Overestimated Individuals: China's "One-Person Company" Survival Guide

By the end of 2024, the Israeli developer Maor Shlomo had finished his term after returning from reserve duty, opened his laptop, and started writing a project. There was no funding, no team, and no Slack channel. Six months later, Wix acquired his company Base44 with $80 million in cash. At the time, the product already had 250,000 users and monthly profit of $189,000. Three months before the acquisition, he hadn’t written a single line of frontend code.

Pieter Levels, a Dutchman, is even more extreme. One person, zero employees—using the most basic PHP and jQuery—while simultaneously running three products: Nomad List, Remote OK, and Photo AI. Total revenue for 2022 was already $2.7 million. He had never gone to work, had never raised funding, and lived the life of a digital nomad across more than 40 countries and more than 150 cities.

These stories are so good—they’re so good they create a kind of illusion: that one person with one computer can build towering structures from flat ground.

One-person-company incubators in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou have been springing up everywhere. In Nanshan, Moli Space covers 100,000 square meters, and 700 companies applied. At Lingang Zero-jie Magic Cube, desk space is free; in Phase One, the 300 desks were snapped up immediately, and Phase Two—8000 square meters—was already on the way. In Chengdu, Dan Shao, who runs a community for one-person companies, had only been operating for less than a month, yet every event was fully booked.

The boom really did explode. According to the “China OPC Development Trend Report (2025–2030),” as of June 2025, the number of one-person limited liability companies nationwide had already exceeded 16 million. In the first half of 2025 alone, the number of newly registered OPCs across the country reached 2.86 million, a year-over-year surge of 47%, accounting for 23.8% of all newly registered enterprises.

But what lies beneath the boom?

We talked with three people who are already on this path. One is an observer who has run a one-person company community for nearly two years and holds more than 2,500 real samples. One is a 00s entrepreneur who, across the U.S. and China from Silicon Valley, built two companies. The third is an independent developer who switched from being an FA in the primary market to building an AI Agent product.

The stories they tell don’t quite match the vibe on social media.

The underlying logic of success

Dai Wenqian runs a one-person company community in Shanghai called SoloNest. The origin was very simple. In June 2024, she had just left the internet education industry and wanted to know what a single person could really do. She flipped through books and videos but couldn’t find an answer, so she decided to do her own field research—organizing meetups, reviewing samples, and conducting interviews.

Nearly two years in, she had accumulated more than 2,500 samples, and in 20% of them she was able to run a business closed loop and get results. She also turned her observations from those samples into a book: One-Person Company.

Joint research by Qichacha and Xiao Bao shows that the three-year survival rate of enterprises established in China in 2021 has already fallen to 71%, with nearly one quarter dying off directly in the first three years. Clearly, SoloNest’s 20% success rate is already outperforming the overall market.

But Dai Wenqian cares even more about the other 80%.

“People who didn’t make it fall into two types. One type tried to do it but didn’t get it to work—the traffic is cut off, or the business model isn’t sustainable. The other type never even started.” she analyzed.

The number of people who never start is far larger than you’d imagine.

“Because they aren’t hurt enough, they have an exit. The brain tricks them into thinking they want to start, but in essence it’s just fear of missing out. Most of them are worried about their current job, and they think OPC entrepreneurship might be a solution—but fear-driven motivation is a terrible starting point.” Dai Wenqian said.

Leon, who previously worked as an FA in the primary market, has seen even more people like this. He attended a one-person company offline event and found that a large number of people had no direction—they attended events everywhere and bought courses everywhere. “No one can help you figure out how you should make money. Only by doing it, stepping into pitfalls, and paying the price is the correct path.” Leo said.

Of the people who started, who made it?

The answer is highly counterintuitive. In the effective samples, Dai Wenqian saw a stable commonality: almost everyone who managed to run the loop wasn’t doing work in their original industry anymore.

They don’t choose a track based on “what I’m good at,” but instead start from “where there are unmet needs.”

Dai Wenqian used herself as an example. She used to do branding at Himalaya. She had never done offline events or run a community. But she had curiosity about people, an aesthetic sense for building products, and the ability to express things in a structured way—these underlying capabilities aren’t constrained by industry. Once you find a market need, the scenario, and the pain points in an industry, you can transfer those underlying capabilities over.

In the SoloNest community, there’s also a guy who makes tennis bags. He also wasn’t making bags before. Because he loved playing tennis, he noticed demand points that weren’t met by existing products in the market, so he prepared 100,000 RMB as seed funding and made an original tennis bag. After two years, he can now reliably sell more than 300 units a month. This maps precisely to Pieter Levels’s methodology. In 2014, Levels set himself a challenge: make 12 products in 12 months and throw them into the market to see which one gets a response. Nomad List was the 7th—and the only one that actually ran.

The key isn’t just picking the right track—you also need to validate enough assumptions quickly.

