[saltyoldman]

While the news may seem inconsequential, many people keep saying "where are all the new apps".

There you go. Your apps are here. Even if 95% go nowhere, some will become 1 person unicorns, perhaps 1 - 3 million ARR companies. If you're wondering if anyone gets rich off AI, it's that 5% of people that couldn't write it before - well they can now with a $20 subscription.

[locknitpicker]

For your hypothesis to hold, you need to explain how your 1-person unicorn expects to get funded for their app when some guy with a $20 subscription can just as easily churn the same app or better.

[deaux]

Unicorn is indeed an exaggeration but 1-5M ARR doesn't need funding. Most in that range weren't VC funded, as by VC metrics that's considered a failure and they shut down if they can't get past it.

[locknitpicker]

The problem still holds: how do you expect to make money by putting together something that anyone with no software development expertise and a $20 subscription is also able to put together?

See also: dark forest hypothesis and AI.

[senordevnyc]

So I’m in this situation. For the last nine months or so, I’ve been growing a super niche SaaS app in a non-technical industry. I’m right around $325k ARR right now, and I’m quite worried about defensibility. Not really worried about my customers vibe coding their own solution, or vibe coding competitors, because there are some non-trivial parts of the application that they probably couldn’t do yet. I’m more worried about other senior software engineers who might be able to catch me with AI now in a way they couldn’t have a few years ago. How do you build a software company if software becomes a low-value commodity that an experienced engineer can recreate in a month with $10k in tokens? I’m still trying to figure that out. I think sales and marketing are still pretty key skills that many engineers lack, but is that enough when you suddenly have a dozen competitors trying to undercut you on price and features? I don’t know, but I’m doing all I can to stay ahead on AI while grabbing as much market share as possible.

[deaux]

Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now.

Another similar but different point: no software development expertise doesn't mean no other expertise. As an extreme example, good luck building tax software with zero tax expertise. This applies to tons of niches.

A third point - lots of this increase in apps is from people who do have software expertise. They're now just able to create things they didn't have the time for, despite their expertise.

[saltyoldman]

I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes can now compete against TaxActOnline or FreeTaxUSA (or any number of large ones out there today), whereas those existing companies built their solution with hundreds of developers.

I mean someone can literally make a tax app now asking the user to just snap a picture of their w2 and any other tax forms from banks they received, and submit in 15 seconds.

[deaux]

But that's not a counterpoint at all, that's exactly what I'm saying:

"Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now."

There are basic flashlight apps, file explorer apps, qr code scanner apps and so on making lots of money. Note taking apps, calendar apps, a billion tile-matching games, we can go on and on. The fact that they're easy to code and lots of SWEs could code one, doesn't mean none of them are making good money. LLMs change nothing about that concept, it just expanded it to more fields.

> I think the counterpoint to that is if a tax expert and 1 coder that vibes

Sure, tax is one where there is a huge population of "tax experts" who could help with this, though I don't think that combination is even close to being enough FWIW. Plenty of niches where this population isn't this big and the pie is a lot smaller, yet still big enough for one person to earn a very sweet living.

[saltyoldman]

My bad, I meant something more along the lines of "mini unicorn" not $100B unicorn. I should have used different words.