🌐 A curated list of awesome resources for OPC (One Person Companies) — policies, inspiration, projects, tools, and more.
Help solo founders find direction, build faster, and thrive independently.
Introduction · OPC Starter · Policies · Inspiration · Tools · Resources
- Introduction
- What is OPC?
- Selection Criteria
- 🎯 OPC Starter
- 🏛 Policies
- 💡 Inspiration
- 🛠 Tools
- 📚 Resources
- Contributing
- License
One person, one company, infinite possibilities.
This project curates everything a solo founder needs — from understanding policies and regulations, to finding inspiration from those who've walked the path, to discovering the best tools and resources that make running a one-person company not just possible, but powerful.
OPC (One Person Company) is a business structure where a single individual operates as both the sole shareholder and director. With the rise of AI, no-code tools, and the creator economy, running a profitable company solo has never been more achievable.
In this list, OPC is used broadly: it includes formal one-person company structures, solo founder businesses, indie products, and small operations intentionally run by one person.
To keep this list useful and trustworthy:
- Prefer official sources for policies, registration, tax, and legal information.
- Include tools that are broadly useful to solo operators, not just newly launched or promotional products.
- Add case studies only when there is a public source for the founder, product, or reported milestone.
- Mark time-sensitive claims, such as revenue, user count, policy status, or market reports, with a year when possible.
- Keep descriptions concise, factual, and focused on why the resource helps one-person companies.
Your quick-start checklist for launching a one-person company.
- Find your niche — Pick a specific problem, validate demand, confirm willingness to pay.
- Register your business — Choose a legal structure (LLC, sole prop, etc.), open a business bank account.
- Build your MVP — Ship the simplest version that delivers value. Use AI tools to move fast.
- Set up payments — Integrate Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, or similar. Track finances from day one.
- Launch & get users — Go where your audience is. Build in public. First 10 users > first 10,000.
- Automate & scale solo — Use AI agents and SaaS to handle support, marketing, ops, and reporting.
- You are the bottleneck — Ruthlessly prioritize. Delegate to AI what doesn't need your judgment.
- Revenue first — One paying customer is worth more than a thousand stars on GitHub.
- Automate everything repeatable — If you're doing it twice a week, automate it. Your time is the scarcest resource.
- Separate you from the company — Use limited liability, business bank accounts, and proper contracts from day one.
- Ship fast, iterate faster — Solo means no meetings, no approvals. Use that speed as your competitive advantage.
- Build in public, but protect your moat — Share your journey to attract users, but keep your unfair advantage close.
Regulations, legal frameworks, and tax policies related to one-person companies across the globe.
- 《中华人民共和国公司法》 — 2023 年修订版公司法，取消一人有限公司数量限制，允许自然人设立多家一人公司。
- 新《公司法》解读 — 上海市人民政府 — 上海市政府对新《公司法》关于一人有限公司等条款的权威解读。
- 杭州市加大个体工商户培育帮扶力度支持转型升级实施意见 — 杭州市人民政府 — 杭州市关于个体工商户培育帮扶及支持"个转企"的政策措施。
- 深圳市扶持个体工商户高质量发展若干措施 — 深圳市市场监督管理局 — 深圳市创业担保贷款、减费让利等扶持个体工商户的系列政策。
- 安徽省进一步促进个体工商户发展若干措施解读 — 安徽省人民政府 — 安徽省（含合肥）促进个体工商户发展的政策措施及解读。
- Choose a Business Structure — U.S. SBA — Official guide from the Small Business Administration on sole proprietorship, LLC, and other structures.
- Register Your Business — U.S. SBA — Step-by-step guide to registering your business with state and local governments.
- Starting a Business — IRS — Federal tax information and requirements for starting a sole proprietorship or LLC.
- Single-Member Private Limited Liability Companies — EUR-Lex — EU Directive on single-member companies, enabling limitation of liability for individual entrepreneurs.
- Company Law and Corporate Governance — European Commission — EU's unified corporate legal framework for doing business across the Single Market.
- Choosing a Business Structure — ACRA Singapore — Singapore's official guide on sole proprietorship, partnership, and company structures.
- Registering a Sole Proprietorship — ACRA Singapore — Step-by-step registration guide for solo business owners in Singapore.
- 一人会社の設立登記 — 法務省 — Japan's Ministry of Justice guide on online registration for one-person companies.
- 'One Person Company' under the Companies Act, 2013 — SSRN — Legal background for India's OPC form and its move from minimum-two-person to single-member company formation.
- One Person Company and Its Role in Promotion of Entrepreneurship in India — Connects the OPC legal structure to entrepreneurship promotion and limited-liability solo ownership in India.
- One-Person LLC: Governance of Indonesian Legal Entities for MSEs — Studies governance issues in one-person limited liability companies for micro and small enterprises in Indonesia.
Real stories, companies, and talks that prove one person can build something remarkable.
- Pieter Levels — $3M/yr as a Solo Founder — Built Nomad List, Remote OK, and PhotoAI entirely solo, generating millions per year with zero employees.
- Maor Shlomo — Base44 Sold for $80M — Solo-built AI startup acquired by Wix for $80M in cash, just six months after launch.
- AJ — Carrd — One person built Carrd into a widely-used landing page builder with millions of users and $1M+ ARR.
- Marc Lou — $1.03M/yr as an Indie Developer — Built 25 projects, 12 profitable. Founder of ShipFast, the " Done For You" SaaS boilerplate.
- Nathan Barry — ConvertKit $29M ARR — Built an email marketing platform for creators to 500K+ users and $29M ARR.
Bannerbear — Automated image and video generation API, bootstrapped to $600K ARR by solo founder Jon Yongfook.
Cubox — Read-later app built by a solo Chinese founder. AI-powered note-taking and knowledge management.
DesignJoy — Brett Williams turned productized design into a $200K/month one-person agency with a subscription model.
Nomad List — The go-to platform for digital nomads to find the best cities to live and work remotely.
PhotoAI — AI photo generator by Pieter Levels, reaching $100K+/month as a solo product.
Photopea — A free browser-based Photoshop alternative built and maintained solo by Ivan Kutskir for 11+ years. Millions of daily users.
Stardew Valley — Eric Barone solo-built this farming RPG over 4.5 years. 50M+ copies sold, $500M+ revenue. One of the most successful indie games ever.
TLDR Newsletter — Dan Ni built a daily tech newsletter into a multi-million dollar AI-powered media business, solo.
TypingMind — Tony Dinh's AI chat interface that reached $45K MRR as a solo product, riding the ChatGPT wave.
小熊猫 C++ IDE — Free C/C++ IDE for Windows built and maintained solo. ¥5 万+/月 revenue.
- Pieter Levels on Lex Fridman Podcast — Deep dive into programming, viral AI startups, and the digital nomad life of the most famous solo founder.
- How to Build a Startup Without Funding — Pieter Levels @ Dojo Bali — Practical talk on shipping fast, staying lean, and building profitable products without investors.
- The One-Person Startup Era Has Officially Begun — Sam Altman predicted the first one-person billion-dollar company — and the numbers are backing it up.
The essential toolkit for solo founders — build, ship, and grow by yourself.
Bolt.new — Full-stack app from a single prompt — frontend, backend, database, and hosting. Free tier includes 1M tokens/month and unlimited databases.
Cursor — AI-first code editor with deep codebase understanding. Tab prediction goes beyond autocomplete — predicts next cursor position and code diffs. (Product Hunt Product of the Year 2024)
DigitalOcean — Simple cloud computing with $6/month starter VPS, good docs, and developer-friendly APIs.
Hetzner — Budget-friendly German cloud provider. VPS starting at €4.5/month with excellent price-to-performance.
Lovable — Most beginner-friendly full-stack AI app builder. Generates clean React + Supabase apps from natural language prompts.
PlanetScale — Serverless MySQL platform with branching, horizontal scaling, and instant schema changes.