Dai Wenqian breaks this process into three checkpoints. First: do you dare to hand-craft something and throw it into the market? Unfortunately, many people don’t even have a validation mindset; they just think and don’t do. Second: once someone is interested, can you sell it? There’s a canyon between “people think it’s pretty good” and “people keep paying consistently.” Third: can you free yourself from delivery work?

The first two filters out the people who are stuck—and keeps them stuck.

The third is the real hard battle.

The 1.2-million trap

After passing the first two gates, people find they’re alive—they are alive—but there’s a ceiling welded firmly above their heads.

Dai Wenqian gave a precise number: if a one-person company relies on its own delivery, the annual revenue ceiling is roughly 1 million to 1.2 million RMB.

“No matter how hardworking you are, selling time has an upper limit.” she said.

This is the most realistic dilemma for one-person companies in China. On social media, people talk about Maor Shlomo’s $80 million exit and Pieter Levels’s $2.7 million in annual revenue, but those are stories from Silicon Valley SaaS and global digital products. In China’s environment, one-person companies more often grow in the C-end, the tertiary sector, and the experience economy, where delivery chains are heavy and people are tied together.

Barry, who works across the U.S. and China doing business, saw an even more fundamental split. What U.S. kids think about when starting companies is B2B SaaS and AI Agent. What Chinese kids think about is physical industries like pets, elder care, and food. This isn’t a matter of who is smarter—it’s the difference in industry structure and willingness to pay. In the U.S., companies have strong pay-for-awareness. Build a small SaaS tool and it can run. But China’s to-B ecosystem is completely different.

So how do you break the 1.2-million ceiling?

The most intuitive path is automation—using AI to take yourself out of the delivery chain.

But this path is far harder than how the narrative makes it sound.

There’s a typical case in the SoloNest community. Jason’s business is job search “coaching”: helping interns and new graduates for internet operations roles revise their resumes, conduct mock interviews, and assist with their job search. He starts by selling pure time—taking more than a dozen clients per month.

Many peers get stuck and die right here. Jason’s approach is to find a batch of peers who can’t sustain customer acquisition, train them, and route clients to them. Money is made per order—there’s no employment relationship. Dai Wenqian calls this “multiple one-person companies collaborating, not one multi-person company.” After that, he also grew a To B operations business, shifting from pure C-end to C plus B.

Now Jason is working on the third step: building a knowledge base using the consulting materials from the past two years, and half-automating delivery products. But in two months, he only completed 60%.

Why is it so slow? Dai Wenqian provided a mathematical model: “Suppose your delivery chain has 5 key nodes. At each node, through automation, you can only reach 80% of what you could do by hand. Does that mean the overall qualification rate of the fully automated chain is 80%? Not at all. It could be 0.8 × 0.8 × 0.8 × 0.8 × 0.8, which is only 33%. The longer the chain, the harder it is to automate. It isn’t additive; it’s multiplicative.”

That’s why it can feel like “the lobster can be automated all at once,” but once you actually build it, you realize that if any single link in the middle isn’t done well, what comes out is garbage. And the prerequisite for using AI well is that when you hand-build it, you’ve already done it very well—otherwise you can’t tell where the problems are.

Leon is the strongest technically among the three interviewees. He now builds AI Agent products himself. He doesn’t write a line of code; all development is handled by AI. His AI penetration in his workflow is close to 100%.

But he is very restrained in his judgment of automation: “To evaluate whether a task can be handed to AI, look at three things: whether the cost is low, whether the risk is high, and whether the results are good. Services for high-net-worth people can’t use AI. AI’s working mode allows it to make mistakes—it optimizes strategies by making mistakes. But in services where you can’t afford mistakes for high-net-worth people, you’re not allowed to mess up. If you make a mistake in one conversation, the whole business is over.”

Some business process steps simply can’t be replaced by AI.

Dai Wenqian herself also admits it: her AI penetration is only 30%. Because her core delivery is in-person, people-to-people interaction, and that part can’t be automated. What she can do is partial automation—like content acquisition, knowledge base consolidation, and so on—but she can’t completely remove herself from the business.

She works more than 14 hours a day. She creates content to attract new users, chats with people to filter them, maintains partners, designs products, breaks down samples, and more—plus every weekend she has two fixed offline events.

“Many one-person company founders won’t post this kind of thing online. No one sees it. Everyone likes to watch the glamorous scenes: having coffee here, visiting exhibitions there, earning millions a year, the big female lead. But the reality is that entrepreneurship is mostly a lot of dirty and exhausting work—repeating, iterating.” she said.

One-person companies aren’t the endgame

Automation is one road, but not the only road.

Dai Wenqian observed another way to break through: not replacing yourself, but “stitching yourself together.”

