
Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019? - robsun
You can find a lot of articles about the most successful startups &#x2F; companies in 2019 but these lack information of one-man companies, unless you started as a one person and now you have dozens of employees.<p>My candidate is my friend. He built mobile app that generates revenue around 30 - 50k $ per year.
======
csallen
Ben Tossell of Makerpad. He made about $200k in the past year from a site that
teaches others how to build interactive sites and apps without writing code.

Lynne Tye of Key Values. She made about $400k in 2019 from a site that
connects software engineers with companies that that share their intangible
values, e.g. diverse team, good for parents, fast or slow-paced, etc.

Robert James Gabriel of Helperbird. He struggled a lot with dyslexia growing
up, and even had a teacher tell him he should give up and drop out of school.
Luckily another teacher encouraged him to learn to code, and he's been quite
prolific since. Helperbird is a browser extension that helps others with
learning disabilities browse the web easier. Robert recently brought on a co-
founder, but he'd grown the app to a "comfortable five figures a month" in
revenue.

Plenty more on [https://www.IndieHackers.com](https://www.IndieHackers.com)
sharing their stories via interviews and on the podcast, and also posting
about hitting revenue goals and other milestones here:
[https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones](https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones)

~~~
batt4good
I'm still blown away that Key Values (as cool an idea as it is) manages to
pull that kind of revenue. One thing I'd be curious to see is if the site
actually can maintain revenue past year one?

~~~
dannyw
Recruiting really, really pays.

~~~
batt4good
So surely Key Values takes a share of recruiting fees, not just a fee to list
on their platform? Idk, it seems like this site wouldn't help cut down on
candidates that are completely not qualified to work at a given company, which
to me seems like a much more daunting hiring challenge for small companies /
startups.

~~~
Pete-Codes
Their whole business model is not taking a cut AFAIK. If you listen to the
indie hackers podcast that will help explain why :)

Imagine if you run a company and have to pay $30k to a recruiter to find
someone. And then imagine paying a fraction of that to post all your jobs on
Key Values.

------
stanmancan
I’m a one man show. I made a SaaS targeted towards a specific company. I did
all the work up front, got them to trial it, and when they loved it they
singed a contract for just over $100k/year.

I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.

I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about
$1,000/m.

All in it’s about $130k/year and it requires about 5 hours a week of my time.
It has freed up the rest of my time to keep building similar projects that can
both boost and diversify my MRR.

I’m very grateful that I’m able to work on projects I enjoy now, but more
importantly it’s given me time to spend with my family and be around for my
kid.

~~~
101008
Wow, those number sound so high for a third world country that I can't help
thinking that if I were in your situation I would give half of that salary (5k
monthly) to my brother and father so they wouldn't have to worry about money
again. Congratulations for being in that situation!

~~~
spottybanana
Coming from scandinavian welfare state, it is really difficult for me to
understand why someone would give to their relatives some of their income.
Especially if you earn it by working, and the reasoning being so that they
don't have to worry about money = have less pressure to work.

I don't want to judge anyone, just wanted to state that there is clearly quite
a big cultural gap here. I don't know anyone around here who would do similar
things.

~~~
namirez
> _it is really difficult for me to understand why someone would give to their
> relatives some of their income._

This is an interesting mindset. I don't want to judge you either, but I never
understood the value of keeping my money and collecting wealth. If I were
struggling, I wouldn't go out of my way to help my family. But if I had extra
income, I would help my family if they were in need.

~~~
markdown
He is from a country with a strong socialist welfare system, so when one is in
need, the government is there to assist them and they don't need to feel like
they are a burden on their family and friends.

~~~
namirez
Agreed, but this reminds me of the old joke about a bruised scout who comes
limping to his friends. "What happened?", they ask. "I helped an old lady
cross the street", says the scout. "But why are you so hurt?" "She didn't want
to cross the street".

Obviously, if my family doesn't need help, I wouldn't try to give them money.
But if they were in need, I wouldn't say that it's not my responsibility to
help either. I think this is a simple judgement call. The efficiency of the
Scandinavian welfare system is besides the point.

------
Scott_Sanderson
If successful means total benefit delivered to shareholders, then I consider
my one-man company to be very successful.

Used to be a corporate attorney grinding high billable hours at big firm. Quit
to start a solo law practice serving clients working with my favorite thing,
cryptocurrencies.

I made $100k working about 30 hours per week from home. Drop off and pick up
kids from local school on cargo bike. Take them to the park after school a few
days a week (babysitter gets them other days). Client list is kept short to
manage stress and avoid need to hire employees.

