Software doesn’t have gatekeepers anymore.
A product needs two things: a real problem and a real edge. For thirty years there was a third—permission—and it only existed because building was expensive. That part is gone.
Conviction is cheap.
Being right still isn’t.
Nobody can stop you now—which hands every builder a harder problem. When permission was the gate, someone else had to be convinced before a thing could exist. Now the only person you can fool is yourself.
So every bet ships with a pre-registered way to be wrong: write down what would prove it wrong, ship it this week, read the result.
The win isn’t shipping faster. It’s killing faster. Being wrong in a week costs almost nothing. Being wrong in a quarter costs the quarter.
Every complaint is a job in disguise.
People complain all day, for free. Somebody annoyed enough to say it out loud is already trying to make progress and getting stuck—that’s a job. Complaints tell you where the energy is.
Energy isn’t enough. The second question is the hard one: can anything be done about it, and is there an edge—a reason this answer beats what they already have? Telling a real job from a loud complaint is the discipline everything here runs on.
A problem and an edge is the whole list now. No permission required. No market-size estimate.
Decades of accumulated links. A game incumbents win by default—a deficit of thousands of referring domains that no new product ever closes.
An assistant doesn’t care who linked to you. It cares whether your page resolves the question. The one door where being small isn’t a handicap.
The gate didn’t disappear.
It moved.
If anyone can build anything, building stops being what separates products. Being found starts.
Distribution, not production, is the constraint that matters—and distribution is moving under everyone’s feet at once. That shift is the studio’s second bet.
People Like You
Dating apps are built to keep people swiping—engagement is the business model, which makes a wedding churn. People Like You is a matchmaker, not a deck of cards.
Matches don’t get you married. You need a spark. Every introduction opens with a tailored preview of why you’d like them—and they get one about you. It’s as if you’d already had the first date. No cold opens, no fishing for something to say.