Daniel Vassallo left Amazon and earned a reported $1M in three years of self-employment by running a portfolio of small bets — then sold his Small Bets community to Gumroad for $3.5M.

Wu Ruimeng is a startup CTO who earned over ¥150,000 ($20K) in two months of side projects using vibe coding — no extra funding, no staff. From a $1.4 baby-naming app to an AI comic-drama tool, his playbook shows how long-tail niches plus AI can become a real one-person business.

Tony Dinh quit his Singapore engineering job, spent four years in Vietnam shipping side projects that mostly failed — then built TypingMind, an AI chat client, in four days after the ChatGPT API dropped. It made $22K in a week and now earns $137K a month.

张sir quit his game-studio job in 2025, shipped six danmu livestream games alone with an AI production pipeline, and claims nearly ¥20M in revenue — of which he personally kept only about ¥0.8–1M. This is how he did it.

Jon Yongfook failed at 20+ products, shipped 12 startups in 12 months, then deleted the interface of a $400/month tool and rebuilt it as Bannerbear — an image-generation API that bootstrapped past $1M in annual recurring revenue.

Danny Postma turned a $19 eBook into Headlime, one of the first GPT-3 apps in production, and sold it for a reported $1M only 8 months after launch.