The Business That Bought My Freedom
The highest return on the software I built wasn't money. It was time.
The best thing I ever built made me a rounding error to investors - and it bought me my freedom.
In 2015 I co-founded CrazyLister, software that helps eBay sellers build professional-looking listings. We made every mistake in the book - including raising venture capital, which in hindsight was the biggest one. We grew it to $2M a year in revenue, swimming hard against a declining market the whole way.
Here’s the thing about $2M ARR: for the founders, it’s life-changing. For a VC, it barely registers. We’d accidentally built a micro-SaaS - a small, niche software business that doesn’t fit the venture model because the market’s just too small to ever return a fund. We spent years trying to force a small-but-great business to behave like a rocket ship. It was never going to.
But that “modest” business did something the rocket ships often don’t: it gave me my freedom. CrazyLister is what funded my pilot’s license. It’s what let me spend four years building a crazy deep-tech company - Diptera.ai. It’s what made it possible to move my family to Thailand on nine hours’ notice. The money was modest; the freedom it bought was not.
That’s why, years later, I’m still a believer in micro-SaaS as a tool for freedom - for the people who can build it.
A micro-SaaS can be run from anywhere, by a tiny team, with low overhead. It throws off income without eating your life. In a world where more and more people want control over their own time, a small software business that quietly pays the bills is one of the most direct paths there is to getting it.
The catch is in that phrase - for the people who can build it. This isn’t passive income or a side-hustle fantasy. Building software that strangers will pay for, month after month, is hard, and most attempts don’t make it. I’m not selling the dream. I’m saying that if you have the skills to build one, a micro-SaaS is one of the highest-leverage things you can do with them - not because it’ll make you rich, but because it can buy back the one thing you can’t earn more of: your time.
And if you’re wondering how much you’d actually need to be free, here’s the sobering math - and why you can’t save your way there.