The biggest illusion in the workplace: Once I have a one-person company, I'll be free.
When working overtime until late at night, getting stuck in meaningless meetings, or being drained by workplace relationships, I believe many people have had the same thought: Why not quit and register a single-person company?
You don't have to watch your superior's face, cooperate with the team, or deal with complex workplace relationships. You can control your own work rhythm, decide your business direction, and completely break free from workplace constraints.
After the popularization of AI in 2026, this idea became even more popular. Support policies have been introduced in various places. Shenzhen released the "Ten Lobster Policies" to support individual entrepreneurship, and Hangzhou established a large number of OPC single-person company incubation parks. Currently, 143 entrepreneurship communities have been built in 38 cities across the country, offering free office space, computing power subsidies, entrepreneurship guidance, and other benefits.
In 2026, a new window period for individual entrepreneurship arrived, and the era of super individuals officially began. 36Kr also continuously published positive content about AI individual entrepreneurship. The phrase "One person is an army" made countless office workers who were tired of the workplace consider quitting their jobs and starting their own businesses.
However, the cold reality is there:
More than half of the entrepreneurs have a monthly income of less than 7,000 yuan, and the vast majority of projects still cannot achieve profitability after six months of operation.
We always mistakenly think that leaving the workplace and starting our own business can bring long-term freedom. But the reality is the opposite:
A single-person company is never a haven from the workplace. It's just a different form of bearing greater pressure and internal strife. The individual entrepreneurship that most people yearn for is essentially a self-beautified workplace illusion.
What is the real nature of a single-person company? Why can't the vast majority of entrepreneurs make a profit despite the hot industry trend? How should we rationally view single-person companies and avoid blind entrepreneurship in today's workplace?
Perhaps you can find a new perspective in this article.
The essence of a single-person company: No team to back you up, one person bears all the business pressure
Most office workers today have a cognitive bias towards single-person companies.
The general public believes that single-person companies have no attendance constraints, no superior control, and no team internal strife. Relying on AI tools, they can easily receive orders and make money, completely saying goodbye to all workplace troubles.
However, when we return to the essence of business, the real situation of single-person companies is completely different:
There is no colleague to share the work, no company platform to back you up, and no fixed salary guarantee.
The entrepreneur has to handle all the work in the front, middle, and back of the product, sales, finance, customer service, operation and maintenance, etc., and bear all the business costs, risks, and performance pressure alone.
The Wu Xiaobo Channel clearly mentioned a key point in the "Personal Economy" special topic:
AI has greatly reduced the technical threshold for individual entrepreneurship, but it has not reduced the survival threshold of entrepreneurship itself at all.
In the workplace, we only need to focus on a single position to get a stable salary. However, starting a business requires individuals to make up for all the business capabilities. Any shortcoming in any link will directly lead to the inability to close the business loop.
The people who enter the single-person company field at present can be mainly divided into three categories, all of which have lost the filter of freedom:
The first category is young people who have left large companies.
For example, they have professional skills in their positions and can build AI workflows based on their past work experience. However, they generally lack business negotiation and market customer acquisition abilities. No matter how perfect the product is, they cannot get real orders.
The second category is middle-aged practitioners who have encountered workplace bottlenecks.
For example, some workplace experts with certain workplace resources have little income after deducting computing power costs after starting their own businesses independently. At the same time, they have to bear all the family expenses, and the economic pressure continues to increase.
The third category is mature super individuals.
For example, they have stable customer resources and a mature business system. They seem to have independent work and free time, but in fact, they have no rest all year round. To make up for the shortcoming in positions, entrepreneurs in the circle will serve as CTO, CFO, etc. in each other's companies. They can only maintain business operations by working together.
What office workers imagine a single-person company to be is less work and more freedom. The actual situation is being on standby 24/7 with no boundary between work and life. At work, you can cut off the work state on time. After starting a business, work and life are completely blended, accompanied by long-term revenue anxiety and business anxiety.
To put it simply:
The hard work in the workplace is a limited consumption with clear division of labor and shared risks. The hard work in a single-person company is a continuous internal strife of fighting alone without anyone to share the burden.
Why is it difficult for the vast majority of single-person companies to make a profit despite the continuous heating up of the industry trend?
With policy support, AI empowerment, and low start-up costs, multiple favorable factors have made single-person companies a national entrepreneurship trend. However, there is a cruel truth hidden beneath the popularity that the public has ignored:
Entrepreneurship itself is a high-risk behavior, and individual entrepreneurship is even riskier. It has never been suitable as a way out for office workers. It only suits a small number of people with comprehensive entrepreneurial abilities.
