Software as the New Idea: What to Do While Your Software Is Building Itself
One of the most famous computer comics is XKCD’s “Compiling.”
This comic resonates because it captures the fact that computers can automate and do the technical heavy lifting while humans find other (fun?) things to do. We have already reached the point where we can set an AI agent to work writing software while we do…something else. But what is that something else? Reading Twitter posts? No. It has to be more than swordfighting.
Software as the New Idea
People used to say that ideas are free, but building a real business is definitely not. Everything surrounding an idea costs money. A classic example is a non-technical founder with an idea looking for a technical founder to help build it, which is a job few would take.
Today, ideas are still free.
However, we have also reached a point where, thanks to the ability of Large Language Models to generate code, some software, at least at the demo level, is inexpensive to the point of being almost free. Now, we can have an idea and create a demo minimum viable product (MVP) for basically nothing.
This leads us to the question: Is software the new idea? We can take that idea and run with it and build it. We can have the AI create the software while the human spends time selling it and looking for product-market fit. If there isn't any, we can dump it and start over.
What Will You Do While Your Software Is Building? (Hint: Find Potential Customers and Users)
The interesting part is that we've always known ideas are free and usually useless without a company built around them, which is relatively expensive in terms of capital and sweat equity. Historically, a lot of blood, sweat, and tears were expended in front of computers and keyboards to develop software. Now, instead of expending all that effort on software, we can spend it on other things necessary for building a business. We use AI to develop software and spend time on sales, pricing, marketing, people management, getting roadblocks out of the way, etc.
Most importantly, we need to spend time finding potential customers and users who can either buy the software or provide feedback on what they would buy, or what the roadblocks are to purchasing. (And yet, while taking feedback, you still have to be strong with your initial intuition.)
For many of us, this will be difficult. Starting a business is much harder than writing software and solving most technical problems. This issue is now more apparent than ever.
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