The Rise of Independent Tech Entrepreneurs and Unique Success Stories

Tech entrepreneurs are now prioritizing simplicity and profitability over rapid growth and investment, reshaping the future of innovation.

### The Hidden Side of Tech: Unconventional Success Stories
* 🏡 Craigslist's founder, Craig Newmark, kept things simple and profitable, refusing VC funding and maintaining the same design since 1996, now making **$500 million to $1 billion annually**.
* 📉 Sahil Lavingia's Gumroad initially thrived, but struggled to meet Silicon Valley's exponential growth expectations; he downsized and made it profitable, now **processing over $100 million in payments annually**.
* 🖼 Mid Journey, founded by David Holtz, achieved **$200 million in annual revenue within 3 years**, with **less than 40 employees and no external funding**, by leveraging Discord for **AI image generation**.
* 🚀 The rise of "Indie Hackers" represents a new approach to tech entrepreneurship, focusing on **building small, profitable businesses** without the need for **massive funding or unicorn status**.
* 💡 These stories challenge the traditional Silicon Valley narrative, showcasing alternative paths to tech success, including **maintaining simplicity, achieving profitability, and valuing freedom over growth at all costs**.
* 🌐 They highlight the importance of **leveraging limitations as assets**, finding **unique solutions to common challenges**, and **redefining success in the tech industry**.

when you hear a tech company, this is what you think about: Visionary Founders starting in a garage 'cause of course you need a garage, building a revolutionary product, raising millions of dollars from investors to grow even faster. They get millions of users, become a global phenomenon, hire thousands of people, the founder becomes a billionaire, and he starts to fight other billionaires in Jiu-Jitsu matches. This is how Tech works, right? Well, there's a whole other side to tech that no one is talking about, and these stories are far more interesting than the next hip startup raising $100 million to build an AI toaster. Like how this guy's passion project turned into a website that gets six billion page views per month, or how a team of less than 40 people in less than 3 years built one of the hottest companies in the world making 2 million a year with no investments from anyone, or how there's a new wave of people taking things to the extreme and challenging themselves to build 12 startups in 12 months, and

there's a key lesson we can take from each one because the next generation of tech companies, the ones that will challenge the current big boys, will probably be very different from what we are seeing today. I'm Eno, a product manager working in Tech, and on this channel, I go behind the scenes of the design, psychology, and stories behind the tech you use every day. And our first story starts here. San Francisco, 1995. Craig Newar is just a normal guy. He's a programmer, and he recently moved to the city. He was one of the early adopters of the internet, and he saw how people were helping each other in the first online communities like Usenet. So, he built an email list collecting events happening in San Francisco as a way to also fit in with the local community. It's just a list of events that Craig was sending around. It's Craigslist. The newsletter spread quickly, so quickly that because there was no moderation, people started to post all sorts of things on it, like job postings, things they wanted to sell.

and its popularity exploded so much so that in 1996 Craig turned this newsletter into a website and by allowing people to pay to promote their listings Revenue started to pour in now think about where we are now this is the start of the internet bubble of the '90s everyone is going crazy for the internet investors are pouring millions of dollars into internet companies you could just add.com to the name of your company in the stock exchange to see its value jump and in the mecca of this madness San Francisco there was this guy with a website that was becoming crazy popular and growing crazy viral he could have done what everyone else around him was doing get tens of millions in Investments hire hundreds of people get fancy offices and grow the business but Craig realized he didn't need all that Craig was turning a profit he could already expand to some other cities and that's exactly what he did and he didn't want to add new features or redesign the website he really really didn't want to

redesign the website. Since even today in 2023, this is what Craigslist looks like. The only difference is that today Craigslist is one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world. They get 6.2 billion page views per month, and they make 500 million to 1 billion in revenue each year. And this is the power of keeping things simple. Craig is the same, same normal guide. The website is the same. They kept things simple, doing one thing really well, and without bells and whistles or obsessing about disrupting the world. Because in the end, even if it makes a billion dollars a year, this is still just Craigslist. There's another story where things went as smooth, but that gave us one of the most unique and unknown companies in tech right now. This is 19-year-old Sahil, and in 2011, he's working at Pinterest, one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley. But he had a spark of an idea that wouldn't let him go. A platform that would make it simple for creators to

sell their work online. Now, this might seem trivial today, but back then, things like Shopify or Stripe were not mainstream yet, and selling anything online was a nightmare. So, Sahil built Gumroad, a super scrappy basic version of the app in a weekend, and he launched it on Hacker News, and it was a smashing success. He got 52,000 users just from that single initial launch. The idea was working, so Sahil did what everyone would do: start to raise some money, and he got investments from the most famous people in Silicon Valley, including Naval Ravikant. He was a 19-year-old kid with a product that was a smash hit in its most buggy form. He quit Pinterest, and he had $8 million in the bank from investors. He was on top of the world. He hired more people, they kept on working on the product, and it kept growing and growing, but there was a problem: it wasn't growing fast enough. This is the volume of payments that Gumroad processed. If this was a regular company, this charge would be amazing, but Gumroad is