Jason’s case follows this logic. He doesn’t hire people; he collaborates with other one-person companies. Each LEGO brick is an independent entity—each has its own capabilities and customers. When put together, they create incremental value.

And if every one-person company can be enhanced by AI, then putting them together would be like enhancing LEGO. Dai Wenqian believes this is the biggest source of imagination for one-person companies: “It’s like LEGO. Not every LEGO brick needs to be 100% AI-ized, but each brick is enhanced by AI. Three enhanced LEGO bricks stacked together isn’t 1+1+1—it’s 3×3×3.”

Another path is to copy your experience and methodology and replicate it for more people. Barry validated this model in practice. He is the founder of two one-person company businesses. From 0 to 1, he explores everything himself. Once the business closed loop is run and proven, he steps back and hands it over to the team to be managed, letting the team pass it on like a relay baton—then he goes on to run other businesses.

Maor Shlomo also had a similar choice. Base44 grew to 250,000 users within six months, with monthly profit close to 200,000 USD, but he still chose to sell to Wix. His explanation was that although the growth was astonishing, the scale and size we need can’t grow organically to that level by one person. One person can build a product from 0 to 1, but from 1 to 100 requires organizational capability, resources, and distribution capability—which one person can’t do.

Three different paths—AI productization, collaboration “stitching,” and partner expansion—but the underlying logic is the same: a one-person company isn’t a final state. It’s a launch pad. Validate something with the lowest cost. Once you’ve gotten it running, you must find a way so that you’re no longer the bottleneck. Otherwise, you’ll be permanently welded onto that 1.2-million ceiling.

Before the door closes

The 2026 data looks promising. Shenzhen issued an OPC entrepreneurship ecosystem action plan, aiming to build more than 10 OPC communities at the scale of over 10,000 square meters by 2027. Shanghai Pudong will provide newly registered one-person companies with up to 300,000 yuan in free computing power. In Suzhou in 2025, 300,000 college students were attracted, and the talent pool is expanding rapidly.

But Dai Wenqian said something that brings people back to reality.

“Barriers have been lowered a lot. In the past, you had to find money, find people, and find venues—the startup costs were extremely high. Now you can validate almost anything with near zero cost. But it’s indiscriminate support—you make it easier for others too. With more players, traffic gets more expensive. This is an arms race.”

The reason Pieter Levels can earn $2.7 million per year as a one-person operation is that he started in 2014 and spent 10 years accumulating an SEO moat and community trust. The reason Maor Shlomo of Base44 could sell his company within six months is that before that, he had already built a data company that raised $125 million—his network, judgment, and speed weren’t starting from zero.

These people aren’t what one-person company narratives describe as “ordinary people can do it too.” They’re the brightest few points in survivorship bias.

In the real one-person company world, the more than 2,500 samples in SoloNest’s community tell the truth: 20% keep making money and are moving into the next stage; 40% get stuck in various ways, but they’re still iterating and still thinking about how to break through; and another 40% are still lost and looking for direction. Among the 20% who are alive, most don’t earn more than 1.2 million per year. They work until the early hours of the morning every day, with weekdays fully booked—no weekends.

In fact, what one-person companies earn is the time difference between discovering a niche demand and the moment it gets captured by organized capital. That time difference has a name: shelf life.

Shelf life depends on two things: when you discover the demand, and how fast you manage to run it through.

Lowering the threshold won’t make shelf life longer. Quite the opposite—it will shorten shelf life. Because if something can be validated at zero cost, others can validate it at zero cost too. The demands you see, others see as well. If today you hand-build an MVP and toss it out for three months without dying, tomorrow ten identical products will show up on the phones of the same users.

That’s why most people get “stuck.” The essence of getting stuck isn’t a capability problem; it’s that the speed at which they convert time into results can’t keep up with how quickly the market crowds in.

Maor Shlomo and Pieter Levels are advertisements rather than samples precisely because they solved the shelf-life problem in two opposite ways. Levels extended shelf life to 10 years through first-mover advantage and compounding. Shlomo compressed shelf life to six months through speed and an exit.

The middle road is the most dangerous. For most Chinese one-person company founders, they don’t have the 10 years to slowly build a flywheel, and they also don’t have Wix writing checks. They work 14 hours a day to sustain the 1.2-million ceiling, thinking that if they just hold on a bit longer, they’ll break through. But the market won’t wait for you to hold on. The next competitor who validates at zero cost could appear at any time and flatten your meager moat.

A one-person company has never been a state you can stay in long term. It’s a window with shelf life.

When the window opens, barriers are low, tools are cheap, and demand is clear—so it looks like the best era for ordinary people. But the window won’t stay open forever. It will be crowded by those who come in later, crushed by more efficient tools, and finally shut down by a startup that gets funding, or by some suddenly exiting business line from a major factory.

Whether you can move yourself out of that bottleneck before the door closes is the only truly real question in this business.