Ep. 370 Solopreneur trends that shaped 2025 (and what to shift next)

If your content has stopped landing, leads feel slower, or business just feels heavier than it used to, you’re not alone. In this episode, Anna unpacks the major solopreneur trends of 2025 – and what they mean for how you work, sell, and show up as you prepare for 2026.

Key moments:

[00:36] Why 2025 has felt heavier – A look at the year’s uncertainty and market shifts

[02:55] Trend 1: Visibility got harder – How LinkedIn changes affected expert content

[06:25] Trend 2: AI made content easy but distinction hard – Why point of view now matters more

[10:12] Trend 3: Corporate budgets shifted – What’s changed and why sales cycles feel slower

[13:30] Trend 4: Trust takes more touchpoints – The decline of hypey funnels and rise of warm leads

[17:40] Trend 5: The push for sustainability – Solopreneurs wanting “better”, not “bigger”

[20:21] What this means for your model – Why simplification is now essential

[22:15] Updating your operating system – From accidental structures to intentional design

[24:40] Groundwork & upcoming workshop – Support for recalibrating your business in 2026

[26:55] Final takeaway – Responding to trends with clarity, not pressure

Resources mentioned:

• Groundwork (10-day reset): onestepoutside.com/groundwork

• Join the waitlist for the Solopreneur Operating System – intentionalexpert.com

Solopreneur Trends 2025

We’re talking about the trends that have shaped solopreneurship in 2025, and in particular, the ones that have been felt in how we’re showing up in our day to day. So if you feel like your content hasn’t been landing as well as before, maybe leads have been slowing down or just the whole sales process has been slower and you just feel. It feels really heavy right now. It feels harder than it used to be. Then this one is for you. Welcome to Reimagining, the podcast that helps you build a profitable business as an independent expert, one that works for you and your lifestyle. I’m your host, Anna Lundberg, former corporate insider turned business mentor, executive coach, and mum of two. Whether you’re a solopreneur, a coach, speaker, consultant, I’m here to guide you in creating a business that gives you freedom, flexibility, and the fulfilment you’re looking for. Ready to redefine success and build a business that you love? Let’s get started.

So we’re looking at the trends that shaped solopreneurship in 2025 and what they really meant for how we’ve been working and growing. And then next week, then in the coming weeks, we’ll be looking ahead to 2026. So it’s, it’s not about what you or I have done wrong. It’s really about what we’ve experienced, what we’ve shifted, what we’ve seen shifting around us, and perhaps then as a consequence, what we might want to shift in our business because of that. So I did a podcast episode on this a few weeks ago. Months, maybe even time has flown.

But it was about how this has been quite a tough market and you may have been feeling that, and if so, you know, I’m very empathetic to that. And we’re all in this together. And it has been a really noisy year. It’s been uncertain and weirdly slow as well. I really felt that, wow, that the beginning of a year. And I heard this from a lot of people, well established season experts, speakers and so on. The first few months, just not much was moving. And, you know, there’s been uncertainty for various reasons, politics, economics and so on.

And that was really tough. And then I’ve talked about, you know, how I took a really long summer. The last few months have been pretty intense and now suddenly it’s Christmas, so Whoosh, where did 2025 go? And so you’re not alone. If you felt like this year’s gone quickly that, you know, it’s been okay, but maybe not quite where you wanted it to be based on your goals that you optimistically at the beginning of the year. And the other important thing to say is that we don’t need and especially because of the trends, I’m talking about a bigger audience, a new funnel. You don’t even need a dramatic pivot. But we probably do need to just update your operating system. Basically, things that got us here probably won’t get us there.

And that’s something that I’ve been doing, you know, continually really over the last decade of managing my business, both in response to macro trends and in response to how I was evolving, how my family was evolving and what I wanted next. So, you know, if you’re quite new to this, then you may be surprised to see that you have to kind of keep iterating, I suppose. But if you’ve been in business for a while, you’ll know that this is one of many shifts that have happened and will continue to happen. And that’s okay. It’s part of the flexibility and freedom that comes with doing your own thing. Okay, so let’s go with the first trend and it will be no surprise to you that I’m going to say that visibility got harder even for the good stuff. So LinkedIn. Let’s talk about LinkedIn.

