Big companies are not your worry in most cases. They have so much bureaucracy and internal politics that it's often cheaper for them to buy out the up-and-coming startups than it is to build in-house.
Instead, if you achieve success without much of a moat, you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". These are companies who employ multiple small teams (think 3-4 people), and each team is charged with cloning one of the most popular apps - they have really abbreviated development cycles, on the order of 6 weeks, and they just keep churning till they've drowned every app on the leaderboard in clones. And because they are astroturfing the whole space, they don't actually need most of these clones to be individually profitable.
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 priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
Don’t worry big companies still can’t copy anything quickly, even with AI. Why? Because before they can ship a single feature, they’ll need to schedule 42 alignment meetings, debate AI-generated slide decks, and log their “strategic pivots” into an AI-curated Jira board.
The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
Every single org I’ve seen using teams (sample size of 4-5 orgs) uses it because it came for free. And every one of them also got slack and paid for it.
That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
If, knowing what you know now, you could go back in time and be the one to create Slack would you not do it? Even if everyone is using Teams now (they're not), it took a really long time to show up that Slack's founders were able to capitalize on.
The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
Is “software startup” the right term? I understand that you might want to “use software” in the startup but surely, in the most successful startups, the thing that makes them successful is that they solve a real problem, that real people/businesses have, and are prepared to “pay” [1] you to solve for them.
If the startup is just “software for the sake of software” then I think that’s a different thing entirely. And to be fair, sometimes software for the sake of it is more like art or fun. And it’s true, sometimes something wonderful comes out of that. Sometimes. :)
[1]: Obviously “pay” can mean _very_ different things in different contexts.
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.
> Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers
This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.
As much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.
Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in).
A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome.
But.
In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature.
But no.
Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k
The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
Oculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
Yes!! The software market is still growing quickly.
What moat are you referring to? AFAICT, moats are bigger now than ever before, but the moats I see are centered around things like consumer habits and B2B contracts and hub/platform experiences. People tend to like the software they know & have, or the contractors they know already, even when they complain about it. The need to overcome static friction is a moat, one that makes it harder for startups to get in, but easier to stay once you’re in.
Big companies are slow. It seems like it would be easy for them to copy products, but they rarely do, and even when they try they take forever. Worry about yourself first, whether you can deliver, whether your product is superior, whether you can get customers, whether your business is sustainable, etc.. Worry about other startups second. They can copy faster than big companies. Do you have an edge over other startups? Don’t worry about the big companies. If they aren’t already solving the problem you want to solve, they won’t start until after you’re successful.
Note acquisitions are a thing! Big companies that want to copy your product are aware that the fastest way to do that is to acquire a working solution and a pile of new customers. You should be thinking about big companies more as opportunity than competition.
Software moats were never really a moat in and of themselves. You always had to be a first mover. It's true that there are fewer and fewer first mover opportunities, but that has less to do with recent LLMs advancements and more that we have already solved a lot of software problems on first principles. It's partially why LLMs work so well, they are pulling the "widgets" from distribution and synthesizing into your requirements. Before, we probably thought we were writing novelty when it was literally solved 1000x over.
If you aren't a first mover, your success was always dependent on other skills and great execution across multiple disciplines, and also a lot of stubbornness. The software layer has always been important, but a support role of successful enterprises. Start-ups have always been hard to pull together successfully for a lot of other reasons unrelated to code.
If you find a disruptive algorithm (like pagerank) there is little evidence that LLMs will infer your solution by looking at your app. Anything else, they are just design choices and have never been moats either, but say you have a qualitative edge, you'll make the choices that can create a recognizable brand where someone vibing a copycat may not care as much. Nothing has changed on this. Your chance of succeeding rests on your ability to reach your users and iterate in a crowded space, this is what you always had to do anyway.
There are things, however, that aren't worth working on anymore with the advent of LLMs. Some of these have been fully dismissed, for example sentiment analysis. A single API call for the cheapest (even local) LLM vendor will give you SOTA classification. There are many more examples but they are so obvious. Essentially, the "build me 1 billion dollar app" prompt will never work, so if you have a burning desire to build something, do it. Just remember, there never was and never will be a promise of unlimited fortunes whatever you do.
Yes, big companies can copy your product. But at what cost, especially when including opportunity cost and the levels of bureaucracy in larger companies? I have heard your question many times during the last 20 years, and still there are more software startups.
