from Hacker News

The Era of Solopreneurs Is Here

by QueensGambit on 3/2/25, 5:52 PM with 100 comments

• by wkirby on 3/2/25, 7:08 PM

  > An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.

  What an insane statement. If the tooling improves that much the team of 100 will also improve. A worker with a shovel only outperforms the other workers if they’re still digging with sticks.

  That sets aside the assumption that a few years from now we’ll see any material improvement at all. More likely we’ll see more wasted hype on some new revolution.

• by intalentive on 3/2/25, 6:32 PM

  >First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online).

  Sales and marketing is still 90% of the game. The solopreneur still doesn’t have an easy way to get paying customers. Either you sell SaaS into a network of business contacts, or else you try to play the influencer / reddit / SEO game to get early traction.

• by ivan_gammel on 3/2/25, 6:57 PM

  A lot of bold statements unsupported by data or even sufficiently deep understanding of the mentioned things.

  Like for example this:

  > Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot

  It is not a CRM system and it is far from addressing the needs of users of real CRMs. Of course, an early stage startup or a business with less than 1000 customers can handle leads in Google Forms. But that is a lot to handle.

  AI does not replace software engineering. It can enhance productivity on certain types of tasks, but AI is doing terrible job on something that mildly deviates from SO answers. It cannot build something like CRM or anything with rich domain.

  It is absolutely possible to go solo today, but it’s not because of AI. Tech founder can just write a lot of good code. Business founder won’t get past outsourced no-code solution.

• by vallode on 3/2/25, 6:50 PM

  I'm not sure how I feel about the take on "disappearing pillars". I think that knowledge and expertise in the different "pillars" the author describes has become easier to access, reducing the moat around the individual pillars and allowing greater overlap between professions. So while you might not need a "sales team", you do need "sales knowledge". Cloud solutions are amazing until they are not and you need "infra knowledge" to understand where you are going wrong and to evaluate potential solutions.

  I would argue that at a given size, scale, and growth you would find yourself looping back to the "original pillars".

  The example of Neartail[1] competing with Shopify is a prime example of this. Shopify has a large market cap, shareholders demanding profits, a large quantity of paying customers. Neartail has none of these, it may have paying customers and it may have some potential in the future but it is currently all within the sphere of control of a few individuals.

  Obviously a lot of what I'm saying is self-inflicted, you don't _have_ to grow endlessly but if you _do_ you need many decision makers and domain knowledge simply starts to reach limits for individuals (even when using AI).

• by featherless on 3/2/25, 7:28 PM

  I've been validating this sentiment almost every day.

  I left my job last year, after over a decade leading design and UX for iOS at Google, to pursue building a bootstrapped solopreneur startup, and the speed at which I've been able to build things out has been wild.

  There are entire domains that would have taken weeks or months for me to learn the ins-and-outs of the tech, that Claude has been able to knock out in a matter of minutes. It's like I have two full time junior engineers working with me at all times (with a similar amount of coaching + guidance required), and for $20/month. These are gains of easily 2x-10x productivity and I already consider myself to be fairly productive as a design engineer.

• by chasely on 3/2/25, 6:44 PM

  > This was possible because AI helped write the file system.

  I have my doubts

• by jpollock on 3/2/25, 6:45 PM

  "For example, the future of CRM isn’t just software—it’s software + sales team. Startups that don’t want to hire salespeople will eagerly adopt AI-driven CRMs that automate outreach, and follow-ups."

  I'm not involved in either side of this part of the business. Doesn't this read as "smarter spam"? Does that result in long-term customers?

  Perhaps I'm just not aware of just how down-and-dirty the top of the funnel is?

  My emotional response is: If you don't value _my_ time (as the customer), why should I consider your product?

• by OutOfHere on 3/2/25, 6:44 PM

  As software engineer jobs get culled (citing the excuse of AI), I strongly urge experienced senior software engineers to flip the game, becoming AI-assisted solopreneurs instead. If you're sufficiently intelligent, you don't even need VC money to bootstrap it. Here are some income models:

  Service:

  1. pay-by-use

  2. subscription

  Software:

  1. open-source with paid new feature development

  2. sales (on app stores)

  Physical products:

  1: Resell from China in West

  2. Develop new from China/anywhere and sell globally. Let big sites like Amazon and Walmart do the marketing and fulfillment.

• by seu on 3/2/25, 7:20 PM

  Love it how people come up with "trends" based on just one or two things happening in a very short time.

• by keiferski on 3/2/25, 7:28 PM

  The main problem with this is that presumably a 100-person team with AI will still outperform the individual with AI. The benefits will be adopted by organizations at every level.

  However I actually think the argument works for things that aren’t actually businesses and don’t really have competition.

  If for example you want to build an online encyclopedia about an obscure niche topic, or dialogue for an indie game, or do any number of other otherwise tedious and resource -heavy tasks, you can now do that with AI tools. This is what excites me the most about AI - not the prospect of outcompeting another business, but of making giant creative projects dramatically more feasible.

