Indie Builders Reach Same $50M-$100M Wealth As VC Founders With Less Stress

@levelsio First off, I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to reply. I've admired your journey from afar for a long time.

As I've said before, if I had my time again I'd probably choose your route, solopreneur, building in public, over mine: founder, acquisition, performance earn-out, and now CEO employee managing 70+ people.

Where I keep getting fascinated though is your point around products having a "natural" lifespan and churn.

I'd love your opinion on whether it's actually time... or whether it's focus.

You (and @marclou) are incredible at shipping new ideas. That's one of the reasons so many people, myself included, enjoy following your journey. But I've always wondered what would happen if you deliberately stopped launching new products and put every ounce of your energy into your biggest winner for 3–5 years.

My gut says that "natural churn" wouldn't exist. I think momentum compounds when founder attention compounds.

Yes, you'd inherit all the headaches, staff, management, operational complexity, higher costs but I also think you could stay bootstrapped, remain highly profitable, and potentially build something 20x larger than anything you've created so far.

This isn't criticism or advice, I honestly love what you're building, and if anything I'm a little jealous of the freedom you've created. I had it in the first business I exited. 1 part-time employee, $800/mo expenses, $80,000/mo profits and a 7-figure exit.

It's just an experiment I'd genuinely love to see, because I can't shake the feeling that with your ability, going all-in on one thing would produce something extraordinary.

There are people doing this. More traditional “business owners” like old school private companies founders. I’m sure also among new gen bootstrapped SaaS guys. @GuillaumeMbh @yasser_elsaid_ for example are bootstrapped focused on one product.

If we’re taking solo founders that grew a single company a lot, probably more niche. Might a be a new generation thing with AI now. @marclou the other day posted a guy in Japan doing well with one biz (not sure how well and not sure if with employees).

I think what levels said about Amazon is true for bootstrapped solofounders too: if you’re not growing you’re shrinking, and growing can also mean building a constellation of products starting from one that market fits.

Which, in a way, is what marc and levels and other indie hackers already do. All their products seem unrelated but they still fit the founder’s brand and they probably backlink each other (I.e. levels does nomads then remote ok then ai photo app targeted to the same people more or less, marc does products for indie hackers etc, @SimonHoiberg does automation products for small businesses etc).

I guess one exception is Yasser above who scaled one big cause of huge market.

I guess how big is the market is just a multiplier. And constellation of products another multiplier. And share of market another multiplier too.

FAANG companies do it all: big constellation of products in the biggest markets with huge market shares.

On “why not focus”, I think instead of scaling nomads, you can just build remoteok. In a way you can see it as another feature but on a diff domain.

And sometimes bootstrapping something new seemingly unrelated can grow fast (photoai): it’s all to be proven that focusing on remoteok/nomads would’ve generated more than starting up photoai.