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.
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.
If you reach out and get customers interested, but you delivery is delayed, don't you risk burning credibility?
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
btw, if you have a chance to work with him you should! highly recommend
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.