Vertical Saas replaced spreadsheets for many businesses.
...ticky system of record is a powerful business model. But once payments became a viable business model, it subsidized the Cambrian explosion of vertical Saas.
Topic: viable business
14 chunks · 13 episodes
3.1x burst in 2024 Q3
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Peak quarter intensity across the topic's active span. Higher values mean attention was concentrated into a shorter stretch rather than spread evenly over time.
Topic summary
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A short read on the topic's time range, peak episode, and strongest associations. Use it as the quick orientation before drilling into examples.
- viable business appears in 14 chunks across 13 episodes, from 2023-10-30 to 2026-05-26.
- Its densest episode is Bits and Bobs 9/3/24 (2024-09-03), with 2 observations on this topic.
- Semantically it travels with business model, vertical saas, and emergent process, while by chunk count it sits between smuggled infinity and ceiling; its yearly rank moved from #32 in 2023 to #142 in 2026.
Over time
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Raw mentions over time. Use this to see absolute attention, not relative rank among all topics.
Observations
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The primary evidence view for this topic. Sort it chronologically when you want concrete examples behind the larger pattern.
The Coasian theory of the program: what is the ideal size?
...0 per consumer install). An app has to be big enough to contain within itself a viable business model. But LLMs can produce code cheaply. They are willing to produce itsy bitsy pieces of code that no human would have bothered with if it couldn't...
SplitWise is crammed with ads.
SplitWise is crammed with ads. That's because it's not a viable business on its own, it's just a useful feature. To be a viable app requires being a viable business So to make it viable they have to cram it with ads.
Personal Knowledge Management is hard because everyone is different.
...ensive to create and needs many users who are the same, it's not a particularly viable business. But in a world of infinite software who cares! It's possible to make one custom fit one to you that adapts as you change.
Emergent processes don't do a good job counting.
...pple tree should grow into an apple. Where to locate an apple orchard to have a viable business. Asking a generative image model to create an image with 37 apples. They don't have a global sense of state, only local state being progressively sum...
Imagine that you had changed the laws of physics of software.
... the graveyard of failed startup apps. Apps that created user value… but had no viable business. But if the laws of physics have changed to make the overhead of distribution, or the amount of bespoke data necessary to make it viable have changed...
For a use case to be viable today, the user has to give it the data it needs to operate.
...omfortable giving the app the data it needs to do the use case. That requires a viable business model to exist for the app to be viable. That's a very high bar! Imagine a power-law curve of all conceivable use cases. Only the ones that are extre...
A pattern we see in LLMs: linear improvement in quality for exponential increases in costs.
...ersonic flight is technologically feasible for consumer travel. It's just not a viable business.
What entities get to peek at the data?
... of faith; to be useful enough it has to glom together enough use cases (plus a viable business model!) to convince a user to install it. This leads to chunky apps: apps that are larger than they could be, and monolithic, one size fits none. Wha...
An app is an agglomeration of use cases surrounded by a defensible business model.
...ases surrounded by a defensible business model. Apps are organized primarily by viable business models, not by amount of user value. The same origin model creates a cave where the origin's owner can hoard things. For example, hoarding a bunch of...
The magnitude of the cold start problem is to some degree an artifact of the current laws of physics of apps.
...ause the experiences can do anything with data they have access to. 5) The only viable business model for consumers is ads. But if you were to have an alternate set of physics that changed some or all of these, you might have a significantly les...
Building a new open ecosystem paradigm requires three things.
...will be motivated to use: a low ceiling. If you skip infrastructure, there's no viable business models for entrants into the system. If you skip protocol, then you get something like a traditional aggregator. You can't build this frankenstein wi...
Sometimes it's useful to try on a provocative, and possibly untrue, assertion for size and see if it stretches our thinking.
...of options. You need to give up control to the ecosystem, to be able to build a viable business helping customers customize and implement your thing. To have an ecosystem, you need to create more value than you capture--creating the conditions w...
A self-steering generic product vision: "Make it so more of your users can do what previously only your savvy users could do"
...nly your savvy users could do" Of course, you need to have a solid core (e.g. a viable business model that generates net monetizable value). If you also have some kind of self-hoisting product quality (e.g. a network effect) then you have not on...