In many cases it would cost them less to buy your company than to create it from scratch. Which is why so many small companies are acquired instead of copied. The question should be more what do you want to do and are you able to follow up on creating a startup? Writing the code is a small part of creating a successful startup
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
It’s the best time to start a company. Few people can build anything now. Big companies are at a huge disadvantage now because they can’t be personal. Software development is going decentralized. You can go to a bunch of businesses and be personal, and develop personalized solutions for them in person. You only need few such clients to be profitable and have lifestyle business.
Yes! All startups are created to solve a problem, regardless of the tools used. Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool. While AI makes writing software much easier. It's likely to lead to an explosion of new apps. Only those that fill a genuine need will survive. Your job is to identify these new problems and determine which apps to build.
Simple apps are a thing of the past. If an LLM can generate an app in a few sittings, it isn't a saleable product. However, people will still pay for a fully engineered application that solves a complex problem that AI cannot easily replicate.
Regarding copies, there is always room for more than one solution to the same need. Your challenge is to figure out how to stand out. A fundamental business hurdle, that has existed since the beginning.
Here's an idea that always bear's fruit. We humans love to do things as easy as possible. Write something that saves energy, time and is simple then people will pay for it.
And most of the time that problem is “the founders don’t have as much money as they want”.
> Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool.
You make it sound like it’s something noble, but let’s not pretend most software companies these days don’t have “make me rich” as the top goal. Effectively everything VC backed (yes, including by Y Combinator) falls in that category. That’s why pivots are a thing. Most founders these days don’t give a shit about what they’re building or customers, they only care about the payoff.
This seems like a very jaded comment, and if it’s because you got burned in a startup, then you have my sympathy and I’m sorry for debating. Just know that not everyone is running on nothing but greed. You might be confusing VCs with startup founders a bit. VCs are definitely profit motivated, by design. It’s going too far, and incorrect IMO, to suggest even VCs, or anyone involved, doesn’t care about building solutions or care about customers. All founders I’ve ever met care about what they make, and most VCs care about it somewhat but also care that the founders care strongly; they don’t often fund founders who don’t care.
So can you source any of your claims of “most”? I just looked it up, and the majority of software startups are self-funded or angel/seed-funded, not VC funded. Founders that don’t care about product or customers enough tend to fail. Founders that only care about the payoff don’t tend to self-fund their startup.
That said, everyone and all companies have financial incentives. There’s nothing unique or new about software startup founders there. The entire economy runs on profit motive. And I’ve seen a lot more people who don’t care about customers or product working in large companies making a nice easy salary working 9 to 5 (or less)!
My personal sampling of founders vs company workers is that founders are, by far, the ones who care more deeply about building something new and delighting customers and growing a sustainable business, care enough to start working nights and weekends, go years with crappy pay or no pay, to do every job in the company from engineering to design to marketing to support to filing taxes. Some people certainly are at least partially motivated to accept these sacrifices for the chance at a payoff, but lots of founders would prefer a lifestyle company where they get to keep building and don’t have the insane pressures and politics of a unicorn company.
Pivots are a thing because good product ideas often are not good business ideas. Startups that fail to pivot are the ones that die, and if your startup dies you don’t get to care about what you’re building or about customers at all. If you want companies to care about product and customers and not profit, then you should embrace sustainable economics, and that means making things people will pay for, and when they’re not paying, making something else.
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.
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, that means profit was the priority, not solving the problem.
There is a chasm of difference between “I care about this problem and want to solve it, but I also need to think how to make it sustainable” and “I don’t really care what I’m tackling, as long as I make bank”.
I would expect it to be obvious that caring about making money above fixing a problem means the problem won’t be solved that well compared to the alternative.
Are you really going to claim you never encountered a startup that is obviously shitting on customers and degrading the experience to make a buck? Do you honestly believe all startups are created to solve a problem (the original claim I responded to) and none are created with the intent of being the next “unicorn” to make the founders rich? If that is the case, search the term “enshittification”. Surely you’ll have encountered it by now. Pick whatever example helps you understand the point.
I don't see how its "obvious" at all. I think most problems wouldn't be solved at all with this view because most problems aren't something people care about. Money gives people the incentive to solve every problem possible. Someone who "cares" is free to solve it even better and make even more money.
This is to some extent a false dichotomy. Generally speaking, products that prioritize fixing a problem “above” making money do not exist. There are no alternatives. Businesses can’t sustain that. Sometimes it happens for a short while, and eventually they reduce the level of service, or charge more money, or die.
I don’t know why you’re picking on startups. Big companies are where you see enshittification the most, and it’s because economies of scale require them to cut costs. Startups can often use VC fuel to offer delightful and unprofitably superior solutions to problems. That goes away after startups graduate to being real companies.