If there’s one thing that comes up in every single mentoring call with my clients, it is LinkedIn. And it has been the most amazing platform for us as solopreneurs, as experts, as thought leaders. It has been a really great platform for organic growth. Compared to Facebook and Instagram where we’re chasing the algorithm and having to pay to reach our followers, let alone non followers. LinkedIn has been really good for high quality content. You know, very small minority of people were posting in the past and really connecting. Obviously it’s a professional platform, so the opportunity was there to connect with high level people, CEOs and founders and, and other experts. I won’t speak to what the algorithm has or hasn’t done.

There are many other people who’ve predicted and analysed and so on. However, the sense has been really that there have been some changes this year. It feels like kind of deep, you know, thoughtful content has been deprioritized. I had colleagues who did various accelerators in the beginning of the years. There were engagement pods and things that were teaching hacks to get those bigger followings. But LinkedIn has been clapping, clamping down on those types of activities on you Know, AI bots, they’re just commenting. I still have some people and I briefly experimented with it, but quickly pulled back from it. Still have people commenting something that’s so obviously poetically chatgpt or whatever AI tool they’re using and I barely want to engage back and it’s frustrating that people are still doing that.

But basically we’ve written maybe the same stuff that used to get lots and lots of views in the past and it just doesn’t anymore. And the feeling I think I see and I feel myself for you, you know, high integrity experts with high integrity content, it’s starting to underperform. And it’s important to realise here this is not because you’re not as good as you were before, it’s not because of quality, it’s more because of the context. So, you know, maybe you used to get good engagement, but you don’t now. You feel like you’re talking into the void. You know, you’ve written your absolute best work and then no one is responding, even though what you’re saying is something that’s so, so important and so worth hearing. And you know, you just get exhausted from showing up again and again and you’re not sure what’s landing. So it means that you might be pulling back.

I’ve had clients, you know, decide, actually, no, I don’t want to be there anymore. At least take a break. You might be leaning in and trying to game it even more, which is of course more exhausting. Or you might be where I am is sort of rethinking the strategy and pulling back maybe from quantity and from what was working before and thinking of how we can make it work for, yes, both the algorithm to some extent, but importantly for our clients, for our business and for our lifestyle. Well, okay, so the platform changed the rules, it’s not you. And audience behaviour as a result, of course is shifting. They’re scanning and they don’t have time, you know, that we all know about sort of fragmented attention and so on. Earning trust is going to take more than a post, so don’t worry about one individual post tanking, as they say.

Visibility isn’t the goal, it’s not the end itself. Right. It’s a means to an end. So try not to get caught up in the likes and impressions and so on. On individual posts, we’re looking more for strateg resonance with the right people and a tapestry of, you know, interactions with people, whether it’s posts and comments and DMs and meeting at networking events and calls and whatever else that will ultimately, you know, bring fruit. So please don’t think you need to post more. Rather, we need to rethink our system to make sure we’re sort of staying in the right people’s orbit, even when the algorithm doesn’t necessarily help us do that. Okay, so that’s the first one.

Visibility got harder and obviously I’ve just hinted at this because it’s impossible to separate these two points, but AI has made content easy and distinction hard in some ways. So tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude have become like an automatic part of the workflow. And, you know, we’re using AI, which is great as solopreneurs without big teams to batch posts, write emails, you know, maybe even generate lead magnets and all sorts. So we’re all much faster, but we’re also less distinct. We can all recognise. And there have been these conversations around M dashes and whatever, like, forget the. The details and who cares if someone has an EM dash or not? It’s more about, okay, yes, you can produce, but it feels bland. Right? Everyone’s content sounds like everyone else’s.

You lose sight of what my voice is, you know, is this what I would say or is this just that I’m sort of writing now in ChatGPT speak? Because I’ve been using it so much, you know, and we’re just kind of keeping up so. So content. It’s kind of levelled the playing field to some extent. You know, it’s. It’s not an advantage anymore. I come from a content marketing background. Content strategy has always been one of my flags that I’ve flown and something I’m passionate about. I really think deeply about this and as a marketer, as a writer, you know, I’ve always been all over the channels with all the content, but this has now become kind of a starting line, not an advantage.

And so a few things that I see, obviously having a strategy, really important and the right strategy, having a point of view, because that’s what differentiates you and helps you to stand out. And you can also play with different media. Now, I know I can also do video and so on to some extent, but I find, you know, video is. Is a way to be more human, to speak to people so they get to see, obviously, them taking people off the platform onto, like, workshops and things. I’ve been doing more free speaking, like panels and going to events and things because again, that kind of just connects the dots with a human being so they can see that you are the person that you portray. Online to build that trust and we’re just kind of numb right to that surface level. Content. I had peaks in the year and I thought, wow, this is amazing.

