I’ve been building apps for the Mac and the web for 30 years. In all that time, especially as an indie developer hacking away on side projects at night, success was largely about how much could be coded. Everyone had good ideas, but not everyone could put them into shipping software.
If you could invest more time, you could do more. If you could grow a team, you could move faster.
This year, those constraints of coding skill and time are going away. We’re already seeing it in many new AI-assisted apps. So much is happening it’s actually difficult to keep up with.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking. If everyone can ship software, what will distinguish the successful companies from the apps that are lost in the noise? It’s no longer enough to just spend more time coding, or to be the first with a good idea.
I think it’s going to become even more important to grow other aspects of running a software business:
- Marketing
- Customer support
- Documentation
- Building trust
- Servers (speed)
Of course I’ll be writing a lot of code too, adding features, fixing bugs. But that’s the bare minimum now.
