Ask HN: One-man teams that got into YC, etc., without much self-capital?
What are some one-man teams (i.e. sole founder without a team) that got into YC (or managed to secure seed investment) mainly due to their product/ability as a technical founder (but not so much because of their personal connections e.g. a harvard grad who knows all the angels in town, etc) and doing so without much self-capital?
I'm wondering whether this is even possible in 2020 (or 2021, etc) when you have almost no captial to hire people, and you are working on your start-up all by yourself, and maybe you have a product that you've worked on for a while with maybe some (none-paying) users each month - what are some good examples of one-man team like this that got into YC or have gotten seed-funded (not through crazy personal connections)?
18 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] threadIf YC became - because I believe it wasn't - just another company supporting regular businesses, with all business features required, then things are different than some here would assume.
For the record my ex co-founder and I were invited to a YC interview back in 2018. We didn't get in but we did manage to secure funding here and there. The start-up died some months ago.
Now I'm founding a new start-up alone and am extremely curious about sole founders who have managed to found a successful startup without captial. Thanks!
You've admitted that you have no close friends who can be cofounders (ie. you're a loner), that you have no staff, and no paying customers.
Investors see all of those as red flags. They like multiple founders for many reasons, including social proof and free labor. The only thing you have going is presumably a working app, which does give you some initial credibility. They also expect a large-enough market, over $10 billion.
If you are in the social media space you will also need whatever the minimum subscriber base is today, around 5-10 million users to get funding.
Instead of chasing VCs with a bad story, you're better off finishing the next point release and devoting your time and energy to sales and marketing. And make some friends, ffs.
If you want to read sole-founder lore, then Marcus Friend (POF), Pierre Omidyar (eBay) and patio11 (hmm) are worth reading.
You describe as red flags essentially that there is currently no business side for a project, hypothetical or real. But there are presumably some specifications, some prototypes, development work, tests, bug fixes, demos etc. - the whole system. Surely all those different aspects of the coherent achievement demonstrate the viability of the idea.
> And make some friends, ffs.
Following Norvig, one ought to spend significant efforts to become good at something. Making friends - especially those who'd be able to share the unusual road of startup founding - isn't something which would be recommended to come lightly or carelessly.
If OP formulates the question for the solo founders, it surely would be interesting to hear which variants there are. Should engineers - here, on YC - regret they were focusing on technical sides instead of jack-of-all-trading and constantly searching for potential mates?
Your question seems to be searching for such an answer as the Indie Hackers forum, touted as founders (some solo, some groups) building profitable internet businesses.
There are many examples of successful single-person startups (forgetting a recent example of a person who ran SaaS product single-handedly for over 4 years and then expanded). However, you can only bootstrap like that. To grow bigger, eventually will have to hire people - which means money, which means either VC or customer - which means tonnes of work in building products/building relationship/shipping product etc. I guess, if startup success rate was 1% then solo-founder startup success rate must be 0.01%.