When I launched my startup in the early aughts, I quickly developed a ritual. At the end of each month, I’d sign off for the day by checking our revenue. Then, after stopping at my favorite hot dog stand, I’d slowly walk home over the Brooklyn Bridge. Whatever the figures, in rain, snow, or sunshine, I could clear my head as I took in the calming East River views. It helped keep me sane, well before I was able to hire our first employee.

Today’s solopreneurs and startup founders are entering a very different landscape. The dizzying pace of AI and tech advancements can be a double-edged sword, beyond the constant barrage of Slack pings. Imitation is easier than ever, and competition is fiercer. When I started my company, competitors, including tech giants, trickled into the ring. Today, your competition can soar from zero to hundreds seemingly overnight.

Performance metrics are also constantly updating, fueling an urge to track them obsessively—a world away from my monthly check-in and bridge walk ritual. And tech tools aren’t just saving time; they’re creating a new standard for how much startups are expected to accomplish. In short, more is more.

The result is predictable: burnout. According to a Q1 2025 “Startup Snapshot” survey of more than 800 European founders, 34% said they had seriously considered stepping down as CEO in the previous year, reports Silicon Canals .

But I’d argue that today, more than ever, being a solopreneur can actually put you at a structural advantage when it comes to fending off burnout. It comes down to control.

Two decades into my own entrepreneurial journey, here’s my playbook for building a calm company in the AI era.

Make Asynchronous Communication Your Default

Ask anyone who’s made the jump from corporate employee to solopreneur, and I’d bet they’d name this as one of the most remarkable changes: fewer meetings. Superfluous meetings are a bane to motivation. They force hard-working employees to clock more hours than necessary. As one Reddit user, required to attend virtual game hours on Zoom and non-essential weekly meetings, shared :

“[U]seless meetings make me want to quit an otherwise good job.”

As a solo founder, you’re meeting with prospective clients, vendors, contract employees—you’re running and hopefully growing a business. But gone are all the unnecessary status updates and time-filler meetings.

My advice: lean into this unique advantage of solopreneurship. I understand that when working on your own, meetings may feel productive. But, as I strongly urge mentee-founders, asynchronous communication should be your default. Using a platform like Lindy, founders can build AI agents to organize and manage their inboxes, filtering out the non-essentials and ensuring that important emails don’t slip through the cracks.

Defaulting to email won’t make your business any less legitimate. I know a founder, ten years into her entrepreneurial journey, who has worked almost entirely with freelancers via email, and her business is still booming. Video calls are reserved for initial interviews and true emergencies. And it works.

There will always be opportunities to meet face-to-face or hop on a video call when it matters. Making asynchronous communication the default takes discipline, but it pays off. Protecting your time this way preserves one of the greatest advantages of solopreneurship.

Prioritize Sustainable Growth

The advent of smartphones created a paradox. Communication became much easier, yet professionals became reachable around the clock. While the quantity of communication increased, quality arguably declined.

The rise of AI presents a similar paradox. Many hoped it would reduce work, but it has often intensified it. Employees work faster, take on more tasks, and put in longer hours, according to recent research published in Harvard Business Review . Quality suffers, and burnout soars.

Solopreneurs are uniquely positioned to resist the urge to do more. You can unilaterally create and enforce your availability boundaries. Take regular breaks. Carve out time for doing nothing at all. Tools like Motion, which uses AI to automatically schedule tasks and protect focus time, can help reinforce those boundaries. Sometimes, doing less requires a concerted effort, but it’s essential. It can recharge your energy and create the mental space needed for innovation and creativity.

If you choose the bootstrapping path, as I did, you fend off another source of modern stress. In a world of shifting targets, higher investor expectations, and pressure for rapid revenue growth, focusing on organic growth offers a calmer, more sustainable path.

Laser Focus On Intentional Product Development

I love AI. I love that capabilities like vibe coding exist, allowing anyone with a great idea to build a product they believe in without having to be a coding expert. It levels the playing field for aspiring entrepreneurs.

At the same time, these newfound possibilities seriously ramp up competition. This is good for users—more options typically mean better prices. But for companies, it can be challenging.

“If it becomes easier for new companies to jump in, then we can expect competition to go way up and profit margins to be even more elusive,” writes Jason Furman for the New York Times .

When competition is fiercer than ever, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important stakeholder: the customer. My advice is to hyperfocus on your product and how to better serve users. Solopreneurs can leverage AI tools to understand their specific needs—for example, using AI agents to collect feedback, analyze support conversations, and look for patterns in user behavior. And before you attempt to develop new products, perfect the ones you already have.

Had my company Jotform imitated our early competitors, like Google, we probably would have sputtered to a halt years ago. It was tempting to chase the trends, but I decided to focus on what we did best—understanding how to make users’ lives easier with usable, fillable forms, and doing that better than anyone else.

That focus helped our company grow from just one employee—me—to 800 employees today. And it allowed me to avoid burning out before realizing how far we could go.