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Ask HN: One Person, $1M Company

54 points by p0d 5y ago

My friend and I were debating the other evening if one person can create/run a $1 million company. Is anyone here doing this?

mastasky 5y ago
Depends on how you define a $1M company. If it’s valuation, then yes, for sure. Most startups these days are worth $5M plus with only a PowerPoint to show for. If it’s revenue, $1M in revenue isn’t that easy to get to alone. If you have a well going software tool or plugin, maybe. Begs the question - why do it alone? If you have $1m in revenue, you can afford to hire 5 people to help you.
trinovantes 5y ago
Does the one million dollar homepage count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage
smarri 5y ago
Sounds like a good challenge!
anderspetersson 5y ago
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.
muzani 5y ago
This guy did it: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-a-hit-mobile-game-and-reaching-1-on-the-app-store-45ea61e1c4 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-a-hit-mobile... 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.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  His net income was $150k after taxes. Gross revenue was $800k in 16 months. Wouldn’t count it as a $1M company, especially as mobile games are entirely seasonal / one-time events, not recurring revenue.
  - ricardobeat 5y ago
    I didn’t mean to diminish it at all, but that’s $600K/year from a two-man team, which is relatively far from what the OP is asking for.
burntoutfire 5y ago
You mean, without hiring employees?
quickthrower2 5y ago
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.
- patio11 5y ago
  My highest charged rate was $30k, though I did have $50k accepted on a proposal once (engagement didn't happen). Presumably rates have moved up in last several years as everything else in tech is moving up (irrespective of whether my value in particular has gone up; would hope it has but highly unlikely anyone is going to be able to hire me as a consultant again). Anyhow: boutique consultancies can absolutely bill a million and change in a year. Separately: there are many one person SaaS and infoproduct businesses which cross the $1M mark. Most would probably prefer me avoid mentioning them by name, and I will make the obligatory disclaimer "I did not need privileged position in the marketplace to come by this information." But to the extent that folks trust me, know that this is both doable and getting more common in the community over time, as entrepreneurs attack better markets, as the Internet touches more people, and as the community gets better about teaching repeatably successful tactics/strategy versus having everyone invent their own businesses from scratch. (I interpreted this question as being about revenue rather than valuation but if it were about valuation the answer is, even more obviously, yes; a typical B2B SaaS company doing ~$300k in revenue will easily clear $1M in valuation. Many SaaS entrepreneurs will get there in about 2-2.5 years from founding.)
- gk1 5y ago
  Can confirm this is achievable with consulting, though of course not easy. I left my job in 2013 to do consulting, after being inspired by Patio11 (hi Patrick!). It took just one year to hit the six-figure mark, and another few to be in the half-million range. There was a clear path to $1M — I peaked in the upper six-figures — but I chose instead to travel more and then start a family. Amazingly my income remained steady even in those "relaxed" years and also through the pandemic. Eventually consulting stopped being fun and felt more like chasing a high score year after year, so I joined a startup to try something new. So I never did reach $1M. Though if we count equity compensation then I was a stone's throw away, if not over.
f0e4c2f7 5y ago
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)
gidorah 5y ago
Do you mean revenue or value? Both are achievable one more so than the other!
akudha 5y ago
You might like this one https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Great-Money/dp/B077SX7C6T/ https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Gr... I listened to the audio version, it is interesting
comprev 5y ago
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
- libertine 5y ago
  But isn't part of the condition of those folks to already have money? I thought one of the main requirements to be a quick hit on Youtube (and other social media) is to have already access to money.
  - comprev 5y ago
    Shmee started out chasing and filming supercars around London as did a few other car channels. He did a great interview about his current operation and amazingly has averaged more than 1 video production per day since he started (10+ years ago maybe). He's got a media team now but its certainly possible he exceeded 1M by himself.
sergiomattei 5y ago
@levelsio for one. there's a bunch aggregated on indiehackers.com
- NiagaraThistle 5y ago
  Came here to say this too. Pieter Levels, (@levelsio) from NomadList / RemoteOk, he's over $1m now i think and pushing towards $3m. In all his interviews, he points out that although this is revenue, he saves/profits 90%+ of this figure because his costs are extremely low, just hosting and some APIs i think.
tofukid 5y ago
I think photopea.com is 1 person doing at least $1m in annual revenue.
killingtime74 5y ago
Wasn’t plenty of fish famously one person for a long time?
pdevr 5y ago
BuiltWith. Previous discussion about BuiltWith: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060
Rd6n6 5y ago
There are several solo indie game devs who passed that threshold. Jonathan blow (braid), Daisuke Amaya (cave story), Dean Dodrill (dust), Markus Persson (mine craft), Lucas Pope (papers please), etc The average outcome for a serious indie game release is about 16k though https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A3QrdN/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A... Wish me luck with my own when it finally releases (pre alpha atm) https://barbariangrunge.com https://barbariangrunge.com
- yellow_lead 5y ago
  Your game looks pretty impressive for just one person. Good luck
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    Thanks! It will eventually need to compete with games made by full teams, so there are still a lot of features and refinements planned
beardyw 5y ago
If you have a limited company in the UK you must use a suitably qualified accountant. Not sure if that counts as a "no".
- gidorah 5y ago
  Up to a certain level you don't need to have an accounting qualification. Even then, if you outsource statutory accounts, I wouldn't have thought that counts.
  - beardyw 5y ago
    Oh wow! Yes you are right. Now let me see what I could have saved ... Seriously I think he was good value when needed just to have one less thing to think about.
    - gidorah 5y ago
      No, I get it. But I guess does an outsourced service count towards your company? I'd say not. You don't count the people that made your pc.
e1g 5y ago
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.
JamesGriffin 5y ago
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.
giantg2 5y ago
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.
WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
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.
- 147 5y ago
  I believe Plenty of Fish was a one man show and was sold for over half a billion. We're getting there.
colek42 5y ago
If you are okay with working yourself to death and are in a nitch and in-demand market you could make that consulting.
realsimplesynd 5y ago
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.
mrjivraj 5y ago
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 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 :)
mandeepj 5y ago
MinistryOfFlat claiming to be doing $1M as a single founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909725
908B64B197 5y ago
There's one way of finding out that might end-up making you and your friend a little bit of cash...
exolymph 5y ago
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.
maxk42 5y ago
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.
sixhobbits 5y ago
See remoteok.io/open
HWR_14 5y ago
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
manmanic 5y ago
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.
- akudha 5y ago
  Can you give a bit more details, if possible? Do you sell a product? Is it a content site?
dezb 5y ago
already doing it in my sleep.. next question?

