Solve 2027 Before It Gets Here

I.

Most small business advice answers last year’s questions. How to send an invoice, how to set up a booking page, how to ask for a referral. Every founder already knows those answers, and the ones who don’t can get them from a chatbot in thirty seconds.

The questions coming in 2027 have no answers yet.

Costs that move every week. Buyers who expect everything on demand, and who increasingly send software to shop for them. Whole companies run by one person. Independent experts who could win a bigger client together, if anyone had worked out how they team up.

On Thursday, November 12, forty women who run businesses will sit down at eight tables at Elevator in downtown Des Moines and start working on those questions. The Iowa Women’s Business Hackathon opens its doors at 8:30 in the morning and wraps by 2:45, so everyone is out in time for school pickup.

I’m hosting it. Bellwether usually writes about other people’s rooms, and this one is mine, so read what follows with that in mind.

II.

A hackathon is a one-day team challenge. The word comes from software, where teams build something working from scratch against a clock. This one borrows the format for business owners. Tables build with AI, simple tools, processes and plans, and a builder sits at every table to handle the technical parts.

Nobody needs a team or an idea. You pick a seat, and your teammates are the women who pick the same table. Each table holds three to five people and is balanced across strengths, so it has someone who dreams up the idea, someone who rallies the room and someone who finishes the job.

There are four problems. Each one goes to two tables, which work on it head to head.

The day opens with a short keynote on why 2027 belongs to the one-founder business. Then the build starts. A coach stops at every table for a halfway check, and at 11:45 the whole room stops and eats lunch together, so you meet the women from every other table.

At 1:30 each table takes fifteen minutes to turn the morning into a one-page 2027 plan for each person’s own business. At 2:00, every table gets three minutes to show its fix working.

Nobody presents alone, and nobody pitches.

III.

The part I care about most happens after everyone goes home.

Each table builds one solution. Within thirty days, all eight go live as free resources, packaged as Claude skills that anyone can add to their own account and run, with the names of the women who built each one on it. You leave with your table’s fix and, inside a month, the other seven.

Build one, get eight.

Three tables win cash, shared by the women at each table: a top prize for the fix that would help the most small businesses, one for the strongest working build and a room favorite chosen by everyone there. Every woman at the winning table also gets a month of downtown coworking, and the room favorite gets a feature story on its founders. The amounts will be announced closer to the day.

IV.

Here is what I believe. The company of 2027 is one founder, a few fractional experts and a lot of software doing the work a department used to do. The tools for that are cheap and getting cheaper. A founder working alone is missing the room.

The numbers point the same way. Businesses with no employees have been growing faster than businesses with staff for more than a decade.

More people are building alone, and the evidence says founders who solve problems together earn more. A hackathon puts both facts in one room for a day.

You don’t need to be technical. You don’t need to live in Iowa. Bring a laptop and its charger, and bring whatever you’re best at.

The problems of 2027 are already on their way. I’d like us to meet them with a head start.

Sources: Iowa Women’s Business Hackathon, event page and agenda, October 19, 2026 · U.S. Census Bureau, “Number of U.S. Nonemployers Grew Faster Than Employer Businesses Nearly Every Year From 2012 to 2023,” July 2025 · Jing Cai and Adam Szeidl, “Interfirm Relationships and Business Performance,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2018.