how compulsive builder john rush runs 24 products without any employees

John Rush proves that you don’t need a team to build considerable – just curiosity, creativity, and smart systems

While most founders see headcount as a measure of success, John Rush is doing the opposite. From a forest outside Istanbul, he runs 24 profitable products with zero employees. “I call myself the most automated entrepreneur on earth,” he says.

His portfolio spans a landing page builder (Unicorn Platform), SEO tools (IndexRusher, SEO Bot AI), and AI agents that monitor support channels, write content, and even manage projects. Each venture is co-owned with one developer, while everything else – distribution, marketing, customer support – is automated.

For founders juggling multiple ventures, his approach feels both radical and practical. Rush demonstrates how a single person can validate, build, and grow products in ways that used to require entire teams.

Validate through story, not code

Rush has built 24 products, but he has killed hundreds of ideas before they reached code. His method is to test demand through story rather than prototypes.

“It’s much easier to test your idea in story form than in product form,” he says. “I share the story on the internet, from all the angles possible. When people start asking when I’ll launch instead of why – that’s the green light.”

IndexRusher, his tool for solving indexing problems in Google Search Console, started this way. He noticed founders complaining on X about pages not being indexed and all solutions being manual. He built a waitlist with a single button to connect Search Console and then processed everything manually. That was the product’s first version.

Scanning Reddit threads, X discussions, and LinkedIn groups for pain points is part of his workflow. Just as important is doing the work himself, from SEO to support to outreach, until the pain becomes clear enough to turn into a product.

The longest prompts are the don’ts

When it comes to building, Rush doesn’t start with a team. He starts with AI coding platforms. “I use Lovable or Wrapifai to build my first MVPs, and also my own Unicorn Platform if the product is very simple,” he says. “You can talk to these tools as though they’re your co-founders.”

For him, the process is prompt-driven. He prepares detailed prompts over weeks, sometimes even months: first the business model, then feature lists with specifics, and finally the longest list of all – the don’ts. “Now I’m so good at spec-ing that I don’t even do follow-ups. I get one shot and it just works.”

The prompts themselves are transferable: he often copies the same brief from one tool into another when switching platforms. And he is quick to warn founders that AI builds can be “too perfect”, adding features nobody asked for. That’s why he keeps early versions minimal.

“Vibe coding tools are great to start, but they’re not meant for production. I copy the whole project into Cursor when I need production-grade. You can move between tools, and you should,” he says.

Automate marketing but don’t skip the personal brand

Rush applies the same philosophy to marketing: automate what can scale. Keyword research, programmatic SEO pages, directories, and LinkedIn outreach are all generated with AI workflows. Marketing, he argues, is the safest place to experiment with automation because mistakes don’t carry the same cost as in product or finance.

He is clear, however, that automation isn’t enough. The most powerful growth channel is the founder’s own presence. “The best thing one could do now is to build a personal brand rather than a company brand,” he says. “A personal brand is like wind on a fire. If there’s no fire – no product – nothing happens. But if there is, it amplifies everything.”

Algorithms, in his view, favour small accounts if the content resonates. “Regardless of your follower count, the algorithms are really good for viral content. You just need one viral post. Before that tweet about Product Hunt, I had almost no attention. Then it hit 100,000 views. Once you go viral, everything changes.”

What should you post about to go viral? Not yourself, Rush insists, but the problem. When he saw that Product Hunt consistently promoted marketing tools while ignoring developer tools, he wrote about it. The message went viral because nobody else was saying it. He recommends founders do the same: find under-discussed problems, state them clearly, and promote them in the online communities where your audience already gathers.

Design for freedom, not headcount

Why spread focus across 24 products instead of doubling down on one? For Rush, the answer is freedom.

“If you have one large startup, it becomes like a job. You’re bound to the idea, the board, the employees. I like the freedom of being early,” he says. That freedom is why he declines corporate contracts that would require SLAs and account managers: “It hurts my pocket, but in the long run I’m better off.”

Every summer, he disappears for months at a time, letting his products run without him. Instead of collapsing, sales remain stable. Part of this resilience comes from Nova, his AI project manager inside Discord. It monitors mentions across the internet, plans fixes, and even replies to customers – convincingly enough that some users mistake it for a human.

Another part is his audience strategy. His users are busy founders like himself: quick to respond, quick to buy, and often signing up for multiple tools at once. He describes the connection almost as emotional: they feel the same frustrations, and their feedback loops are fast and honest. Corporate clients, by contrast, are slow, bureaucratic, and come with the added burden of liability if something goes wrong.

For him, it comes down to lifestyle priorities. “Don’t trade freedom for money,” he says – whether that means turning down contracts, spending summers offline, or making room for family and real life outside the screen.

The future looks bright for…

Looking ahead, Rush sees entrepreneurship moving away from scale for its own sake. “We’ll see fewer monopolies and more specialised businesses,” he says. The trend is already visible in how even venture-backed companies now boast about being lean rather than bloated. “Even YC-backed startups are bragging about their headcount being three people instead of 50. It’s cool to be small now.”

In his view, the future belongs to niche, human-centred businesses: lightweight, automated, and focused on very specific audiences. With smarter search engines and generative AI favouring depth and trust, he believes specialised founders can finally outcompete generalist giants.

Beyond this episode: automating for freedom

John Rush’s story shows how a founder can scale by staying small: automating the work that used to require teams, leaning on personal brand for growth, and choosing freedom over headcount.

Winning Friends is a podcast powered by Estonia’s e-Residency, hosted by Logan Merrick and Dylan Hey. Each episode explores how real relationships – in business, partnerships, and the systems we rely on – shape the way we build.

Want to dig deeper into how global entrepreneurs are building borderless businesses safely? Don’t miss our article on Estonia’s e-⁠Residency programme, a way for founders around the world to launch, run, and scale companies with European access, no matter where they live.

Watch the full episode of Winning Friends featuring John Rush below.