"It's never been easier to start a company, but never harder to be successful."
Came across this interesting quote the other day... Do you agree or disagree with the quote? Why or why not?
I should mention that the domain of interest here is primarily 'high growth technology companies', not necessarily something like a dentist office or a barbershop.
I think data could also help here, so please feel free to share.
My initial thoughts: the first part certainly seems true, as anyone with a laptop and a web connection has the power to at least prototype some potentially useful SaaS product for a potential customer. But then I also think there are some systemic factors that have really eroded this since the early or mid 2000s:
- Low hanging fruit, especially in B2C, has been picked clean.
- Outreach via advertising, social media, blogs, forums, etc, has made connecting with people online so much more difficult, due to spam and general volume and density of online notifications for people; now there's AI, and bots keep getting trickier, so there's an arms-race with outreach blocking.
- More competition than ever, with things like YC becoming more mainstream and culturally relevant.
- With AI/LLMs and democratization of coding tools, a lot of software products become cheap commodities that can be built in-house by potential customers, or have no competitive moat.
Though many of these concerns may be overblown and/or only apply to specific niche startup categories.
So what do you think?
First part is true, but how do you define "successful"?
All of this can be summed up as "The Race to Zero"
If you make a product or a SaaS product and try to charge a dime for it, eventually 30 other competitors of the same service will offer a free version of your service + 1 or 3 things that they expect you to upgrade for.
Now sure some may say this is "market validation" however looking at this, why would I use any of their products when as you said there is no competitive moat anymore and I can just copy the SaaS end to end in one shot for free with AI.
You have to be more creative...
Indeed, I am still perplexed at YC going so heavily for the 'GPT wrappers'. Clearly some are going to help generate quick wins.
As soon as the tools and capabilities are more widespread across developers, I think there will be a larger wave of 'intrapreneurship' easily solving many problems. In some of my consulting I've been specifically trying to help with this. Many larger companies already have the talent and understand their processes sufficiently to whip up solutions in timeframes that actually make more sense than going to external vendors. Sort of like the anti-YC, heh.