ByteCrunch · Biz Intelligence

What indie founders actually make money building.

Seventeen business idea themes, ranked by revenue density and stress-tested against real shutdowns. Built from a full-text corpus of Starter Story interviews, Failory post-mortems, and IndieHackers ideas.

Rank by

Solo founders

What one person can build with no team.

Businesses run by a single founder with two employees or fewer, pulled from the structured founder and headcount fields, not guesswork. The lean end of the corpus, where one person carries the whole thing.

Where solo founders win · by volume
Top solo businesses
How to read this. Median MRR is the middle of self-reported monthly revenue for profitable examples in a theme: directional, unverified founder claims, not audited numbers. Fail rate is Failory shutdown/interview count matched to the theme, divided by profitable examples; a proxy for how crowded and unforgiving the space is. Opportunity blends median revenue, example volume, and a fail-rate penalty. Absurd revenue outliers (a few parser artifacts above $5M/mo) are filtered from example lists. Click any example to read the founder's full interview in-app. Text is scraped from Starter Story and reformatted for reading. Treat this as idea-generation signal, not diligence.