You don't get to just 'decide' if your fledgling business is a potential unicorn or will just be a lifestyle SaaS business. It's a product of your idea/technology, the size of the market, competitive pressures, and your early traction.
It's more like this: You wake up and realize that -- while it's still early -- the thing you started has major potential; but you need a lot of capital to seize the opportunity. So you realize that going the VC route is likely your best bet. And that if you're doing the VC route, getting into YC is the best possible start.
If instead you wake up and realize your TAM is probably <$100M, your tech isn't anything particularly novel, and your path to a 'good life' is fairly clear if you can just organically grow from there - great, don't go the VC route.
But this idea that you're trying to discover treasure in a field or some bullshit is just bad. The better analogy is - you have a patch of land. You can slightly change that patch of land but it's mostly fixed. You could slowly farm that land and make a good living. Or you could risk it all, dig everything up in a search for oil, and maybe strike it big. If you fail, the land is worthless. Now, today you realize you have strong indications and evidence that there is A LOT of oil down there. So you go talk to some money guys, get funding for the exploration, and you're off.
But the guy who has zero evidence of oil, zero reasons for thinking it's down there, and is happy farming anyways - OF COURSE is better off just going the farm route.