What are the best tools and technologies to scale and sustain a small-team business?
If you are seeking an alternative to corporate life, self-employment — sometimes called “solopreneuring” — may be the answer for you. You can ply your software development, design, or business skills as an independent contractor — and make a decent living.
Or, taking it a step further, you can build your own company for even larger returns. However, building a scalable business requires financial investment, product ideas, market research, marketing acumen, sales abilities, technology solutions, and likely a team of skilled people to help make it happen. It takes money and resources.
Until now. Tim Cortinovis, in his recent book, Single-Handed Unicorn: How to Solo Build a Billion-Dollar Company, claims you can build a huge company with just AI tools and freelancers. The online and AI tools now available make it possible to rapidly build and scale a company by yourself, or at least with a really small team. The only missing ingredient is the entrepreneur’s spirit of innovation and ability to identify and serve a market.
What is needed to scale a one-person business is the right mindset, toolset, and business model, Cortinovis explained in a recent podcast. With the emergence of AI agents, “you can handle everything,” he said.
“They work on nearly all platforms the same. You have one managing agent, the brain of the others. You have subagents on the way down, and you can give the subagents access to client information, client addresses and so on. And invoices and another subagent. This is accessed through your email client, like Gmail, Outlook, or a database. Connect to WhatsApp, and you can handle incoming customer queries and customer messages automatically. And the management agent just supervises all the processes and is responsible for that person to be successful.”
“There are already some impressively sized solopreneur companies at the so-called bleeding edge,” said Nic Adams, co-founder and CEO at Orcus. “A solopreneur or micro-team can build and scale a billion-dollar operation by weaponizing automation, data pipelines, self-improving agents, to name a few. The key is combining real-time adversarial AI with modular, cloud-native infrastructure that scales horizontally without human bottlenecks — such as org charts and headcounts.”
Achieving scale “no longer depends on headcount; it depends on leverage,” agreed Arvind Rongala, CEO of Edstellar. “Today’s solopreneur doesn’t need to do everything — just needs to architect a system where technology, global talent, and automation do the heavy lifting.”
AI can generate, automate, and predict — “but it still struggles with abstract judgment, strategic storytelling, and enterprise trust,” said Rongala. “These remain the domain of human intuition.”
Adams added that “a few gaps remain in seamless AI orchestration and secure autonomous decision-making at scale. True autonomous agents that handle complex, multi-domain workflows end-to-end without human intervention are still nascent. Additionally, there’s a need for ultra-low-latency AI threat detection to defend the platform itself from adversarial exploitation, a black hat arms race in itself.”
What are the best tools and technologies to scale and sustain a large one-person or small-team business?
Adams recommended “cloud compute platforms for elastic scale; container orchestration such as Kubernetes for modularity; advanced large language models tuned for domain-specific tasks; AI orchestration frameworks like LangChain or custom pipelines; and state-of-the-art observability tooling to monitor emergent behaviors. In essence, a full-stack AI ops environment with self-healing, self-optimizing capabilities.”
The best tools are those that remove bottlenecks, said Rongala. “AI copilots, intelligent CRMs, global payment platforms, and modular APIs.” Still, he added, “What truly drives success is clarity — knowing what not to do, and letting the system run the rest. It’s not about being a one-person army, it’s about being a systems thinker.”