we discovered that the share of solo founders has nearly doubled between 2018 and 2026 to 39 percent of new startups
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.
Indeed, for years, I was looking for a technical co-founder.
I virtually did not find the right profile serious enough for such a role.
I ended up learning software myself after graduating from business studies at university.
Then AI came in the middle of my self-learning journey, I started using it as a software writer. I thought I could 'vibe-code' it into anything I want.
I was wrong.
1. It made so many mistakes. 2. I needed solid understanding of software basics to be able to understand the code it is writing, to be able to architect a complex software for a startup idea I had in mind.
I went back to learning software from reliable non-AI sources. By the time I learnt so many things about software, I gave AI another try.
This time it worked.
I became an AI-assisted Founder & Systems Architect.
But it's only the beginning, AI is non-deterministic!
You/we have little idea how much effort went into the project or why there was a glitch on the production server at that time. The commenter’s story suggests they have been putting a lot of effort into learning skills and building their project for years. They didn’t name the site in their comment. They were making no claims about it being in production or bug-free. You hunted it from their profile then named it in the comment, apparently as a dunk. If you wanted to help them, you could have worded it much differently.
HN is for people who like to build things, 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.
Most who are running a successful (or) profitable startup know that sales is a day and night job in most industries, and that it’s completely unrealistic not to have separate cofounders for development and sales.
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 have an extensive sales background and also an entry level software developer that worked for years at a coworking office while getting my solo miniSaas off the ground.
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.
delay building as much as possible - unless you're doing something completely innovative such as inventing the iPhone.
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.
Bus Factor being the biggest issue for investors (which you may not need) but is a blocker for many clients. I think it's even more important to have a co-founder or at least a key-hire on the team.
Why would a solo tech startup even exist after automation? Any software that can be done by one person can be done by anyone with an AI subscription a moment after launch. Why would anyone risk investing in that?
There are benefits to specialization, and will be for a long time even with AI. It's worth a premium to not limit all my software to what I and my agents know, and to be able to rely on other people to fix it if there's a problem.
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.
You're paying for effective token usage. You've simplified "automation" to mean "perfect automation". That's not going to happen for a long time, and likely never.
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.
One person + AI setups still need your own expertise. Your job is now supervising the AI agents. You still have to set the direction and catch their mistakes. The better you are at it, the better chance you have.
There's probably an open source version of whatever you're trying to use, which you can unzip and deploy. Yet people don't do it most of the time, because they don't want to have to deal with it themselves.
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 anyone to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.
Early != right. No one gets a co-founder because they want some simple (Claude-doable) work done by them!
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.
> Harvard's Noam Wasserman found that 65 percent of high-potential startups die because of conflict between people, not the product or market.
Have to call BS on this, no one argues when everything is going gangabusters. 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.
While it's undoubtedly true that if things are going well, people are happy, there's lots of statistics plotting the number of cofounders vs the chance of success. Each additional cofounder beyond 2 drops your chance of success materially. 2 > 1 > 3 >> 4 >>>> 5+.
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, so both can be true.
Whilst I would like this to be true there is simply too much real life work. Also I’m the dev in a partnership where the other guy brings all the domain knowledge and b2b customers. There’s almost no overlap of our circles of competence and neither of us could do the company individually.
I think what’s not being considered here is if the barrier for entry of a product is so ridiculously low that a single individual can kick off a few agents to build it then work the sales channels, the companies buying the products can just do the same thing.
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).
My heart goes out to how much time and energy you just spent on trying to make that work, it can be something you wanted to do, but losing it is brutal.
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.
I disagree if only for the fact that people will get lonely working by themselves and working with a team (even if small) is something most people want, even if they think otherwise.
You're absolutely right. I'm by some somewhat complicated fate not worth explaining here practically forced to attempt to make a living by selling software, and it's indeed lonely. I'm sitting on the computer at home developing every day and have to force myself to go for a coffee outside. :(
> In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there's this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company... Which would have been unimaginable without AI and now will happen.
I don’t think it will be the default for enterprise, but it will be for consumer apps. I built a personal finance net worth/cash flow tracker in 3 days, and my circle of friends and family are all on it now. It’s the golden era of building something specific for you and your family.
It's important in this discussion to distinguish between people who make a living from what they create and those who don't. Of course, people can create amazing things with AI in short time but I took "solo founder" to be the solo founder of a company that earns money or manages to obtain good funding.
> Julian Weisser is the founder and CEO of Solo Founders
Seems like they are a little too close to this issue for their opinion to carry much weight then.
> 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
But the same underlying change could destroy the value proposition for 95% of potential startup ideas, or ultimately be part of the downfall of the VC system itself, or even capitalism. 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…
Why found at all if LLM providers perpetually undercut you, especially if you freely give your prompts to them? your customer can just use them directly. It's truly a wonderful system for them.
57 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 73.9 ms ] threadThat 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.
Indeed, for years, I was looking for a technical co-founder.
I virtually did not find the right profile serious enough for such a role.
I ended up learning software myself after graduating from business studies at university.
Then AI came in the middle of my self-learning journey, I started using it as a software writer. I thought I could 'vibe-code' it into anything I want.
I was wrong.
1. It made so many mistakes. 2. I needed solid understanding of software basics to be able to understand the code it is writing, to be able to architect a complex software for a startup idea I had in mind.
I went back to learning software from reliable non-AI sources. By the time I learnt so many things about software, I gave AI another try.
This time it worked.
I became an AI-assisted Founder & Systems Architect.
But it's only the beginning, AI is non-deterministic!
Happy Coding!
Because that throws a server error ;)
Be kind. Don't be snarky.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
HN is for people who like to build things, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 anyone to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.
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.
Have to call BS on this, no one argues when everything is going gangabusters. 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, 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).
Even WhatsApp, a self-driven hyper growth startup that mainly did development had, IIRC, 40 people when they were acquired.
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.
-- 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.
After automation: Cofounders Will Be the Unfair Advantage
This seems to be the wrong date range to test for AI's impact.