Ask HN: What are some examples of successful single-person businesses?
I've heard success stories of people making millions from adsense or from creating software products. It's made me think who has been the most successful at building a company as a sole proprietor.
I guess we should discount companies that have single ownership but outsource all the work.
321 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 336 ms ] threadBut they have staff.
Large single-person startups? https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/successful-one-person-sta...
Also, customer support is a very valuable use of your time :-)
My measure of success isn't the money (though I love money), but the independence and freedom it gives me.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/08/25/the-...
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.
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 :)
I like philosophical arguments! ^_^
* 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.
To give another example, Cristiano Ronaldo is said to have been the highest paid sports star last year, with estimated earnings of $88 million.
https://www.forbes.com/profile/cristiano-ronaldo/?list=athle...
As laumars pointed out there's the question of whether you include assistants.
A singer writing his own songs or an actor always looking for roles to play might be a business, while typically they are controlled by a record company or movie studio, which again isn't really like running a business on your own.
"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...
2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12065355
Edit: specificity and formatting
csallen, if you're reading this, get Gary Brewer to do an interview for IndieHackers.
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.
Just because I hire somebody to clean my office, doesn't mean it's not a one-person company.
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).
It probably wasn't quite as advanced as BuiltWith (scale-wise), but it was similarly impressive how much output was crunched by one developer. I learned a lot from him.
> I am in utter disbelief one person can do everything, even if I account for being an automation freak. As someone who works in data acquisition, and someone who has evaluated BuiltWith along with other providers of tech install data, I can get a rough idea of how it stays as a one-man shop.
Whether deliberate or not, the more hairy type of signal analysis tends to be missing from BuiltWith's dataset. Unless it's exposed via DNS or direct webpage code, BuiltWith doesn't detect it. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as it keeps it maintainable. Especially because you can use your historical data to identify changes in signals and be able to reactively update them as they change instead of use resources to proactively monitor all of them manually. But it limits it to a "public web facing" tech install base. You can greatly expand this by including secondary signals like parsing SEC files and job postings and whatnot, which will capture a lot of non web facing technologies. But those are a lot more complicated signals that require a lot of filtering/processing to reliably leverage, and would likely grow beyond a one-man shop like BuiltWith.
Salesforce is a classic example of this. It's generally an internally focused software, but if you use Partner Portals or Web2Lead forms, it'll be exposed publicly. Builtwith[2] identifies 12.1k live sites using it and 30k historical sites using it. HGData[3], which provides similar data but uses a wider range of signals, can identify 92k sites/companies currently using it.
> crawler needs to handle tons of edge cases Not particularly. If rendering the page, sure. But when doing pattern recognition within the source code itself, edge cases that'd bork rendering are mostly moot.
I'm not at all disparaging BuiltWith - it's a solid product for what it is and a bargain for the price charged. But it's also a very limited product which, when destructured, hints at a lot of decisions made with the intention of being maintainable as a one-man shop. In the space it occupies, it also has a really solid pricing model if you can get by with using the limited dataset it provides. But if you need visibility into any internal software or tools or hardware, it has much more limited use.
[1] http://www.hostingadvice.com/blog/builtwith-more-than-how-we...
[2] https://trends.builtwith.com/analytics/Salesforce
[3] https://discovery.hgdata.com/product/salesforce-com-crm
This can be useful for market research, to see what technologies are being used and by whom. It could also be used as a lead generation tool.
Example: If I am creating a new email list tool, I could find websites (via builtwith) that are using a competitor and send cold email with specific comparisons between my new service and their current one, or asking what they like/dislike about their current tool.
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-create...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkS5PkHQphY
Apparently, ranking well for certain keywords (mostly web hosting and website builders) can be very, very lucrative.
But they're easy enough to find. Just Google lucrative keywords like "best hosting" and you'll see them
Over 1MM annual revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq
As long as other open source contributors are not payed for their contributions, I would still qualify it as a single person company. It's just that the company's approach is a little bit different than the traditional one.
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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.
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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.
>This could be telling the story of IE users being murdered out of existence.
I have deep respect for Markus Frind being able to scale so well.
Still I feel there is some missing ingredient in the early growth of PoF.
What really happened before the big monthly 500k Adsense checks started coming in?
Cue eBay(it was not Pez dispensers, it was to large extent newsgroups spam), cue AirbnB, cue Facebook in Harvard years, cue every "growth hacking" story.
There is always some missing piece in the success story(ala Balzac).
Minecraft on the other hand seems the purest single person success story.
He actually did an interview with Rolling Stone [0] where he told his "story".
[0] http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/the-flight-of-the-b...
There was some podcast or something I remember listening to guy said he was worth $15K/hr or something haha man, I am a grub
1: https://www.tarsnap.com/about.html
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.
> people making millions
> It's made me think who has been the most successful at building a company as a sole proprietor.
I guess no one managed to top that comeback in the last decade (thread is 3600 days old!).
A little known fact about it is one of his replies is this:
we're in a similar space -- http://www.getdropbox.com (and part of the yc summer 07 program) basically, sync and backup done right (but for windows and os x). i had the same frustrations as you with existing solutions.
let me know if it's something you're interested in, or if you want to chat about it sometime.
drew (at getdropbox.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35103
Bootstrapped social networking site doing multiple 5-figures/month.
It's a paid membership community - https://join.nomadlist.com/
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.
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.
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.