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> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they

> shouldn't we be seeing a ton of 1 person startups? Here's the dirty secret: 1 person AI coding enabled startups don't want their customers to know that they are 1 engineer AI coding startups so they do not expose it or share that info. There is still a lot of negative sentiment associated with this. 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)

ed_mercer 9mo ago
Agreed, it's never been a better time to start a startup with a very small team.
- CharlieDigital 9mo ago
  The key (based on my exp with these 3) is the composition of the team. At least 1 person on the team needs to have domain experience and if solo, that solo founder needs to have domain experience and good connections or the wherewithal to get the first handful of paying customers via cold calling, cold emails. The main challenge remains sales, marketing, and branding. There are free CRMs and anyone can build a CRM. Why do some CRMs succeed while others fail? Branding, marketing, awareness. So I don't see it as "there will just be 10x more competitors" because I've built enough stuff that I failed to sell and used enough shitty software to know that the software itself is rarely the reason why people buy X over Y. It's because they didn't even know Y existed.
rockyj 9mo ago
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.
- CharlieDigital 9mo ago
  Two of the startups are lead by non-technical founders who have strong industry specific experience (legal and finance). The third has a partner that has industry experience (is the ICP). So you definitely still need strong sales and marketing and a deep understanding of a business domain. 1 person and AI is not sufficient to create a business.
margorczynski 9mo ago
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.
- CharlieDigital 9mo ago
  You are discounting sales, marketing, and branding. Take drop shipping for example: anyone can do this, but the successful ones are those that know how to brand and market the product well. Not to mention having the right mindset for startups and building a business. The code and product is maybe only 20% of the story.
  - margorczynski 9mo ago
    I'm not. That edge eventually converges to 0 when you have 10+ competitors that offer the same for 10x less money. If you don't have some kind of cult following like Apple eventually you'll get margin-squeezed till death and all that marketing, sales, etc. will get cut down to stay afloat. Of course all of the above is just my theory how this will play out in the long run, I'm no oracle by any means.
    - CharlieDigital 9mo ago
      > that offer the same for 10x less money. Not likely because there is still a lower bound. These 1 person startups are winning partially because they are already 10x cheaper than the incumbents. But beyond that, it's not likely that there are 10x the number of people who know the domain and have the right mindset plus appetite for risk.
      - vidarh 9mo ago
        I'm not entirely disagreeing. There are limits there that means we can't assume the margins will go to their theoretical minimum. But you're also in part assuming the models don't increasingly know the domain or know how to research the domain and compile the information for you. They'll be squeezing margins out of a lot more than just the tech.
HarHarVeryFunny 9mo ago
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.
- godzillabrennus 9mo ago
  I expect you see the world this way because you are a software developer. People who know how to sell and understand the problems to solve do not routinely understand how to build software to solve those problems so they can sell them to customers. Now that the bar for building software is lowering, the world of building a startup is changing. A relatively newcomer to software is able to ship a medium complexity vibe-coded app to a few test customers and kick off revenues.
  - MajidAliSyncOps 9mo ago
    I agree that the bar for building software has dropped significantly, but I think the harder part still shows up right after the first few customers. Shipping something workable is easier now, but understanding which problems are actually worth solving — and getting consistent feedback early — still seems to be the main separator between hobby projects and real businesses.
    - godzillabrennus 9mo ago
      I totally concur. That said, technology is evolving fast, and I think it's clear that the bar for solving those problems with non-technical people will drop dramatically in the next 12 months.
lunar_mycroft 9mo ago
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-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
- CharlieDigital 9mo ago
  Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3. 2 of the 3 existed as entities for more than a year already, but pivoted at least once (both were VC-funded but now doing something very different than what they started with when I first met founders) and ultimately let go of their offshore and contract engineers once AI became good enough some time early last year. Founders basically realized that the quality of code was as good or better than what they were getting from their engineers while reducing the turnaround time; now they can go from talking to customers to having a working prototype in the same day instead of waiting 24h+ for an offshore team. The other one started in November of 2024 and found traction around March. So two companies went from multi-person teams to 1 person teams and 1 team was a 1 person eng team from the get-go (with a business-oriented partner). I'd also point out that 2025 was a particularly volatile year because of shifts in the political and economic environment (including very high interest rates) so I wouldn't take your stat at face value without considering external factors that might affect the total number of net new business registrations. It still remains true that building a product is not the same thing as building a business. It may be that we'll see less SaaS startups as companies find that they can just in-house software instead of buying. Who knows? Startup I'm at canceled one of our subscriptions because we ended up building an in-house replacement because it is now cheap enough and easy enough that we could.
  - 9mo ago
carlgreene 9mo ago
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.
- CharlieDigital 9mo ago
  Most startup -> enterprise deals are like this in nature. Enterprise buyers are already wary of small startups (for various reasons). A 1 person startup? Wouldn't even get a meeting with the buyers in many cases even if your software was 10x cheaper and exactly solved the business problem.
  - pc86 9mo ago
    I worked for a public health care Enterprise early in my career and I make a joke to one of the VPs once about how it seemed like the real career success would be finding one of our pain points as a patient or employee, leaving to start a company that solves that, and selling it back to us. He laughed and said several people had done that but you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was.
    - CharlieDigital 9mo ago
      > you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was I spent ~16 years of my career in life sciences and this is also my experience. There's no way you get into an enterprise account with a pharma as a startup without a lot of deep connections; life sciences space is very high in regulatory requirements and risk and the risk/reward ratio with startups simply isn't worth it. In my specific space, clinical trials can run for years. A company that might fold if they run out of runway? Non-starter. I was a member of a small company that did make this work and it required that we put our code in escrow with a large multi-national IT company that owned the support contract (customer paid us for licensing, paid multi-national IT company for support, our source code went into escrow).
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]

ed_mercer 9mo ago

Agreed, it's never been a better time to start a startup with a very small team.

