[Alex3917]

> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company

The average cost of raising a kid in a middle class family is around 250K. What percentage of micro SaaS founders do you think had less than double or triple that (inflation adjusted) spent on them between when they were born and when they founded their companies?

If founding a SaaS company is free, it's only in the same sense that gas for a Tesla doesn't cost anything. Being one person who has the liberal arts / social science background to understand people, and can also code, and can also design, and can also do marketing, requires many hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of education -- even if it's just sitting around in the library for a few years instead of working.

There are definitely people who are wildly successful without that kind of background, but I don't think they're representative of the typical people building micro SaaS companies. Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.

[csa]

> Keep in mind you're really only able to learn to code if you're able to read English at a proficient level, which only ~13% of Americans are able to do.

Proficiency is measured on a scale — it is not binary.

What specific level of proficiency are you referring to, and what is your source for saying that this is the minimum level needed to learn to code. I will go out on a limb and say that your 13% is folks who can read at a 12th grade level (or thereabouts). Note that in the literature, this does not refer to the reading level of an average 12th grader, rather the level that curriculum developers aim to have 12 graders read at.

Also, what level of coding are your referring to?

I will just say straight up that I can teach and have taught kids who have little or no knowledge of English how to code (e.g., with Scratch), so I think you may need to make your assumptions a bit more transparent.

[Alex3917]

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF

> Also, what level of coding are your referring to?

Just being a working developer. For which the main skill is just being able to read and understand the documentation for new languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.

[csa]

Thank you for the source.

That said, I don’t think proficiency as defined in that source is an ideal proxy for “can be a developer”, especially given the that “developer” can refer to a wide range of tasks.

Some comments:

1. To pass a FAANG algo interview, yes, the proficient level is needed.

2. To do the bulk of coding and bug fixing that many (most?) developers do, I think that there are a lot of high intermediates (my sub-categorization of intermediate) can do the work and actually are employed as developers. I’ve seen enough janky code in code bases and submitted as “updates” or “fixes” for me to believe that this is widely true.

3. To be a productive creator, I also think the proficient level is necessary. That said, I have seen a bunch of janky creations with questionable efficiency/productivity that lead me to believe again that proficiency is an ideal rather than a necessity.

Literacy is a tricky subject, so I encourage you to exercise caution before throwing around ideas like only the proficient 13% of the population can be developers. There are so many qualifications that need to be made before that statement is plausibly true that it is not worth making, imo.

Let me add that I agree with your overall statement that most successful founders come from relatively privileged backgrounds. There are many reasons for this, literacy being one.

[beardedman]

The US (surprisingly) is not the only country where people start businesses. ;)

Look at emerging markets & look at tech being applied to them by folks that have far far less than 250k.

> If founding a SaaS company is free

VIRTUALLY free is what I said. And yes it is - you have resource like CodeAcademy & a VPS cost less than $5 these days.

[friendlybus]

13% of America is literate enough to code??