In an age where a laptop and an idea can launch a global business, solopreneurs are creating big bang disruptions armed with freedom, agility, and the permission to fail. Organizational size and capital are no longer the absolute prerequisites for success.

The Secret of Successful Solopreneurs? Slice the Market, Focus on the Core!

They know their strengths. Leveraging their unique skills and capabilities, they meticulously analyze existing products and services to identify and conquer niche markets. By focusing on what they do best for core customers and delivering exceptional value, they build trust by offering previously high-cost professional services at drastically lower prices, or even for free. This is the power of selection and focus.

Acquiring Early Customers: Start Next Door, Scale with Platforms!

An outstanding product is useless if it's not accessible. Instead of trying to satisfy everyone from the start, they target a small group of customers with the most pressing needs. They leverage personal connections and existing online platforms to acquire initial customers, providing top-notch experiences to generate word-of-mouth marketing. Once products are selling and revenue is flowing, the business gains momentum and becomes sustainable.

In the scaling and monetization phase, they actively utilize existing infrastructure like cloud services, SaaS, social media, AI tools, and payment systems. Outsourcing is also an option when necessary.

Proving Customer Value: Build Trust by Being 'Better and Cheaper'!

The key is 'solving problems and earning customer validation.' To gain trust and build a fanbase as a solopreneur, you must offer something 'decidedly better, cheaper, or free' than existing alternatives. This trust then forms the foundation for gradually implementing monetization models to build a sustainable revenue stream.

'Your Personal Story': Create a Fandom Through Connection!

Assuming you have a great and affordable (or free) product, a product made with sincerity creates a virtuous cycle. From a product adoption perspective, what's needed now is a 'genuine personal story.' Going beyond mere knowledge or product delivery, your story—why you started, the challenges you overcame, and the future you envision for your customers—moves hearts. A story infused with personality, philosophy, and humanity transforms customers into loyal advocates.

1. The Transition from Link-Based to AI Information Consumption

Sometime ago, even I started using ChatGPT, Google AI Studio, Claude, and Perplexity instead of searching on Google first. That's because these AI services find, organize, and summarize the information I want for me. Furthermore, they make it incredibly easy for me to give commands, find what I'm missing, and even what else I need, and organize it all. Now, I only search on Google when necessary, like to verify the facts of information obtained through AI services, or to find the absolute latest information.

2. The Change in the Advertising Business

What business model should the countless websites that lived off advertising—all those search terms, search ads, banner ads—now adopt? The so-called Big Tech companies (AI companies) are gobbling up all the information in the internet world (learning from it) and providing AI services. There's no longer a reason to follow links to destination sites. What kind of business model will Big Tech companies propose for their lucrative advertising business? What kind of symbiotic model will they offer to the countless internet companies, content providers, and individual bloggers, excluding Big Tech?

The traditional search engine presented a list of web pages (links) containing relevant information when a user entered a query, and users obtained the desired information by clicking on these links. Companies including Google generated revenue by displaying ads based on the traffic (pageviews, visitors) generated during this search process. Thus, the search advertising market was the core of the digital advertising market and Google's main revenue source for 27 years. However, AI engines based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Grok, synthesize and summarize information from multiple sources in response to a user's question (prompt), providing a single, integrated answer. Naturally, these AI answers reduce the need for users to individually click links on various websites to search for information. The tendency for the 'destination' of AI information search to increasingly become the AI engine itself is growing stronger. This is a huge challenge that demands a redesign of the search-based business and advertising ecosystem built over decades.

3. Advertising in the Age of AI

Let's look at the current usage patterns of AI services. While I agree that providing sources with the answer results *does* increase the objectivity of the provided material, it is often merely a supplementary means to confirm the existence of evidence. Again, instances of following links to enter and view the destination website are remarkably low.

Ultimately, to encourage user movement, it will likely be provided in the form of native advertising included within the AI answer, but even that is fundamentally different from search advertising. If information gathering is satisfied within the current chat window through questions and answers, and links are only used for a few specific actions (purchase, booking, etc.), it is highly likely to not generate the traffic of the past. Furthermore, the recommendation algorithms of just a few Big Tech companies are so artificial that it's impossible to tell if it's truly based on genuine needs or if it's artificially induced by a combination of personal information and queries. Whether clicks or impressions generated in that way are truly helpful requires time to see. It needs to be proven in the market what their value is and how they differ from simple clicks, impressions, and conversions of the past.

