It depends on the skill level. A one person company is called a consultant, basically a person who is willing to do the things in the company that no one wants to do whether they are easy or hard. There is an irony in this. Often the more people don't want to do the thing in question, the more the consultant gets paid.
Agree. A consultant with pricing power is very different from a disguised employee. The line seems to be whether you can set terms, choose clients, and build leverage.
It depends. For drivers, it’s basically been captured.
For say, peer-to-peer car or vacation rental (e.g. Turo, Airbnb) you have some one man companies but the top hosts on the platform is usually an established company often with a staff of employees.
It’s not until you tap through to see they have tens of thousands of trips, dozens of cars in each city, etc.
So when you say Uber driver - it may work in the “driver” category only. In pretty much the rest of the gig economy there is a lot of room for both solopreneuers and SMB.
The “gig economy” may well end up just being “the economy”.
My solo SaaS just hit $400k ARR after about 15 months, and I've sold 99% of the customers via a sales call. So it can be done, but I have to say, it's pretty grueling. And my sales calls are basically a dream come true: ~50% of them have the customer giving me their card for a trial in less than 10 mins. Another 10-20% sign up within the following few weeks.
Despite the success, I'm trying to pivot to self-serve now, because I'm definitely the biggest growth bottleneck, and I honestly dread every single call.
All that said, I think there's another HUGE reason to do sales calls: you learn a ton. I've talked with hundreds of customers and potential customers over the last year, and I've learned so much about their businesses and the niche, I think it would have been really difficult for me to do this with self-serve from the start.
For say, peer-to-peer car or vacation rental (e.g. Turo, Airbnb) you have some one man companies but the top hosts on the platform is usually an established company often with a staff of employees.
It’s not until you tap through to see they have tens of thousands of trips, dozens of cars in each city, etc.
So when you say Uber driver - it may work in the “driver” category only. In pretty much the rest of the gig economy there is a lot of room for both solopreneuers and SMB.
The “gig economy” may well end up just being “the economy”.
Despite the success, I'm trying to pivot to self-serve now, because I'm definitely the biggest growth bottleneck, and I honestly dread every single call.
All that said, I think there's another HUGE reason to do sales calls: you learn a ton. I've talked with hundreds of customers and potential customers over the last year, and I've learned so much about their businesses and the niche, I think it would have been really difficult for me to do this with self-serve from the start.
but the saas unicorns, or 100 person, 10 person saas company are def. under threat.