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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
What Can You Learn from 22 Microteam Success Stories? (…Plus 1) – Real microteams, real results, and the repeatable patterns behind outsized growth with tiny teams… and one notable failure.
Stardew Valley (ConcernedApe): Solo IP to Half-Billion Sales
One person. Four years. Zero budget.
A farming simulator game built from scratch by a guy who taught himself to code, compose music, and draw pixel art, all while working as a theater usher to pay rent.
The result? Over 30 million copies sold. More than $500 million in revenue. And a game that's still in the top-played list on Steam nearly a decade after launch.
This is the story of Eric Barone, known online as ConcernedApe, and how he built one of the most successful indie games of all time without a team, without funding, and without compromise.
The $24,000/Year Bet
Eric Barone graduated college in 2011 with a computer science degree, ready to land a programming job.
Instead, he got rejections. Lots of them.
So he took a job as an usher at Seattle's Paramount Theatre, making about $24,000 a year. It wasn't glamorous, but it paid the bills while he figured out his next move.
Eric had always loved Harvest Moon, a classic farming game from the 90s. But the newer versions felt hollow. They'd lost the charm, depth, and soul that made the originals great.
He thought: "What if I made the Harvest Moon game I wish existed?"
So in 2012, he started building Stardew Valley. Alone. In his spare time.
No team. No funding. No plan to sell millions of copies. Just a guy who wanted to make something he'd actually want to play.
For four years, Eric worked on the game obsessively. He taught himself pixel art by watching YouTube tutorials. He composed all the music himself (he'd never written music before). He coded every system including farming, fishing, mining, relationships, seasons, events… from scratch.
His girlfriend (now wife) supported him through the whole thing, even when friends and family questioned why he was "wasting" years on a game instead of getting a "real job."
"I didn't have a backup plan. I didn't think about failure. I just worked on it every single day."
In February 2016, Stardew Valley launched on Steam.
It sold 425,000 copies in the first two weeks. By the end of the first month, it had made over $6 million.
Eric, the guy who'd been ushering people to their seats for $12/hour, had just built a half-billion-dollar IP… by himself.
The One-Person Studio Strategy
Eric didn't accidentally stumble into success. He made specific, intentional choices that allowed him to operate as a solo developer and still compete with AAA studios.
Here's what made Stardew Valley work as a one-person operation: