Hunter Arbaugh brings in more than $5 million a year in a one-person business selling billboard ads from his home office.
Arbaugh, 33, started his business, Supper Club, in August 2024, investing about $2,500 to form an LLC and launch. Working for both billboard companies and then an agency that bought the ads, he found the buying process dated and unduly complicated, with a web of fees and charges.
He decided to do something about it. Leaving his agency job, he developed an all-inclusive solution, with one price covering both the ad and production, installation and shipping. He tapped connections he’d built over seven years in the industry to spread the word and gave the business an unconventional name, Supper Club, to attract customers who believed in creative advertising, rather than AI-written billboards. “There’s so many very tech-forward companies in my industry,” he says. “I wanted to set myself apart a bit.”
Arbaugh brought in less than $1 million the first year, but sales kept mounting. He handles virtually every piece of the business himself, as a solo entrepreneur, augmenting what he can do using AI-powered tools. For instance, after a lot of experimenting, he used vibe coding to create his own customer relationship management software (CRM) using a platform called Base 44. That makes it easier to customize his sales presentations for each client and keep himself available to clients when they need him. Word of mouth has driven his growth. “I don’t need every advertiser to know about my company,” he says. “Clients keep coming back for more, and they bring their friends along for the ride, too.”
For his back office, he uses Collective, an AI-native financial operating system that targets “businesses of one” with services such as business entity formation and bookkeeping. He used it to help him move the business recently from Los Angles to Louisville, Ky., when he relocated.
Arbaugh is among a growing number of one-person businesses bringing in $1 million or more in annual revenue. Many are extending what they can do by using digital and AI tools and tapping help from contractors and platforms that tackle tasks they might otherwise have had to do themselves.
Among the nearly 32 million nonemployer businesses in the U.S. in 2024, 130,356 brought in $ 1 million in revenue or more in 2024, up from 117,060 in 2023, according the most recent data from the U.S Census Bureau. The largest category of these businesses is in construction (20,986 businesses), followed by professional services (18,378), retail trade, including ecommerce (17,101) and wholesale trade (11,664). Arbaugh is in an elite revenue category: Just 1,051 brought in $5 million and up, in 2024, up from 905 in 2023, and most are financial firms, such as hedge funds.
Collective announced this morning that it has raised $100 million to fuel additional development of its agentic financial operating system for solopreneurs, as well as product development in banking and insurance. The round includes a $40 million Series B round led by General Catalyst, QED and Gradient Ventures, with Intuit Ventures, FT Partners and SemperVirens and $60 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), to fuel customer acquisition.
“It is funding us to invest back into the tooling so we can provide every solopreneur with their own finance department,” said Hooman Radfar, co-founder and CEO of Collective. The “self-driving” platform provides AI tools with access to human experts. In addition to entity formation and bookkeeping, it offers invoicing, payroll, taxes and access to business and health insurance, charging between $199 a month and $349 a month depending on the business size. The company says it is growing 127% year-over-year.
“With CVF, we look for companies with high-quality unit economics and a large market opportunity,” said Pranav Singhvi, Partner and co-head of CVF, General Catalyst. “We see solo businesses as one of the most dynamic segments of the economy, and we expect that trend to accelerate as AI advances. Collective has built a one-stop shop for their financial needs. Their vision and track record make Collective exactly the kind of company CVF was designed for.”
Taylor Crane, a serial entrepreneur in the tech space, started his business, Fractional Jobs, in 2020, using Collective to set up his business and handle his bookkeeping. Fractional Jobs caters to professionals who work as part-time executives on a recurring basis for multiple companies. After a year as a fractional head of product, the entrepreneur, based in Brooklyn, N.Y., well understood the challenges in the space, such as difficulties in finding work and complexities in business operations.
Determined to solve these problems for other fractional executives, he started his solo business as a self-service job board. He soon discovered that the executives needed a more curated, white-glove approach to matchmaking and shifted in that direction, connecting the executives to his network of early-stage startups, small businesses and nonprofits. He spends a lot of his time networking to find companies seeking fractional help and doing Google, AI and LinkedIn searches to find other opportunities for his subscribers. It’s become a calling. “The mission of the company is to accelerate the fractional work movement,” he says.
Along the way, the newsletter where he shares the job opportunities took off, with an open rate of about 65%, and has grown to a subscriber list of nearly 50,000 fractional executives, with 3,000 people joining every month. “Every fractional executive is looking for new opportunities, always,” Crane says. Companies targeting the subscribers began advertising, which added to his revenue. This year, he anticipates revenue in the $600,000 to $1 million range.
The solopreneur trend is accelerating around the world. The recent Stripe Report says that AI-native solo founders brought in nearly twice the revenue of other solo-founded startups. The report tracks the growth in this population but does not disclose the number of businesses in these categories. It notes that B2B businesses, those using AI and those who sell globally have an edge, as do those who master customer retention.
Radfar, at Collective, believes the trend is only going to accelerate with the growth of AI tools, which is allowing many entrepreneurs to start and scale self-funded businesses at an unprecedented rate, bypassing the challenge of raising venture capital altogether. “They want to do their own thing, and they can with AI,” he says.
Meanwhile, many people in traditional jobs are now worried about the risks of being an employee in an age of AI, with many big organizations announcing they are growing without adding jobs, or laying people off. These workers are saying, “Wait a minute! I don’t need a big company anymore,” Radfar says. He believes the quest to realize the potential of these businesses is going to fuel future growth of the platforms that serve them. “This race is going to continue and continue,” he says.
Feature image credit: Taylor Crane, a former fractional executive, started his newsletter, Fractional Jobs, after noticing how challenging it was for fractional executives to find their next project. Fractional Jobs
