1. Stardew Valley
- It's a country-life role-playing game
- Developed by Eric Barone
- It has generated $300M+ in revenue in 6 years
- Eric could become the first 1-person founder to do $1B+ in sales
2. BuiltWith
- It helps you find what technologies and services a website uses
- Founded by Gary Brewer
- It generates $14M in revenue per year
3. Viral Nova
- It's a curation site for the most viral content on the Internet (similar to Buzzfeed)
- Founded by Scott Delong
- At its peak, it generated $5-$10M per year in revenue and 100M readers per month with 0 funding and 0 employees
4. Photopea
- It's a free photo and graphics editor
- Made by Ivan Kutskir
- It generates 10M visits per month and ~$1.5M in revenue per year
- People spend 1.5 million hours a month using Photopea
5. Digital Inspiration
- It builds google plugins for docs, sheets, slides, and more
- Founded by Amit Agarwal
- It gets 5M visits per month and earns $10M in revenue per year
- 40M+ have downloaded the plugins
6. Rego apps
- 3 of its apps (5-0 police scanner, remote for tesla apps, and police scanner+) are the most downloaded apps in their category
- Founded by Allen Wong
- He has made over $100M+ from these apps
7. Portfolio of diverse businesses
- Justin Welsh has built several businesses that generate $3M+ in revenue (94% margins)
- He earns through consulting, courses, paid community, newsletter sponsorships, and more
8. Brumate
- It sells adult beverage (beer, wine) cans to keep them cold for 24+ hours
- Founded by Dylan Jacob
- He made $20M in revenue with 0 employees
- It has 2.5M+ worldwide customers
9. Portfolio of diverse businesses
- Pieter Levels has built several companies—remote job marketplace, AI photography, nomad community, and others—that make ~$3M+ in revenue
10. Carrd
- It's a one-page website builder
- Founded by AJ
- It generates $1M+ ARR
- 4M+ sites have been built on Carrd
Trending on Indie Hackers
Great list! Here's some more links:-
Successful one-person online businesses
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35333088
50+ side projects making $1M
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/50-side-projects-making-1m-f51ce727df
Ask HN: Side project of more that $2k monthly revenue what's your project?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567822
Ask HN: Side projects making less than $2k MRR, what's your project?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35571486
Solo founders with profitable businesses, collected stories
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/wjRD/solo-founders-with-profitable-businesses-collected-stories.html
One-person software shop
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13167156
Competition doesnt matter
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13168965
Discover money-making startups and side-projects.
https://www.startups.fyi/
https://www.businessinsider.com/i-made-17-million-in-revenue-in-less-than-2-years-from-drop-servicing-my-freelance-work-2022-10
https://blog.kowalczyk.info/article/2f72237a4230410a888acbfce3dc0864/lessons-learned-from-15-years-of-sumatrapdf-an-open-source-windows-app.html
Very inspirational...
This list is very useful and inspiring! Thanks, @AkshayRaveendran for putting it together.
Thank you so much for this post !!!!
Woow, That was fantastic,
I'm trying to think and understand the commons between all of these businesses.
Thank you for sharing that information. Can you tell where do you get this information?
I think it was while browsing through Reddit...
Thank you for your quick answer. Thanks
Are there any learnings from them? Strokes of genius when it came to marketing, or timing, product placement, ...?
The only thing I'm learning is from my mistakes actually... recently I got broke and now I'm getting back on my feet by analyzing where it went south, what needs to change, etc..
These people are pure inspiration.
Carrd is actually very useful!
I've used Photopea and it's amazing.
The scalability of internet businesses is awesome
Must collect and learn from them
Why are you copy pasting the content from Reddit on IH?
@csallen
Simply Bc I got inspired! I'm a solo entrepreneur myself so yk