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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

	▲	cess11 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		They spend a lot of effort trying to get good at predicting user preferences, through modeling of personality, behaviour patterns and more. You can find out quite a lot in their blogs and publications: https://research.atspotify.com/2022/02/modeling-users-accord... https://research.atspotify.com/user-modeling/