In June 2020, during the first pandemic lockdown, Danny Postma took an eBook he’d written about writing better headlines — a $19 download — and turned it into software. He was a self-taught developer living in Bali, Indonesia, with no funding, no co-founder, and no plan beyond shipping something people would pay for.
The software was Headlime: an AI tool that generated marketing copy. Eight months later, it belonged to someone else, for a seven-figure sum. That wasn’t the end of the story. It was the first data point in a pattern Postma has now repeated twice.
From an ebook to $20,000 a month
Headlime found its market fast. By February 2021, it was generating $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue — a single founder, working alone, competing in a category that would soon be flooded with venture-backed AI copywriting startups.
The following month, Conversion.ai — the AI content-generation company that would go on to rename itself Jarvis, then Jasper AI, after a trademark dispute — acquired Headlime. Postma announced it himself.
”⚡ BIG NEWS: @getheadlime has been acquired by @conversionai,” he wrote on X on March 30, 2021. “Together we’re now the biggest AI-powered copywriting tool on the market.”
The deal was reported at more than $1 million — a seven-figure exit, eight months after launch, for a product one person had built and run.
Twenty products, one founder
Postma didn’t take the exit as a retirement plan. He kept building, under the umbrella of his own studio, Postcrafts, which he’d been operating since 2019. The approach was portfolio-style rather than single-bet: small, focused AI tools, shipped fast, kept running if they found traction and left alone or shut down if they didn’t. Postcrafts’ own site lists a run of products launched this way — HairstyleAI, TattoosAI, ProfilePicture.AI, and Deep Agency among them — alongside the earlier, acquired Headlime.
Most of those products were modest. One, launched in March 2023, was not.
The headshot pivot
HeadshotPro let users upload a handful of selfies and get back dozens of studio-quality professional headshots — generated by AI, styled with different backdrops and outfits, priced for the LinkedIn-photo problem millions of remote and hybrid workers suddenly had. Postma built it, by multiple accounts, in about a month.
The launch went further and faster than Headlime had. According to reporting on the launch by Starter Story and GreyJournal, HeadshotPro did six figures in sales within its first weeks online, driven by the same channel Postma had used before: building in public, largely on X, rather than paid acquisition.
The growth didn’t taper. Independent business trackers — GetLatka’s revenue database and an Indie Hackers breakdown of the product’s SEO strategy — have both put HeadshotPro at approximately $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue, roughly $3.6 million a year, achieved within about a year of launch. A case study published by Rewardful, the affiliate-tracking platform HeadshotPro uses, credits its affiliate program alone with contributing more than $50,000 of that in a typical month.
What “solo” actually meant
For a stretch, HeadshotPro was, by Postma’s own account and the accounts of people who’ve tracked his business, a company with a headcount of one. He wrote the product, handled the marketing, ran the SEO strategy that put HeadshotPro at the top of search results for “professional headshot” queries, and answered support himself. As revenue scaled past six figures a month, he began bringing on a small team — the pattern nearly every successful solo-built product eventually follows, because the tools that let one person build a product don’t scale the same way to running a support queue and a growing affiliate network.
What didn’t change was the funding structure. No venture round. No outside capital. Two products, two real outcomes — a seven-figure acquisition and a business generating millions a year — both financed entirely by the revenue the products themselves produced.
The pattern, twice
The first time Postma built something people paid for, he sold it within a year. The second time, he kept it, and it grew past what the first one sold for, every few months. Neither outcome required a pitch deck.
What connects them is a founder who has now demonstrated, twice, that the gap between “side project” and “seven-figure business” can be closed by one person with a clear read on what people will actually pay for — and the discipline to ship it before someone with more capital does.
Related founders
- Marc Lou Was Fired in 2021. He Now Runs 15+ Startups Alone and Cleared $1M in a Year. — another Bali-based solo builder running a portfolio of bootstrapped products with no outside funding.
- Six Months, $80 Million: How Maor Shlomo Built Base44 Alone — a solo founder whose AI product went from launch to a nine-figure acquisition in months, not years.
Quote from Danny Postma drawn from his own post on X, March 30, 2021 (@dannypostma). Headlime’s revenue and acquisition details are drawn from Postma’s Failory interview (“Building & Selling a SaaS for +$1M in 8 Months,” failory.com), Indie Hackers’ coverage of the deal, and TheyGotAcquired’s acquisition write-up. HeadshotPro’s launch and revenue figures are drawn from Starter Story’s and GreyJournal’s reporting on the launch, GetLatka’s revenue tracking, an Indie Hackers breakdown of HeadshotPro’s SEO strategy, and Rewardful’s published case study on HeadshotPro’s affiliate program. Postcrafts product portfolio drawn from postcrafts.com.
Frequently asked
Who is Danny Postma?
Danny Postma is a Dutch, self-taught developer based in Bali, Indonesia. He founded Headlime, an AI copywriting tool acquired by Conversion.ai in 2021, and later HeadshotPro, an AI headshot generator that reached roughly $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue as a solo-built product.
How much revenue does HeadshotPro make?
Multiple independent trackers, including GetLatka and Indie Hackers, have reported HeadshotPro at approximately $300,000 in monthly recurring revenue — roughly $3.6 million annualized — within about a year of its March 2023 launch.
Did Danny Postma raise venture capital?
No. Both Headlime and HeadshotPro were built and grown without outside investment. Postma has built his companies under his own studio, Postcrafts, funding growth from revenue rather than fundraising.
