[carlosjobim]

Why didn't programmers think of stepping down from their ivory towers and start making small apps which solve small problems? That people and businesses are very happy to pay for?

But no! Programmers seem to only like working on giant scale projects, which only are of interest to huge enterprises, governments, or the open source quagmire of virtualization within virtualization within virtualization.

There's exactly one good invoicing app I've found which is good for freelancers and small businesses. While the amount of potential customers are in the tens of millions. Why aren't there at least 10 good competitors?

My impression is that programmers consider it to be below their dignity to work on simple software which solves real problems and are great for their niche. Instead it has to be big and complicated, enterprise-scale. And if they can't get a job doing that, they will pretend to have a job doing that by spending their time making open source software for enterprise-scale problems.

Instead of earning a very good living by making boutique software for paying users.

[fileeditview]

I don't think programmers are the issue here. What you describe sounds to me more like the typical product management in a company. Stuff features into the thing until it bursts of bugs and is barely maintainable.

I would love to do something like what you describe. Build a simple but solid and very specialized solution. However I am not sure there is demand or if I have the right ideas for what to do.

You mention invoicing and I think: there must be hundreds of apps for what you describe but maybe I am wrong. What is the one good app you mention? I am curious now :)

[carlosjobim]

There's a whole bunch of apps for invoicing, but if you try them, you'll see that they are excessively complicated. Probably because they want to cover all bases of all use cases. Meaning they aren't great for any use case. Like you say.

The invoicing app in particular I was referring to is Cakedesk. Made by a solo developer who sells it for a fair price. Easy to use and has all the necessary functions. Probably the name and the icon is holding him back, though. As far as I understand, the app is mostly a database and an Electron/Chromium front-end, all local on your computer. Probably very simple and uninteresting for a programmer, but extremely interesting for customers who have a problem to solve.

[fragmede]

One person's "excessively complicated" is another person's "lackluster and useless" because it doesn't have enough features.

[carlosjobim]

Yes, enterprise needs more complicated setups. But why are programmers only interested in enterprise scale stuff?

[taco_emoji]

I'm curious: why don't YOU create this app? 95% of a software business isn't the programming, it's the requirements gathering and marketing and all that other stuff.

Is it beneath YOUR dignity to create this? What an untapped market! You could be king!

Also it's absurd to an incredible degree to believe that any significant portion of programmers, left to their own devices, are eager to make "big, complicated, enterprise-scale" software.

[carlosjobim]

What makes you think that I know how to program? It's not beyond my dignity, it's beyond my skills. The only thing I can do is support boutique programmers with my money as a consumer, and I'm very happy to do that.

But yes, sometimes I have to AI code small things, because there's no other solution.

[cjs_ac]

Solving these problems requires going outside and talking to people to find out what their problems are. Most programmers aren't willing to do that.