New businesses entering the club get grouped into the revenue range of $1 million and $2.5 million, and that range grew about 8% in 2024. Two groups grew much faster. Money people (think: investing, insurance and real estate) grew about 20% while advisers and consultants grew about 11%!

Last time, I wrote about the 117,000 businesses that cleared $1 million on hard mode and had been doing it for decades. That number is now 126,000, netting the second-best growth year on record, right behind the post-COVID boom of 2021!

People treated the post-COVID era like a fluke, an outlier year that would never happen again. Well, we're not only back to similar levels seen during the time the world rebounded, but I think the growth of the $1M+ category will only increase significantly in the years to come!

Now let’s double-click into the coder segment. In 2024, there were actually 2.5% less solo coders in business than in 2023, while consultants grew by about 10% year over year!

I think we will continue to see growth across technical categories in the higher revenue bands as people leverage AI to take them to new heights, but as the technology has largely automated much of the lower-level work, you can see how the lower end has started to stall. And, I believe this same trend is what is contributing to the non-technical categories being able to pull ahead. Because they no longer need the same support and resources to build as they might've needed before.

And the trend is only speeding up. In 2024, America added 1.56 million businesses with no employees, the most in a single year since the Census started counting them in 1997! This year, applications to start a professional services business are up about 30% with 94% of them not planning to hire any employees.

Early adopters of AI are getting the advantage, and non-technical people are the ones moving up.

My moonshot bet: I truly believe there will be 10 times as many $1 million solopreneurs in 10 years. That would be more than 1 million businesses generating $1 million.

How am I so confident? Well one of the things I can’t get over is how the line behind them is getting longer and the time to get there is compressing. The $500,000 to $1 million range grew to 440,000 business in 2024 (up over 7% vs. 2.1% the year before).

AI isn't a coder's game anymore. If you think it isn't for you, read that 40 to 1 again: for every coder who got into the club, 40 people like you and me did.

It's still super early. So be honest: what's holding you back?

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, 2024 Nonemployer Statistics release

• Census Nonemployer Statistics API, 2023 and 2024

• Census Business Formation Statistics, monthly, not seasonally adjusted

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Ledger 1 holds: what you can do, the skills, the reps, and the years it took to build.

Ledger 2 holds: how many people know that you can do it.

For a hundred years, the work did the talking. You kept your head down, did great work, built expertise, and before long the right people noticed. Most of us were raised on some version of that, and it wasn't wrong.

It worked for so long that almost nobody bothered to maintain the second ledger at all. That world ended, and the one replacing it punishes people that did nothing wrong.

Good Work is the Entry Fee

Doing better work than your competition used to garner praise and help your reputation. But, now with the help of AI, the people who used to be considered average use tools to punch significantly above their weight class.

The clearest study I could find on what that means comes from a software company that gave an AI assistant to over 5,000 customer support reps. The least-skilled cohort (~1,000 individuals) resolved 36% more issues per hour, whereas the most-skilled cohort (~1,000 individuals) saw no significant change.

Read that again. The best people didn't get better. Everyone else got closer to them. But, that's one job at one company. Let's look at a different kind of work.

In a different online experiment, 453 professionals (marketers, consultants, grant writers, HR people and others) got short writing tasks. Half of them, picked at random, were shown ChatGPT and told they could use it. That half finished 40% faster, and their work was graded 18% better, and the authors reported that inequality between workers decreased. These are people who sell their thinking for a living, and the same thing happened to them.

The direction is hard to miss. Good skills used to set you apart. Now a whole class of people who were previously considered average have tools that bring their output close to yours. Your skills didn't get worse; they got commoditized.

Good work still matters, but not in the way that it used to. In this new game, it pays your entry fee, but no longer provides the competitive advantage. So, now that you're in the game, what are you going to do about it? How do you win?

Visibility is Capital

As Ledger 1 has quietly dropped in value, Ledger 2 has compounded, while no one sent out a memo saying the rules of the game were changing.

Historically, a resume proved competence. It was an instrument used as a proxy for credibility prior to you entering the room. But, its fatal flaw? It could never produce trust. And, in today's world, trust has become the silver bullet to pierce through the noise. How do you build trust?

Investing in Ledger 2.

So, what goes into it? Proof. Receipts. Stories. Projects you published, interviews you recorded, things you put your name on and stood behind. Ledger 2 grows every time your words end up somewhere outside of your own head.

Let's bring it into a business context and see how it plays out in the numbers. In a recent study, a team of economists studied bars and restaurants in Texas, using the state's own tax records to track revenue. Roughly 18% of them weren't listed on Yelp. When a business got added, its revenue rose somewhere between 5% and 10% without doing anything different.

Same Ledger 1. Different Ledger 2.

Think about who reads Ledger 2. Anyone deciding to hire you for your services before the first call, before the first meeting, before they ever need what you sell. It doesn't matter if you're an employee, a freelancer, or a business owner with a team of twenty or a team of one. The entire world around you looks for Ledger 2 as a prerequisite to doing business.

