For years, Y Combinator told everyone the same thing: solo founders don't make it. Get a co-founder or don't bother applying.
The data now says the opposite.
Ten years ago, 22% of startups with no VC funding were started by one founder. Today it's 38%. It jumped six percentage points in the last year alone.
That chart comes from John Rush, and Pat Walls from Starter Story built a whole video around it. Pat has interviewed thousands of solo founders over eight years, and in this one he walks through three real businesses: a dominoes game making $20K a month, a one-person design agency at $145K a month, and a job board doing $146K a year with 30 customers.
His thesis: we've entered the decade of the million dollar solo founder. I built and sold my last business alone, so I watched the full thing and pulled out every number. Watch it, then read the breakdown.
The Chart That Kills the Co-Founder Rule
The stat is worth sitting with: 38% of bootstrapped startups now have exactly one founder.
"There was this lie that was maybe true 10 years ago: you needed a co-founder to be successful."
That's Pat in the video, and he's earned the opinion. He started Starter Story solo eight years ago and has talked to more founders than almost anyone alive.
His sharpest point is about the alternative. He's talked to plenty of VC-backed founders who raised money, got the TechCrunch article, worked ten years, and walked away with nothing. Billion dollar company or bust, and the investors drive the bus.
The solo founders he talks to own businesses that cash flow. Smaller headlines, but they keep the money and their weekends.
So the question stops being "should you build alone" and becomes "what do you build alone." Pat picked three examples from the Starter Story database, and each one teaches a different model.
Business #1: A Dominoes Game Making $20K a Month
MexicanTrain.com is a free online version of Mexican Train, a dominoes game Pat had never heard of. Neither had I.
The numbers, from the DillyDally Games case study:
- $16,000 to $20,000 a month in revenue
- $500 to start
- Around 300,000 visits a month
- Revenue is essentially all ads. No sales team, no subscriptions, no support inbox.
One guy, a card table game your grandmother plays, and a browser.
The growth story is the useful part. In 2019 the founder took the revenue the game was making and went all-in on Facebook ads. That pushed him from 2,000 daily active users to 15,000. The ads weren't profitable on their own, but the players kept coming back, and all that traffic eventually did something better: it made him rank #1 in Google for his game. Now the ads are off and the traffic is free.
→ Paid ads as a one-time push to ignite retention and SEO, not as a forever tax.
Pat's remix idea on camera: ChatGPT listed five similar niche dominoes games, including one called Chickenfoot. Lots of people play it online, and when he checked, chickenfootdominos.com was sitting unregistered at $16 a year. He literally begged viewers to go build it.
(If you build the chicken foot empire, I want to hear about it.)
Business #2: DesignJoy, One Designer at $145K a Month
DesignJoy is Brett Williams. Not Brett Williams and his team. Just Brett.
He runs a productized design service: $4,995 a month flat, and he becomes your designer. Landing pages, logos, whatever you need. The case study lists $145K a month in revenue and $1 in startup costs.
How does one human serve 20 to 30 clients at that price without dying?
- No calls. Zero.
- One request at a time per client. You queue your work, he ships it.
- Clients pause for months when they don't need design, then come back.
And the part everyone skips: he didn't start at $4,995. He started around $300 a month, priced as a no-brainer, stacked proof and testimonials, and raised for years until he found his ceiling.
→ Charge by the month, not the hour. Revenue stops tracking your time.
If you think this is a one-off unicorn: Pat pulls up Gem Designs, a near-identical design subscription for SaaS startups doing $100K a year. Same model, different person, still working. A model being taken doesn't mean it's closed.
Business #3: RailsDevs, 30 Customers Paying $299 a Month
RailsDevs started as a spreadsheet. A year later it was generating $146,000 a year. One founder, zero employees.
It's a reverse job board: Ruby on Rails developers list themselves, and companies pay $299 a month to contact them. At $10K a month, that's roughly 30 paying companies.
Thirty customers. That's the whole business.
Why it works, per Pat:
- Businesses pay, not consumers. Hiring hurts, and companies pay real money for painkillers.
- The niche solves the cold-start problem. Only Rails devs on one side, only Rails shops on the other. Both sides are easier to find, and the service gets sharper by being narrow.
Same shape as RanchWork, Peter Askew's job board for ranch workers, where a single 60-day job post costs $200. Ten active postings is $2,000. A job board for everyone is Indeed and you will lose. A job board for ranchers (or Rails devs, or Next.js devs) is a business one person can own.
→ Niche down until the giants can't see you, then charge B2B prices.
The Pattern Behind All Three
A game, a service, a job board. On the surface they share nothing. Underneath, they're the same playbook:
- Each one picked a niche big enough to pay one person and too small for a funded team to chase
- Each one has a model where revenue doesn't scale with hours: ads, flat-rate subscription, monthly B2B fee
- Each one started embarrassingly small ($1, $500, a spreadsheet) and let pricing or traffic compound
- None of them needed permission, funding, or a co-founder
And the build side keeps getting cheaper. Pat's take is that a game like Mexican Train is now a Cursor or Lovable prompt away. In 2015, being able to build the thing was the hard part. Now the hard part is picking the right niche and doing distribution longer than everyone else.
That's the actual skill. I wrote up the full solo founder SaaS playbook if you want the systems side, and Jack Friks' $40K/month solopreneur routine if you want to see what the day-to-day really looks like.
The Part Nobody Puts in the Chart
I'll add the piece Pat's video doesn't cover: building alone works, but figuring things out alone is slow.
When I was stuck at $15K to $20K a month on my own business, I paid $13,000 to join a mastermind. Stupid decision, right? Six months later I was at $75K a month.
Nothing about my product changed. What changed was that I could ask people two steps ahead of me instead of guessing.
Solo founder describes your cap table, not your life. The ones who make it to $1M a year all have some version of this: a peer group, a community, weekly calls with people who get it. Pat wears every hat (dev, design, marketing, support), and so will you. You just don't have to learn every hat by trial and error.
FAQ
Can a solo founder really build a million dollar business?
Yes, and it's getting more common. 38% of startups with no VC funding now have a single founder, up from 22% ten years ago. DesignJoy does over $1M a year with zero employees, and businesses like RailsDevs ($146K/year) and MexicanTrain.com ($16K to $20K/month) clear strong six figures with one person.
What business models work best for solo founders?
Models where revenue doesn't scale with your hours. The three in Pat's video: an ad-monetized niche game (300K visits a month), a productized service at a flat $4,995 a month, and a niche B2B job board at $299 a month. All three run without employees, sales calls, or investors.
Do you need to know how to code to start a solo business?
Less every month. AI tools like Cursor and Lovable can build a niche browser game or a simple marketplace from prompts. The founders in these case studies won on niche selection and distribution (Facebook ads into SEO, testimonials into price raises), not engineering.
Do investors fund solo founders?
More than they used to, but the stat cuts the other way: the 38% figure counts startups with no VC funding at all. A cash-flowing solo business making $10K to $145K a month doesn't need a term sheet, and the founder keeps every point of equity.
Steal the Model, Then Find Your People
Pick one of the three shapes: a niche game with ad revenue, a productized service with flat pricing, or a reverse job board in a niche you know. Start this month, start ugly, and give distribution two years.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year (plenty of them solo) and pull out the exact numbers behind how they got there.
