So I'm just curious if Patrick was really meaning that he can without pausing name 50 non-VC backed lifestyle product companies that are making $1M in salaries and profits for their founders, or that he meant that he can name 50 companies that are generally well-off, and are making e.g. a few thousand dollars per year for their founders.
The difference is important in my opinion, as I can name a several that make a few thousand dollars a year by consulting, but I don't know people that make over a million a year for themselves with an internet product without an investment. Those that I personally know that earn $1m, are in more fishy type of business (E.g. quick SMS loans) and have a sizeable financial backing from more traditional investors.
Most companies that build and ship product can easily consult, so, any of those companies that continue to ship product for multiple years should cause you to ask how much more than $1MM they must be making.
"Salaries and profits" is an awfully weird metric, since salary is the #1 cost factor both for consultancies and product companies. Maybe you should just say "revenue".
I respectfully suggest that your radar is off here. No, you don't need to be in "fishy types of businesses" to break $1MM.
But that's not what founders themselves earn. Founder's personal salary and a slice of pure profits that are not reinvested to company growth can be considered a total that founders "earn" in lifestyle businesses.
Even with this metric, of course there is a lot of lifestyle internet companies in the world that do over $1M per founder. I'm just interested if Patrick meant that he can name 50 companies (presumably from his network) that are doing this well.
I worked for consultant who had a lifestyle business. He pulled in nearly half a million dollars in revenue per year, but I got paid a higher salary than he did. But I drove my own car, and he drove a company car. He didn't own a computer, but the company had a fiber connection, a server room and several very nice recent laptops. He didn't own a cell phone or a camera, but the company supplied him with a nice world smart phone and multiples of the latest cameras. He rarely took vacations, but the company paid for him to travel the world to visit clients and trade shows. Etc.
It's for this reason that revenue is often a better gauge of success for a lifestyle business, than profit or salary.
The traditional challenge you'd level here is "Name three" (37signals, Fog Creek, Balsamiq) but, due to the type of people I hang out with, I could get to fifty before having to slow down and start checking my Gmail. A friend of mine who is in the selling shovels business estimated that there are 30,000 firms selling SaaS. (That number struck me as crazy until I realized that, oh yeah, I'm routinely in rooms with several hundred of them at once.) The overwhelming majority will never raise outside capital.