<i>Sure, there are now dozens of e-commerce solutions similar to Snipcart. Yet there is 0 business like ours.</i><p>It sounds like Snipcart are doing something very similar to Moltin (<a href="https://moltin.com" rel="nofollow">https://moltin.com</a>), which is a YC company.
I'd agree that the fascination with VC money is not helpful. There are certainly verticals where you can only survive with outside investments (biotech comes to mind) or where scaling quickly is important, but no amount of money will save you if you don't have product-market fit.
I like the takeaways, but the no VC seems to be quite an exaggeration.<p><i>They invested temporary resources (design, frontend) and a full-time salary (mine) into Snipcart, our developer-first e-commerce platform.</i>
My Odd Startup!<p>One guy, no VC, patience, problem identified, for solution, crucial secret sauce found and scalable, production quality code written, alpha test in progress, meager burn rate, no users or revenue yet.<p>Problem? One where the first good solution should be a "must have" for nearly everyone on the Internet.<p>Solution? An excellent solution now with a high technological barrier to entry and later with some strong network effects.<p>Solution appears to the users as just a simple Web site that looks good on everything with a Web browser up to date as of maybe 10 years ago and from just 24,000 programming language statements.<p>Platform? Microsoft's .NET Framework 4.0 with ASP.NET, ADO.NET, Visual Basic .NET, and a little use of C via <i>platform invoke</i>.<p>Potential? If people like the solution, then in line to be the first company worth $1T.