I’ve been running a solo business since 2020. No employees. No office beyond the one filled with cat hair and comic books. Just me, a computer, a set of AI tools, and a network of clients I genuinely give a shit about.
Six years in, I wanted to put down what worked and why. The traditional agency model is a staffing arbitrage play: founders sell, juniors grind, middle managers translate between the two, and most of the taste and judgment that made the pitch compelling gets stripped out somewhere in the middle. I built Studio Self to eliminate that experience entirely.
The thesis was simple. Creative agencies should be small, stay small, and focus entirely on the work. AI changed the math on what “small” can accomplish. I use it for operations, project management, invoicing, scheduling, meeting transcripts, coding, and a thousand small tasks that used to eat 50% of my working week. I don’t use it to write copy or develop strategy. The market is already flooded with AI generated creative work, and the sameness is becoming impossible to ignore.
Ronald Coase argued in 1937 that companies exist because of coordination costs. Every time those costs drop, optimal firm size drops with it. AI is making it possible to run a one person company that would have needed five people in 2020. The structural economics of going solo are only going to improve.
My formulation: AI handles everything that doesn’t require creative judgment. I handle everything that does.
