The Snare of the Slopreneur

AI slop entrepreneurs have no moat, but someone has to explore the new tech

AI slop creators have no time to think and no defensible moat. We need them anyway.

Slopreneurs flood your feed with AI slop and zero critical thinking. But they’re doing exploratory work the rest of us won’t. Here’s how to survive their content (and learn from it).

You probably know the type.

One day after Claude Cowork came out, they had a YouTube video called “How Claude Cowork Saves Me 10 Hours a Week” and a Substack post titled “If You’re Not Using Claude Cowork, You’re Already Behind.” Not a day goes by without them publishing LinkedIn posts such as, “7 New AI Tools That Feel Illegal To Use,” “Three Tools to Replace Your Entire Team,” and “Top 10 New Tools You’ll Wish You Found Sooner—Number Eight Will Make You Weep with Joy.” Not wanting to miss out on an opportunity, they’d already published an entire course called “Earn Six Figures with Clawdbot” before the tool was renamed to Moltbot and then OpenClaw—three days later.

I call them slopreneurs: entrepreneurs making a living off slop.

slopreneur /slɒprəˈnɜː/ noun informal, derogatory

A person who builds a business model around the rapid, high-volume production of low-quality, derivative content or products — typically leveraging generative AI and other automation shortcuts — prioritizing speed, scale, and short-term profit over originality, craft, or genuine value, without intent to build a sustainable enterprise.

The term slopreneur came to me as I completed my 10K run yesterday morning. Always a great time for creative ideas to ambush you between labored breaths. I thought the term was brilliant. Then it turned out the word was already suggested before. James Rendel beat me to it three months ago. (Such is the life of a Solo Chief. When you finally have a great idea, you’re probably not the first one. You’re rarely even the second.)

“Their posts fill your feed every day, promising the world in exchange for a comment, creating an avalanche of content optimised to be optimised, always with a distinct angle of self-promotion or quick profit. Emboldened by the latest in AI, it’s the work of a slopreneur. They don’t just inadvertently make slop (hey it’s ok to admit we’ve all inhaled at least once right), they’ve turned it into a whole business model and personality.” - James Rendel, “The Slopreneur”

I say we should pity, warn, and embrace the slopreneur.

The Flaw of the Slopreneur: No Time for Critical Thinking

When your business model depends on being among the first to report on a trend or technology, the last thing you have time for is critical thinking.

That’s why slopreneurs breathlessly broadcast the news that McKinsey has “25,000 AI agents as employees,” completely ignoring that a headcount of AI agents makes no sense whatsoever. One might as well count the number of vibe-coded apps and call them your team of interns.

That’s why slopreneurs stumbled over each other in their haste to report that AI agents on Moltbook were inventing their own religion, completely overlooking the fact that those millions of bots on Moltbook were basically humans trolling the Internet by posing as agents.

That’s why slopreneurs uncritically parrot every press release about ‘AI co-founders,’ ‘algorithmic managers’ and ‘AI board members,’ never stopping to ask how a language model that can be turned off with a switch could possibly have fiduciary duties or legal liability. For Solo Chiefs who actually carry the single wringable neck, this isn’t just sloppy thinking—pun not intended—it’s an insult.

In their hurry to be the first to publish something clickworthy (and hopefully rake in millions of views), slopreneurs have little time for reflection. Almost no time to double-check if something really makes sense. Too litle time for the one thing that’s supposed to separate humans from the language models themselves: critical thinking.

The Risk of the Slopreneur: No Defensible Moat

As a Solo Chief advisor, there’s something else that bugs me. Most slopreneurs have no moat.

Sure, a small selection of influencers is able to attract millions of readers or viewers. They earn a good living with advertising and sponsoring, and maybe some additional revenues with books and courses. There’s no doubt about that.

But how defensible is that business when they have no proprietary data, no network effects, no unique infrastructure? How easily can they retain their views and followers when every competitor can literally offer exactly the same thing? How are they going to build a viable business when all the slop they make is, by definition, cheap perishable waste with a half-life shorter than Sam Altman’s reputation? Slopreneurs must publish their slop faster and faster just to stay in the game. It’s the Red Queen Effect with a content calendar.

