This proposition's assumption is that there's something special about ideas. Reminds me of the kind of person that might make you sign an NDA before telling you a "cool idea I had last night." It's no secret that YC -- like basically all incubators -- invests in people, not ideas. Teams will sometimes fumble for years before they find product-market fit.
Great point. I give the author of this post props for trying this and it has been an entertaining proposition. But to me premise 2 is admitting there will be massive shortcuts taken here. There is now way one person could build a product that would scale as well as a product made by an entire team. You might be able to get it about 90% there, but the last 10% is the hardest IMHO.
In my experience this kind of rationale is what leads to MVPs being spun out quickly using hybrid tools which have a hard time scaling. Sure it kinda looks like the real deal, but the product will limit the growth potential of your company.
There are plenty of products/services built by a single person that only hired more people once they were able to afford it and needed it. This is especially common when access to VC funding is pretty much non-existent and you can't just hire a bunch of people.
I'd much rather be in the position of having too much demand for a badly build piece of software then an awesome team, VC funds and a beautiful Elixir architecture with no demand.
Reminds me of this post [1] that hit the top pages yesterday. It's actually the anti-example for my argument, but the way software runs in the real world. Apparently it's commercially more interesting to run cr*p, even if that gives rise to a significant probability of costing you $172k a second.
I think the first sell is special, the idea just leads you there.
There are no shortcuts.