| ▲ | fragmede a day ago |
| Fascinating. it's gone the other way for me. because I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week, it's made everything more fun, not less. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| I followed a lot of Twitter people who were vibecoding their way to SaaS platforms because I thought it would be interesting to follow. So far none of them are having a great time after their initial enthusiasm. A lot of it is people discovering that there’s far more to a business than whipping up a SaaS app that does something. I’m also seeing a big increase in venting about how their progress is slowing to a crawl as the codebase gets larger. It’s interesting to see the complaints about losing days or weeks to bugs that the LLM introduced that they didn’t understand. I still follow because it’s interesting, but I’m starting to think 90% of the benefit is convincing people that it’s going to be easy and therefore luring them into working on ideas they’d normally not want to start. |
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| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | absolutely! It turns out that the code is just this one little corner of the whole thing. A critical corner, but still just one piece of many. |
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| ▲ | conductr a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Yeah, I see that perspective bu I guess my thought process is “what’s the point, if everyone else can now do the same” I had long ago culled many of those ideas based on my ability to execute the marketing plan or the “do I really even want to run that kind of business?” test. I already knew I could build whatever I wanted to exist so My days of pumping out side projects ended long ago and I became more selective with my time. |
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| ▲ | carpo a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input. | |
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | which turns it into passion. the side project that I'm only interested in because it could maybe make some money? eh. a project in a niche where I live and breath the fumes off the work and I can help the whole ecosystem with their workflow? sign me up! | | |
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| ▲ | caseyohara a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week This reminds me of the famous HN comment when Drew Houston first announced Dropbox here in 2007: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 |
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| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | you don't get to choose why you get Internet famous, it chooses you. thankfully, I'm not important enough for my comment to amount to the same thing. |
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| ▲ | cglace a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| So you can create a serious contender to Salesforce or Zapier in a week? |
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| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | like an Eventbrite or a shopmonkey. but yeah, you don't think you could? Salesforce is a whole morass. not every customer uses every corner of it, and Salesforce will nickel and dime you with their consultants and add ons and plugins. if you can be more specific as to which bit of Salesforce you want to provide to a client we can go deep. | | |
| ▲ | caseyohara a day ago | parent [-] | | But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week". Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts. What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede a day ago | parent [-] | | The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena. My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes. A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow. I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people. as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music | | |
| ▲ | petersellers 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music I'm not sure what you are trying to say here - that this website is comparable to Spotify? Even if you are talking about just the "core experience", this example supports the opposite argument that you are trying to make. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The way I see it, the core user experience is that the user listens to music. There's playlist management on top of that and some other bits, sure, but I really don't see it as being that difficult to build those pieces. This is a no code widget I had lying around with a track that was produced last night because I kept asking the producer about a new release. I linked it because it was top of mind. It allows the user to listen to music, which I see as the core of what Spotify offers its users. Spotify has the licensing rights to songs and I don't have the business acumen to go about getting those rights, so I guess I could make Pirate Spotify and get sued by the labels for copyright infringement, but that would just be a bunch of grief for me which would be not very fun and why would I want to screw artists out of getting paid to begin with? | | |
| ▲ | dijksterhuis 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > The way I see it i think ive detected the root cause of your problem. and, funnily enough, it goes a long way to explaining the experiences of some other commentators in this thread on “vibe coding competitive SaaS products”. |
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| ▲ | caseyohara a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure, yeah, go ahead, do it. Seriously! Build a SaaS business in a week and displace an existing business. Please report back with your findings. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | As much as I'd like to pretend otherwise, I'm just a programmer. Say I build,
I dunno, an Eventbrite clone. Okay, cool I've got some code running on Vercel. What do I do next? I'm not about to quit my day job to try and pay my mortgage on hopes and dreams, and while I'm working my day job and having a life outside of that. There's just not enough hours left in the day to also work on this hypothetical EventBrite clone. And there are already so many competitors of them out there, what's one more? What's my "in" to the events industry that would have me succeed over any of their numerous existing competitors? Sure, Thants to LLMs I can vibe code some CRUD app, but my point is there's so much I don't know that I don't even know what I don't know about business in order to be successful. So realistically it's just a fun hobby, like how some people sew sweaters. |
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| ▲ | cess11 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Salesforce is and pretty much always has been a set of code generation platforms. If you can produce a decent code generation platform, do it. It's one of the most sure ways to making money from software since it allows you to deploy systems and outsource a large portion of design to your customers. Spotify is not the audio player widget in some user interface. It started off as a Torrent-like P2P system for file distribution on top of a very large search index and file storage. That's the minimum you'd build for a "whitelabel [...] Spotify clone". Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on. Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify and you're set for retirement if you only grab a reasonable salesperson and an accountant off the street. Robust file distribution with robust abuse detection or robust ad distribution or robust user prediction would be that valuable in many business sectors. If building and maintaining actually is that effortless for you, show some evidence. | | |
| ▲ | fragmede 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Since then they've added massive, sophisticated systems for user monitoring and prediction, ad distribution, abuse and fraud detection, and so on.
Use that code generation platform to build a product off any combination of two of the larger subsystems at Spotify I'm listening. I fully admit that I was looking at Spotify as a user and thus only as a music playing widget so I'd love to hear more about this side of things. What is user prediction? | | |
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