This guy makes $3M/year from 20 different projects | Starter Story

John Rush was unhappy working at VC-backed startups. So he quit and launched his own apps—26 of them, to be precise. Today, his portfolio of solo-founded projects generates $3 million in annual recurring revenue. In this episode of Starter Story, Rush walks through the exact process he uses to come up with ideas, validate them before writing code, and operate a sprawling collection of businesses without burning out.

The exit from VC-backed life

Rush spent a decade working for large venture-funded startups. The work paid well but left him feeling bored and unmotivated. The VC model, he realized, incentivized the wrong things: raising money, chasing hockey-stick growth, and spending on vanity metrics. "Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them, that's bull spend," Rush says. He saw marketers rationalizing poor performance with lines like "it'll be good for the brand"—which he dismisses bluntly: "Yeah, it wasn't."

The alternative he chose was building small, profitable apps as a solo founder. No investors, no board, no growth-at-all-costs pressure. Just products that generate cash and serve real users. Over three years, he launched 26 of them. Twenty are currently active.

The idea generation system