a Silicon Valley Tech startup. And if there's one thing that Silicon Valley really hates, it's linear growth. This is what anyone investing in a tech company expects: exponential growth. Since 90% of startups fail, the only way to keep this going is for the ones that succeed to give a 50x, 100x, 1,000x return. And it looked like Gamaro wasn't doing that. In 2014, they tried one last effort to kill all non-essential work and tried to move the needle, but it was too late. CRO with its 20-person team was about to enter the very crowded graveyard of failed starters. Sahil could just shut down everything, give the remaining money back, and start another billion-dollar startup. But instead, he made an unusual decision to keep it running and try to make it profitable without raising any more money and missing out on building the next big F. The team went from 20 people to five people and eventually to just him. He was alone, no office, no employees, desperately trying to run the business.

and help the creators that were using G. He woke up, responded to his customer support queries, fixed bugs. This was far from the glamorous tech billionaire dream life, but finally, in 2017, something happened. So Hills Invest Invers wanted to sell back to him their stake in Gamr for just a dollar, mostly for tax reasons, and this would allow Sahil to take back full control and ownership of the company. He ran the company focusing on making it profitable and self-sustaining, and this is Gamr's growth up to 2019. You cannot even spot the moment where everyone left and he was running things on his own, and today Gamr is thriving. He runs it with a unique approach where there are no offices, there are no company meetings, and you don't even get paid as a regular employee. Designers and engineers at Gamr simply pick up tasks from a board and complete them. The Hill host public board meetings on YouTube, and this company that was on the brink of collapse by Silicon Valley standards is now

processing over a 100 million dollars in payments to creators, all while being profitable with a minimal team. Camron was like a phoenix; it was reborn because sometimes freedom is much more meaningful and important than just more resources. But the next story is about a product that most of you are at least familiar with because it's one of the hottest companies in Tech right now, but very few people actually know its incredible story. If CH gbt took over the world with language models, Mid Journey did the same for AI image generation. But while all other companies competing in the AI race are big behemoths like Google and Meta or OpenAI with billions of dollars in the bank and thousands of engineers, the journey is different, very different. Less than 40 employees, completely bootstrapped, meaning zero dollars of outside investment, and they are making $200 million a year in revenue. This is equivalent to $5 million per employee. Oh, and it was founded less than 3 years ago. All of this while being

completely profitable. There is basically no company in the tech world that is even close to achieving something like this. Everyone in Silicon Valley is begging them to give them money, but this is what the founder of Mid Journey, David Holtz, is telling everyone. But to understand how we came to this, we have to understand David's story. David Holtz first founded Leap Motion, a company that back in 2014 built this: The Leap Motion controller, a device that allowed you to use your hands to control your computer or all kinds of digital interfaces. The device sold okay, but it never became mainstream, and this is because it was truly ahead of its time. Right now in 2024, we are seeing the first devices that really leverage hand tracking into controller interfaces, like the Apple Vision Pro or The Meta Quest 3, but the Leap Motion was doing this 10 years ago. Eventually, in 2020, David grew tired of running Leap Motion, and that's when he came across this: a paper from free Berkeley researchers that showed how diffusion AI models can be used to

generate images, and as soon as he saw it, he understood that this is going to be it, his next venture. But instead of going to venture capitalists to raise $10 million to build it, he decided to bootstrap it, start small with a team of only 10 people, and work with limited resources. During his time at Leap Motion, he often had a conflicting relationship with investors. Famously, one time he showed the limo controller to a group of venture capitalists, and they asked whether it can be used to control interfaces only in 2D instead of free, of course, he replied. And to that, the investor proposed to make the device work only in two dimensions but then have users pay for the third one. Oh, okay. And because of this, Mid Journey had to be scrappy. He had a small team, and he had to make critical choices, but there's one that's surely the most interesting and consequential in this story. See, Mid Journey runs on Discord, and today it's actually the largest Discord server in the world with almost 18 million people.

in it, and many people are confused as to why one of the biggest AI image generation services out there forces you to use it from Discord. A regular company with tons of cash to spend would have invested in creating their own website, with their own platform, their own infrastructure, to allow people to enter prompts and get images, and scaling that to millions of users. But David's team didn't have their resources; they just needed a way to get people to type things and provide images back, and Discord was already there. It was unorthodox; nobody had ever run a service like this from Discord, not at this scale. It's just not what successful tech products do. But having such limited resources meant that this was their only option, and this turned out to be one of their greatest assets. Because by using Discord, not only did they get a way for people to interact with the AI model, they also got instant feedback in the Discord channel, meaning they were able to iterate incredibly fast on whatever they were doing by hearing directly from users in the Discord. Also, if you join