~~~
chapium
I'm happy for your success, that sounds like a dream come true.

------
quelsolaar
I'm running MinistryOfFlat.com and I have made 7 figures this year. No
investors or co workers. No marketing beyond my 2k twitter followers and a
website. Solve a very specific and hard problem and the right people will find
you.

~~~
Jack000
Just read through all your stuff, the UV unwrapper is very cool. Do most
people use it with 3d paint tools? It seems the small disconnected bits would
be hard to paint by hand.

some thoughts/questions:

\- Do you use a library for packing? This alone is a lot of work. Since you
write in C, are you using boost polygon or CGAL for the computational geometry
algorithms?

\- Have you thought about a data-driven approach? Unwrap and packing are
geometric operations, but seam marking/segment classification may be amenable
to an ML-based method (specifically the spectral graph CNN that came out
recently). This seems like the largest hurdle to more "human-like" unwrapping
but I'm only a hobbyist so this could be way off base.

I'm almost tempted to create a competing product, but alas I already have a
startup in a different domain : ]

~~~
quelsolaar
I don't use libs for anything. I write everything from scratch. Not having any
dependencies is a huge win for many of my customers. You can find some of my
source at gamepipeline.org

------
xs
First that comes to mind is Joe Rogan. He started a podcast in 2009.

His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from
his youtube videos alone.

But the bulk of his downloads are going to be from his rss feed, where he has
between 2m-20 million downloads per episode with about 4 ads baked into each
episode. If he charged a (low) standard of $20 per 1,000 downloads for those
ads, this means he makes at least $160,000 per episode. He does like 20
episodes a month. Some believe Joe may be the first podcaster to make a
billion dollars. If he hasn't earned that already he will in the next few
years.

Let me reiterate. Joe started his podcast himself. By himself. Like as in, he
set up his Libsyn account, bought his own mic. Booked his own guests. Then
published it all himself. Now he has very minimal help, like 1 or 2 people to
help him. It's so insane.

Now you might say "that's not a one-person business". But in this gig economy,
not many people are. There's always someone hiring a lawyer, or graphic
designer, or podcast producer, to work freelancing gig by gig. So the single
person business is usually getting help from others. But there are other
podcasters who have also done it all themselves, and are raking it in too.

~~~
gremlinsinc
Pretty sure he was a celebrity before though, that kinda makes things easier
than for the avg joe blow.

~~~
Fordec
While true, not sure it's a material point in a discussion about who's the
biggest outlier you can think of. Outliers get to be outliers because of non-
standard factors.

------
iloveitaly
Sidekiq makes ~1M/year in gross revenue. I believe the only full-time employee
is the founder, and it doesn't sound like there are any material recurring
expenses:

[https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-
side...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-sidekiq)

It's the most profitable one-man show I know of, although there's many that
I've run into that ~500k, albeit with a much higher operational burden.

~~~
digianarchist
Mike created a quality product that was much better than the alternatives at
the time. I remember working in a Rails shop and struggling with Resque.

~~~
iloveitaly
Agreed. Sidekiq solves a real problem much better than the alternatives. As
soon as your app starts to make real money it's worth paying for enterprise
for the support + added features. I feel like there's got to be other
businesses to be built by creating 'premium' open-source packages for common
pain points in application development.

------
kesor
Evan You is making Vue.js financed by Patreon donations. Looks like about
19k/mo, which is 230k/y. Although there are most probably people who help him,
he is doing it mostly on his own. And I suspect that Patreon is just one of
his income sources.
[https://www.patreon.com/evanyou](https://www.patreon.com/evanyou)

------
gnicholas
I run a one-person company [1] whose tech makes reading on screen
easier/faster/more accessible. The B2C tools (iOS app and browser plugin)
bring in 5 figures, but in 2019 the IP licensing took off.