If yours was empty, do you think that'd afford their trust? Or do you think they'd look for a different solution that did?

If you're anything like me, you went “all in” building Ledger 1 and thinking that your work would do the talking. Now that I'm on the other side of it - I can confidently say that was the most expensive mistake that I have ever made.

My Trophy Mantel

I founded Novo in 2016 and I ran it as CEO for the first nine years. I raised over $170 million from venture capitalists (VCs) and built a team of more than 150 people across three continents. Our core banking product served over 250,000 small businesses spread across all fifty states.

Through it all, LinkedIn was another box to check after we got recognition. It was my trophy mantel that I could point to and make my parents proud!

Sure - that's how most people use it. You post when you earn the credential, land the job, hit the milestone, win the client. By default, I posted about our funding rounds, awards, and growth milestones.

“Look, Mom! I raised some money. Don't I deserve a gold star?”

What I never posted about were the things that others would find more value in. Like the countless times that I failed throughout my journey. The decisions, the mistakes, the times I fell down and how I got back up. That was the part someone a few years behind me could have used, and I kept it all to myself.

I thought building a personal brand was a distraction from the real work. The company was the asset and it required 100% of my attention.

The strange part is that in the early days, I'd learn almost anything the job asked of me. I mean if I didn't do it - then who would? Strategy. The numbers. When we needed design, I picked up Illustrator. When something needed testing, I learned how to QA. I'd learn anything to further the business except how to build my own name.

Everything I put in went into the company's ledger. The learnings, the decisions, the mistakes, the opinions. All of it had Novo's name on it. None of it had mine.

"What Do You Do?”

After my daughter was born, my wife and I decided that I'd step back from day-to-day operations and we'd take a year sabbatical.

About six months into the sabbatical, the weight of the trade finally caught up with me. At first, it happened like a slow leak from the faucet. But, over time it became something that I couldn't stop thinking about. Someone would ask, “What do you do?” And every time, the only answer I had was “Novo.”

I pointed at a company. That was Ledger 1.

What I actually did during that time, how I thought, what I'd learned, what I stood for during tough times, all of that should have lived in Ledger 2, but there was nothing there for me to point at because I thought it was a distraction.

The thing I had actively decided against was the only thing that nobody could take away from me.

Finally contributing to Ledger 2

If I could speak to my younger self, I would physically force him to build his personal brand no matter how much of a “distraction” he thought it might be.

Not because the company mattered less. But because of the thousands of people that could have benefited from what I was learning along the way, and I kept all of it in a ledger with someone else's name on it.

Everyone has an audience they can't see yet. Even if that's just someone like your younger self, on a similar journey, trying to learn through the things you share about yours.

After running a company for almost a decade, I filled Ledger 1. The advice I grew up on that worked for a hundred years, I thought would have worked for me because I built my company from nothing. But, now I'm playing catch-up after missing 10 years of compounding growth.

I couldn't be more excited about getting back into the arena.

Partially because I think this is the best time in history for builders. But, also because I am on a mission to fix my Ledger 2 and it feels great to be a beginner again.

After not having invested in my personal brand, it feels like I'm starting from zero. Allowing my curiosity to steer has been a refreshing experience and has felt like the early days of Novo, except this time, the priority is Ledger 2.

Thankfully, my LinkedIn 'trophy-posting era' gave me 4,000 followers to work from, but it could have been 40,000+ if I had done it right the first time.

I'm starting my Ledger 2 now, in public. The learnings this time, not the trophies. Start building your Ledger 2 with me. Subscribe and follow along!

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The entrepreneur who gets started today gets to play a completely different game.

Who are they

They are not who you’d picture.

Top industries by number of firms crossing $1 million with no employees:

If you are anything like me - you might’ve expected to see more tech-driven categories with folks wearing Converse and hoodies - but - it’s quite the opposite. Professional services might lead, but what came after surprised me. It’s made up of more traditional categories that usually don’t get much attention.

When you zoom to the highest-end of the spectrum (firms clearing $5 million or more), you’ll find the majority of them are made up of financiers and entertainment. So, money and fame; no surprise there, I guess.

But, they took a long time to get there. For about two thirds of them, it’s taken more than a decade (and for half of those businesses, it took more than two decades!).

In 2023 there were 30.4 million nonemployers. Out of that, 117,060 businesses made over a million. About 1 in 260. Most nonemployers are tiny, so this cohort gives us something to shoot for.

That's what the map looks like. Now here's what it cost to walk it.

What hard mode actually required

Hard mode: building a business that cleared seven figures with no employees, without AI. No leverage, no headcount, limited tools. And, a decade or more to do it. Every function inside your own capability, and everything outside it paid for with other people’s time.

Although I haven’t built a $1M+ independent business myself (yet), I know what that boundary feels like, because I spent nine years building my last company the old way.

