Self-Employment as a Spectrum with Amelia Hruby
Aggressively Human: Online Business in the Age of AI, Algorithms & Automations
Defining the self-employment spectrum
Hosts and Amelia outline self-employment as varied arrangements from side hustles to full-time businesses over time.
The narrative surrounding self-employment is often binary: you’re either running a full-time business or you’re not. But is that the reality? What would be possible if we treated self-employment as a spectrum? And what do we face as we move across the spectrum in terms of time, money, and momentum? For this discussion, we’re welcoming back Softer Sounds founder, Off the Grid host, and author Amelia Hruby.
In this episode, Amelia shares what led her to a significant decision at the end of 2025: scaling back her podcast studio Softer Sounds dramatically and putting herself on a six-month sabbatical for that side of her business while investing in the creator-style side of Off the Grid. We dive into the idea of self-employment as a spectrum, the many forms it can take across a career, and why moving along that spectrum is a feature, not a flaw.
Hear from all three of us how we cobbled work together to build the income we needed across the years — the bridge jobs, the clients who weren’t the dream but paid the bills, and the years of audience-building that often preceded any real traction. This isn’t a conversation about how to build a six-figure business. It’s about what self-employment actually looks like at different stages, and what we’d do differently if the goal is to simply stay self-employed.
* What Amelia’s six-month sabbatical actually looks like — and why she chose a third option instead of hustling harder or closing the studio
* Self-employment as a spectrum: from side contracts and bridge jobs all the way to full-time business ownership (and back again)
* How Meg, Jessica, and Amelia each cobbled things together to get started — and what cobbling it together still looks like for established businesses
* The role of bridge work in creating the time and mental space to build what you actually want long-term
* Why Amelia chose to focus on Off the Grid and The Interweb instead of doubling down on Softer Sounds
* What publishing books (Amelia’s and Jessica’s came out within a week of each other in October 2025) has to do with long-term business strategy
* Hitting your capacity ceiling — and the different forms it takes at every stage of growth
* Authority building: why showing up consistently before a trend breaks is what actually creates leverage when the trend arrives
* The privilege question: how partner income, healthcare access, and life stage shape what risks you can realistically take
* When and why to go back “in-house”
“The only consistent business models you can count on are being a CPA or owning a funeral home. Otherwise it’s gonna change all the time. If you wanna be self-employed long-term, you have to love the ride of it. You have to love that it changes all the time. Do you enjoy every moment of it? No, I do not relish in the fact that AI perhaps stole half my business. I don’t have to love that. But I have to love dusting myself off and doing something new again.” - Amelia
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