I admit, I’ve watched some of the slopreneurs’ videos about n8n, Claude Code, Moltbook, and Antigravity just to familiarize myself with what’s new. There’s certainly value in that. I contributed my share to their ad revenue. But I feel zero loyalty toward any of these creatives. They’re all as replaceable as a pack of baking soda. (Apologies to the baking soda industry, which at least has some brand differentiation.) The slopreneur influencers are all the same to me.

In the age of AI, the question that every Solo Chief must ask is: what is the value that compounds? What becomes worth more and more the longer you stay in business? How are you building your data, network, reputation, or infrastructure in a way that others can’t steal from you? No Solo Chief should envy a million followers. It’s a vanity metric when there’s no moat.

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I say this with some empathy. I’ve felt the pull myself—the itch to publish fast when a new tool drops, the fear that silence means irrelevance. Each of us knows the temptation to chase what’s trending instead of what matters. The difference is whether you recognize the trap before it becomes your business model.

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The Charm of the Slopreneur: Exploring the AI Frontier

But I don’t want to sound too negative. We must appreciate the value these slopreneur influencers bring.

For example, I watched several videos yesterday about smart rings. I wanted to know the differences between the Oura Gen 4, Ultrahuman Ring Air, and RingConn Gen 2 and what the experiences are of people who’ve been testing them in real life. This means I ended up watching several videos by smart tool reviewers. I appreciated their insights and I wish them well with the few cents of ad revenue my online searches generated.

But here’s the sad truth: I did not subscribe to any of their channels. Their hard-earned knowledge is already a commodity, slurped up by the same LLMs these very same entrepreneurs used to generate their content in the first place. Within seconds after they hit Publish, the value of their knowledge became zero.

And that’s the charm of the slopreneur. Someone needs to do the difficult work of—very briefly—staying two steps ahead of the crowd and the machines. The rest of us can only be pioneers (first followers) and settlers (early majority) when some people volunteer to be explorers. In evolutionary terms, every ecosystem needs its scouts. The bold and daring ones who try the unknown berries first so the rest of us can watch what happens.

Explorers don’t have it easy. Almost nothing is known about the new technological terrain besides the marketing fluff of the vendors, which is most likely full of lies and half-truths—especially so in the AI industry. Their job is to figure out as fast as possible what’s worth our time and money, and then get something out the door and published to inform the horde of pioneers, settlers, and stragglers coming after them.

The slopreneurs are the Marco Polos, James Cooks, and Vasco da Gamas of our time—with better Wi-Fi and fewer cases of scurvy.

It’s hard work, really. No wonder they use AI to speed things up.

If he could, Christopher Columbus would have done the same.

The slopreneur’s real tragedy isn’t the slop. It’s that they’re Solo Chiefs who forgot to ask the crucial question: what survives when the platform goes ‘poof’?

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I’m a seasoned founder, intrapreneur, and former CIO who builds maps and models for Solo Chiefs navigating sole accountability in the age of AI—informed by plenty of scar tissue. All posts are free, always. Paying supporters keep it that way (and get a full-color PDF of Human Robot Agent plus other monthly extras as a thank-you)—for just one café latte per month. Subscribe or upgrade.

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My Message for the Slopreneur

Counting the slopreneurs as one rather eccentric subculture among the Solo Chiefs, I want to end this post on a high note.

If you’re a slopreneur: keep doing what you’re doing. The world needs people like you who explore the technological frontiers. Someone’s got to do this hard work. And we’re all better off because of it.

But I have two tips for you.

First, the value of your work increases when you allow yourself a few minutes to actually think. Don’t be just a parrot breathlessly disseminating someone else’s marketing bullshit. You’re not a White House correspondent uncritically swallowing press updates. Your job is to tell the rest of us what’s true and what’s not. That’s where you add your value. The more critical you are, the more likely people will hit Subscribe.

Second, critically assess your defensible moat. What value are you compounding over time? What gets worth more and more with every click and every share of your content? In the age of AI, your posts and videos depreciate faster than an avocado in Paramaribo. To have a viable business, you need something that survives a crisis and the pressure of your competition. Imagine YouTube deleting your account or your LinkedIn profile getting hacked. (It has happened to others.) Will you have lost everything you have? Or would that be just a painful but survivable setback?

The future is only yours when you plan to overcome the worst.

And thanks for the exploratory slop.

Jurgen, Solo Chief

P.S. Be honest—have you ever eaten the unknown berries first, or do you wait and watch?