Every technological shift has a strange kind of second-order effect. With AI, everyone talks about productivity, cost savings, and automation. But the biggest effect won’t be inside large companies. It will be in how many more people decide to start something on their own.

We’ve seen this before. The internet created bloggers, YouTubers, indie app developers. Mobile created entire categories of single-founder startups. AI agents and SaaS are doing the same thing now. The difference is that the friction is even lower. A small team can focus on the one thing they’re good at and outsource everything else to SaaS, to AI agents, or to freelancers who manage those tools.

In India, the number of registered startups has grown 300x in the last decade (source). Shows like Shark Tank India gave a cultural nudge, but the real driver is that it’s simply easier and more socially acceptable to try. Success stories like Flipkart, Zerodha, and Zoho are proof that you don’t need to follow the safe path.

Globally, the same pattern holds. By 2027, more than half the US workforce is expected to freelance, up from 36% in 2020 (source). Gen Z isn’t shy about it: they don’t want to work under someone else forever. The SME sector’s contribution to India’s GDP has already grown from 16.67% in 2015 to 26.47% in 2025. And when companies downsize, people often discover they’d rather work for themselves.

Common wisdom says: build for enterprises, that’s where the big money is. But if you look at the data, the contrarian move is building for new founders. Not just “SMBs” in the old sense but the millions of people starting niche products, side projects, and small companies. They don’t want bloated software. They don’t want to hire an agency to set up 10 different tools. They want something fast, intuitive, and powerful enough to let them compete.

This is why I’m building Comarketer. It’s an AI-powered copilot that helps founders launch and market their products without having to stitch together a dozen tools or outsource everything. The bet is simple: the next five years won’t just be about enterprises adopting AI. They’ll be about millions of new entrepreneurs who finally have the leverage to build something of their own.

And if that’s true, the best products of this era will be the ones built for them.