Big companies are not your worry in most cases. They have so much bureaucracy and internal politics that it's often cheaper for them to buy out the up-and-coming startups than it is to build in-house.
Instead, if you achieve success without much of a moat, you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". These are companies who employ multiple small teams (think 3-4 people), and each team is charged with cloning one of the most popular apps - they have really abbreviated development cycles, on the order of 6 weeks, and they just keep churning till they've drowned every app on the leaderboard in clones. And because they are astroturfing the whole space, they don't actually need most of these clones to be individually profitable.
Rocket Internet is often engaged in arbitrage where they bring an existing company’s idea to a different country or context. This is very different from the flood-the-zone astroturfing discussed above. Zalando is its own company employing ~5k engineers. This isn’t a copycat I would claim.
But maybe you’re referring to practices I am not aware of.
I worked for them: Its quuuiiiittteee different what they do from this "app-cloning-approach":
Rocket Internet copies business models and adapts them other countries. They are bringing in own people if they invest if required for the startup, but usually the companies are mainly built be the original founders with support from Rocket Internet on different layers (like legal).
Also Rocket invests Money. Sometimes .. a lot!
I worked for them and even interviewed to be founder of one of their spin-offs. GP’s comment has nothing to do with Rocket’s model. Zero.
And that’s coming from someone that despises Rocket for what they did to my workplace, the parent company, all teams I knew, and all colleagues I met from other projects.
App mills don’t respect anything at all, Rocket at least is Lawful Evil.
I personally think the hard part of building a SaaS app is not coding, it's understanding the complexities of a problem and building good abstractions to solve it. Code/software is the result, but certainly not the main challenge. And I think this reflects the time breakdown of good software engineers (mostly collaborating, brainstorming and designing interfaces vs. coding).
Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true.
If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened).
Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
Don’t worry big companies still can’t copy anything quickly, even with AI. Why? Because before they can ship a single feature, they’ll need to schedule 42 alignment meetings, debate AI-generated slide decks, and log their “strategic pivots” into an AI-curated Jira board.
The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
Every single org I’ve seen using teams (sample size of 4-5 orgs) uses it because it came for free. And every one of them also got slack and paid for it.
That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
It’s so funny. My company is basically merger hell and we have both Teams and Slack for similar reasons.
One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it.
The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
If, knowing what you know now, you could go back in time and be the one to create Slack would you not do it? Even if everyone is using Teams now (they're not), it took a really long time to show up that Slack's founders were able to capitalize on.
The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
Nobody really likes Teams, but it does seem to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC.
Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
That’s a whole lot of ifs. At the end of this long road filled with if’s, what are the chances that he can have a profit large enough to overcome the opportunity cost of not just working as an enterprise dev in a 2nd tier city and have continuing profits or have a meaningful exit?
Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.
> Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers
This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.
It’s hilarious how many apps for parents now have AI. Like, couldn’t you figure out how to calculate a mean and weight quantiles, need an LLM for that?
As much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.
Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in).
A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
google makes products, they mostly suck at making platforms, and their most notable platform (android) was purchased, though one can argue gsuite/workspace as a platform, but one might also argue that its more just an amalgamation of projects.
One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).
Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).
The fruit company still has an internal culture, especially in hardware-focused teams, with a relentless focus on shipping products followed by iterative refinement.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
I realize it's a strained equivalence, but Apple makes a lot of money violating EU anticompetitive laws. Their stranglehold over app distribution is not entirely dissimilar to ransome.
Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.
Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.
Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome.
But.
In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature.
But no.
Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k
The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
Oculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
Yes! All startups are created to solve a problem, regardless of the tools used. Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool. While AI makes writing software much easier. It's likely to lead to an explosion of new apps. Only those that fill a genuine need will survive. Your job is to identify these new problems and determine which apps to build.
Simple apps are a thing of the past. If an LLM can generate an app in a few sittings, it isn't a saleable product. However, people will still pay for a fully engineered application that solves a complex problem that AI cannot easily replicate.
Regarding copies, there is always room for more than one solution to the same need. Your challenge is to figure out how to stand out. A fundamental business hurdle, that has existed since the beginning.
Here's an idea that always bear's fruit. We humans love to do things as easy as possible. Write something that saves energy, time and is simple then people will pay for it.
And most of the time that problem is “the founders don’t have as much money as they want”.
> Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool.
You make it sound like it’s something noble, but let’s not pretend most software companies these days don’t have “make me rich” as the top goal. Effectively everything VC backed (yes, including by Y Combinator) falls in that category. That’s why pivots are a thing. Most founders these days don’t give a shit about what they’re building or customers, they only care about the payoff.
This seems like a very jaded comment, and if it’s because you got burned in a startup, then you have my sympathy and I’m sorry for debating. Just know that not everyone is running on nothing but greed. You might be confusing VCs with startup founders a bit. VCs are definitely profit motivated, by design. It’s going too far, and incorrect IMO, to suggest even VCs, or anyone involved, doesn’t care about building solutions or care about customers. All founders I’ve ever met care about what they make, and most VCs care about it somewhat but also care that the founders care strongly; they don’t often fund founders who don’t care.
So can you source any of your claims of “most”? I just looked it up, and the majority of software startups are self-funded or angel/seed-funded, not VC funded. Founders that don’t care about product or customers enough tend to fail. Founders that only care about the payoff don’t tend to self-fund their startup.
That said, everyone and all companies have financial incentives. There’s nothing unique or new about software startup founders there. The entire economy runs on profit motive. And I’ve seen a lot more people who don’t care about customers or product working in large companies making a nice easy salary working 9 to 5 (or less)!
My personal sampling of founders vs company workers is that founders are, by far, the ones who care more deeply about building something new and delighting customers and growing a sustainable business, care enough to start working nights and weekends, go years with crappy pay or no pay, to do every job in the company from engineering to design to marketing to support to filing taxes. Some people certainly are at least partially motivated to accept these sacrifices for the chance at a payoff, but lots of founders would prefer a lifestyle company where they get to keep building and don’t have the insane pressures and politics of a unicorn company.
Pivots are a thing because good product ideas often are not good business ideas. Startups that fail to pivot are the ones that die, and if your startup dies you don’t get to care about what you’re building or about customers at all. If you want companies to care about product and customers and not profit, then you should embrace sustainable economics, and that means making things people will pay for, and when they’re not paying, making something else.
You’re arguing something different than @latexr did, and picking a VC as your example makes sense here but fails to counter the fact that most startups aren’t VC funded. Still, you’re also like GP confusing VC motivation with founder motivation. It’s possible for founders to care deeply about the problems they’re solving, and for the company’s primary goal to be an exit, at the same time. Both can be true, contrary to what GP claimed.
There are an infinitesimal number of tech based startups that are “lifestyle companies” that were bootstrapped and use revenues to grow without taking investor money.
There are even fewer that are “successful” - ie where everyone involved wouldn’t be better off just working as a LOB CRUD developer.
The goal of the founders don’t matter even if they do “care” about the customer. The customer is at the whim of the strategies of the investors of the company and if an acquired, the customer will probably get an email about “our amazing journey” when the company is shut down
These smaller companies are doing well, they just aren’t incentivised to tell you about it. The VC backed companies are, either targeting you as a consumer or an investor and n an eventual IPO.
You’re not debating me, you’re contradicting @latexr.
> infinitesimal
You invented a narrow niche to knock down there, but as I said, I actually looked it up and the majority of startup companies that form are seed or self funded, not VC funded. I was responding to @latexr’s claims that “most” founders don’t care about product at all, which I believe is just false. You’re arguing with me about something else, and I don’t know what your point is yet. Mine is that caring about customers and caring about money aren’t exclusive things, a successful business must do both.
> Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming that caring about money means they don’t care about product or customers.
It’s not at all a tautology. A company that cares about its customers can balance its need to make money and leave money on the table because it’s not in the best interest of the customers.
Agreed, that’s what I’ve been saying from the top. Again, you’re disagreeing with @latexr, and agreeing with me.
The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
That's a cynical take, but a more positive interpretation is that pivots are needed if your company isn't actually solving a problem. Otherwise people would pay for it, and the founders would be getting rich. So you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.
One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment.
> you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.
In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution.
If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable, that means profit was the priority, not solving the problem.
There is a chasm of difference between “I care about this problem and want to solve it, but I also need to think how to make it sustainable” and “I don’t really care what I’m tackling, as long as I make bank”.
I would expect it to be obvious that caring about making money above fixing a problem means the problem won’t be solved that well compared to the alternative.
Are you really going to claim you never encountered a startup that is obviously shitting on customers and degrading the experience to make a buck? Do you honestly believe all startups are created to solve a problem (the original claim I responded to) and none are created with the intent of being the next “unicorn” to make the founders rich? If that is the case, search the term “enshittification”. Surely you’ll have encountered it by now. Pick whatever example helps you understand the point.
I don't see how its "obvious" at all. I think most problems wouldn't be solved at all with this view because most problems aren't something people care about. Money gives people the incentive to solve every problem possible. Someone who "cares" is free to solve it even better and make even more money.
This is to some extent a false dichotomy. Generally speaking, products that prioritize fixing a problem “above” making money do not exist. There are no alternatives. Businesses can’t sustain that. Sometimes it happens for a short while, and eventually they reduce the level of service, or charge more money, or die.
I don’t know why you’re picking on startups. Big companies are where you see enshittification the most, and it’s because economies of scale require them to cut costs. Startups can often use VC fuel to offer delightful and unprofitably superior solutions to problems. That goes away after startups graduate to being real companies.
Read the thread. I’m not “picking on startups”, the conversation is about startups. Yes, Big companies do it too, that’s just not what this particular conversation is about.
I see, so no comment at all on the fact that caring about products and customers requires making money?
I have read the thread, thank you, and you certainly have been talking about startups and founders as if these issues are unique to them. It’s not just ‘yeah yeah big companies too’… if you actually care about and study enshittification at all, it is, by and large, entirely coming from big companies, and it isn’t new to software, it has always been happening. The only thing new is a cute term for it that got popular recently. Old business terms that mean the same thing include: loss leader, hook product, bait and switch, and plain old “promotion”. Regardless of what the topic here is, it doesn’t make sense to harp on startups over quality going down. For that to happen, it had to be higher at some point, and that point is: startups. VC funding might lead to some quality decline, but all companies trim and get worse as they grow, and always have. Startup is the phase when companies provide the highest level of product or service.
This is why I like using mathematical or algorithmic approaches to solve difficult problems. Writing programs that use statistics, mathematics, optimization, analytical geometry, etc guarantee a certain level of security from the swarms of CRUD merchants flooding the market.
These startups were not created to solve a problem, some didn’t even have a technical person. These startups were created to be VC bait and hopefully sell out to the bigger fool
A lot of people still think moats are about features. They’re not anymore. Features are cheap now. Execution and distribution are the real bottlenecks.
Big companies can copy your product, but they usually won’t copy:
– your speed early on
– your willingness to serve a tiny, unsexy niche
– your ability to change direction without internal politics
In practice, most startups don’t die because a big company copied them. They die because they never found real users who cared enough to pay.
The moat today often looks like:
– deep understanding of a specific workflow or pain point
– trust with a narrow audience
– compounding advantages (data, habits, integrations, community)
If your plan is “build something cool and hope it sticks”, it’s probably not worth it.
If your plan is “solve a painful problem for a very specific group, then expand”, it still is.
Curious how people here think about moats post-AI. Are we underestimating distribution, or overestimating defensibility?
Zero to one makes this crystal clear. Most startups die because they didnt manage to sell not because they didnt manage to build the product. Secondly there was never a code moat. Code was always cheap. But architecture, distribution, quality control, integration once landed, this is where money is mostly made. Most indie or small companies die because they just pick shitty problems. eg nobody cares about a goddamn notes app, the one on Mac works fine and most people write garbage in their notes like utter trash. So obviously a notes app has little value because the asset it manages has very little value. Not so much if you are building something like document storage for regulated industries. Or compliance software. In these cases, its the business domain expertise which counts. Even when applying for jobs without domain expertise code monkeys never get paid past a threshold. People / entities that command a premium are the ones with domain knowledge.