4. The Essence of the Threat and Potential Solutions in the AI Age

source : https://blog.google/products/search/ai-mode-updates-may-2025/

Even though websites provide information, the banner ad revenue earned on those sites is likely to decrease significantly. In particular, web services that provided news or community services may face serious financial problems due to declining advertising revenue. If Big Tech companies fail to create a symbiotic ecosystem, it will naturally weaken content creation motivation. If only a few Big Tech companies try to monopolize everything, it is self-evident that the entire internet ecosystem will weaken.

Ultimately, content creators will someday come to grapple with the serious question: 'To what extent should we allow AI crawling?' How much should they disclose to be recognized for their expertise by AI services and still generate *some* traffic? Or should they block AI learning altogether and try to make users type the website address directly or search for it and find them? This is by no means an easy problem.

Let's look at this from another angle. The existing open and distributed web ecosystem may increasingly head towards closure. This is because one easy way to solve this problem is the shift from the advertising business to content monetization. From using content for free in exchange for seeing banners or ads in the past, the tendency to transition to a closed, paid model based on expertise may strengthen.

This change shows it's a key variable that will determine the future of the internet information production-consumption ecosystem. If an open and mutually beneficial cooperative model is not established, the internet information production-consumption ecosystem is likely to shrink. Closing wide-open doors, specializing, and selling dearly is not a panacea.

The Paradox of Surplus — The Seed and Shadow of Civilization

Is the people’s choice wise—or pre-programmed?

Why democracy wobbles

Elites, ignorance, and the elusive “wisdom of crowds”

Why the poor drift conservative

Cultural capital and the politics of desire

Rethinking democracy

 The Japanese earthquake prophecy manga that's been flooding YouTube thumbnails lately feels like a warning message thrown at our society. Just as the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake suddenly became reality, the disaster prophecies for 2025 are no longer far-fetched tales in our age of climate crisis. The only questions are when it will happen and how devastating it will be. Climate change works the same way—nature gives us warnings and waits patiently for a long time, but when disaster strikes, it comes without warning.

The waterfront apartments and houses in low-lying areas that we've believed in and invested in as our "greatest assets" will inevitably see their value shaken when faced with the changing physical reality. Before mortgage terms come due, before we can even use these properties as retirement assets, the scenario where they get branded as flood-risk zones and their values plummet is no longer just imagination—it's a looming reality.

Meanwhile, it's the ultimate irony that the hillside neighborhoods and highlands where poor people used to live are now gaining the new premium of "safety" and becoming the prime real estate of future cities.

Just as typhoons need to turn the sea and sky upside down to create a healthy natural ecosystem, the same goes for the spaces built up by human capital and greed. The "change" that comes after all the warnings will fundamentally reshape not just the real estate market, but our society's class structure, financial systems, and the very sustainability of our nation.

Right now, we stand at a crossroads.

Will we turn away from physical reality and continue with dangerous investments and development driven by past inertia? Or will we accept the grave warning of climate crisis and redesign our cities, assets, and entire social systems according to new values of "safety" and "fairness"?

Capital builds its own fortress for sustainable wealth, but the typhoon still comes. The typhoon is merciless to everyone, whether inside or outside the castle walls. The boundaries between land that will be submerged and land that will rise above water, between unsafe and safe ground—these will all be determined by "climate risk" going forward.

 We witness conflict every day.

Some conflicts terrify us, some arguments make us uncomfortable, and some news stories sadden us.

But if you observe carefully, all these conflicts, arguments, and news stories flow toward hatred of the other side.

And someone quietly profits from this hatred.

As views increase, traffic surges, and public opinion fluctuates, that's how "discord" becomes a business.

Once, news was about delivering information. Now it has become part of an algorithm designed to generate clicks.

Once, politicians created policies for the nation and its citizens, whether they were criticized or celebrated for them.

Now they've become content creators who must choreograph frameworks of conflict.

They develop strategies by calculating what people click on, which headlines hold attention longer, and which words trigger anger.

There are people uncannily skilled at figuring all this out, and they use it to make money.

This is the discord monetization model.

Now "discord" itself has become an industry

This isn't just a problem with media or politics. Discord is content, and content makes money, which is why it has become a continuously growing industry.

Why do we tolerate this discord?

The answer is simple : because it's entertaining.

Ultimately, through this entertainment, we've become spectators of the discord business rather than participants in democracy.

And we willingly vote for, click on, and purchase the provocations we've chosen ourselves.

Every fight comes with a cost.

Communities divide, trust collapses, truth disappears, dialogue is abandoned, and eventually, we all become a society that consumes only "palatable lies."

