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After automation: Solo founding will be the default

42 points rmason 2 hours ago 52 comments

functionmouse 2 hours ago | parent

Then we'll automate the founders.

onion2k 2 hours ago | parent

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.

BehanPrW 2 hours ago | parent

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!

Krei-se 2 hours ago | parent

Is it projkilo.com ?

Because that throws a server error ;)

gradus_ad 1 hour ago | parent

My god this is comedic gold

redanddead 1 hour ago | parent

what is it about cofounder searching these days?

ajax33 2 hours ago | parent

The best way to avoid divorce is to avoid marriage /s

aetherspawn 2 hours ago | parent

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.

salesthrowaway3 1 hour ago | parent

I have an extensive sales background and also an entry level software developer that worked for years at a coworking office while getting my solo miniSaas off the ground.

I tried over and over to explain to other founders that they REALLY should think about sales early. I'd try to say "Ok imagine your product is done magically. It works great. Now what?"

And it was interesting to see them struggle to think of what they would actually do if it was done.

hbrav 1 hour ago | parent

How do you avoid doing sales too early?

If you reach out and get customers interested, but you delivery is delayed, don't you risk burning credibility?

salesthrowaway3 1 hour ago | parent

My flippant answer is ask Bill Gates about that. It seemed to work out.

But in reality, as long as you're somewhat honest in the sales process, it'll still work out better to talk to potential customers as early as possible. Maybe the dogma has changed, but doesn't YC say to talk to your early users/customers as early as possible, and if you dont have anyone like that to talk to, how are you even building this thing you have no connection to?

hilariously 1 hour ago | parent

There's no other leading metric that will tell you (directionally) whether you are doing a good job. Did they buy it? Did the conversion get made? Is it easier or harder to sell based on what you made/how you made it?

Yes, you can have whales that fuck you up, or bad feedback, or whatever, but at the end of the day a lot more folks end up siloing worrying about initial impressions, run out of money, build something nobody cares about anyway, and then they get to START at "let's go build what people actually will buy"

joewhale 1 hour ago | parent

You’ll rarely be too early. If you’re building some people want/need, they will be happy to hear what you’re working towards and potentially give feedback.

nostrademons 42 minutes ago | parent

If you have customers that are interested, and you end up burning the relationship, there are usually other customers that are interested. The real risk when founding a startup is that you end up building something nobody wants, because the need is made up. Once you have ~10 or so customers, you can be reasonably sure that there are more than 10 or so customers, because markets are almost never that small or that specialized.

(The exception is companies that are glorified consultancies, eg. you have just one customer that needs a very specific service done. But these are eliminated once you've triangulated enough to find 10 or so customers. At that point your product is general enough that it will no longer appeal to the companies that just want custom development outsourced.)

aetherspawn 26 minutes ago | parent

You can definitely do certain kinds of sales too early. Early sales should be website and brand creation, and talking to people about what you’re building to see if they’re interested, not necessarily closing deals. I’d say close 1 or 2 pilot deals (for pennies and/or free is good) and then pause it there, so that you have only a reasonable amount of pressure to build and steer a high quality product.

Otherwise you’ll be under such stress that you’ll become reactive and lose your Birds Eye View, and that’s a slow way to sink.

Ericson2314 1 hour ago | parent

I thought this was complaining the solo founder would just be sales. Sales, with some agent lackies doing dev.

charlieyu1 1 hour ago | parent

I failed at most things I found because I'm not good at selling. I have kinda accepted this.

jwpapi 1 hour ago | parent

I just run ads and it’s profitable and I’m running it alone. Before developing I did do online marketing.

I’ve coded before vibe-coding.

dundercoder 1 hour ago | parent

What are your products? Curious what ads are still working for.

siliconc0w 2 hours ago | parent

For B2B you really need to have face to face conversations that AI doesn't really help scale.

edoceo 1 hour ago | parent

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.

teamonkey 1 hour ago | parent

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?

Matticus_Rex 1 hour ago | parent

There are benefits to specialization, and will be for a long time even with AI. It's worth a premium to not limit all my software to what I and my agents know, and to be able to rely on other people to fix it if there's a problem.

Investment size for software plays is going to drop, and people will still invest for the same reason they do now: solving problems for people is valuable. Marginal costs dropping will bring down a lot of costs in various places, but the software itself is only part of what SaaS provides.

kakugawa 1 hour ago | parent

You're paying for effective token usage. You've simplified "automation" to mean "perfect automation". That's not going to happen for a long time, and likely never.

However, automation may likely become good enough that an SME can build the initial system to bootstrap the business. Not scale the business, but enough to prove that it's viable.

charlieyu1 1 hour ago | parent

One person + AI setups still need your own expertise. Your job is now supervising the AI agents. You still have to set the direction and catch their mistakes. The better you are at it, the better chance you have.

arcticbull 47 minutes ago | parent

There's probably an open source version of whatever you're trying to use, which you can unzip and deploy. Yet people don't do it most of the time, because they don't want to have to deal with it themselves and they value consistent experiences across industry. Gimp has been around for just short of 30 years and yet Photoshop continues to grow revenue every year. "Claude make me a Photoshop" ~= a very slow and expensive "brew install gimp" + "hey Claude just move some stuff around to make my gimp look different than everyone else for no reason."