We have large educational clients that are integrating the tech because of its
benefit for students (especially those with ADHD and dyslexia). IP licensing
is great because it means I don't need to spend time building the integrations
myself, and I don't have any costs attached to the licensing deals, so it's
pretty much all profit. In 2020 the IP licensing will greatly exceed the B2C
revenue, and we may even make the B2C tools free at that point.

1: www.beelinereader.com

~~~
rodolphoarruda
Do you think it makes sense to sell instructional content under IP licensing
for basic education institution? I have produced a lot of basic infosec
awareness materials this year I could be revamping to make suitable for
teachers and school administration. Payment would be done once a year, more or
less aligned with a new pack release which would contain updates/new content.

~~~
gnicholas
Just to clarify, would you be selling to K12 or higher ed? This could wrap
into a "media literacy" package, which is taught in K12.

My gut reaction is you would not want to position this as IP licensing if
selling to schools. We do IP licensing to edtech/education companies, but our
school offerings are all software/SaaS. I think schools would find the notion
of IP licensing to be a mismatch, which would create friction even if the
offering itself is a good fit.

~~~
rodolphoarruda
Basic education, mainly. All levels except higher-Ed. Yes, the idea is to wrap
it into digital literacy/citizenship modules that teachers could be using in
their classes as complementary topics.

I'm struggling to find the right way to position this as a service in which
the client/user can work, edit, deliver the content or part of it without
having commercial ownership over it, e.g. cannot resell my content to 3rd
parties.

~~~
gnicholas
Selling into education (especially K12) is tough, and many startups have died
on that hill. The sales cycle is slow, budgets are limited (unless there's a
specific line-item for what you're selling, which is possible since
"digital/media literacy" is popular these days), and billing can be
problematic.

If I were you, I'd find other companies that are already in the space, see
what they offer and how they price/sell, and either mimic them or consider
joining forces in some way.

------
semireg
I’d imagine that many users don’t comment because they feel their salary mix
is too sensitive.

I’m a mobile app dev consultant that also maintains a few node/docker
appliances for industrial IOT clients.

I make enough to dedicate 10 hours a week (sometimes nights and weekends) to
build and maintain an electron app that I sell for $50 a license. My software
is beginning to compete with other software that costs $500 a license. I have
a lot of room to grow, and it’s super unsexy: label printers. I basically
created the label design app I wish I had. You can check it out at
[https://label.live](https://label.live).

~~~
stef25
Wish I'd discovered this back when I needed it, all label printing software is
garbage but this looks perfect.

Just one issue - can't easily find the price of your app.

------
aerovistae
I have so many ideas and the path to reaching customers just seems impossible.
I am constantly saying to myself, who could be persuaded to PAY for this? And
yet so many people here have successful products that I NEVER would have
thought could work (a color gradient on text?!?!). I do not know how people
reach actual revenue on their side projects.

~~~
steve_taylor
I have a lot of ideas and the capability to build them all. I’m sure I’d be
able to sell them as well. My problem is that I don’t have time, because I’m
the sole income earner for a family of four. I’ve tried to get numerous
projects off the ground, but it always required giving up sleep and putting my
day job under threat. I don’t have runway because that money is earmarked (not
by me) for a deposit on a house in one of the world’s most expensive markets.

~~~
herval
Get a slower-paced job? I'm assuming you're in the Bay Area by the mention to
world's most expensive market - there's plenty of very high paying jobs here
where you don't exactly have to worry much, and it isn't particularly hard to
get them.

You can also go a very long way by using a small portion of your income to pay
someone in a cheaper location to code for you. You can literally pay a full
time engineer somewhere else if you stop eating lunch + one starbucks out
every day, for instance!

------
thrw202001
I run a small MOOC helping country side municipalities/rural communities in
Scandinavia with teaching their youth and young adults about IT, networking
and cloud technologies. It started as a pilot project in a small municipality
north of the arctic circle and I sold my first license in February. It then
quickly gained attraction in similar types of municipalities when the results
came in.

It was a lot of work in the beginning, but now I usually have a very nice
schedule. Every week I spend around 4 hours researching different topics, 8
hours on updating or creating videos for the platform and 4-8 hours in video
meetings with customers or regarding new business opportunities.

This year I made north of €150k (~$167604) and will double that before Q3.
Seeing how things are going, most likely I will not be a one man show by the
summer due to a need for account management and/or content creation, but it's
doable.