Someday, that cost will inevitably return as massive division.

We must ask ourselves :

Who created this fight?

Who was first to label something as hateful?

Who is quietly making money?

What protects our world is the willingness to focus on truth.

Starting Small with a Minimal Viable Product (MVP): Key Strategies for Success
(Featuring Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe)

Launching an MVP in the Early Stages of a Startup

One of the most critical strategies for any early-stage startup is quickly rolling out a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to gauge market response. Let’s take a look at how Airbnb, Twitch, and Stripe began with simple MVPs, validated their ideas in the market, and evolved into successful business models.

1. Airbnb

Airbnb was founded by Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk in 2007, after meeting as design school classmates in San Francisco. They came up with the idea of renting out living spaces by using air mattresses—especially during conventions and conferences—so attendees wouldn’t get stuck paying high hotel fees or struggling to find available rooms.

§  October 2007 : Brainstormed “renting out space” for design conference attendees

§  Early 2008 : Launched the first website under the name “Air Bed & Breakfast”

§  Summer 2008 : Operated during specific events like the Democratic National Convention in Denver to gather market feedback

Initially, Airbnb placed air mattresses in living rooms for conference visitors who couldn’t find a hotel.

§  Air mattresses and a simple breakfast : Provided a basic but comfortable sleeping setup.

§  Payment system : No online payment feature; the rental fee was exchanged directly between guests and hosts.

§  No map feature : There was no way to visually show the location of the listing.

§  Short-term testing : The website was open only during conference seasons and then shut down afterward to do small-scale market validation.

By releasing their service quickly with minimal features, Airbnb gathered real user feedback and improved their business model accordingly. Their later success in raising funds and growing their user base is now widely recognized.

2. Twitch (Originally Justin.tv)

Justin.tv, the predecessor to Twitch, was started by Justin Kan, Emmett Shear, Michael Seibel, and Kyle Vogt. They wanted to explore the potential of live streaming, so they built a product with only the most essential features.

§  March 2007 : Justin.tv officially launched

§  2011 : Split the service into Twitch.tv to focus on game streaming

§  2014 : Amazon acquired Twitch for about $970 million

In the early days of Justin.tv, cofounder Justin Kan wore a camera on his head 24/7 and live-streamed his daily life :

§  Single-channel broadcast : The website had only one live channel—Justin’s. It didn’t offer game broadcasts or other content.

§  Streaming infrastructure : They relied on a CDN instead of their own technology, which was expensive.

§  Market response and technical feasibility : They quickly developed an MVP to see if “live streaming” could be an engaging experience, while also testing the tech’s viability.

3. Stripe

Founded in 2010 by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison, Stripe aimed to simplify the complex online payment systems and lengthy signup processes by creating a quick, easy-to-use payment platform.

§  Late 2009 – Early 2010 : Started under the internal project name /dev/payments

§  2011 : After joining Y Combinator (YC), they officially rebranded to Stripe and began to expand

§  2012 : Raised $2 million from investors including General Catalyst

Stripe’s initial platform had a very limited API, and account setup was done manually:

§  /dev/payments beta version : Focused almost entirely on credit card processing and left out any complicated features.

§  Developer-friendly interface : Designed for quick and easy integration, especially for YC startups.

§  Problem-solving approach : Since online payments were notoriously cumbersome at the time, Stripe’s main goal was to “eliminate complexity and provide a simpler payment API.” 

4. Common Themes and Takeaways

All three companies rapidly entered the market with products that featured only the bare essentials:

§  Airbnb rushed to get a simple website running right before a conference.

§  Justin.tv launched a 24-hour live broadcast to immediately gauge market interest.

§  Stripe provided a beta version that YC startups could use right away.

Each product was deliberately limited in functionality :

§  Airbnb had no map feature, online payments, or comprehensive lodging options.

§  Justin.tv started with just one live channel.

§  Stripe offered little beyond basic credit card processing.

Their early adopters were enthusiastic but small in number:

§  Airbnb served conference goers who needed last-minute accommodations.

§  Justin.tv attracted early adopters interested in trying a new format of live streaming.

§  Stripe fulfilled the needs of YC startups and a niche developer community.

These cases clearly show the value of leveraging even a modest MVP to test your ideas in the market. Instead of perfecting a product from the start, it’s crucial to launch quickly with limited features and use customer feedback to gradually refine the product into something people truly want. This strategy works especially well for startups with limited resources, and it helps lay a solid foundation for eventually reaching a large user base. Above all, getting those small, early wins can help you stay motivated and pave the way for bigger growth down the road.