I think that the opposite is also very plausible. I've seen numerous startups take a big company's product unrefined product and quickly turn it into something better.
Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
231–239 of 239 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
MeTAS, ironic since quite some AI companies ended up in the news for using humans when they claimed it was AI.
And a lot of companies call themselves “AI companies” because their developers use copilot to generate code.
It’s hilarious how many apps for parents now have AI. Like, couldn’t you figure out how to calculate a mean and weight quantiles, need an LLM for that?
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#233The opposite is increasingly true… 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…
I feel like you've proven the point in the opposite direction. A software startup may be competing with Salesforce as an alternative. That would be worth pursuing as a software startup. You've laid the case that it's better and easier to create internal tools and not rely on Salesforce or an alternative solution. It's easy to roll-your-own so you don't pay outside companies for this solution any more. This does not bode well for a software startup (maybe it bodes well for you as an engineer working on that project, but that's not a software startup).
I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#234In 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 proble…
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.
In my experience, most employees have no clue how their business works.
They know how their tiny bit works, and can even often misunderstand why they are even doing what they're doing.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their revenue last year was 400 billion dollars... you tell us.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
have you seen the M chips? to me that revolutionized computing. supercomputer-level latency for in-ram operations on a $2k laptop
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
have you seen the M chips? to me that revolutionized computing. supercomputer-level latency for in-ram operations on a $2k laptop
Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.
Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#237In the AI Era, Do Startups Still Have an Edge?
Startups have always competed with big companies based on three gaps: speed, risk tolerance, and incentives. The question is whether these advantages still hold in the age of AI.
* Speed Gap: Still valid. Might even widen. The bottleneck at big companies was never coding. It's approvals, alignment, and politics. AI makes implementation faster for everyone. But here's the thing—when the implementation bottleneck disappears, startups ship immediately. Big companies still get stuck at the decision-making bottleneck that comes before implementation. So the speed gap doesn't shrink. It might actually widen.
* Risk Gap: Still valid. AI doesn't change this. Big companies only want to solve proven problems. If something fails, someone has to take the blame. Startups can bet on unproven problems. If they fail, they don't have much to lose anyway. This is about org structure and decision-making culture. AI isn't going to suddenly make big companies comfortable with risk.
* Incentive Gap: Still valid. Actually stronger now. Employees at big companies get salaries. Founders get equity. This hasn't changed. If anything, AI makes it better for founders. Lower implementation costs mean you can get further with less capital. Less fundraising means less dilution. The math got better for founders.
All three gaps are still intact. AI hasn't weakened the structural advantages of startups. Some of them actually got stronger.
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#238Big 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 o…
> you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". Is this happening for SaaS apps too. With AI assistance, most SaaS apps feel achievable in 6 weeks.
I personally think the hard part of building a SaaS app is not coding, it's understanding the complexities of a problem and building good abstractions to solve it. Code/software is the result, but certainly not the main challenge. And I think this reflects the time breakdown of good software engineers (mostly collaborating, brainstorming and designing interfaces vs. coding).
Re: Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?
#239Product is very rarely the moat. It also depends on what you're building. A software startup can not win solely by just having a great product (of course there are exceptions). Finding a niche community, being able to distribute your product to them, how you price it, frequency of updates etc... all things that were just as important in building a moat pre agentic coding