3-Person Teams, $1.5M & John Rush

Weekly #094 | Creating 100x founders by 2027

Author

George Samuels
March 19th, 2024

Table of Contents

"My growth secret: bet only on organic. When you grow a product for free, you have a limited number of things you can do. And almost all those things last forever and have a high ROI." - John Rush

John Rush (@johnrushx), is an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast who’s been building startups since 2009. He’s also very contrarian, doing things that often go against conventional startup advice (but works). He emphasizes the future of tech, predicting a profound shift in how tech companies are run by 2027.

He advocates for utilizing AI agents and tools to scale operations without traditional managers or more employees. He has a significant background in creating profitable SaaS tools and tech products, having developed over 20 in 2023 alone. John's approach to product development involves not listening to users but trusting his own instincts — again, pretty contrarian, huh?

Let’s dive in this fascinating micropreneur.

💼 Biz Breakdown

John’s primary focus is building startups, with a focus on AI-powered platforms like MarsX, which has achieved a $1.5M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue).

He also runs Unicornplatform.com, which is a dev tool innovator and AI enthusiast. John's approach to product development involves not listening to users but trusting his own instincts.

He’s developed over 20 products in 2023, including open-source alternatives to paid tools, and has a newsletter called "100xfounder.beehiiv.com".

John's goal is to create a 100x founder by 2027, with a team consisting of a CEO, CTO, and COO, all of which are scaled using AI agents and tools

👥 Team Spotlight

John predicts that teams of the future will consist of only 3 people:

  1. A CEO for creative work

  2. A CTO for tech tasks using AI-powered platforms like MarsX

  3. A COO for non-creative operations

Eerie side-note: this is a setup I evolved into with my other company, Faiā, before I even knew John. So must be on to something!

So this is the setup John has himself. However, he mentions that for one of his companies, UnicornPlatform, he has only one other developer working with him there.

Recent studies have shown that smaller teams are consistently surpassing the performance of their larger counterparts. This has shed light on the undeniable advantages that come with having a more compact and tightly-knit group. In various industries and sectors, it has become evident that smaller teams possess a unique ability to adapt quickly, communicate efficiently, and make decisions with greater agility. These teams are able to foster a stronger sense of camaraderie and collaboration, leading to increased productivity and innovation.

UK Small Business Growth Outperforms Larger Companies in Recent Years Says Mastercard | The Fintech Times

The number of micro-businesses in the UK grew every year in the last decade, while small business growth outpaced larger companies' growth.

thefintechtimes.com/uk-small-business-growth-outperforms-larger-companies-in-recent-years-says-mastercard

For John, it’s been pretty clear for him for years. But more recently, he said:

“X laid off thousands of people, 80% of all staff is gone but it's doing better than ever on all possible KPIs. Every day another 10-person team is taking a market share from 1000 people corporates.” 1

This is why we’re big supporters of micropreneurs and their micro-empires!

🔑 Key Insight

There’s a lot you can learn from John, but one of his more interesting insights comes from a tweet of his about why most people will be laid off in the coming years. But he makes a point about smaller teams — the superpower of micropreneurs and micro-empire builders:

🏛️ Historical Ties

One ancient history concept that applies to John Rush's product development approach is the concept of "time and motion studies" developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the early 20th century. Taylor's approach involved timing tasks, analyzing inefficient motions, and optimizing tasks to increase productivity. Rush's focus on efficiency and optimizing tasks using AI-powered platforms like MarsX can be seen as a modern application of Taylor's principles.2

☝️ Actionable Tips

SEO accounts for about 30% of John’s traffic and revenue, yet it’s often overlooked by newer founders and micropreneurs. We’ve been doing our own experiments based off of John’s tips (and Julian Goldie).

So we highly recommend you check out two of his platforms in relation to SEO:

  1. UnicornPlatform.com — website builder for those who like to build fast, yet still maintain good SEO

  2. LIstingBott.com — a service we’ve used ourselves, which lists your product on 100+ directories. This helps improve your DR (Domain Ranking) and slopes up exponentially over time.

  3. IndexRusher.com — a tool that helps to get a website indexed by Google much faster

Conclusion

Overall, John is an incredibly prolific builder. What’s fascinating is that his team setup (CEO, CTO, and COO) echoes what most founding teams look like in a startup. However, in his future world, these three may be all that’s needed to build a super successful company that rivals larger competitors. There’s actually a lot of evidence of smaller teams and even language models outperforming their larger counterparts.

Microsoft releases Orca 2, a pair of small language models that outperform larger counterparts

When tested on 15 diverse benchmarks (in zero-shot settings) covering aspects like language understanding and common-sense reasoning, the Orca 2 models matched or outperformed five to ten times bigger models.

venturebeat.com/ai/microsoft-releases-orca-2-a-pair-of-small-language-models-that-outperform-larger-counterparts

So all in all, if you’re a subscriber of this newsletter, you’re ahead of the pack. Micropreneurs building micro-empires is the way of the f

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