America is quietly filling up with one-person businesses. Not startups chasing venture funding, not franchises with staff and storefronts — just individuals running real, revenue-generating companies on their own. This shift has been building for years, but it’s accelerated fast enough that it now deserves a name of its own: the solopreneur economy.
Most people still picture entrepreneurship as a founder building a team. That picture is outdated. The dominant new business in America today has exactly one owner and often nobody else. That changes everything about how these businesses get their marketing done, because a solopreneur can’t hire a marketing department. They need something else entirely.
This article looks at how big the solopreneur economy actually is, why it’s growing, and what that growth means for demand in marketing services.
The Numbers Behind the Solopreneur Boom
The U.S. now has 29.8 million solopreneurs generating $1.7 trillion in annual revenue, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2025 nonemployer business data — accounting for 6.8% of total U.S. economic output and roughly 81.9% of all small businesses in the country. That’s not a side economy. That’s the majority structure of American small business.
Growth hasn’t slowed down either. Nonemployer establishments — businesses with no paid employees other than the owner — grew 4.9% in 2021 and 4.7% in 2022 as the post-pandemic surge took hold, and continued climbing 2.1% in 2023, per Census Bureau nonemployer statistics released in 2025. There were 30.4 million nonemployer businesses generating $1.8 trillion in receipts as of the most recent Census data.
Solo Founders Are Now the Default, Not the Exception
The share of new businesses started by a single founder has jumped dramatically. New startups launched by a single founder rose from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025, a 53% increase in just six years, according to 2025 solopreneur economy research cited by Stripe Economics. Full-time self-employment hit its highest level on record in 2025, with roughly 16.77 million Americans self-employed, per the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council’s 2026 analysis of BLS data.
This isn’t a fringe lifestyle choice anymore. It’s become the default way a meaningful share of Americans choose to build income and independence, and the trend line points in one direction: up.
Solopreneurs Are Profitable, Not Just Persistent
The narrative that solo businesses are marginal side hustles doesn’t match the data. The same U.S. Census Bureau nonemployer data cited above — $1.7 trillion in annual receipts spread across 29.8 million solopreneurs — points to a population that includes a meaningful share of owners clearing real, sustainable income without ever hiring staff. These are real businesses generating real income — they just don’t look like the traditional company-with-a-staff model.
That profitability creates a specific problem: a solopreneur who’s growing fast enough to need professional marketing but has no intention of building an internal team to do it.
Why Solopreneurs Can’t Just “Do Their Own Marketing”
A one-person business has exactly one person’s worth of time, and that time is already spoken for. The owner is the salesperson, the service deliverer, the bookkeeper, and the customer support line — all before they get to marketing. Something has to give, and marketing is usually the first thing that gets deprioritized because it doesn’t feel as urgent as the client work sitting in front of them.
This is exactly why solopreneurs increasingly turn to outside help instead of trying to do everything themselves:
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More than 4 in 10 solopreneurs (43.5%) pay at least one contractor, and that share rises sharply among higher earners, according to Gusto’s 2026 solopreneur economy research.
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A majority of solopreneurs who do outsource — 61% — work with two or more contractors rather than just one.
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Creative work, which includes graphic design, content creation, and marketing, is the single most commonly outsourced category at 27.2%, per the same Gusto research.
Solopreneurs aren’t avoiding marketing. They’re outsourcing it, because that’s the only version of “having a marketing function” that fits inside a one-person operation.
The Demand Signal for Marketing Services Is Structural, Not Temporary
This isn’t a passing trend that reverses when the economy shifts. The Census Bureau’s own multi-year nonemployer figures — steady annual growth since 2021, not a single-year spike — point to a structural increase in solo business activity rather than a temporary blip. Delaware business incorporations — a leading indicator of new company formation — grew roughly 40% year over year since early 2025, according to Stripe Economics’ 2025 solopreneur research.
Every one of those new solo businesses eventually hits the same wall: they need visibility, a website, search presence, and a way to generate leads, but they don’t have the bandwidth to build any of it themselves. That wall is where marketing services demand comes from, and it’s being rebuilt fresh, every year, by millions of new one-person companies.
What This Shift Means for Anyone Selling Marketing Services
The solopreneur economy has created a client base that’s large, growing, and structurally dependent on outside help. These aren’t corporate accounts that already have an in-house marketing team and a procurement process. They’re individual owners who need someone to just handle it — SEO, a real website, social presence, ad campaigns — without adding headcount or learning a new skill set themselves.
That’s a fundamentally different sales conversation than pitching a company with 50 employees. It’s also a much larger and faster-growing pool of potential clients, given that solopreneurs now make up over 80% of small businesses in the U.S.
A Market This Size Doesn’t Stay Quiet Long
$1.7 trillion in solopreneur-generated revenue is not a number that gets ignored by the broader economy for long. The businesses generating that revenue need marketing partners who understand their constraints: no internal team, limited time, and a real need to look credible against competitors who might have more resources. As a RedKnight franchisee, you build relationships with exactly this population of business owners in your area. RedKnight’s corporate team delivers the marketing execution — SEO, website design, PPC, social media, and content — so you can focus entirely on sales and client relationships rather than trying to build a delivery team from scratch.
The solopreneur economy isn’t a niche worth watching. It’s already the majority of small business in America, and it needs marketing help at a scale that’s still being built out.
Ready to serve this growing market?
The solopreneur economy is one of the fastest-growing client bases in American small business, and it needs marketing partners who can execute without adding to their workload. RedKnight Franchising’s “You Sell, We Build” model lets you focus on relationships with these business owners while RedKnight’s corporate team delivers the marketing execution.
The free e-book digs further into where this demand is heading and who is positioned to serve it.
If serving this market as an owner interests you, inquire about ownership.