11 Companies Making $1M+ That Are [Practically] Bedroom Businesses
Time to feed the ideation part of your brain some real treats.
I’ve been running my one-person publishing business for nearly 3 years, and I wish I could say the road was rocky. That would be amazing.
Instead it’s a mountain trail at altitude, icy, full of potholes, sometimes there are disguised mammoth traps and sometimes you can’t see where you’re going at all.
Yet you wake up every morning, and give it another go. Often, progress is non-existent or slow, other times you skyrocket and get blinded by success and make a mistake that ruins it.
But you get up again. You work again, feel grateful for the middle of the road. Then get up again. And again. And again.
You’re forced to build and find unbreakable sources of motivation, both within yourself and externally.
For me, I get tons of motivation from people whose bedroom businesses have built them a life. You know, the small guys and gals punching well above their weight from the very start.
Saturday Solopreneur
This is no surprise — I feel like everyone must know Justin Welsh. His newsletter business has become famous for proving that a well-run bedroom venture can indeed scale. And fast. Founded as a one-person business in 2019, it seems to still be a 1-employee business today.
According to the website and LinkedIn, Saturday Solopreneur has so far generated over $5M in revenue with a 92% profit margin.
TinyWow
I’ve used TinyWow before, without as much as giving it a second thought, let alone acknowledging it as someone’s business.
It’s clear to me now how much inspiring brain food we can be blind to, even when it crosses our eyesight multiple times a week.
Founded by Ewan Gower, TinyWow is a bunch of conversion tools: Files to PDF, image and video editing tools that use AI, large-size compression of files, and more.
The tools are the best out there. They are all free.
The website is reported to currently be getting scaled traffic of around 6.6 million visits a month and generates its revenue through a monthly subscription plan that offers a captcha-free and ad-free experience.
The success of TinyWow proves the effectiveness of being so generous it’s unreal, as a building method:
Give your absolute best for free. Make money by offering convenient extras.
Photopea
In Photopea, its founder Ivan Kutskir basically recreated the entirety of Photoshop in a browser for free.
Technically, recreating Photoshop feature to feature, is in itself absolutely insane. Making it work in a browser, that’s truly the next level of genius.
Ivan Kutskir had allegedly put over 7,000 hours into the project before he made a single penny from it.
According to My First Million podcast, Photopea currently gets around 13 million visits a month, and generates revenue of roughly $100,000 a month.
GetCyberLeads
This project is a perfect example of the curate-and-sell business model.
The founder of this newsletter Alex West charges his clients $400 — $1000 a month, depending on their chosen subscription tier.
GetCyberLeads is a handpicked list of companies of all sizes that have recently raised some capital. Based on a bunch of attributes, Alex decides which ones he thinks are about to hire an agency.
His paid subscribers are agency owners, who once a month receive this finely sorted list of companies likely to be looking for an agency, along with contact information, estimated available budget, and names managing ad spend.
Curating, fine-tuning, and selling existing information is one of the easiest ways to start a one-person business. The benefit and value for the customer is crystal clear. The more research-and-curate experience you build, the higher the quality of the information provided to your subscribers becomes.
Lenny Rachitsky
Lenny Rachitsky’s empire which started as Lenny’s Newsletter on Substack, now includes Lenny’s Newsletter, Lenny’s Community, Lenny’s Job Board, and I’m sure there’s more.
The success of this newsletter started with tons of free thought-leader content on Substack, writing about growth, building product, and building careers.
Sharing your best content for free is again the game changer here, allowing you to establish yourself as an authority in a niche, so you can then monetize that through paid community and paid newsletter.
The estimated revenue for all of Lenny Rachitsky’s products is currently $2 —$3M in total.
Marketing Examples
Recently voted the №1 marketing newsletter by actual marketers, with 130k paying subscribers, this is a blog killing it right now, considering it’s run by someone who started it more as a curious newbie.
Harry Dry has always been open about learning as he goes and sharing about it, and building in public.
This is an open and quite genuine approach to building an online product. You gain expertise and authority as you research and learn intensively at the same time.
I’d say timing matters here. With this approach, if you can be early to a niche or a market, things will build a lot quicker and probably easier.
If you can jump in on something as an early adopter and build an early authority, you’re onto a winner.
GymStreak
Finally, an app!
The founder, Joseph Mambwe, couldn’t have started from more of a scratch — he taught himself how to code, and did everything that he was capable of by himself. He hired an agency to do his launch and post-launch marketing and promo, but the app has always been a one-person business.
He started Gym Streak as an app for tracking your workouts but then expanded to something even more game-changing.
If you’ve ever tried an online workout with questionable results or even pain (a long-standing story of me and Yoga with Adrienne) you know how revolutionary this idea is:
The app expanded to offer full 3D visualizations of all possible exercises and what they need to look like from every angle so that you can do them correctly.
The app is free with premium features, and as reported by the founder, generated $300,000 in year 1, and $2.5M in year 2.
Rootd
Rootd is the world’s leading app on managing panic attacks. This app is also built on a personal story, with a single founder, and zero employees.
Ania Wysocka, the creator of Rootd, has built it to over 2 million users, 36k+ reviews across Apple & Google, and 7-figures in recurring revenue.
If anyone knows their audience to a T, it’s Ania. She’s been doing all her customer care & support herself, which uniquely enables her to stay on top of the real effects and symptoms her audience is facing, apart from also having lived with panic attacks herself.
I especially love that Rootd has consistently been able to generate 7-figures as a bootstrapped company, which Ania confirmed in this interview. It shows it’s possible to build a serious business completely on your own, without giving away any equity.
BuiltWith
This business is one of the most niche ever — it’s a database that tells you which plugins websites are using if they’re built on WordPress or Shopify.
This leads list database website gets visits from over 10 million people a month.
According to My First Million podcast, the reported revenue is over $14M with just one person running this as their business.
StreamYard
StreamYard was co-founded by two individuals, Geige Vandentop and Dan Briggs. They first met in their university’s engineering program and have been building things together ever since.
StreamYard is a live streaming studio that operates in-browser, enabling users to simulcast their streams to platforms like Facebook and others.
They started StreamYard as a 2-people bedroom project and were able to build it into a firm position that way.
However, soon after they experienced their first boost of significant revenue growth, they quickly expanded their team to 19 members.
In January 2021, Hopin, a virtual events platform, acquired StreamYard for $250M.
Plenty Of Fish
Plenty of Fish has since been exited, and I guess not many people know that it started as a one-person business and remained that way for a long time (I didn’t).
The founder, Markus Frind, built Plenty Of Fish as an exercise to help him learn a new programming language.
With the website being an early adopter in digital dating services (it started in the pre-smartphone app era), it gained popularity at lightning speed. By 2008, Markus Frind was allegedly making $10M a year working 10 hours a week.
At the time of exit, Markus Frind sold the company for $525M.
Bootstrapped.
What I’ve learned
Although in most cases these businesses couldn’t be more different from each other, the strategies I’ve fished out from it all are actually quite similar:
- No matter what, you need to know your audience inside out, and stay actively involved to keep up with the latest.
- It’s all about leverage — use media, capital, code, or your unique perspective and experience. Your tool of choice should be the one you feel the strongest at.
- Find your are of being 100% unstoppable — either you go 100% at creating, infuencing, and distribution, and outsource the rest. Or you go 100% at building product, and outsource the launch strategy.
- The beauty of the internet — if you build yourself up to be the best at X, you can eventually sell or teach to the whole world.
- Give your absolute best for free. Earn money by offering convenient extras.
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More useful stuff published (now weekly) on my Substack: Building Momentum, Solo
