The Easiest Businesses to Start Right Now As a Solopreneur

• While it’s a great time to start a business, it’s even more promising for solopreneurs.
• Three experts and five founders told Insider which businesses are best for solopreneurs today.
• Virtual assisting, financial advising, and digital marketing companies are among them.

Entrepreneurship has been on the rise during the pandemic as people sought creative outlets, activities to fill their free time, and ancillary income.

While it’s an advantageous time to start a business because of low startup costs and fewer barriers to entry, it’s especially promising for solopreneurs — business owners who run a company without employees — to capitalize on skills they already have, said Dave Mawhinney, an entrepreneurship professor and executive director of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University.

Luke Pardue, an economist at the human-resources platform Gusto, said personal and professional services such as grocery delivery and virtual assisting were among the most successful companies to emerge in the past two years.

“During the onset of the pandemic, we saw a focus on entrepreneurship in these personal-services sectors,” Pardue said. “As the economy shifted towards remote work, we’ve seen that new business creation has been focused on professional services.”

Insider spoke with three economy experts and five entrepreneurs about the best businesses to start today if you’re a solopreneur. Pardue said virtual-assisting companies are promising right now, while Mawhinney and Arun Sundararajan, an author and professor of entrepreneurship at New York University, said financial advising and digital

marketing companies

are here to stay.

“If you are a digital marketer, can offer some sort of financial advice, or have anything to do with writing or computer coding, you can dip your toes into freelance work with platforms like Upwork,” Sundararajan previously told Insider.