First published March 2024. Restored in full in October 2026.
I’ve always struggled with the question, ‘what do you do?’
You know, the one you get when meeting other adults for the first time. After mutual commentary on the weather, of course.
I dislike the pressure of introducing myself on video calls to strangers, as I feel a bit like a chameleon.
To date, my main business income has come from my recruitment business, but over time I’ve leaned into other business ventures and diversified my income.
I also grew a team, then scaled it back, replacing team members with tech.
So, am I a solopreneur now, or a multipreneur? Or both?
I often talk about being lean as a positive. I’ve already written about running a lean recruitment business.
To pigeonhole what I do and find like-minded people, I’m opting for leanpreneur. Let’s jump into my thoughts on leanpreneurism.
Where we’re up to
When I started digging around lean entrepreneurship, a few bits came up. Let’s cover off what is out there already.
Lean Startup
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries is a groundbreaking book about entrepreneurship and product development. The core idea is to treat a startup as an experiment, not a smaller version of a large company.
The principles centre on eliminating wasteful practices and increasing value production during the product development phase (lean thinking). It talks about creating Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) to test a market and then listening to customer feedback to iterate.
Leanpreneurs will take ideas from this, but in essence it’s a related but separate concept.
Lean entrepreneurs
The other result that pops up when I Google lean entrepreneur is the book of the same name by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits.
This is more of a guide to applying Lean Startup principles. It features case studies and methods such as Value Stream Discovery, Innovation Accounting and Pivot or Persevere decision-making.
Again, it’s a useful book, but it doesn’t fit my definition of a lean entrepreneur or leanpreneur.
Entrepreneurs
This is a blanket term that covers anyone running a business for profit.
The Silicon Valley scene popularised the term to the point where most people think entrepreneurs are the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Of course, they are, but they’re also an extreme version of an entrepreneur. You can be an entrepreneur at any scale.
We need to get more granular with our definitions. There are other types of entrepreneur.
By demographic:
- Mompreneur
- Kidpreneur
- Seniorpreneur
By product or market focus:
- Social entrepreneur
- Ecopreneur
- Infopreneur
By behaviour or business model:
- Solopreneur
- Multipreneur
- Leanpreneur
I’m not looking for a definition linked to demographics or product/market selection. Let’s dig into the behaviours and business models.
Solopreneurs
Solopreneurism has boomed recently, with famous solopreneurs like Pieter Levels, Justin Welsh and Dan Go.
They eschew the traditional entrepreneur route, shunning funding to become a one-person army.
HubSpot defines solopreneurs as follows:
- They’re both founders and employees
- They don’t hire a team
- They have a single business focus
- They are not building a business to scale
- Different financial/business structures
- They have minimal workplace requirements
Solopreneurism is getting much closer, but there are a few key differences.
Multipreneurs
A term recently coined by Greg Isenberg, he defines it as:
someone who creates multiple products per year, with the aim of creating a company that creates companies
This has grown from his experience and expertise in community building. I like the thought of a micro-holding company.
Checking out Multipreneurship.com, I love the rules they’re looking to break:
- Diversified risk
- Creator aligned
- Community currency
- Exponential learning
- Cross pollination
- Controlled destiny
- Personal growth
- Silicon world
This is certainly an area to watch and one I’ll be following closely.
Leanpreneurs
So, I’ve settled on describing myself as a leanpreneur.
Leanpreneurs are a blend of the above.
vs entrepreneurism
Leanpreneurs are entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship means many things to many people.
I just consider it to be anyone running any kind of business, but society has attached a status to it. For example, would I describe myself as an entrepreneur at my 20-year school reunion? Probably not.
But I am an entrepreneur. I think it comes down to levels and what you’re comfortable with. For me, entrepreneur is the parent category here, and we’re niching down.
vs solopreneurism
Leanpreneurs are different from solopreneurs in that they are not wedded to the idea of staying solo. I like to partner with others. I like to outsource to freelancers or businesses, and I’m not averse to hiring when needed.
I don’t have a single business focus, and I want to scale businesses.
I do have minimal workplace requirements and build and operate businesses without the help of many others, if any, so in that sense, it’s similar to solopreneurism.
vs multipreneurism
Leanpreneurism isn’t reliant on having an audience and launching multiple products to that same audience. You can serve diverse audiences. My recruitment and job board businesses serve a different audience to this blog, for example. However, I’m constantly looking for overlapping opportunities.
I like to think of this as my Mafia Plan.