I was the business guy, so my boundary of what I could and couldn’t do was pretty clear to me (even though it felt like it was ever-expanding). Started with the typical things like strategy (brand positioning and all of the other fun stuff that we love to think about but doesn’t get us very far) and numbers (modeling, accounting, payments, and counting beans). When I needed design, I taught myself Illustrator. When my co-founder asked me to QA something, I first had to look up what that even meant, but then I taught myself how to do it and then did it - no questions asked. When I needed something more niche, I had to learn it from zero. If it was learnable in a reasonable amount of time, I learned it... because if I didn’t, then who would?

Outside my boundary was software development. I could have learned to code, but what I couldn’t do was figure out how it’d be worth it. For me - I thought the learning curve was too steep, the time to competence too long, and the cost of that time too high against everything else the business needed from me - especially in the early days. The math said no, and, in the end, the math was right.

Here’s what I’d tell you now that I didn’t fully appreciate then. Now that I can reflect back on that time, I see the boundary as a highly beneficial. It set my scope. It killed a hundred tempting ideas before I wasted a week on them, because they were outside the line and someone else’s job. My limitations made the decisions for me, and I got to spend my hours on the work that only I could do instead of on choosing the work.

Development was a dependency, so we built a team around it. That team, and everything else about running Novo the old way, is a story for a different piece.

What matters here is the boundary itself. I ran a company the old way, with a team and a clear sense of where my own limits were. Then I stepped back from running it and took a sabbatical with my wife and daughter in August 2025.

But, now that I’m getting back into the arena and dusting off my previous capabilities, things feel different. When I looked at that same boundary again, it wasn’t where it had been.

Same person. Same limits. Different physics.

So why is any of this about to change?

Why hard mode is over

The work didn’t disappear. It moved inside the boundary.

The dependency that used to force a hire is now something I can work with directly. Historically, the path from idea to product was typically owned by an engineer. And, if you weren’t an engineer then you had to find one to help you through that journey. Now with AI, not only has the distance between idea and product compressed, but also has the need for external resources other than you.

The line that used to make a decision for me wasn’t in the same place anymore. This has been both the most liberating and terrifying experience of my adult life, because I can do anything now.

Let’s get clear on something - I’m no AI expert. But, I am a recovering startup founder that has developed a strong curiosity. I’ve worked with a lot of tools and spent some real money exploring through them.

I won’t tell you AI can run a business for you. Anyone selling something like that is optimizing for views and probably shouldn’t be listened to anyway (I only mention that because I listened to them for far too long and that’s why I’m going to be writing about it). AI accelerates the idea and it can accelerate the business when implemented thoughtfully with clear goals, context, and guard rails. It does not (and cannot) do it all for you while you sit back and put your feet up. That’s a dream and that’ll never happen, at least probably not before the robots take over anyway.

Here’s the part I’m still working out though. When you feel like you can do anything, you should not do everything. For me - I don’t have the same boundary signaling what I can and cannot do. The constraint that used to organize my time is gone, and the discipline it imposed has to come from me now.

That’s the blessing and the curse. The work got cheaper, but the choosing got more expensive. In this new game, the choice is what matters most and the advantage goes to the person who moves first.

Why you're still early

Only 3% of these businesses are 0 to 2 years old. That isn’t because young businesses can’t do it. It’s because the old path took more than a decade.

That is the proof of how early this new game still is. You are not late to a crowded field. You are early to a field that just opened and it is being defined in real-time. No matter how many AI gurus you hear on TikTok - everyone is still trying to figure it out and, more importantly, everyone is struggling to keep up.

Real talk: hard mode might be over and timelines will be quicker, but that doesn’t mean we are entering into the “easy mode” era. The work is still yours. You still need something worth building, the willingness to do it yourself, and the tolerance for doing it badly for longer than you’d like. AI will never replace that.

The next few years will produce a new cohort of businesses that looks nothing like the one from before. The tools exist, the playbooks are public, and the reasons requiring external hires are falling fast. The people who start riding this wave now won’t look early. When looking back in 10 years, they’ll look obvious.

I don’t have this all figured out. I haven’t built a $1M+ independent business myself (not yet at least). But I know it’s the most interesting topic in business right now, and I’d rather see what I can do in the arena than watch from the sidelines!

Start now

The 117,000 businesses proved something while playing a completely different game. No AI, no leverage, limited tools, no support. Every one of them built it anyway. They started with something they wanted to build and did the work under conditions significantly worse than today and continued to do it for a long time.

I challenge you to get started today. Get started by doing the smallest thing that you could think of to get you on the path. Watch that podcast, read that book, build that website, or write that draft. Whatever it is - just start the thing and come back to it again tomorrow and do it again.

If you’re building something of your own, I’d love to hear about it. I read everything, and I’m genuinely curious what people are starting right now.

Onwards and Upwards!

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, 2023 Nonemployer Statistics, released May 15, 2025. census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2023-nonemployer-statistics.html

• Other Census data found via the Census API.

• Federal Reserve Banks, "2026 Chartbook on Nonemployer Firms" July 2026. doi.org/10.55350/sbcs-20260707