~~~
lucasverra
Hey there, congrats! How to reach you ? I run a digital product consultancy in
Paris and we help SMB’s to increase performance on internal processes

------
throwaway_29575
My wife.

She runs her own web/digital marketing company and is the only full-time
employee (which includes time for school pick-up/drop-off). She has a few
freelancers for graphic design and content writing and I help out as I can
while working a full-time corporate job.

Her company revenue is over 300k/year.

~~~
crikli
That is _awesome._ When did she start the company? What has her growth
strategy been and how has she acquired new clients?

~~~
throwaway_29575
She's been running it for about 12 years, basically not long after the kids
started at school. Growth has been organic, probably around 20% year on year
at a guess.

For a long time new clients were mostly Google Ads/Remarketing, word-of-mouth
and customer referrals and a few ongoing relationships with sales executives
in traditional media like TV, radio, etc. Over time organic SEO has come into
it as her ranking improved.

There's been minimal networking which is always a concern if online stops
working. There's just not the time to be out at business chambers, BNIs, etc,
look after kids and get work done. It's also a long term commitment.

~~~
crikli
I've got a business that my wife and I are launching, as well as a couple of
other ventures queued up for 2020. All of them will rely on effective digital
marketing. I'd love to visit with your wife, see if there is a fit. My email
is chrisrikli at gmail.

------
Toss8675309
I'm a one man development and consulting shop and have been so for almost 12
years.

My 2018 gross revenue was $600K and 2019 gross revenue will be about $780K.

I'm an extremely efficient developer, a very good salesperson, and I'm an
absolute fanatic about delivering high quality work _on time_.

I don't presume to have any special knowledge but would love to find a way to
help other devs/tech people do what I've done.

~~~
rhlsthrm
I'm a solid full stack developer and I feel like I have the time flexibility
and ability to start a side consulting business. Do you have any tips to get
started? How would you go from 0 to your first client?

~~~
Toss8675309
Absolutely

0\. Make sure your house is in financial order. If you are a habitual user of
credit cards, have high monthly debt obligations, and no saving, before you
even think about going out on your own, change that.

1\. Audit your ability to estimate time and hit deadlines. Most developers are
rubbish at knowing how long a project will take, even a small one. Make sure
you can hit a deadline. This is more important at the outset than your ability
to estimate.

2\. Start thinking about yourself as a provider of solutions rather than as a
developer. You happen to have the superpower of being able to create software,
but that's just a tool. Real value is delivered by providing solutions to
problems within a business.

I could write pages on each of these points, if you have further questions I'm
happy to answer.

Getting your first client, a couple ideas: \- Talk to small marketing / ad
agencies in your town that won't have internal developers, offering to put
some technical muscle behind what they're doing for their clients. \- Look for
people in your personal network that could benefit from your superpower. Offer
to build tools to solve the issues they're dealing with.

These are super generic ideas, I can offer better and more targeted advice if
I know a little more about you and your skillset. Hit me up at
batmaniac@gmail.com.

~~~
rhlsthrm
Hey this is really amazing advice, thanks a ton for sharing! I'll definitely
reach out with more questions! Especially the time estimation part. Even
during my day job I find I tend to underestimate. Over estimating is probably
more desirable in this line of work.

~~~
Toss8675309
Yeah, time estimation is really tough. When I started I figured out I just
needed to take my time estimate and double it. Then I got really analytical
about it. Now I take my gut estimate and add 20%, but I've also gotten away
from time-based billing into value-based estimating (that's a whole other very
deep subject).

The "really analytical" phase wasn't too crazy by HN standards:

\- Break the complete project in Pivotal Tracker down to stories no larger
than 8 points

\- Track the time spent on each story in Harvest

\- Use that data to figure out how much time a given point score equated to,
along with variance.

\- Work to reduce the variance.

I should also say...I've been estimating software for, good god, I haven't
done this math lately, 18 fucking years. Do anything repeatedly that long,
your instincts become pretty solid.

------
blaisio
Pull Reminders. Launched in 2018, acquired by GitHub in June 2019. A very good
product that does one specific task really really well. I assume it was
acquired for at least a few hundred thousand, if not a few million.

------
domlebo70
Sorry to hijack slightly, but figured it's related: I am trying to build a
"lifestyle" side project into something profitable, as a goal to replace my
job. I think I have a good product and niche.

What I want is some sort of mentor network. Someone who has already succeeded
where I haven't, and that I can pester with questions, check I am on the right
track, vent, etc, every now and then.

Does such a thing (or something like it) exist?

