One person, running the whole show, one person against the world, doing everything yourself - what a romantic idea!
But it is a common idea.
According to a news story, there are 20 million+ single-person businesses in the United States, for more than three-fourths of all U.S. businesses, according to recent U.S. Census data.
But in the tech startup field, this one-person-startup idea is still a very romantic idea. It is also a very practical idea - at least one person has found a way to get people to pay up so one can lead a free life. Cynics call it a lifestyle business, and I still have to understand what it means. It is what it is.
The number one quality in a person seeking to start and run a successful one-person startup is the ability to focus - doing the most important task at any given moment. Being able to focus also means you are able to prioritize tasks and have the courage to just go in and get the work done. The idea being, if not you, then who?
The number two quality is being a better jack of all trades - handling coding, marketing, daily ops, troubleshooting, making deals, etc. These people are fast learners.
Here are seven people in the tech startup field, who successfully managed to build sustainable single-person startups:
1. Gabe Rivera, founder of Techmeme, a news aggregation website.
2. Marcus Frind , founder of PlentyOfFish, a popular dating website just recently sold for $575 million to the bigger fish in the market, i.e. Match.com
3. Gabriel Wienberg, founder of privacy-friendly search engine DuckDuckGo,
4. Marco Arment, founder of Instapaper, an app to help paper save aricles to read later.
5. Salihefendic, founder of popular to-do app Todoist.
6. Maciej Ceglowski, founder of popular bookmarking app Pinboard.
7. Markus Persson, creator of Minecraft game (sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion).
Thank you for reading.
This guide is from The Success Manual, which contains 200+ guides to succeeding in business, career and personal life. Get the pdf ebook for $12 only.