Building is no longer the bottleneck
For most of software history, building was the bottleneck. If you had an app idea and weren't technical, your options were pretty limited.
| Option | Reality |
|---|---|
| Hire developers | Expensive |
| Find a technical cofounder | Basically startup dating |
| Learn to code | Years |
| Give up on the idea | Surprisingly common |
That was the moat for a long time: access to execution. Five years ago, building anything real meant a small team, decent budget, and three months. Now one person can open a tool like Lovable, Claude or Replit and generate a real UI, auth, a database, onboarding, a half-working product, and at least one feature or dashboard nobody asked for. A long lunch with a side of extra confidence, and you have an app.
Which means a lot of people are building apps right now who couldn't before (like me). Marketers with strong eye. Designers who would have needed a technical cofounder. And regular people who have had an idea for years and finally have a way to prototype it.
The bottleneck moved. Now the hard part is everything around the build, like, you know, running the actual business.
The software supply explosion
The internet is filling up with software extremely fast right now. New apps, agents, generators, internal tools, Chrome extensions, you name it. Categories with a handful of competitors a year ago now have dozens. And the bar to ship the next one keeps getting lower.
Most of what's online right now was shipped in the last eighteen months.
Most of that growth is recent. Most of what's online right now was shipped in the last eighteen months. The Shopify App Store is the version of this you can actually watch happen in real time. It's the kind of number people don't believe until they look it up.
Being new doesn't get you noticed anymore. Neither does being functional. Both used to be impressive on their own and now they're table stakes. The products that pull ahead are the ones doing something the other forty in their category aren't.
"Good" is no longer enough
Before vibe coding came around, users were willing to put up with "bad" UI if no other alternative solutions existed. Now they look at Claude.
Today, when I'm evaluating an app or tool and I hit friction, my first thought isn't "what else is out there" anymore. It's:
Here's the thing, I actually don't WANT to build it myself. I just want a solution that works, is enjoyable to look at, isn't bloated with 100 features I don't need, doesn't ask me 15 onboarding questions, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Is that too much to ask?
And it's not just "build it myself" anymore. The "good enough" alternative used to be spreadsheets and duct-taped workflows. Now it's ChatGPT, Claude, a Notion doc, Zapier, Airtable, or some other chaotic workflow somebody built at 1:14am that somehow still works.
The DIY option is quietly breaking a lot of products' moats. Polished UI used to signal effort, skill, resources, legitimacy. Now it mostly signals someone had access to AI. A polished sidebar has convinced a lot of people they had product-market fit, when what they actually had was generated screens.
Polished UI isn't a differentiator anymore.
Products increasingly compete on the things that are harder to automate:
- Clarity — knowing what your product is actually for
- Positioning — being the obvious pick for a specific kind of person
- Trust — earned over time, not declared on a landing page
- Reliability — the boring stuff that keeps people from churning
- Distribution — how you reach the people you're for
- Taste — knowing what to leave out
None of those come out of a build prompt. They come from someone who picked a specific person and built like that person was the only one who mattered:
| Product | Positioned against | What they actually won on |
|---|---|---|
| Linear | Jira | Being for people who notice keyboard shortcuts |
| Tally | Typeform | Being for Notion users who didn't want to pay $50/month for a form |
| Beehiiv | Substack | Being for operators who treat newsletters as a growth channel |
| Granola | Otter | Being for people who actually take notes in meetings, not just record them |
| Superhuman | Gmail | Being for people who would pay to make email feel fast |
| Cron | Google Calendar | Being for people who care about how their calendar looks |
None of these positioned themselves as a "better" version of an existing tool. They built sharper, not broader.
Most products won't. Which is why a lot of them are going to struggle in the middle. Not bad enough to fail immediately, not useful enough to become essential. Just kind of… there.
The question users are quietly asking when they land on a new product isn't "can this team build software." That's assumed. It's "is there a reason this exists, other than the fact that someone could ship it."
The valuable part isn't execution anymore
Taste sounds vague, but in practice it's mostly the discipline of subtraction — what you choose to build, what you leave out, and what you refuse to add when someone requests a hyper-specific feature you can already tell only they want.
AI tools are extremely good at adding things. The harder skill is deciding what's actually worth building. Which is why the rare thing now isn't the ability to ship. It's making good decisions consistently, understanding users deeply enough to know which problems are real, and operating something long enough that people start to depend on it.
Judgment, taste, and understanding your users are skills that compound the more you practice them. They're what the next generation of products will be built on.