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Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

secondbreakfast.co

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Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#81

Post by _bxg1 »

clairity wrote: post #79
_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

most people would be similarly surprised that $1T-market-cap microsoft is a business & enterprise software company, rather than a consumer one. it's ~80-90% of their $130B in yearly revenue (hard to get more precise because of the way they report their numbers).

That's not surprising to me personally, but I can see how it might be to the average person

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#82

Post by secondbreakfast »

nathanbarry wrote: post #65

Thanks for mentioning ConvertKit! We're happily building our niche product for creators and growing quickly. Just a couple corrections, at the end of 2019 we were just under $20M ARR (Not $24M). Today we are at $22M ARR and 30,000 customers. You can see all our numbers (updated in realtime) here on Baremetrics: http://convertkit.baremetrics.com I'm happy to answer any questions.

hey nathan - big fan of what y'all are doing. also love boise (i lived in idaho last year). updated those numbers and added attribution to baremetric

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#83

Post by save_ferris »

whateveracct wrote: post #78
tlb wrote: post #59

The metal economy is huge. Almost every product requires metal. But metallurgists don't take home a big fraction of it. What's special about the software economy is that people who write the software take home a large fraction of it. Maybe more than half, depending how you count. Which is unprecedented. It's not just because software can be zero marginal cost. Musicians don't take home half of music revenue. In most…

What would cause it to not last outside of precedent? In all those cases, it sounds like middlemen exist that corner the end-market that you gotta go through to make big money. How would that even work with software in the age of the internet, open source, and commodity cloud infra?

AI-driven software development down the road could theoretically commoditize developer skills.

I sometimes wonder how many decisions I make per day that an AI could replicate in some repeatable way. Who knows, but nothing lasts forever.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#84

Post by chrischen »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

I'd imagine the smart startup engineer folks will never know o this market because they're either working at some place like Google or doing their own thing, and one would need to have worked at a less sophisticated blue chip company to be exposed to these flawed systems.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#85

Post by _bxg1 »

cutler wrote: post #47
crimsonalucard wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you use ERP instead of a regular SQL database? edit Got a lot of vote downs. This was a genuine question from someone completely ignorant on what ERP is. Not trying to say that SQL is better, but I'm asking this because I'm ignorant of what ERP is and the description makes it appear as if it's a database. What's the difference? would be better wording I guess.

Try getting your average office worker to deal with an SQL database directly. No chance unless it only has a single table. A database without an interface tailored for a specific purpose is useless for office staff. I know this from experience having once tried to get office staff using pgAdmin to update the shiny new database I had designed for them.

What's funny is that this is what SQL was originally designed for. That's why it reads so much like English. Of course, CLIs were too.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#86

Post by shp0ngle »

imgabe wrote: post #46

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are gi…

I like the TV Series “Rotten” on netflix... it basically shows every food, fruit, meat, vegetable, you name it, is actually heavily controlled by cartels and mafias.

I had no idea there were mafia cartels that had wars about avocados.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#87

Post by vbordo »

irrational wrote: post #19

I work for a Fortune 150 manufacturing company. When I started working here there was no IT group at all (it was all outsourced). The CEO and President said many times that we were not a software/technology company and that would never be a core focus. Nearly 2 decades later, technology is now listed as number 2 of our top 5 core focus. We are working on converting all contractors into full time employees. The IT gro…

What kind of manufacturing applications does IT manage?

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#88

Post by fovc »

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability.

We've slowly stitched together an assortment of SaaS tools, custom built modules, and Excel files in the exact way I swore we would never do. If anyone's been through this hell before, I would appreciate some help.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#89

Post by chii »

pascalxus wrote: post #66
voidfunc wrote: post #5

This does not just apply to software..., tons of small and medium sized businesses and opportunities out there. For engineers you will most likely never notice them if you're caught up in the Silicon Valley / VC thing. Of course it requires getting out of your comfort zone... a lot of dev's just want to exchange labor for cash and grind out code because it is comfortable and cozy (right now). There are tons of small…

the types of opportunities that lead to SaaS businesses, are extroadinarily hard to find. I've gone to dozens of dozens of networking events and talked to dozens of people from a variety of industries. I've done informational interviews, etc. It's very difficult to find problems that don't have good enough solutions. Most of the time people are pretty happy to continue dealign with the problem the way they have been.

But that's why when you _do_ find a solution, it's worth money.

But i agree that it's fundamentally a people business - you're trying to convince a business owner to change their way of working for the better. You will need to present evidence that it is _indeed_ better - that's even harder than it sounds. And in most cases, SaaS providers are very biased on the value provided vs charged. I tend to think business owners as conservative, and therefore, the new SaaS product will have to provide extraordinary value to be considered.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#90

Post by pragmatic »

_bxg1 wrote: post #60

I have to think there are lots and lots of industries ripe for disruption or even for their first taste of software, and it's just that they're outside the radar of the vast majority of engineers. Industries you never ever hear about unless you're an insider. Maybe we need some mechanism for cross-pollinating people from "deep industry" with entrepreneurs. Many of the "visible" ones have already been saturated to dea…

maybe they don't want software people f#cking up their lives?

I know it's hard for the avg hackernews to understand but software isn't always a blessing but many times a curse bestowed upon workers by someone in the mngmt chain who has been sold on a solution.

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