Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?

Post by pousada » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 2:09 PM UTC

latexr wrote: post #62

cowboy_henk wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cynical take, but a more positive interpretation is that pivots are needed if your company isn't actually solving a problem. Otherwise people would pay for it, and the founders would be getting rich. So you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.

> That's a cynical take One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment. > you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for. In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution. If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable,…

Post by robofanatic » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 2:14 PM UTC

qgin wrote: post #64

It’s still hard to create something successful. Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

pousada wrote: post #72

latexr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a cynical take One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment. > you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for. In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution. If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable,…

Of course profit is a priority how else are you going to pay the bills/employees etc?

Post by latexr » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 2:27 PM UTC

pousada wrote: post #72

latexr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a cynical take One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment. > you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for. In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution. If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable,…

Of course profit is a priority how else are you going to pay the bills/employees etc?

Post by ctkhn » Sat, Jan 17, 2026, 2:39 PM UTC

Oras wrote: post #71

artyom wrote: post #59

> Big companies can copy your product in no time Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true. If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened). Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple prioritie…

While I agree with sone of your points, there are many evidences that this happened in the past. One example is Microsoft creating teams to take on Slack.