• by CER10TY on 3/2/25, 7:07 PM

  >While the giants are trapped in their own complexity, nimble teams can build and launch AI-native solutions that directly challenge established players. Target a bloated SaaS vertical, rebuild it from the ground up with AI at its core, and position it as the next-generation alternative.

  Is there _anyone_ that would jump ship to yet another SaaS just because it's "AI enabled"? Obviously it's all the rage for VCs right now, but I can't imagine switching to some other product simply because it has AI and mine doesn't.

• by joshdavham on 3/2/25, 7:05 PM

  It's hard to agree with your conclusion that AI will start to replace the need for developers when the premises of your argument aren't even correct.

  > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams

  This is simply not true. Sales teams are absolutely still needed and continue to provide lots of value, especially in b2b.

  > Then, serverless computing eliminated IT teams

  I'm honestly left scratching my head here. This is not true at all!

  > And now, AI is breaking the last barrier—software development itself.

  ...

• by jrsj on 3/2/25, 7:43 PM

  There is technology that can greatly benefit solopreneurs, but it isn’t AI. It’s just an evolution of the same tech that has been a huge benefit to early stage projects for awhile now. Knowing what you’re doing with highly productive tools like Rails or Laravel or whatever your preference is going to have a far greater impact than some LLM will.

• by light_triad on 3/2/25, 6:54 PM

  The incumbents have an advantage in distribution and adding AI as features in mature products.

  AI makes devs more productive but the need for moats still applies and competition will be worse not better. Distribution and defensibility is key

• by prmph on 3/2/25, 8:27 PM

  The article starts out interesting: > But DeepSeek didn’t just build another AI model. They wrote their own parallel file system (3FS) to optimize costs—something that would have been unthinkable for a company of their size. This was possible because AI helped write the file system.

  I thought, hmm, now that’s interesting. But then the breathless leaps of faith comes quickly

  > Now, imagine what will happen in a couple of years—AI will be writing code, optimizing infrastructure, and even debugging itself. An engineer with AI tool can now outbuild a 100-person engineering team.

  > This kind of disruption was previously limited to narrow consumer products like WhatsApp, where a 20-member team built a product that led to a $19 billion exit. But now, the same thing is happening in business applications that requires breadth

  Umm, not so fast, AI will not enable a couple of guys to write a robust production grade kernel in a couple of weeks or months, unless that kernel is simply a fork of Linux with some cosmetic tweaks. I always wonder, do the people making these sorts of pronouncements actually understand software? Have they built software of any significant size and depth?

  And then:

  > First, the internet killed the need for sales teams (distribution moved online).

  Sales teams have not been killed simply because distribution has moved online, although kind of sales people you need, and what they do, has certainly changed.

• by ant6n on 3/2/25, 8:00 PM

  It seems, just as an example, that ycombinator does not like solo founders.

• by aerhardt on 3/2/25, 7:31 PM

  What a display of intellectual laziness and dereliction.

• by varispeed on 3/2/25, 7:14 PM

  There is institutional prejudice against "Solopreneurs". The notion is that if you are doing the business alone, then it must be something wrong with you. Like, why didn't you attract any co-founders? Why you don't have a team behind you that supports you etc. etc. Basically they want to shoehorn outdated economic models onto emerging businesses and they way they operate. This is fuelled by the rich, who inherited their wealth and have no talents on their own, just want to get shares in "cool" things and appear in circle jerk magazines how they spotted this little company and took them to the next level etc. As solopreneur you are unlikely to get any grants and other government support too. There is always one question that shuts the conversation down: "What if you get hit by a bus?"

• by merwerigh on 3/2/25, 8:01 PM

  1. Insane statements 2. Lack of data 3. Advertising your own products

  I really thought it would be meaningful article but it just disappointed me :(

• by kubb on 3/2/25, 6:39 PM

  So the secret sauce was the filesystem?

• by gatienboquet on 3/2/25, 7:05 PM

  Shopify will use AI too and add way more values on their product soon also ?

  The need for IA Programmer will be x10 too.

• by fxwin on 3/2/25, 6:42 PM

  This just reads like a fluff piece to advertise their own products, and the conclusions in the summary are the kind of vague handwavey promises AI bros have been making for the past 3 years

  > Take our own experience: Neartail competes with Shopify and Square, and it’s built by one person. Formfacade is a CRM that competes with HubSpot—built by one person.

  Would like it better if claims like this were backed up by numbers.

• by leshokunin on 3/3/25, 12:37 AM

  I remember when social media was the hype at the start of web2, and a bunch of people came in saying everything would be social.

  Then the same thing with cloud. Big data. Bitcoin. VR. Ethereum. Web3. NFTs.

  I mean AI is cool and it helps with some stuff. And it's also not going to be this epic panacea where rogue coders turn into the best entrepreneur they can be. To throw out such takes is just short sighted hype.

• by EdwardDiego on 3/2/25, 7:59 PM

  No infra team cos cloud? And AI will handle it?

  Oh my sweet summer child.