Written by: Ada, Shenchao TechFlow
At the end of 2024, Israeli developer Maor Shlomo was discharged from reserve duty, opened his laptop, and started a project. No funding, no team, no Slack channel. Six months later, Wix acquired his company, Base44, for $80 million in cash. The product already had 250,000 users and a monthly profit of $189,000. In the three months leading up to the acquisition, he didn't write a single line of front-end code.
The Dutchman Pieter Levels is even more extreme. One person, zero employees, using the most basic PHP and jQuery, simultaneously running three products: Nomad List, Remote OK, and Photo AI. By 2022, his total annual revenue had already reached $2.7 million. He has never held a job, never raised funding, living a digital nomad life across more than 40 countries and 150 cities.
These stories are so compelling that they create an illusion: one person plus one computer can build an empire from scratch.
Incubators for one-person companies are sprouting up everywhere in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. Nanshan Moli Camp covers 100,000 square meters, attracting 700 company applications; Lingang Zero Boundary Magic Cube offers free workspaces—its first phase of 300 workstations was snapped up, and a second phase of 8,000 square meters is already on the way. Danshao, who runs a one-person company community in Chengdu, found every event packed to capacity after operating for less than a month.
The trend has indeed exploded. According to the "China OPC Development Trends Report (2025-2030)", as of June 2025, the number of one-person limited liability companies in China has exceeded 16 million. In the first half of 2025 alone, 2.86 million new OPCs were registered nationwide, a surge of 47% year-on-year, accounting for 23.8% of all newly registered enterprises.
But what lies beneath this trend?
We spoke with three people currently on this path: an observer who has run a one-person company community for nearly two years with over 2,500 real samples; a '00s generation entrepreneur who has built two businesses spanning China and Silicon Valley; and an independent developer who transitioned from being a primary market FA to building an AI Agent product.
The stories they tell are different from the narrative on social media.
The Underlying Logic of Success
Dai Wenqian operates the one-person company community SoloNest in Shanghai, which started for a simple reason. In June 2024, she had just left the internet education industry and wanted to know what one person could actually achieve. Unable to find answers in books or videos, she decided to conduct her own field research: organizing events, examining samples, conducting interviews.
After nearly two years, she has accumulated over 2,500 samples, 20% of which have successfully established a commercial closed loop and achieved results. She has also compiled her observations into a book: "One-Person Company".
Joint research by Qichacha and Xiaobaogao shows that the three-year survival rate for enterprises established in China in 2021 had fallen to 71%, meaning nearly a quarter died off within the first three years. Clearly, SoloNest's 20% success rate outperforms the market average.
But Dai Wenqian is more concerned about the 80%.
"Those who didn't make it fall into two categories. One group took action but didn't succeed—their traffic dried up or their model wasn't sustainable. The other group never even started," she analyzes.
The number of people who never start is much larger than imagined.
"Because they aren't in enough pain; they have a fallback. Their brain tricks them into thinking they want to start, but essentially, it's just a fear of missing out. Most of them are worried about their current job and think OPC entrepreneurship might be a solution, but fear is probably a terrible starting point," says Dai Wenqian.
Leon, who worked as a primary market FA, has seen even more such people. Attending offline events for one-person companies, he found large numbers of people without direction, constantly attending events and buying courses. "No one can help you figure out how you should make money. Only by doing, by stumbling, by learning the hard way, is the correct path," says Leon.
Among those who did start, who survived?
The answer is very counterintuitive. Dai Wenqian sees a stable commonality in the effective samples: almost all those who successfully closed the loop are not working in their original industry.
They don't choose their赛道 (battlefield) based on "what am I good at," but rather use "where is there an unmet demand" as their starting point.
Dai Wenqian uses herself as an example. She worked in branding at Himalaya, never having organized offline events or run a community. But she possessed underlying abilities like curiosity about people, an aesthetic sense for product development, and structured expression—skills not limited by industry. Once she identified a demand point, scenario, and industry pain point, she could migrate these underlying abilities over.
There's also a guy in the SoloNest community who makes tennis bags; he wasn't originally in the bag industry either. Because he liked playing tennis, he discovered a demand not met by existing products on the market. With 100,000 RMB in startup capital, he created an original tennis bag. After two years, he now steadily sells over 300 bags a month. This corresponds precisely to a methodology in Pieter Levels' playbook. In 2014, Levels set himself a challenge: make 12 products in 12 months, throw them on the market, and see which one got traction. Nomad List was the 7th, and the only one that took off.
The key isn't just choosing the right赛道, but also rapidly validating enough hypotheses.