Most people just don't want to deal with it. They want to focus on what they bring to the table and outsource the rest to people who specialize in, own, maintain and support that thing.

teamonkey 2 minutes ago | parent

I don’t think that’s the same thing at all.

I’m not saying that people will just clone <large, established and popular software developed by large numbers of people, pre-AI>.

I’m asking why anyone would ever invest in a solo software startup, where the scale is necessarily small and achievable at low cost, and AI makes it feasible for anyone to clone any idea of that scale within the time it takes to establish a foot in the market, if it looks remotely valuable.

arach 1 hour ago | parent

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

hungryhobbit 1 hour ago | parent

Early != right. No one gets a co-founder because they want some simple (Claude-doable) work done by them!

You get a co-worker for the expertise, knowledge, and skills that they have that you don't. An AI that has a small/simple subset of that can't replace a co-founder.

Will there be more solo founders now? Of course, there were solo founders before, and the barrier to solo is now lower. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that it's still (even with AI) relatively rare for a single human to know everything (and how to do everything) that a successful start-up requires.

jaccola 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

arcticbull 54 minutes ago | parent

While it's undoubtedly true that if things are going well, people are happy, there's lots of statistics plotting the number of cofounders vs the chance of success. Each additional cofounder beyond 2 drops your chance of success materially. 2 > 1 > 3 >> 4 >>>> 5+.

It's exceedingly rare for things to go perfectly and as with any other relationship it's how you handle the situation that matters. More people mean more risk that you don't navigate successfully. But of course being the only one means literally everything's on your shoulders and you don't get anyone to bounce ideas off of.

Yes, things going badly creates friction, the question is whether your cofounder relationship helps or hinders, and it sounds like in most cases it hinders. So both can be true.

dhsysusbsjsi 1 hour ago | parent

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.

HolyLampshade 1 hour ago | parent

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).

georgemcbay 1 hour ago | parent

There seems to be a lot of people convinced that AI will progress exactly to the point where it maximally benefits their own role (current or desired) and then hits a magic wall where it somehow doesn't also entirely replace whatever value they think they are bringing to the table.

It is a fascinating shared delusion.

woah 1 hour ago | parent

This is only the case for standalone SaaS with no real network effect.

stuartjohnson12 1 hour ago | parent

"everyone will do be doing the thing due to ai" - founder of thing company

gumby 1 hour ago | parent

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.

davmar 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

hilariously 1 hour ago | parent

My heart goes out to how much time and energy you just spent on trying to make that work, it can be something you wanted to do, but losing it is brutal.

I hope you have some folks to help you come down off the treadmill <3

And you're right, I said it upthread, everything but finding and selling your initial PMF is basically window dressing on a house you might never be able to build.

davmar 1 hour ago | parent

thanks for the kind words, and i agree with your comment about PMF. i'm grateful to be off the treadmill this time.

a couple of additional insights i gained:

- don't start a new company at the same time you have a newborn baby. it's an impossible balance.

- raise a little more money than you think you need to extend your runway. i should have continued fundraising but was anxious to get to building.

joewhale 1 hour ago | parent

What problem were you solving and what were you building?

lucas_the_human 1 hour ago | parent

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.

layer8 1 hour ago | parent

Also bouncing thoughts off each other. People can achieve more together by communicating about it, than each working completely separately.

jonathanstrange 47 minutes ago | parent

You're absolutely right. I'm by some somewhat complicated fate not worth explaining here practically forced to attempt to make a living by selling software, and it's indeed lonely. I'm sitting on the computer at home developing every day and have to force myself to go for a coffee outside. :(

vanschelven 1 hour ago | parent

> 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

Aurornis 1 hour ago | parent

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.

joewhale 1 hour ago | parent

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.

jonathanstrange 52 minutes ago | parent

It's important in this discussion to distinguish between people who make a living from what they create and those who don't. Of course, people can create amazing things with AI in short time but I took "solo founder" to be the solo founder of a company that earns money or manages to obtain good funding.

semiquaver 47 minutes ago | parent

  > Julian Weisser is the founder and CEO of Solo Founders
Oh. Seems like they are a little too close to this issue for their opinion to carry much weight then.

  > 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
But the same underlying change could destroy the value proposition for 95% of potential startup ideas, or be part of the downfall of the VC system, or even capitalism itself!

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…

gradus_ad 45 minutes ago | parent

Startups about Startups... The Synthetic CDO's of this cycle?

akshayp29 34 minutes ago | parent

Rebuttal: https://akspad.substack.com/p/after-automation-cofounders-wi...

After automation: Cofounders Will Be the Unfair Advantage