After automation: Solo founding will be the default
every.to
every.to
Sure, as a total fluke in a very specific industry, software might sell itself. Everywhere else, and especially in physical product and deep tech, someone has to fully own the sales side of the business including the really time intensive stuff like website, email marketing, conferences, merch, sales meetings and trade shows. Heck, even viable solo founder companies would probably sell a magnitude harder with a sales co-founder.
Anecdotally my company picked up a few big distributor contracts for software tools and deep tech products, stuff people want. The products are done, high quality, but they don’t sell themselves - we have to actively put effort into outreach for every sale. Think about that in the context of your own startup. Building the thing is not the end hurdle, it’s kind of like a dependency to selling the thing, which creates revenue.
I tried over and over to explain to other founders that they REALLY should think about sales early. I'd try to say "Ok imagine your product is done magically. It works great. Now what?"
And it was interesting to see them struggle to think of what they would actually do if it was done.
If you reach out and get customers interested, but you delivery is delayed, don't you risk burning credibility?
But in reality, as long as you're somewhat honest in the sales process, it'll still work out better to talk to potential customers as early as possible. Maybe the dogma has changed, but doesn't YC say to talk to your early users/customers as early as possible, and if you dont have anyone like that to talk to, how are you even building this thing you have no connection to?
Yes, you can have whales that fuck you up, or bad feedback, or whatever, but at the end of the day a lot more folks end up siloing worrying about initial impressions, run out of money, build something nobody cares about anyway, and then they get to START at "let's go build what people actually will buy"
(The exception is companies that are glorified consultancies, eg. you have just one customer that needs a very specific service done. But these are eliminated once you've triangulated enough to find 10 or so customers. At that point your product is general enough that it will no longer appeal to the companies that just want custom development outsourced.)
Otherwise you’ll be under such stress that you’ll become reactive and lose your Birds Eye View, and that’s a slow way to sink.
I’ve coded before vibe-coding.
research markets, research TAMs (they can be too big or too small - which is fatal) - read books about selling. reach out to potential customers in your target markets that match the TAM you want.
do pilots.
only after that then you can start building.
That seems like a less interesting metric than the percentage of successful founders who go it alone. If there are just more startups because founding something alone is much easier, but you're no more likely to succeed as a solo founder, then all that's changed is the number of failing startups. That's not a great ad for starting something without a someone to share the burden.
FWIW in my experience with startups it's the relationship between founders that keeps the product on track and heading in the right direction. Founders keep each other honest (mostly) about whether something is worth building. When someone is going solo they build what they want, which goes brilliantly if they have taste and experience of their market, and horribly when they don't. And it's much more common to see the latter.
Have to call BS on this, no one argues when everything is going gangbusters. So likely the causation is the other way around.
Also everyone involved (from founders to backers) is incentivised to blame the interpersonal relationships since it protects their judgement, ego, etc.
It's exceedingly rare for things to go perfectly and as with any other relationship it's how you handle the situation that matters. More people mean more risk that you don't navigate successfully. But of course being the only one means literally everything's on your shoulders and you don't get anyone to bounce ideas off of.
Yes, things going badly creates friction, the question is whether your cofounder relationship helps or hinders, and it sounds like in most cases it hinders. So both can be true.
> startups die because of conflict between people, not the product or market.
I don’t think they could possibly disentangle the causes.
The value in buying a product or service from someone else is access to expertise, an expectation of support, and on some level the distribution of legal and financial/time risk in developing a new product. If you can do it all with some LLM then especially that risk of building a bespoke product is all but obliterated.
Anecdotally I started to see this at my last gig where bizdev folks were writing their own tools and in some cases their own little micro products (things 15-20yr ago they would have had to purchase from a third party, or get internal dev to work on). Now, I certainly don’t want to deal with that sort of technical debt, but plenty of firms don’t feel the same way (clearly given how much layoffs have been impacting everyone on the SWE side).
It is a fascinating shared delusion.
Investment size for software plays is going to drop, and people will still invest for the same reason they do now: solving problems for people is valuable. Marginal costs dropping will bring down a lot of costs in various places, but the software itself is only part of what SaaS provides.
However, automation may likely become good enough that an SME can build the initial system to bootstrap the business. Not scale the business, but enough to prove that it's viable.
Most people just don't want to deal with it. They want to focus on what they bring to the table and outsource the rest to people who specialize in, own, maintain and support that thing.
I’m not saying that people will just clone <large, established and popular software developed by large numbers of people, pre-AI>.
I’m asking why anyone would ever invest in a solo software startup, where the scale is necessarily small and achievable at low cost, and AI makes it feasible for many people or corporations to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.
i'm a solo-founder whose business was likely included in his research and was dissolved this morning.
we ran out of runway while trying to find PMF. i think that's why most solo companies will die, not loneliness.
I hope you have some folks to help you come down off the treadmill <3
And you're right, I said it upthread, everything but finding and selling your initial PMF is basically window dressing on a house you might never be able to build.
a couple of additional insights i gained:
- don't start a new company at the same time you have a newborn baby. it's an impossible balance.
- raise a little more money than you think you need to extend your runway. i should have continued fundraising but was anxious to get to building.
Even WhatsApp, a self-driven hyper growth startup that mainly did development had, IIRC, 40 people when they were acquired.
> Julian Weisser is the founder and CEO of Solo Founders
> The amount of human hours required to build something useful and get it in front of customers has collapsed. With AI, it takes less time and money to get started than ever before
So it’s unclear if, on balance, this new state of affairs is “good for solo founders.” Seems like they’re in the same boat as the rest of us, expecting interesting times in the next 1-5 years…
After automation: Cofounders Will Be the Unfair Advantage
-- Sam Altman
Take that as you will
If one person can build and run it by prompting Claude, 100 other people are going to clone it as soon as it gains traction.
This seems to be the wrong date range to test for AI's impact.
btw, if you have a chance to work with him you should! highly recommend
You get a co-worker for the expertise, knowledge, and skills that they have that you don't. An AI that has a small/simple subset of that can't replace a co-founder.
Will there be more solo founders now? Of course, there were solo founders before, and the barrier to solo is now lower. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that it's still (even with AI) relatively rare for a single human to know everything (and how to do everything) that a successful start-up requires.
Be kind. Don't be snarky.
HN is for people who like to build things, and who like to support others who build things, and it’s not cool to sneer at others for mistakes or make dismissive assumptions about their effort.