Dai Wenqian breaks this process down into three watersheds. The first: do you dare to handcraft something and throw it on the market? Unfortunately, many people lack even the mindset to validate, all thought no action. The second: after someone shows interest, can you sell it? There's a chasm between "someone thinks it's good" and "people consistently paying for it." The third: can you extricate yourself from the delivery process?
The first two filters weed out those who don't move and those who move but don't succeed.
The third is the real hard battle.
The 1.2 Million RMB Trap
Those who pass the first two hurdles will find that while they are alive, there is a ceiling firmly welded above them.
Dai Wenqian gives a precise number: the annual revenue ceiling for one person relying on self-delivery is about 1 to 1.2 million RMB.
"No matter how diligent you are, selling time has an upper limit," she says.
This is the most realistic dilemma for one-person companies in China. Social media talks about Maor Shlomo's $80 million exit and Pieter Levels' $2.7 million annual income, but those are stories of Silicon Valley SaaS and global digital products. In China's soil, one-person companies more often grow in the C-side (consumer), tertiary industry, and experience economy, with heavy delivery chains, tightly binding the person to the service.
Barry, who operates businesses spanning China and the US, sees a more fundamental divide. American kids think about B2B SaaS and AI Agents when starting businesses. Chinese kids think about physical industries like pets, elderly care, and food. This isn't about who is smarter; it's the difference in industrial structure and willingness to pay between the two countries. American companies have a strong willingness to pay for enterprise software; a small SaaS tool can succeed, while China's to B ecosystem is completely different.
So, how exactly does one break through the 1.2 million RMB ceiling?
The most intuitive path is automation, using AI to remove oneself from the delivery chain.
But this path is far more difficult than the narrative suggests.
There is a typical case in the SoloNest community. Jason's business is job search coaching, helping interns and new graduates in internet operations roles with resume editing, mock interviews, and job search assistance. Starting out, it was purely selling time, taking on a dozen clients a month.
Many peers get stuck here and die. Jason's approach was to find a group of peers who struggled with sustained customer acquisition, train them, and refer clients to them. He shares revenue per order, no employment relationship. Dai Wenqian calls this "multiple one-person companies cooperating, not one multi-person company." Later, he developed a To B agency operation business, evolving from pure C-side to C plus B.
Now Jason is working on the third step: using consultation data from the past two years to build a knowledge base and develop a semi-automated delivery product. But after two months, it's only 60% complete.
Why so slow? Dai Wenqian provides a mathematical model: "Suppose your delivery chain has 5 key nodes, and automating each node only achieves 80% of the quality of doing it manually. Is the overall qualification rate after automation 80%? No, it's 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8, which is only 33%. The longer the chain, the harder automation becomes. It's not additive; it's multiplicative."
This is why automation "seems like it could happen all at once," but when you actually build it, you realize if any single link isn't done well, the output is garbage. Using AI well requires that you were already doing a great job manually; otherwise, you can't identify the problems.
Leon is the most technically skilled among the three interviewees. He now builds his own AI Agent product, writing not a single line of code, delegating all development to AI. AI penetration in his workflow is close to 100%.
But his judgment on automation is very measured: "Evaluating whether a task can be handed to AI depends on three things: is the cost low, is the risk small, is the effect good? Services for high-net-worth individuals cannot use AI. AI's way of working is that you allow it to make mistakes, and it optimizes strategy through errors. But in services for high-net-worth individuals, mistakes are not allowed. One communication mishap, and the whole business is finished."
Some parts of the business simply cannot be replaced by AI.
Dai Wenqian herself admits her AI penetration rate is only 30%. Because her core delivery is offline human interaction; this part cannot be automated. What she can do is partial automation, including content marketing for customer acquisition, knowledge base沉淀 (precipitation/accumulation), etc., but she cannot completely remove herself from the business.
She works over 14 hours a day. Creating content to attract new users, screening through chats, maintaining partnerships, designing products, analyzing samples, plus two fixed offline events every weekend.
"Most one-person company founders don't post this kind of thing online. Nobody wants to see it. Everyone likes the glamorous pictures: drinking coffee here, visiting exhibitions there, earning millions a year, 'big女主' (strong female lead). But the reality is, entrepreneurship involves a lot of dirty, tedious work, constant repetition, constant iteration," she says.
One-Person Company is Not the End State
Automation is one path, but not the only one.
Dai Wenqian observes another way to break through: not replacing oneself, but拼接 (piecing/assembling) oneself together.
Jason's case follows this logic. He doesn't hire employees; he cooperates with other one-person companies. Each Lego block is an independent entity, with its own capabilities and clients, pieced together to create增量 (incremental value).