Railway — Deploy backends, databases, and cron jobs in seconds. Great DX for solo devs.
Supabase — Open-source Firebase alternative — the default backend for solo SaaS. Postgres, auth, storage, real-time, and edge functions in one. (Product Hunt DEV TOOL WINNER)
Turso — Edge-hosted SQLite database. LibSQL implementation with excellent DX and replication options.
Upstash — Serverless Redis and Kafka. Pay-per-request with global replication, perfect for serverless workloads.
v0 — AI UI component generator by Vercel. Produces production-quality React/Next.js code with shadcn/ui and Tailwind.
Vercel — Zero-config deployment platform for frontend and full-stack apps. Git push → production.
WeaveFox — Free AIGC platform that turns text prompts into full-stack applications with one-click deployment.
Windsurf — AI-first IDE with agentic coding flows for complex multi-file edits. Strong alternative to Cursor with competitive free tier.
Adobe Firefly — Professional image editing and generation within Adobe's ecosystem. Commercial-safe AI imagery trained on licensed content.
Canva AI — All-in-one design for non-designers. Marketing graphics, social posts, presentations, videos, and documents with AI assistance.
Figma — Industry-standard collaborative design tool with powerful AI features. Essential for app interface design and team collaboration.
Framer — Build and publish stunning websites visually, no code required.
Google Stitch — AI-powered UI design tool by Google that generates mobile and web UIs from text or image prompts.
Lovart — World's first AI Design Agent. Collaborative canvas for branding and marketing — upload references, sketch concepts, edit layers.
Midjourney — Industry-leading AI image generation. Unmatched aesthetic quality for product mockups, marketing visuals, illustrations, and brand imagery.
Shadcn/ui — Beautiful, copy-paste React components built on Radix UI and Tailwind CSS.
Beehiiv — Newsletter platform built for growth. 0% revenue share, built-in referral system, ad network, and AI website builder. Native MCP integration for Claude.
Buffer — Social media scheduling and analytics with AI caption suggestions. Manage all platforms from one dashboard.
Plausible — Privacy-friendly, lightweight web analytics. No cookie banners needed.
PostHog — Full-featured product analytics. Session recording, feature flags, A/B testing, and self-hosted option. Free tier up to 1M events/month.
Umami — Open-source web analytics. Simple, privacy-focused, and self-hostable for free.
X — The go-to platform for building in public and growing an audience as a solo founder.
Alipay AI Pay — AI-native payment solution by Alipay that enables AI agents to handle transactions seamlessly. 100M+ users, ideal for agentic commerce.
支付宝 — Alibaba's payment platform. 0.6% fee, required for serving Chinese customers.
Fondo — AI-powered bookkeeping for startups. Automated categorization, monthly closes, tax preparation, and R&D tax credits.
Lemon Squeezy — Merchant of record for digital products. Handles global tax, billing, VAT, and compliance — so you don't have to.
LLC Class — Wyoming LLC registration for non-US solo founders — includes registered agent for LLC, EIN, and Operating Agreement to unlock Stripe and US business banking.
Mercury — Banking built for startups. Treasury, corporate cards, and financial workflows designed for one-person companies. No fees.
Paddle — Merchant of record specializing in EU compliance. Handles VAT, tax, and global billing — 5% + $0.50 fee.
微信支付 — China's dominant mobile payment. 0.6% fee, essential for Chinese market.
QuickBooks Solopreneur — Auto-categorizes expenses, tracks mileage, captures receipts, and estimates quarterly taxes.
Stripe — The default payment infrastructure for SaaS. Checkout, subscriptions, invoicing, and customer portal. Powers millions of one-person companies.
Xero — Cloud-based accounting software designed for small businesses and solo operators.
Cal.com — Open-source scheduling with booking pages, round-robin, and workflow automation. The Calendly alternative that respects your data.
Carrd — Ultra-simple one-page sites for solo founders. $9-49/year flat fee, perfect for landing pages and mini-products.
Linear — Fast, streamlined issue tracking and project management for builders who ship.
