The "Prosumer"

Hello again my friend,

It really feels like the idea of what a “big, successful business” has changed.

It used to mean thousands of employees all over the world, big offices…the whole ‘luxury’ vibe. It’s still a thing and when I say ‘change,’ I’m not suggesting it’s over. But we also have people working alone building businesses that make $30M a year now.

If anything, people are looking at companies with 8,000 employees, and asking “what do you need 8,000 employees for?” I’ve caught myself doing it with digital businesses like agencies or software companies.

What sucks is that in most cases, they probably don’t need that many employees anymore.

These are companies where changing an icon has to go through managers, and their managers, and a director who takes it to a committee, etc. Funny enough, employees fighting for a 3% raise there have everything they need to create a competing company (or complementary company, we don’t have to be cynical).

So many people are doing this that there’s a growing trend where the consumer is becoming the company. A “prosumer.”

Someone who is still a consumer in every normal way, but is also quietly producing. Selling something. Publishing something. Part individual, part business, and badly served by software built for either one.

They will still have jobs. They will still buy groceries. They will still scroll TikTok when they should be sleeping. They will still be consumers in all the normal ways people are consumers. But more of them will also have a side hustle, audience, shop, newsletter, service, course, paid community, Etsy store, consulting offer, digital product, AI workflow, or some weird little internet business that makes money in the background.

And once that happens, the line between "consumer" and "business customer" starts to get messy. So does the line between "small business" and "serious company."

For a long time, the mental image of a business person was still corporate. Suit, office, staff, assistant, meetings, expense reports, all of it. Then it became the founder in a hoodie on a laptop. Now it is going even further: one person alone for weeks at a time, building, selling, automating, testing, and operating from anywhere.

That person might not look like a business.

But they might spend like one.

Let's lock in.

Younger people are not waiting for the old career ladder to give them everything.

Axios reported that 57% of Gen Z now has a side gig, compared with 21% of boomers and older generations, citing The Harris Poll, which called Gen Z America's first true "side hustle" generation.

That number is wild, but it also makes sense. The old promise (school, job, house, etc.) isn’t true anymore, and the world is harder to navigate.

Forget housing. The beef and potatoes I bought from the grocery store last night cost 50% more than last year. Maybe my grocery math is dramatic, but the feeling is real: people need more money, and jobs are not exactly falling out of the sky.

Citizens surveyed more than 2,300 U.S. adults aged 18-34 and found that 67% had pursued an entrepreneurial venture, including 24% with a side hustle or gig work outside their primary job.

Maybe they don’t want to be "small business owners" in the traditional sense. No office, employees, payroll, inventory, etc. They just want a thing that is theirs.

And for that, they have much higher purchasing power, they can also use and buy business tools/software, but there’s no committee. There’s no 10 layers of cake to cut through to do something.

That is the prosumer.

Yeah, but we’re seeing it more now. For years, starting something was expensive (easy to forget). You needed money, maybe help, like a designer or a developer. The first few customers were so important you’d hire people to help. Maybe you needed an office. But now you can do everything from a laptop and it’s expected/accepted.

The cost of trying has clearly fallen.

A May 2026 working paper looked at more than 160,000 Product Hunt launches and found that entrepreneurial entry increased sharply after ChatGPT-3.5, driven disproportionately by solo entrepreneurs.

On Tuesday, Axios reported that research from the newly launched Nasdaq Economic Institute linked a surge in one-person business formations to generative AI and agentic coding tools. Applications from one-person firms have risen more than 20% since early 2025, while applications from companies likely to hire workers have been mostly flat. They’re not trying to build a billion-dollar company in every case. $20,000 a month is life-changing to the average person.

AI lowers the floor, not the ceiling.

It makes it easier to start. It does not make it easy to win.

That is still a huge change. The person with a half-formed idea can now make the first version. The freelancer can now be an agency. The creator can be a media company. The local business can now market itself better without hiring a full team.

There are probably 50 pieces of software that can help you get the first version of a business up and running before dinner. A Shopify store, a beehiiv newsletter, a payment link, a logo, scheduling, contracts, invoices, ads, content, customer support, basic automation.

This is more practical for people considering pursuing something.

For one person to do every single thing is so hard. Even if the tech is cheap and you don’t need employees per se, it’s still so much work.

So you talk to ChatGPT for help and it helps. But realistically, even if the goals are smaller, you will need AI to do things for you. To buy the groceries, or access its own tools, something.

Yesterday, Axios reported that Visa is teaming up with OpenAI to bring Visa's payment tools into OpenAI's agent system. The idea is that AI agents could eventually spend money on a user's behalf, within limits. Users would be able to set spending caps, merchant restrictions, and approval requirements, while Visa handles things like fraud detection, chargebacks, and refunds.

AP reported the same partnership as ChatGPT gaining the ability to shop and complete transactions at merchants that accept Visa, with guardrails like approvals and spending limits.

This is not just about having ChatGPT order pizza. Axios noted the same setup could eventually support consumer shopping, invoice payments, and even AI coding agents buying APIs, compute, or developer services.

Talking about a prosumer or a one-person business, the only way to really do everything and have a life is using tools like this. It’s one example, and there are security implications, but it’s all going in the same direction.

For the prosumer class to grow, they need tools to keep everything solo.

This is where other growing companies have to take notice.

We used to always use “headcount” to help us figure out if a company had money. If they could make payroll for 500 or 5,000 employees, then of course they could afford our services.

That was not always perfect, but it worked well enough. Entire categories are built around this assumption.

But what happens if the founders of today and tomorrow are trying to avoid that? If the goal is not to build a 5,000-person company, but to build a 50-person company that can do the same amount of work? Or 10, or none even?

All of the “enterprise” markets will shrink and suddenly everyone is going to go after and build for the smaller teams that use AI, don’t drown in committees, and want to win. Not the people milking six-figure jobs to sit in meetings all day. The real winners.

This is not just some internet fantasy. Companies are already being pushed to think this way. Shopify's CEO Tobi Lutke told teams they should demonstrate why they cannot get work done with AI before asking for more headcount or resources.

Revenue per employee is becoming a bigger part of how companies think about themselves. Founders want leaner teams. Investors like efficiency. AI makes smaller teams more capable. And if a company with fewer employees can produce the same revenue, the old definition of "big business" starts to look dated.

This creates a real problem for anyone selling into the old version of enterprise.

If your business model depends on clients having several hundred employees, and the next generation of companies is trying very hard to avoid having several hundred employees, your model comes into question.

Enterprise is not disappearing tomorrow.

But the old enterprise assumption is getting weaker.

For individuals, I think the takeaway is more personal.

You do not have to become an entrepreneur in the dramatic internet sense. You do not need to build a unicorn, start a podcast, call yourself a founder, or post some inspirational thread about how you escaped the matrix.

And I want to be honest about the money, because the internet usually is not. LendingTree's latest side hustle survey found side hustlers earning a record average of about $1,242 per month, up from $473 in 2022. But averages lie a little here. The same research showed the median is only a few hundred dollars a month, because a small group of high earners pulls the average way up while most people earn beer money, especially in the first year.

So no, your weekend project probably will not replace your salary by September.

But here is the other side of that math: for the people who stick with it past the beer-money phase, an extra $1,000 a month is a 20% raise on the median household income that nobody had to ask a manager for. It is also a skill, an audience, and an option that compounds whether or not the money does.

So it is probably worth asking:

That last part matters.

I do not think everyone should quit their job. Most people should not. A job can be a funding source, a learning environment, a network, and a stabilizer. There is nothing wrong with that.

But I do think more people should stop waiting for permission. If the tools are cheaper, distribution is more accessible, payments are easier, and AI can help you with the annoying parts, then the real question becomes whether you have anything worth building.

That is uncomfortable, but useful.

So no, I do not think the future is "everyone becomes a founder."

More people will have a thing. A side business. A freelance offer. A paid community. A newsletter. An agent doing some of the work in the background.

Companies will need to learn how to serve the prosumer, neither a full enterprise nor a consumer at Starbucks, but the thing in between.

The consumer is not disappearing. The company is not disappearing. But the space between them is getting crowded, and I think that is where a lot of the next decade of business gets built.

Thanks as always for reading.