The old rule that a market needed hundreds of thousands of users to justify a software product is quietly dying, because the cost of building that product just collapsed.
The Details:
Software economics used to demand scale before a team would touch a market. A six-month build meant only large addressable markets made sense, so livestock auctioneers, funeral homes, and regional logistics firms got left running on spreadsheets and duct-taped tools never designed for them. AI-assisted development shrinks the build timeline enough that an eighty-location dental group or a specialty insurer now clears the bar to justify a dedicated product.
The scarce resource has flipped from coding skill to domain knowledge. The person who knows exactly how a farm visit gets scheduled or how a change order moves through a roofing job can now direct an AI-assisted build with enough precision to carry real weight in the product itself, something that used to require a full engineering team to translate.
Winning in these markets means starting absurdly narrow, not building a category. Sit with one specific user, ask why they do the fifty small things they do daily, and resist turning that into a platform too early. Premature abstraction is where the actual insight, the tacit knowledge nobody had to articulate before, quietly disappears.
Faster code does not mean faster trust. Underserved industries come with messy paper records, legacy exports that barely work, and operators who have every reason to be skeptical of outsiders. That relationship-building timeline has not moved at all, even while the engineering timeline has sped up dramatically.
Bottom Line: The market for vertical software just got bigger because building got cheaper; the winners will be the ones who show up in person and go narrow before they ever go big.
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