You probably think this song is about you.

June 30, 2026

🔗 Daily Rivets 🔗

🔨 Build: Figure out your number. Before you romanticize quitting, do the unsexy math: what would you actually have to earn on your own to match your paycheck? Open a spreadsheet and build it line by line - your salary floor, self-employment tax (~15.3%, on top of income tax), health insurance and retirement now on you, plus a cushion for the slow months the report says never fully disappear. The total will probably scare you a little. Good - now it's a target instead of a guess.

🤖 Leverage (AI): Come figure out what AI means for your kids - live, July 9. It's not just a work tool anymore. It's reshaping how our kids think, learn, and pay attention, and most of us are winging it. So I'm hosting a Riveter Labs working session - The Analog Edge: How Your Family (and Kids) Can Thrive in the Age of AI - Thursday, July 9, 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT. Bring your real questions; we're saving real time for live Q&A. Save your spot. Can't make it live? RSVP and we'll send the replay.

📚 Learn: Read the Lettuce report. Somebody finally asked 600+ people who work for themselves what's actually working - and wrote it all down. Not the laptop-on-a-beach fantasy. Brass tacks: how to handle slow seasons, taxes, and healthcare, and where to find clients. Read it with a pen. Then pick the one thing you've been avoiding and deal with it. Download it here.

Hold your people close.

If you freelance, consult, sell something, run a side hustle, or just lie awake wondering whether you could quit and do your own thing - this song IS about you. So you're right.

"Solopreneur" is a clunky word for a simple thing: a business that's just you. No staff, no co-founder. You and the work. There are an estimated 30 million people doing it in this country right now. So if it feels like everyone you know is suddenly working for themselves - they kind of are.

This is what nobody tells those 30 million people: the internet sells the dream - the freedom, the laptop on the beach, "follow your passion" - and skips the part that actually matters.

So my friends at Lettuce did something rare. They asked more than 600 people who work for themselves what's actually working and what isn't. Then they put it in a report.

​I read it twice. (You should, too.)

If you're thinking about making the leap, what's below is your pre-flight checklist. If you've already jumped, it's your read-up list. None of it is glamorous. All of it is what separates the people who last (us) from the people who quietly go back to a job in eighteen months.

TAKEAWAYS:

Starting is the easy part; we're happy with the choice. Two-thirds said going out on their own met or beat their expectations. So if you're scared of the leap - don't be, not of that. The hard part isn't jumping. It's still standing a year later. Plan for the marathon, not the sprint.

Never live off a single paycheck-replacement. The people actually making real money don't have one client - they have a few. Nearly three in four juggle multiple gigs. One client isn't freedom. It's a boss with extra steps, and you're one bad email away from zero.

The money will swing. Count on it. Unpredictable income is the single biggest stressor people named (58%) - and it doesn't fade with experience. The ones who make it don't dodge the slow months. They save for them. (Ding, ding, ding! I live by this.)

Figure out health insurance before you need it, not after. More than a third said it was the scariest part of striking out on their own, and one in four stay on a partner's plan to make it work. Boring? Deeply. It's also the thing quietly trapping people in jobs they're desperate to leave. Know your options early.

Taxes and retirement are where money silently leaks out. Two-thirds don't trust the tax advice they're getting. A full quarter have nothing saved for retirement. You don't have to become an accountant - you have to start asking better questions. (If terms like "S-Corp" mean nothing to you yet, that's a signal to learn, not to look away.)

Your network is your paycheck. The number-one thing people credited for growth wasn't ads or algorithms. It was relationships - three out of four said so. And the most successful still show up in person. The internet didn't kill that. It made it rarer, which made it worth more.

That last one is where I plant my flag - because it's the whole reason The Riveter exists.

The work doesn't come from a slick logo or a perfect website. It comes from people knowing what you're good at and being able to find you. That's the part we teach. The data just proved it: getting seen gets you the work, and the boring back-office stuff lets you keep it. You need both.

​Download the full report here. Read it with a pen. Then pick the one thing you've been avoiding — and finally deal with it.

📅 You're Invited.

Speaking of the things that keep us up at night.

If you're a parent right now, you already know the role: emotional center, scheduler, tutor, strategist, project manager, calm in the storm. (A 2023 Pew study found 78% of mothers are the parent primarily responsible for managing their kids' schedules and activities. Shocking absolutely no one in this newsletter.)

And now we get to do all of it while figuring out what AI means for our children's futures. Cool. Love it. No notes.

So join me Thursday, July 9 at 1 pm ET / 10 am PT for a Riveter Labs session I genuinely can't wait for: The Analog Edge: How Your Family (and Kids) Can Thrive in the Age of AI.

And this one is built to be a working session - not a webinar you half-listen to with your camera off. Come with your real questions, because we're saving serious time to answer them live.

I'm bringing in two people who actually know this terrain:

• ​Sam Joustra: former admissions officer at Vanderbilt and the University of Michigan, now Head of Student & Family Programming at Top Tier Admissions.
• ​Kate Caspar: longtime educator and former Associate Head of School at The Winsor School.

Together, we'll workshop the real stuff: helping kids build genuine motivation and independence, avoiding burnout and over-management (theirs and yours), navigating extracurricular pressure without losing your mind, what schools and colleges are actually looking for now, and how to foster "the analog edge" - sustained attention, real-world engagement, and real human connection.

Then we open it up for an extended live Q&A, so you leave with an actual game plan for a calmer, more connected summer.

If you want to see your kids reading a book instead of mindlessly scrolling this summer, this one's for you.

Also, because to my point above about relationships being everything: This one came to us through Laura Brounstein - a longtime friend of mine and Riveter member, a former magazine editor (she led SELF and edited at Cosmo and Seventeen) turned start up exec turned founder of her own brand and content strategy firm. She connected us with the team at Top Tier Admissions, and I'm so glad she did.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and we'll send you the replay.

Rooting for all of us,

Amy