In the early 2000’s, you could throw up a calculator. A todo list. A forum. An affiliate marketing page (a blog). A favicon generator. An image combiner. A love calculator. A timer. Etc…Now a days, the kinds of product required to be “minimally viable” is beyond what an average developer can program by themselves, in a reasonable amount of time.
There are some niche cases, but just think about it. What are you going to build, that doesn’t already exist, and how are you going to market it, make people pay for it, afford it yourself, and offer a seamless experience? We have every social media site. Every video streaming site. Every audio streaming site. There isn’t a single tool I personally use, that I can’t just google, and find 20 companies offering it with a generous free-tier.
It’s kind of like comparing the person who invented the fork, to the person who invented the air fryer. in 2023, you can’t just bend some sharp metal, an make a MVP. Shit’s gotten harder, and harder, and harder.
I thought that by focusing on a niche and taking dedicated actions, I thought that it’s possible but after reading this, I reflected on how many such cases I have actually seen and now I’m a bit insecure. wonder how you guys are thinking.
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.