> especially now that it's so easy to get that initial traction
It's gotten much cheaper to get traction. In some consumer markets, it is basically cost-free; all it takes is a motivated technical entrepreneur with a couple months of savings.
It's gotten much cheaper to get traction. In some consumer markets, it is basically cost-free; all it takes is a motivated technical entrepreneur with a couple months of savings.
a) You raise money after having invested a year of work on your own dime.
b) You raise money based on your connections/pedigree ("reputation").
Not boasting, but simply stating fact, that on my own, I've written:
- A system for managing employee leave and sickness with google apps integration in 2 months
- A credit control application for one of my clients in 3 weeks, automatic emails, dunning letters, cash-flow forecasting
- A purchase order system that would automatically raise invoices in their accountancy system in 3-4 weeks
- An entire search system a la booking.com in 4 weeks, with named location search, geo location, tags, categories, blah, blah, blah. Basically the heart of any listing style startup.
And while I realize I'm a good programmer, I'm not a phenomenal programmer, I'm fairly lazy, I find it hard to focus on more than about 5 hours of actual programming unless I'm doing something really interesting.
And these are some off the top of my head examples. I've written loads of small startup sized apps that would be of the complexity that YC fund in much less than 12 weeks, let alone 12 months.
You're looking for an MVP with some traction, not a polished product. Reddit, for example, launched without the ability for users to create their own subreddits, and many would describe that as one of the key reasons of Reddit's growth. I believe they actually launched without commenting, but I can't find a source on that.
While today's startups have more expected of them, it's now easier than ever to write a web app, even SPAs that even 3 or 4 years ago would be too hard for individuals to write on their own.
reddit launched with only voting and submitting of links (no self posts). Commenting, subreddit creation, self posts and all that was added years after launch.
(Source: I was there :) )
VWO, a bootstrapped A/B testing product, started getting paying customers with a very basic interface and reports[1], and today it is a ~$10M business.
The thing about this is if you read about ycombinator it's all about getting a product out of the door within 3 months. And they don't expect you to have a product when you start. In a team of two they seem to say one person should be focusing on the business side, so that is one person getting a product out of the door AND get some growth in 3 months with some help from the other. They expect it themselves.
There's no way you could clone Dropbox's first version in anything less than 6 months, and that assumes you're a great programmer.
It took the Dropbox team something like 18 months to publicly release, which was all paid for by funding. It required significant funding to build and to operate (freemium).
reddit was also created with funding and could not have existed without funding. It made no money.
I know the story of a lone developer creating a little app that takes off sounds good, but the reality is most significant projects take a good amount of time and money.