
Ask HN: What are some examples of successful single-person businesses? - 1ba9115454
I&#x27;ve heard success stories of people making millions from adsense or from creating software products. It&#x27;s made me think who has been the most successful at building a company as a sole proprietor.<p>I guess we should discount companies that have single ownership but outsource all the work.
======
jasonkester
Careful with your terminology. "Successful" has different meanings for
different people.

By _my_ definition, for example, I run the most successful single-person
business that I'm aware of. But it doesn't make millions, so it might not meet
your definition at all.

My goal was to replace my day job with a software business that required as
close to zero attention as possible, so that I could have time to spend on the
things that actually matter to me.

The business brings in the equivalent of a nice Senior Developer salary, which
is not what most people think of when they imagine a successful Startup. But
it lets me work with a bunch of cool tech when I want to, and, more
importantly, is automated to the point where Customer Service involves a quick
30 second - 10 minute email sweep over morning coffee. For me, that's a lot
more valuable than a few more million dollars in the bank.

The cool thing about running your own business is that you get to decide on
your own definition of success.

EDIT: I wrote a bit about how I got into this position, in case anybody is
interested. It's not actually all that hard to do:

[http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-
with-...](http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-
laptop.html)

~~~
SmellTheGlove
You're a solid writer. I really liked the blog post.

Your definition of success happens to align with mine. I have "enough" right
now, and I'd be really happy to work less and maintain my current income level
- I just haven't yet been able to pull away from the corporate life.
Eventually.

Anyway, had to ask, the one gap seems to be health insurance. I know you
mentioned a cheap major medical policy, but what are folks doing to cover
their families a little more comprehensively? At least in the US, this is the
one big thing that makes it really hard to leave corporate life. I'm fortunate
enough to have dual citizenship with a european country, so we could "just"
relocate there, but ideally we'd do this while staying resident in the US. I
still haven't solved the insurance issue.

~~~
jonas21
I'd encourage you to price out plans on your state's health insurance
marketplace (every state has one thanks to the ACA).

You may find that the coverage you want is less expensive than you'd expect.
For example, when I put in information for a family of 4 in California, "Gold"
plans were between $850 and $1050 per month (and less if you qualify for a
subsidy).

~~~
SmellTheGlove
I did, it's about $1350/mo here for a family of 3. Deductible is still $2k on
a gold plan. While that's not as bad as I thought, that sort of thing has to
be a barrier to people with families considering taking a risk and doing a
startup. Imagine if we had universal healthcare in this country...

~~~
briandear
We have universal healthcare in France and France isn't exactly buzzing with
innovation. There is innovation, but there is more innovation happening at the
Palo Alto Starbucks than in practically the entirety of France.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
I'm not suggesting universal health care drives innovation. I'm suggesting
that introducing it to an already innovative culture would serve as a
multiplier of some kind.

------
dhruvkar
Builtwith.com (one employee/founder and a part-time blogger) does an estimated
$12M a year [1] assuming a 'few thousand' = 2000 paying customers.

" _the Basic at $299 per month for customers that want lists of sites mainly
for the purpose of lead generation; Pro at $495 per month, suited more for
users that work in an industry using a lot of A /B testing and comparison-type
data; and Enterprise at $995 per month, which covers all bases and allows
sales teams with multiple people to all use the platform at once. Brewer says
that in terms of paying users on the platform there is a ‘few thousand’ and
the split is about 40 percent Basic, 40 percent Pro and 20 percent
Enterprise._"

Similar thread a while ago [2]

1: [http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-
one...](http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one-of-
australias-most-profitable-online-companies-and-has-zero-staff/)

2:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355)

Edit: specificity and formatting

~~~
shubhamjain
It's incredulous that a person can single-handedly run a product as complex as
that. Builtwith isn't a low-maintenance CRUD app, it's a beast. It crawls
>100M websites, searches for thousands of signals, monitors their usage, finds
lead information, and serves them to thousands of customers. The signals need
to be constantly updated; crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases; and not
to forget, you need to deal with people's issues. I am in utter disbelief one
person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak.

~~~
ccozan
What if the actual development was outsourced?

My company does the same, it doesn't have a single employee, I outsource
everything to different teams I have close relation. It just works, I do the
business development and technical specifications, rest is handled by external
teams.

~~~
kungito
Well if its outsourced is it really a single person company?

