
Ask HN: What's the largest business you know of run by a single founder - pedalpete
I&#x27;m trying to understand how big solo founder companies can get before they take on other staff. Is there a ceiling? What are the challenges?<p>As a reference, I run https:&#x2F;&#x2F;doarama.com and looking for comparisons.
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shaunpud
Maybe BuiltWith? [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/)

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pedalpete
Great one. I'm in Oz too, so may reach out. Thanks.

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kohanz
PlentyOfFish is probably one of the biggest when it was run by its founder.

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crispytx
Really good article on Markus Frind of POF:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-
bootstrapped...](http://www.businessinsider.com/how-markus-frind-bootstrapped-
plentyoffish-and-sold-it-for-575-million-2015-7)

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ddorian43
Another good article [http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-
architecture](http://highscalability.com/plentyoffish-architecture)

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f_allwein
Craigslist has 30 people now according to
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist)
, but was run by only the founder for a while (unclear in the Wikipedia page)

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soulchild37
[https://pinboard.in](https://pinboard.in) , his income from just pinboard
makes him live comfortably in Bay Area

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Sandel
I know of a guy that sells some windows libs and has a turnover of about 1
million per year. He runs this alone and also has some 3 months of holiday per
year.

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davismwfl
what is the size you are wanting to understanding? Revenue? Cost? Net?

Revenue is easily above the low 7 digits, Net is above the low 7 digits.
Essentially the ceiling is not artificially limited, your abilities though
are.

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pedalpete
My abilities are artificially limited? I'm not sure I understand that.

I purposefully didn't select a metric. Was going much more for what the
community judged. Could be users, rev, scale of impact (however that would be
defined).

I'll have to look at the stats on each of the responses to see what kind of
numbers craigslist, and pof had while the founders were still going it solo.

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davismwfl
Poor choice of word on my part. That wasn't a dig on you, just that as a solo
founder before taking on staff there is a limit to how much you can
accomplish.

Your ability to produce is limited by the number of hours you can work. The
revenue and income is limited by whom you are selling to. The more clients you
sell too the less likely you can scale before taking on staff. So typically
you'd have fewer clients at higher revenue per client. Which also has its own
issues.

In general, and in my opinion you wind up hiring staff for almost any business
once you cross $500k/yr run rate or you have more then 5-10 active
clients/projects that require weekly touches. The level and details of what
that staff is and the cost varies greatly.

That said there are solo founders generating more.