Is “software startup” the right term? I understand that you might want to “use software” in the startup but surely, in the most successful startups, the thing that makes them successful is that they solve a real problem, that real people/businesses have, and are prepared to “pay” [1] you to solve for them.
If the startup is just “software for the sake of software” then I think that’s a different thing entirely. And to be fair, sometimes software for the sake of it is more like art or fun. And it’s true, sometimes something wonderful comes out of that. Sometimes. :)
[1]: Obviously “pay” can mean _very_ different things in different contexts.
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
I feel like you've proven the point in the opposite direction. A software startup may be competing with Salesforce as an alternative. That would be worth pursuing as a software startup. You've laid the case that it's better and easier to create internal tools and not rely on Salesforce or an alternative solution. It's easy to roll-your-own so you don't pay outside companies for this solution any more. This does not bode well for a software startup (maybe it bodes well for you as an engineer working on that project, but that's not a software startup).
I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
Yes!! The software market is still growing quickly.
What moat are you referring to? AFAICT, moats are bigger now than ever before, but the moats I see are centered around things like consumer habits and B2B contracts and hub/platform experiences. People tend to like the software they know & have, or the contractors they know already, even when they complain about it. The need to overcome static friction is a moat, one that makes it harder for startups to get in, but easier to stay once you’re in.
Big companies are slow. It seems like it would be easy for them to copy products, but they rarely do, and even when they try they take forever. Worry about yourself first, whether you can deliver, whether your product is superior, whether you can get customers, whether your business is sustainable, etc.. Worry about other startups second. They can copy faster than big companies. Do you have an edge over other startups? Don’t worry about the big companies. If they aren’t already solving the problem you want to solve, they won’t start until after you’re successful.
Note acquisitions are a thing! Big companies that want to copy your product are aware that the fastest way to do that is to acquire a working solution and a pile of new customers. You should be thinking about big companies more as opportunity than competition.
Yes, big companies can copy your product. But at what cost, especially when including opportunity cost and the levels of bureaucracy in larger companies? I have heard your question many times during the last 20 years, and still there are more software startups.
In many cases it would cost them less to buy your company than to create it from scratch. Which is why so many small companies are acquired instead of copied. The question should be more what do you want to do and are you able to follow up on creating a startup? Writing the code is a small part of creating a successful startup
In my experience (enterprise software), customers buy our products not because we have a moat or some hard-to-achieve technical advantage but because they can speak to us in their words, they know we care, and we try solve their problems quickly.
Just yesterday I was speaking with the COO of a $200M/yr revenue company in the supply chain space. He'd learned Claude Code and built a couple apps to solve internal problems but reached out to talk to us. I asked him "you've been able to build some really impressive tools, clearly you can solve your own problems, why are you talking to me?" And he said "I have a business to run. I shouldn't be coding. I need somebody who understands my business & can solve my problems without taking a lot of my time."
Is there a cheaper way for him to solve his problems? Absolutely. But he wants to put the key in the ignition and know the car will turn on every time without thinking about it. There is an endless list of problems to solve; I don't think software businesses are going anywhere anytime soon.
This should be the top comment. The thing about growth of businesses overall, is that they want outsourced capacity (that’s what employees or contractors are) and that dynamic doesn’t go away because of AI, because like the comment mentioned, it’s not reliable enough in the sense that it can accept high-context vague instructions and ‘figure it out’ like an enterprise developer can.
No, they want "outsourced capacity" from contractors with domain specific expertise. Too many freelance/indie contractors on here scratching their heads as to why to can't land clients or jobs — you need domain expertise and experience, not just the ability to write code.
I even dream of build tools for business to make apps (like Air table, but better) and even if you can do anything that do, perfectly, the software they need not means they want to babysit it all the time.
Is like the person that knows how cook, amazingly, yet hire a chef for take care of it most days.
Obviously a COO shouldnt be prompting Claude Code but your competition is someone in their team doing the same. The person in their team is trusted and knows the business.
I mean its a matter of RoI, isnt it ? Investing in your existing partnership means that specific business can come to you for their problems rather than work up so much expertise bloat. I suppose there a point after which more expertise hurts a business.
Maybe. great businesses don't need moats. They just need sonething people buy from them. Maybe venture capital needs moats - but you can get rich without that. (If rich is even the goal - a nice life is a better goal)
beware of any business where there is no competition - there is generally good reason nobody else is making money there.
Is it still worth pursuing a software startup ... using the same strategies/approach/mindset/tools/means/methods of yesteryears?
Answer is Yes for the first part and No for the second part.
Problems which need software solutions and/or have a software component (at this point, practically everything) still exist in plenty. AI/ML has only changed the playing field drastically. It cannot understand the intent behind the problem which is a uniquely Human Dilemma. This is where the opportunities lie; understanding different Problem/Business Domains by studying and closely interacting with possible clients and coming up with tailored solutions whether domain-specific or client-specific.
The emphasis now is on better problem understanding/specification/verification (DSLs/notations/diagrams etc.) and faster iteration to a MVP. AI/ML is a great help here but the cycle is initiated by a Human who is always in the loop and steers it on the right trajectory in the state space of possible solutions.
There was never a statistical “advantage”, you just never heard about the 9/10 outright failures or even the parts of the 1/10 where people are toiling in obscurity and would have been better off financially “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” ((c) r/cscareerquestions) or even being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.
OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
I can’t think of any reason for someone statistically to start a company unless they had an “unfair advantage” post 2012 instead of working toward getting a job at BigTech and easily make 1 million+ over 4 years as a mid level developer who should get promoted to a senior by year 3
Same here - did the grind for a few years then went straight to big tech. I got offers from the full set of FAANG. I still have a disdain for code monkey work as a job (I really think its practically unskilled labour). I had studied ML to a fairly high level, so landing gigs was easy. Not to mention the money is so much better.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Your task in a software startup (or any startup) is to produce the moat. If you can create something with little effort in a few weeks or months then so can anyone else.
If your product does something hard or useful that you know how to do because you understand the audience or business, or includes data or knowledge that others may not know about or have, or just you can put the effort in to great service to build a large customer base it becomes harder to be copied.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Having worked in the corporate world all my working life I can safely say with confidence that big companies absolutely DO NOT move fast. Do not underestimate the power of middle-management to destroy momentum!
Solve a problem for someone and if it was a painful one, they'll pay you for it.
An interesting paper in this context is "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change" by Hannan and Freeman, 1984 [1]. A quote from the introduction: "...selection processes tend to favor organizations whose structures are difficult to change.".
In other words, it's typically a good thing that larger companies are slow to adapt. That's something that startups can make use of.
The risk is the same as it was a decade ago, and the decade before that.
The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.
Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.
It is. Big companies (or really anyone) usually don't have the time to copy an idea unless it becomes too big already. And if your idea becomes too big, it was worth pursuing it.
Or worth buying up. Which in many cases was the "purpose" of doing the startup in the first place.
Sure, we'd all like to think that the goal was an idealistic "startup does things for bettering humankind".
But let's face it: A large amount of startups are literally founded as an "easier" alternative of building a "more agile" sub-organization within an established and more process driven org and then just get bought out by some of those larger orgs.
Whether or not those large orgs are then actually successful in integration and actually properly leveraging what they bought vs. just "crushing competition", is not necessarily the concern of the founders, depending on how ruthless vs. idealistic they are.
Product is very rarely the moat. It also depends on what you're building. A software startup can not win solely by just having a great product (of course there are exceptions). Finding a niche community, being able to distribute your product to them, how you price it, frequency of updates etc... all things that were just as important in building a moat pre agentic coding
Startups have always competed with big companies based on three gaps: speed, risk tolerance, and incentives. The question is whether these advantages still hold in the age of AI.
* Speed Gap: Still valid. Might even widen.
The bottleneck at big companies was never coding. It's approvals, alignment, and politics. AI makes implementation faster for everyone. But here's the thing—when the implementation bottleneck disappears, startups ship immediately. Big companies still get stuck at the decision-making bottleneck that comes before implementation. So the speed gap doesn't shrink. It might actually widen.
* Risk Gap: Still valid. AI doesn't change this.
Big companies only want to solve proven problems. If something fails, someone has to take the blame. Startups can bet on unproven problems. If they fail, they don't have much to lose anyway. This is about org structure and decision-making culture. AI isn't going to suddenly make big companies comfortable with risk.
* Incentive Gap: Still valid. Actually stronger now.
Employees at big companies get salaries. Founders get equity. This hasn't changed. If anything, AI makes it better for founders. Lower implementation costs mean you can get further with less capital. Less fundraising means less dilution. The math got better for founders.
All three gaps are still intact. AI hasn't weakened the structural advantages of startups. Some of them actually got stronger.
Software moats were never really a moat in and of themselves. You always had to be a first mover. It's true that there are fewer and fewer first mover opportunities, but that has less to do with recent LLMs advancements and more that we have already solved a lot of software problems on first principles. It's partially why LLMs work so well, they are pulling the "widgets" from distribution and synthesizing into your requirements. Before, we probably thought we were writing novelty when it was literally solved 1000x over.
If you aren't a first mover, your success was always dependent on other skills and great execution across multiple disciplines, and also a lot of stubbornness. The software layer has always been important, but a support role of successful enterprises. Start-ups have always been hard to pull together successfully for a lot of other reasons unrelated to code.
If you find a disruptive algorithm (like pagerank) there is little evidence that LLMs will infer your solution by looking at your app. Anything else, they are just design choices and have never been moats either, but say you have a qualitative edge, you'll make the choices that can create a recognizable brand where someone vibing a copycat may not care as much. Nothing has changed on this. Your chance of succeeding rests on your ability to reach your users and iterate in a crowded space, this is what you always had to do anyway.
There are things, however, that aren't worth working on anymore with the advent of LLMs. Some of these have been fully dismissed, for example sentiment analysis. A single API call for the cheapest (even local) LLM vendor will give you SOTA classification. There are many more examples but they are so obvious. Essentially, the "build me 1 billion dollar app" prompt will never work, so if you have a burning desire to build something, do it. Just remember, there never was and never will be a promise of unlimited fortunes whatever you do.
I would strongly recommend staying away from software startups unless:
- The CEO of some major corporation or a big VC is a close friend or friend of your family.
- You are rich and have a lot of friends who will buy your product.
- You already finished the MVP; which you started building 12 years ago... Might as well try to complete.
- You're a criminal.
The market is insanely saturated and people already have more stuff than they need. Capitalism has been over since 2008. Now it's just feudalism. Product is irrelevant; it's all a social game of selection. You have to be selected. You just need to know someone and have a product with a semi-reasonable narrative that your CEO buddy can use as a justification to give you company money. That's it.
I disagree with the sour mindset, as I don’t feel those games were necessary for my startup, although I admit mine was bootstrapped (0$), and didn’t grow as far as the others, it still made me millionaire, has paid my employees a high-than-average salary and has the potential of adding them a few hundred thousands each.
I admit the old market (do web apps to manage records! or notes!) is saturated but the IA market is brand new and fresh open.
How do you find users? Organic? SEO is useless as all the projects with any meaningful pagerank are all pointing to each other. Social media advertising is useless; nobody even sees your tweets or posts. Advertising? How do you get a return on CPC? All the big competitors seem to be running negative margins. Also, small volume social media ads tends to attract only bots... Are you operating in a niche? How do you get word of mouth in this case? Niches related to solving bureaucratic problems are often regulated! No SOC2 or ISO27001, no contracts for you.
In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.