~~~
criddell
Is 100% of the equity owned by one person? Then I would say yes.

Just because I hire somebody to clean my office, doesn't mean it's not a one-
person company.

~~~
dwg
100% ownership does not imply no employees.

Also, there's a difference between hiring software engineers, who will be
engaging in activities related to your core business, and hiring someone to
clean.

If the owner does not, or is not able to build and maintain their software,
some will consider this to not be a single person business (regardless of how
the extra help is contracted).

------
jimminy
At some point scale will require you to hire, at least a few people, if you're
really successful. But two examples that I can think of are Markus Frind
(Plenty of Fish) and Markus Persson (Minecraft).

\---

Markus Frind is probably the biggest. He spent 5 years (2003-2008) working on
Plenty of Fish, and at that point it was bringing in about $5M/yr and had 3
employees.

When the site sold in 2015 for $575 million it was 70 employees, but he still
owned 100% of the company.

\---

Markus Persson would be another possible option, for the first $10-20M that
Minecraft brought in he was the only person (aside from a contracted
musician). And then for a while after that, it was him and his friend who was
hired to manage the business side so he could focus on the programming work.

~~~
royjacobs
Hmm, so if I apply some deep learning training techniques it seems like the
takeaway from this is: Change your first name to Markus.

~~~
dkns
Correct. Because as we know correlation = causation.

~~~
NietTim
Highly relevant chart, and subsequent proof, for this:
[http://i.imgur.com/3B0pt3M.png](http://i.imgur.com/3B0pt3M.png)

~~~
IanCal
You may also like this huge collection of spurious correlations
[http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-
correlations](http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations)

------
wriggler
I built and run StoreSlider[1]. It made ~$700,000 in 2016, mainly in affiliate
revenue from eBay. Costs are essentially hosting (between two and five $10
Linodes, depending on load).

Took me some effort to built, but it's on autopilot now.

[1] [https://www.storeslider.com](https://www.storeslider.com)

~~~
lampenrad
Sorry for questioning the legitimacy of your revenue claim, but according to
Similarweb your site gets less than 5000 visitors a month. [1] Alexa's
estimates seem similar, putting the global rank at 6.5 mio. [2] Wouldn't you
need millions of yearly visitors for that kind of revenue? I know those
traffic estimations aren't perfect, but this seems off by a lot. Am i missing
something?

[1]
[https://www.similarweb.com/website/storeslider.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/storeslider.com)
[2]
[http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/storeslider.com](http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/storeslider.com)

~~~
wriggler
I block all bots and crawlers except Googlebot and Bingbot (the others bring
no users but can hit the servers hard), so I'd treat Alexa etc with a pinch of
salt.

Nonetheless, the figures I gave are for 2016. Since then, there has indeed
been a fall in all numbers, largely because a site like this will always be
overly reliant on Google and, for whatever reason, Google favours the site
less this year than it did the year before.

At its peak, the site had approximately 53,000 daily visitors.

~~~
srednalfden
What tech do you use for the site?

~~~
wriggler
Lumen (from Laravel) with Nginx on Linode.

PHP 7.1 has given a huge boost in terms of the performance you can get from a
cheap VPS.

------
russellallen
Your problem will be definitional. The Rock earned ~ $65mm last year. Is he a
'one man company'? I guarantee he's billing through a services entity...

1:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/08/25/the-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/08/25/the-
worlds-highest-paid-actors-2016-the-rock-leads-with-knockout-64-5-million-
year/#e68e91475a91)

~~~
laumars
Celebrities will almost never work alone. They will have PAs, body guards,
drivers, etc who all work full time for them. Even the minor celebrities will
have agents who work for them - albeit not exclusively. But someone on the
scale of the Rock definitely wouldn't be operating his business alone.

~~~
chii
> work alone

He (alone?) does the actual "work" that brings in the bread. The other people
could be considered contractors. I mean, a single SaaS app developer still
doens't "work alone" when you consider that she might be buying services like
hosting and/or payment processing.

It's hard to really find the line between alone and not.

~~~
laumars
I don't really agree with that logic because you could then argue that anyone
working for a company who isn't a developer (eg the finance department, sales
team, customer support team and even upper management) aren't part of the
company either.