From the perspective of macro industry data, the overall survival rate of entrepreneurship is extremely low. According to the data of the China Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, the three-year survival rate of newly registered enterprises in China is less than 20%, and the five-year survival rate is only 7% - 8%. The business risk of single-person companies focusing on the AI track is much higher than that of traditional enterprises:
A survey by MIT shows that 95% of AI individual entrepreneurship projects cannot achieve the expected revenue. A 2026 industry review by Huxiu pointed out that nearly 40% of the first batch of AI single-person companies that followed the trend have been cancelled and closed down within two years, and the industry exit wave has already quietly emerged.
Combined with real business cases, we can more clearly see the core business risks of single-person companies:
Firstly, quitting jobs blindly and following the trend of entrepreneurship leads to a rapid break in cash flow. 36Kr tracked the case of a post-95s operation staff from a large company. The person quit the job due to being tired of workplace interpersonal strife and entered an AI cultural and creative single-person company. Relying on AI, they quickly produced cultural and creative products, but lacked the ability to operate traffic. The products were highly homogeneous and had no pricing advantage. Coupled with fixed expenses such as social security and promotion, they exhausted all their savings in half a year and finally closed the company and returned to the workplace.
Secondly, the business depends on external orders, and the revenue stability is extremely poor. An office worker with community resources quit the job to start an AI enterprise consulting business. They finally got a large order of 100,000 yuan, but the cooperation was directly terminated due to the strategic adjustment of the client, and all the balance could not be recovered. The subsequent small orders have a long payment cycle and are difficult to implement. Without a team to share the risks, a single order crisis is enough to stop the business.
Thirdly, there is a unique legal joint liability risk. This is also a hidden danger that most novice entrepreneurs completely ignore: Ordinary limited liability companies bear limited risks with company assets, but single-person companies are prone to the problem of unclear separation between public and private accounts. Once the business incurs losses and debts, the court can directly hold the entrepreneur accountable, and the entrepreneur's personal assets such as real estate and savings will be enforced. A failed entrepreneurship will directly affect the safety of family assets.
Through the above comparison, it is not difficult to find that the workplace is an employment choice with controllable risks and stable income. Starting a single-person business is a business game with unlimited potential returns but completely self-borne risks. Entrepreneurs have to deal with business risks such as market fluctuations and order losses, as well as unique legal risks.
Most office workers have long been engaged in executive positions and lack the necessary entrepreneurial abilities such as customer acquisition, business docking, and risk management. Naturally, they cannot adapt to the high-pressure environment of individual entrepreneurship.
Excluding the objective high risks of entrepreneurship itself, the failure of ordinary people in entrepreneurship is mostly due to falling into three major subjective cognitive illusions.
1. Misjudging the cost of entrepreneurship: Only calculating the explicit monetary cost and ignoring the implicit time cost
Currently, all kinds of entrepreneurship promotions emphasize that the start-up capital of a single-person company is less than 3,500 yuan. The park provides free office space, and the cost of AI tools is low. It can almost be a zero-cost trial.
However, such promotions deliberately avoid the most core implicit costs: time cost and opportunity cost.
Industry data shows that it takes 40 to 60 hours of manual planning time to build a set of implementable AI business workflows. AI can replace basic execution work, but core decisions such as market demand judgment, business model design, and project review still need to be completed by the entrepreneur in person.
The biggest mistake of office workers in starting a business is only calculating the visible cash expenditure and ignoring the fixed salary and career development opportunities they give up after quitting the job.
Every day without revenue in entrepreneurship is essentially a continuous loss.
2. Overestimating the value of tools: Thinking that AI can make up for the lack of business cognition
More than half of the failed projects in the market have the same problem:
Emphasizing technology and ignoring demand, looking for the market with tools instead of developing products around market demand.
Many entrepreneurs blindly polish the AI technology functions and invest all their energy in tool optimization, but they never conduct research on real market demand and do not sort out a clear profit model.
AI is just a tool to improve efficiency and cannot make up for the lack of underlying business cognition. People who don't understand the market and monetization will only expose their own shortcomings faster with the help of AI.
Seventy percent of the success or failure of entrepreneurship depends on basic business skills such as customer acquisition, delivery, and demand insight. AI tools only play a 30% auxiliary role. Office workers in executive positions generally lack business thinking, and blindly entering individual entrepreneurship has a very high probability of failure.
3. Confusing personal and platform capabilities: The illusion of self-owned traffic is completely shattered after leaving the platform
Many office workers overestimate their own abilities and mistake platform resources for personal strength.
In the workplace, they can successfully negotiate with customers and complete performance relying on the company's brand endorsement, team resources, and mature channels. Once they leave the platform and start a business independently, without brand trust, team collaboration, and a standardized pricing system, the difficulty of customer acquisition will increase significantly.
