In the early 2000’s, you could throw up a calculator. A todo list. A forum. An affiliate marketing page (a blog). A favicon generator. An image combiner. A love calculator. A timer. Etc…Now a days, the kinds of product required to be “minimally viable” is beyond what an average developer can program by themselves, in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some niche cases, but just think about it. What are you going to build, that doesn’t already exist, and how are you going to market it, make people pay for it, afford it yourself, and offer a seamless experience? We have every social media site. Every video streaming site. Every audio streaming site. There isn’t a single tool I personally use, that I can’t just google, and find 20 companies offering it with a generous free-tier.
It’s kind of like comparing the person who invented the fork, to the person who invented the air fryer. in 2023, you can’t just bend some sharp metal, an make a MVP. Shit’s gotten harder, and harder, and harder.
I thought that by focusing on a niche and taking dedicated actions, I thought that it’s possible but after reading this, I reflected on how many such cases I have actually seen and now I’m a bit insecure. wonder how you guys are thinking.
Every company has tons of pain points. Talk to them, find out what they are, how big they are, and if you can build a solution to relieve those pain point(s). Then talk to 100 other companies and see if you see a pattern where it makes sense to invest into building something that companies would pay for.
The days of building a “beer chugging” app for the original iPhone are gone, but it was never really a solid business to begin with.