I think you&#x27;re wrong on the 6-12 months.<p>Not boasting, but simply stating fact, that on my own, I&#x27;ve written:<p>- A system for managing employee leave and sickness with google apps integration in 2 months<p>- A credit control application for one of my clients in 3 weeks, automatic emails, dunning letters, cash-flow forecasting<p>- A purchase order system that would automatically raise invoices in their accountancy system in 3-4 weeks<p>- 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.<p>And while I realize I&#x27;m a good programmer, I&#x27;m not a phenomenal programmer, I&#x27;m fairly lazy, I find it hard to focus on more than about 5 hours of actual programming unless I&#x27;m doing something really interesting.<p>And these are some off the top of my head examples. I&#x27;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.<p>You&#x27;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&#x27;s growth. I believe they actually launched without commenting, but I can&#x27;t find a source on that.<p>While today&#x27;s startups have more expected of them, it&#x27;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.