LinkedIn’s really sending me really great people who are aligned with my work and so on. And then it sort of. It just feels like, oh, it’s the same 10 tips to be a good leader or whatever it is. And, oh, no, people are writing EM dashes and. And whatever that, you know, that Schlop will be. So look, AI is brilliant, right? It’s such an important tool that I’m sure most of us, I certainly am not using it to its full potential. And I’m learning. We’re all learning.

Everyone is learning, by the way. No one knows, really. It’s brilliant for us as solopreneurs and it’s brilliant for scale and speed, but it can’t necessarily give you clarity. So the differentiator is going to be, you know, what are you actually saying that no one else is? What’s your point of view? What are you getting across and how are you saying in a way that builds trust rather than just getting. Getting ignored because it’s just another ChatGPT post, so that’s visibility got harder. And then, of course, partly, you know, to blame is the fact that AI made content easy. The next one is, and I know a lot of you experience this as well, the kind of budgets on the corporate side, I suppose budgets have shrunk to some extent, that things have been shifted for things like dei and let’s not get into the politics of that. It’s really unfortunate how.

How some of the trends have happened there and the feeling can be, you know, no one wants to pay for this. Even some areas like leadership development, a lot of companies have their own internal coaches now, so it’s harder for external coaches to come in. There’s question marks over how effective training is anyway, and all these workshops and things that were relatively easy to sell. Perhaps we ourselves, as experts think actually, you know, that’s not the best thing to do a lunch and learn. We recognise that it really needs to be a more substantial programme. My idea would be to do coaching with a founder and the leadership team and then to do, you know, a series of workshops or sessions, maybe clinics and so on over a longer period of time. Same as when I work with individuals. I hate promising, you know, results in like a week or, you know, whatever it is.

I love working with people for a longer period of time so we can really get into the nuances and the weeds and really understand how to make real transformation, have the accountability, implementation, all that. So it’s all a bit tricky. So as a result of that, you know, investments I guess have become more cautious, especially for this kind of advisory work that we come in. I’ve certainly heard people saying, you know, it just feels so slow. You know, people say, yeah, yeah, we’re interested, we have budget. But they don’t respond. Even when they say, you know, I love your work and I want to work together, they just kind of ghost you, they hesitate. It’s more, oh, maybe next quarter or oh, no, sorry, our budget’s for car or now, you know, we’re too busy.

That’s a big one. Which is ironic when you’re trying to help them be less busy. So you might be feeling like you have to justify your existence. And again, a lot of my clients say, you know, oh, it’s so exhausting having to chase and follow up and then we take it personally and that’s really, really tough. Okay, so to some extent this is only highlighting something that has always been true, that we need to be super clear on the problem we’re solving. And in particular, let’s say we’re selling to corporate and that’s a big, you know, umbrella and but if you’re selling to companies B2B, but also B2C, by the way, business to consumer, you know, leading with your values and mission and you know, the sense of meaning is so important for thought leadership and for your integrity and so on. And it’s not necessarily the thing that a company will buy. Right.

So we need to really connect what we do and our passions and mission to something that is an urgent, tangible outcome based value. So we really need to look at it through the eyes of the company that is now super busy experiencing restructuring and you know, cut budgets and obviously meeting overload and stress about AI and change management. So. And there are things that are super urgent burning needs that need solving and we can absolutely translate what we do into solving those problems. But we need to be so clear to cut through that noise again, coming back to kind of the LinkedIn and AI piece of and to resonate with those companies. So it’s not enough to be just, you know, yes, we should be more, whatever it is, accessible, diverse, all these things that 100% we should be, but we just need to anchor that in ROI based language for the companies if we want to work with corporates. I guess related to that in terms of sales processes, this is I’m hearing more and more and I Had this experience a few years ago that again, because of, I guess the, the noise online, the content, you know, so many more experts now than. Than were around when I started 10 years ago, which is amazing and so good that we can all empower ourselves as solo experts.