Make — Visual workflow automation — the sweet spot between Zapier's ease and n8n's power. See the actual logic, add JS when needed.
n8n — Open-source workflow automation with unlimited workflows and zero usage fees. Full code access when needed.
Notion AI — All-in-one workspace with AI. Docs, databases, projects, meeting summaries, and knowledge base. The operating system for one-person companies.
Reclaim.ai — AI calendar that defends focus blocks, schedules habits, and finds optimal meeting slots based on your energy patterns.
Super — Turn Notion into a website. $12/month for a beautiful, fast site with your Notion content as the CMS.
Zapier — Connect 7,000+ apps with AI decision steps. The easiest automation for non-technical founders.
Claude — Best-in-class reasoning and long-context model. Excels at coding, analysis, writing, and complex problem-solving. Powers Claude Code for agentic development.
ChatGPT — The most widely-used AI assistant with 800M+ weekly users. Strong at general tasks, browsing, DALL-E image generation, and plugins.
DeepSeek — Open-source Chinese AI model with frontier-level reasoning. Extremely cost-effective API — often 10–50× cheaper than GPT-4. Strong at code and math.
Gemini — Google's multimodal AI with deep Workspace integration. 750M+ monthly users. Strong at search, analysis, and multimodal tasks.
Google AI Studio — Free platform to prototype and build with Gemini models. Ideal for solo devs exploring AI integration.
Kimi — Chinese AI with industry-leading long context window. Excellent for reading and analyzing long documents in Chinese and English.
Perplexity — AI-powered search engine with real-time citations. The best tool for research, competitive intelligence, and fact-checked answers.
GPT Image 2 — OpenAI's latest image generation model with photorealistic quality, perfect for marketing assets and product visuals.
Manus — Autonomous AI agent for multi-step tasks. Plans, researches, codes, and deploys apps in a sandbox. Best for deep analysis and complex workflows.
Genspark — Super agent with Mixture-of-Agents architecture. Handles presentations, documents, video creation, and even simulated phone calls. Fastest general agent.
Replit Agent — Full-stack AI agent that builds, deploys, and hosts apps. Built-in database, auth, 30+ integrations (Stripe, Figma, Notion). MVP in minutes.
Descript — Edit video and podcasts like editing a document. AI transcription, filler-word removal, eye contact correction, and overdub voice cloning.
ElevenLabs — Industry-leading AI voice platform. Voice cloning from seconds of audio, 70+ languages, near-indistinguishable from real speech. The standard for AI voice.
HeyGen — AI avatar video generation. Create talking-head videos with realistic digital humans. Supports 40+ languages for global content.
Kling AI — By Kuaishou. Generates up to 2 minutes of video — 5× longer than competitors. Native audio generation. Best value for product walkthroughs and social content.
NotebookLM — Upload documents, get an AI podcast discussing them. Turns research papers, notes, and articles into conversational audio summaries.
Otter.ai — Meeting transcription and summary. Integrates with Zoom, Meet, and Teams. Auto-generates action items and follow-ups.
Pika — Creative AI video with unique 'Pikaffects' — physics-based animations like melting, crushing, inflating. Perfect for scroll-stopping social hooks.
Runway — Cinematic-quality AI video generation with advanced creative controls. Text-to-video, image-to-video, and AI editing for professional content.
Frase — AI content optimization platform. Analyzes top-ranking pages, generates content briefs, and optimizes articles for both SEO and GEO.
Crisp — All-in-one messaging with AI chatbot, live chat, knowledge base, and CRM. Generous free tier makes it perfect for early-stage products.
Intercom Fin — AI customer support that resolves tickets using your knowledge base. Handles common questions 24/7. The gold standard for AI support.
Tawk.to — Completely free live chat with unlimited agents. Perfect for budget-conscious solo founders.
Clay — AI lead research and enrichment from 75+ data sources. Builds detailed prospect profiles automatically. The outbound engine for solo SaaS.