54 points by p0d 5y ago

My friend and I were debating the other evening if one person can create/run a $1 million company. Is anyone here doing this?

mastasky 5y ago

Depends on how you define a $1M company. If it’s valuation, then yes, for sure. Most startups these days are worth $5M plus with only a PowerPoint to show for. If it’s revenue, $1M in revenue isn’t that easy to get to alone. If you have a well going software tool or plugin, maybe. Begs the question - why do it alone? If you have $1m in revenue, you can afford to hire 5 people to help you.

trinovantes 5y ago

Does the one million dollar homepage count? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage

smarri 5y ago

Sounds like a good challenge!

anderspetersson 5y ago

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.

muzani 5y ago

This guy did it: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-a-hit-mobile-game-and-reaching-1-on-the-app-store-45ea61e1c4 https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/creating-a-hit-mobile... 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.

ricardobeat 5y ago
His net income was $150k after taxes. Gross revenue was $800k in 16 months. Wouldn’t count it as a $1M company, especially as mobile games are entirely seasonal / one-time events, not recurring revenue.
- ricardobeat 5y ago
  I didn’t mean to diminish it at all, but that’s $600K/year from a two-man team, which is relatively far from what the OP is asking for.

burntoutfire 5y ago

You mean, without hiring employees?

quickthrower2 5y ago

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.

patio11 5y ago
My highest charged rate was $30k, though I did have $50k accepted on a proposal once (engagement didn't happen). Presumably rates have moved up in last several years as everything else in tech is moving up (irrespective of whether my value in particular has gone up; would hope it has but highly unlikely anyone is going to be able to hire me as a consultant again). Anyhow: boutique consultancies can absolutely bill a million and change in a year. Separately: there are many one person SaaS and infoproduct businesses which cross the $1M mark. Most would probably prefer me avoid mentioning them by name, and I will make the obligatory disclaimer "I did not need privileged position in the marketplace to come by this information." But to the extent that folks trust me, know that this is both doable and getting more common in the community over time, as entrepreneurs attack better markets, as the Internet touches more people, and as the community gets better about teaching repeatably successful tactics/strategy versus having everyone invent their own businesses from scratch. (I interpreted this question as being about revenue rather than valuation but if it were about valuation the answer is, even more obviously, yes; a typical B2B SaaS company doing ~$300k in revenue will easily clear $1M in valuation. Many SaaS entrepreneurs will get there in about 2-2.5 years from founding.)
gk1 5y ago
Can confirm this is achievable with consulting, though of course not easy. I left my job in 2013 to do consulting, after being inspired by Patio11 (hi Patrick!). It took just one year to hit the six-figure mark, and another few to be in the half-million range. There was a clear path to $1M — I peaked in the upper six-figures — but I chose instead to travel more and then start a family. Amazingly my income remained steady even in those "relaxed" years and also through the pandemic. Eventually consulting stopped being fun and felt more like chasing a high score year after year, so I joined a startup to try something new. So I never did reach $1M. Though if we count equity compensation then I was a stone's throw away, if not over.

