독립 기술 기업가의 부상과 독특한 성공 사례

기술 기업가들은 이제 빠른 성장과 투자보다 단순성과 수익성을 우선시하며 혁신의 미래를 재편하고 있습니다.

### 기술의 숨겨진 이면: 색다른 성공 사례
* 🏡 크레이그리스트의 창업자 크레이그 뉴마크는 **1996년부터 벤처캐피털의 투자를 거부**하고 동일한 디자인을 유지하면서 단순하고 수익성 있는 사업을 유지하여 현재 **연간 5억 달러에서 10억 달러의 수익**을 올리고 있습니다.
* 📉 사힐 라베지아의 검로드는 처음에는 번창했지만 실리콘밸리의 기하급수적인 성장 기대치를 충족시키지 못해 어려움을 겪다가 규모를 축소하고 수익성을 높여 **현재 연간 1억 달러 이상의 결제를 처리**하고 있습니다.
* 🖼 데이비드 홀츠가 설립한 Mid Journey는 **직원 40명 미만, 외부 자금 지원 없이 AI 이미지 생성에 Discord를 활용**하여 **3년 만에 연 매출 2억 달러**를 달성했습니다.
* 🚀 '인디 해커'의 등장은 **대규모 자금이나 유니콘 지위 없이도 수익성 있는 소규모 비즈니스**를 구축하는 데 초점을 맞춘 기술 창업에 대한 새로운 접근 방식을 나타냅니다.
* 💡 이 이야기들은 **단순성 유지, 수익성 달성, 어떤 대가를 치르더라도 성장보다 자유를 중시하는 등 기술 성공을 위한 대안적인 길**을 제시하며 전통적인 실리콘 밸리의 이야기에 도전합니다.
* 🌐 이들은 **한계를 자산으로 활용**하고, 일반적인 문제에 대한 고유한 해결책을 찾고, 기술 업계에서 성공을 재정의하는 것이 중요하다는 점을 강조합니다.

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.

The Weird Rise Of Anti-Startups

Design, Engineering, Psychology And Stories Behind Tech

Learn how I make my videos: https://www.enricotartarotti.com/storybehind?utm_source=channel_link

🖖 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

알려지지 않은 기술 성공 스토리

기술 기업의 성공은 흔히 선구적인 창업자, 막대한 자금, 빠른 성장과 연관되지만, 이러한 통념에 도전하는 잘 알려지지 않은 흥미로운 이야기도 있습니다.

단순한 이메일 목록으로 시작하여 큰 투자 없이도 수익을 내며 빠르게 입소문을 타는 웹사이트로 성장한 크레이그 뉴어의 크레이그리스트가 그 사례 중 하나입니다.

이 새로운 기술 기업가들은 색다른 접근 방식을 취하고 있으며, 이들의 성공이 업계의 미래를 재정의할 수도 있습니다.

비즈니스에서 단순함이 주는 힘

크레이그리스트의 성공은 단순하고 일관된 접근 방식을 통해 연간 5억 달러에서 10억 달러의 수익을 창출한 덕분입니다.

주말에 기본 버전으로 출시된 Sahil의 Gumroad는 52,000명의 사용자와 800만 달러의 투자금을 확보했지만 선형적인 성장에 어려움을 겪었습니다.

이러한 어려움에도 불구하고 사힐은 검로드를 계속 운영하기로 결정하고 수익성에 집중하여 결국 팀을 20명에서 자신 한 명으로 줄임.

사힐은 2017년에 Gamr을 완전히 장악하여 현재 크리에이터에게 1억 달러 이상의 대금을 지급하는 고유하고 자립적인 모델을 구현했습니다.

데이비드 홀츠가 설립한 미드 저니는 3년 만에 직원 40명 미만, 부트스트랩 자금, 연 매출 2억 달러라는 놀라운 성공을 거두었습니다.

홀츠의 이전 벤처 회사인 Leap Motion은 핸드 트래킹 기술로 시대를 앞서갔으며, Mid Journey의 혁신적인 접근 방식의 토대를 마련했습니다.

AI 이미지 생성에 대한 미드저니의 독특한 접근 방식

Mid Journey의 창업자는 투자자로부터 천만 달러의 투자를 받는 대신 10명의 소규모 팀으로 벤처를 시작하기로 결정했습니다.

이 회사는 1,800만 명의 회원을 보유한 세계 최대 규모의 서버인 Discord에서 운영되며, AI 이미지 생성을 위한 독특하고 색다른 플랫폼을 제공합니다.

이러한 접근 방식은 사용자가 AI 모델과 상호 작용할 수 있는 방법을 제공할 뿐만 아니라 즉각적인 피드백을 제공하여 신속한 반복과 개선이 가능했습니다.

미드 여정 디스코드의 공개적인 특성으로 인해 사용자들은 쉽게 프롬프트를 복사하여 붙여넣을 수 있으며, 이는 한계가 가진 힘을 강조합니다.

인디 해커로 알려진 새로운 기술 기업가들이 자유와 좋은 삶을 위한 수익성 있는 소규모 비즈니스 구축에 집중하는 새로운 물결이 일고 있습니다.

인디 해커들은 간편한 접근 방식과 코드 재활용을 통해 빠른 속도로 제품을 출시하는 한편, 그 과정을 투명하게 문서화하고 성공과 실패를 모두 공유하고 있습니다.

인디 해킹은 개인 프로젝트로 연간 200만 달러의 수익을 올리는 피터 레벨스 같은 기업가들을 통해 기존 고용의 수익성 있는 대안이 되고 있습니다.

이 새로운 접근 방식을 통해 개인은 막대한 투자나 대규모 팀 없이도 자신만의 비즈니스를 구축할 수 있습니다.

2021년 벤처 캐피털 자금의 정점을 찍으면서 더 많은 사람들이 완전한 통제권을 유지하면서 처음부터 의미 있는 벤처를 만들 수 있다는 사실을 깨닫게 되었습니다.