In 2024, Julia Taylor’s business made $867,000 and was going backwards. GeekPack had been running six years. There were 180,000 followers across social, a 25,000-person newsletter, a flagship course, ...
In 2022, Milly Tamati wrote a LinkedIn post sheepishly from a Scottish island with a population of 191 people. She asked if there were any other “generalists” out there. ...
For fifteen years, Aakash Gupta got paid to figure out why people buy things. He had done it at Google, then at Affirm, then at Apollo, where the company ...
Olly Richards had spent ten years building a language education business called StoryLearning. By 2023, it had crossed ten million dollars in sales and was running on about four ...
Leonie Dawson has been making things and putting them on the internet since 2002, and for the past sixteen years, the thing she’s made most is courses. Whatever she ...
David Perell built a writing course that students called “life-changing” 39 times in a single round of post-cohort surveys. More than 2,000 people enrolled at prices reaching into the ...
Microsoft Excel might be the most taught skill on the internet. YouTube has thousands of free tutorials covering every function from VLOOKUP to pivot tables. Udemy sells courses for ...
Kieran Drew spent three years eliminating every hour of time-for-money work from his online writing business. He invented a metric to track his leverage and published the number every ...
Rachel Rodgers spent years as an intellectual property attorney, working with bestselling authors, tech startups, and clients who could write a five-figure check without blinking. Then she started a ...
Nicolas Cole and Dickie Bush spent years teaching people how to write online. Cole, successful in his own right, had built a ghostwriting agency to $2 million a year. ...
Chris Do ran an Emmy-winning design agency for 23 years. Nike, Google, Sony, Xbox. An estimated $80 million in billings over the life of the studio. And then in ...
In the middle of 2020, a private equity vice president managing $3.5 billion in assets started posting Twitter threads about finance. He had 500 followers. He had no plan ...
Jay Clouse spent five years building a creator business the way most people are told it works. He started a podcast. Grew a newsletter. Took freelance clients. Built a ...
Pieter Levels spent his twenties training as a techno DJ in Amsterdam. When the music career stalled, he just left. Packed a bag, bought a laptop, and started wandering ...
The indie hacker playbook is simple: ship fast, see what sticks, move on if it doesn’t. A dozen projects in a year is a badge of honor in these ...
As a security researcher, Ian Carroll found vulnerabilities for a living. He would probe TSA databases, hotel door locks, even Formula 1 infrastructure. He even reported bugs to United’s ...
Katelyn Bourgoin interviewed 300 people before her startup failed. VC-backed, she had talked to her target customers, asked them what they wanted and built exactly what they described. But ...
Scott Oldford owed $726,000 at twenty-one years old. His agency had collapsed. He’d mortgaged his parents’ house trying to save it. Monthly expenses of $120,000 grinding against revenue that ...
The going rate for a Notion template is about five dollars. Thomas Frank sells his for $139 and he’s sold over 30,000 of them. The business generates $100,000 a ...
Most creators scale by adding. More products. More platforms. More team members. More complexity. Dan Koe scaled by subtracting. He runs a $5 million-a-year business with zero employees and ...