Tell HN: My 3 competitors are all super polished companies run by solo devs

1 gametorch 0 7/7/2025, 5:03:46 PM

I'm a solo developer that runs a small AI startup in the game development industry.

The demand is good. After initial marketing, I've seen a lot of organic growth. I get 3-5 new paying customers per day without doing anything. I'm crossing 300 signups soon.

I quickly ran into competitors building the same exact product. These looked like super polished, well-established companies. The websites look nice. The engineering looks solid.

As far as I can tell, they're all run by individual solo developers, too.

I built my entire startup with o3. I already considered myself a good engineer. I think I shipped 2-3x faster than ever before, when building this startup, due to AI. It seems that other developers are exhibiting similar gains.

How long until the first 1-person $100m company? I would bet it happens in 2026. Maybe even 2025.

Tell HN: My 3 competitors are all super polished companies run by solo devs

Missed OpenAI's GPT-4o Tutor? I Built the Demo They Didn't Release (brimink.com)

Website achieves a carbon rating of A plusmate (websitecarbon.com)

PubGrub: Next-generation version solving (2018) (nex3.medium.com)

Google Shut Down My Android Play Store Account and Killed My Business (flyingbytes.github.io)

Automatically Packaging a Haskell Library as a Swift Binary XCFramework (alt-romes.github.io)

Xbox producer suggests laid-off staff use AI to deal with emotions (bbc.co.uk)

Tesla Stock Slides After Musk Says He's Creating a New Political Party (wsj.com)

AI is learning to lie, scheme, and threaten its creators during stress tests (fortune.com)

Generic Interfaces (go.dev)

Excessive copying in C++ and your program's speed (johnnysswlab.com)

Inside America’s Death Chambers (theatlantic.com)

AlexScan – The Domain Security Analyzer (github.com)

7 Nobel Economists Urge France to Lead with 2% Ultra Rich Wealth Tax (lemonde.fr)

Meetings Are the Mind Killer

Introduction to Indian English (oed.com)

Jane Street's Indian Options Trade Was Too Good (bloomberg.com)

Show HN: Dwani.ai – multimodal inference API for Indian languages (dwani.ai)

Tempest-LoRa: Cross-Technology Covert Communication (arxiv.org)

Bedroom Design Orientation and Sleep Electroencephalography Signals (2019) (lww.com)

I used to prefer permissive licenses and now favor copyleft (vitalik.eth.limo)

In Praise of the Contrarian Stack (hackers.pub)

Show HN: Doc81 – tech documentation tool designed in AI-native mind (github.com)

27 Notes on Growing Old(er) (ian-leslie.com)

The Economics of Programming Languages [video] (2023) (youtube.com)

ChatGPT could pilot a spacecraft unexpectedly well, early tests find (space.com)

Overlord Engine: The Game Engine for Web Development (overlordsystems.com)

Show HN: I built AI-powered social media scheduler app (postquick.top)

Show HN: 404skill – real-world projects to level up your swe skills (404skill.github.io)

Why Building Smarter EDA Tools Is Key to Winning the AI Era (viksnewsletter.com)

Tech Companies Have Created a Loneliness Doom Loop (nytimes.com)

Show HN: Tinder for Startup Ideas (ideaswiper.vercel.app)

Paris' popular bike share program has a big sticky finger problem (electrek.co)

Real-time systems with Combine and WebSockets (blog.jacobstechtavern.com)

Batch Mode in the Gemini API: Process More for Less (developers.googleblog.com)

Neon DB MCP exploited to exfiltrate customer data (tramlines.io)

AI doesn't work the way you think it does [video] (youtube.com)

China Has Paid a High Price for Its Dominance in Rare Earths (nytimes.com)

CoreWeave to buy Core Scientific in $9B deal to meet AI power needs (reuters.com)

AWS Reproduced Our Lambda Crash, Then Blamed Us and Sent a Bill

Show HN: StopAddict – Gamified app to help you quit addictions

A LLM Plugin for OpenAI TTS (github.com)

Mcpeo: MCP Tool Selection Bias in LLMs – An Emerging Security Concern (nickwinder.com)

Show HN: I Got Tired of Calculator Sites, So I Built My Own

Gene Therapy Reverses Deafness in Just Weeks (scitechdaily.com)

Longevity Escape Velocity (en.wikipedia.org)

Securing GitHub Copilot agent mode and MCP Workflows with runtime guardrails (tramlines.io)

On-the-job learning upended by AI and hybrid work (ft.com)

Mobile-Friendliness of Flagging Submissions

SUS Lang: The SUS Hardware Description Language (sus-lang.org)

Tell HN: My 3 competitors are all super polished companies run by solo devs

Comments (0)