So I’m in this situation. For the last nine months or so, I’ve been growing a super niche SaaS app in a non-technical industry. I’m right around $325k ARR right now, and I’m quite worried about defensibility. Not really worried about my customers vibe coding their own solution, or vibe coding competitors, because there are some non-trivial parts of the application that they probably couldn’t do yet. I’m more worried about other senior software engineers who might be able to catch me with AI now in a way they couldn’t have a few years ago. How do you build a software company if software becomes a low-value commodity that an experienced engineer can recreate in a month with $10k in tokens? I’m still trying to figure that out. I think sales and marketing are still pretty key skills that many engineers lack, but is that enough when you suddenly have a dozen competitors trying to undercut you on price and features? I don’t know, but I’m doing all I can to stay ahead on AI while grabbing as much market share as possible.

Among all apps that do $1M ARR, the share that got there through particular software expertise that only few people had, has been exceedingly small for a very long time now.

Another similar but different point: no software development expertise doesn't mean no other expertise. As an extreme example, good luck building tax software with zero tax expertise. This applies to tons of niches.

A third point - lots of this increase in apps is from people who do have software expertise. They're now just able to create things they didn't have the time for, despite their expertise.