The Case for Solopreneurship as a Workplace Accommodation

Celebrating being named to Zoom’s Solopreneur 50 with a call for more ND businesses

There are a handful of moments in a life where the work you have been doing, mostly invisibly, mostly in your own time, gets seen.

This morning is one of those moments. I have been named to the inaugural Zoom Solopreneur 50. It is a national recognition programme identifying the 50 most innovative independent business builders, selected from around 3,000 applicants by a jury that includes leaders from Zoom and Upwork and a professor from Carnegie Mellon.

I am proud of the recognition. I want to use it to make an argument, because the recognition is not really about me. It is about a structural shift in American work that the ZSP50 is the first major institution to name out loud.

There are now more than 33 million self-employed Americans, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. That is roughly one in five working adults. The standard narrative about this number is that it represents the gig economy, the side hustle, the precarity of late-stage capitalism. That narrative is not wrong, but it is also not the whole story. A growing slice of those 33 million are people running real businesses with real revenue, real customers, and zero employees. They are doing it on purpose. They are doing it because the alternatives no longer work.

I am one of them. I run a Substack, a therapeutic writing program, a podcast network with over a million downloads, and an international membership community called the Late Diagnosis Club. Bloomsbury will publish my book on Autistic culture in April 2027. I have no employees. I have never raised outside funding. The whole operation runs from my couch and the coffee shop up the road. None of this would have been possible 10 years ago, and not just because the AI tooling did not exist yet.

The honest answer to “how do you do all of this alone” is that I am Autistic, I was diagnosed at 39, and I have spent most of my working life discovering that conventional employment is the part I cannot do.

Conventional employment is, for most neurodivergent adults, an accommodation problem with no good solutions. The unpredictable commute that gets each day started with dysregulation. Needing to be somewhere at a specific time when time-blindness and PDA make that a near impossibility. The open-plan office is sensory torture. The performance review is a social-coding exercise designed by and for neurotypical brains. The promotion track requires a person to demonstrate the soft skills, the political instincts, and the constant low-grade self-promotion that Autistic brains, in particular, are not wired to perform. The unspoken rules are not unspoken to everyone. By the time a late-diagnosed Autistic adult understands why every job has felt like a slow-motion car crash, they are usually 35 or 45 or 55 and have spent two decades being told they are difficult, intense, too much, not a culture fit, lacking executive presence, or worse.

The standard advice at that point is to start your own thing. The implicit promise is that you will get to make your own rules.

What the standard advice misses is that running a traditional business is also, mostly, managing people. It involves the same soft-skill tax, the same political reading, the same constant performance of leadership presence, only now you are doing it for the people who depend on you for their income. I have done it. My previous company, The Author Incubator, scaled and sold. By the time I exited, I was managing a team of 50 and burning out faster than I could rebuild. Looking back, the traits that let me build that company quickly were the same traits that made running it sustainably impossible. I was a strong founder and a deeply mismatched manager.

This is the bind that the current generation of late-diagnosed neurodivergent adults has been stuck in for decades. Conventional employment does not accommodate us. Building a conventional business does not accommodate us. The pattern is so consistent that the autism research literature has a name for it: occupational instability is one of the most reliably documented outcomes of late-diagnosed adult autism, and underemployment among Autistic adults sits stubbornly above 80 percent in most studies.

The Zoom Solopreneur 50 is the first time I have seen a major institution recognise that something has changed.

The reason it has changed is that the technology stack required to run a serious business is now a one-person stack.

• AI handles research, drafting, editing, summarisation, customer service triage, and the kind of administrative work that used to require a full-time assistant.

• Zoom (or Teams if you are that kinda person) collapses the geographic and logistical infrastructure that used to require a physical office and a team to staff it.

• Substack collapses your website, online classroom, and email service into a single, no-cost platform.

The thing that used to be a 30-person operation can now be one Autistic woman in Somerset with a laptop and a single business value:

Never build faster than your nervous system can sustain.

My previous company was larger and grew faster, and the pace was the part that broke me. This company is smaller by design, and that design choice is why it works. For solopreneurs, especially neurodivergent ones, durable growth matters more than maximum growth. I’m not the first to talk about the company-of-one, but no one else has explained that the company-of-one is not just an entrepreneurial preference; it is a workplace accommodation strategy for neurodivergent people.

The Solopreneur 50 selection has given me a national platform to make: most successful solopreneurs are probably neurodivergent and don’t yet know it. The traits that let someone build a business alone, deep focus, pattern recognition, comfort with isolation, willingness to think differently from everyone in the room, are very often the same traits that get adults identified as ND later in life. We are everywhere in entrepreneurship. We are also, very often, hiding.

What is now possible: running a real business as a one-person operation, with revenue and reach and impact that would have required a team a decade ago.

What is still hard: pacing it correctly, choosing not to scale beyond what your body can hold, accepting that the recognition and the income and the impact you are building will look different from the conventional version, and trusting that different is not lesser.

The Zoom Solopreneur 50 has just told the world that this model of work is viable inside the lifetime of the people now using it, and it is particularly viable for the neurodivergent adults who have spent that same lifetime finding out conventional work was never going to fit.