> especially now that it's so easy to get that initial traction
It's gotten much cheaper to get traction. In some consumer markets, it is basically cost-free; all it takes is a motivated technical entrepreneur with a couple months of savings.
You can't have very meaningful traction until you release an actual product. Most significant products (e.g. Dropbox) will take one person at least 6-12 months to develop, followed by 3+ months before there are charts showing traction.
a) You raise money after having invested a year of work on your own dime.
b) You raise money based on your connections/pedigree ("reputation").
Not boasting, but simply stating fact, that on my own, I've written:
- A system for managing employee leave and sickness with google apps integration in 2 months
- A credit control application for one of my clients in 3 weeks, automatic emails, dunning letters, cash-flow forecasting
- A purchase order system that would automatically raise invoices in their accountancy system in 3-4 weeks
- An entire search system a la booking.com in 4 weeks, with named location search, geo location, tags, categories, blah, blah, blah. Basically the heart of any listing style startup.
And while I realize I'm a good programmer, I'm not a phenomenal programmer, I'm fairly lazy, I find it hard to focus on more than about 5 hours of actual programming unless I'm doing something really interesting.
And these are some off the top of my head examples. I've written loads of small startup sized apps that would be of the complexity that YC fund in much less than 12 weeks, let alone 12 months.
You're looking for an MVP with some traction, not a polished product. Reddit, for example, launched without the ability for users to create their own subreddits, and many would describe that as one of the key reasons of Reddit's growth. I believe they actually launched without commenting, but I can't find a source on that.
While today's startups have more expected of them, it's now easier than ever to write a web app, even SPAs that even 3 or 4 years ago would be too hard for individuals to write on their own.
> Reddit, for example, launched without the ability for users to create their own subreddits, and many would describe that as one of the key reasons of Reddit's growth. I believe they actually launched without commenting, but I can't find a source on that.
reddit launched with only voting and submitting of links (no self posts). Commenting, subreddit creation, self posts and all that was added years after launch.
Not sure why you got downvoted. I think many makers balk at getting customers with an unpolished / unfinished product - "No one will pay for this. We need more features." is the sentiment I have heard often. While I am sure that a product like Stripe might take long to get to stage where people can start using it, in many cases, it is not so hard to create the MVP in 3 - 4 months that solves atleast one pain point for lots of users.
VWO, a bootstrapped A/B testing product, started getting paying customers with a very basic interface and reports[1], and today it is a ~$10M business.
I don't know, HN has changed or someone's stalking my comments. Or perhaps, despite my efforts not to, it sounds like boasting. I was just trying to share my experiences of writing YC-sized apps and the time it took me, and I know better programmers than me.
The thing about this is if you read about ycombinator it's all about getting a product out of the door within 3 months. And they don't expect you to have a product when you start. In a team of two they seem to say one person should be focusing on the business side, so that is one person getting a product out of the door AND get some growth in 3 months with some help from the other. They expect it themselves.
The key part you're ignoring is "Most significant products (e.g. Dropbox)"
There's no way you could clone Dropbox's first version in anything less than 6 months, and that assumes you're a great programmer.
It took the Dropbox team something like 18 months to publicly release, which was all paid for by funding. It required significant funding to build and to operate (freemium).
reddit was also created with funding and could not have existed without funding. It made no money.
I know the story of a lone developer creating a little app that takes off sounds good, but the reality is most significant projects take a good amount of time and money.
I kinda disagree, but it depends on the product/market. You can't pre-sell a nuclear fusion reactor before it's built (I'll bundle that with my swampland in Florida!) but there are ways to generate meaningful traction through list-building, pre-launch sales, commitments, etc. for SaaS apps that you could use to raise money. And frankly, that's what an entrepreneur should be doing in the first place to validate that you should be building that product for the target audience in the first place or that there is a market for your product. And you can always strip down your MVP to it's absolute core to get it out the door faster so you don't spend 6 months building it.
Can you explain, step by step, the cheap, easy way to gain traction as a technical entrepreneur with a few months of savings? This sounds like an infomercial. I'm not sure what the cheap, easy route to gain traction would be unless it's "pay a spammer". If that is the predominant position in SV, it's good to know.
Bummed out that no one has answered this. Maybe it's just something investors say so that it's easy to discard people and startups that aren't already obvious winners; "oh, you don't have enough traction for how long you've been up. Getting traction is super easy these days so you must be dumb. Next!"
Not if what you want to build requires more than 0.5 to 1 developer years of work. There are a large family of problems that can only be tackled with 10+ developer years worth of work to get to a MVP.
It's gotten much cheaper to get traction. In some consumer markets, it is basically cost-free; all it takes is a motivated technical entrepreneur with a couple months of savings.