To further blur things, in my examples for a celebrity, agents still
contribute to bringing in the actual work yet (as you defined) yet they
literally are an external service one would pay for. And what about the script
writing? Directors, studio editors, cameramen and sound technicians? They are
all creating the product too - without which The Rock wouldn't be in business.

I think if there is one thing we can agree on, it's that even the most
fiercely independent of people still depend on the work of others. Nobody can
work entirely in isolation. Or at least without themselves living in
isolation. But that's really more a philosophical tangent rather than an
answer to the question originally posted to HN :)

~~~
chii
the metric I'd use is whether one party is fungible. I argue that you can't
replace the rock and still get the same product/show. but you can replace the
agents and finance team etc.

I like philosophical arguments! ^_^

~~~
laumars
TV shows and movie franchises often replace cast. Sometimes with the new actor
/ actress playing an existing character.

* Sometimes it's done out of necessity so the changes are glossed over (Dumbledore changed characters due to Richard Harris sadly passing away, or when actors/actresses get fired from soap operas),

* sometimes it's made a feature (eg Doctor Who regenerations)

* and sometimes they'll just introduce a new leading character to replace the old one (eg the crime comedy "Death in Paradise" which has had 3 different leading inspectors as the previous actors have left the show).

Few people, if indeed anyone, are irreplaceable in their careers.

------
numbsafari
Isn't Tarsnap[1], by Colin Percival a great example of this? I'm surprised it
wasn't the first thing mentioned since he's reasonably active on HN.

1: [https://www.tarsnap.com/about.html](https://www.tarsnap.com/about.html)

~~~
dom0
I'd be surprised if he made millions from this service.

~~~
cperciva
You shouldn't. Tarsnap is a decade old; a million dollars over ten years is
not a lot of money by the standards of tech salaries.

~~~
dom0
I assumed that OP's "making millions" referred to a yearly-ish timeframe, not
the entire existence of a business.

~~~
cperciva
Ah, got it. Right, Tarsnap is under a million dollars per year.

~~~
notgood
Never mind that, your company is still awesome, and with Tarsnap now running
on Windows (10) thanks to the 'Windows Subsystem for Linux' I'm sure it will
do a lot better in the coming years.

~~~
cperciva
Oh, I'm not worried about that... I don't think $1M/year is a sharp line
dividing "success" from "failure". I decided a decade ago that my criteria for
success were:

1\. Staying in Canada,

2\. Doing work which I found interesting and meaningful, and

3\. Earning more money than Google offered me,

and I'm hitting all three.

------
xchaotic
How do you define successful single-person? I've been running a one person
consultancy for 12 years now, had to retrain quite a bit over the years,
sometimes it was so busy that I outsourced pieces of work. It's been good
enough that I have a house and no mortgage attached to it, all while spending
almost enough time with my family - much more recently. This is what I wanted
and I consider that a success in maintaining a work/life balance, working from
home and having a good life in general. It's not quite 'fu' money yet, as I
still ahve to work for a living, but I working towards that goal. I know a few
good people that agree with this point of view - Basecamp/37 signals folks
etc.

~~~
Applejinx
That's a very relevant question. I guess inherent in the question is 'FU
money' as the only criterion?

I started Airwindows about ten years ago specifically because friends of mine
were getting jerked around by a large-ish audio DSP plugin company, and
intentionally targeted a then absurdly cheap pricepoint. Ran it for ten years,
and transitioned to a Patreon model when my payment processor went out of
business, always DRM-free, always scorning concerns of 'piracy', the purpose
always being democratization of tools. It's still working, I've got a decent
amount of influence in my industry sector, and I'm seeing hardware-based
startups taking a similar approach.

My current plans are to extend outwards into an additional website/identity
dedicated to being interdisciplinary, and be the primary resource for this new
model: the idea is that as we move beyond money as a primary metric,
interconnectivity and significance become central to what 'wealth' is in the
future. So long as subsistence is assured and the flow of money/gifting is
enough to keep developing creatively, the important thing becomes 'how
authoritative' you can be, and though this has traditionally expressed itself
through money directly it could also be expressed in terms of 'FU relevance'
or the ability to steer the zeitgeist.

If I manage that (not saying I'm fully there, but I'm probably at least
halfway), does that count as successful if my choices intentionally ignore the
accumulating of money? I'm convinced money is increasingly irrelevant to real
significance, especially as we move towards general AI. If we haven't better
optimized purposefulness by the time we reach AI escape velocity, we'll have a
serious problem.

