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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

#61

Post by wyre »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #16
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.

Could Apple's $99 fee to get on the App Store be contributing to with holding this flood, or their app review process?

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

#62

Post by dpark »

airstrike wrote: post #54
trcf22 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't figma be considered a crud app? It’s still basically adding and updating things in a DB no? With some highly complex things like rendering, collab and stuff. (Fair question btw)

It's very, very far from a CRUD app or "just updating a DB". GUI-heavy apps are notoriously hard to get right. Any kind of "editable canvas" makes it 10x harder. Online collaboration is hard, so that's another 10x—there are known solutions, but it's an entire sidequest you have to pour a massive amount of effort into. Custom text editing and rendering is really hard to do well. Making everything smooth and performant…

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

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

#63

Post by makeitdouble »

gitmagic wrote: post #44

> So what does work? I would add hardware products to that list. While they also have become somewhat easier and cheaper to create, the threshold is still much higher than for software and SaaS products.

An asterisk to this: SEA competition is way fiercer than people in the west give it credit for.

There's more and more product that I wish existed, and one search in AliExpress returns me what I exactly wanted plus some more. 5 years ago the product just existed and quality was meh, nowadays it's pretty much on par.

I had to recently look for camera gear, and the amount of adapters or quirky tripods is just great. Ulanzi for instance is a pretty well known brand at this point.

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

#64

Post by kbuchanan »

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…

I think this list demonstrates the OP's point—entrenched, resource-heavy, and reputable firms have and will continue to capture most of the markets, not for lack of competition, but by ownership over the distribution channels.

Having said that, I don't think it's all AI (this trend's been going on for a while), nor do I think startups can't thrive—as the pie gets bigger, competitors can carve out yet smaller niches, as the OP points out.

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

#65

Post by dpark »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #16
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.

App Store is already flooded with competitors for every simple niche.

That’s why this article makes no sense to me. The “Cambrian explosion” was the introduction of the app stores on phones. There are 2 million apps on Apple’s store.

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

#66

Post by layer8 »

beachy wrote: post #59
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…

I think there's truth in what you say (though if you are building something where you rely on blog posts you are probably doomed anyway). But AI has huge value in gratuitously bulking out products in ways that are not economically feasible with hand coding. As an example we are building a golf launch monitor and there is a UI where the golf club's path is rendered as it swings over the surface. Without AI, the backgr…

Your example either supports “be different”, because the competition won’t think of it or won’t come up with the right prompting, or it supports TFA, because it’s easily replicated by the competition. It’s not clear which one you’re arguing for, given that GP argues against TFA.

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

#67

Post by redmattred »

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 strategy. Longform blog content + SEO is a way different beast than SEM.

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

#68

Post by layer8 »

jayd16 wrote: post #42
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…

Isn't this agreeing with the article? You can't just build something and hope for a market, you need to invest heavily to have a chance. You both are saying that, no?

I think GP is saying that this was already the case before LLMs. I.e. LLMs are only helping with things that were never part of a moat to begin with.

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

#69

Post by zdragnar »

dpark wrote: post #62
airstrike wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very, very far from a CRUD app or "just updating a DB". GUI-heavy apps are notoriously hard to get right. Any kind of "editable canvas" makes it 10x harder. Online collaboration is hard, so that's another 10x—there are known solutions, but it's an entire sidequest you have to pour a massive amount of effort into. Custom text editing and rendering is really hard to do well. Making everything smooth and performant…

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.

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

#70

Post by bawolff »

sfn42 wrote: post #31
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…

I'm in that boat, everything is just a crud app. I've worked on some fairly complex apps but at their core they were crud apps and most of their complexity were caused by bad developers overcomplicating and fumbling things. That's not to say something like Figma isn't on an entirely different level, but most apps aren't Figma and don't need to be. Most apps are simple crud apps and if they aren't it's usually because…

> It's also worth noting that a crud app can be quite complex too. There can be a lot of complexity even if the core is simple.

I suppose technically a database is just a CRUD app

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