You can find a lot of articles about the most successful startups / 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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Plenty more on <a href="https://www.IndieHackers.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.IndieHackers.com</a> sharing their stories via interviews and on the podcast, and also posting about hitting revenue goals and other milestones here: <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/milestones</a>
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.<p>I have a site with ads on it that makes ~$1500–2000/m in ad revenue.<p>I also do some hosting/maintenance for clients. 4 clients and it’s about $1,000/m.<p>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.<p>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.
If successful means total benefit delivered to shareholders, then I consider my one-man company to be very successful.<p>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.<p>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.
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.
First that comes to mind is Joe Rogan. He started a podcast in 2009.<p>His SocialBlade profile says he makes between $16,500 - $264,000 a month from his youtube videos alone.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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:<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-sidekiq" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/016-mike-perham-of-side...</a><p>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.
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. <a href="https://www.patreon.com/evanyou" rel="nofollow">https://www.patreon.com/evanyou</a>
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.<p>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.<p>1: www.beelinereader.com
I’d imagine that many users don’t comment because they feel their salary mix is too sensitive.<p>I’m a mobile app dev consultant that also maintains a few node/docker appliances for industrial IOT clients.<p>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 <a href="https://label.live" rel="nofollow">https://label.live</a>.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
My wife.<p>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.<p>Her company revenue is over 300k/year.
I'm a one man development and consulting shop and have been so for almost 12 years.<p>My 2018 gross revenue was $600K and 2019 gross revenue will be about $780K.<p>I'm an extremely efficient developer, a very good salesperson, and I'm an absolute fanatic about delivering high quality work <i>on time</i>.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>Does such a thing (or something like it) exist?
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 - <a href="https://www.sideprojectors.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.sideprojectors.com</a> - You don't need to start from zero. :)
I'm a one-man army, too. I've built SaaSHub <a href="https://www.saashub.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.saashub.com</a> & LibHunt. I left my job a few months ago and since then have focussed on developing and growing SaaSHub.<p>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.<p>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.
A friend of mine runs a 1 person business. Well, technically, he does have an assistant who does his office admin and books.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What is his business, you are probably wondering?<p>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.
This was posted a while back about their tech stack but lots of good comments here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20985875</a><p>Also very similar post as this one, some good comments: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156</a>
Drew DeVault's SourceHut (<a href="https://sr.ht" rel="nofollow">https://sr.ht</a>). 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.
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.)<p><a href="https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-stores-b58dc858af88" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@PierreAbel/9-years-on-the-app-stores-b58...</a>
Not a success story, but I've been building my venture for some time now and recently started making revenue.<p>We answer all legal questions in 42 minutes (<a href="http://www.helplicit.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.helplicit.com</a>), and are now expanding that to other domains (<a href="http://www.fortyq.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fortyq.com</a>)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Having said that, building is an addictive hellride and I wouldn't trade it for anything else :)<p>Happy to share more of the limited experience I have, feel free to PM. Cheers to building!
I'm working on <a href="https://remoteleaf.com" rel="nofollow">https://remoteleaf.com</a>, 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 :)
All these nummers and still, my dad is a vet and earned 300k € in his best month ( without much sleep).<p>Most of the even more successful ones don't even take that in per year.<p>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.<p>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)
Depends a lot on your definition of "successful" and "business".<p>Most very successful one person businesses I know of are specialty consulting businesses.
I singlehandedly built a small business HR SaaS - <a href="https://www.hrpartner.io" rel="nofollow">https://www.hrpartner.io</a> - 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.<p>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.
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.
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.
I believe Pieter Levels makes about $500k a year from Nomad List and Remote OK combined.<p>As Courtland said, Ben Tossell and Lynne Tye are going great!<p>I recently interviewed Belle who makes Exist app for iOS with her partner Josh. They make 10k a month and are ones to watch: <a href="https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-learning-to-code/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nocsdegree.com/self-taught-developer-talks-learn...</a>
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.<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-software-engineering-daily" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-so...</a>
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park-io" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/034-mike-carson-of-park...</a>
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.<p>Eventually he employed his wife to do customer support and now it's been sold for millions and has hundreds of employees.<p>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.
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.<p><a href="http://handycafe.com" rel="nofollow">http://handycafe.com</a>
<a href="https://carrd.co/" rel="nofollow">https://carrd.co/</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/ajlkn" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ajlkn</a> - great for building small/simple websites/landing pages - seems still growing since its premiere.
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.<p>[0] <a href="https://stratechery.com" rel="nofollow">https://stratechery.com</a>
Not the "most successful", but notable nonetheless - <a href="http://www.tinytouchtales.com/end-of-year-2019/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tinytouchtales.com/end-of-year-2019/</a><p>That's the person behind Miracle Merchant and Card Crawl games.
I'm a one-man army and my latest microstartup is <a href="https://visalist.io" rel="nofollow">https://visalist.io</a><p>Last month I earned around $7K and my estimate is I will cross $100K this year.
You could try looking up Solo Founders on Indie Hackers.<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.indiehackers.com</a>
Can't reveal product without their permission.<p>But know of 1 person company that generates $500k revenue per year and gets its customers via SEO.