When people think of entrepreneurs, they often associate them with words like “go-getters”, “obsessed with growth”, and proponents of “hustle culture.” They might talk about the importance of mental health and well-being in public, but their calendars often reflect anything but work-life balance.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of attitude can lead to burnout. A 2024 survey of 300 entrepreneurs found that 63% of entrepreneurs report dealing with burnout, and 59% reporting dealing with anxiety and depression.
These figures can be discouraging for those who want to start a business, or for business owners wondering whether it’s possible to continue doing so without sacrificing their mental health. And in a world that oscillates between glorifying hustle culture one day and encouraging slow-living the next, some entrepreneurs are determined to find a middle ground. They’re choosing to pursue “cozy entrepreneurship.”
The disillusionment with full-time employment
Deya Aliaga started her business as a way to escape corporate life. The 31-year-old Berlin-based entrepreneur had trained her whole life to climb up the corporate ladder. However, she became disillusioned with it when she started a six-month internship at a major consulting company. She decided to try her hand at freelancing during her evenings and weekends.
Aliaga didn’t have extensive experience in specific skills, so she took on work ranging from voiceovers to administrative tasks and email support. If she didn’t know how to do a particular thing, she’d turn to Google and YouTube to teach herself. Eventually, she got enough work to be able to do it full-time, and started gathering a range of skills to manage projects, run content systems, launch products, and manage teams. That led to creating her first digital product around business management and systems, and eventually, her YouTube channel.
Like Aliaga, Lorraine Mazwi also started a business as an alternative to full-time employment. The 36-year-old spent her 20s moving her way up in healthcare, starting as a nurse and becoming a manager by the age of 30. She found herself burned out when she fell pregnant and unexpectedly became a single mom—a year after her own mom passed away. She decided to quit her job and focus on documenting her personal development journey on YouTube. Eventually, she started getting requests from her audience to provide coaching. Today, Mazwi runs a YouTube channel and offers coaching services around personal branding and business systems.
Escaping the hustle culture trap as entrepreneurs
Like most entrepreneurs, Aliaga and Mazwi both found themselves falling into the hustle-culture trap when they started building their businesses. For Mazwi, it was an ingrained mindset that she developed as an immigrant to the UK from Zimbabwe. Because it served her well as a healthcare professional, she subconsciously carried that into her business: “I would have spells where I’m working hard, then I would burn out, and I wouldn’t be able to do anything.”
Aliaga found herself falling into the mindset of optimizing her business around financial growth, to the point where she found herself struggling to get out of bed to start her workday. That’s when she realized something has to change.
“When you start a solo business, so much of that business is tied to you,” she says. “You’re not going to be doing your best work when you are unhappy, drained of energy, having no fun, no creativity.”
When Aliaga was thinking about how to change her business, she stumbled across the term ‘cozy gaming‘, which referred to the genre of video games that were about “slowing down, having fun, and creativity.”
She asked herself the question: what would that look like in the context of entrepreneurship?
Cozy entrepreneurship in practice
Aliaga started by setting a set of ground rules for herself. The first rule was “very strictly a zero shame policy.” One of the things that Aliaga struggled with was the idea of always having to do more: “I noticed very quickly that reduced stress and overwhelm for me, and it actually allowed more organic productivity to happen.”
The second rule was introducing boundaries and constraints, so that she didn’t feel pressured to be thinking about her business “every second of the day.” That also required blocking time for fun in her calendar. “This has made me more productive because there’s an exciting treat, so I’m not dilly-dallying [or] dragging my tasks out,” she says.
The last rule was to optimize her business for how she wants to feel on a day-to-day basis. “I think a lot of the default for entrepreneurship, when you don’t define your version of success, you end up doing society and culture’s version of success, which is more money.” And if you sacrifice your version of success with society’s, Aliaga says, “of course you end up with a business you hate.”
A sustainable way of growing a business
Mazwi realized that she needed to change her approach to work if she wanted to grow her business sustainably.
For her, cozy entrepreneurship meant designing systems that allowed her to work in seasons. That means doing thinking work on days when she has a lot of energy, and focusing on administrative tasks on days that she doesn’t.
She also divides her year into quarters, with the first and last quarter of the year being her busiest. In the second and third quarter, when business is slow, she’ll schedule her content and marketing ahead of time so she can slow down and give herself annual leave.
Ute Stephans, a professor of entrepreneurship at King’s College in London, says that cozy entrepreneurship is, at its core, “sustainable entrepreneurship.”
“Entrepreneurs start businesses because they want autonomy,” she says. At the same time, that autonomy makes them prone to burnout. “There’s no obvious way to end the workday, you can always do more, you can always grow your business in different ways.”
She goes on to say that those who end up thriving in entrepreneurship see their well-being and mental health as an investment. Typically, these entrepreneurs have already gone through cycles of burnout and crisis, and are in a place to recognize the importance of balance while also having the experience to deal with problems and conflict without unnecessary stress.
What productivity means to cozy entrepreneurs
Aliaga says that one of the biggest mental shifts she had to make was shifting her idea of productivity. While traditional work environments might tie the amount of hours you work to your performance and productivity, she found that doesn’t translate to running a business.
“I’ve seen so many times in my business, when I stopped working hard and changed to working smart, I made so much more money. I focused down and only optimized one thing, instead of trying to optimize 100 things and splitting my energy 100 ways,” she says.
Stephans sees the cozy entrepreneurship trend as a positive thing. For a long time, she says, the media shows one kind of entrepreneurship—one where the founder or business owner prioritizes growth at all costs and is willing to sacrifice everything to get it.
Now, she says, “we have this idea of entrepreneurship as a means to multiple ends.”
And given that entrepreneurs have different motives for starting a business and seek fulfillment in different ways, “I would actually expect that we see a rich variety of different models of entrepreneurship,” she says.
Aliaga challenges the idea that ‘cozy entrepreneurship’ gives the connotation of being lazy.
“Day to day in my business, I want to feel happy, inspired, creative. I want to feel good and proud of myself and the work I’m doing. None of that has anything to do with ‘I don’t want to do anything.’ It’s just what you do and how you do it.”