A Mafia Plan is a concept from a long-time mentor, James Schramko. The idea is to create a business model that is so good, and offers so much value, that customers feel like they can’t refuse it. Much like offers made by the Mafia.
He focuses on core elements such as recurring revenue, delivering high value and seeking leverage. He’s been a huge inspiration to me, and you should check out his book, Work Less, Make More.
Principles of leanpreneurism
How do you define a leanpreneur succinctly?
A leanpreneur is an entrepreneur who builds businesses for themselves, not for others.
A leanpreneur relentlessly focuses on building more spare time. They can reinvest that time personally or back into their businesses. Building with time in mind builds choice.
A leanpreneur builds assets. They build to sell.
A leanpreneur can be any type of business owner. B2B or B2C. Product or service. Full-time or side hustle. You can be well established or not have started yet. The barriers to leanpreneurship are lower than any other type of entrepreneurism.
This is because we define ourselves by the simple fact that we value our time above all else.
Benefits of being a leanpreneur
You’ll see a lot of overlap with the benefits of solopreneurism and multipreneurism.
Freedom
You have the autonomy to do what you want when you want. The caveat is that you must design your business to work for you, and not the other way around.
Flexibility
A lean business gives you flexibility as you define it. You define everything about it. This can be overwhelming (see below) but also liberating.
Low expenses
By definition, running lean means you travel light on expenses. Lean businesses are not human-capital intensive, so that’s a giant saving. Labour is usually the number one expense in a business.
Direct impact
There is a satisfaction in being close to your endeavours. Your business brand is intrinsically linked with your reputation. This is powerful, but it’s something you need to protect. Reputation is difficult to win and easy to lose.
Challenges of being a leanpreneur
Loneliness
Leanpreneurs will typically start out as solopreneurs, and some stay there. It can be a lonely track, particularly when times are tough or you’re in the doldrums. That’s why it’s so important to network and be part of relevant communities. There is a skill to surrounding yourself with the right people in the right doses.
Burnout
When the buck stops with you, it’s easy to drill yourself into the ground. Burnout is real, and you need to design some room in the margins to stop yourself overworking.
Overwhelm
It can be daunting to shoulder all the responsibility, even if you gain freedom and autonomy. It’s crucial to break your priorities and plans down into manageable chunks. And there’s no such thing as an overnight success. Success porn is also to be avoided.
Risk
As the owner of a lean business, you are running the gauntlet until you create assets that work for you and have enterprise value. It’s important to do two things:
- Transition away from time-for-money services as soon as you can.
- Take out key person insurance in case anything happens to you.
Focus
With a blank canvas, it can be difficult to focus. Using systems, processes and technology to keep your focus is crucial.
Leanpreneurs I admire
You could argue that many famous folk are leanpreneurs, especially if they started out as a team of one (Musk, Bezos, Branson, Rowling). What we’re looking for are examples of those who stayed lean.
People like Pieter Levels (NomadList, RemoteOK and others). His open startup page is gone now, but for a while there he stated 0.75 FTE and a 7-figure revenue.
Or Jason Fried and his partners at 37Signals. They work in small teams of 3, put profit first and stay intentionally lean. Have a look at their employee handbook and some of their books. ReWork is a great place to start. And, like most solopreneurs, they distribute all profits every year rather than reinvest.
Tony Dinh, a serial creator and the builder of one of my favourite AI interfaces, TypingMind. Tony is another one-person show whose monthly revenue currently tops $40,000.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock on LinkedIn, you will have seen Justin Welsh’s content. A famous solopreneur, he extols the virtues of solopreneurism, selling courses that teach his content systems. Last I checked, his revenue is $1.7m with monthly expenses of $623. Now that’s lean, and he would rather not grow a team.
I’m going to be featuring people like this soon, inviting them to talk about their lean life. Selfishly, I am eager to learn more, and I want to take you along for the ride too.
Who is leanpreneurism for?
By definition, leanpreneurism is accessible to everyone.
You’ll see from the examples above that it doesn’t matter if you’re in tech or non-tech, have employees or don’t. It’s more about the principle of staying lean.
Anyone can be a leanpreneur.
Learn more about leanpreneurism
Does leanpreneurism resonate with you?
Through my new commitment to writing, I’m trying to find other people like me. If you were interested in joining a community of leanpreneurs in the future, get in touch.
2026 note: this is where the word started for me. I’ve written the follow-up, two years on, in What is a leanpreneur?, and the community I was hoping for now exists. If you want a small room of lean operators building this way, join the Leanpreneur community.
