Every company has tons of pain points. Talk to them, find out what they are, how big they are, and if you can build a solution to relieve those pain point(s). Then talk to 100 other companies and see if you see a pattern where it makes sense to invest into building something that companies would pay for.

The days of building a “beer chugging” app for the original iPhone are gone, but it was never really a solid business to begin with.

I think from a macro perspective, it comes down to- Will there be more new products/websites/apps in the future or less? The future is a long time, so I’m guessing more.

But I agree, it does seem to get harder. But there is more scaffolding now and you are starting with more tools.

It’s actually a good thing. How many “Uber for X” companies and Pets.coms died wasting billions in capital? There are still real problems out there but it takes ingenuity and patience to address them. Quick fixes just lead to quick exits. Differentiation is everything.

It’s why most people do b2b saas. Narrowly defined problems, with people that have money and value their time

In addition to what everyone has already said, changing laws = changing needs = opportunity. One example, HIPAA becomes law which then sprouted many industries looking at everything form compliance to electronic medical records to platform security to audits to insurance products etc. Cannabis becoming legal has also created a multi billion dollar ecosystem.

Think about how nascent AI is. One doesn’t need to create a Chatgpt clone to realize the amount of ancillary opportunities for governance, platforms, fake detection, data training, model customization etc.

I think I went a little too hard on the niche thing such that my only current potential customers are the US government. They are the worst customers ever! Worse than French Canadians who don’t ever leave a tip!

A simple iOS, android, web app? Yes. Long gone.

A simple SASS, ChatGPT, etc app? No. Still here.

That’s the platform lifecycle for you.

Whoever that quote is from, he’s a very uninspired person

Each time comes with different challenges. What makes a startup succeed is the entry barrier: if no one else is willing or capable to cross it, then you have fewer competitors, and if your project is good, it may succeed.

Nowadays any CRUD app seems simple to make to you because it is. They were not as simple to make before: UX was not this advanced, iOS and Android development were unstable, nobody knew iOS development and it was far from a safe bet at the time. Going back a while, Doom was the first multiplayer FPS to be played online in real time at a time when you still needed to refresh a web page to show new information. They (actually he, as there was a single developer) had to create every single protocol from scratch.

So… No, things are not more complicated. Entry barriers (which are good) are just different.

There are still many simple apps to be built, but they are more niche and often require a deep understanding of the business domain.

For example I launched a basic crud app that got to $100k/year in revenue. The key is finding a problem that many people still tackle in excel and then turn it into a SaaS app.

For example, in the industry I worked in people have to do safety report and rules checks. These were always done on paper, then typed into excel, and then moved into a DB. We just made simple form where user selects the rule, makes a note on it, hits submit. boss required 50 rule checks a day, so we added a counter that showed them 1/50, 2/50, etc.

Whole thing was built in less than a month. So, they are out there, but you need to know that customer really well.

This is 70% horse shit but if you do it like everyone else then yes, you are fucked. Every area of every area is getting more competitive.

The vast majority of product dev, consulting, and programming jobs are CRUD which is why the vast majority of computer science degrees are going to waste.

For clarity, throwing up a calculator, A todo list or A forum was really only profitable when it was on a “new” platform like the iPhone or marketed correctly to the correct group.

CRUD apps will be fine if it is a specialized ones like Grinder for Cats(Super specific social site/forum) or Twitter for albino little people from Albania. But if you are looking for low effort apps then sure but how much value were they adding even back then?

It’s about délégation in my opinion, use auth0, serverless, nocode options until you can’t anymore use it.

But I know I’m a cheapstake and rather handle the auth myself and I know I’m spending time I should not doing something someone else allready solved.

When I started doing web apps in 2013 everyone was complaining that all the easy to make million dollar apps like flashlights and fart pillows are already created.

Now it seems everyone is complaining that all the SaaS and CRUD is done (which isn’t true but we can imagine that it is)

I guess in 10 years everyone will see posts about how every single simple AI tool is already made.

Move with the times. You have 1000 different ways you can integrate AI to a web app and provide value to a customer. The hard part has always been figuring out what and how. I also see new very basic CRUD SaaS apps pop up constantly. You can always improve on existing solutions or target a different group.

I’m a professional software engineer, and I work on everything from physical devices to mobile apps. The longer a technology exists, the less “low hanging fruit” problems remain that can be solved with that technology. Identifying a niche problem is generally more viable, but not very easy to do. Identifying a niche problem that you can solve yourself is harder. Identifying a niche problem that you can effectively sell your solution to for a profit is even harder.

Honestly, I think the better approach is to focus on new technologies that not many people understand. The newer a technology is, and the less people that know how to use it, the more “low hanging fruit” problems there are. Look at how many companies have tried to make use of neural networks, blockchains, ChatGPT, etc. If you can understand something new before most people even know it exists, you should be able to identify problems that nobody has yet tried to solve with that new thing.

You should read Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Maybe a cliche recommendation, but it solves the problem you’ve run into. All those crud products you’ve mentioned were stepping stone for someone’s bootstrap career. In terms of “building something that doesn’t exist” that is a risk that not even Apple or Google would commit to. Most the products you find have surpassed the CRUD building phase that would motivate you, and reached a phase where they can pay thousands to sell you an end product on a google search. There’s a resume website I found that is so CRUD, it says ‘AI’ but it’s just a long form where you fill out information and a button that rephrases using GPT-3.5. It’s beyond simple but every week I see a new feature that is available they’re testing for retention. I would’ve requested a refund but in the second week they added ‘Monthly Resume Review by a Human’ which kept me from leaving. That feature over time will be apart of their collection of features that have been proven to attract customers.

Eric Reis talks about how you should create a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). A product that is so simple (To do list) that periodically (weekly) has features added to a A/B testing pool to see if it increases retention (Invest more time) or doesn’t account for increased retention (drop it and move on). After a couple of years that Todo app becomes Notion, a fully realized product that initially charged 4.99 for a CRUD markdown viewer connected to a git repo. Based on their own data they realized their customer base was NOT interested in styling font so they reoriented. Facebook and google use this concept all the time, the like button was created this way. Initially a redumentary feature with just a single functionality that increased retention which produced further investment to become the cornerstone of all social media today.

Consider creating a publicly creating a new app every month. SOOOOOOOO simple, don’t even create an app, create a PWA (Progressive Web App) It’s a website that behaves like an app and users can create a shortcut to it on their Lock Screen (acts just like an app), then let the audience choose its direction. If the product doesn’t get an attention of an audience, then you’ve saved an entire year devoting yourself to a product that fundamentally didn’t have interest.

PWA Example: (This will blow your mind)

• Goto the instagram website on your iPhone,
• press share on safari
• save to homescreen
• save
• Open the new home screen app
• Watch as it opens in a separate window with no URL search bar and no Safari Interface. Starbucks created their app in 2017 like this.

(P.S) Notion didn’t start as a TODO list, but as a mark down website maker. However you can conclude with a Notion like product from starting at a TODO app. Also Door dash came after Uber Eats but now has a 60% market share, The top 10 delivery apps found their own footing by listening to a different market. Uber Eats listened consumers and DoorDash listen to restaurants. CocaCola markets to the youth and Pepsi markets to the boomers (Thus their failed BLM ad).