~~~
Bakary
Money can be relevant if, say, having some reserves at the right time makes
the difference between gaining access to the technology or being left out.
It's all utterly hypothetical of course.

~~~
Applejinx
Money is only abstracted influence. What if you managed to get enough direct
influence that you could get access to the technology without ever having to
work through a money stage?

Happens every day on YouTube, in a sense. Think 'unboxing videos' or perhaps
'endorsement deals' is a better analogy. If you can get enough social
influence, you can work with technology/capabilities far outside your normal
'money' conditions, because your importance is being weighted directly. You
pay taxes on such gifts because the government rightly sees this as
compensation, but it didn't go through a money/abstraction stage. If you were
collaborating on some creative work using but not owning tools of
extraordinary value, you probably wouldn't even be taxed on it, but both sides
still benefit: you don't retain the tools but you produce work on them in
which you have an ownership stake.

------
chrischen
I built and run Instapainting.com by myself. As of the date of this comment it
is still only one employee (me).
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting)

Things like customer support is outsourced to other startups, and of course
the artists on the platform don't work for me, but could be if the company was
structured differently (it's structured as a marketplace).

~~~
ericax
How did you outsource customer support to other startups? And can I ask which
startup?

~~~
chrischen
We use [http://www.hioperator.com](http://www.hioperator.com).

------
danieltillett
Now that I am no longer a single employee business (again) I can admit that I
ran Mark II of my company on my own doing everything without outsourcing
(sales, customer support, development, sysops, UI/UX, website design,
copywriting, manuals, SEO, advertising, accounting, etc) making much more than
seven figures in profit for quite a few years.

It probably wasn’t the wisest idea to stay solo for so long, but the freedom
of not having employees made me very reluctant to hire anyone again. The only
reason I chose to hire is that the business' growth forced me make the
decision to either turn away customers or hire staff. The people I have are
great, but I do miss the days of doing everything myself without having to
explain why something is important.

~~~
Recursing
>much more than seven figures

Is it the same as saying eight figures or nine figures?

~~~
danieltillett
It is the same as me not wanting to post exactly what I have earned in a
public forum :)

For the purpose of this thread it really is not that important how much money
I have made.

------
joelrunyon
[http://NomadList.com](http://NomadList.com)

Bootstrapped social networking site doing multiple 5-figures/month.

~~~
manuelflara
What's the business model? Job postings on
[https://remoteok.io](https://remoteok.io)?

~~~
joelrunyon
You can click the link :)

It's a paid membership community -
[https://join.nomadlist.com/](https://join.nomadlist.com/)

~~~
manuelflara
I had clicked, in fact I knew the site already, but I thought it was only a
directory of cities ranked by several metrics. Nice!

------
LeonidBugaev
Sidekiq by Mike Perham [http://sidekiq.org/](http://sidekiq.org/)

Over 1MM annual revenue
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq)

~~~
rcshubhadeep
hmmm... It is OSS though. Not sure we can consider it as a single person
company.

~~~
flipp3r
Not completely. However is commits or line changes mean anything, you can see
at
[https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/mperham/sidekiq/graphs/contributors)
that 1 person did approx 90%+ of the work on the code itself.

~~~
rcshubhadeep
And why was I down voted? Really, I did not even express a strong opinion. I
kind of expressed a doubt. This is really strange. I may not know something
and I may have doubt. I believe a community like HN is a good place to express
them and get corrected. I am shocked to see that this is not really welcomed
here.

------
sudhirj
There's pinboard, maciej still runs it solo, I think.

~~~
idlewords
Yes I do. It makes about $200K a year.

My measure of success isn't the money (though I love money), but the
independence and freedom it gives me.

~~~
exergy
Just want to say, keep up with the activism, but please post more on your
blog! I miss the dry wit.

~~~
_pmf_
Pro tip: he has a Twitter account in the same vein.

