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The Sideprocalypse

johan.hal.se

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Re: The Sideprocalypse

#11

Post by CuriouslyC »

This vibes with me, though I think it's overly glum.

You can't hope to succeed by building something cool without distribution already figured out. If you haven't put the work in building a social following, you're pretty much locked into pay to play (which isn't horrible if you target small targeted bloggers/youtubers/etc, but it's not my bag). OpenClaw exploded because Peter has >100k twitter followers and among them are plenty of people who themselves have a ton of followers.

So, if you're building, you also need to focus on building an audience.

The high touch enterprise sales strategy is solid though, and easier to bootstrap. That's why Alex Hormozi and Dan Martell push people getting started that way.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#12

Post by tjansen »

Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents, I now hope to complete it in 3 or 4 months, with a lot of extra features I would never have dared to include in an MVP.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#14

Post by CuriouslyC »

Gud wrote: post #6

“Quality is not a metric” is the core argument here. I say the only way to build a successful long term product is by focusing on quality, ESPECIALLY when the competition is shitting out crap.

Quality buys you user retention/longevity. You can't retain users you don't have though, and getting users now is brutal.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#15

Post by arkensaw »

tjansen wrote: post #12

Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents…

do you want to tell us what it is?

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#16

Post by lelanthran »

simpaticoder wrote: post #10

>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software…

> Customers will have more options, and this will allow them to be more discerning.

Lets assume this is true - how on earth are they to determine that your code doesn't have any glaring security holes but the 2h vibe-coded app has more holes than the Swiss is able to put into their cheese[1]?

I really want to know how customers can tell the difference between very pretty crap and your stuff?

-------------

[1] Yeah, I know it doesn't work like that.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#17

Post by tjansen »

arkensaw wrote: post #15
tjansen wrote: post #12

Maybe it's wishful thinking, being one of the SaaS-developing developers he describes. But I think that only the complexity required for a SaaS is increasing. You certainly can't earn millions with the kind of SaaS that used to take a week or two, and can now be done on a weekend. So I am trying the kind of SaaS that I never dared to start, knowing that it would take a year or two of my spare time. And with AI agents…

do you want to tell us what it is?

A cloud-based RSS reader (like Google Reader, Feedly, Inoreader...).

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#18

Post by Anonyneko »

0x303 wrote: post #2

I don't disagree with the sentiment, but it's a depressing take to say that the best approach for self-preservation is to latch hard onto corporate

I feel like that isn't even anything new, most businesses have worked like that for a long time. It's much more straightforward to be a supplier for a few big clients than to be a B2C. We just don't hear about them as often because of their nature.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#19

Post by ileonichwiesz »

simpaticoder wrote: post #10

>Yours actually works and is higher quality, because you know about things like TTFP and INP and "not putting your Supabase god-token in the client"? Oh, you sweet summer child: I take no pleasure in this but I need to tell you that these things don't matter anymore. Quality is not a metric anyone cares about in 2026. Quality will matter the most in 2026. Specifically because the barrier-to-entry for making software…

Just like the tide of fast fashion caused people to seek out local-sewn clothes made from high-quality materials, right? Right?

Quality isn’t a differentiator if the market is saturated with indistinguishable garbage. Everything is made in sweatshops out of the cheapest plastic available, and I don’t see why software isn’t next in line.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#20

Post by clickety_clack »

This is the kind of thing that anyone could have said at any time in history. Sure, it’s easier now to solve the kinds of problems that were hard a few years ago, but that just brings whole classes of previously “impossible” problems into the merely “hard” category. We’re just finding out what those are now, and if you can figure one out there’s money to be made.
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