Ask HN: Examples of sucessful one person startups?

I make Nomad List (http://nomadlist.com). Not sure if it's succesful, that's up to you to decide. But it has revenue, profit, 3,000+ paying members, premium advertisers, was #1 on here and Product Hunt, been on Reddit's frontpage and has a decent reach in the remote work community.

One person, no funding.

Pinboard[1] is the most prominent example that comes to my mind, along with tarsnap[2]. These 'startups'[3] have in common some things:

* Both 'entrepreneurs' have strong personality, although they are quite different.

* Both have a simple, traditional pricing model: You pay for the service. End of the story. Tarsnap in particular uses 'picodollars'.

* Both have a very simple web UI.

* Both are pretty stable. You don't see "coming back soon" pages and 404 errors.

[1] https://www.pinboard.in/

[2] https://www.tarsnap.com/

[3] I don't know if these two businesses can be considered startups. To me startup is something defined. Not very specifically, but not very loosely either. The feeling I'm getting reading HN is that any (self-perceived) modern or pseudo-modern tech-company that doesn't have reason to market itself as a structured corporation poses as a startup.

BuiltWith: http://www.startupdaily.net/2015/09/builtwith-is-perhaps-one...

Dan Grossman is the sole guy behind both Improvely and W3Counter.

Pretty sure Plenty Of Fish is a single guy.

There is a really good book out there on one person startups called the $100 startup by Chris Guillebeau - it gives loads of examples of startups around the world, which were started by one person (http://amzn.to/1Kb63VH)

This should help -http://www.softwaresmitten.com/blog/2013/01/09/10-successful...

When you say one person, do you mean didn't have a co-founder/team when they started? Or still only one person to this day? If the former, then Balsamiq was started by one guy.

i believe i heard that PlentyOfFish was started by a single dev and run that way for some time.

Craigslist.

minecraft <- The start

Oculus

Dropbox?