------
siner
Stardew Valley: [http://stardewvalley.net/](http://stardewvalley.net/)

~~~
arnioxux
The creator did an AMA on reddit:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4b8s7v/im_co...](https://www.reddit.com/r/StardewValley/comments/4b8s7v/im_concernedape_developer_of_stardew_valley_ask/d175u5n/)

I thought it was pretty inspirational that he managed to keep at it for 4
years solo even when his grandma and himself started to doubt that he would
ever ship.

------
hyperpallium
Problem is, "big for one person" is not big enough to be news, relative to all
the companies. Once they get big enough for many to hear about them, they
_have_ to grown, to handle it. e.g. Notch (Minecraft)

Secondly, the best way to make solid, reliable money is to have a niche,
without competition. So, you keep your mouth shut.

You'll probably most likely notice them in small, industry-oriented niches.
Or... _after_ they grow larter than one-person.

To give an answer:
[https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/](https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/)

~~~
patrics123
Somewhere there is an awesome Video about balsamiq where the founder Talks
about how he tried everything he could to remain a single-person operation but
failed to do that due to support requests

~~~
togglework
[http://conversionaid.com/podcast/peldi-guilizzoni-
balsamiq/](http://conversionaid.com/podcast/peldi-guilizzoni-balsamiq/)

------
Changu
The Flappy Bird creator said he made $50k per day from in app ads. But he
pulled the game after a short while. Said because he felt guilty for making
people play all day. Would love to know the whole story behind this.

~~~
giosch
I remembered that he was threatened with a legal action by Nintendo for using
Super Mario pipe sprites, but it may be only a rumor.

~~~
zer0tonin
That's not unlikely considering how aggressive Nintendo can be when it comes
to protecting their IP.

~~~
ido
He was found to not have infringed on their IP.

------
majani
According to porn industry insiders, xvideos is run by a married couple. They
are very secretive, but they definitely do millions in revenue annually.

~~~
marktangotango
Do you have a source for this? Is all their revenue from ads?

------
galfarragem
Sublime Text was for a long time a single-person business.

------
avichalp
We can find few of them here
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)

------
mylh
We (two python developers) have started a SaaS SEO checker service [1] in
February 2017 (took 4 month to develop from 0) and already have paying
customers on our business plan. I completely agree with the definition of
successful business when you have ability to do what you want when you want. I
already have a couple of other websites generating revenue from advertising
and all this allowed me to quit daily job 2 years ago. So definitely there are
a lot of examples of successful single- (two-) person businesses out there.

[1] [https://seocharger.com](https://seocharger.com)

~~~
badestrand
Looks great! How did you find your first customers? Cold contacting?

~~~
mylh
Thank you :) Actually the only source of traffic to our website is organic
search and our first clients came from google. We do not consider cold
messaging as this is the same as spam. Frankly speaking we expected more
traffic and clients but it turned out that SEO niche is very crowded though
our solution is quite different from all others. We are developers and are not
very good at marketing. Tried adwords but with no luck. So the website is now
left on autopilot and with the hope to organic growth.

~~~
odonnellryan
Don't underestimate the value of this type of promotions. I'm sure quite a few
people have used your service because of this post.

------
xiaoma
If Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive and still has access to the coins he mined
but never sold, they're already worth billions and the work has changed the
world.

~~~
eriknstr
But if he moved even a single millibitcoin out of his wallet I think the
market might react with panic in fear that he would sell a lot of coins at
once, and so the fear of the value plummeting might cause it to do just that.

So even if he is alive, could he ever reap the benefits of those coins?

Hopefully he mined with different wallets so that he's been able to sell
smaller amounts of coins without anyone knowing that it was him.

------
speedyapoc
Not entirely single person, but I run Musi [1] with one partner. We have
monthly revenues in the mid six figures with 2-3k a month in expenses.

[1] [https://feelthemusi.com](https://feelthemusi.com)

~~~
Exuma
How did you get your app to take off? I built a music app and it was just
insufferable trying to get users that didn't uninstall the app 1 hour later.
It was disappointing to because personally I thought the UI was really nice.

~~~
speedyapoc
Got in the game super early (nearly 5 years ago) when the space wasn't nearly
as saturated. That and getting really lucky with ASO