In hist first speech/announcement he said: "...everything is AI now..." - from this day on, Google was dead for customer acquisition.
From now on, every search query with same terms served always an individual page at different times. The good old SEO days were dead, this user-acqui channel died.
Then they increased & enlarged the space for ads at top of page; and these days finally they introduced this AI panel - most people wont scroll anymore on Google.
The value cannot be just the software. E.g. some workflow tool (Salesforce). These tools will continue to exist for awhile but any customer capable of moving off of it to a startup version, can probably make their own startup version, tailored to them.
Now, if you offer something besides the software — logistics, networks, financial instruments, regulatory compliance, physical goods, compute, etc — that has value besides the software.
But the five billionth workflow automation tool has fast diminishing value in 2026.
Absolutely, if your moat isn't the code, but a deep understanding of a specific problem and speed. We're building InvestBot for investors who lose money not because of bad stocks, but because they panic and break their own rules.
Big companies don't copy this because:
The problem is too niche and behavioral (not "how to get returns," but "how to enforce your own discipline").
Their game is scale; ours is depth of trust. We see this with our 200+ beta users: 64% ran portfolio scans more than twice, 12% immediately said they'd pay $20-30/month for rule monitoring. That's not a forecast—it's existing, paying demand for discipline.
Speed vs. bureaucracy. Our engine, which analyzes thousands of historical scenarios against user-defined constraints, was built by two people in 5 months. A large corporation would still be aligning on a roadmap in that time.
The takeaway: Code is a commodity. The real moat in 2026 is speed, focus on a real pain point, and the ability to turn users into a community that trusts your approach more than a magic pill.
It’s the best time to start a company. Few people can build anything now. Big companies are at a huge disadvantage now because they can’t be personal. Software development is going decentralized. You can go to a bunch of businesses and be personal, and develop personalized solutions for them in person. You only need few such clients to be profitable and have lifestyle business.
You gotta find a niche these days and do it well. No longer can there be generalist software. Find underserved industries that aren’t “cool” per se, but still have problems.
Have heard from multiple investors that they think boring software is the next wave, rather than a new UI/UX/Productivity way of doing things.
Depends on your market. Enterprise is hard to crack. B2B you can sneak in via grassroots but it requires building a guerilla marketing presence, B2C is a hit business model with on average deep pocket requirements.
Little moat, but also little thresholds. The only way to not win 100% is not to play.
Yes if people have to learn how to use it. Make something that will last centuries not just a couple of decades. 700 years ago they invented double-entry method of accounting which is still used today. Relational databases were invented recently as well and will survive well past most front-end frameworks. Eventually skynet will be invented but no one believes me just like no one would have believed that aluminum tubes would be flying through the sky or enriching uranium. If before you couldn't open a winapi window, now you can do that in one sentence instruction, and you'll have a good starting point. Things are changing. Look at accounting, accountants don't even do accounting anymore, they're just QB users.
A software startup has always, always been a longshot. This is still true. Also, vanishingly few companies of any kind, including software, ever get a "moat". Small companies survive, when they do, by being fast moving enough to keep making new things.
You certainly should not start a software startup to get rich, as that was never the most likely outcome. You should start one if you have an idea for software that isn't out there, which you think people would find useful, and you want to see what it's like to do a startup (enough to give it several years of your life).
I have, btw, never founded a software startup, though I have worked at some. I got paid in salary, not equity. It is now, always was, and probably always will be a longshot.
Depends what you expect, people still have problems that need solved by software, if you expect to be the next Google the odds are not in your favor but if you aim to have a sustainable income from software that should be viable.
Sure, the world still needs software.
Perhaps even more so now with the advent of AI.
There's still a ridiculously minuscule chance that you'll end up profitable, let alone successful.
I read that software, from a business perspective, is almost always looked at as a liability rather than an asset. There just isn't very much profitable software in this world, and the software that can become profitable likely subsidizes its business with advertising. The only saving grace is that software that becomes profitable can typically scale. See Facebook, TikTok, Google.
Games sell but are risky and creatively demanding.
If big companies could align themselves quickly they could copy your software since 10years ago. The issue is unwillingness. Why would Meta bother with copying a SaaS ? They are making money head over fist with their ads business. Keep in mind how much money big tech makes. Mark Zuckerberg personally is worth 100B dollars, most startups will be lucky to hit that number in their lifetime. Point is, its bot worth their time to pursue new ideas but rather buy out existing ones. Which is good news.
This is the problem with big concentration of wealth and power. The big tech mega corps can copy your idea easily because they don’t have any budget, they can undercut you or sell at a loss, and they can distribute it to all their current customers with anti competitive bundling.
It has happened over and over many times and American antitrust law is useless. The largest corporations must be broken up, taxed heavily, and regulated in new ways. Otherwise there is no fair competition or level playing field for startups.
If they have at least one tiny step/foot in the door, they are good at upselling nearly everything. And they are continuously buying up other companies and integrating them (somehow questionable very often) and then selling this as new SAP product after replacing the former logo
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Whenever you have doubts about your ability to do something enough to ask for advice from random people you don’t know, and if that thing is unnecessary and will be significantly difficult, like a startup that is just some option for you to work on, the answer is probably no.
You have to feel the true desire to make something happen because you must. Anything other than that is probably a bad idea.
The moat for small company is the lower coordination overhead than bigger companies, not about the effort of writing code.
Big companies try to balance a lot of stakeholders, the collection of all their requirements makes them risk adverse and creates wasted effort. I’ve been on a lot of projects (pre AI coding) with rewrites and changes that have more to do with politics and org changes, lack of vision, and needless veto points.
That’s the small software company advantage still IMO
It depends on what you define as a startup. In my opinion it is, but as I’d read in another place: I think features will turn into products. So build a feature and do it the best for a segment and it should give you at least a small business.
And sure, maybe someone will try to copy what you build, but that’s a good problem to have because by then you’re probably somewhat successful.
Yes, but not SaaS or services in general but products. And focus on B2B, not B2C because money in B2C is there only for huge companies whereas if you hit the right niche, you can make bank with B2B.
Also, disregard any "success stories", as they are 99.999% funded by a massive piles of money and immeasurable amount of connections in high and right places, that you never hear of.
Yes! Coding is just one of the tasks you've got to do when building a software business. You also have to find a good value preposition, identify a good channel to your customers, manage your resources etc.
Channels are becoming even more important as software has become easy to copy. But copycats always existed. When it wasn't created by AI, it was created in low wage countries.
I’ve recently realized that behind each copycat, there is an entrepreneur. It’s not a big factory with written “Leading #1 in piracy” at the front. It’s someone with almost as many skills as the original entrepreneurs, trying to copy a few of them to see where there is traction, with hopes and dreams similar to the original, but too far away from the world’s center of activity to propose something relevant. Some of them probably do it with the “I can do it better than them” mindset.
Software startups still work, but only if software is not the point.
Code is now cheap, so the advantage moved into things that cannot be copied by looking, accumulated data, hidden workflows, trust, and judgment earned by staying inside a problem too long.
Big companies copy shapes, not gravity. If your edge is visible, it is temporary. If it only appears over time, you are still early.
Big companies are very bad at developing new software.
That's why it's so common for successful software startups to eventually get acquired. Big companies know that it's a lot more efficient for them to spend money simply buying someone who did the thing, than spending money and taking on a bunch of risk trying to do the thing themselves.
You're gonna get a lot of positive responses here, but frankly only do it if you think you can make meaningful money within a month or two.
Everything is going off the rails this year. You only have to use Claude Code for 10 minutes to realize every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.
Lol that's what they told us last year. And they'll say the same thing next year. It's obviously useful for certain tasks but the number of errors and hallucinations are still quite bad for anything large or complex or really novel. That part is improving very slowly and some fundamental theoretical breakthroughs will be needed.
I just keep hearing all these people that preach this, but I don't see anything substantial (that isn't something stupid or a tutorial they followed from medium) that anyone responds with. e.g. of a meh: give me top 10 HN articles for today and summarize the contents, add tags and build a website. I know AI can do that, but it's not impressive.
Not to pick on you, be mean or anything, but your github profile says no contributions in a year. Obviously there are other online git repo sites.
Care to share anything in prod? For a reply so aggressive, the proof is in the pudding.
AI is already more or less ultimately powerful with nearly endless ressources - though, no one built a big software company in the last 3 - 4 years solely with AI to replace one of the behemoths.
The fact that you own a car which could bring you everywhere does not mean that you actually will go eveywhere.
On a conference 2 month ago, one speaker claimed that AI will be so powerful that within 3 years there will be guys who replace microsoft because they have a better coding AI than today.
Have you actually had it do anything substantial and then tried to work with the code it produces afterwards? It may "work" but it's a horrific mess. Good luck bug fixing that.
Yes, with GPT 5.2 Codex and 5.2 Pro specifically. It’s not a mess because of the context I provide and the guidance and reattempts I apply. It’s working great, the resulting code is good when I accept it, and I’m getting much more done than in the before times.
Im working productive with it every day (Claude Opus). If you provide enough context, the code usually works veeeery well on first shot.
(For sure, I do not tell it "build me a facebook", instead Im telling it precisely which single function I want to have, how it should work, what the output should be.
Chunk it into single parts/components/building blocks. Then do each of these a dedicated project/workspace. In each of these workspaces, you put in only the source code relevant for this module. You are working in each project/workspace separately.
I am just as bullish as you on the potential. AI is going to change the world all right. Much bigger than the internet.
I an far, far less bullish than you on the timeframe. The vast amount of work is not even optimised for computers without AI. Much if not most bureaucratic process has stayed mostly the same for the best part of a hundred years.
It will change everything, but not in a single year!
+1. Claude is actually really good at all kinds of development but Claude will still make plenty of mistakes and occasionally go so far in the wrong direction that it still needs someone with experience to steer it.
"Current business conditions or issues" -- I think that's because OP wants you to fill that in yourself, so that you might explain your assumptions or the market potential that you see, which might be wildly different from his (i.e. software having little to no moat)
I think that the opposite is also very plausible. I've seen numerous startups take a big company's product unrefined product and quickly turn it into something better.
Depends on your goal - do you have an idea you care about and want to solve? Probably a good idea. If you "want to be your own boss" or looking for something just to be acquired, hard to say, depends on who you know, etc.
There never was a moat in software. It's your business, value, service, industry knowledge, sales, etc. that's what matters. Not the software. Software is and has always been cheap.
The biggest problem is the government has made it more and more difficult to start a business, both through fees, especially through taxes, and very especially through all the regulations.
Thought this would be a thread about the crazy offers being handed out to join AI teams at Amazon, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, or any of the massively capitalized 'neolabs'.
It depends on what you are pursuing. Software was never a true moat for the really hot stuff. See books Zero to One, 7 Powers. It can be moat when you have something extremely complex, like for Unreal Engine, software actually is the moat. However, when it comes to regular software, everything was always prone to being copied. Will it be copied, it depends entirely on what's for the grabs for someone else to copy it. If you have a mature SaaS, that already has some competitors, what does anyone gain by copying it if the projection for building a sustainable business is very small? Personally I am building something that is relatively complex (much more complex / non-standard than a CRUD and likely not in Claude training data, and something that would be a very bad idea to write it in AI slop due to security issues) and relatively niche, something that a well funded startup would never dream about building, yet something that a smaller team would have a difficult time to compete with me, LLMs or not.
That's always been the case, in software and elsewhere.
Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.
So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?
Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.
If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.
So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.
I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
Got to get more creative and less funding dependent. People still seem caught up in the old process of ideation, static creation, pitch decks. Ack! Garbage now! I only ever took funding to scale to 3-5 heads, well I have 20 heads for nearly nothing now... Ive created more "startup" ideas in the last 3 years then the last 20 of my career. I just keep cranking out anything remotely interesting, launch, and if it don't "work", move on. I just launched another one this week, feels most promising, but we'll see... I didn't go quitting my day job just yet.
Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.
Since the majority of our industry is still in a combination denial/disbelief and bureaucratic incompatibility with AI workflows, startups are increasingly well positioned to reap the rewards.
The way I think about it is, everyone is struggling to make AI tools work well, so if you can be in the top 50% of people trying, you're actually in the top 10% in terms of positioning for future growth.
in the valley at least its difficult to pursue that unless you’re in a “hot” field. A few years ago, it was cloud, then big data, then crypto and now AI. When startups in those fields can raise hundreds of millions, they can lure away a lot of talent (both tech and non tech).
Nah. Regardless of where the company is nominally headquartered there are always an effectively infinite number of employees who can be hired to work remotely or out of satellite offices.
The fact that people look to start a business based on searching foe a moat shows they don't believe in free markets. As well as shows what's wrong with Silicon Valley.
The proof is really in the pudding, isn't it? I don't see a wave of successful vibe-coded startups in the market yet. That's kind of the benchmark for whether this stuff actually does in practice what the AI-hypemen claim it can.
Rather the opposite. A vibe-coded startup cannot survive if it can be trivially duplicated. The proof will be in observing the inverse phenomenon; (pure) software companies disappearing.
I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
Let's take that thought for a second: " big companies can copy your product in no time"
How will big companies know your revenue and the number of paying customers you have?
Before you even get there, you'll have made generational wealth pretty much. They made tons of clones of Agario but none of them were as good.
The problem is finding a solid idea and marketing it to people. That's the harder part. Programming is still hard despite vibe coders churning out slop but not as hard.
The problem is the software has already been made in the past. It has built up over time. Just like songs. There are so many already there.
When smartphones just came out I was already not making websites anymore. But every single app I made got at least 10k downloads in one week and around 1/5 got in the top 10 of a category like "social" even though I've only ever spent maybe a month max on developing any single app.
But now there are soooo many already there. Good luck getting into the top 10 social now with one weekend of coding.
You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.
Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.
With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
Could it be that it's just a wrapper for APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic? I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm surprised to find someone else with the same view.
Big companies are not your worry in most cases. They have so much bureaucracy and internal politics that it's often cheaper for them to buy out the up-and-coming startups than it is to build in-house.
Instead, if you achieve success without much of a moat, you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills". These are companies who employ multiple small teams (think 3-4 people), and each team is charged with cloning one of the most popular apps - they have really abbreviated development cycles, on the order of 6 weeks, and they just keep churning till they've drowned every app on the leaderboard in clones. And because they are astroturfing the whole space, they don't actually need most of these clones to be individually profitable.
Rocket Internet Is one of these copycat business style.
Rocket Internet is often engaged in arbitrage where they bring an existing company’s idea to a different country or context. This is very different from the flood-the-zone astroturfing discussed above. Zalando is its own company employing ~5k engineers. This isn’t a copycat I would claim.
But maybe you’re referring to practices I am not aware of.
I worked for them: Its quuuiiiittteee different what they do from this "app-cloning-approach": Rocket Internet copies business models and adapts them other countries. They are bringing in own people if they invest if required for the startup, but usually the companies are mainly built be the original founders with support from Rocket Internet on different layers (like legal). Also Rocket invests Money. Sometimes .. a lot!
I worked for them and even interviewed to be founder of one of their spin-offs. GP’s comment has nothing to do with Rocket’s model. Zero.
And that’s coming from someone that despises Rocket for what they did to my workplace, the parent company, all teams I knew, and all colleagues I met from other projects.
App mills don’t respect anything at all, Rocket at least is Lawful Evil.
> you will be cloned by one of the "App Store mills".
Is this happening for SaaS apps too. With AI assistance, most SaaS apps feel achievable in 6 weeks.
I personally think the hard part of building a SaaS app is not coding, it's understanding the complexities of a problem and building good abstractions to solve it. Code/software is the result, but certainly not the main challenge. And I think this reflects the time breakdown of good software engineers (mostly collaborating, brainstorming and designing interfaces vs. coding).
> Big companies can copy your product in no time
Your advantage in this case, now or 10 years ago, is that this is simply not true.
If your business is "a flashlight app", yeah, eventually they'll copy it (as it happened). However they'll take an unusual long time to do that simple thing (as it also happened).
Why? Because everything at big companies is a political game, full of internal conflicts, multiple priorities, non-collaborative teams, self-interest, promotion games, and a bunch of other things not really related to build the thing in question. It very rarely has anything to do with how fast the code can be written.
If your business is good enough and becomes something more than "a piece of software", and solves a problem, becomes a brand, has great user feedback... that's not something you can "copy in no time".
Don’t worry big companies still can’t copy anything quickly, even with AI. Why? Because before they can ship a single feature, they’ll need to schedule 42 alignment meetings, debate AI-generated slide decks, and log their “strategic pivots” into an AI-curated Jira board.
The real moat isn’t just code it’s speed, focus, user trust, and the ability to actually ship. Those are things bloated orgs struggle with, with or without AI. If you’re solving a real problem and building a real brand, you’re already ahead.
The real moat is not being forced to use Jira then.
That’s not even it, because in the small company jira won’t be such an oppressive system.
I don’t do side projects related to computers and never have in 30 years. But I still use a Trello board to keep myself organized
Ironically I use a vibe-coded Trello clone with some tweaks for my specific workflow...
Care to share those tweaks?
a) THe only problem with Jira is that its soooo slow :-)
b) give Linear.App a chance - its great
Or you can just vibe code Rectilinear app.
No, i meant this app: https://linear.app/ as replacement for JIRA :-)
In a previous big-tech job, we called this the "Release Prevention Team".
As a customer, I often find myself talking to the very similar Sales Prevention Team.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I think the exact opposite of the original statement might be true: Find a product made by a big corporation that is a great concept but has clearly suffered from an internal shitshow of a team for some time, and copy it. If other corporations are sloppily copying it - even better. That just means the product has actual market fit.
While I agree with sone of your points, there are many evidences that this happened in the past.
One example is Microsoft creating teams to take on Slack.
Every single org I’ve seen using teams (sample size of 4-5 orgs) uses it because it came for free. And every one of them also got slack and paid for it.
That says everything about how shitty Teams STILL is. MS still hasn’t improved it much from the steady state turd that it’s been a few years ago.
It’s so funny. My company is basically merger hell and we have both Teams and Slack for similar reasons.
One of the more important acquired companies with a cash cow product basically refused to move to Teams because they hate it and concocted a reason that we just had to keep it.
The reason was total BS but it was crafted to appeal to the higher-ups, and it worked, because nobody was really going to fight over less than ten bucks per person per month.
If, knowing what you know now, you could go back in time and be the one to create Slack would you not do it? Even if everyone is using Teams now (they're not), it took a really long time to show up that Slack's founders were able to capitalize on.
The change in the software landscape today is the apparent ability to develop a competitor faster thanks to LLMs. But, as the parent points out, the bottleneck was never code writing. It was waiting on the people involved to get past their egos. LLMs have done nothing to change that.
Teams is still nowhere near Slack's features and usefulness. I wouldn't say it's a direct competitor, it's like store brand vs a mid-luxury item
Nobody really likes Teams, but it does seem to have more features than Slack in terms of integration with the rest of Microsoft's office software ecosystem. It's nice to be able to open up and edit Word/PowerPoint/Excel documents directly, view the Outlook calendar directly, etc. It is also integrated with SharePoint and OneDrive for file storage. Teams had video calls before Slack as well IIRC.
Teams, Slack and Discord all seem to be built as clunky web apps; but my experience is that Discord seems to work slightly better than Slack, which in turn works slightly better than Teams.
the thing is: TEAMS just works, even for all office drones who cant use a computer without accidents
I can't get it to work. I have to use an incognito window or it just craps itself. Terrible software for mediocre companies.
Well, since you are on HN you are quite above the maximum level of experience allowed to use TEAMS without hassle :-D
I dont think the founders or early team at slack are upset with how things played out
Just the consumers unfortunately.
That’s a whole lot of ifs. At the end of this long road filled with if’s, what are the chances that he can have a profit large enough to overcome the opportunity cost of not just working as an enterprise dev in a 2nd tier city and have continuing profits or have a meaningful exit?
What about other smart guys looking for ideas for their startup?
Same as 10 years ago, unrelated to how fast it can be copied.
It’s still hard to create something successful.
Remember that Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers and Facebook still has barely been able to create a new successful product on their own without acquiring it from a smaller company.
> Mark Zuckerberg has had “AGI” for over a decade in the form of tens of thousands of human software engineers
This makes me think that companies like Open AI, Anthropic etc are simply new types of body shoppers. body shoppers don’t have their own products they just supply talent to help other companies make products and services.
Mechanical Turk at scale.
MeTAS, ironic since quite some AI companies ended up in the news for using humans when they claimed it was AI.
And a lot of companies call themselves “AI companies” because their developers use copilot to generate code.
It’s hilarious how many apps for parents now have AI. Like, couldn’t you figure out how to calculate a mean and weight quantiles, need an LLM for that?
Body shoppers on steroids
As much as Facebook was a silly and poorly coded site at the time, Zuck seemed to do better in like 2007 when it was pretty small. I wonder if increasing the capabilities of somebody who still has ideas left and isn’t burdened by a bloated organization is the real benefit here.
Successful people also tend to overestimate what portion of that success was down to timing/luck. Zuck had a lot of early-mover advantage in the social media space (especially in the university demographic Facebook started out in).
A lot of his later ventures have been trying to break into markets that are already crowded by more established players, and that's just a lot harder to execute on.
Did you mean "underestimate"?
Yes, yes I did
Damn, that is an interesting point
That’s an interesting thought. Thanks.
Facebook cannot make products, its that simple.
Or Google
Large companies struggle to launch anything due to their staff size.
They're as inefficient as a government
google makes products, they mostly suck at making platforms, and their most notable platform (android) was purchased, though one can argue gsuite/workspace as a platform, but one might also argue that its more just an amalgamation of projects.
One can see this from the failure of google+ (and killing off beloved apps, like reader on its altar, when I would argue if they are thinking platform, the idea is to make any app insert data into the platform, you don't want to push away users, you want to get them using the platform with them even knowing it).
Or their disjointed messaging strategy for many years (which might not even matter, they seemingly have given up on it?). It shouldn't matter what messaging app someone uses, let it use a common platform. Spend the money on figuring out how to make them use a common platform, because killing their app just pushes them away and you are not guaranteed that they will move to your new app vs something else. Moving their old app to your new platform, again, keeps them as users, increases the value of the platform (as more users are inserting dfata into it) which makes it more valuable to others to do the same. One might have different apps geared towards differ things (someone might be happy with just text messaging, another might want video and text messaging, but if you kill the first guy's app and expect him to move, he might just as quickly move to whatsapp or something else).
how is apple, overall, so good at this?
The fruit company still has an internal culture, especially in hardware-focused teams, with a relentless focus on shipping products followed by iterative refinement.
Is it though?
Their revenue last year was 400 billion dollars... you tell us.
They are still milking the product they launched 20 years ago, doing slight periodic updates to match innovations of others with few years delay. They are about as good at making new products as Google and Facebook.
I'd say it depends on your definition of "good", since the revenue seems to suggest they're doing something most people agree with.
By that logic, the online scam industry is shipping the best products of all time. By some estimates they make over a trillion a year.
IMO false equivalence... scams are designed purely to steal money from people, while Apple products carry intrinsic value and benefit to most people.
I realize it's a strained equivalence, but Apple makes a lot of money violating EU anticompetitive laws. Their stranglehold over app distribution is not entirely dissimilar to ransome.
have you seen the M chips? to me that revolutionized computing. supercomputer-level latency for in-ram operations on a $2k laptop
Sounds awesome. But they achieved it by basically harwiring specific RAM to specific CPU. It's awesome that they made a product, but there's no extensibility and since it's internal apple innovation it's basically a technological dead end. Nobody can build anything upon this and there's nothing to build. Even a cool $2k laptop you can run small LLM on is basically a closed off expensive toy. Much like iPhone.