And if every one-person company can be enhanced by AI, then piecing them together creates enhanced Legos. Dai Wenqian believes this is the greatest source of imagination for one-person companies: "It's like Lego. Not every brick needs to be 100% AI-ified, but each brick is enhanced by AI. Three enhanced Lego bricks pieced together aren't 1+1+1; it's 3×3×3."
Another path is replicating one's experience and methodology to more people. Barry has实践验证 (validated through practice) this model. He is the founder of two one-person companies. He explored from 0 to 1 himself, and after the commercial closed loop was established, he withdrew and handed over management to a team, letting the team take over like a relay baton, while he went on to explore other businesses.
Maor Shlomo faced a similar choice. Base44 grew to 250,000 users and nearly $200,000 monthly profit in six months, but he still chose to sell to Wix. His explanation: despite the astonishing growth, the scale and size we needed couldn't be reached organically by one person. One person can take a product from 0 to 1, but going from 1 to 100 requires organization, resources, and distribution capabilities—things one person cannot achieve.
Three different paths: AI productization, cooperative assembly, partner expansion—but the underlying logic is the same: a one-person company is not the final state. It's a springboard. Use the lowest cost to validate an idea. Once it's proven, you must find a way to no longer be the bottleneck. Otherwise, you'll forever be welded to that 1.2 million RMB line.
Before the Door Closes
The 2026 data looks bright. Shenzhen issued an OPC创业生态行动计划 (Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Action Plan), aiming to build over 10 10,000-square-meter-level OPC communities by 2027. Shanghai's Pudong offers up to 300,000 RMB in free computing power to newly registered one-person companies. Suzhou attracted 300,000 university students in 2025; the talent pool is rapidly expanding.
But Dai Wenqian says something sobering.
"The barrier to entry has significantly lowered. Before, finding money, people,场地 (venue)—startup costs were huge. Now you can validate almost anything at near-zero cost. But this benefit is universal; it's easier for you, but also easier for others. More players mean more expensive traffic. This is an arms race."
Pieter Levels can earn $2.7 million a year alone because he started in 2014, accumulating a decade of SEO moat and community trust. Maor Shlomo of Base44 could sell his company in six months because he had previously founded a data company that raised $125 million; his network, judgment, and speed were not starting from zero.
These people are not the "anyone can do it" narrative told in one-person company stories. They are the brightest points in survivor bias.
The real world of one-person companies is the 2,500+ samples in the SoloNest community: 20% are consistently making money and moving to the next stage; 40% are stuck in various ways but still iterating, still wanting to break through; and another 40% are still迷茫找方向 (confusedly searching for direction). Among the surviving 20%, most earn less than 1.2 million RMB annually. Working until late at night, weekdays packed, no weekends.
Actually, the one-person company model profits from the time gap between "a niche demand being discovered" and "it being captured by organized capital." This time gap has a name: its shelf life.
The shelf life depends on two things: the timing of your discovery of this demand, and the speed at which you make it work.
Lowering the barrier won't延长 (lengthen) the shelf life. Quite the opposite, it will shorten it. Because what you can validate at zero cost, others can too. The demand you see, others see it too. Today, if you handcraft an MVP and throw it out, surviving for three months, tomorrow ten identical products will appear on the same user's phone.
This is why most people get "stuck." Being stuck is essentially not an ability problem; it's that the speed at which time兑现 (realizes/cashes in) on them cannot keep up with the market's crowding speed.
The reason Maor Shlomo and Pieter Levels are advertisements, not samples, is precisely because they solved the shelf-life problem in two opposite ways. Levels extended the shelf life to ten years through first-mover advantage and compound interest. Shlomo compressed the shelf life to six months through speed and exit.
The middle path is the most dangerous. For most one-person company founders in China, they neither have ten years to slowly build a flywheel, nor a Wix coming to write a check. Working 14 hours a day to maintain the 1.2 million RMB ceiling, they believe if they just hold on a little longer, they can break through. But the market won't wait for you to hold on. The next peer validating at zero cost can appear at any time, flattening your little moat.
A one-person company has never been a state one can长期停留 (long-term reside in); it is a window with a shelf life.
When the window opens, with low barriers, cheap tools, and clear demand, it seems like the best era for ordinary people. But the window won't stay open forever. It will be crowded out by those entering later,碾过去 (run over/overwhelmed) by more efficient tools, and finally,彻底关上 (completely closed) by some funded startup or a major company's business line suddenly entering the fray.
Whether you can move yourself away from that bottleneck position before it closes is the only real challenge in this business.