~~~
inovica
Drop me a message. I've started and run several ventures, a couple of which
became more than lifestyle. Nothing is done alone though - there are always
people who help you on your journey; employees, friends, mentors, family.
Happy to point you in a direction

~~~
domlebo70
Great, thank you. PM'ed via LinkedIn.

------
sideproject
I run SideProjectors, which generates some profit. But my reason for posting
is for anyone who wants to take-over someone's side project, then have a look
at some of the projects posted -
[https://www.sideprojectors.com](https://www.sideprojectors.com) \- You don't
need to start from zero. :)

~~~
Clex
Signing up to SideProjectors using Twitter requires permissions to follow,
unfollow, tweet, update account info, read direct messages, etc. That's
extremely scary.

~~~
sideproject
Apologies - we only need to get user account info (to get the twitter
username). Will go and remove those permissions now - we had this Twitter
integration set up ~3 years ago and didn't review it - No excuses! :) Sorry
for scaring you (and other users of course).

------
stanislavb
I'm a one-man army, too. I've built SaaSHub
[https://www.saashub.com](https://www.saashub.com) & LibHunt. I left my job a
few months ago and since then have focussed on developing and growing SaaSHub.

It's been growing steadily for the last 2-3 months. My expectations are that
it will generate ~$2,500+ in January and $100k+ in 2020 given the current
growth.

I have a massive list of ideas that I will work on next. Yet, I'd like to be
fully sustainable (in an expensive city like Sydney) before jumping to the
next project/idea.

~~~
clktmr
How does SaaSHub generate revenue? I have neither seen any ads nor any payment
possibilities.

~~~
stanislavb
There are some ads on internal pages only. Not too many.

Also, companies can pay for a featured listing
[https://www.saashub.com/featured-products](https://www.saashub.com/featured-
products)

------
majewsky
Drew DeVault's SourceHut ([https://sr.ht](https://sr.ht)). It may not make as
much revenue yet, but it provides value to the open-source community by
developing a set of developer collaboration tools that actually improve on
existing workflows and embody the Unix philosophy.

------
ja27
Pierre Abel of L’Escapadou - educational iPad apps for pre-K to early
elementary. I don't know his 2019 numbers but I suspect he did at least $350k
this year, down from $600k+ a couple years ago. (Note that the revenue charts
in his post don't included educational bulk sales which he says are 45% of his
revenue.)

[https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-
stores-b58...](https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-
stores-b58dc858af88)

------
judlaw
Not a success story, but I've been building my venture for some time now and
recently started making revenue.

We answer all legal questions in 42 minutes
([http://www.helplicit.com](http://www.helplicit.com)), and are now expanding
that to other domains ([http://www.fortyq.com](http://www.fortyq.com))

The reason I'm writing here is because I'm constantly surprised by the
relative ease with which one 'lands' a 100k per year contract, or accidentally
makes an API that forks its way to glory. I'm fortunate to know some amazing
founders, some of whom are raising millions in VC. Been in and out of
accelerators myself. Yet no story I know starts or has ever been like that.

Imho, it is excruciatingly hard work to provide people value and get them to
pay for it. Takes time, constant follow-ups, a strong value proposition..none
of which gets built jlt.

I wouldn't be fooled by the end result of $ x M ARR. There is a lot going on
behind the scenes, which rarely gets spoken of because it sounds just sounds
rad to say that I had an idea and somebody just signed me a cheque. No matter
the entity at the paying end, people are fundamentally programmed to be uneasy
letting go of large sums of money. Takes a lot of convincing to get there.

Having said that, building is an addictive hellride and I wouldn't trade it
for anything else :)

Happy to share more of the limited experience I have, feel free to PM. Cheers
to building!

------
abinaya_rl
I'm working on [https://remoteleaf.com](https://remoteleaf.com), at this point
it's not a successful business. I'm in the process of appearing and talking
about it in the 2020 version of this thread :)

------
NicoJuicy
All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best
month ( without much sleep).

Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year.

And yes, he is a one man show, no tech involved. It was very eye opening to
me, since my dad can't even boot a PC.

Competition is local though, it's 6-9 other local veterinarians. He seems to
be the most successful one (= he is the one everyone sees passing by day and
night in the car)