f0e4c2f7 5y ago

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)

gidorah 5y ago

Do you mean revenue or value? Both are achievable one more so than the other!

akudha 5y ago

You might like this one https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Great-Money/dp/B077SX7C6T/ https://www.amazon.com/Million-Dollar-One-Person-Business-Gr... I listened to the audio version, it is interesting

comprev 5y ago

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

libertine 5y ago
But isn't part of the condition of those folks to already have money? I thought one of the main requirements to be a quick hit on Youtube (and other social media) is to have already access to money.
- comprev 5y ago
  Shmee started out chasing and filming supercars around London as did a few other car channels. He did a great interview about his current operation and amazingly has averaged more than 1 video production per day since he started (10+ years ago maybe). He's got a media team now but its certainly possible he exceeded 1M by himself.

sergiomattei 5y ago

@levelsio for one. there's a bunch aggregated on indiehackers.com

NiagaraThistle 5y ago
Came here to say this too. Pieter Levels, (@levelsio) from NomadList / RemoteOk, he's over $1m now i think and pushing towards $3m. In all his interviews, he points out that although this is revenue, he saves/profits 90%+ of this figure because his costs are extremely low, just hosting and some APIs i think.

tofukid 5y ago

I think photopea.com is 1 person doing at least $1m in annual revenue.

killingtime74 5y ago

Wasn’t plenty of fish famously one person for a long time?

pdevr 5y ago

BuiltWith. Previous discussion about BuiltWith: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10316060

Rd6n6 5y ago

There are several solo indie game devs who passed that threshold. Jonathan blow (braid), Daisuke Amaya (cave story), Dean Dodrill (dust), Markus Persson (mine craft), Lucas Pope (papers please), etc The average outcome for a serious indie game release is about 16k though https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A3QrdN/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/1W6lZir97bUU0KdvIGNIVWG0O-_A... Wish me luck with my own when it finally releases (pre alpha atm) https://barbariangrunge.com https://barbariangrunge.com

yellow_lead 5y ago
Your game looks pretty impressive for just one person. Good luck
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Thanks! It will eventually need to compete with games made by full teams, so there are still a lot of features and refinements planned

beardyw 5y ago

If you have a limited company in the UK you must use a suitably qualified accountant. Not sure if that counts as a "no".

gidorah 5y ago
Up to a certain level you don't need to have an accounting qualification. Even then, if you outsource statutory accounts, I wouldn't have thought that counts.
- beardyw 5y ago
  Oh wow! Yes you are right. Now let me see what I could have saved ... Seriously I think he was good value when needed just to have one less thing to think about.
  - gidorah 5y ago
    No, I get it. But I guess does an outsourced service count towards your company? I'd say not. You don't count the people that made your pc.

e1g 5y ago

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.

JamesGriffin 5y ago

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.

giantg2 5y ago

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.

WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago

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.

147 5y ago
I believe Plenty of Fish was a one man show and was sold for over half a billion. We're getting there.

colek42 5y ago

If you are okay with working yourself to death and are in a nitch and in-demand market you could make that consulting.

realsimplesynd 5y ago

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.

mrjivraj 5y ago

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 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 :)

mandeepj 5y ago

MinistryOfFlat claiming to be doing $1M as a single founder - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21909725

908B64B197 5y ago

There's one way of finding out that might end-up making you and your friend a little bit of cash...

exolymph 5y ago

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.

maxk42 5y ago

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.

sixhobbits 5y ago

See remoteok.io/open

HWR_14 5y ago

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

manmanic 5y ago

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.

akudha 5y ago
Can you give a bit more details, if possible? Do you sell a product? Is it a content site?

dezb 5y ago

already doing it in my sleep.. next question?