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

iamcharliegraham.substack.com

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

#101

Post by gsaines »

redmattred wrote: post #67
gsaines wrote: post #11

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…

I think you may be missing the mark on your conclusions for why your products had difficulty acquiring paid users. People still pay for software, but for high stakes problems like finding a new job, managing your mental health, or caretaking an aging parent, etc. taking the leap on a not quite fully baked product offering seems unrealistic. Also with Skritter you used a completely different customer acquisition strat…

Thanks for engaging with this. I'm not trying to troll or be sarcastic. Could well be the case that painted door testing just doesn't work on B2C. What I learned on Skritter and CodeCombat is that if you have a couple of years to devote full time to building, it's almost always possible to power through bad channel / market fit with good product and build a small company.

The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW).

The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.

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

#102

Post by WA »

Animats wrote: post #94

Would someone please name a few products in this space, where there's a glut of vibe-coded apps? Thanks.

Not names, but categories: Habit trackers, period calendars, journaling apps, calorie trackers, workout tracking apps, symptom trackers, budget planning apps, tax/tip calculators, meditation apps, productivity timers, recipe collection apps, affirmation / inspiring quotes apps, SaaS boilerplates, social media scheduling tools, AI chat bot, AI wrappers for all of the above.

You'll find hundreds of apps for every single keyword. But on the other hand, it's still a winner takes all market, so the top 1-5 per category make ~95% of revenue.

Edit: To clarify, imho these categories have been popular forever, because that's what every new indie dev thinks about first when they have a "great" idea. They're not necessarily tied to vibe coding and would've been released even without AI.

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

#104

Post by rhines »

bodhi_mind wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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) I recognized something similar when I first started interviewing candidates. I try to interview promising resumes even if they don't have the perfect experience match. Something that becomes obvious when d…

Saying everything is a CRUD app is a reflection on the level of abstraction a developer usually works in. Someone who worked more in embedded systems may say something like “everything is ‘just’ a state machine.”

It's also IMO valid. CRUD isn't derogatory. It's also not particularly illuminating though. Almost everything is a CRUD app. If you get the fundamental data structures, access patterns, and control flow right for those CRUD operations, you have the foundations for what can be a successful app. And then you enhance it further - games add nice graphics, collaborative workspaces add good conflict resolution, social media sites add addictive recommendation systems. The core is CRUD but that doesn't mean the work stops there.

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

#107

Post by sfn42 »

tracker1 wrote: post #97
sfn42 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's essentially what I mean when I say crud app. It's basically a web api written in something like C# or whatever you prefer, which receives HTTP requests and translates them into DB operations. CRUD and views basically. For this type of development you want the DB to handle basically all the heavy lifting, the trick is to design the DB schema well and have the web API send the right SQL to get exactly the…

I prefer to just use Dapper for most DB interactions with C#... EF (and ORM tooling in general) can come with a lot of gotchas that simply understanding the SQL you are generating can go a long way to avoid.

Dapper is nice, but what you don't get as far as I know is migrations. With EF the app just spins up the whole DB from scratch which is great for onboarding or when you just needed a new laptop etc. Also EF is fine as long as you know what you're doing, or at least pay attention to what you're doing.

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

#108

Post by HappyPanacea »

bee_rider wrote: post #17
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.

> accessibility can be ignored How good are AI-assisted accessibility tools now? Is the poison also the cure here?

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

#109

Post by dpark »

zdragnar wrote: post #69
dpark wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a CRUD app, though, which is why that classification isn’t generally meaningful. CRUD basically just means the app has persistent storage.

"Having CRUD operations" and "Just a CRUD app" are very different things. The custom text rendering bit alone should have been a good cue for this distinction.

That was the point. It is a CRUD app but it is not just a CRUD app.

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

#110

Post by airstrike »

dpark wrote: post #109
zdragnar wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Having CRUD operations" and "Just a CRUD app" are very different things. The custom text rendering bit alone should have been a good cue for this distinction.

That was the point. It is a CRUD app but it is not just a CRUD app.

When people say "a CRUD app" they mean "an app that is mostly just CRUD"
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