Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.
Harry Dry is a British solo entrepreneur and the creator of Marketing Examples, the self-proclaimed #1 marketing newsletter with 130,000+ subscribers. Built from a pre-marathon epiphany in Paris in May 2019, his newsletter distills world-class marketing and copywriting into sharp, visual, bite-sized breakdowns sent every Monday. With zero paid ads, he grew an audience of 110,000+ across platforms, earned the endorsement of writer David Perell who called him 'the best copywriter I know,' and turned a $1,000 investment into a full-time business - all while operating as a one-man show.
Adam Wathan is a Canadian developer, entrepreneur, and the creator of Tailwind CSS - the utility-first CSS framework used by millions of developers worldwide. As CEO of Tailwind Labs, he turned a side-project experiment into a multi-million dollar business encompassing Tailwind UI, Headless UI, and an ecosystem of developer tools. A college dropout turned prolific course creator, he built his reputation first through 'Refactoring to Collections' and 'Refactoring UI' (co-authored with Steve Schoger), generating over $2.5 million in book sales alone. In January 2026, he made headlines again when AI's disruption of developer documentation led to dramatic revenue declines and significant layoffs at Tailwind Labs, prompting major sponsorships from Vercel, Google, and others rallying to support what they called 'foundational web infrastructure.'
Josh W Comeau is a Montreal-based frontend developer, indie course creator, and one of the most beloved CSS and React educators on the internet. After stints at Unsplash, Shopify, Khan Academy, and Gatsby, he left corporate engineering in 2020 to build interactive, deeply original courses that generated over $550,000 in presale revenue. His CSS for JavaScript Developers and The Joy of React courses have taught more than 28,000 developers through a teaching style that blends interactive widgets, mini-games, and the rare gift of building genuine mental models rather than just showing code.
Michael Lynch is a bootstrapped solo founder who quit Google after seven years to build software and hardware businesses entirely on his own terms. He grew TinyPilot - a KVM-over-IP device built from a $100 Raspberry Pi kit - into a $1M/year business and sold it in 2024 for ~$600K. He writes with radical transparency about money, failure, and the craft of independent software development at mtlynch.io, and is now writing 'Refactoring English', a book on writing for software engineers.
Wes Bos is a full-stack JavaScript developer, educator, and course creator from Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He has taught over 500,000 developers worldwide through his free and paid online courses covering JavaScript, CSS, React, and Node.js. His flagship free course JavaScript30 has over 682,000 enrollments. He co-hosts the popular web development podcast Syntax.fm with Scott Tolinski and CJ Reynolds. His course business has generated over $10M in revenue, largely as a solo operation with a free-tier marketing strategy that has built a massive, loyal audience.