In LLM era, can software startup survive?
Nowadays, vibe coding is everywhere. Turning an idea into software is just matter of tokens. I was joking the other day. Creating a tax return softwar is much faster than purchasing Turbotax at Costco. Large companies still have compute resources and customer bases. For startup, users are expecting open source and free software. Posts of subscription or one-time purchase software on Reddit will get tons of downvotes instantly.
Discussion Highlights (6 comments)
efren6
The environment of computation and it's interactions in the 7 day week of a modern classed society is open to debate and great thought will come from it to solve the problems of mere boredom , as well as the vital life sustaining things people need.
genldd
The code was never the hard part. Understanding the market, developing product market fit, and evolving is the hard part. Large companies aren't going to chase every opportunity.
gregzem
If you are settled with distribution channels, can productize the solution or convert the startup feom product one to a service model then you are probably safe. The development itself is cheap and has no moat.
vivzkestrel
- getting it promoted like nord vpn is the hard part, you do that, someone or the other ll buy something as long as it serves a utility
fnordpiglet
I think it’s completely inverted actually. The big companies have a much smaller moat now. This is almost certainly the best time to do a startup. You can build a decent product very fast, GTM in a month or so, and pivot rapidly. But it requires a lot of skill to do it with AI tooling in a way that sustainable and the techniques and tools are very immature and shifting around rapidly. Large companies are struggling very hard to integrate these into their flows and workforce while a small company, with the right small set of people, can achieve as much or more than a large one with thousands of developers.
kumarvvr
To me, it seems that the modern software startup is geared up to provide highly customized solutions to customers. Software that easily bends to the customers needs, rather than customer changing their processes to make use of software.