This is why I like using mathematical or algorithmic approaches to solve difficult problems. Writing programs that use statistics, mathematics, optimization, analytical geometry, etc guarantee a certain level of security from the swarms of CRUD merchants flooding the market.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Your task in a software startup (or any startup) is to produce the moat. If you can create something with little effort in a few weeks or months then so can anyone else.
If your product does something hard or useful that you know how to do because you understand the audience or business, or includes data or knowledge that others may not know about or have, or just you can put the effort in to great service to build a large customer base it becomes harder to be copied.
There was never a statistical “advantage”, you just never heard about the 9/10 outright failures or even the parts of the 1/10 where people are toiling in obscurity and would have been better off financially “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” ((c) r/cscareerquestions) or even being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
Maybe. great businesses don't need moats. They just need sonething people buy from them. Maybe venture capital needs moats - but you can get rich without that. (If rich is even the goal - a nice life is a better goal)
beware of any business where there is no competition - there is generally good reason nobody else is making money there.
Depends on your market. Enterprise is hard to crack. B2B you can sneak in via grassroots but it requires building a guerilla marketing presence, B2C is a hit business model with on average deep pocket requirements.
Little moat, but also little thresholds. The only way to not win 100% is not to play.
In my experience (enterprise software), customers buy our products not because we have a moat or some hard-to-achieve technical advantage but because they can speak to us in their words, they know we care, and we try solve their problems quickly.
Just yesterday I was speaking with the COO of a $200M/yr revenue company in the supply chain space. He'd learned Claude Code and built a couple apps to solve internal problems but reached out to talk to us. I asked him "you've been able to build some really impressive tools, clearly you can solve your own problems, why are you talking to me?" And he said "I have a business to run. I shouldn't be coding. I need somebody who understands my business & can solve my problems without taking a lot of my time."
Is there a cheaper way for him to solve his problems? Absolutely. But he wants to put the key in the ignition and know the car will turn on every time without thinking about it. There is an endless list of problems to solve; I don't think software businesses are going anywhere anytime soon.
This should be the top comment. The thing about growth of businesses overall, is that they want outsourced capacity (that’s what employees or contractors are) and that dynamic doesn’t go away because of AI, because like the comment mentioned, it’s not reliable enough in the sense that it can accept high-context vague instructions and ‘figure it out’ like an enterprise developer can.
I even dream of build tools for business to make apps (like Air table, but better) and even if you can do anything that do, perfectly, the software they need not means they want to babysit it all the time.
Is like the person that knows how cook, amazingly, yet hire a chef for take care of it most days.
Obviously a COO shouldnt be prompting Claude Code but your competition is someone in their team doing the same. The person in their team is trusted and knows the business.
A software startup has always, always been a longshot. This is still true. Also, vanishingly few companies of any kind, including software, ever get a "moat". Small companies survive, when they do, by being fast moving enough to keep making new things.
You certainly should not start a software startup to get rich, as that was never the most likely outcome. You should start one if you have an idea for software that isn't out there, which you think people would find useful, and you want to see what it's like to do a startup (enough to give it several years of your life).
I have, btw, never founded a software startup, though I have worked at some. I got paid in salary, not equity. It is now, always was, and probably always will be a longshot.
The risk is the same as it was a decade ago, and the decade before that.
The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.
Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.
Depends what you expect, people still have problems that need solved by software, if you expect to be the next Google the odds are not in your favor but if you aim to have a sustainable income from software that should be viable.
It is. Big companies (or really anyone) usually don't have the time to copy an idea unless it becomes too big already. And if your idea becomes too big, it was worth pursuing it.
Or worth buying up. Which in many cases was the "purpose" of doing the startup in the first place.
Sure, we'd all like to think that the goal was an idealistic "startup does things for bettering humankind".
But let's face it: A large amount of startups are literally founded as an "easier" alternative of building a "more agile" sub-organization within an established and more process driven org and then just get bought out by some of those larger orgs.
Whether or not those large orgs are then actually successful in integration and actually properly leveraging what they bought vs. just "crushing competition", is not necessarily the concern of the founders, depending on how ruthless vs. idealistic they are.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Having worked in the corporate world all my working life I can safely say with confidence that big companies absolutely DO NOT move fast. Do not underestimate the power of middle-management to destroy momentum!
Solve a problem for someone and if it was a painful one, they'll pay you for it.
