The Profitable Power of a Sovereign Collective

Artificial intelligence doesn’t eliminate the value of human partners, but it does change the equation.

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.

In 2026, Claude Code could easily build that same product. But what Claude Code can’t do:

• Decide if it’s the right product for the market

• Determine if the design has taste or is generic

• Build trust with a community of WordPress developers

• Curate which features matter and which are noise

• Lead a movement around a philosophy of design

Those human elements — judgment, taste, relationships, domain expertise, community trust — are what matter. And even though I’ve never been able to code myself, that’s why I was able to grow and lead an eight-figure software company.

But my technical partners also helped me make better decisions at the strategic level, which went far beyond coding. And that is the realm in which the new collaboration lives.

Here’s Why Humans Stay in the Loop

A company of one or just a few founders can accomplish more than ever. We already know that the number of high six- and seven-figure businesses without investors or employees has increased over the last 15 years, thanks to the internet and related technologies.

But here’s what’s truly new: AI has eliminated the need for most technical collaboration while simultaneously increasing the need for human collaboration around what AI can’t provide.

You don’t collaborate for technical capability anymore. You collaborate for:

1. Strategic Judgment: AI can execute. It can’t decide what’s worth executing. A strategic advisor who’s been through multiple business cycles, who understands market timing, who can smell a bad idea before you waste six months — that’s irreplaceable human value.

2. Taste and Curation: AI generates content. But is it good? Is it distinctive? Does it connect with your ideal prospect? Does it sound like everyone else who uses the same AI? A collaborator with taste can tell you, “This is generic, push harder,” or “This is it, ship it.” That editorial judgment bridges the gap between what’s 90% and all the way there.

3. Relationship Capital: AI doesn’t have a network. It doesn’t have 15 years of trust built with an audience that you can partner with. When you collaborate with someone who has genuine relationships with customers, partners, media, investors, and community members, you’re accessing decades of accumulated social capital that no amount of AI can replicate.

4. Domain Expertise: AI knows everything and nothing. It has broad knowledge but no lived experience. A collaborator who’s actually done the thing you’re trying to do — one who’s failed three times and succeeded once, who knows the subtle nuances AI misses — brings context that is the difference between amateur and professional.

5. Community Leadership: AI can moderate a forum. It can’t be the trusted leader people follow. Community requires a human at the center: someone people trust, someone who embodies their values, someone they’d follow from platform to platform. In other words, the human element behind the technical functionality.

AI augmentation makes it possible for a solo entrepreneur to do more than ever. But your ambition and human need for collaboration may make it feasible to team up to accomplish even more.

The Open-Source Analogy

When I originally wrote about this subject a few years ago, I used open-source software as an analogy for how Web3 collaboration might work. That analogy still holds, but for different reasons.

I spent a decade developing software and hosting solutions in the WordPress ecosystem. WordPress itself is free, open-source software that was “forked” by Matt Mullenweg from another blogging platform. A community of developers built WordPress together, then thousands of commercial products emerged from that shared foundation.

What made WordPress work wasn’t just the code being free. It was:

• A shared vision and philosophy (democratizing publishing);

• Clear initial leadership (Mullenweg as benevolent dictator);

• Community trust and norms (defined by the community itself); and

• Commercial opportunities while contributing back to the community.

It was when the commercial opportunities arose that new leaders began to emerge within smaller segments of the broader community. As two of the first to offer paid, supported WordPress products, both Brian Gardner and I became leaders in the more business-oriented sector of WordPress.

A couple of years later, we teamed up to take things to a much higher level. That led to an array of new products and eight figures in highly profitable revenue.

It’s important to note that we provided leadership to our own communities first, and then the commercial opportunities caused those communities to intersect with the broader WordPress ecosystem. Many others succeeded in that ecosystem over the subsequent years.

This is exactly how AI-augmented collaboration will also work:

The “code” (AI capability) is essentially free and available to everyone. What matters is the vision (what you build with it) and these related skills:

• Leadership (who people trust to guide the project);

• Community (the humans who rally around shared values); and

• Equity (how you capture value and share with contributors).

The technical barrier is gone. The human barriers — trust, taste, judgment, leadership — remain and become even more important.

Why Audience Still Wins

In 2022, I wrote:

The people who develop audiences will always have the upper hand and most leverage when it comes to collaboration.

That’s even more true in 2026. Why?

Anyone can use AI to build a product. AI democratized technical capability. But AI can’t build trust at scale. It can’t develop a reputation for quality. It can’t create a community that follows you from platform to platform because they believe in your judgment.

Audience is the moat that AI can’t cross. If you have an audience that trusts you:

• You can launch products they’ll try because of who YOU are;

• You can attract collaborators who want access to that trust;

• You can charge premium prices because you’re not competing on features; and

• You can pivot when markets shift because people follow you, not your product.

This is why I’ve always emphasized audience-first approaches. The key is not about having the best technology or the most financial resources. It’s about having the relationships and trust that make everything else possible.

And that trust requires a human at the center.

AI can put together your newsletter. But it can’t be you. It can’t have the lived experience, the unique perspective, the personal story that makes people care. That’s the irreplaceable human element.

What This Means for 2026 and Beyond

I don’t think we’re headed toward a world where humans are replaced by AI, at least not at the entrepreneurial level. We’re heading toward a world where:

1. Solo ventures become even more powerful because AI eliminates the need for hiring.

2. Small teams become even smaller but more strategically valuable.

3. Collaboration happens at higher levels, meaning strategy, not execution.

4. Community becomes even more valuable as the trust mechanism AI can’t replicate.

5. Audience remains the ultimate moat that no amount of AI capability can substitute.

The age of seven-figure small continues to accelerate. But now, instead of needing a developer, a designer, and a marketer, you need Claude Code and two trusted humans who can help you decide if what you’re building actually matters.

That’s a sovereign collective. Radically small, exceptionally capable, and entirely human where it counts.

Keep going-

Brian

P.S. Ready to transform your expertise into location-independent income and upgrade your life at midlife? Further Premium gives you the complete roadmap, with business building instruction, financial planning advice, expat guidance, and more.

further: flashback

🎶 Love and Rockets – Ball Of Confusion, Seventh Dream of Teenage Heaven, 1985 🎶

When I first heard Ball of Confusion in 1985, I didn’t immediately realize it was a cover of the 1970 hit from the Temptations. But I did know the guys from Love and Rockets used to be in Bauhaus with Peter Murphy, so I was able to maintain my music nerd credibility somewhat. (YouTube)

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