At present, most single-person companies in China copy the overseas paid subscription monetization model. However, the domestic users' payment habits are not yet mature, and the life cycle of pure AI tool projects is generally less than three years.
Even if the entrepreneurship park can connect with government and state-owned enterprise official orders, large orders far exceed the delivery ability of a single person. Collaboration among multiple entrepreneurs will generate high communication costs, and the business will be in a dilemma.
After all, most entrepreneurs can't make money not because the industry trend is declining, but because they deliberately beautify the freedom of entrepreneurship, magnify the fatigue of the workplace, overestimate their own comprehensive abilities, and underestimate the cruelty of the business market.
Rationally re-recognize single-person companies: Don't blindly choose entrepreneurship to escape the workplace
I don't deny the long-term value of single-person companies and super individuals. The individual economy will be an important trend in future career development. But I always adhere to one view:
Never regard entrepreneurship as a way out to escape workplace pressure.
The people who are suitable for single-person companies are never those who hate going to work and fear workplace pressure. They are practitioners with complete business closed-loop capabilities, strong stress resistance, and stable customer source reserves.
For ordinary office workers, to objectively view individual entrepreneurship, they need to establish three levels of clear cognition:
1. Distinguish between two types of fatigue: Workplace pressure and entrepreneurship anxiety are fundamentally different
The fatigue in the workplace comes from interpersonal communication, ineffective work, and job assessment. However, the enterprise will bear the business risks, and individuals have a fixed monthly salary as a guarantee. The income is stable, and the risks are controllable.
The fatigue in entrepreneurship comes from cash flow pressure, order anxiety, and all-chain business problems. There is no fixed income as a guarantee, and all market risks and business risks need to be borne by individuals alone.
Many people want to escape the workplace. In essence, they don't want to face pressure and hard work, rather than wanting to actively break through themselves.
If they can't bear the regular pressure in the workplace, they basically can't resist the long-term and unknown survival anxiety in the process of entrepreneurship. Sometimes, the pressure of having no one to back you up is even more difficult to accept than the difficulties in the workplace.
2. A stable entrepreneurship path: Start with a side business to verify and refuse to quit the job and go all in
Among the entrepreneurs I know, all the single-person entrepreneurs who can achieve stable profits started with a side business.
First, use spare time to polish the business, connect with customers, and run through the monetization process. After verifying that the business model is feasible, then fully invest in entrepreneurship.
In contrast, almost all the entrepreneurs who quit their jobs directly and entered the field have encountered the dilemma of income interruption and depletion of savings.
Don't use quitting the job to escape workplace anxiety. First, try individual entrepreneurship with a side business. After verifying the market demand, stable revenue, and your own stress resistance, then make a decision to start a full-time business.
3. Recognize the essence of freedom: Entrepreneurial freedom is based on extreme self-discipline
People yearn for the unrestricted freedom of single-person companies but ignore the hard prerequisite behind freedom: Without system supervision and superior control, all work rhythms, business plans, and goal progress need to be driven by self-motivation.
In the workplace, work is promoted by the company system. In entrepreneurship, the entire process of business can only be completed by self-discipline.
True and sustainable individual entrepreneurship is never about slacking off at will. It is about high self-discipline and self-restraint without supervision.
Conclusion:
Actually, only when I wrote to this point did I gradually understand:
A single-person company cannot solve workplace internal strife, nor can it save office workers who fear pressure.
The communication, responsibility, pressure, and troubles that you want to escape in the workplace will not disappear because of starting your own business. They will only appear in a more lonely and cruel form on the entrepreneurial road.
The essence of a single-person company is an independent business model without a team to back you up and full-link self-financing. It is not a haven from the workplace.
The core reason for the difficulty in making a profit under the trend is that the public has fallen into three major entrepreneurial cognitive misunderstandings of cost, tools, and traffic, and at the same time ignored the natural high-risk nature of entrepreneurship.
The financial writer Wu Xiaobo once said:
In the future, everyone can become an independent individual, but not everyone is suitable for quitting the job and starting a business.
AI can simplify the work process and reduce the difficulty of execution, but it can never help anyone avoid the pressure of survival and business.
Don't envy the apparent time freedom of entrepreneurs. You can't see their revenue anxiety at night. Also, don't blindly resist the rules and constraints in the workplace. Behind the stable salary, it is the enterprise that shares most of the entrepreneurial risks for us.
Put down the illusion of single-person companies and rationally view the two paths of the workplace and entrepreneurship.
True career freedom is never about leaving the platform and fighting alone.
It is about having strong enough abilities and the confidence to choose employment or entrepreneurship at any time.