An interesting paper in this context is "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change" by Hannan and Freeman, 1984 [1]. A quote from the introduction: "...selection processes tend to favor organizations whose structures are difficult to change.".
In other words, it's typically a good thing that larger companies are slow to adapt. That's something that startups can make use of.
It depends on what you are pursuing. Software was never a true moat for the really hot stuff. See books Zero to One, 7 Powers. It can be moat when you have something extremely complex, like for Unreal Engine, software actually is the moat. However, when it comes to regular software, everything was always prone to being copied. Will it be copied, it depends entirely on what's for the grabs for someone else to copy it. If you have a mature SaaS, that already has some competitors, what does anyone gain by copying it if the projection for building a sustainable business is very small? Personally I am building something that is relatively complex (much more complex / non-standard than a CRUD and likely not in Claude training data, and something that would be a very bad idea to write it in AI slop due to security issues) and relatively niche, something that a well funded startup would never dream about building, yet something that a smaller team would have a difficult time to compete with me, LLMs or not.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Whenever you have doubts about your ability to do something enough to ask for advice from random people you don’t know, and if that thing is unnecessary and will be significantly difficult, like a startup that is just some option for you to work on, the answer is probably no.
You have to feel the true desire to make something happen because you must. Anything other than that is probably a bad idea.
That's always been the case, in software and elsewhere.
Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.
So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?
Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.
If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.
So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.
I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
The problem is the software has already been made in the past. It has built up over time. Just like songs. There are so many already there.
When smartphones just came out I was already not making websites anymore. But every single app I made got at least 10k downloads in one week and around 1/5 got in the top 10 of a category like "social" even though I've only ever spent maybe a month max on developing any single app.
But now there are soooo many already there. Good luck getting into the top 10 social now with one weekend of coding.
Yes! Coding is just one of the tasks you've got to do when building a software business. You also have to find a good value preposition, identify a good channel to your customers, manage your resources etc.
Channels are becoming even more important as software has become easy to copy. But copycats always existed. When it wasn't created by AI, it was created in low wage countries.
I’ve recently realized that behind each copycat, there is an entrepreneur. It’s not a big factory with written “Leading #1 in piracy” at the front. It’s someone with almost as many skills as the original entrepreneurs, trying to copy a few of them to see where there is traction, with hopes and dreams similar to the original, but too far away from the world’s center of activity to propose something relevant. Some of them probably do it with the “I can do it better than them” mindset.
Since the majority of our industry is still in a combination denial/disbelief and bureaucratic incompatibility with AI workflows, startups are increasingly well positioned to reap the rewards.
The way I think about it is, everyone is struggling to make AI tools work well, so if you can be in the top 50% of people trying, you're actually in the top 10% in terms of positioning for future growth.
"Current business conditions or issues" -- I think that's because OP wants you to fill that in yourself, so that you might explain your assumptions or the market potential that you see, which might be wildly different from his (i.e. software having little to no moat)
Thought this would be a thread about the crazy offers being handed out to join AI teams at Amazon, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, or any of the massively capitalized 'neolabs'.
in the valley at least its difficult to pursue that unless you’re in a “hot” field. A few years ago, it was cloud, then big data, then crypto and now AI. When startups in those fields can raise hundreds of millions, they can lure away a lot of talent (both tech and non tech).
Nah. Regardless of where the company is nominally headquartered there are always an effectively infinite number of employees who can be hired to work remotely or out of satellite offices.
Is it still worth pursuing a software startup ... using the same strategies/approach/mindset/tools/means/methods of yesteryears?
Answer is Yes for the first part and No for the second part.
Problems which need software solutions and/or have a software component (at this point, practically everything) still exist in plenty. AI/ML has only changed the playing field drastically. It cannot understand the intent behind the problem which is a uniquely Human Dilemma. This is where the opportunities lie; understanding different Problem/Business Domains by studying and closely interacting with possible clients and coming up with tailored solutions whether domain-specific or client-specific.
The emphasis now is on better problem understanding/specification/verification (DSLs/notations/diagrams etc.) and faster iteration to a MVP. AI/ML is a great help here but the cycle is initiated by a Human who is always in the loop and steers it on the right trajectory in the state space of possible solutions.
The fact that people look to start a business based on searching foe a moat shows they don't believe in free markets. As well as shows what's wrong with Silicon Valley.
I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
The value cannot be just the software. E.g. some workflow tool (Salesforce). These tools will continue to exist for awhile but any customer capable of moving off of it to a startup version, can probably make their own startup version, tailored to them.
Now, if you offer something besides the software — logistics, networks, financial instruments, regulatory compliance, physical goods, compute, etc — that has value besides the software.
