alt Hacker NewsAfter automation: Solo founding will be the default
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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.
> 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 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.
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).
Let me share part of my journey.
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!
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?
Rebuttal: https://akspad.substack.com/p/after-automation-cofounders-wi...
After automation: Cofounders Will Be the Unfair Advantage
> With solo as the default, the main reason startups die will be loneliness
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.
> 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…
These aren’t founding startups, they are founding small businesses, mostly just features.
Even WhatsApp, a self-driven hyper growth startup that mainly did development had, IIRC, 40 people when they were acquired.
"everyone will do be doing the thing due to ai" - founder of thing company
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.
For B2B you really need to have face to face conversations that AI doesn't really help scale.
> 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.
-- Sam Altman
Take that as you will
The easy solo-founder, agent-built startups are going to be saturated with competition.
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.
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 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.
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.
Julian was early to this theme and very helpful to hundreds if not thousands of founders
btw, if you have a chance to work with him you should! highly recommend
The best way to avoid divorce is to avoid marriage /s
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.