Instantly — AI cold email at scale. Unlimited accounts, built-in warm-up, AI-written personalized sequences. The solo founder's outbound sales machine.
Learn, connect, and stay inspired.
- The Lean Startup — Eric Ries' classic on building businesses through validated learning and rapid iteration.
- Company of One — Paul Jarvis makes the case for staying small intentionally and building a sustainable solo business.
- MAKE: Bootstrapper's Handbook — Pieter Levels' practical playbook on shipping products, finding customers, and growing as a solo maker.
- The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick's guide to talking to customers and validating business ideas through conversations.
- The Minimalist Entrepreneur — Sahil Lavingia's book on how to start a business without funding, from the founder of Gumroad.
- Zero to One — Peter Thiel's contrarian view on innovation and building something truly new.
- Rework — Basecamp's counter-intuitive approach to business that challenges traditional startup wisdom.
- The Personal MBA — Josh Kaufman's fast-track business education covering fundamentals without the MBA price tag.
Kit (ConvertKit) — Email-first operating system for creators. Industry-leading automation sequences and digital product sales. Best for creators who sell.
Resend — Developer-first email API. 3K free emails/month, excellent deliverability, and React email component library.
MailerLite — Simple email marketing with automation. 1K free subscribers, drag-and-drop editor, and landing pages.
- Indie Hackers Newsletter — Weekly stories, strategies, and revenue numbers from solo founders building profitable businesses.
- The Bootstrapped Founder — Arvid Kahl's newsletter on building, growing, and selling bootstrapped SaaS companies.
- Small Bets — Daniel Vassallo's newsletter on building diversified income streams through small bets.
- Starter Story — Case studies and interviews with founders who started successful businesses, many solo.
- Indie Hackers Podcast — Interviews with solo founders sharing how they built profitable online businesses from scratch.
- The Bootstrapped Founder Podcast — Arvid Kahl explores the journey of bootstrapped founders, from idea to exit.
- My First Million — Sam Parr and Shaan Puri brainstorm business ideas and interview successful entrepreneurs.
- 津津乐道 — Chinese podcast on tech and startup topics hosted by industry veterans.
- 无人知晓 — Chinese podcast featuring indie developers and their journeys.
- Indie Hackers — The largest community for solo founders and indie makers to connect, share, and learn.
- r/SideProject — Reddit community for sharing side projects, getting feedback, and finding collaborators.
- MicroConf Connect — Community and conferences for bootstrapped SaaS founders, with a strong focus on solo and small teams.
- 电鸭社区 — Chinese community for remote work and indie developers.
- INDEV 独立开发者社区 — Chinese community for independent developers to share and learn.
- V2EX — Tech-focused community in China for developers and entrepreneurs.
- The Indie Course by Pieter Levels — Learn to build and launch profitable startups solo, from the maker of Nomad List.
- 30x500 Academy — Amy Hoy's course on finding customers, understanding their pain, and building products that sell.
- Marketing for Developers — Justin Jackson's guide for technical founders on finding customers and growing revenue.
- Y Combinator Startup School — Free online course from YC on how to start a startup.
- FreeCodeCamp — Free coding curriculum and full-stack development learning path.
- McKinsey: The State of AI in 2025 — Business-function adoption context for agentic AI and the gap between pilots and scaled workflow impact.
- MIT 2025 AI Agent Index — Tracks deployed agent products, capabilities, ecosystem shape, and safety features across the industry.
- PwC AI Agent Survey 2025 — Enterprise adoption signal for agent deployments, expected ROI, governance, and implementation barriers.
- KPMG Zero-Person Company Experiment — One of the clearest public experiments asking whether AI agents can run company functions with minimal human supervision.
- Gusto 2026 New Business Formation Report — How AI is changing who starts businesses and how solo founders launch operations.
- Stripe Sessions 2026: Indexing the Economy — Industry context for smaller, faster business entities, embedded finance, and nanocorp narratives.
Contributions are welcome. Please read the contribution guidelines before submitting a PR or opening an issue.
This project is licensed under MIT.