But the five billionth workflow automation tool has fast diminishing value in 2026.
This is the problem with big concentration of wealth and power. The big tech mega corps can copy your idea easily because they don’t have any budget, they can undercut you or sell at a loss, and they can distribute it to all their current customers with anti competitive bundling.
It has happened over and over many times and American antitrust law is useless. The largest corporations must be broken up, taxed heavily, and regulated in new ways. Otherwise there is no fair competition or level playing field for startups.
I would strongly recommend staying away from software startups unless:
- The CEO of some major corporation or a big VC is a close friend or friend of your family.
- You are rich and have a lot of friends who will buy your product.
- You already finished the MVP; which you started building 12 years ago... Might as well try to complete.
- You're a criminal.
The market is insanely saturated and people already have more stuff than they need. Capitalism has been over since 2008. Now it's just feudalism. Product is irrelevant; it's all a social game of selection. You have to be selected. You just need to know someone and have a product with a semi-reasonable narrative that your CEO buddy can use as a justification to give you company money. That's it.
I disagree with the sour mindset, as I don’t feel those games were necessary for my startup, although I admit mine was bootstrapped (0$), and didn’t grow as far as the others, it still made me millionaire, has paid my employees a high-than-average salary and has the potential of adding them a few hundred thousands each.
I admit the old market (do web apps to manage records! or notes!) is saturated but the IA market is brand new and fresh open.
How do you find users? Organic? SEO is useless as all the projects with any meaningful pagerank are all pointing to each other. Social media advertising is useless; nobody even sees your tweets or posts. Advertising? How do you get a return on CPC? All the big competitors seem to be running negative margins. Also, small volume social media ads tends to attract only bots... Are you operating in a niche? How do you get word of mouth in this case? Niches related to solving bureaucratic problems are often regulated! No SOC2 or ISO27001, no contracts for you.
In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.
Depends on your goal - do you have an idea you care about and want to solve? Probably a good idea. If you "want to be your own boss" or looking for something just to be acquired, hard to say, depends on who you know, etc.
You're gonna get a lot of positive responses here, but frankly only do it if you think you can make meaningful money within a month or two.
Everything is going off the rails this year. You only have to use Claude Code for 10 minutes to realize every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.
Lol that's what they told us last year. And they'll say the same thing next year. It's obviously useful for certain tasks but the number of errors and hallucinations are still quite bad for anything large or complex or really novel. That part is improving very slowly and some fundamental theoretical breakthroughs will be needed.
Have you actually had it do anything substantial and then tried to work with the code it produces afterwards? It may "work" but it's a horrific mess. Good luck bug fixing that.
Yes, with GPT 5.2 Codex and 5.2 Pro specifically. It’s not a mess because of the context I provide and the guidance and reattempts I apply. It’s working great, the resulting code is good when I accept it, and I’m getting much more done than in the before times.
I am just as bullish as you on the potential. AI is going to change the world all right. Much bigger than the internet.
I an far, far less bullish than you on the timeframe. The vast amount of work is not even optimised for computers without AI. Much if not most bureaucratic process has stayed mostly the same for the best part of a hundred years.
It will change everything, but not in a single year!
+1. Claude is actually really good at all kinds of development but Claude will still make plenty of mistakes and occasionally go so far in the wrong direction that it still needs someone with experience to steer it.
Got to get more creative and less funding dependent. People still seem caught up in the old process of ideation, static creation, pitch decks. Ack! Garbage now! I only ever took funding to scale to 3-5 heads, well I have 20 heads for nearly nothing now... Ive created more "startup" ideas in the last 3 years then the last 20 of my career. I just keep cranking out anything remotely interesting, launch, and if it don't "work", move on. I just launched another one this week, feels most promising, but we'll see... I didn't go quitting my day job just yet.
Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.
You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.
Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.
With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
Could it be that it's just a wrapper for APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic? I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm surprised to find someone else with the same view.
The proof is really in the pudding, isn't it? I don't see a wave of successful vibe-coded startups in the market yet. That's kind of the benchmark for whether this stuff actually does in practice what the AI-hypemen claim it can.
Instead, if you achieve success without much of a moat, you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". These are companies who employ multiple small teams (think 3-4 people), and each team is charged with cloning one of the most popular apps - they have really abbreviated development cycles, on the order of 6 weeks, and they just keep churning till they've drowned every app on the leaderboard in clones. And because they are astroturfing the whole space, they don't actually need most of these clones to be individually profitable.
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