alt Hacker News > shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups?
I know 3 such founders; none would advertise to their customers the extent of their AI usage. There is also a consideration that if they advertise their 1 eng status and success, it might attract other competitors or the customers might think they can do it themselves (maybe possible, but not for 95% of them since some tech know how is still required) or customers would see it as a business risk.
All 3 have blown me away with what they are doing. All 3 have real, paying customers. (They occasionally reach out for some higher order architecture questions)
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I don't think cheaper/easier software development can be the limiting success factor for many startups. Success is more about the skills and business aptitude of the founder(s), which is why VCs invest more in people than ideas, and don't seem to flinch when founders pivot to something completely different.
I could see AI coding leading to more attempted startups, and more people shipping initial products and attempting to get traction with them, but whether they do get traction and achieve PMF, and are able to actually grow it into a business is going to come down to the startup expertise of the founders, not how quickly/cheaply the code of the product was written.
But eventually people will catch up you can basically create a working product alone with the help of AI.
My prediction is that this will lead to a margin free-fall for many software products where the main moat is the software itself. And a lot of SaaS companies will also become redundant when the AI can code up a tailored solution in an hour for free.
I am one of those founders who does not want their customers to know. I have one specific very large customer that is quite an old school company. My software has become pretty pivotal for some of their workflows and if they knew it was one guy on his laptop keeping things afloat with the help of a mysterious AI I am pretty sure they'd reconsider our contract.
Agreed, it's never been a better time to start a startup with a very small team.
My biggest question now is - since now anyone can build a SaaS, and since everything is now optimized not for "employment" but for "enterprise" (run your own business), just how many 1-2 person companies can we build? I mean how many genuine sell-able ideas are there. Can we as a society have a 100,000s small software enterprises (and not a few hundred employing 1000s)?
I would love to start my own SaaS company, even if it generates $1000 a month I will be elated. And I have 20+ years of experience programming and in FinTech, but what do I build? Not to mention, without sales & marketing nothing will really work.
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...