Ask HN: One-man teams that got into YC, etc., without much self-capital? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: One-man teams that got into YC, etc., without much self-capital?

45 pointsarchibaldJ18 comments

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)?

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OP here. Just to clarify I'm asking for examples of one-man team that got into YC, etc, because I would like to look them up and read up their founder stories and maybe get inspired or something :)

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!

Maybe study interesting stories about failures instead of seeking inspirational exit homilies. 90% of them are random walk bullshit, 10% are serious and deep.

There are many ways one gets inspired e.g. replicating a certain system of doing things, knowing how success can come about, etc. The point you are trying to make is obvious and unsustainable at best. Random walk bullshit is easy to spot if you've been in the scene long enough.

Obvious and unsustainable? I find failure very inspirational. The whole point is to learn from the mistakes of others. If you won't take that bit of advice, I don't know what to say. Keep reading that Elon Musk five time champion biography.

I can't answer your question about YC, but you mentioned that you are looking for inspiration. For that, I recommend taking a look at Indie Hackers https://www.indiehackers.com/ and Failory https://www.failory.com/ - if you haven't already done so. Oh yeah and https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/ - if you aren't looking to build a megabillion startup.

Great links! Thanks! am looking into them now :)

I got into YC as a solo-founder in 2012. Didn’t have any connections or go to an ivy league school. I was working on an app that was growing quickly and doing $15k/month in ad revenue. The odds are stacked against you as a solo-founder so you need to show them something that tells them you can execute. It’s probably harder now, but definitely still possible. Showing them a them a graph that points up and to the right helps ;)

That's very inspiring to know! And thanks for the kind words!

What are you (hypothetically) building? You may not need VC as that isn't the only path to a software business. Many do so by simply making them profitable, charging money up front. Only take VC if you have an exponential growth opportunity. I don't mean merely superlinear, as in cubic or quadratic, but actually exponential growth.

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.

Thanks for the advice and pointer! Highly appreciate it! Yeah I think I should go really niche and unscalable and solve the self-sustainability part first. I'm building a video editor.

Let me play devil's advocate for a second. The short answer to your question is no, it's not possible in any reasonable sense to get funding today with zero connections.

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.

I'd play the other side for a moment.

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?

I assume you are looking for motivation. This thread might provide some https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11924009.

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%.

Great point. And thanks for the link! Yeah I think I need to mentally prepare myself for many years of no disposable income before this thing takes off. Sustainability comes first. I've been trying to do too many things at once (designing + coding + writing + content marketing + sales here and there + taking care of admin stuff as well as product research) and experimented too much for scalability and ended up burning out at a higher rate than expected without getting anywhere revenue-wise. So yup I've experienced first-hand the physical limits of what I can do and the importance of being able to hire without dependencies on angels and VCs (i.e. having more capital). I need to go super niche and unscalable now and focus on acquiring paying customers only. And take some freelance work here and there and save up :)

I guess a lot of times business knowledge wins and you’ll have a hard time getting into YC if you don’t have the necessarily skills to sell your startup and yourself to others.

That's interesting. Usually it's a given for a new aspiring company. However the whole idea of YC was to give good technical ideas the ability to sustain and grow.

If 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.

Downvote me for saying that if you are a single founder and did not graduate Ivy League you stand very little chance

hard to say as most founders understate their credentials publicly, to make for a more satisfying rags-to-riches story

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