[rl3]

>Once you actually start, the bar for getting in seems to get much higher, because there's suddenly a lot more concrete data points to benchmark your startup against.

I started in late 2013 and was rejected by YC in 2016. Haven't applied to anything since, with the exception of Apollo. Certainly was very aware of that dynamic at the time.

As a solo founder who lacks the aforementioned impressive resume, and who's nearly a decade in, I no longer have much hope for accelerators.

This was written less than a month before COVID inflicted a great deal of pain and delayed things by a little more than a year:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22429827

But hey, at least I'm at step one now.

[allisdust]

Would it not make sense for you to get user validation with a smaller scale poc than the herculean plan you outlined. Also your plan seem to focus too much on funding goals than user acquisition or product market fit. Unless you are planning to create a spacex style capital intensive company, I don't see why you need so much funding for.

[rl3]

>Would it not make sense for you to get user validation with a smaller scale poc than the herculean plan you outlined. Also your plan seem to focus too much on funding goals than user acquisition or product market fit.

I used to think in those terms. Thing is, it's a multi-dimensional problem.

Dimension one is a human resource limitation. One person pitted against a rapidly evolving technology landscape with very high technical bar. What that equates to is making one demo/MVP after another and eventually burning out. Or, compromising quality. Early on, it was possible to do it the traditional way. Things are now moving too fast.

Regardless, the reward in either scenario is funding based on whatever "product market fit," and users that require tending to. Best case, you might end up a multi-billion dollar company if you make it. One not all that different from pile after pile of technical debts that routinely waddle to their respective exits, then exist in some hellish afterlife post-exit. That's typically defined as success. I imagine one loses their soul in the process of even creating such a thing.

Point being, I view user acquisition and product market fit as poison pills. Not just for the company optimizing for it, but for society as a whole. They are a large part of what is wrong in the world.

Dimension two is expansion of scope. The more you think, the more beautiful things get. It's really hard to go back and limit scope once you've woven ideas together over the span of years in a kind of tapestry where individual concepts end up almost symbiotic. Fortunately, I inadvertently dedicated my time to this type of thinking rather than grinding out demos.

So, what you're left with is selling a vision. Absent any track record, it still necessitates a demo—but the nature of that demo becomes fundamentally different—as does its target audience. More of a living design document built to help convey that vision.

---

>Unless you are planning to create a spacex style capital intensive company, I don't see why you need so much funding for.

Well, the goal is for people to wake up one day and find out that the way they interact with computing as a whole has fundamentally changed forever.

On HN, you see people grasping with regularity at individual threads which constitute pieces of this puzzle, with no clear consensus on what should be done. There's an almost morose acceptance that pervades the current technological hellscape in which we live. Now people are looking back at dreams of what once could have been as a way out of this mess, but that alone isn't sufficient.

In any case, things get expensive at that level. I'm in my mid thirties and the core team I want to hire is probably twenty years my senior on average. Some of them probably don't even care about the money.

In all likelihood it'll go nowhere and I'll remain a nobody, but it's already been a wild ride, and hopefully I'll at least have fun and be spared the stereotypical startup/accelerator/VC grind.

Hey, perhaps somewhere along the way I'll even figure out how to not sound delusional.

[mtVessel]

If your vision is truly so all-encompassing, maybe that's the thing you should work on selling -- but not to investors; to the people you want to work with. Solve your HR problem, get some co-founders, and get going.

[rl3]

That's more or less the plan. Convince some key people, maybe raise a seed round that pays for a couple years of formal pre-production, and very delicately snowball into a dream team contingent on further funding.

Co-founders can't work since I've been at it nearly a decade, but that's more for control/singular vision reasons and not equity.

In the mean time, I'm just thankful to be alive and working a full-time job to get there.