Is the future of software data, marketing or niches?

There is currently an explosion of creation, triggered by AI opening it up to those who previously didn’t have the skills to do it.

This is both good and bad.

People are now able to create software, and other types of media, that were previously out of their reach. They are now able to do things that they would have previously needed to pay other people to do or would have taken too long to do to be practical.

However this also means that the rate of creation has skyrocketed and this means that things that would have previously stood out and gained traction are now lost in the noise.

In an article titled “The Only Moat Left Is Money” Elliot Bonneville puts the case that previously the ability to create something, the effort, acted as a filter but now that filter has been removed. The filter is now attention.

When creation was hard, skill was the differentiator: you had to actually be good to make something worth showing. Now the barrier is near zero, so you need reach. Reach costs money or it costs years. Probably both.

There are efforts, although small at this stage, to surface some of the creations. Scott Hanselman has started Tiny Tool Town to showcase small utilities that people have developed. Their tagline is:

A place for stupid-delightful tools made with love. Free, fun & open source. Made for an audience of one.

If I was to develop an application tomorrow, using AI or not, it is now even more difficult than before to get it noticed and potentially make sales. The risk is also that it is so much easier and quicker now to create software that it would not be long before a copy is created and anything original about my version would be lost.

Unless there is a moat.

The software that will be successful is likely to have something to protect it, something that is difficult to copy. This could be data that only they have access to. It could be vast amounts of money to market and promote it. For the small developer without access to proprietary data or vast marketing budgets it is not so clear.

Maybe the future is identifying a niche that is unattractive to others and becoming the de facto software for that niche?

A lot of business advice in the past advocated for picking a niche to start and then expanding later into other areas. Perhaps now this is more important than ever.