Martijn Verbove@verboveProduct · #24

The era of raising $10M to ship a mediocre SaaS product is over. AI didn’t make software buildable. Software was already buildable years ago. And most products still failed. Why? Because building was never the bottleneck. Solving a real customer pain with measurable output value was. That’s still true now. Lower build cost does not create better companies. It removes the old protection layer. In the old world, you could burn millions on bloated software and survive because development was slow and expensive for everyone. That protection is gone. Now the bar is simple: • deliver value fast • integrate into real workflows • iterate continuously • price on outcomes, not features Hot take: AI won’t kill startups. It will exposes bad ones faster.

Explains why lower build cost doesn't guarantee success