Ask HN: Are there any substantial product-based businesses with zero employees?

[gathersight]

Other than the founder or the founding team?

Or, put another way, is it possible to build a sizeable business using contractors and external providers only?

For arguments sake, 'sizeable' and 'substantial' equate to $10m+ pa in revenue and the business must make and sell something i.e. it's not a holding company, licensor, trader etc.

[Jefro118]

BuiltWith.com is pretty much just one guy doing over $10m per year. At the notch below there are others like Pieter Levels who I think is doing over $1m per year with Nomad List and RemoteOK and I think it's mostly just him with some part time help. Probably a few more that no one has heard of.

[gathersight]

Thanks, builtwith.com is a pretty useful tool too.

[kleer001]

sounds a bit like arbitrage and I suspect there's at least one or two

[garbagecoder]

Mondragon Cooperatives?

[jsiaajdsdaa]

In the event that there isn't, you should try to be the first!

[gathersight]

Yup! My curiosity is this: at what scale does using contractors instead of employees start to break? Is it possible to build an infinitely large business with contractors only?

[jsiaajdsdaa]

Hire me and we can find out :) I am of the opinion that 1 developer can build an amazing service, compared to 10 normal ones