In this past weekend’s newsletter “Software for Someone,” I argued that cheap code makes tiny, personal tools viable even when they never become businesses. On Behind the Craft, host Peter Yang talks with Amol Jain, head of engineering at the AI coding platform Replit, about the other branch: what still has to be true when the maker wants strangers to pay.
Quotes lightly edited for clarity.
Jain starts with a repeat founder who knew the market but couldn’t build the product himself:
As AI was taking off, he sort of realized that there was an opportunity to help people measure their AI proficiency and even get certified for it, especially enterprises and companies. He’s nontechnical and didn’t know how to build it.
He went to an agency that quoted him $100,000-plus to build this platform. That didn’t sit right with him. He had heard of Replit, so he jumped on and essentially within three days was able to build the whole thing end to end.
He built and launched it, and within the first two months, he was already at $180,000-plus in revenue. As a repeat founder, he had great product intuition. He knew how to distribute and sell. He just didn’t know how to build, and a tool like Replit made it easy for him to do that.
The agency quote makes the cost collapse vivid. But the business didn’t appear merely because software became cheaper. Jain credits what the founder already had before Replit supplied the missing implementation: product intuition, sales ability, and distribution.
That pattern also explains why generic apps are getting easier to make and harder to sell:
Software is becoming rather easy to build, so a lot of generic use cases—meal planners or exercise trackers—are getting commoditized. People are building their own versions, and I can see agents swallowing many of them as skills.
Everyone has an agent that has a skill that does this. That said, the overall pie of businesses is still expanding. If you look at Stripe data, you can see the number of businesses being created going up.
It’s because of the unique advantages that people have: their expertise, judgment or taste, community, and network. People are tapping those advantages to create tangible businesses. These don’t have to be massive businesses. There is a lot of success you can have with a small business that thrives.
We see pool cleaners, nurses, jewelers, and others with domain expertise who couldn’t turn that knowledge into businesses before. Now they can bring those ideas to life. The key is finding and leaning into that specific advantage.
A household tool can succeed by being useful to one household. For anyone turning a prototype into a product, usefulness is only the starting point. Once anyone can generate a comparable interface, the commercial question becomes: what does this product offer that a prompt cannot reproduce? Jain applies that test to the software companies that survive cheap code:
If the cost of code goes to zero, what do you pay for? The things that stand that test are trust, data, infrastructure, physical things, labor, and networks. Software that offers those things—where it’s not just an interface over some data—is valuable and will continue to exist.
Salesforce, Workday, social networks, and DoorDash are Jain’s examples of company’s with such moats. Their value comes from data, regulatory risk, networks, or physical labor rather than the UI alone.
