Careful with your terminology. "Successful" has different meanings for different people.

By my definition, for example, I run the most successful single-person business that I'm aware of. But it doesn't make millions, so it might not meet your definition at all.

My goal was to replace my day job with a software business that required as close to zero attention as possible, so that I could have time to spend on the things that actually matter to me.

The business brings in the equivalent of a nice Senior Developer salary, which is not what most people think of when they imagine a successful Startup. But it lets me work with a bunch of cool tech when I want to, and, more importantly, is automated to the point where Customer Service involves a quick 30 second - 10 minute email sweep over morning coffee. For me, that's a lot more valuable than a few more million dollars in the bank.

The cool thing about running your own business is that you get to decide on your own definition of success.

EDIT: I wrote a bit about how I got into this position, in case anybody is interested. It's not actually all that hard to do:

http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-...

Builtwith.com (one employee/founder and a part-time blogger) does an estimated $12M a year [1] assuming a 'few thousand' = 2000 paying customers.

"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

At some point scale will require you to hire, at least a few people, if you're really successful. But two examples that I can think of are Markus Frind (Plenty of Fish) and Markus Persson (Minecraft).

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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.

I built and run StoreSlider[1]. It made ~$700,000 in 2016, mainly in affiliate revenue from eBay. Costs are essentially hosting (between two and five $10 Linodes, depending on load).

Took me some effort to built, but it's on autopilot now.

[1] https://www.storeslider.com

Your problem will be definitional. The Rock earned ~ $65mm last year. Is he a 'one man company'? I guarantee he's billing through a services entity...

1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2016/08/25/the-...

Isn't Tarsnap[1], by Colin Percival a great example of this? I'm surprised it wasn't the first thing mentioned since he's reasonably active on HN.

1: https://www.tarsnap.com/about.html

How do you define successful single-person? I've been running a one person consultancy for 12 years now, had to retrain quite a bit over the years, sometimes it was so busy that I outsourced pieces of work. It's been good enough that I have a house and no mortgage attached to it, all while spending almost enough time with my family - much more recently. This is what I wanted and I consider that a success in maintaining a work/life balance, working from home and having a good life in general. It's not quite 'fu' money yet, as I still ahve to work for a living, but I working towards that goal. I know a few good people that agree with this point of view - Basecamp/37 signals folks etc.

I built and run Instapainting.com by myself. As of the date of this comment it is still only one employee (me). https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/instapainting

Things like customer support is outsourced to other startups, and of course the artists on the platform don't work for me, but could be if the company was structured differently (it's structured as a marketplace).

Now that I am no longer a single employee business (again) I can admit that I ran Mark II of my company on my own doing everything without outsourcing (sales, customer support, development, sysops, UI/UX, website design, copywriting, manuals, SEO, advertising, accounting, etc) making much more than seven figures in profit for quite a few years.

It probably wasn’t the wisest idea to stay solo for so long, but the freedom of not having employees made me very reluctant to hire anyone again. The only reason I chose to hire is that the business' growth forced me make the decision to either turn away customers or hire staff. The people I have are great, but I do miss the days of doing everything myself without having to explain why something is important.

http://NomadList.com

Bootstrapped social networking site doing multiple 5-figures/month.

Sidekiq by Mike Perham http://sidekiq.org/

Over 1MM annual revenue https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/sidekiq

There's pinboard, maciej still runs it solo, I think.

Stardew Valley: http://stardewvalley.net/

Problem is, "big for one person" is not big enough to be news, relative to all the companies. Once they get big enough for many to hear about them, they have to grown, to handle it. e.g. Notch (Minecraft)

Secondly, the best way to make solid, reliable money is to have a niche, without competition. So, you keep your mouth shut.

You'll probably most likely notice them in small, industry-oriented niches. Or... after they grow larter than one-person.

To give an answer: https://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/

The Flappy Bird creator said he made $50k per day from in app ads. But he pulled the game after a short while. Said because he felt guilty for making people play all day. Would love to know the whole story behind this.

According to porn industry insiders, xvideos is run by a married couple. They are very secretive, but they definitely do millions in revenue annually.

Sublime Text was for a long time a single-person business.

We can find few of them here https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses

We (two python developers) have started a SaaS SEO checker service [1] in February 2017 (took 4 month to develop from 0) and already have paying customers on our business plan. I completely agree with the definition of successful business when you have ability to do what you want when you want. I already have a couple of other websites generating revenue from advertising and all this allowed me to quit daily job 2 years ago. So definitely there are a lot of examples of successful single- (two-) person businesses out there.

[1] https://seocharger.com

If Satoshi Nakamoto is still alive and still has access to the coins he mined but never sold, they're already worth billions and the work has changed the world.

Not entirely single person, but I run Musi [1] with one partner. We have monthly revenues in the mid six figures with 2-3k a month in expenses.

[1] https://feelthemusi.com

I'm surprised no one has mentioned improvely.com by Dan Grossman.

I think it makes around $40K to $50K per month. Over the last few years, I've seen it grow from around $10K to $50K. That slow steady SaaS growth is pretty inspiring.

Daring Fireball by Jon Gruber (https://daringfireball.net).

The most successful one-man business is not in software. I know of a successful mediator. He charges $18000 to $20000 per day and has always been booked for the last 20 years.

http://www.wqsadr.com/randallwwulfffeescheduleandpolicies.ht...

I know some affiliate marketers who make $2M+ without any employees.

