There is a founder who is doing $10M/year in revenue with 0 employees 🤯
Business: Google add-ons
Traffic: 5M visits/month
Installs: 40M
Here’s the breakdown of his business:
1/ The founder @labnol:
• First professional blogger in India
• Builds add-ons for Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc
• Only full-time employee
• Little competition as super-niche
• Customers include LinkedIn, Disney, and the US Embassy.
2/ In 2004, Amit quit his tech job and started blogging to promote his skills.
He wrote (and still does) about tech stories and how-to guides.
Here are the two things he did to attract the initial audience:
a. Persuaded Indian filter blog (one of the most read at the time) and other publications to share his content.
b. Promoted the blog at various tech events.
The blog got 1000s of visitors, so he decided to pursue it full-time.
Today, 34% of his audience is from the US.
3/ Leveraging the audience growth
Amit started building plugins and promoted them on his blog.
He sourced ideas from blog comments, friends, Reddit, and more.
Today, he has 20+ plugins (free+paid).
Here are the top 4 ones and my rough calculations on the revenue:
a. Mail Merge
• Send bulk personalized emails. Everyone will receive them as if it was sent solely to them.
• Track email opens and clicks.
8.5M+ have downloaded this plugin. At 0.5% conversion to the paid plan ($39.yr), that’s $1.6M in ARR.
b. Notifications for Google Forms
• Send customized notifications.
• Automatically email every time a user submits your Google Form.
• Save leads in CRM by forwarding the form responses in emails.
It has 10M+ downloads. At 0.5% conversion ($49/yr), that’s $2.5M in ARR
c. YouTube uploader
• Allow your team members to upload a video on your channel with a simple form.
• Get an email notification when someone uploads to your channel.
It has 8M+ downloads. At 0.5% conversion, that’s $3.1M in ARR.
d. Document Studio
• Create documents from data in Google Sheets and Google Forms.
• Integrate with Slack, Trello, and 100s of other apps.
It has 6.8M+ downloads. At 0.5% conversion ($79/yr), that’s $2.6M in ARR.
My revenue calculations might be off, but he is def at the top10 of the highest revenues per employee.
His only problem is platform risk which can easily drive his business to 0. We’ve seen this happen to many companies built on top of big tech.
That’s a wrap!
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