Technology will grow in parallel and surpass it fairly quickly like the Android phones did. Only brand loyalty in US holds this thing still propped up long term.
Oculus?
I worked for oculus, well reality labs.
Lots of talented people, and decent hardware, once the stupid politics was overcome.
But.
In all the time I worked there, we never managed to get "join my friends" feature get made. Trying to join your friends in a game was so fucking hard. You'd think being a social company, who's whole point is connecting people, this would be the first feature.
But no.
Threads is the only product they have launched in the last 5 years that anything close to successful. Even then it only launched because management ignored it, let them get an MVP out the door before swelling the size of the team from ~8(?) to >>2k The time to fun was also waaay too high. it got better towards the end, but in 2020-2023 it would take ages to log in, update, load, get kicked out, reboot and then join.
Oculus was shipping hardware/software before the Facebook acquisition, and proceeded to slowly bleed out post-acquisition. We shipped a few decent VR headsets in the middle there (Quest 1, 2 and 2s/3), but most of the other initiatives within Meta's reality labs withered on the corporate vine...
That division is losing billions a year. I wouldn’t call it a success
Did they make though or did they buy? What did they actually buy that wasn't already done at Valve?
Acquired
Yes! All startups are created to solve a problem, regardless of the tools used. Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool. While AI makes writing software much easier. It's likely to lead to an explosion of new apps. Only those that fill a genuine need will survive. Your job is to identify these new problems and determine which apps to build.
Simple apps are a thing of the past. If an LLM can generate an app in a few sittings, it isn't a saleable product. However, people will still pay for a fully engineered application that solves a complex problem that AI cannot easily replicate.
Regarding copies, there is always room for more than one solution to the same need. Your challenge is to figure out how to stand out. A fundamental business hurdle, that has existed since the beginning.
Here's an idea that always bear's fruit. We humans love to do things as easy as possible. Write something that saves energy, time and is simple then people will pay for it.
> All startups are created to solve a problem
And most of the time that problem is “the founders don’t have as much money as they want”.
> Apps are simply tools to solve human problems. Because humans will always have challenges to address, software will remain a vital tool.
You make it sound like it’s something noble, but let’s not pretend most software companies these days don’t have “make me rich” as the top goal. Effectively everything VC backed (yes, including by Y Combinator) falls in that category. That’s why pivots are a thing. Most founders these days don’t give a shit about what they’re building or customers, they only care about the payoff.
This seems like a very jaded comment, and if it’s because you got burned in a startup, then you have my sympathy and I’m sorry for debating. Just know that not everyone is running on nothing but greed. You might be confusing VCs with startup founders a bit. VCs are definitely profit motivated, by design. It’s going too far, and incorrect IMO, to suggest even VCs, or anyone involved, doesn’t care about building solutions or care about customers. All founders I’ve ever met care about what they make, and most VCs care about it somewhat but also care that the founders care strongly; they don’t often fund founders who don’t care.
So can you source any of your claims of “most”? I just looked it up, and the majority of software startups are self-funded or angel/seed-funded, not VC funded. Founders that don’t care about product or customers enough tend to fail. Founders that only care about the payoff don’t tend to self-fund their startup.
That said, everyone and all companies have financial incentives. There’s nothing unique or new about software startup founders there. The entire economy runs on profit motive. And I’ve seen a lot more people who don’t care about customers or product working in large companies making a nice easy salary working 9 to 5 (or less)!
My personal sampling of founders vs company workers is that founders are, by far, the ones who care more deeply about building something new and delighting customers and growing a sustainable business, care enough to start working nights and weekends, go years with crappy pay or no pay, to do every job in the company from engineering to design to marketing to support to filing taxes. Some people certainly are at least partially motivated to accept these sacrifices for the chance at a payoff, but lots of founders would prefer a lifestyle company where they get to keep building and don’t have the insane pressures and politics of a unicorn company.
Pivots are a thing because good product ideas often are not good business ideas. Startups that fail to pivot are the ones that die, and if your startup dies you don’t get to care about what you’re building or about customers at all. If you want companies to care about product and customers and not profit, then you should embrace sustainable economics, and that means making things people will pay for, and when they’re not paying, making something else.
It doesn’t matter what the motivations were for the founders once they take VC money. The purpose of tge company then becomes the exit.
Your personal sample doesn’t jibe with the literally thousands of even YC companies
You’re arguing something different than @latexr did, and picking a VC as your example makes sense here but fails to counter the fact that most startups aren’t VC funded. Still, you’re also like GP confusing VC motivation with founder motivation. It’s possible for founders to care deeply about the problems they’re solving, and for the company’s primary goal to be an exit, at the same time. Both can be true, contrary to what GP claimed.
There are an infinitesimal number of tech based startups that are “lifestyle companies” that were bootstrapped and use revenues to grow without taking investor money.
There are even fewer that are “successful” - ie where everyone involved wouldn’t be better off just working as a LOB CRUD developer.
The goal of the founders don’t matter even if they do “care” about the customer. The customer is at the whim of the strategies of the investors of the company and if an acquired, the customer will probably get an email about “our amazing journey” when the company is shut down
These smaller companies are doing well, they just aren’t incentivised to tell you about it. The VC backed companies are, either targeting you as a consumer or an investor and n an eventual IPO.
> even if they do “care” about the customer
You’re not debating me, you’re contradicting @latexr.
> infinitesimal
You invented a narrow niche to knock down there, but as I said, I actually looked it up and the majority of startup companies that form are seed or self funded, not VC funded. I was responding to @latexr’s claims that “most” founders don’t care about product at all, which I believe is just false. You’re arguing with me about something else, and I don’t know what your point is yet. Mine is that caring about customers and caring about money aren’t exclusive things, a successful business must do both.
Where did you find this tidbit of information that most tech startups don’t take outside funding?
Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
> Where did you find this tidbit
Google it. There are pages and pages of sources. Here’s one: https://gregslist.com/
> Every company “cares about their customers” to the point where that’s how they make their money.
And if they don’t make money, they fail and lose the opportunity to care about customers. It’s a boring tautology to say that companies care about money. The point is that @latexr is wrong about assuming that caring about money means they don’t care about product or customers.
It’s not at all a tautology. A company that cares about its customers can balance its need to make money and leave money on the table because it’s not in the best interest of the customers.
Agreed, that’s what I’ve been saying from the top. Again, you’re disagreeing with @latexr, and agreeing with me.
The tautology is that all companies care about money. Companies care about money by definition. Many companies and many people in companies also care about customers and product quality. However, there is an absolute limit to how much money a company can leave on the table, regardless of what the customer wants, and serving the customer’s best interest becomes a ‘bad decision’ and threatens the ability for the company to do anything for the customer the moment it’s unprofitable, as soon as costs exceed income. This effectively means that at some level, companies must prioritize profit over service, otherwise service will cease to exist. The balance must lean in favor of the company on average over time.
That's a cynical take, but a more positive interpretation is that pivots are needed if your company isn't actually solving a problem. Otherwise people would pay for it, and the founders would be getting rich. So you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.
> That's a cynical take
One that you apparently agree with, given the rest of your comment.
> you need to pivot until you actually create a solution to a problem that people will pay for.
In other words: You don’t care about the problem, you care about the profit from selling a solution.
If a startup is “created to solve a problem” and then pivots to solve a different problem because the first one wasn’t profitable, that means profit was the priority, not solving the problem.
Of course profit is a priority how else are you going to pay the bills/employees etc?
A healthy business uses revenue to pay bills, employees, etc.
Using profit to pay for those things is what we call gambling.
Guess I got the semantics wrong, not my first language _shrug_
“The”, not “a”.
There is a chasm of difference between “I care about this problem and want to solve it, but I also need to think how to make it sustainable” and “I don’t really care what I’m tackling, as long as I make bank”.
Both exist. The second one is ever more the norm.
Why is this a problem? As long as the problem gets solved.
I would expect it to be obvious that caring about making money above fixing a problem means the problem won’t be solved that well compared to the alternative.
Are you really going to claim you never encountered a startup that is obviously shitting on customers and degrading the experience to make a buck? Do you honestly believe all startups are created to solve a problem (the original claim I responded to) and none are created with the intent of being the next “unicorn” to make the founders rich? If that is the case, search the term “enshittification”. Surely you’ll have encountered it by now. Pick whatever example helps you understand the point.
I don't see how its "obvious" at all. I think most problems wouldn't be solved at all with this view because most problems aren't something people care about. Money gives people the incentive to solve every problem possible. Someone who "cares" is free to solve it even better and make even more money.
This is to some extent a false dichotomy. Generally speaking, products that prioritize fixing a problem “above” making money do not exist. There are no alternatives. Businesses can’t sustain that. Sometimes it happens for a short while, and eventually they reduce the level of service, or charge more money, or die.
I don’t know why you’re picking on startups. Big companies are where you see enshittification the most, and it’s because economies of scale require them to cut costs. Startups can often use VC fuel to offer delightful and unprofitably superior solutions to problems. That goes away after startups graduate to being real companies.
> I don’t know why you’re picking on startups.
Read the thread. I’m not “picking on startups”, the conversation is about startups. Yes, Big companies do it too, that’s just not what this particular conversation is about.
I see, so no comment at all on the fact that caring about products and customers requires making money?
I have read the thread, thank you, and you certainly have been talking about startups and founders as if these issues are unique to them. It’s not just ‘yeah yeah big companies too’… if you actually care about and study enshittification at all, it is, by and large, entirely coming from big companies, and it isn’t new to software, it has always been happening. The only thing new is a cute term for it that got popular recently. Old business terms that mean the same thing include: loss leader, hook product, bait and switch, and plain old “promotion”. Regardless of what the topic here is, it doesn’t make sense to harp on startups over quality going down. For that to happen, it had to be higher at some point, and that point is: startups. VC funding might lead to some quality decline, but all companies trim and get worse as they grow, and always have. Startup is the phase when companies provide the highest level of product or service.
Plus, how many of these existing apps were just databases wired up in different ways?
This is why I like using mathematical or algorithmic approaches to solve difficult problems. Writing programs that use statistics, mathematics, optimization, analytical geometry, etc guarantee a certain level of security from the swarms of CRUD merchants flooding the market.
And how many of these apps were just files wired up in different ways?
These startups were not created to solve a problem, some didn’t even have a technical person. These startups were created to be VC bait and hopefully sell out to the bigger fool
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
Short answer: yes, but the “moat” has changed.
A lot of people still think moats are about features. They’re not anymore. Features are cheap now. Execution and distribution are the real bottlenecks.
Big companies can copy your product, but they usually won’t copy: – your speed early on – your willingness to serve a tiny, unsexy niche – your ability to change direction without internal politics
In practice, most startups don’t die because a big company copied them. They die because they never found real users who cared enough to pay.
The moat today often looks like: – deep understanding of a specific workflow or pain point – trust with a narrow audience – compounding advantages (data, habits, integrations, community)
If your plan is “build something cool and hope it sticks”, it’s probably not worth it. If your plan is “solve a painful problem for a very specific group, then expand”, it still is.
Curious how people here think about moats post-AI. Are we underestimating distribution, or overestimating defensibility?
Zero to one makes this crystal clear. Most startups die because they didnt manage to sell not because they didnt manage to build the product. Secondly there was never a code moat. Code was always cheap. But architecture, distribution, quality control, integration once landed, this is where money is mostly made. Most indie or small companies die because they just pick shitty problems. eg nobody cares about a goddamn notes app, the one on Mac works fine and most people write garbage in their notes like utter trash. So obviously a notes app has little value because the asset it manages has very little value. Not so much if you are building something like document storage for regulated industries. Or compliance software. In these cases, its the business domain expertise which counts. Even when applying for jobs without domain expertise code monkeys never get paid past a threshold. People / entities that command a premium are the ones with domain knowledge.
