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Comment by lunar_mycroft | Hacker News Reader

As of the middle of the year, there was no increase in publicly available indicators of new startups at all [0]. No change in the trend in steam releases, domain name registrations, app store releases, etc. People might be able to keep the fact that they're a one person team that built the app with AI secret, but they wouldn't be able to keep the fact that they made an app secret. Unless someone has evidence that's changed dramatically in the last six months, I have to conclude that the reason we aren't seeing a wave of AI enabled SaaS startups isn't that they're keeping the fact that they're solo operations with AI a secret, but rather that no such wave actually exists.

[0] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

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Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3.

2 of the 3 existed as entities for more than a year already, but pivoted at least once (both were VC-funded but now doing something very different than what they started with when I first met founders) and ultimately let go of their offshore and contract engineers once AI became good enough some time early last year. Founders basically realized that the quality of code was as good or better than what they were getting from their engineers while reducing the turnaround time; now they can go from talking to customers to having a working prototype in the same day instead of waiting 24h+ for an offshore team. The other one started in November of 2024 and found traction around March.

So two companies went from multi-person teams to 1 person teams and 1 team was a 1 person eng team from the get-go (with a business-oriented partner).

I'd also point out that 2025 was a particularly volatile year because of shifts in the political and economic environment (including very high interest rates) so I wouldn't take your stat at face value without considering external factors that might affect the total number of net new business registrations.

It still remains true that building a product is not the same thing as building a business. It may be that we'll see less SaaS startups as companies find that they can just in-house software instead of buying. Who knows? Startup I'm at canceled one of our subscriptions because we ended up building an in-house replacement because it is now cheap enough and easy enough that we could.

> Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3.

I'm not saying your three friends/acquaintances don't exist, I'm saying the evidence suggests they aren't representative of a trend. This is consistent with the other evidence we have (e.g. studies which show that LLMs produce at best relatively modest gains in productivity, not enough for a one person team to do the work of even two people.

> I'd also point out that 2025 was a particularly volatile year because of shifts in the political and economic environment so I wouldn't take your stat at face value without considering external factors that might affect the total number of net new business registrations.

Sure, it's always possible that without LLMs there would have been a significant contraction in these metrics. The issue is exactly that though: you can always make that argument. In other words, you've rendered your claims unfalsifiable.

I'm not saying it's evidence for some larger trend; I'm presenting the reason why single-person teams might not advertise why they are single person and that these teams are not necessarily starting as single person teams, but sometimes collapsing down to single person teams.

Maybe you don't mean to, but when you present an anecdote you're implying evidence of some trend, otherwise it's just a pointless statement. And unless a multi-person team is collapsing down into multiple single person teams, there's no increase in productivity and we're actually in a worse position as a whole.

Except in context that was very much what was suggested. The implication of the comment I replied to is that there actually are "a ton of 1 person startups" (and by implication, that LLMs do enable the massive increases in productivity that their proponents like to claim), but that they just keep the fact that they are quiet.

This matches what I’ve been seeing as well. Small teams can move surprisingly fast now, but the bottleneck usually shifts from engineering to distribution and positioning.

We’ve found that building the product got easier, but turning it into a sustainable business still required just as much manual effort around sales, onboarding, and retention.

You're moving the goalposts; building the product never equaled writing some code, it's always involved all of the efforts you reference. The expectation is that you optimized the code generation and shifted the bottleneck, but are overall more productive (i.e. the cycle is shorter). If you're not iterating faster then there's be no productivity gain.

Those companies weren’t multiple person teams. They were one person teams with contract work. Maybe you know the details of the kind of money they were paid or how involved they were with the work but that could mean so many things.

I’d have to say when I hire someone in Fiverr to make a logo for my app I’m not suddenly a multi-person team. If I use AI to make my logo instead of paying a human $50 to make one I didn’t exactly experience a productivity revolution.

The other thought that popped into my head is that offshore contractors have access to AI, too. So shouldn’t we see their output go up and prices go down? Again we have another facet of this lack of market indicators.

They were multi-person teams.

Some had employees (which were let go when they pivoted). Some were contractors doing all of the engineering work.

The majority of businesses fail within 5 years.

Are they using AI because it’s better or because they have no other choice?

If I hire two sandwich artists for 6 months but nobody buys my sandwiches, I don’t have much choice but to fire them.

This word “pivot” is strong.

    > Are they using AI because it’s better

Because it's better (versus the engineers they were able to hire).

    > If I hire two sandwich artists for 6 months but nobody buys my sandwiches

Pivot is strong and in both cases where they went n -> 1, the pivots were dramatic. One went from building a (credit) card switching SDK to building a legal assistant AI. One went from building a fin-tech compliance product to a CRM for managing collections.

Because they went back to the drawing board, they ended up letting go of their teams and started using AI to build MVPs and then found that they could ship faster and better.

This now seems like even less useful information than before.

They literally changed to doing an entirely different business.

This would be like saying I hired two sandwich artists, but sandwiches don’t sell well, so I fired my sandwich artists and now I run a coffee shop on my own.

You can choose to bury your head in the sand with word games. Or acknowledge that LLM is enabling single person startups. Up to you.

I'm sharing information, not presenting an argument. You seem to want to argue that... something, but it is not apparent to me what it is.

Whatever you choose to do with this information, it did not change reality.

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