Last modified: 2024-09-14 22:07

The hype must stop.

Calm down, tech-preneurs.

Something funny is that many entrepreneurs believe that “competition is good”.

In fact, it’s only good for those who already have money and are protected from the risks of collapse.

As a result, hundreds of ‘SaaS’ or other tools are created, and I haven’t seen this many ‘new products’ in the last 3 or 4 years (since the beginning of LLMs hype, in fact).

However, most of these tools are ‘dormant’, a bit active at the beginning (the hype, as always) and their growth quickly slows and then fades away.

What all these tech-bros don’t tell you (and yes, I’m using the masculine form for a reason, it’s not a lack of inclusion) is when their projects fail. Some will have a bit of honesty and talk about it, then move on to the next project.

Open Source tools already made it possible to make a lot of paid tools based on free tools (for example, all the Laravel company’s apps are based on this: a huge pile of free tools plugged together to make a super-paying tool), but now with the various LLMs plugged into an IDE, or online code/image generators, you can create a SaaS in a day, with all the branding and design behind it, it doesn’t cost much, it runs for a while, and then you let it go to sleep because there’s not much to do - well, a bit of support maybe, but LLMs actually help with that - but it’s not enough to make enough money to spend full-time on it, so you attempt to make another project.

For a few years now, online tools have been popping up all the time, some of them identical, most of them similar, and they’re all going to be there, all together, like thousands of poorly maintained self-service bicycles. Each one will produce its own service, hoping that it works, but others are already there anyway.

In the end, the products that will work the best will do it based on a single criterion: will the tech-bro behind the SaaS have been a good enough manipulator… er, sorry, a good enough ‘salesman’, to sell his product. And to do that, will our child prodigy have enough money to hire a good marketing department to do the job for him?

We’re back to the beginning of this article: those whose projects work well are those who already have the money to make it work. As a result, there’s a lot of competition, but the winners are always the richest. There’s no point in having a good idea. You have to sell hype, you have to sell, you always have to find a way to sell.

It’s like the proliferation of streaming platforms: when it was just Netflix, everyone had it, pretty much everything was on it, it was pretty much fine. Now there’s a dozen of them, the customer doesn’t know which self-service bicycle to choose, and in any case most of them have slightly degraded quality, or differences too significant, that they will have to take pieces of each to have a correct tool.

Most of these SaaS are brand new tools, they are babies, and so just like babies, they are not finished.

Competition creates thousands of small average (or rotten) projects in the world.

So what do we do? What is the solution?

Here it is: very often, it is enough to take a single large project that has already existed for ages, improve it with our needs, and there you have it.

That’s Open Source.

Collaboration for the common good.

As opposed to competition for personal and individual profit.

Edit: I wrote this article before this other one was published: https://astro.build/blog/goodbye-astro-studio/.

It’s “funny”, because what happened with Astro Studio is exactly the logical consequence of what I’ve just written.

Quality is one thing, but what really works is popularity (and the chance or opportunity to acquire said popularity). Without these prerequisites, the project doesn’t work.

In the meantime, literally MILLIONS of units of money are injected into certain SaaS every year, and a huge proportion of them don’t work.

It’s sad, and as I said at the start of this article, tech-bros don’t talk about it, or maybe very little, because it doesn’t look good to show a failure. It doesn’t sell as well at fund-raising pitches.