But it also means that there’s a lot more noise and sort of clutter and competition out there. And, and so in the past, and in fact, my first year as a coach, my first few weeks I could put out a post or an email or something and I would get people buy. It was relatively new, but people are so tired, both the experts creating it and the people consuming it of constant content and hypey launches. Right. We’ve all kind of gone through those awful webinars and if you haven’t, I can give you a peek behind the curtain of sort of a decade ago. The webinars that were really, some of them were faking that, you know, pretended there were lots of people online. I did that briefly. And lots of, you know, chat sort of.

You had recorded people chatting from before and then you sort of made it look like it was a live session. The other formulas for, for webinars was, you know, you kind of just tell them your story and the big picture and then at the end you smack them with the pitch of how they have to pay lots of money to work with you. A bit like the kind of speakers who do rah rah rah at the front and then they go, hey, buy my 20,000 programme at the back of the room at the end. So, so, you know, it’s, it’s. We’re exhausted of all this content. It’s not enough to just post. Even if you do, which is amazing, have people reaching out saying, hey, this is really resonating. It just takes more touch points.

You know, people need to listen to my podcast, they need to have been rec me that need to have maybe if we’re lucky, had chat GPT go, oh, you really need to talk to Anna. That’s ideal. So organic marketing reach for most of us is, is pretty inconsistent. Right. So. And even by the way, to reassure you people with way bigger followers than you and me, bigger following or follower numbers, you know, can’t rely on that, obviously, because we’re building on rented ground ground, as you say, so we’re reliant on LinkedIn or whatever. And the reality is if you do this kind of. And why not, I’ll just give you a little exercise to do it.

Where did your last five clients come from? Or if you Have a lot of clients. Even better, where did your best clients come from? And usually almost without exception, they will have come from a conversation, they will come from a referral. Someone who saw you speak years ago and now comes back to you. Someone who’s had a recommendation because they’ve worked with someone else. You know, someone past colleague who already knows and trusts you. It doesn’t come from just a cold email. Hey, unless, you know, it happens to really land at the right time, I can solve this thing for you. Or, you know, just one post.

You have to have really dialled in messaging if you’re going to put one post out and get people to go, oh my gosh, I need this right now. So, you know, following up with warm leads, people already in your world, the stuff really that kind of feels quite unscalable. That’s what works. And it can feel exhausted and it’s quite boring. It’s not very sexy. But having a proper sales system and starting with the warmer people rather than going way out into the universe of cold people who’ve never heard of you, is so much more effective for immediate sales and to be honest, to build consistency as well. So it’s really a whole ecosystem of relationships you don’t need. Most of us don’t need hundreds and thousands of leads, right? We need the right fit ones who already trust us.

And the conversion there will be. You know, I find it’s almost 100% conversion when it’s someone who knew me already or, you know, when I have that in because they’re already open to work with me. And then when I show that I can solve the problem, boom, easy peasy. You can’t delegate that kind of trust building process to an algorithm, really. So it’s really about relationships. This is good news, I think, because most of us don’t love the whole, you know, chasing the algorithm, being online all the time. A lot of my clients say I hate social media. Fair enough.

So worry less about those complex content funnels and things and think more about conversations that you’re having. Not to say that you stop the content, but it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a tapestry of touch points, of people interacting with you. And then the final trend, and this is really through my own lens, but it’s what I’ve been hearing again and again, people I’m speaking to is, is people saying, you know, I don’t want to build an empire, I don’t need much more than I have, but I want better, I don’t want to be working six days a week or you know, I don’t want to be feeling guilty when I’m taking time off to be with the kids or vice versa. You know, I’ve built something that works, but it feels heavy, it feels misaligned, it’s too dependent on me. We’ve talked about that recently actually. Like what happens if you’re not very well for a few weeks, you know, if you’ve pre scheduled your content and if you can, you know, if you’ve got one to one clients, you can maybe reschedule and things. But, but it’s quite tough to be, to have a business that’s fully resilient and kind of works even when you have ups and downs in your own life. And that’s really something to think about when you’re designing your business model.

So things are kind of working, but it’s only because I’m holding it together. And then if I don’t feel well, then oh my gosh. Or if I’m, you know, offline, then that doesn’t work at all. Or you know, you built offers that kind of worked in the last few years, but now maybe they’re not working so well or they’re paying the bills, but it’s not where your passion is. And so, you know, you’re in a place where you don’t really want to do more of what you’re doing. You want to change things and you need to, yeah, you need to pivot things in order to be able to grow to scale. Even if you don’t want to build an empire, you might want to reach that next level. And you can’t do so by just working longer hours because you’re already at the max, for example.