You nailed right Most startups die because they optimize too much and have no real users
Is “software startup” the right term? I understand that you might want to “use software” in the startup but surely, in the most successful startups, the thing that makes them successful is that they solve a real problem, that real people/businesses have, and are prepared to “pay” [1] you to solve for them.
If the startup is just “software for the sake of software” then I think that’s a different thing entirely. And to be fair, sometimes software for the sake of it is more like art or fun. And it’s true, sometimes something wonderful comes out of that. Sometimes. :)
[1]: Obviously “pay” can mean _very_ different things in different contexts.
The opposite is increasingly true…
I spent the past 6 months rebuilding a medium-size company’s CRM.
They were on Salesforce for a decade, and now they’ll own their data based on the work of a single engineer.
For Salesforce, the moat is increasingly the inertia that comes from big-company contracts and the perceived safety of buying Salesforce.
Society is experiencing the first wave of the true Cambrian explosion of software and there’s never been a better time to be an indie maker. Never. This is like the iOS App Store moment, but multiplied by 100 and expected to last 10x longer.
I feel like you've proven the point in the opposite direction. A software startup may be competing with Salesforce as an alternative. That would be worth pursuing as a software startup. You've laid the case that it's better and easier to create internal tools and not rely on Salesforce or an alternative solution. It's easy to roll-your-own so you don't pay outside companies for this solution any more. This does not bode well for a software startup (maybe it bodes well for you as an engineer working on that project, but that's not a software startup).
I feel like most "solutions" that are really just "platforms" and require extensive customization and integration will suffer due to this. It's easy to just roll your own these days.
Yes!! The software market is still growing quickly.
What moat are you referring to? AFAICT, moats are bigger now than ever before, but the moats I see are centered around things like consumer habits and B2B contracts and hub/platform experiences. People tend to like the software they know & have, or the contractors they know already, even when they complain about it. The need to overcome static friction is a moat, one that makes it harder for startups to get in, but easier to stay once you’re in.
Big companies are slow. It seems like it would be easy for them to copy products, but they rarely do, and even when they try they take forever. Worry about yourself first, whether you can deliver, whether your product is superior, whether you can get customers, whether your business is sustainable, etc.. Worry about other startups second. They can copy faster than big companies. Do you have an edge over other startups? Don’t worry about the big companies. If they aren’t already solving the problem you want to solve, they won’t start until after you’re successful.
Note acquisitions are a thing! Big companies that want to copy your product are aware that the fastest way to do that is to acquire a working solution and a pile of new customers. You should be thinking about big companies more as opportunity than competition.
Yes, big companies can copy your product. But at what cost, especially when including opportunity cost and the levels of bureaucracy in larger companies? I have heard your question many times during the last 20 years, and still there are more software startups.
In many cases it would cost them less to buy your company than to create it from scratch. Which is why so many small companies are acquired instead of copied. The question should be more what do you want to do and are you able to follow up on creating a startup? Writing the code is a small part of creating a successful startup
In my experience (enterprise software), customers buy our products not because we have a moat or some hard-to-achieve technical advantage but because they can speak to us in their words, they know we care, and we try solve their problems quickly.
Just yesterday I was speaking with the COO of a $200M/yr revenue company in the supply chain space. He'd learned Claude Code and built a couple apps to solve internal problems but reached out to talk to us. I asked him "you've been able to build some really impressive tools, clearly you can solve your own problems, why are you talking to me?" And he said "I have a business to run. I shouldn't be coding. I need somebody who understands my business & can solve my problems without taking a lot of my time."
Is there a cheaper way for him to solve his problems? Absolutely. But he wants to put the key in the ignition and know the car will turn on every time without thinking about it. There is an endless list of problems to solve; I don't think software businesses are going anywhere anytime soon.
This should be the top comment. The thing about growth of businesses overall, is that they want outsourced capacity (that’s what employees or contractors are) and that dynamic doesn’t go away because of AI, because like the comment mentioned, it’s not reliable enough in the sense that it can accept high-context vague instructions and ‘figure it out’ like an enterprise developer can.
No, they want "outsourced capacity" from contractors with domain specific expertise. Too many freelance/indie contractors on here scratching their heads as to why to can't land clients or jobs — you need domain expertise and experience, not just the ability to write code.
> There is an endless list of problems to solve
As an indie hacker I often struggle to find new ideas. Are there any practical strategies for discovering these real pain points?
The best way to get an idea is to do something for 5-10+ years, learn the limitations, learn what's missing.
2nd best way is to meet those people and talk to them. The more of them from different backgrounds you talk to, the more ideas you can get
Talk to customers. Listen to their problems. Build a prototype. See if they will pay for it. Repeat.
As a founder I spend as much time as I can with customers. They tell us what to build.
One of the better, more levelheaded responses here.
A PM I've worked with many times always used to say, "They want an easy button! It's that simple!."
Yeah, this is how we survive.
I even dream of build tools for business to make apps (like Air table, but better) and even if you can do anything that do, perfectly, the software they need not means they want to babysit it all the time.
Is like the person that knows how cook, amazingly, yet hire a chef for take care of it most days.
Obviously a COO shouldnt be prompting Claude Code but your competition is someone in their team doing the same. The person in their team is trusted and knows the business.
In my experience, most employees have no clue how their business works.
They know how their tiny bit works, and can even often misunderstand why they are even doing what they're doing.
Or maybe COO was using it for leverage
I mean its a matter of RoI, isnt it ? Investing in your existing partnership means that specific business can come to you for their problems rather than work up so much expertise bloat. I suppose there a point after which more expertise hurts a business.
Maybe. great businesses don't need moats. They just need sonething people buy from them. Maybe venture capital needs moats - but you can get rich without that. (If rich is even the goal - a nice life is a better goal)
beware of any business where there is no competition - there is generally good reason nobody else is making money there.
The real question to ask is;
Is it still worth pursuing a software startup ... using the same strategies/approach/mindset/tools/means/methods of yesteryears?
Answer is Yes for the first part and No for the second part.
Problems which need software solutions and/or have a software component (at this point, practically everything) still exist in plenty. AI/ML has only changed the playing field drastically. It cannot understand the intent behind the problem which is a uniquely Human Dilemma. This is where the opportunities lie; understanding different Problem/Business Domains by studying and closely interacting with possible clients and coming up with tailored solutions whether domain-specific or client-specific.
The emphasis now is on better problem understanding/specification/verification (DSLs/notations/diagrams etc.) and faster iteration to a MVP. AI/ML is a great help here but the cycle is initiated by a Human who is always in the loop and steers it on the right trajectory in the state space of possible solutions.
There was never a statistical “advantage”, you just never heard about the 9/10 outright failures or even the parts of the 1/10 where people are toiling in obscurity and would have been better off financially “grinding leetcode and working for a FAANG” ((c) r/cscareerquestions) or even being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
> being an enterprise dev in a tier 2 city.
Tangential to the question, but this is me and one of my top three regrets in life is not having been a founding engineer. For people without generational wealth or a safety net it takes a particular combination of executive function and youthful ignorance of the opportunity cost (a steady paycheck and obvious career trajectory) to be a founder. As soon as I grew enough of the former the latter evaporated as I realized how close I'd come to financial ruin and how I didn't want to ever again.
OP, if you're even thinking about it, you should just do it before wisdom sets in and you know better. Or maybe I'm romanticizing the startup experience too much - anybody with actual expertise care to comment?
I can’t think of any reason for someone statistically to start a company unless they had an “unfair advantage” post 2012 instead of working toward getting a job at BigTech and easily make 1 million+ over 4 years as a mid level developer who should get promoted to a senior by year 3
Same here - did the grind for a few years then went straight to big tech. I got offers from the full set of FAANG. I still have a disdain for code monkey work as a job (I really think its practically unskilled labour). I had studied ML to a fairly high level, so landing gigs was easy. Not to mention the money is so much better.
Yes, otherwise there wouldn't be billions of dollars flowing into seed rounds every year to make novel products.
Not sure why you think a large company can copy a product in no time, they have to steer a cargo ship, you have a speed boat.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Your task in a software startup (or any startup) is to produce the moat. If you can create something with little effort in a few weeks or months then so can anyone else.
If your product does something hard or useful that you know how to do because you understand the audience or business, or includes data or knowledge that others may not know about or have, or just you can put the effort in to great service to build a large customer base it becomes harder to be copied.
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Having worked in the corporate world all my working life I can safely say with confidence that big companies absolutely DO NOT move fast. Do not underestimate the power of middle-management to destroy momentum!
Solve a problem for someone and if it was a painful one, they'll pay you for it.
An interesting paper in this context is "Structural Inertia and Organizational Change" by Hannan and Freeman, 1984 [1]. A quote from the introduction: "...selection processes tend to favor organizations whose structures are difficult to change.".
In other words, it's typically a good thing that larger companies are slow to adapt. That's something that startups can make use of.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2095567
The risk is the same as it was a decade ago, and the decade before that.
The startup will take over your life. You will pour every bit of time and money you have into it. You will lose your sanity. And it’s pretty much a guarantee that you will fail.
Unless you already have a comfortable financial cushion and/or industry connections that will guarantee funding and partnerships, you have to be truly crazy to try that life. But, ultimately it’s the crazy ones that end up winning.
It is. Big companies (or really anyone) usually don't have the time to copy an idea unless it becomes too big already. And if your idea becomes too big, it was worth pursuing it.
Or worth buying up. Which in many cases was the "purpose" of doing the startup in the first place.
Sure, we'd all like to think that the goal was an idealistic "startup does things for bettering humankind".
But let's face it: A large amount of startups are literally founded as an "easier" alternative of building a "more agile" sub-organization within an established and more process driven org and then just get bought out by some of those larger orgs.
Whether or not those large orgs are then actually successful in integration and actually properly leveraging what they bought vs. just "crushing competition", is not necessarily the concern of the founders, depending on how ruthless vs. idealistic they are.
Product is very rarely the moat. It also depends on what you're building. A software startup can not win solely by just having a great product (of course there are exceptions). Finding a niche community, being able to distribute your product to them, how you price it, frequency of updates etc... all things that were just as important in building a moat pre agentic coding
In the AI Era, Do Startups Still Have an Edge?
Startups have always competed with big companies based on three gaps: speed, risk tolerance, and incentives. The question is whether these advantages still hold in the age of AI.
* Speed Gap: Still valid. Might even widen. The bottleneck at big companies was never coding. It's approvals, alignment, and politics. AI makes implementation faster for everyone. But here's the thing—when the implementation bottleneck disappears, startups ship immediately. Big companies still get stuck at the decision-making bottleneck that comes before implementation. So the speed gap doesn't shrink. It might actually widen.
* Risk Gap: Still valid. AI doesn't change this. Big companies only want to solve proven problems. If something fails, someone has to take the blame. Startups can bet on unproven problems. If they fail, they don't have much to lose anyway. This is about org structure and decision-making culture. AI isn't going to suddenly make big companies comfortable with risk.
* Incentive Gap: Still valid. Actually stronger now. Employees at big companies get salaries. Founders get equity. This hasn't changed. If anything, AI makes it better for founders. Lower implementation costs mean you can get further with less capital. Less fundraising means less dilution. The math got better for founders.
All three gaps are still intact. AI hasn't weakened the structural advantages of startups. Some of them actually got stronger.
Software moats were never really a moat in and of themselves. You always had to be a first mover. It's true that there are fewer and fewer first mover opportunities, but that has less to do with recent LLMs advancements and more that we have already solved a lot of software problems on first principles. It's partially why LLMs work so well, they are pulling the "widgets" from distribution and synthesizing into your requirements. Before, we probably thought we were writing novelty when it was literally solved 1000x over.
