

Ask HN: Why so many solo applicants, against the odds? - mchannon

Seems like every third applicant team went at it solo, despite clear indications that this wouldn't be helpful to their application.<p>I also see plenty of fishing for co-founders, though interestingly enough there's almost never a co-founder looking for a founder with an idea.  How many founders could find cofounders if only they dropped their ideas?<p>It stands to reason that the ideas solo founders have occupy a continuum ranging from brilliant and groundbreaking to derivative and pedestrian, and that the talented solo founders working on the low-grade ideas could table their existing projects in order to combine their talents with another solo founder to make an awesome 2-person team with a whiz-bang idea.<p>If this is true, that means that half our (solo founders') ideas have negative value, but nobody knows (or can admit to themselves) who.  Any thoughts on how to agglomerate solo founders into powerful teams when both sides are already committed to their own ideas?<p>Or is it possible, post-rejection, that there really is no need for cofounders outside of YC, and we're all just better off going it alone?
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benologist
I think the whole "you must have a cofounder" thing is silly. There's no hard
and fast rule, except for the one where almost every startup is going to fail
with or without cofounders, with or without YC.

Applications and acceptance don't mean anything. _Applying_ isn't helpful for
97+% of applicants. Rejection doesn't really mean much either.

~~~
shimms
There is a fair bit of information out there that strongly suggests a
correlation between founding teams of 2 having more success than single
founders. 3 appears to be the maximum before it becomes detrimental again.

The startup genome project has done good work collating and analysing this
stuff.

(I'm a solo founder btw, but with a great group of advisors, some trusted
mentors I can mitigate a few of the issues this creates.)

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stray
Look, a great idea and a couple bucks will buy you a grande americano.

A mediocre idea however, can make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. The
trick is to reproject that idea into working code -- and if you aren't going
to do it without YC, you wouldn't have done it with YC either.

If you actually build something of value, some of your friends will be so
excited about it that you won't have to search for a cofounder.

So really, a YC rejection IMO should be interpreted as "just build the damned
thing already".

Build it and cofounders will come.

~~~
jiaaro
Didn't apply to YC but, I can attest to this first hand.