Apparently, ranking well for certain keywords (mostly web hosting and website builders) can be very, very lucrative.

https://insomnia.rest/

Guy quit his job a year or two ago to develop this full-time and seems to be doing pretty well for himself. I use the client all the time as a developer.

If I recall correctly, IMDB used to be a one-man show for a long time, up to and even after getting acquired by Amazon.

Here are a couple of awesome examples: Affiliate Marketer https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/ Patt is awesome, he actually shares his monthly income and expense statements. Started solo and now he hired a bunch of people.

Nathan Barry (http://nathanbarry.com/) the guy who started convertKit https://convertkit.com/

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https://ipinfo.io - single person business that does over 250 million API requests a day, and generates good revenue.

Google > quora > 10 year old article > https://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/the-other-number-ones....

But they have staff.

Large single-person startups? https://smallbiztrends.com/2014/07/successful-one-person-sta...

I know a guy who does arbitrage of porn traffic and he makes $2M a month, already saved up $20M.

Working by example may work. And analysing many successful examples may also yield some insight. But make sure to get the full picture: look also at those who fail. They might have tried the very same methods to most degrees. Don't fall for the survivorship bias :) It might be other factors which are truely important than those which seem the obvious ones.

Please first define success. You should think about your own values in order to know what is success for you.

I personally know people that made millions from creating software products and companies. But I do know nobody that did(or does it) it alone.

In fact, I "made millions" myself whatever that means starting with software(a million dollars is way less than 10 years ago because of inflation so it is not that much, specially if you life in a expensive place), but I made a hell lot of work and found colleagues along the way.

IMHO you should never focus on money. Money is just a tool for exchanging value. You should focus on creating value, even if at first it gives you little money. Because of innovation dilemma most things that create real value give you very little money first( Do you know how much money the Apple Store did the first year?)

In my opinion your priority should be finding a social circle that will help and understand you. If you have a business that means entrepreneurs. They will understand and support you like no one else. HN is virtual, you need real people around.

For me success is the ability to be free in my life, made my own decisions in my business, I could write on HN, or go climb a mountain when people is working, or travel a new country, or the ability to only invest on business that are ethical for me.

If earning more money means not being free, I will decline the offer, in fact I decline offers every single day. Why should I do it? To become a 80 years old billionaire? To have everybody know me so I have to live isolated against paparazzis or criminals wanting to kidnap my children because they know I am rich?

But your values could be different. Your priorities could be to show off, exert power over other people, of go meet interesting people, or have extreme experiences or send your children to elite schools, whatever is success for you.

my business:) 1.5m annual revenue, 10-15k mobthly profit, built from zero, very proud of it.

I suppose there is very little public information about such companies because they have no obligations of sharing it.

This guy uses an AI to write books for Amazon. Note that article is from 2012.

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/143382-programmer-create...

Domainers: I've known many on person companies that made tons off parking domains. Seems like this model has run its course.

Farming has done well for my wife, she run her business and feeds a bunch of folks. Find her at the Oakland Grandlake on saturday and Marin civic center on Sunday. She sells plants :)

As for me, I develop https://thestartupway.website/ only by myself but I really cannot tell you if it's a successful business. I have a job of a software engineer and when my friends ask me to make a landing page for them I just use my tool and take a small money from them. It's just for fun for me and it's great that it helps somebody with their needs. So, for me, it's a little success )

I don't think there are any that ever remain a one-person company in practice - even for my own projects I've always needed to outsource or farm-out tasks that aren't a valuable use of my time - e.g. website design or handling customer support. I'm sure there are plenty of de-jure sole-proprietor ships - but I doubt any of them of truly work alone.

Why discount outsourcing? The book "The E-Myth" argues that you absolutely should outsource everything but your core competency. (And "The 4-hour work week" would argue you should outsource that too)

Does outsourcing somehow diminish success?

There are additional resources listed here:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/small-operations.h...

Nomadlist.com from levels.io

Salvatore Sanfilippo: Sole creator and maintainer of Redis

Mike Perham: Sole Developer of SideKiq ( Background tasks processing with Redis) and Inspector (Application infrastructure monitoring, reimagined)

https://www.bottomlinehq.com Single founder/employee, 6-digit revenue, no outside funding.

Plenty of Fish? Exited for billions while still a solo operator

https://wowbrary.org/

nonprofit to connect people with their local library's catalog

run by one person for 10+ years

I made millions from Adsense, not in USD though :)

Top affiliate marketers in the health, wealth, personal development and dating niche make $m per year, some in the 10's of $m.

CDBaby?

Bitcoin? That is, if Satoshi is a single person

Craigslist is pretty close to a single person operation and it's been pretty successful.

I know it's an outlier.

I sell twitter and Instagram followers for 5 years. I made 15000 usd in average ( before tax).

Distrokid

plenty of fish comes to mind, not sure if it's around anymore, but this was a free dating platform

Stock Trading: no customers, no employees and no investors, check my profile for details on how to start. Good luck!

PewDiePie

please don't. we have enough people monetizing junk on the internet. you're trying to skip the most important step.

Agar.io.

Minecraft.

Slot

Ugmonk

Dentistry.

4chan

please don't. we have enough people monetizing junk on the internet. you're trying to skip the most important step.

Well, they all have the same number of employees.

TheHun.net, run by one person for years and still doing well over 1M a year in revenue.

Stupid question. Why do you wanna know that?

Tinder is a highly successful single person business vs. the Ashley Madison strategy of focusing on couples.