If you aren't a first mover, your success was always dependent on other skills and great execution across multiple disciplines, and also a lot of stubbornness. The software layer has always been important, but a support role of successful enterprises. Start-ups have always been hard to pull together successfully for a lot of other reasons unrelated to code.
If you find a disruptive algorithm (like pagerank) there is little evidence that LLMs will infer your solution by looking at your app. Anything else, they are just design choices and have never been moats either, but say you have a qualitative edge, you'll make the choices that can create a recognizable brand where someone vibing a copycat may not care as much. Nothing has changed on this. Your chance of succeeding rests on your ability to reach your users and iterate in a crowded space, this is what you always had to do anyway.
There are things, however, that aren't worth working on anymore with the advent of LLMs. Some of these have been fully dismissed, for example sentiment analysis. A single API call for the cheapest (even local) LLM vendor will give you SOTA classification. There are many more examples but they are so obvious. Essentially, the "build me 1 billion dollar app" prompt will never work, so if you have a burning desire to build something, do it. Just remember, there never was and never will be a promise of unlimited fortunes whatever you do.
I would strongly recommend staying away from software startups unless:
- The CEO of some major corporation or a big VC is a close friend or friend of your family.
- You are rich and have a lot of friends who will buy your product.
- You already finished the MVP; which you started building 12 years ago... Might as well try to complete.
- You're a criminal.
The market is insanely saturated and people already have more stuff than they need. Capitalism has been over since 2008. Now it's just feudalism. Product is irrelevant; it's all a social game of selection. You have to be selected. You just need to know someone and have a product with a semi-reasonable narrative that your CEO buddy can use as a justification to give you company money. That's it.
You’re talking about VC startups.
I disagree with the sour mindset, as I don’t feel those games were necessary for my startup, although I admit mine was bootstrapped (0$), and didn’t grow as far as the others, it still made me millionaire, has paid my employees a high-than-average salary and has the potential of adding them a few hundred thousands each.
I admit the old market (do web apps to manage records! or notes!) is saturated but the IA market is brand new and fresh open.
How do you find users? Organic? SEO is useless as all the projects with any meaningful pagerank are all pointing to each other. Social media advertising is useless; nobody even sees your tweets or posts. Advertising? How do you get a return on CPC? All the big competitors seem to be running negative margins. Also, small volume social media ads tends to attract only bots... Are you operating in a niche? How do you get word of mouth in this case? Niches related to solving bureaucratic problems are often regulated! No SOC2 or ISO27001, no contracts for you.
In the last 15 years, I met just one person who bootstrapped a tech startup 'on their own' to be worth a few millions... This guy was super smart and switched on... But I later found out his wife's parents were multi-millionaires. I'm thinking that was probably the differentiator. I met a LOT of successful tech people. They always got major help. I never actually met one who didn't have access to significant help.
It all crashed when Sundar Pichai took over:
In hist first speech/announcement he said: "...everything is AI now..." - from this day on, Google was dead for customer acquisition.
From now on, every search query with same terms served always an individual page at different times. The good old SEO days were dead, this user-acqui channel died.
Then they increased & enlarged the space for ads at top of page; and these days finally they introduced this AI panel - most people wont scroll anymore on Google.
AI?
Try and go for $100 MRR (pay for servers and some pizza). Big companies won't go for that.
Try another idea (while still running the above). Go for $1000 MMR. Still too small.
This is harder than you think and will teach you incredible skills. Next: keep going. :)
DISCLAIMER: obviously don't quit your job/starve/become homeless etc to try this.
The serious answer:
The value cannot be just the software. E.g. some workflow tool (Salesforce). These tools will continue to exist for awhile but any customer capable of moving off of it to a startup version, can probably make their own startup version, tailored to them.
Now, if you offer something besides the software — logistics, networks, financial instruments, regulatory compliance, physical goods, compute, etc — that has value besides the software.
But the five billionth workflow automation tool has fast diminishing value in 2026.
Absolutely, if your moat isn't the code, but a deep understanding of a specific problem and speed. We're building InvestBot for investors who lose money not because of bad stocks, but because they panic and break their own rules.
Big companies don't copy this because:
The problem is too niche and behavioral (not "how to get returns," but "how to enforce your own discipline").
Their game is scale; ours is depth of trust. We see this with our 200+ beta users: 64% ran portfolio scans more than twice, 12% immediately said they'd pay $20-30/month for rule monitoring. That's not a forecast—it's existing, paying demand for discipline.
Speed vs. bureaucracy. Our engine, which analyzes thousands of historical scenarios against user-defined constraints, was built by two people in 5 months. A large corporation would still be aligning on a roadmap in that time.
The takeaway: Code is a commodity. The real moat in 2026 is speed, focus on a real pain point, and the ability to turn users into a community that trusts your approach more than a magic pill.
It’s the best time to start a company. Few people can build anything now. Big companies are at a huge disadvantage now because they can’t be personal. Software development is going decentralized. You can go to a bunch of businesses and be personal, and develop personalized solutions for them in person. You only need few such clients to be profitable and have lifestyle business.
Yes, but not in relationship to products being copied. Copying the technical aspects of an idea has been possible for a long time anyway.
Knowing how to acquire, support and cultivate a growing user base is the challenge.
The availability of a technical "moat" has always been a select property of only a few products. All real moats are network effects.
You gotta find a niche these days and do it well. No longer can there be generalist software. Find underserved industries that aren’t “cool” per se, but still have problems.
Have heard from multiple investors that they think boring software is the next wave, rather than a new UI/UX/Productivity way of doing things.
Depends on your market. Enterprise is hard to crack. B2B you can sneak in via grassroots but it requires building a guerilla marketing presence, B2C is a hit business model with on average deep pocket requirements.
Little moat, but also little thresholds. The only way to not win 100% is not to play.
Yes if people have to learn how to use it. Make something that will last centuries not just a couple of decades. 700 years ago they invented double-entry method of accounting which is still used today. Relational databases were invented recently as well and will survive well past most front-end frameworks. Eventually skynet will be invented but no one believes me just like no one would have believed that aluminum tubes would be flying through the sky or enriching uranium. If before you couldn't open a winapi window, now you can do that in one sentence instruction, and you'll have a good starting point. Things are changing. Look at accounting, accountants don't even do accounting anymore, they're just QB users.
A software startup has always, always been a longshot. This is still true. Also, vanishingly few companies of any kind, including software, ever get a "moat". Small companies survive, when they do, by being fast moving enough to keep making new things.
You certainly should not start a software startup to get rich, as that was never the most likely outcome. You should start one if you have an idea for software that isn't out there, which you think people would find useful, and you want to see what it's like to do a startup (enough to give it several years of your life).
I have, btw, never founded a software startup, though I have worked at some. I got paid in salary, not equity. It is now, always was, and probably always will be a longshot.
Depends what you expect, people still have problems that need solved by software, if you expect to be the next Google the odds are not in your favor but if you aim to have a sustainable income from software that should be viable.
Sure, the world still needs software. Perhaps even more so now with the advent of AI.
There's still a ridiculously minuscule chance that you'll end up profitable, let alone successful.
I read that software, from a business perspective, is almost always looked at as a liability rather than an asset. There just isn't very much profitable software in this world, and the software that can become profitable likely subsidizes its business with advertising. The only saving grace is that software that becomes profitable can typically scale. See Facebook, TikTok, Google.
Games sell but are risky and creatively demanding.
Software is a tough business.
If big companies could align themselves quickly they could copy your software since 10years ago. The issue is unwillingness. Why would Meta bother with copying a SaaS ? They are making money head over fist with their ads business. Keep in mind how much money big tech makes. Mark Zuckerberg personally is worth 100B dollars, most startups will be lucky to hit that number in their lifetime. Point is, its bot worth their time to pursue new ideas but rather buy out existing ones. Which is good news.
This is the problem with big concentration of wealth and power. The big tech mega corps can copy your idea easily because they don’t have any budget, they can undercut you or sell at a loss, and they can distribute it to all their current customers with anti competitive bundling.
It has happened over and over many times and American antitrust law is useless. The largest corporations must be broken up, taxed heavily, and regulated in new ways. Otherwise there is no fair competition or level playing field for startups.
SAP comes to my mind here :-)
If they have at least one tiny step/foot in the door, they are good at upselling nearly everything. And they are continuously buying up other companies and integrating them (somehow questionable very often) and then selling this as new SAP product after replacing the former logo
> Considering there is very little moat left in software and big companies can copy your product in no time?
Whenever you have doubts about your ability to do something enough to ask for advice from random people you don’t know, and if that thing is unnecessary and will be significantly difficult, like a startup that is just some option for you to work on, the answer is probably no.
You have to feel the true desire to make something happen because you must. Anything other than that is probably a bad idea.
The moat for small company is the lower coordination overhead than bigger companies, not about the effort of writing code.
Big companies try to balance a lot of stakeholders, the collection of all their requirements makes them risk adverse and creates wasted effort. I’ve been on a lot of projects (pre AI coding) with rewrites and changes that have more to do with politics and org changes, lack of vision, and needless veto points.
That’s the small software company advantage still IMO
It depends on what you define as a startup. In my opinion it is, but as I’d read in another place: I think features will turn into products. So build a feature and do it the best for a segment and it should give you at least a small business.
And sure, maybe someone will try to copy what you build, but that’s a good problem to have because by then you’re probably somewhat successful.
Yes, but not SaaS or services in general but products. And focus on B2B, not B2C because money in B2C is there only for huge companies whereas if you hit the right niche, you can make bank with B2B.
Also, disregard any "success stories", as they are 99.999% funded by a massive piles of money and immeasurable amount of connections in high and right places, that you never hear of.
Isn't it the opposite? E.g. there is very little moat left and small companies or individuals can copy any product big or small in no time?
Yes! Coding is just one of the tasks you've got to do when building a software business. You also have to find a good value preposition, identify a good channel to your customers, manage your resources etc.
Channels are becoming even more important as software has become easy to copy. But copycats always existed. When it wasn't created by AI, it was created in low wage countries.
I’ve recently realized that behind each copycat, there is an entrepreneur. It’s not a big factory with written “Leading #1 in piracy” at the front. It’s someone with almost as many skills as the original entrepreneurs, trying to copy a few of them to see where there is traction, with hopes and dreams similar to the original, but too far away from the world’s center of activity to propose something relevant. Some of them probably do it with the “I can do it better than them” mindset.
Software startups still work, but only if software is not the point.
Code is now cheap, so the advantage moved into things that cannot be copied by looking, accumulated data, hidden workflows, trust, and judgment earned by staying inside a problem too long.
Big companies copy shapes, not gravity. If your edge is visible, it is temporary. If it only appears over time, you are still early.
Big companies are very bad at developing new software.
That's why it's so common for successful software startups to eventually get acquired. Big companies know that it's a lot more efficient for them to spend money simply buying someone who did the thing, than spending money and taking on a bunch of risk trying to do the thing themselves.
Do it if you want to - if you feel some burning desire to create that thing and you just can't get it out of your head.
So long as it's not about AI. The world hasn't run out of problems that could be solved or improved by software.
You're gonna get a lot of positive responses here, but frankly only do it if you think you can make meaningful money within a month or two.
Everything is going off the rails this year. You only have to use Claude Code for 10 minutes to realize every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.
Lol that's what they told us last year. And they'll say the same thing next year. It's obviously useful for certain tasks but the number of errors and hallucinations are still quite bad for anything large or complex or really novel. That part is improving very slowly and some fundamental theoretical breakthroughs will be needed.
I don't care what they told you last year, I didn't say jack shit. I'm saying it now.
Cope or pretend it's not happening, I don't care, this is the year.
Why would any of us care what you say? You're not particularly intelligent and have never accomplished anything significant. You're just some guy.