So it becomes more at this stage of your business, it becomes more about sustainability and more clarity. Not so scrappy, like trying to just take on everything that people give you, which is so good in the beginning. And we absolutely have that phase of experimentation. But there’s this kind of intentional build that needs to happen and it’s very much going to be about simplifying, doing less and, and really going where the, the pull is. And you may know Pareto principle of 80:20. I saw somebody online say it was Tim Ferriss’s principle and it almost got me to comment. But I don’t want to get involved in these things on, on social.

But you know, the pareto principle that 20% of your clients probably generate, you know, 80% of income and, and those ratios really hold true throughout your business. Probably 20% of your content, 20% of your marketing activities, sales activities. It’s really important. Our whole job becomes to 20% are okay. This is not burnout. This is the big thing. It’s not a massive thing. And, and that’s why it doesn’t feel so dramatic, I suppose.

But all these trends together and these kind of internal senses of. It’s just overwhelming. And I just feel like it’s not giving me the freedom that I had hoped. And I’m not quite, you know, I’m not able to say no to clients that feel like a bad fit because I’m just grateful for the work and all these feelings. And it’s such a shame because obviously we’re built the business for freedom, for flexibility, to do meaningful work, to be able to manage it around the family, whatever that looks like, our health and so on. And when it doesn’t do that, even if on paper it kind of looks successful and, oh, it’s not really delivering on the promise. But we don’t need to, you know, I always say don’t need to quit your job and move to Barley. And the same here.

We don’t need to like fold the business and start again. We don’t need to burn it all down and begin again from scratch. But we do need to kind of pause and rebuild with. With, you know, more intention, more simpler structure, more resonance. And maybe you need support with that as well. So a few weeks ago, we ran. I ran Groundwork, which was kind of laying the foundations for this. I will probably be doing that again in January because I know some people felt it was a bit too much at the end of the year.

So let me know if you want to join that. Or you can go to onestepoutside.com groundwork that’s kind of a check in on where or what things are working and maybe not working as you want them to. But really it’s all about your. Your operating system. What I’d call your solopreneur operating system. It may have kind of developed organically, you know, you may have kind of started intentionally developing it, but then it’s become a little bit of an accidental Frankenstein. You maybe just need to update the software. You just need a reboot.

That’s a pretty good tech solution, right? You don’t have to throw everything out and buy a new computer necessarily. Although my laptop is on its last leg, so I might need to buy some new hardware there. But generally my Mac is very nice and it just requires, you know, a reboot, some TWEAKS maybe closing some tabs, and that’s all you need to do. So it’s not like a whole new strategy. And to start everything again, and certainly not chasing like, oh, I’ve got to sign up to this programme to learn how to finally game the LinkedIn system or whatever. It’s rather taking a pause, taking a step back and thinking about what you want to build, how you want to build and design it. So there’s groundwork that I just mentioned. I’ve got something new coming in the new year as well, so keep an eye out for that.

In the meantime, I will be also running a workshop in January which is all around designing your solarpreneur operating system. And so if that’s of interest, if you go to intentionalexpert.com, you’ll be able to sign up there to a wait list and as soon as the details are available, then that will be there as well. But in the meantime, yeah, I hope these insights were interesting. Let me know if you had other trends that you’ve experienced over the the past year, if there are other things that you know that you want to bring to the table and share. And again, it’s not about, you know, dwelling on the things that have gone badly, it’s just about the reality kind of facing. Facing what’s happened. Can’t change it now anyway. Certainly don’t have control over a lot of these massive macro trends, but we can control how we respond to that and how we shift into 2026 with more intention, more clarity.

And really, again, building strategically and sustainably, not just reacting to all these silly little changes to the algorithms and things like that. Okay, great. So see you back here next week and then we’ll soon be wrapping up for Christmas. See you then.

If you’re starting to feel like something needs to shift next year in how you work, in how your business runs, or what it’s all really building towards, there’s something new coming soon that’s designed to help. It’s for experienced solopreneurs who want to grow with more clarity, more structure, and more calm without burning everything down. If that sounds like you, head to intentionalexpert.com and pop your name on the waitlist and you’ll be the first to know when more details are ready. That’s intentionalexpert.com.