How Much Money Do Solopreneurs Make? (2024)

Pat Walls

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Updated: June 23rd, 2024

TL;DR:

Based on our data, solopreneurs can make between $1,000-$25,000,000 per month.
The average revenue for a successful solopreneur is $285K per month.
The highest grossing solopreneur in our records makes over $300,000,000 per year.
Solopreneur owners salaries can vary wildly depending on industry, niche, and size of the business

So you're thinking about starting a solopreneur?

And now you're wondering how much solopreneur owners actually make...

Well, let’s dive in!

Here are example of real solopreneurs and how much money they make - as reported by the founders themselves:

1. Stardew Valley ($300M/year)

In 2011, Eric started working on the video game Stardew Valley as a way to improve his chances of getting a job.

How much money it makes: $300M/year

2. ConvertKit ($25M/year)

In 2013, Nathan set a challenge for himself: build a $5K/mo SaaS in 6 months with just $5,000. He got the idea after reading people's complaints about Mailchimp online, and decided to build a product that addressed those.

How much money it makes: $25M/year

3. BuiltWith ($14M/year)

While searching for his next idea, Brewer naturally looked at other websites for inspiration. While looking through the source code of a website (a neat trick programmers often do), he found a piece of code unique to Java and could deduce that the website was built using that technology. And then it clicked him. He said: "Wouldn't it be cool to know the exact technology every website uses?"

How much money it makes: $14M/year

4. Busch Global ($12M/year)

John's passion for entrepreneurship and business growth motivated him to create Busch Global first as a franchise and a development partner. His early successes demonstrated the potential of franchising, inspiring the business idea.

How much money it makes: $12M/year

5. Tabs Chocolate ($11M/year)

While Oliver was learning how to build e-commerce businesses, one day while he saw a girl on Tiktok talking about sex chocolates (8M views and 2M likes), and he was able to see how the product was available in certain local shops but none online. That was his lightbulb moment.

How much money it makes: $11M/year

6. Plenty of Fish ($10M/year)

Markus started Plenty of Fish in 2003 as a way to improve his résumé. A new programming language called ASP.NET was released, and instead of reading books about it, he went ahead and created the site in two weeks to learn it.

Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, plentyoffish.com, archived December 30, 2003

How much money it makes: $10M/year

Dan was a stock trader in NYC after his education, but his interest in software and engineering led him to create Scraper API, a tool for developers to extract data from web pages.

After running the business for a few years and scaling it to six figures in revenue, he decided to start a newsletter due to his growing fascination with technology and current news.

How much money it makes: $5M/year

8. Ship 30 for 30 ($2.5M/year)

Dickie started writing online in 2020.

He was writing a newsletter, but after 9 months, he only had around 300 subscribers.

He decided that if people weren’t going to find him, he needed to go to where the people were and double down on it.

The people were on Twitter, so he committed to writing 30 threads in 30 days to grow his account.

That personal writing challenge turned into the foundation of Ship 30 for 30, which started as a Slack accountability group to help people publish consistently.

How much money it makes: $2.5M/year

9. Dan Koe ($2.5M/year)

Eager to choose an unconventional career path and his love for fitness got him to start a fitness YT channel in college, then a freelance course out of his love for web development through which he built an audience, and lot of iterations with failing and succeeding at digital products.

How much money it makes: $2.5M/year

10. Woodies ($2.28M/year)

Cory had previously launched a semi-successful watch brand. Due to his watch business, he traveled a couple of times to China, and after one of the trips, he came back with the idea for wood sunglasses. Wood sunglasses seemed awesome so Cody tried to jump on them early. He was able to sell 8,000 glasses in a week with a launch on Groupon.

How much money it makes: $2.28M/year