I just keep hearing all these people that preach this, but I don't see anything substantial (that isn't something stupid or a tutorial they followed from medium) that anyone responds with. e.g. of a meh: give me top 10 HN articles for today and summarize the contents, add tags and build a website. I know AI can do that, but it's not impressive.
Not to pick on you, be mean or anything, but your github profile says no contributions in a year. Obviously there are other online git repo sites.
Care to share anything in prod? For a reply so aggressive, the proof is in the pudding.
This.
AI is already more or less ultimately powerful with nearly endless ressources - though, no one built a big software company in the last 3 - 4 years solely with AI to replace one of the behemoths.
The fact that you own a car which could bring you everywhere does not mean that you actually will go eveywhere.
On a conference 2 month ago, one speaker claimed that AI will be so powerful that within 3 years there will be guys who replace microsoft because they have a better coding AI than today.
I do not see this happen
Have you actually had it do anything substantial and then tried to work with the code it produces afterwards? It may "work" but it's a horrific mess. Good luck bug fixing that.
Yes, with GPT 5.2 Codex and 5.2 Pro specifically. It’s not a mess because of the context I provide and the guidance and reattempts I apply. It’s working great, the resulting code is good when I accept it, and I’m getting much more done than in the before times.
Yes.
Im working productive with it every day (Claude Opus). If you provide enough context, the code usually works veeeery well on first shot.
(For sure, I do not tell it "build me a facebook", instead Im telling it precisely which single function I want to have, how it should work, what the output should be.
Its just a boon.
Yes, Opus 4.5 is not business as normal. If you haven't tried it, you really need to, to update your opinion.
I am talking about opus 4.5. It made a complete mess out of my project.
Do not throw your project in there as a whole.
Chunk it into single parts/components/building blocks. Then do each of these a dedicated project/workspace. In each of these workspaces, you put in only the source code relevant for this module. You are working in each project/workspace separately.
Try this
That's what it does. Switch to Codex (not someone else's harness) with 5.2 Codex XHigh
I am just as bullish as you on the potential. AI is going to change the world all right. Much bigger than the internet.
I an far, far less bullish than you on the timeframe. The vast amount of work is not even optimised for computers without AI. Much if not most bureaucratic process has stayed mostly the same for the best part of a hundred years.
It will change everything, but not in a single year!
Claude Code is useless for anything that requires advanced knowledge.
+1. Claude is actually really good at all kinds of development but Claude will still make plenty of mistakes and occasionally go so far in the wrong direction that it still needs someone with experience to steer it.
Claude helped me to built an app I could have never built without it - I was learning the advanced knowledge during exploration of that field.
(though, I have 25+ years of tech/software experience, so I didnt start from scratch)
> Everything is going off the rails this year. […] every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.
Didn’t we say that last year?
If true then VC money would dry up. We definitely are not at the stage where new company formation has ended.
You're asking what's a defensible value-add, but without really framing current business conditions or issues.
Time - opportunity - matters a lot, perhaps more than anything. And to face that, one needs to ask better questions (even if you're just polling).
"Current business conditions or issues" -- I think that's because OP wants you to fill that in yourself, so that you might explain your assumptions or the market potential that you see, which might be wildly different from his (i.e. software having little to no moat)
I think that the opposite is also very plausible. I've seen numerous startups take a big company's product unrefined product and quickly turn it into something better.
Depends on your goal - do you have an idea you care about and want to solve? Probably a good idea. If you "want to be your own boss" or looking for something just to be acquired, hard to say, depends on who you know, etc.
You're asking an orthodox and conservative audience who have time to be on HN
There never was a moat in software. It's your business, value, service, industry knowledge, sales, etc. that's what matters. Not the software. Software is and has always been cheap.
The biggest problem is the government has made it more and more difficult to start a business, both through fees, especially through taxes, and very especially through all the regulations.
Thought this would be a thread about the crazy offers being handed out to join AI teams at Amazon, Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Apple, or any of the massively capitalized 'neolabs'.
It depends how surgical your product market fit is and how fast you capture the identified market.
Everything else is just details and it doesn’t matter if the idea is rehashed a million times.
if you have to ask the answer is no.
if you are young there’s still hope that you can change your mindset and approach though.
if software can save time and make money than human capital then there will be demand.
It depends on what you are pursuing. Software was never a true moat for the really hot stuff. See books Zero to One, 7 Powers. It can be moat when you have something extremely complex, like for Unreal Engine, software actually is the moat. However, when it comes to regular software, everything was always prone to being copied. Will it be copied, it depends entirely on what's for the grabs for someone else to copy it. If you have a mature SaaS, that already has some competitors, what does anyone gain by copying it if the projection for building a sustainable business is very small? Personally I am building something that is relatively complex (much more complex / non-standard than a CRUD and likely not in Claude training data, and something that would be a very bad idea to write it in AI slop due to security issues) and relatively niche, something that a well funded startup would never dream about building, yet something that a smaller team would have a difficult time to compete with me, LLMs or not.
That's always been the case, in software and elsewhere.
Yet, Ford didn't copy Tesla, why not?
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma but overall the idea is that large corporations have totally different goals and incentive than startups. Also check https://steveblank.com and his startup owner manual trying to clarify that a startup is NOT a small company, rather it's searching for a product/market fit.
So is it worth pursuing a (software) startup?
Honestly if you want to make money, no. It's much easier to work for a large corporation (big economical benefits) or a public institution (work safety). You might not get ridiculously rich either way but you will be safer than most.
If you want to make a ridiculous amount of money though, well you might have to make sacrifices you are underestimating. I don't want to promote the grind culture but checkout Silicon Valley, the TV show, in particular when they discuss VC and promises done. Basically if you ask for a very high valuation you have to deliver on those claims and obviously they investors are going to keep you accountable on that. You might have to work more than you wanted (which might make the whole process a nightmare more than a joy) but more dangerously you might lose the very raison d'etre of the company you founded. If it's "just" about making money, you won't care, if you have a genuine mission, those compromises are going to eat you alive.
So... is it "worth it" very much depend on who you are, who you want to be and how saturated the market is.
I wouldn't worry about the big corporations, I would worry about what you can actually deliver and how not being able to do so will change you along the way.
Got to get more creative and less funding dependent. People still seem caught up in the old process of ideation, static creation, pitch decks. Ack! Garbage now! I only ever took funding to scale to 3-5 heads, well I have 20 heads for nearly nothing now... Ive created more "startup" ideas in the last 3 years then the last 20 of my career. I just keep cranking out anything remotely interesting, launch, and if it don't "work", move on. I just launched another one this week, feels most promising, but we'll see... I didn't go quitting my day job just yet.
Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.
There's still plenty of moats frankly, same moats as before. What isn't the moat is the software development time.
In our case, we're building a tool that has a moat from: integrations, multiple parties connecting, and others
It's very sticky once we get in, and has nothing to do with the software so much as legal, company policy and inter party communication
Since the majority of our industry is still in a combination denial/disbelief and bureaucratic incompatibility with AI workflows, startups are increasingly well positioned to reap the rewards.
The way I think about it is, everyone is struggling to make AI tools work well, so if you can be in the top 50% of people trying, you're actually in the top 10% in terms of positioning for future growth.
in the valley at least its difficult to pursue that unless you’re in a “hot” field. A few years ago, it was cloud, then big data, then crypto and now AI. When startups in those fields can raise hundreds of millions, they can lure away a lot of talent (both tech and non tech).
Nah. Regardless of where the company is nominally headquartered there are always an effectively infinite number of employees who can be hired to work remotely or out of satellite offices.
Google won't copy anything unless is super strategic or generates $$$ (100M ARR?).
Sometimes, software that 2 devs make in a year, takes same 2 years for 5 teams of 10.
That seems very optimistic, a team that can ship with two would probably be 10x as fast on average.
Yes, if you have customers who need your software and are willing to pay for it.
The fact that people look to start a business based on searching foe a moat shows they don't believe in free markets. As well as shows what's wrong with Silicon Valley.
Yeah, and a moat can just be a solid trusted brand. Claude Code can't take that away.
You could probably become rich wholesaling gravel in your city. There are plenty of opportunities all around. Execution is key.
Big companies aren't the problem.
Finding customers is the difficult part.
If you are asking then the answer is no (for you)
The only software worth writing is tools for agents that contain something hard for them to vibe code in a couple of sessions.
Making someone’s agents 20% better, cheaper or faster will be a measurable and easy sales goal.
Unfortunately any pro-AI viewpoint, no matter how uncontroversial, will be immediately dismissed and down voted here. Doesn't make it not true.
The proof is really in the pudding, isn't it? I don't see a wave of successful vibe-coded startups in the market yet. That's kind of the benchmark for whether this stuff actually does in practice what the AI-hypemen claim it can.
Rather the opposite. A vibe-coded startup cannot survive if it can be trivially duplicated. The proof will be in observing the inverse phenomenon; (pure) software companies disappearing.
I hope this is sarcasm…
If you have to ask, then the answer is no.
Build something novel, what has changed?
I'd argue the question was wrong, it's not that big companies can copy you easier now. They could have always invaded your space and destroyed your business. As other pointed out it was always picking up the pennies that they didn't want until those pennies became dollars.
The concern now is that other small team or solo developers can rebuild what you have very quickly. This happened in the mobile space with all the decompiled and repacked (with min changes) apps that showed up in the stores.
The moat for SaaS startups was that the code is hidden. Now that matters less because people use AI to try and reverse engineer your backend from the API or even UI screenshots.
You have to pick up the pace to keep ahead of them and make sure you don't cause problems for customers while doing it.
That's the same it's always been?
Building something hard cannot be replicated easily or at all. People can and always have stolen things.
I do agree that you just have to move faster but again that's the same.
Let's take that thought for a second: " big companies can copy your product in no time"
How will big companies know your revenue and the number of paying customers you have?
Before you even get there, you'll have made generational wealth pretty much. They made tons of clones of Agario but none of them were as good.
The problem is finding a solid idea and marketing it to people. That's the harder part. Programming is still hard despite vibe coders churning out slop but not as hard.
The problem is the software has already been made in the past. It has built up over time. Just like songs. There are so many already there.
When smartphones just came out I was already not making websites anymore. But every single app I made got at least 10k downloads in one week and around 1/5 got in the top 10 of a category like "social" even though I've only ever spent maybe a month max on developing any single app.
But now there are soooo many already there. Good luck getting into the top 10 social now with one weekend of coding.
You can get the same output as $500k/year of software engineers for $2.4k/year now. Never been better if you ask me!
Not with that attitude
YES, now is the best time in history to build a software startup.
Copying isn't your biggest worry.
You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.
I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.
I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services ... There got to be something between homelabs and cloud services bc the gap is too big.
Not quite there yet but Yunohost is a fantastic attempt to get closer to this ideal. Install the OS - and the basic self-hostic-use-case apps are all just there to click and install. From Immich to Kodi to Wordpress and what not.
https://yunohost.org/
With IPv6 (and/or NAT-forwarding) it was already possible to host stuff.
However, E-mail's horrible protocols and spam-blocking security monopolies mean you're stuck with one of the big cloud providers, even if you could automate/solve e-mail server complications.
Not true. Been hosting my own email for years and only prblem is delivery to some MS hosted services (usually hotmail)
> I can imagine a future where it will be possible for a family to host their own essential services
Exactly. Even something as seemingly mundane as hosting your own email is a major challenge.
Good luck. To have something that a regular family could use would require remote access from the company for troubleshooting, updates, maintenance.
So you get all of the downsides of cloud hosting (company employees can still remote in), with none of the upsides (all the hardware is now geographically distributed, instead of one big building) with the privilege of paying for it instead of being "free" like facebook/google.
no
Could it be that it's just a wrapper for APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic? I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm surprised to find someone else with the same view.