71–80 of 80 posts
My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited i…
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For your hypothesis to hold, you need to explain how your 1-person unicorn expects to get funded for their app when some guy with a $20 subscription can just as easily churn the same app or better.
Unicorn is indeed an exaggeration but 1-5M ARR doesn't need funding. Most in that range weren't VC funded, as by VC metrics that's considered a failure and they shut down if they can't get past it.
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The problem still holds: how do you expect to make money by putting together something that anyone with no software development expertise and a $20 subscription is also able to put together? See also: dark forest hypothesis and AI.
Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now. Another similar but different point: no software development expertise doesn't mean no other expertise. As an extreme example, good luck building tax software with zero tax expertise. This applies to tons of niches. A third point - lots of this i…
I mean someone can literally make a tax app now asking the user to just snap a picture of their w2 and any other tax forms from banks they received, and submit in 15 seconds.
Eventually the cost to develop app and games could drop so low that we will need to shift our mental model in how we discover and use apps. For example, TikTok revolutionized short form videos by introduced a UI where users can explore a lot more videos more quickly, and the cost of showing a bad video is significantly lower (then clicking on a long YouTube video). This eventually led to algorithmically led discovery…
Many game ads on ios are already playable, I guess we're just one step away from what you describe.
My dad was a software engineer when he was younger, but his skills atrophied over the decades as he worked his way into upper management and spent all of his non work time caring for the family. For the past 8 years or he's had an app idea for something he wants himself on his phone that he's been dying to make, but just didn't have the means to do it. He tried no code/lo code options, but they were just to limited i…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now. Another similar but different point: no software development expertise doesn't mean no other expertise. As an extreme example, good luck building tax software with zero tax expertise. This applies to tons of niches. A third point - lots of this i…
I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes can now compete against TaxActOnline or FreeTaxUSA (or any number of large ones out there today), whereas those existing companies built their solution with hundreds of developers. I mean someone can literally make a tax app now asking the user to just snap a picture of their w2 and any other tax forms from banks they received, and submit in 1…
"Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now."
There are basic flashlight apps, file explorer apps, qr code scanner apps and so on making lots of money. Note taking apps, calendar apps, a billion tile-matching games, we can go on and on. The fact that they're easy to code and lots of SWEs could code one, doesn't mean none of them are making good money. LLMs change nothing about that concept, it just expanded it to more fields.
> I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes
Sure, tax is one where there is a huge population of "tax experts" who could help with this, though I don't think that combination is even close to being enough FWIW. Plenty of niches where this population isn't this big and the pie is a lot smaller, yet still big enough for one person to earn a very sweet living.
Not one actual app is mentioned. As with most articles that are about this, few if any public facing examples are described. Where are the lists of actual production software that was vibe coded and also successful?