Comment by rainonmoon
6 days ago
That’s not a viable business, it’s a walking liability. Besides which, why would anyone trust your friend (as an investor or customer) ever again when they’ve shown such profound disregard for user data and their IP? If your metric of success is “I have no idea what I’m doing and still made money from it” your friend would have a better time starting a podcast.
> Why would anyone trust your friend (as an investor or customer) ever again when they’ve shown such profound disregard for user data and their IP?
Plenty of people probably. There are hundreds of businesses that constantly get exposed for massive leaks and/or horrendous business practices yet they're doing just fine. I'd imagine the killing blow in this case would be the stripe key but beyond that they would've likely had no massive issue.
On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features.
The customers know there was a hack because the hacker emailed them (I had a test account and received the same email). Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered.
I think there's something to be said for that.
> On the contrary, he's solving a real business need for these small businesses at a fraction of the cost with a product that's easier to use and with better features.
He's doing the digital equivalent of drop-shipping. No one is making money at that anymore either, although people did well at first.
Drop-shipping software products isn't a long-term thing.
> Yet he's had no churn because there's so much value being delivered.
In a market that is tolerant enough of broken software that they won't churn after getting notice that it broke, it only takes another "ideas guy" to vibe-code a competitor product and take all the customers because they can charge less than he is charging[1].
[1] Because, as you said, he now has to retain a real dev to fix it, which costs money, which will have to come out of the customers., said customers being willing to switch to a cheaper replacement, which will be the vibe-coded low-cost competitor, which will eventually need a real developer, which will raise costs, which have to come from the customer, which ....
In a few months, his customers will be vibe-coding that app for themselves.
His early assessment when I talked to him abut this was "it's the end of SaaS".
But the reality is that the users are first and foremost concerned with their day-to-day business. Just because you can do X doesn't mean you will do it.
It's also true that there still remains some foundational knowledge required like knowing what a database is, what React is, how to prompt. There's a big generational divide on this so I do not think we are the point (yet) where "anyone" can do it. There is still a need to have some background knowledge and some technical friends that can guide you.
> I have no idea what I’m doing and still made money from it
I feel like this describes most people that start their own business at first. It just usually isn’t a lack of experience in producing the product. It’s a constant tradeoff of what skill to invest more time into to keep it afloat. They’ll learn sooner or later.
Entrepreneurship is search. The vast majority of new businesses fail and this is the unacknowledged truth.
It's just search, and most people who try will discover ways to fail, not to succeed.
This attitude towards exposing customer data as a palatable oopsie on someone’s path to learning (by… outsourcing the effort of learning to an LLM?) is truly disgraceful.