Can a tiny team build a billion-dollar business?
Close CEO Steli Efti thinks so.
“A decade ago, it would have broken people's brains to say you’re running a small billion-dollar business. I believe in the next decade, there will be thousands of small billion-dollar and trillion-dollar companies. Instead of getting flying cars à la The Jetsons, we're getting hyper-scaling rocket ship SMBs around the globe,” Efti says.
Founders prefer small teams because they move fast, avoid bureaucratic headaches, and actually get things done. But founders also want to scale. In the past, you had to pick a lane: launch a VC-backed startup chasing a huge IPO or stay small and settle for a “lifestyle” business with modest goals.
Thankfully, that shitty tradeoff is crumbling fast. Founders don’t have to pick sides anymore. They can have the best of both. Enter the small, scaling business (SSB)—a new breed of company that’s lean, ambitious, and scales like a rocket without the baggage of traditional growth.
More founders are ditching the VC rat race and going straight for revenue and profitability by bootstrapping. They want to scale, but on their own terms—with freedom, independence, and zero strings attached to investor money. SSBs can be nimble and punch way above their weight class, competing at levels previously unheard of.
Let’s take a look at some examples of SSBs that are making it happen today and rewriting the rules of what’s possible.
6 Trailblazing SSBs and How They’re Winning
1. Ahrefs
You can’t throw a rock without hitting a marketer who uses Ahrefs, the powerful SEO data analytics tool (assuming you’re in a place surrounded by a few marketing people and some rocks). Ahrefs built an SEO SaaS product estimated to have a 24 percent market share in their niche—second only to the OG behemoth, Google Ads.
Founded in 2010, Ahrefs bootstrapped its way into existence with $300k in personal funding. By 2015, they earned $7 million in ARR with 15 employees. By 2019, they hit $50 million with 45 employees. Today, they’re earning over $100 million with a nimble team of just 136 people.
Ahrefs credits their success to obsessively building a best-in-class product so they don’t have to rely on a huge marketing budget to be competitive. CMO Tim Soulo told the Marketing Strategies podcast, “We think that the best marketing you can do is building a superior product.” Easy enough.
2. Rocketable
Launched in 2023, Rocketable is not only aiming to become a one-person billion-dollar company. This ambitious Y Combinator startup wants to create one-person billion-dollar companies using AI agents.
How it works: Founder Alan Wells acquires and automates existing software products, replacing human teams with AI agents. “I believe acquiring existing products is the key to speedrunning the path to building a single-person, billion-dollar software company,” Wells says.
Y Combinator partner Jared Friedman calls Rocketable, “Literally the most AGI-pilled idea I have heard.” If Rocketable achieves its mission, it could become the blueprint for other founders to launch and scale a one-person empire with a fleet of robot helpers.
3. Origami Agents
Another Y Combinator startup, Origami Agents, is a two-man team of founders Finn Mallery and Kenson Chung. They have been scaling their B2B SaaS product at breakneck speed. In just 8 weeks, they reached $50,000 in MRR—which should come as no surprise, since their product uses AI to automate sales prospecting and connect businesses with their ideal customers.
Like Rocketable, they’ve identified a customer base hungry for their AI solution. Unlike Rocketable, however, they envision a world in which AI augments human employees, but doesn’t replace them altogether. Kenson Chung told VentureBeat, “Only humans can close big deals, but AI can make them much smarter and faster.”
With two forward-thinking innovators using an AI-powered approach to sales, we predict Origami Agents will have no problem scaling their startup’s revenue astronomically, even as a duo.
4. MarketBeat
Tech startups aren’t the only SSBs that can scale big with a small team. Take MarketBeat, for example. Founded in 2011 by Matt Paulson, this financial news media company earns $40 million in ARR with a team of just 18 employees. That’s over $2 million per employee.
Paulson turned his subject matter expertise as a financial blogger into a newsletter that grew steadily over the years. Growth really took off during the pandemic as more people became interested in keeping up to date with news about stock market volatility. To meet increased demand, they grew their team by just seven new employees—and quadrupled their business.
MarketBeat now serves 4 million subscribers and was named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine in 2021. Not bad for a company with fewer employees than football players on the field during a game.
5. Pieter Levels (Photo AI, Remote OK, and more)
To understand the levels of success Pieter Levels has reached, you only need to check out the title of this podcast episode: “Pieter Levels: Making $2.7M a Year with No Employees.”
Serial solopreneur Levels might not have a one-person billion-dollar company (yet), but he has a one-person multi-million dollar empire of profitable websites. In 2014, he set an ambitious goal: launch 12 startups in 12 months. He’s launched over 40 startups, and I can’t confirm whether or not this guy actually sleeps.
His most successful platforms bring in enough monthly revenue to make it all worthwhile:
- Nomads.com (formerly Nomad List) - $47K monthly
- RemoteOK.com - $26K monthly
- PhotoAI.com - $121K monthly
- InteriorAI.com - $37K monthly
As a skilled engineer and designer, Levels says, “People don't realize how crazy rich you can become just running a simple, stable business and investing the profits.”
Well, if anyone would know, it’s him.
6. Simple Modern
Founded in 2015, this Oklahoma-based drinkware company might be “simple,” but its sales are mind-blowing. With around 100 employees, Simple Modern brings in a staggering $250 million in annual revenue.
A trio of co-founders—Mike Beckham, Bryan Porter, and Micah Ames—bootstrapped their business with $200k in cash. Their dream of selling insulated drinkware put them in direct competition with huge brands like Yeti and Hydro Flask.
Beckham says the competition never scared them thanks to their four-step process to “find the white space” in a market: Find a product with robust demand, analyze the strengths of existing competitors, find the needs not being met (the “white space”), and identify your own skills to fill that space. Simple Modern proves there’s enough white space for a scrappy SSB to fill, even in a crowded market.
Small Teams, Massive Impact
The rise of small, scaling businesses (SSBs) is more than just a trend—it’s a fundamental shift in how companies grow. The next decade won’t be about who raises the most funding or has the highest headcount. It’ll be about who builds the smartest, most efficient, high-impact businesses.
The next billion-dollar company might not be a corporate giant—it might be a team of two developers, a solopreneur, or an AI-powered operation running with near-zero overhead. The game has changed, and the new rules are being written by SSBs.
