Ask HN: $0 vs. $10k vs. $100k to start a company, what would you do?

Don't worry about being a company, worry about building a product or service enough people want to pay for. The nice thing about software is that your development costs can be close to zero. Keep your day job, program nights and weekends, and see if you can fill a niche by creating something worth taking to the next step.

And, you might get funded too.

At the low end I would start building a small AI app - likely in the chat or forum space. Start as an OSS vendor that has a free deployable or paid options

At $10k really isn't much different because 10k is not paying for anything significant. But I would either add agentic features (since it uses a fuck-ton more tokens) for my chat/forum- OR - I would hire an intern at a non-zero biweekly rate (maybe $1k per month) for at least 4 hours per day.

At $100k I would start a construction company if I can attract a GC and build ADUs for people for $500k each in the Bay Area. Probably have the GC and one other person and myself doing the actual buildings and split it 3 ways evenly (as long as everyone's doing the same amount) and make about 3 ADUs per year.