~~~
tempsy
Yes that is impressive but the difference is your dad has to work for that
money whereas with software once you achieve success in you do very little
work relative for the amount of money you bring in.

~~~
NicoJuicy
And everyone is forgetting their unpaid hours they did for getting it off the
ground.

You still need support for all of your users and actual sales. Which is also
work.

Users can ask for a refund if your cloud goes down.

I would also rephrase "once you reach success" to "if you reach success"

The statement is also not valid for consultants, only for business owners with
SAAS products/licenses.

TLDR; you're statement is largely false. Success != Luck

------
jonshariat
This was posted a while back about their tech stack but lots of good comments
here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875)

Also very similar post as this one, some good comments:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156)

------
ktaylor
A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an
assistant who does his office admin and books.

My friend has steady gross revenues of $6M a year. When I first met him about
8 years ago he was 26 and living at home with his parents. He once remarked on
how much he appreciated his mother still doing his laundry and cooking for him
and his father.

I forgot to mention, he has extremely high gross margins and EBITDA. He does
all the work himself other then that admin I mentioned already.

What is his business, you are probably wondering?

He owns internet domains. He flips them like real estate. He looks at Google
trends, buys undervalued properties, develops their traffic via SEO, generates
affiliate sales revenue, and if given the opportunity, then sells them at a
much inflated value. He owns 1000s of domains and has built highly automated
systems to efficiently manage them.

~~~
everybodyknows
What sort of content is supplied by such web sites?

~~~
ktaylor
My understanding is he looks for phrases people are increasingly searching for
such as "BHP Free Sippy Cup" and then buys a domain such as bhp-free-sippy-
cups.com. On the site, he just displays affiliate links to various vendor
product pages for that product, e.g. Amazon, etc.

The trick is understanding the trends and having the SEO skills to efficiently
build the traffic. He can't put too much individual time into any one property
because it will on average only generate a few hundred dollars a month in
revenue.

If the trend becomes popular enough someone comes in and buys the domain for
their real sippy cup business.

------
swyx
2 months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21332072)

8 months ago
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19701783)

------
noodle
Depends a lot on your definition of "successful" and "business".

Most very successful one person businesses I know of are specialty consulting
businesses.

~~~
gnzoidberg
This is a very good point. The definition I would use is _not selling your
time_ , where my income is not just a multiplier of the hours I put in, even
if the multiplier is high.

------
cyberferret
I singlehandedly built a small business HR SaaS -
[https://www.hrpartner.io](https://www.hrpartner.io) \- over the past few
years and grown it to a stage that I can now take a salary from it after 3
years of living on savings. I DO have a co-founder now who joined in May of
this year, so strictly speaking I am no longer a one person business, but I
created all the 50,000+ lines of code (and 200+ database tables) of my system
myself.

EDIT: It has actually been a bit of a family project, with my wife helping out
with voice overs and my son helping out with video production etc.

~~~
domlebo70
Awesome. What were the big mistakes you made along the way?

~~~
cyberferret
Thanks. I guess the biggest mistake in the early days was doing 'scattergun
marketing' and not focusing on where our users actually were. Once we narrowed
down and marketed to HR managers and business owners via LinkedIn and Capterra
etc., we saw great results.

Another mistake was probably not sticking to a marketing avenue long enough.
We would sometimes change our website completely a couple of times a month, so
we never really knew what was working or not as we didn't have enough
quantitative data. Nowadays we just rarely make sweeping changes, but instead
make small tweaks to our marketing and watch analytics for patterns.

