Well, you can do it with only 1. But it would him/her several years and a LOT of effort. I think parent was saying that to get a "functional" team, a minimum of

Well, you can do it with only 1. But it would him/her several years and a LOT of effort. I think parent was saying that to get a "functional" team, a minimum of 5 would be needed. Even with the 5 people, I think the estimate of 1 year is a bit extreme. Unless you get brilliant programmers that can work together really well, I'd imagine they would need more time than that. I don't know what the product is, but to be able to compete with a mature product(even a bad one) takes a lot of time and energy. It all depends on what you want version 1.0 to do.