[alangibson]

I got out of software and into physical products a couple of years ago. I wish I could say I was prescient, but honestly it's just so much easier to sell physical items.

Margins are worse, but selling is easier. If you've got a thing you can be sure that someone somewhere will give you money for it.

[gordonhart]

Kind of looks like vibecoding is doing to SaaS what Chinese mass manufacturing did to physical products two decades ago. Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price.

[bwfan123]

> Only the marketing and distribution matter in a world where it's very easy for others to clone something and sell it at a lower price

Great point. AI remixes and rips-off existing code-bases in a manner that is impossible to attribute copyright violation making it legal. ie, Perfect cloning. In a world where cloning is legal, the engineering cost of product drops to zero. That is where software production could be headed. What remains is marketing/distribution/sales.

There will remain niches solving "hard problems" which cant be cloned, but those will be rare. Hard problems are where a lot of engineering complexity resides, involving interacting components for which there are no examples in training datasets to copy from. For example, a complex distributed system or hardware with multiple nuanced tradeoffs.

[rithdmc]

> Only the marketing and distribution matter

Don't forget liability & compliance :)

[SoftTalker]

And yet people can still make money producing and selling high quality physical products. It's a smaller market but there are people who don't want mass produced chinese crap and they go out of their way to find it.

There will be people who will pay for "human coded" software if it is better. Quality is always a differentiator that some people will pay for.

[7777332215]

What kind of physical products and what kind of customers?

[alangibson]

airtite.shop

Stuff for old men like me

[alex_suzuki]

But… distribution is so much harder?

[alangibson]

There's legions of companies that will do warehousing and shipping for you. Definitely costs though.

That's what I mean by margins being a significant difference.

[alex_suzuki]

A friend of mine dabbles in niche hardware products. The amount of work he has to put in to get the CE and other certifications is significant. That’s before assembly, shipping (including customs shenanigans) and… returns. For a software guy like me, digital products seem much less daunting… and of course they scale “perfectly”. Nice smokers though, must be nice to earn money from something like that, congrats!

[Debeli]

Well, you're like then opposite version of me :D I was into physical products and services most of my life, and from recently I'm just trying to create stuff that can be sold digitally :D Still not there, but slowly getting to it.