"Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#11

Post by gsaines » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:29 PM UTC

This confirms what I've been discovering. I wrote about the details here: https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2025/9/8/why-is-b2c-user-a...

Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#12

Post by advisedwang » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:30 PM UTC

> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors, hundreds now appear - all competing for attention. Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks.

Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS Office, Gmail, Workday, Jira, EPIC, Salesforce, WebKit, Mint, etc etc but it doesn't seem to be happening.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#13

Post by grahac » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #7

Bullshit. Practically an AI slop article itself. The rest of us actually building products know reality is different because we’re intimately familiar with our competitors and their limitations. Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI. I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.

Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created.

What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#14

Post by spamizbad » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:31 PM UTC

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience.

I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it cannot be "vibe coded" or copied whole-cloth - complexity, scale, and reliability requirements are far too great and your potential customer base will not tolerate you fumbling around.

You eventually reach a point where there are no blog posts or stackoverflow questions that walk you through step-by-step how to make this stuff happen. It's the kind of stuff that your company and maybe a few dozen others are trying to build - and of those few dozen, less than 10 are seeing actual success.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#15

Post by hkon » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

SCHiM wrote: post #2

> Your company can scream to anyone that listens that all the competition is AI SLOP, but when hundreds of companies are pitching the same solution, your one voice will get lost. If you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy... If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI i…

I don't think it matters for developers. They compete in the short term.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#16

Post by Eric_WVGG » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:35 PM UTC

advisedwang wrote: post #12

> Where a great idea in a space once had 5-10 competitors, hundreds now appear - all competing for attention. Big companies used to move slowly, but now a ragtag team of two developers at a large firm can whip up something that looks top-of-market to the untrained eye in a matter of weeks. Perhaps I'm out of touch, but I haven't seen this explosion of software competition. I'd LOVE to see some new competitors for MS…

You're right.

The iOS app store would currently be flooded with newcomers in niche spaces — workout apps, notes, reminders, etc. And games, my god, there would be vibed clones of every game imaginable.

It's simply not happening.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#17

Post by bee_rider » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:36 PM UTC

SCHiM wrote: post #2

> Your company can scream to anyone that listens that all the competition is AI SLOP, but when hundreds of companies are pitching the same solution, your one voice will get lost. If you cannot out compete "AI SLOP" on merit over time (uptime? accuracy? dataloss?), then the AI SLOP is not actually sloppy... If your runway runs out before you can prove your merit over that timeframe, but you are convinced that the AI i…

It certainly seems possible that AI slop could be flawed in some major ways while still competing well in the market: security is usually invisible to users until it isn’t, similar uptime and bugs, accessibility can be ignored if you don’t mind being an unethical person.

Then again this is also often a flaw with human-generated slop, so it is hard to say what any of this really means.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#18

Post by grahac » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:38 PM UTC

spamizbad wrote: post #14

Can't say I agree with this article at all. This has not been my experience. I don't quite know how to articulate this well, but there's something that I'd call a "complexity cliff" in the software business: if you want to compete in certain spaces, you need to build very complex software (even if the software, to the user, is easy to use). And while AI tools can assist you in the construction of this software, it ca…

If the software is doing complicated integrations, that may be a barrier as said in the article.

And to be clear, this is people using teams of Claude Code agents (either Sonnet 4.5 or Sonnet 5 and 5.5 in the future). Reliability/scale can be mitigated with a combination of a senior engineer or two, AI Coding tools like the latest Claude Code and the right language and frameworks. (Depending on the scale of course) It no longer takes a team senior and mid-level engineers many months. The barriers even for that have been reduced.

Completely agree that using Lovable, Bolt, etc aren't going to compete except as part of noise, but that's not what this article is saying.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#19

Post by DenisM » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:40 PM UTC

grahac wrote: post #13

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #7

Bullshit. Practically an AI slop article itself. The rest of us actually building products know reality is different because we’re intimately familiar with our competitors and their limitations. Copying and playing catch up was possible before AI. I really wish we could downvote submissions like this. It adds nothing of meaning to the discussion of the subtleties of competitive product development.

Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created. What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?

On a tangent, I sometimes avoid correcting typos and awkward expressions because it adds non-ai signal. I do t intentionally add any, but I let them be.

Re: "Be Different" doesn't work for building products anymore

#20

Post by grahac » Mon, Oct 06, 2025, 4:42 PM UTC

DenisM wrote: post #19

grahac wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. This is totally not AI slop. AI-edited for grammar, but human-created. What industry are you building in? And have you been building in it a while or is it a new startup?

On a tangent, I sometimes avoid correcting typos and awkward expressions because it adds non-ai signal. I do t intentionally add any, but I let them be.

I like that this is a meta comment :)