the mid Journey Discord. It's public by default, and you can see everything that people are generating. And this is the best tutorial. There is no need to explain how to write prompts or do parameters. You can just see what others are doing and start copy-pasting. And this is me. Journey's biggest lesson: by being limited, your limitations become your biggest assets. But while mid Journey hacked their way to $200 million a year, there's a whole new wave of builders that don't care about building the next unicorn company—a whole new subculture of people that want to build Tech products just to get Freedom, decent money, and a good life without all the headaches of managing a huge company. And this is Indie hacking. $2,000 a month, $4,000 a month, $440,000 a month. These are some of the Twitter—I'm sorry, X—bios of Indie hackers, a new breed of tech entrepreneurs that is taking a whole different approach to building Tech. They don't dream of changing the world or disrupting the market; they just want to use

technology to build a small but profitable business that solves very specific problems and live a good life from it. Oh, and possibly not just one, but dozens of these to run at the same time and without needing to hire anyone. You can go to the Indie hackers website or on Reddit or on Product Hunt to find thousands of people launching new products at a staggering rate by focusing on the basics, no fancy design, little to no marketing, and doing everything on their own by recycling code between projects. And just to be clear, this is not a few hundred bucks from a side project, $38,000 a month with an AI interior design tool, $100,000 a month with a design as a subscription service, $51,000 a month with a tool that helps others build their own Indie hacker projects. This one is so meta. And the key idea behind Indie hacking is building in public, documenting the journey instead of hiding secretly and then doing a big reveal, sharing transparently how much you're making, and not only the successes but the failures.

as well and learning from each other. Some people have gotten to the point where they're making really good money from Indie hacking. Peter Levels, one of the most famous Indie hackers, has made $2 million a year without any employees, just building and running projects from his laptops like Nomad List, a portal where you can see where the best places to live and work remotely are. In the past, you were either an employee of some tech company, or you could start your own company by becoming CEO and hiring a bunch of people with all their responsibilities and headaches that came with this, and with a small glimmer of hope that you would hit it big. But this is a new alternative that's emerging for people to still build something of their own, but without having a need to change the world or disrupt the market in the process. And all of these stories are telling us something very interesting about the future of tech. For the last decade, tech companies funded with tens of millions of dollars in investments became the norm, and this will still happen, of course, but venture

Capital funding peaked at the end of 2021, and if before that anyone with an idea could get millions thrown at them, today the story is different. Many people just like David Holtz are realizing that you can still build something big and meaningful from scratch and without asking money from anyone, maintaining full control of it. Sometimes, this can be your secret weapon to win versus anyone else, or you can build something the Indie Hacker Way, enjoying life and still building something meaningful in the process. But there's another Wild Tech story that no one knows about, and it's a story of how Italy almost became Silicon Valley, and you can watch it in this video right here.

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Design, Engineering, Psychology And Stories Behind Tech

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🖖 Hey! I'm Enrico and on this channel I go behind the scenes of tech. I'm a tech Product Manager, builder of digital stuff, YouTube aficionado and also a rare Italian who doesn’t know how to cook.

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Enrico Tartarotti

Tech company success is often associated with visionary founders, massive funding, and rapid growth, but there are lesser-known, intriguing stories that challenge this narrative.

One such story is Craig Newar's Craigslist, which started as a simple email list and quickly grew into a viral website, turning a profit without any major investments.

This new wave of tech entrepreneurs is taking unconventional approaches, and their success may redefine the future of the industry.

Craigslist's success is attributed to its simple, consistent approach, generating $500 million to $1 billion in annual revenue.

Sahil's Gumroad, launched from a basic version in a weekend, gained 52,000 users and $8 million in investments but struggled with linear growth.

Despite the challenges, Sahil chose to keep Gumroad running and focused on profitability, ultimately reducing the team from 20 to just himself.

The Success Stories of Gamr and Mid Journey

Sahil took full control of Gamr in 2017, implementing a unique, self-sustaining model that now processes over $100 million in payments to creators.

Mid Journey, founded by David Holtz, has achieved remarkable success with less than 40 employees, bootstrapped funding, and $200 million in annual revenue within three years.

Holtz's previous venture, Leap Motion, was ahead of its time with hand-tracking technology, paving the way for Mid Journey's innovative approach.

Mid Journey's Unique Approach to AI Image Generation

Mid Journey's founder decided to bootstrap the venture with a small team of 10, rather than seeking $10 million from investors.

The company operates on Discord, which has become the largest server in the world with 18 million members, providing a unique and unorthodox platform for AI image generation.

This approach not only offered a way for users to interact with the AI model but also provided instant feedback, allowing for rapid iteration and improvement.

The Mid Journey Discord's public nature allows users to easily copy and paste prompts, highlighting the power of limitations.

A new wave of tech entrepreneurs, known as Indie hackers, is emerging, focusing on building small, profitable businesses for freedom and a good life.

Indie hackers are launching products at a rapid pace, using a no-frills approach and recycling code, while transparently documenting their journey and sharing both successes and failures.

Indie hacking is becoming a lucrative alternative to traditional employment, with entrepreneurs like Peter Levels making $2 million a year from solo projects.

This new approach allows individuals to build their own businesses without the need for significant investment or a large team.

The peak of venture capital funding in 2021 has shifted the narrative, leading more people to realize they can create meaningful ventures from scratch while maintaining full control.