I do blog about some of these learnings over at
[https://devan.codes](https://devan.codes)

------
mmmuhd
I heard that the site builtwith is still being run by the single founder,
maybe he has recruited help by now, but if he still run it all alone then it
is most successful one person business I have heard of in 2019.

~~~
stanislavb
Yes, I've heart it's a one-man army project. His/their office is based on the
other side of the bridge where I live. One of my small goals for SaaSHub is to
be as successful as BuiltWith :)

------
ingend88
I built a Product Management Interview training platform and earned about 50K
total with 100K in the lifetime. Next step is to transition to online course
and expected to make about $200k/year.

------
Pete-Codes
I believe Pieter Levels makes about $500k a year from Nomad List and Remote OK
combined.

As Courtland said, Ben Tossell and Lynne Tye are going great!

I recently interviewed Belle who makes Exist app for iOS with her partner
Josh. They make 10k a month and are ones to watch:
[https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-
learn...](https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-learning-to-
code/)

------
lpolovets
Jeff Meyerson at the SW Engineering Daily podcast. I'm not sure if he has any
employees (maybe one part-time?), but the podcast pulls in $60k+/mo.

[https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-
so...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-software-
engineering-daily)

------
dmlittle
I'm not sure how it's doing today but back in 2017 park.io was making over
$1M/yr [1]. If I had to guess it's probably bigger today.

[1] [https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-
park...](https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park-io)

~~~
ca98am79
Hi - I added a partner in 2019 and we are doing even better now, thanks!

------
nojvek
Browserless.io - wonderful profitable niche running headless browsers in the
cloud. Not sure if still one person anymore.

------
stef25
Way back when, Markus Frind was the first guy to make 1M / month off Adsense
on the plenty of fish dating site. Which looked like absolute garbage but it
was about the only free dating site at the time and it had grandpas,
teenagers, crack whores and everything in between.

Eventually he employed his wife to do customer support and now it's been sold
for millions and has hundreds of employees.

I used to do maintenance on a fairly popular dating site which was all
horrible php spaghetti code, MD5 passwords ... the works. By the time I got to
the office at 9AM they'd already received over 1000EUR in payments, every
single day. They used really scummy techniques like fake profiles operated by
off shore workers.

------
inancgumus
I know a guy from our local industry who has a free cybercafe software. He's
making about $500k/year for the past 20 years or so. It's a one man business.

[http://handycafe.com](http://handycafe.com)

~~~
domlebo70
How does it generate revenue?

------
kraavi
Pinboard

------
puranjay
I worked with an entrepreneur who runs an affiliate site that pulls in about
$100k/month, has zero employees, and no office.

~~~
tuesday20
What kind of site is it? If it is a review site, does he use the products he
reviews?

~~~
puranjay
It's a software review site and yes, he does use the products he reviews.

------
lukaszkups
[https://carrd.co/](https://carrd.co/) by
[https://twitter.com/ajlkn](https://twitter.com/ajlkn) \- great for building
small/simple websites/landing pages - seems still growing since its premiere.

------
cmod
Surely Ben Thompson (Stratechery[0]) must be one of the most profitable single
person businesses / publishers around. One person, email distribution,
multiple millions in revenue per year.

[0] [https://stratechery.com](https://stratechery.com)

~~~
conductr
I’ve always respected his work. But I don’t subscribe to blogs, just see it
pop up on HN frequently. I didn’t realize he was monetizing it. I’m surprised
he’s doing so well with tbh but good for him.

------
eps
Not the "most successful", but notable nonetheless -
[http://www.tinytouchtales.com/end-of-
year-2019/](http://www.tinytouchtales.com/end-of-year-2019/)

That's the person behind Miracle Merchant and Card Crawl games.

------
1hakr
I'm a one-man army and my latest microstartup is
[https://visalist.io](https://visalist.io)

Last month I earned around $7K and my estimate is I will cross $100K this
year.

------
leerob
You could try looking up Solo Founders on Indie Hackers.

[https://www.indiehackers.com](https://www.indiehackers.com)

------
ingend88
I run a one person company and made about 50K last year. This year, plan is to
bring the courses online and generate about $100K in total.

------
codesternews
@robsun what kind of app your friend built?

~~~
robsun
It's medical app. I don't want to provide more details as he is not aware I
mentioned him ;).

------
anonu
The guy from builtwith.com

------
theyoungwolf
i think coinmarketcap was solo or one person

~~~
johnking
Solo = 1 person

------
kak9
Can't reveal product without their permission.

But know of 1 person company that generates $500k revenue per year and gets
its customers via SEO.

~~~
gnicholas
That's a lot of revenue! What's the cost structure? That can make all the
difference in the world.