~~~
Exuma
Where did you learn ASO? Is there a noob 101 guide somewhere online?

~~~
speedyapoc
Trial and error. I didn't really read anything but instead just tried to put
myself in the shoes of a customer. It came down to me realizing that the
features and info that I felt were important as developer were possibly not so
important for a user.

------
webstartupper
I'm surprised no one has mentioned improvely.com by Dan Grossman.

I think it makes around $40K to $50K per month. Over the last few years, I've
seen it grow from around $10K to $50K. That slow steady SaaS growth is pretty
inspiring.

------
flgb
Daring Fireball by Jon Gruber
([https://daringfireball.net](https://daringfireball.net)).

------
dqdo
The most successful one-man business is not in software. I know of a
successful mediator. He charges $18000 to $20000 per day and has always been
booked for the last 20 years.

[http://www.wqsadr.com/randallwwulfffeescheduleandpolicies.ht...](http://www.wqsadr.com/randallwwulfffeescheduleandpolicies.html)

~~~
tomatoman
Wow.. I just want to seat in a mediation done by him to see WTF he does that
cost so much.

~~~
dqdo
He helps resolved complex litigation issues out of court. Litigation can take
1 to 2 years in the court and cost millions of dollars. In a 1-day session, he
can resolve 95% of these cases and help both parties come to an amicable
agreement. People's lives and time are no longer wasted in long drawn out
court battles.

Just a side note, most mediators are former lawyers. After many years of
practice, they seek a better way to resolve conflicts. The pay isn't bad
either.

One more thing. Randy is actually one of the best mediators in the world.
After the 9/11 attacks in New York, Randy was called in to mediate and
arbitrate the case with the insurance companies and tenants. After 2 years,
they were able to come to an agreement and the resulting funds allowed for the
area to be rebuilt.

------
puranjay
I know some affiliate marketers who make $2M+ without any employees.

Apparently, ranking well for certain keywords (mostly web hosting and website
builders) can be very, very lucrative.

~~~
betimd
Why you're not putting the list here (people you know)?

~~~
puranjay
Mostly because some of them are (or have been) clients and friends, and they
like to keep their income and tactics secret.

But they're easy enough to find. Just Google lucrative keywords like "best
hosting" and you'll see them

------
rachekalmir
[https://insomnia.rest/](https://insomnia.rest/)

Guy quit his job a year or two ago to develop this full-time and seems to be
doing pretty well for himself. I use the client all the time as a developer.

~~~
mod
Last I heard (a month or two ago) he was making a pittance (like ~1-2k/month
or so).

Sad considering how sweet the app is.

------
eps
If I recall correctly, IMDB used to be a one-man show for a long time, up to
and even after getting acquired by Amazon.

------
sharkhacks
Here are a couple of awesome examples: Affiliate Marketer
[https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/](https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/)
Patt is awesome, he actually shares his monthly income and expense statements.
Started solo and now he hired a bunch of people.

Nathan Barry ([http://nathanbarry.com/](http://nathanbarry.com/)) the guy who
started convertKit [https://convertkit.com/](https://convertkit.com/)

------
coderholic
[https://ipinfo.io](https://ipinfo.io) \- single person business that does
over 250 million API requests a day, and generates good revenue.

~~~
craigmi
is this yours? I use it regularly to do ASN lookups.

------
neals
Google > quora > 10 year old article >
[https://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/the-other-number-
ones....](https://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/the-other-number-ones.html)

But they have staff.

Large single-person startups? [https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/successful-
one-person-sta...](https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/successful-one-person-
startups.html)

------
anovikov
I know a guy who does arbitrage of porn traffic and he makes $2M a month,
already saved up $20M.

