The Profitable Power of a Sovereign Collective

What if I told you that the most profitable solo companies aren’t solo at all?

I’ve spent the last several years writing about powerful tiny companies that generate outsized profits and distilling those ideas here at Further:

• The Rise of 7-Figure Small

• The Sovereign Startup

• Small Is the New Big

These are the tiny, expertise-based businesses that allow you to earn everywhere and live anywhere.

The implication (and possible downside) is that you’re on your own. But that’s not quite right.

And that’s because the most powerful solo companies don’t operate in isolation. They collaborate.

I don’t mean in the way traditional businesses collaborate, by raising capital, hiring employees, or even merging into larger entities.

Instead, the solo companies maintain their independence while forming temporary alliances with other sovereign operators to accomplish what none of them could do alone.

This is a sovereign collective. It’s a situation where everyone involved has their own tiny company, but big things happen when these companies work together for a while before the collective disbands.

I’ve been building this way for 20 years without fully articulating the model. Now, with AI fundamentally changing what’s possible for small ventures, the sovereign collective is no longer just one option among many.

I’ll make the case that it’s becoming the dominant model for how the most capable people will work beyond their own solo firm. Let me explain by going back to the beginning.

The Power of the Individual (Then and Now)

Picture this:

It’s 1998. A young attorney, disgruntled with the practice of law, wants to earn a living as a writer instead. Rather than seeking a writing deal in New York or Los Angeles, he looks to the emerging commercial internet to form a direct relationship with an audience.

With no business background and zero traditional marketing knowledge, the young man finds himself becoming a digital entrepreneur through trial and error. His writing ends up playing the role that sales and marketing are supposed to, once he discovers that a compatible product or service should be offered.

Fast forward six years and three successful service businesses later: The young(ish) entrepreneur wants to exit both client work and “real-world business” to focus more on writing and developing a completely online business model.

At this point, it seems many others share this desire, given the rise of the professional blogging movement. He spots an opportunity to achieve his goals both creatively and professionally by helping others succeed in their digital business pursuits.

So, he starts a “blog” in January 2006. The site quickly evolves into more of a digital magazine, with numerous contributors writing for free alongside the founder, who edits every guest article while continuing to write two long-form educational articles each week.

Producing content at the cusp of Web 2.0 and the emergence of social media proves to be incredibly lucrative in terms of traffic. Our entrepreneur takes that traffic and gets people to stick around via email and RSS, and he quickly grows an audience that’s looking for a steady stream of educational content to help them build their own audiences.

From there, three startups emerge from the “magazine” over the next three years, each one attaining over seven figures in profitable revenue within 12 months. There are no investors, and the only employee is someone the third startup inherited through a business partnership.

Okay, enough with the pseudo-suspense.

That guy is me. And I share my story to illustrate the power of an individual who thinks in terms of media, not marketing, when using the internet to reach the right people.

This approach — building audience first, monetizing strategically, partnering selectively — worked then. It works even better now.

But the nature of the partnerships has fundamentally changed. Artificial intelligence doesn’t eliminate the value of human partners, but it does change the equation.

What’s Changed in the 2020s

When I originally coined the term “sovereign collective” in 2022, artificial intelligence wasn’t dominating the conversation. And even though I had known for years it was coming, it wasn’t “ready for prime time” just yet.

GPT-3 existed, but felt more like a parlor trick than a business tool. Everyone was obsessed with Web3, DAOs, and new collaboration platforms that would make it easier for creators to work together.

The mass conversation wasn’t about AI because it wasn’t yet relevant to how we build businesses. Then ChatGPT hit in 2023, and the entire narrative shifted.

Now in 2026, AI overwhelmingly dominates the discourse. And we’re at what many consider a tipping point:

• Claude Code can build sophisticated software with minimal human technical contribution.

• AI agents are beginning to autonomously improve themselves.

• The technical skills that once required years of training and expensive hiring are now accessible to anyone who can describe what they want.

I’ll make the case that this doesn’t mean people become less powerful. It means they become more powerful, but only those who understand what humans still uniquely provide.

The Collaboration Shift: From Technical to Strategic

Here’s what’s changed about partnering since I built those seven-figure companies between 2007 and 2009:

Old collaboration model (2000s-2020s):

• Creator (audience/content) + Partner (technical skills) = Product

• Example: I attracted the audience and then created course content, while my more technical partner handled design, platform development, and operations.

• Example: I defined an SEO strategy for our first SaaS product, and a two-person team built the software.

New collaboration model (2026+):

• Creator (audience/content) + AI (technical execution) + Partners (judgment/taste/trust) = Product.

• Technical execution is commoditized by AI.

• Human collaboration happens at a higher level: strategy, curation, quality control, and community leadership.

What this means in practice:

In 2008, when I entered the emerging WordPress premium market with a unique design framework, a technical partner handled the coding. The product couldn’t exist without that coding capability, so we had a full partnership.