One Person, $1M Company
My friend and I were debating the other evening if one person can create/run a $1 million company. Is anyone here doing this?
I think that's absolutely doable. Not easy but doable.
And for anyone thinking along those lines, I'd argue that the goal isn't to get to $1M/yr but rather to a place of financial freedom. I think more people would hit that mark, if in addition to plowing money into growing their businesses, they also diversified and invested their cashflows effectively.
Below is a story of an Optometrist who became a billionaire over time. His fortune came from two things:
1) He started a successful business that did about $10 million/yr in profit.
2) Over his lifetime, he continuously redirected his business profits into stocks.
https://twitter.com/mrjivraj/status/1425230319796596744?s=20
update: for some reason the link above goes to the beginning of the thread instead of the tweet about said Optometrist. You can scroll to Tweet #27 in the thread.
enjoy the thread...and don't forget to compound :)
Obviously achievable and I think you’d be surprised what some people can generate on their own even outside dev world:
- ads / digital marketing type individual
- high paid consultants
- small SaaS (know guy who did this)
- big hit wonders on App Store
- real estate
- small business brokers
- lawyers
- authors
The question really is how soon until someone does $1B on their own.
I’ve ran one - now there is a team, so that project no longer qualifies. At that scale, most of your time goes to customer service, marketing, bug fixing, and admin. Not value creation. So you start hiring to delegate low-impact work, and congratulations now you have a small business. The day-to-day is far less glamorous than it sounds.
You mean $1M in value or in revenue over some period?
Worth $1M - I think so. It's not too unrealistic to hit that with moderate annual income and some assets.
Making $1M per year - I think this is technically possible but not very common.
I don’t see why not. Some here on HN are probably getting that much as a salary :-). patio11 has some blog posts on getting up to a $50k a week consulting rate that would see you hit the target in the first 20 weeks of the year. If it has to be ARR I can imagine courses can make this much (like the top React courses) which require little maintenance I.e. can be managed by one person maybe outsourcing some graphic design and video work but not taking on employees.
Though it depends on your definition of One Person. He ported another game but the money went into his business account and it was more like a licensing deal. The game design was done by someone else, though.
Not sure what you mean with a "$1 millon company", but there are lots of single founders creating very profitable companies, check out indiehackers.com.
Sextoy.com was a 1-person company for many years. They probably broke ten million in annual revenues before hiring their first employee.
So was plentyoffish.
I think photopea.com is 1 person doing at least $1m in annual revenue.
Not me, but one of my friends. He ran an ecommerce shop, selling items manufactured in China, and easily cleared over 1M in revenue (think it was something like 3 to 4!). Eventually, since it was consuming his whole life, he brought on a team to help him handle other aspects especially since he just had a kid.
Of course! Happens all the time. Go look for 1 person startups on microaquire or flippa. I bet there are dozens of 1 man operations for sale right now for over $1M. A million is actually not as hard to get to as you might think for an exit. (Still very hard I'm sure, I don't mean to downplay it)
You’ve got to really find your niche. I make around $1.5M profit per year from an independent website that takes an hour of two of work per week, me only. It’s been running for 15 years. The whole thing was a freaky case of perfect product and timing and there was definitely luck involved.
Wasn’t plenty of fish famously one person for a long time?
If you have a good understanding of how to hack YouTube (or other social sites) that seems plausible. Some list video channels appear to have crossed that mark (I bet a well trained GAN or GPT-3 could easily reproduce content of that quality—it’s not about talent of any sort). Though actually doing that could be considered unethical, as it would be contributing to the wire heading of children (who else watches list videos?) to an algorithm obsessed with watch time optimization.
If you are okay with working yourself to death and are in a nitch and in-demand market you could make that consulting.
I listened to the audio version, it is interesting
@levelsio for one. there's a bunch aggregated on indiehackers.com
Valuation I assume? Probably most companies "worth" $1 million haven't been formally valued, so you'd have to go off ARR and assume a theoretical acquisition multiple.
Some YouTube content people are turning over big bucks. Supercar channels like Shmee150 might fall in this category. His personal collection is full of top end machines
I mean, it seems trivial to say, but a lot of people who inherit a lot of money start a company. They may even put $1 million in cash into it. At that point they are the sole employee of a million dollar company.
At a more serious implementation of the same idea, I'm willing to bet a lot of solo entrepreneurs with wealthy families are getting a million dollar valuation in the friends and family round
There's one way of finding out that might end-up making you and your friend a little bit of cash...
Do you mean revenue or value? Both are achievable one more so than the other!
If you have a limited company in the UK you must use a suitably qualified accountant. Not sure if that counts as a "no".
You mean, without hiring employees?
Sounds like a good challenge!
already doing it in my sleep.. next question?