Solo Giants: 6 One-Person Companies that Bucked the Trend
OpenAI chief Sam Altman told Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian about an ongoing bet in their tech CEO group chat. It’s about when the first billion-dollar company with just one person, assisted by AI, come into being. “This would have been unimaginable without AI, but now it will happen,” Altman said. The tech industry sees a future where companies can succeed with smaller, more efficient teams, challenging the idea that growth requires more employees. “There’s going to be a new phenomenon where CEOs and founders are going to be so excited to get up and go to work with much smaller, much more performant, much more culturally strong teams,” Ohanian said. Well, there already are a few tech ventures that are successful as a one-person company. Plenty of Fish (POF) Founded in 2003 by Markus Frind, the dating website is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. The company that began in 2003 was run single-handedly by the founder till 2007. The company today is one of the most popular dating sites and boasts around 170 million users in 2024. In the beginning, Frind operated POF from his home, relying on Google AdSense for revenue, which grew from $5 to $3,300 a month by year’s end. This success convinced him to focus solely on POF. Despite its growth and profitability, Frind avoided venture capital, preferring to grow POF independently. By 2008, POF had 15 million registered users and was generating about $10 million annually, all without any employees for the first five years. As POF continued to grow, Frind moved operations to Vancouver, hiring a team to expand and improve the website, introducing new features and premium options. By 2015, Frind decided to sell POF to The Match Group for $575 million, leaving the company. Builtwith Founded in 2005 by Gary Brewer, BuiltWith is headquartered in Brighton, United Kingdom, and operates as a website technology analysis tool. Despite its modest team of 50 employees as of 2020, the company did initially generate over $14 million in annual revenue with just one full-time employee. Brewer started BuiltWith in 2007 after realizing the need for a platform that could easily identify the technologies used by websites. Initially a side project, while he worked a corporate job in Sydney, the platform quickly became valuable for lead generation, allowing competitors services like Mailchimp to identify and contact potential customers. In 2011, Andrew Rogers, who was working on a similar project joined Brewer. The duo set a high bar for hiring additional staff, deciding only to consider expanding the team if monthly revenue reached $100k. BuiltWith’s marketing strategy relies on its free tool to attract paid users, supported by a weekly blog post from a contractor. By 2017, the platform had garnered significant traction, with over 2 million page views, more than 500,000 users a month, and between 2,000 to 3,000 paying customers on plans ranging from $295 to $995 per month. Balsamiq In 2008, Giacomo (Peldi) Guilizzoni founded Balsamiq, a wireframing and prototyping tool company based in Turin, Italy. By 2020, the company was generating $10 million annually. The company is a web-based user interface design tool for creating wireframes. Users generate digital sketches or concepts for an application or website, and facilitate discussion and understanding before any code is written. “My idea originally was to start a one-man company and let it stay that way but the product was too successful. The market told me that I needed to grow and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since,” Peldi said. The company now employs around 40 people and reported a revenue of $7.3M in 2023. Viral Nova Founded by Scott Delong in 2013, it is a curation site for the most viral content on the internet, similar to Buzzfeed. At its peak, it generated $5-$10M per year in revenue and 100M readers per month with 0 funding and 0 employees. The startup operated solely by DeLong and assisted by two freelance writers, managed to expand its website to match Buzzfeed’s reach and scale, attracting around 100 million monthly readers. This growth was achieved without employing any full-time staff or securing external investment. ViralNova was purchased by Zealot Networks in a cash and stock deal for upwards of $100 million. DeLong subsequently launched GodVine, a website that features inspiring stories that appealed to Facebook’s predominantly female audience. It rose to become a top 1,500 website according to Alexa’s traffic rankings. Stardew Valley Eric Barone began working on Stardew Valley in 2011 as a side project, with the game officially releasing in February 2016. Barone developed Stardew Valley, a hit Indie farming simulator RPG inspired by Harvest Moon. The game stands out for being crafted entirely by Barone, covering coding, art, music, and design, and became a commercial success without any external funding. Barone started Stardew Valley to improve his job prospects after college. What began as a resume builder, evolved into a full-time project fuelled by passion. Despite the lack of a formal plan, Barone’s intuitive development process and deep research into game mechanics led to a rich and authentic experience. He announced the game on Steam Greenlight in 2012, gaining early attention and community support. A partnership with Chucklefish in 2013 helped with logistics while allowing Barone to maintain creative control. By 2021, Stardew Valley had sold over 15 million copies across all platforms, indicating substantial revenue given the game’s price point, which varies by platform but is generally around $14.99. Photopea Founded by Ivan Kutskir, Photopea is a free online photo and graphics editor that has carved out a significant niche in the digital editing space. Launched as a solo project, Kutskir’s creation has grown into a robust platform, rivaling traditional software with its comprehensive suite of editing tools. The platform now boasts 10 million visits per month and generates approximately $1.5 million in annual revenue. Remarkably, users spend a collective 1.5 million hours each month on the site, a testament to its utility and user-friendly design. Kutskir’s journey with Photopea began as an experiment, aiming to offer a free, web-based alternative to Photoshop. This experiment quickly evolved into Kutskir’s primary source of income, with the platform’s growth trajectory showing no signs of slowing down. In the last year alone, Photopea crossed the $500,000 mark in annual recurring revenue (ARR), a significant milestone for any digital tool. Monetization of Photopea comes primarily through ads, a strategy Kutskir chose based on his previous experience with online games. This approach, coupled with licensing deals that allow for API customization, has proven effective. Kutskir today has an annual server cost of just $45, a figure that is almost unheard of for platforms with such high traffic.
Tech leaders predict that AI will enable solo entrepreneurs to achieve great success, challenging the idea that growth requires large teams.
Tech leaders predict that AI will enable solo entrepreneurs to achieve great success, challenging the idea that growth requires large teams.
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K L Krithika is a tech journalist at AIM. Apart from writing tech news, she enjoys reading sci-fi and pondering the impossible technologies, trying not to confuse it with reality.