Tiny Desk Awards: 13 Companies Making $1M+ With 0 Employees

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
I was like, have you done any deals that I would have heard of? And he's like, you know Disneyland?
He's like, a lot of windows in Disneyland. We do all the windows in Disneyland.

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
Oh my God.

**Sam Parr** (0:14)
They bought a window company, got them a Disney contract, we do all the windows at Disney.
All right, what's up? We are talking about something pretty special. This episode, this is gonna be different than our normal episodes, which are freewheeling, freestyling. Today we got a plan.
And the plan is we're gonna talk about companies that crush it with only one or two employees. So the reason we thought about this was there was some news a couple of weeks ago that a company that I had never heard of called Wargraphs sold for $54 million. And that's obviously impressive, but the most impressive part was that Wargraph was just one dude. So one guy sold his company for $54 million.
And I don't know, do you know what Wargraphs did?

**Shaan Puri** (1:06)
Are you familiar with it? No, is it a gaming thing?

**Sam Parr** (1:08)
It's a gaming thing, yeah. So he built basically a companion app, I think for League of Legends. So if you play League of Legends, this was like a thing that would keep tracking your stats and stuff like that help you get better at the game.
So he built this little companion app and it had gotten really popular. I think he got into like a million players that used it and was generating serious revenue. And so he sold it for 54 million in cash and he was up front. He was like, I got half of the, sorry, I got half of the 54 million in cash up front and I have the other half as like my earn out that I have to leave it like, you know, if it hits, you know, our milestones along the way, which is just super impressive for a one person company. And-

**Shaan Puri** (1:44)
How old was the person?

**Sam Parr** (1:46)
I think he started when he was young, but now it's been like, you know, seven or eight years. So, you know, he probably-
I'm gonna guess something like 30, but it got me thinking. It was like, everybody talks about big businesses.
For good reason, big businesses are awesome. There they are, but what about mighty businesses? What about the guys who are punching above their weight? So somebody who has just themselves or just one or two people that does millions in revenue, profitably, flies under the radar, and how many other war graphs are there out there? So we did some research and we found some. And so that's what this episode is gonna be about. And we've kinda touched on this before. We've done some of our most popular episodes. If you go on YouTube, you'll see the episode with Peter Levels, I think has a couple hundred thousand listens, the episode about Amit Agarwal, the guy who builds G Suite, you know, basically like Google Sheets plugins.
He does millions of dollars in revenue as just kind of one guy who was a blogger turned app builder. And so those have been some of our most popular episodes. So I think this is gonna be a good one to Sam. Anything else before we jump in?

**Shaan Puri** (2:48)
Yeah, I wanna give an honor roll of mention to this one person.
Have you listened to Juvenile growing up? Remember rapper, the rapper Juvenile?

**Sam Parr** (2:57)
Of course, you're giving him a shout out like he's listening. Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (3:01)
Like last year NPR, they do this thing called the Tiny Desk Concert Series. You know what that is? It's like they're in the office, like playing acoustic songs.

**Sam Parr** (3:09)
Yeah, those are cool.

**Shaan Puri** (3:10)
They said, who should we have? And this one guy goes, you should have Juvenile. And Juvenile replies and he goes, what the F is a Tiny Desk and hell no.
And you know what? They got him to do it anyway. It happened this weekend. And so in preparation for this one man band show, I've been listening to that Juvenile Concert at the Tiny Desk MPR Series. It was awesome. It was awesome.
You remember Back That Ass Up and Slow Motion for Me and all that?

**Sam Parr** (3:42)
It was so good. It was so good.

**Shaan Puri** (3:44)
It was so good. I had to be inspired. Hitman Manny freshed in it and it was awesome. It was awesome, awesome, awesome. So honorable message to Juvenile.

**Sam Parr** (3:53)