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The Sideprocalypse

johan.hal.se

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Re: The Sideprocalypse

#71

Post by throwaway13337 »

He's wrong about SEO being the differentiator. Quality matters.

It's a huge trope to think your product didn't work for the market because the marketers beat you. I used to be that kind of developer until I made some products that people actually wanted.

But he's right that the software market is changing. Software will be easier to build and require less people to build it. So more, smaller companies will compete for market share. Margins will be cut and the consumers will get more of what they want for a lower price.

I think this is called a working market. It's what it looks like when capitalism actually works.

This could be the end of enshitification.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#72

Post by SyneRyder »

tjansen wrote: post #55
hagbard_c wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would distinguish your cloud-based RSS reader from the many other cloud-based RSS readers, both self-hosted as well as the others?

Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first…

I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.

API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving their agent an API key to their RSS sync account... that might have some interest.

Feedly seems hostile to third-party client access (ie mobile & desktop apps), so being friendlier towards RSS clients could be of interest.

Personalized AI feed is a good idea but you don't have all the personalized year of context that my Claude does. My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.

And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS. But that's me.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#73

Post by paulryanrogers »

monero-xmr wrote: post #48
chasd00 wrote: post #8

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…

Every business has secrets. You don’t know why a business succeeds unless you know their edge. Looking at my SaaS you’d think you could copy it. And perhaps you could make something that looks the same. But you don’t know my secrets and there is no way I’m telling you. So you will never beat me

Never is a long time. Best of luck!

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#74

Post by mbgerring »

ileonichwiesz wrote: post #19
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.

Yeah it actually did do this for me. I will not purchase new clothing at all unless I have some understanding of the supply chain and where it was made, with a strong preference for clothes that are at least cut and sewn in the US. I won’t tolerate buying clothes, or really any textile product, if I can’t be relatively certain it will last me at least five years. A flood of cheap, unreliable shit did actually make me more discerning.

N of 1, obviously, but this isn’t as outlandish as you wanted to make it seem here.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#75

Post by TrackerFF »

I think the realistic take is to treat SaaS products like any other extremely skewed distribution, like income in sports.

Most people will barely make anything, some will be able to supplement their income, very few will be able to make a living. Even less will become "rich". For every product that blows up, there are thousands that will barely make anything.

But of course, it all depends on what your product does. If you make the millionth TODO / GenAI image editor / food calculator app and hope to make some money, good luck.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#76

Post by arkensaw »

MrJohz wrote: post #70
arkensaw wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. If someone pitched you a book about a young kid who goes to a school of magic to learn how to use his powers, makes friends and enemies and ultimately battles evil, you might shoot down their dreams because "some cocaine-addled sales critter" already had that idea, and she's called J K Rowling and she's worth billions and shes so successful she can't even be cancelled because she makes so much money. And yet…

Is TNotW really the same concept as Harry Potter? It has a university in it, which I guess is similar to a school, and after a while the main character ends up there, but it's a very different concept - it's classic high fantasy that includes a period of learning and study, whereas HP is primarily boarding school fiction with magical elements. Similarly, The Magicians, as I understand it, is also more about a univers…

> This isn't directly relevant to your point

Well, that kind of was exactly my point, although I feel now I didn't make it very clearly.

Someone might shoot down a prospective author who intends to write a book featuring a young protagonist getting a formal education in magic because it's "been done", but the resulting works are very different. It was a counterpoint to the article saying that we should not try to realise our ideas because someone somewhere has had "the same idea". They probably have had an idea which could be described in a similar fashion, but it doesn't really mean its the "same idea"

I probably stumbled a bit describing those books as the same concept when I should have put "same idea" in quotes

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#78

Post by tjansen »

SyneRyder wrote: post #72
tjansen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainly, a friendly and simple UI. Feedly looks like it hasn't gotten much love recently. Inoreader is too cluttered for my taste, though it has a feature set I can't match any time soon. I have plenty of other ideas for what to build on top of it: offering an SDK and APIs so you can vibe-code the UI you want, a built-in podcast listener, using news from aggregated feeds to build a personalized AI feed. But the first…

I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market. API access is worth chasing. There was something I wanted to do with Feedly (I've already forgotten what it was) but once I saw their APIs were hidden behind some enterprise level plan, that was the end of that. If we're in a world where everyone has a personal AI agent, giving the…

> I think you're in a tough market, but I'll agree that Feedly hasn't gotten much love, and is clearly aiming for a more enterprise market.

Yes, enterprise is certainly where the money is (Feedly's plans start at $1600/month...), but as a solo dev working on a side-project, that's not an accessible market for me anyway. So I try to create a service that's simple and cheap.

> My AI agent is (probably) going to do a better job of choosing the most relevant stuff.

The idea would be basically: the feed reader know the user's interests because of the subscriptions, and knows the last time the user logged in. So it can filter what happened since then; it can also order the posts by relevance, allowing the user to catch up. And in a second step, an agent could even write the posts dynamically, summarizing information gathered from the user's feed, possibly even adjusted to the user's level of knowledge and offering background info where needed.

> And personally, less interested in podcasts in my RSS app. That's something for Pocket Casts / AntennaPod. I like my audio separate from my RSS.

There are some feeds that are more like a mixture of text and podcast. I usually read only the text, but sometimes it catches my interest and I want to listen to one or two posts. That's when I start hating the lack of podcast support in Feedly.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#79

Post by theptip »

chasd00 wrote: post #8

I wish i could take back the view i gave to this article, it says nothing. Is there such a thing as an inverse hype machine? Where people take the opposite side of a hyped product and then hype that view just as much but for the same purpose? His footer even admits he's basically just trolling for views so he can reach the status of "thought leader". btw, someone else having the same idea you have for a saas company…

The whole premise is very unimaginative. It just takes one step on the infinite series and does not ask what the asymptote is (if there even is one).

If every coked up SDR can build a tech stack, then every junior SWE can get superhuman SEO.

If every product has superhuman seo and engineering, and there are 10 or 100x more products, then probably everyone uses the exact right one for their needs, and quality for your specific usecase is higher. (More competition means more quality, more of every differentiator, including lower prices. )

In a world of zero marginal cost of production (turning ideas into reality with a prompt), maybe it’s hard for anyone to eke out profit margin; I can’t see what anyone’s edge would be in this world. The end state here is much more disruptive than “dang, a coked up sdr out-competed me on my SaaS ide-“.

Re: The Sideprocalypse

#80

Post by randallsquared »

amarant wrote: post #69
arkensaw wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh thanks, I'll check that out! BTW, The Magicians TV series might be the best thing SyFy ever made. It's got so much heart, it's properly funny, it's creative, it's epic despite a shoestring budget, and the characters stay with you long after you finish.

Agreed I loved it! Right up until they turned it into a musical for some reason. Me and my wife call it "doing a magicians" when a TV show suddenly starts singing for no reason. But yeah up until that point it was great!

It's a whole thing. The Magicians was just following a trend that genre shows need a musical episode if they've been on long enough. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MusicalEpisode
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