~~~
Tar90
How does that work? Never heard of traffic arbitrage before.

~~~
anovikov
Essentially it is, build doorways that attract targeted traffic in some
categories, and sell that traffic to porn sites... sounds simple, very hard to
do profitably and requires both decades of experience, being extremely smart,
and some luck.

("don't try to repeat this trick at home" disclaimer goes here)

------
planetmaker
Working by example may work. And analysing many successful examples may also
yield some insight. But make sure to get the full picture: look also at those
who fail. They might have tried the very same methods to most degrees. Don't
fall for the survivorship bias :) It might be other factors which are truely
important than those which seem the obvious ones.

------
pipio21
Please first define success. You should think about your own values in order
to know what is success for you.

I personally know people that made millions from creating software products
and companies. But I do know nobody that did(or does it) it alone.

In fact, I "made millions" myself whatever that means starting with software(a
million dollars is way less than 10 years ago because of inflation so it is
not that much, specially if you life in a expensive place), but I made a hell
lot of work and found colleagues along the way.

IMHO you should never focus on money. Money is just a tool for exchanging
value. You should focus on creating value, even if at first it gives you
little money. Because of innovation dilemma most things that create real value
give you very little money first( Do you know how much money the Apple Store
did the first year?)

In my opinion your priority should be finding a social circle that will help
and understand you. If you have a business that means entrepreneurs. They will
understand and support you like no one else. HN is virtual, you need real
people around.

For me success is the ability to be free in my life, made my own decisions in
my business, I could write on HN, or go climb a mountain when people is
working, or travel a new country, or the ability to only invest on business
that are ethical for me.

If earning more money means not being free, I will decline the offer, in fact
I decline offers every single day. Why should I do it? To become a 80 years
old billionaire? To have everybody know me so I have to live isolated against
paparazzis or criminals wanting to kidnap my children because they know I am
rich?

But your values could be different. Your priorities could be to show off,
exert power over other people, of go meet interesting people, or have extreme
experiences or send your children to elite schools, whatever is success for
you.

~~~
Plough_Jogger
Inflation over the past 10 years has not been significant. $1,000,000 of
purchasing power in the US today is roughly equivalent to $1,179,000 in 2007.

~~~
sokoloff
Isn't "purchasing power" by definition after taking inflation into account?

------
elvirs
my business:) 1.5m annual revenue, 10-15k mobthly profit, built from zero,
very proud of it.

~~~
dhruvkar
Nice, what's the business?

------
BanzaiTokyo
I suppose there is very little public information about such companies because
they have no obligations of sharing it.

------
tjpnz
This guy uses an AI to write books for Amazon. Note that article is from 2012.

[https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-
create...](https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-
creates-800000-books-algorithmically-starts-selling-them-on-amazon)

~~~
bbcbasic
AI! They used to call it a spam bot.

~~~
vijayr
spam or not, the process is _very_ interesting

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY)

------
wessorh
Domainers: I've known many on person companies that made tons off parking
domains. Seems like this model has run its course.

Farming has done well for my wife, she run her business and feeds a bunch of
folks. Find her at the Oakland Grandlake on saturday and Marin civic center on
Sunday. She sells plants :)

------
starikovs
As for me, I develop
[https://thestartupway.website/](https://thestartupway.website/) only by
myself but I really cannot tell you if it's a successful business. I have a
job of a software engineer and when my friends ask me to make a landing page
for them I just use my tool and take a small money from them. It's just for
fun for me and it's great that it helps somebody with their needs. So, for me,
it's a little success )

------
DaiPlusPlus
I don't think there are any that ever remain a one-person company in practice
- even for my own projects I've always needed to outsource or farm-out tasks
that aren't a valuable use of my time - e.g. website design or handling
customer support. I'm sure there are plenty of de-jure sole-proprietor ships -
but I doubt any of them of truly work alone.

~~~
idlewords
I've worked solo for nine years. I think there's a bunch of us out there.

Also, customer support is a very valuable use of your time :-)

------
lgas
Why discount outsourcing? The book "The E-Myth" argues that you absolutely
should outsource everything but your core competency. (And "The 4-hour work
week" would argue you should outsource that too)

Does outsourcing somehow diminish success?

~~~
SwellJoe
If you're starting from nothing, you may not have the budget to outsource
everything...or even anything. Admittedly, with services like Fiverr,
Mechanical Turk, various code outsourcing sites, and whatever else, the price
of outsourcing is pretty low. But, I've found the odds of getting good work
are pretty low. I wouldn't want to have to rely on it. And, costs skyrocket on
development when you have to have it done more than once by shitty developers
(there are great developers on all of those sites...but, being able to assess
them is not a skill that is in most non-developers tool chest).

But, I think that's kind of semantics. Is a "one-person company" not a one-
person company anymore if they hire an accountant to do their taxes? I doubt
anyone would argue it's now a two-person company. Likewise, if you get a
lawyer to help with a contract or something, it's still a one-person shop by
most people's measure.

I suspect OP just wanted to rule out folks who were coming into it already
wielding significant capital. That's a major limiting factor for a lot of
people who might want to build an outsourced company.

