AI Business Cases
Deep dives into businesses making real money with AI.
He Was CEO of a 100-Person Company. After Military Reserve Duty, He Built a Solo App and Sold It for $170M in Six Months.
Maor Shlomo — alumni of Israel's elite intelligence unit, co-founder of a startup he scaled to 100 employees at age 24 — spent over a year on military reserve duty after October 7th. When he returned, he stepped down as CEO and started building again alone. While trying to make his girlfriend a website for her tattoo studio, he conceived of 'software that makes software.' With zero outside investment, his vibe coding platform Base44 amassed 350,000 users in six months and was acquired by Wix for $80M cash plus a $90M earnout.
Former Optician Spent 3 Years, Watched 15 Hours of YouTube Coding Tutorials — Now Earning $35,000/Month with 3 SaaS Products
Samuel Rondot, a French optician, taught himself to code before and after his daily commute. His first business was an Instagram automation service powered by contractors in India and Bangladesh, which hit $30,000/month — enough for him to quit his job. He now runs 3 SaaS products including AI video generation tool StoryShort, generating $35,000/month. His strategy, with Claude Code handling 90% of development, is simple: 'Don't invent — improve what works by 1%.'
Two Guys Who Built a Lecture Recording App for Professors Are Now Making $42,000/Month
A small app built in 2019 to solve university professors' lecture recording problems evolved through the COVID pandemic into a knowledge management platform for all organizations. Harry Brodsky and Khanan Grauer, with a team of just 5, acquired over 100,000 users and achieved $42,000 MRR through bootstrapping alone. Free strategy failures, an AppSumo experiment, giving up on paid ads — this is the growth formula they found after 7 years of failures and pivots.
The Man Who Shut Down His AI Consumer App After 3 Months — Then Built a Reddit Marketing Tool to $1M ARR in 4 Months
Richard Wang spent five years as an engineer at a Chinese tech company before going independent — but his first AI consumer app failed after just three months. Humbled by the experience, he started posting on Reddit himself to learn marketing, and built a community of 300 people before writing a single line of code. The result was Leadmore AI — a solo AI SaaS that hit $30K MRR in four months with zero marketing spend and has since crossed $1M ARR.
The Man Who Failed at a Delivery Startup Now Makes $120K/Month Buying Other People's SaaS
He co-founded an AI chatbot company and sold it to Microsoft. He joined a startup as employee #9 and watched it grow to $250M ARR. Then he built his own delivery startup — and it failed miserably. 'I am not someone who builds things from zero.' The moment Pascal Levy-Garboua admitted that, he started buying SaaS products built by others. Today, three products generate $120,000 per month.
70 Failed Consulting Projects → Two Founders Build $500K ARR Agentic Engineer
Adam Elkassas was tired of wasting 2-6 weeks on client scoping meetings while working at a crypto hedge fund. An internal AI scoping bot became pre.dev, and together with co-founder Arjun Raj Jain, they reached $500K ARR. Over 10,000 founders including NVIDIA and YC startups are now using it.
0 Employees, $138K/Month Solo — The PhotoAI Story of Pieter Levels
A Dutch developer who failed 70 times built a single AI photo service generating $138K/month. The full story of a one-person AI business run from a laptop — no employees, no investors, no office.