Hub, released in July, found that self-employed Kiwis now generate 17%of GDP, roughly $78 billion a year, and that the sector is growing faster thanthe economy overall.
Faster than the economy overall. That's the line I keepcoming back to.
Why now, specifically
Stripe's team put their finger on something that I think isthe whole argument, so I'll paraphrase it closely.
The reason businesses were historically built by groups isthat one person rarely holds all the skills the job requires. Sizing a market.Writing the code. Pricing the product. Running a campaign. Closing the deal.When you couldn't do one of those, you found a human who could, and that humanneeded paying or needed equity.
AI now fills a meaningful number of those gaps. Not all ofthem, and not perfectly. But enough of them that the threshold at which you'reforced to bring someone on keeps climbing. Sam Altman's phrasing for this erawas "revenge of the idea guys", which is glib but not wrong.
Except there's a ceiling, and we kept watching people hitit
This is where our programme actually comes from, so bearwith me.
AI builders have genuinely dissolved the first barrier.Around 63% of people using vibe coding tools have no developer background. J.P.Morgan documented a case where a $500,000 development agency quote became a$1,000 vibe-coded prototype for early validation. That is an extraordinarychange and we're not here to talk anyone out of it. We use those toolsourselves.
But a prototype is not a product, and the failure pattern isdull in its predictability. Someone builds something impressive over a weekend.It demos beautifully. Then real users show up and it falls over. One case in2026 saw a platform collapse under fifty concurrent users because errorhandling had never been engineered and database locking had never beenconsidered. The AI had optimised for the happy path, and the happy path was theonly thing that worked.
Founders who get through that stage generally do one ofthree things. Find a technical co-founder after all. Pay for a rebuild. Or keepthe scope so small it never has to carry weight.
We think there's a fourth option and nobody is reallyoffering it. You learn enough to own it yourself.
Not enough to become a software engineer. Enough to readwhat the AI wrote, judge whether it's any good, fix it when it isn't, and makearchitectural decisions on purpose rather than by accident.
That's the whole programme in one sentence.
One more number, because it matters
Forty-one percent of founders running companies less thantwo years old say they plan to hire in the next quarter.
I like that statistic because it punctures the ideology.Solo isn't a religion. It's a starting position, and increasingly a viable one.Some of these ventures will stay one person forever by choice. Others will hirethe moment it makes sense. The point isn't never having a team. The point isthat you no longer need one before you're allowed to start.
Who this is actually for
We've deliberately built it so four quite different peoplecan sit in the same cohort and each get what they came for.
The entrepreneur with an idea and no way to build it.You've been waiting for a technical co-founder, or getting quotes you can'tjustify. Ten weeks from now you'll have a tested product you built andunderstand, and the judgement to decide what comes next without asking anyone'spermission.
The side hustler building around a job. Software isone of the few side hustles that isn't trading hours for dollars. The programmeis self-directed by design, with an on-demand library open from day one, so itfits around shift work, school pickup and a full-time role. Your weekly mentorsession is the rhythm, not a timetable you fall behind on.
The vibe coder who's hit the ceiling. You've builtsomething in Lovable or Replit or Bolt. It half works. You can't fix it when itbreaks and you can't explain it to anyone technical. This is the step afterthe AI builder, not an alternative to it. Same tools, plus the architectureunderneath them and a working developer who reviews your code properly.
The intrapreneur inside an organisation. Not everyonewants to leave their job. Some of the best ventures start as a solution to aproblem you see every day at work. Being the person who can prototype thething, cost it honestly and speak credibly to the engineering team is a rareposition to hold. Gartner expects citizen developers to outnumber professionalengineers four to one by 2028. Being a good one rather than a dangerous one isabout to matter a great deal.
What we're excited about
The three-mentor model, most of all. Go back to that Stripeinsight: one person rarely holds all the skills. AI closes some of that gap andhuman beings close the rest. So you get ten one-to-one sessions rotating acrossa technologist, a product specialist and a business operator, because asolopreneur has to be all three and nobody is born good at all three.
We're excited that the assessment is a pitch, not an exam.You present your venture, demo what you built, and explain the decisions youmade and why. It's assessed against NZQA Level 6 criteria by a Category 1provider, so the credential is real. But the thing you walk out with thatmatters most is the product.
We're excited about being a Foundation Partner of AucklandStartup Week, and about the session Alan and I are running on 14 October. We'llbe announcing something there we're keeping quiet about for now. If you'rethinking of applying, come along.
And I'm excited, and slightly terrified, that I'm enrollingin the founding cohort myself. Paying my own way, same as everyone else. I'mthe non-technical co-founder of an education company that teaches people tobuild software and I've never built any. That seems like precisely the personwho should be testing whether this works. I'll be posting weekly, including theweeks it goes badly.
The founding cohort
Ten weeks. Starts 19 October. Auckland and online. Placesare limited, it's the first cohort, and both the pricing and the attentionyou'll get from us reflect that.
If you've been waiting for a technical co-founder, considerthis your permission to stop waiting.
Own what's next.
Ngā mihi, Diana
Sources: Stripe Economics, The Age of theSolopreneur (June 2026); The Peak, Solopreneur businesses are on therise (July 2026); Entrepreneur, Solopreneurship Is Set to Hit a RecordHigh in 2026 (January 2026); US Census Bureau Nonemployer Statistics andBusiness Formation Statistics; Stats NZ Household Labour Force Survey; Hnry andSimplicity Research Hub Self Employment Report (July 2026); Gartner citizendeveloper projections.
Applications are open now: New Zealand:https://www.missionreadyhq.com/become/tech-solopreneur and Australia: atlearn.missionready.academy/technical-solopreneur