
Ask HN: One-man teams that got into YC, etc., without much self-capital? - archibaldJ
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&#x2F;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?<p>I&#x27;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&#x27;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)?
======
archibaldJ
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!

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

~~~
archibaldJ
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.

~~~
anticsapp
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.

------
fullStackOasis
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/](https://www.indiehackers.com/) and Failory
[https://www.failory.com/](https://www.failory.com/) \- if you haven't already
done so. Oh yeah and
[https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/](https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/)
\- if you aren't looking to build a megabillion startup.

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

------
makeee
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 ;)

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

------
satvikpendem
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.

~~~
archibaldJ
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.

------
redis_mlc
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.

~~~
avmich
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?

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

~~~
archibaldJ
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 :)

------
tomklein
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.

~~~
avmich
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.

------
biolurker1
Downvote me for saying that if you are a single founder and did not graduate
Ivy League you stand very little chance

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

