Closet Tools: A Tool That Just Automates Poshmark Sharing, Making $30-40K a Month — a Solo SaaS Built in the 5 AM Hours at a Single $30 Price

The starting point was roughly 30 lines of JavaScript, written to spare his wife some manual work. On the US resale platform Poshmark, listings get buried unless you repeatedly “share” them. Jordan O’Connor, an electrical engineer, wrote a bookmarklet to automate that tedious repetition for his wife — and that became Closet Tools. About three years after its February 2018 launch, it was doing $38K a month with 1,500 customers as of late 2020. When he appeared on a podcast in April 2023, the show notes described the business as sitting “in and around the $30-40K MRR mark.” Zero outside funding, zero employees, run solo.

And this is not the story of a single engineer with time to burn. O’Connor had a full-time job, three children (at the time), and student loan payments consuming more than half the household income. The only time available was 5 to 7 in the morning. Those two hours, sustained for about three years, are what sit underneath these numbers.

The numbers

Three years of zero revenue was preparation, not failure

What gets overlooked in this timeline is the three years before Closet Tools. O’Connor’s day job was electrical engineering; his programming experience stopped at C for robotics. Web technology was self-taught from zero. He tried one indie project after another, failed to monetize them, and picked up web development, SEO, and copywriting along the way. He put $2,500, on a maxed-out credit card, into an SEO course. For a household carrying debt, that looks reckless, but given that Closet Tools’ acquisition would later run almost entirely on SEO, it turned out to be the highest-yield expense of the whole story. The motivation was concrete: the only lever for fixing a household budget where repayments ate more than half of income, while keeping his wife at home, was those two morning hours.

Closet Tools got off the ground quickly not because the product was brilliant, but because demand was confirmed before the product existed in earnest. When a single post in a Reddit reseller community brought 200 signups, the “should I build this” question was already answered. Monetization came a month later. The first cohort was 10 customers, a small certainty of $30 x 10, and from there the structure was simply to let search traffic accumulate.

The pitch never got more complicated than “this takes over work that eats hours of your day.” At $30 a month, about $1 a day, the trade against hours of manual labor explains itself. Some customers reportedly sell $50,000 a month on Poshmark using the tool. The customers are businesspeople and the subscription is a business expense: a B2C price point with what is effectively B2B economics, which is what supports a single price with no discounting.

$30, one plan, never raised

SaaS orthodoxy says: tier your plans, raise prices, push ARPU up. Closet Tools has not moved its single $30 price since launch. In theory that leaves money on the table. Under the constraint of solo operation it is also rational. With one plan there are no billing edge cases, no feature gating, no price-change announcements. The cost of operating the business is minimized in the pricing design itself.

Other cases that commit to “designed to be run by one person” include Healthchecks.io, a monitoring SaaS run by one person, and Pallyy, a social media tool grown solo to $74K a month. In each, refusing complexity in features and pricing is inseparable from refusing headcount.

In 2020, between May and August, a stretch that included paternity leave, revenue doubled from $18K to $35K. Sales growing while the founder steps away only happens with the combination of SEO (acquisition without selling) and an automation product (a low-support commodity). The structure of the business is visible in that one fact.

What didn’t work, and the structural risk

O’Connor’s three self-taught years are, read from the other side, a pile of indie projects that failed to monetize. Closet Tools was his first success, not his first attempt. Skip that and read this as “30 lines of script turned into $38K a month,” and you misjudge the reproducibility.

The structural risk is obvious: the entire business sits on top of a single platform. A change in Poshmark’s rules or its stance toward automation tools shakes the premise of the business itself. It is the same shape of risk as GMass’s $130K a month built on top of Gmail, the foundation belongs to someone else. The trajectory from $38K in late 2020 to “the $30-40K range” in 2023 also suggests growth has plateaued. A tool cut precisely to a niche inherits that niche’s ceiling as its own. O’Connor himself had, by 2023, started paid consulting sessions called “Rank to Sell,” teaching his SEO approach to other founders, which reads as adding a revenue pillar outside the single product.

What transfers, and what doesn’t

What travels is the sequence more than the product. Even two hours a day of side-project time is enough foundation for a solo SaaS if invested in the order skills, then validation, then operations, on a three-year clock. The niche choice travels too: a platform’s “tedious manual chore” is pre-validated, users are already paying for that chore in time, so an offer to buy the time back needs no explanation. So does the operating design: if you will run it alone, refusing complexity in pricing, plans, and support is itself a competitive advantage.

The limits are equally clear: the depth of platform dependence equals the depth of the chosen niche. Closet Tools will not outgrow Poshmark, and it shrinks at Poshmark’s discretion. Anyone attempting this pattern should read the platform’s terms and its tolerance for automation before writing any code.