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Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
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Dec 11 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
I'm obsessed with 1-person companies and have spent over 50 hours researching them.

Here are the 10 most impressive ones that have generated millions in revenue with 0 employees:
1/ Star Dew 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

Here's how he did it
2/ BuiltWith

• It helps you find what technologies and services a website uses

• Founded by Gary Brewer

• It generates $14M in revenue per year

Here's the full story of how Gary built it and operated with 0 employees
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
6/ 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

Here's how Amit built it
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

Here's his Reddit AMA

reddit.com/r/financialind…
7/ Portfolio of diverse businesses

• @thejustinwelsh has built several businesses that generate $3M+ in revenue (94% margins)

• He earns through consulting, courses, paid community, newsletter sponsorships, and more

Here's how Justin did it
@thejustinwelsh 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

Read the full story
9/ Portfolio of diverse businesses

• @levelsio has built several companies—remote job marketplace, AI photography, nomad community, and others—that make ~$3M+ in revenue

Listen to his excellent interview on the MFM pod

10/ @carrd

• It's a one-page website builder

• Founded by @ajlkn

• It generates $1M+ ARR

• 4M+ sites have been built on Carrd
@carrd @ajlkn I love the idea of 1-person businesses. That being said, I enjoy building lemon.io with the team.

If you enjoyed this thread:

1. Follow me @volodarik. I share everything on the way of scaling my co to $100m
2. RT this tweet to share this thread with your audience
As this is blowing up, I'll shamelessly plug

Next week I'm launching a completely free email course on how to create amazing brand as we did for lemon.io

Subscribe, and I'll email it to you next week.
*Not selling anything in the course.

volodarik.com/materials/crea…
@shl started @gumroad as a VC-backed startup but turned it around to a profitable business with no full-time employees and $200m GMV.

sahillavingia.com/work

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More from @volodarik

Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Dec 12
Who can hire a junior 3d artics?

My friend has moved from Ukraine (lost everything there) to LA and looking for a job in game dev.

He learns fast, is hard-working, and can work remotely or in the office.

If you know game-dev founders, please, intro.
Some of his works ImageImageImageImage
ImageImageImageImage
Read 7 tweets
Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Dec 8
ChatGPT has crossed 1M+ users in just 5 days.

To compare, it took Netflix 41 months, FB - 10 months, and Instagram - 2.5 months.

But many haven’t yet realized its full potential.

Here are the 10 mindblowing things you can do using it right now:
1/ Generate code

ChatGPT can help you generate code to build your app/website from scratch.

You save time and effort and can focus on the more important tasks.

100X engineer just arrived.

Rakshit, who had zero programming knowledge, used this feature to create a Twitter bot.

medium.com/@rlodha1/how-i…
Read 16 tweets
Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Dec 5
I've spent a few days researching newsletters for CTOs and engineering managers (our target audience).

Here are the ones you should read:
1/ The Pragmatic Engineer by @GergelyOrosz
newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Except for long-form insights on high-growth startups, Gergely wrote an exceptional piece on the impact of the Ukraine war on the tech industry.

newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/war-in-ukrai…
2/ Level Up by @patkua

Pat writes very high-level topics like keeping their energy level as an engineering leader, being introverted, and having fewer meetings. Already one of my favorites.

levelup.patkua.com
Read 14 tweets
Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Dec 4
Dylan Jacob made $20M in revenue in 2 years with 0 full-time employees.

Then, he hired a small team and scaled it to $150M+ in revenue in 5 years.

Business: Adult beverage cans
Customers: 2.5M+
Traffic: 1M/month

Here's the breakdown of his business:
• The company is Brumate.

• It sells drinkware—multi-functional can coolers, mugs, feature-packed coolers, and other hydration solutions to keep your wine/beer cold for a longer time.

• It has ~150K 5-star reviews.

So, how did Jacob grow the company? Read on. Image
1/ The Beginning

At a party, Jacob was drinking beer, forgot about it for 15 mins, & came back to an undrinkable warm beer.

This led to his search for cans to keep the beer cold. None existed.

So, he started Brumate as the solution.
Read 8 tweets
Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Nov 27
Eric Barone has made $300M+ (yes, that's not a typo) in revenue in 6 years with 0 employees.

He developed a game that has sold 20M copies to date.

At this rate, he can easily become the first one-person founder to do 1B+ in sales.

Here's how he did it:
1/ In 2011, @ConcernedApe made the video game Stardew Valley to improve his chances of getting a job.

The premise was simple: You inherit a large farm.

You now have to grow crops, raise livestock, build relationships with the villagers, and start a family.
2/ Going full-time

Eric decided to work solo to retain 100% creative control.

He learned everything—adding 3-D graphics, animations, & music—as he built the game.

By Dec 2011, he was so obsessed with the game (he worked 8-15 hrs/day) that he gave up on finding a job.
Read 9 tweets
Aleksandr Volodarsky 🇺🇦 Profile picture
Nov 20
There is a founder who is doing $10M/year in revenue with 0 employees 🤯

Business: Google add-ons
Traffic: 5M visits/month
Installs: 40M

Here's the breakdown of his business:
1/ The founder @labnol:

• First professional blogger in India
• Builds add-ons for Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc
• Only full-time employee
• Little competition as super-niche
• Customers include LinkedIn, Disney, and the US Embassy.
2/ In 2004, Amit quit his tech job and started blogging to promote his skills.

He wrote (and still does) about tech stories and how-to guides.

Here are the two things he did to attract the initial audience:
Read 11 tweets

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