CharlieDigital 9mo ago
The key (based on my exp with these 3) is the composition of the team. At least 1 person on the team needs to have domain experience and if solo, that solo founder needs to have domain experience and good connections or the wherewithal to get the first handful of paying customers via cold calling, cold emails. The main challenge remains sales, marketing, and branding. There are free CRMs and anyone can build a CRM. Why do some CRMs succeed while others fail? Branding, marketing, awareness. So I don't see it as "there will just be 10x more competitors" because I've built enough stuff that I failed to sell and used enough shitty software to know that the software itself is rarely the reason why people buy X over Y. It's because they didn't even know Y existed.

rockyj 9mo ago

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.

CharlieDigital 9mo ago
Two of the startups are lead by non-technical founders who have strong industry specific experience (legal and finance). The third has a partner that has industry experience (is the ICP). So you definitely still need strong sales and marketing and a deep understanding of a business domain. 1 person and AI is not sufficient to create a business.

margorczynski 9mo ago

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.

CharlieDigital 9mo ago
You are discounting sales, marketing, and branding. Take drop shipping for example: anyone can do this, but the successful ones are those that know how to brand and market the product well. Not to mention having the right mindset for startups and building a business. The code and product is maybe only 20% of the story.
- margorczynski 9mo ago
  I'm not. That edge eventually converges to 0 when you have 10+ competitors that offer the same for 10x less money. If you don't have some kind of cult following like Apple eventually you'll get margin-squeezed till death and all that marketing, sales, etc. will get cut down to stay afloat. Of course all of the above is just my theory how this will play out in the long run, I'm no oracle by any means.
  - CharlieDigital 9mo ago
    > that offer the same for 10x less money. Not likely because there is still a lower bound. These 1 person startups are winning partially because they are already 10x cheaper than the incumbents. But beyond that, it's not likely that there are 10x the number of people who know the domain and have the right mindset plus appetite for risk.
    - vidarh 9mo ago
      I'm not entirely disagreeing. There are limits there that means we can't assume the margins will go to their theoretical minimum. But you're also in part assuming the models don't increasingly know the domain or know how to research the domain and compile the information for you. They'll be squeezing margins out of a lot more than just the tech.

HarHarVeryFunny 9mo ago

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.

godzillabrennus 9mo ago
I expect you see the world this way because you are a software developer. People who know how to sell and understand the problems to solve do not routinely understand how to build software to solve those problems so they can sell them to customers. Now that the bar for building software is lowering, the world of building a startup is changing. A relatively newcomer to software is able to ship a medium complexity vibe-coded app to a few test customers and kick off revenues.
- MajidAliSyncOps 9mo ago
  I agree that the bar for building software has dropped significantly, but I think the harder part still shows up right after the first few customers. Shipping something workable is easier now, but understanding which problems are actually worth solving — and getting consistent feedback early — still seems to be the main separator between hobby projects and real businesses.
  - godzillabrennus 9mo ago
    I totally concur. That said, technology is evolving fast, and I think it's clear that the bar for solving those problems with non-technical people will drop dramatically in the next 12 months.

lunar_mycroft 9mo ago

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-why-ai-coding https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...

CharlieDigital 9mo ago
Can't speak for anyone else, but I personally know 3. 2 of the 3 existed as entities for more than a year already, but pivoted at least once (both were VC-funded but now doing something very different than what they started with when I first met founders) and ultimately let go of their offshore and contract engineers once AI became good enough some time early last year. Founders basically realized that the quality of code was as good or better than what they were getting from their engineers while reducing the turnaround time; now they can go from talking to customers to having a working prototype in the same day instead of waiting 24h+ for an offshore team. The other one started in November of 2024 and found traction around March. So two companies went from multi-person teams to 1 person teams and 1 team was a 1 person eng team from the get-go (with a business-oriented partner). I'd also point out that 2025 was a particularly volatile year because of shifts in the political and economic environment (including very high interest rates) so I wouldn't take your stat at face value without considering external factors that might affect the total number of net new business registrations. It still remains true that building a product is not the same thing as building a business. It may be that we'll see less SaaS startups as companies find that they can just in-house software instead of buying. Who knows? Startup I'm at canceled one of our subscriptions because we ended up building an in-house replacement because it is now cheap enough and easy enough that we could.
- 9mo ago

carlgreene 9mo ago

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.

CharlieDigital 9mo ago
Most startup -> enterprise deals are like this in nature. Enterprise buyers are already wary of small startups (for various reasons). A 1 person startup? Wouldn't even get a meeting with the buyers in many cases even if your software was 10x cheaper and exactly solved the business problem.
- pc86 9mo ago
  I worked for a public health care Enterprise early in my career and I make a joke to one of the VPs once about how it seemed like the real career success would be finding one of our pain points as a patient or employee, leaving to start a company that solves that, and selling it back to us. He laughed and said several people had done that but you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was.
  - CharlieDigital 9mo ago
    > you better take a half dozen executives with you or you'd never get the first meeting no matter how good the product was I spent ~16 years of my career in life sciences and this is also my experience. There's no way you get into an enterprise account with a pharma as a startup without a lot of deep connections; life sciences space is very high in regulatory requirements and risk and the risk/reward ratio with startups simply isn't worth it. In my specific space, clinical trials can run for years. A company that might fold if they run out of runway? Non-starter. I was a member of a small company that did make this work and it required that we put our code in escrow with a large multi-national IT company that owned the support contract (customer paid us for licensing, paid multi-national IT company for support, our source code went into escrow).

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]