I get the feeling OP wants to have some inspiration that doesn't require a
team and doesn't require significant capital; probably because OP doesn't have
access to either. There are lots of places in the world where that would be
true even for someone with talent and ambition.

------
Mz
There are additional resources listed here:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/small-
operations.h...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/small-
operations.html)

------
cyrusmg
Nomadlist.com from levels.io

------
haidrali
Salvatore Sanfilippo: Sole creator and maintainer of Redis

Mike Perham: Sole Developer of SideKiq ( Background tasks processing with
Redis) and Inspector (Application infrastructure monitoring, reimagined)

~~~
kesor
Redis is not a business, it is an open-source project. RedisLabs is a business
who hired Salvatore to work as part of their team, before he quit that is.

~~~
haidrali
doesn't it include "making millions from adsense or from creating software
products" ? I think Yes

------
magsafe
[https://www.bottomlinehq.com](https://www.bottomlinehq.com) Single
founder/employee, 6-digit revenue, no outside funding.

------
plantain
Plenty of Fish? Exited for billions while still a solo operator

~~~
us0r
He was not solo at the end but for a long time he was. I think right before he
went PPC he started to hire people. Also where do you get the billions from?

~~~
hacksonx
When he sold he had plenty of employees but still owned everything.

------
goosing
[https://wowbrary.org/](https://wowbrary.org/)

nonprofit to connect people with their local library's catalog

run by one person for 10+ years

------
wordpressdev
I made millions from Adsense, not in USD though :)

~~~
jawngee
Vietnamese dong?

~~~
wordpressdev
Pakistani Rupee!

~~~
nathan_f77
That's still a lot of money! Well done!

~~~
wordpressdev
Thanks.

------
mingabunga
Top affiliate marketers in the health, wealth, personal development and dating
niche make $m per year, some in the 10's of $m.

------
sudhirj
CDBaby?

~~~
touchofevil
+1 for CDBaby created by Derek Sivers. You can find his interviews discussing
the creation of CDBaby at sivers.org His interviews with Tim Ferris are great.

~~~
vram22
I think I read that he sold in for something in the range of 20 million. His
business model for CDBaby was interesting. I interacted with him via email for
a bit when he was starting his recent or current venture, Wood Egg, which was
a project to create a series of startup ecosystem guides (books) for many
countries in South / East / South East Asia, written mainly by people familiar
with or from those countries. Interesting idea.

------
avemuri
Bitcoin? That is, if Satoshi is a single person

------
gumby
Craigslist is pretty close to a single person operation and it's been pretty
successful.

I know it's an outlier.

------
sleeplesss
I sell twitter and Instagram followers for 5 years. I made 15000 usd in
average ( before tax).

~~~
laksmanv
curious what your site is? do you have any email I could reach out?

~~~
sleeplesss
sorry bro, I can not say it. By the way, I think people think this is a gray
business so I am not proud of it. I do it just for my living expense. Iam
studying iOS app development since I don't want to do gray zone business. just
post question here if you have, I will try to answer.

~~~
laksmanv
Is your site similar to sogro.co and socialenvy? is that 15K/month or year?

~~~
sleeplesss
I think it is not similar. I think followers that I buy and sell are fake. It
is 15,000 usd per month, but they included twitter, instagram, facebook,
youtube, etc... services.

------
gfiorav
Distrokid

------
epynonymous
plenty of fish comes to mind, not sure if it's around anymore, but this was a
free dating platform

------
SirLJ
Stock Trading: no customers, no employees and no investors, check my profile
for details on how to start. Good luck!

------
badkangaroo
PewDiePie

------
cbar_tx
please don't. we have enough people monetizing junk on the internet. you're
trying to skip the most important step.

------
NuclearC
Agar.io.

------
HeavyStorm
Minecraft.

~~~
HeavyStorm
Also consider RimWorld (has a contractor now).

------
zackrompin
Slot

------
symbiosis
Ugmonk

------
sunstone
Dentistry.

------
wellboy
4chan

------
kough
Well, they all have the same number of employees.

------
wand3r
Tinder is a highly successful single person business vs. the Ashley Madison
strategy of focusing on couples.

~~~
tomascot
You should start selling jokes and then tell us how you made your millions

~~~
wand3r
Well in your hypothetical it would be pretty obvious... selling jokes of
course

