Operating as an independent founder can frequently feel an isolating journey, a challenge that Martijn Verbove is actively working to dismantle.

As the mastermind behind MakerMap, Verbove has successfully cataloged over 4,000 independent makers originating from 119 countries alongside 2,100 proprietary products, mapping them out on a global scale.

“It’s about finding and being found,” he explains. “Especially for solo entrepreneurs or small teams, why go at it alone if there are thousands of people across the world that could potentially be collaborating? If you’re both building the same thing, it would at least be good to know of each other.”

The genesis of the map began when thousands of creators on the social media network X—formerly recognized as Twitter—started adopting a uniform introductory format detailing their age, home city, and current project. In response, Verbove integrated a function allowing users to introduce themselves on X, build a dedicated profile on the MakerMap interface, and seamlessly link the two.

Interestingly, Verbove does not operate as a full-time solopreneur himself. He serves as the co-founder of Doczen, a United Kingdom-based, venture-backed enterprise delivering artificial intelligence agents tailored for customer operations divisions. Despite this, he describes his routine as being a “VC-backed founder by day, indie hacker by night.”

“I always love building little things before I share them with the team,” he notes.

The Global Explosion of One-Person Enterprises

Across the globe, the expansion of single-operator commercial entities is experiencing unprecedented momentum. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau highlights that nonemployer businesses—ventures managed exclusively by their owners without salaried staff—outpaced employer enterprises in growth rate every single year between 1997 and 2023, with the sole exception of the 2008 Great Recession. By 2023, the count of nonemployer establishments climbed to 30.4 million, marking a significant rise from 22.7 million in 2012.

Parallel trends are echoing internationally. According to official government data in the United Kingdom, nonemployer operations expanded from just under 3.3 million in 2010 to nearly 4.3 million by 2023.

Similarly, Australian government records indicate that nonemployer entities reached 1.8 million during the 2025/2026 fiscal year, surging past the 1.3 million recorded in 2011.

Verbove argues that traditional corporate employees are increasingly waking up to the reality that their current organizations may fail to weather upcoming technological disruptions, leaving them far more willing to bet on their own capabilities.

“Fewer of the existing businesses are going to be able to transform an industry,” he observes.

Concurrently, artificial intelligence is tearing down historical barriers surrounding supply chain management, market distribution, and brand outreach. “With AI, everything becomes a task,” he states.

Sydney, Australia-based Michael Ripia serves as a prime example of this paradigm shift. He operates Halo Marketing entirely on his own, leveraging AI utilities to generate client websites, field inbound customer calls, and manage appointment scheduling.

“AI has shifted how I operate on a daily basis,” Ripia shares. “It hasn’t replaced any of the strategy or relationships I build with my clients. What it has done is take away hundreds of hours of repetitive tasks that would take me away from things that allow my business to grow.”

Ripia observes that clientele deeply value the rapid turnaround times enabled by AI. “Proposals that used to take me 3 hours now take 30 minutes,” he notes. “Days of research can now be completed in 20 minutes. Marketing campaigns that used to have five different people involved can now be created, refined and executed by myself with the right amount of systems in place. AI is allowing entrepreneurs to compete with businesses that are 10x their size. Not because they’re spending every waking hour working, but because they are able to remove so much friction from every corner of their business.”

He even relies on artificial intelligence for creative ideation. “All these different ideas, you can bounce off AI,” he explains. This exact process helped him figure out how to generate revenue from an entirely separate venture: a tennis community known as Sydney Tennis NSW, where local coaches now pay an annual subscription fee to promote their services. “It was one thing I always wanted to monetize, but I’ve never really monetized it,” he reflects. Today, that vision is a financial reality.

The Ascendancy of Niche Innovators

Looking ahead, Verbove forecasts that the proliferation of solo businesses will only accelerate as founders find it simpler to center enterprises around hyper-focused niches. For instance, he points out that an individual skilled in repurposing long-form video content into optimized YouTube clips with high conversion rates can easily establish a viable microbusiness.

“We’re going to get a lot of microbusinesses that are highly specialized in one thing, that will be led by one person or a small team of people,” he predicts.

He also anticipates an uptick in cooperative networking. To combat professional isolation, independent operators running distinct ventures are beginning to coordinate physical coworking sessions. “They work together on relevant topics and meet up for specific events,” he adds.

Ultimately, even when an enterprise is steered by a single individual, human connection and collaboration remain foundational to its success.