RIP SaaS
We hardly knew ya. I’ll hardly miss ya.
As covered in previous editions of this blog, it is getting harder and harder to sell certain kinds of software because it is getting easier and easier to create software in your house. The “death of SaaS” is the talk of the town because of the subscription model that became so popular over the last decade. A recent Wired article on Tim Cook’s legacy at Apple condenses a major part of his success to the “subscriptionization” of the tech giant.
I won’t rehash my anger over having to continuously pay rent on digital products, but suffice to say, many simple software products people pay for can now be approximated locally with agentic “AI” tools, likely for far less than the cost of a monthly subscription.
This has its pros and cons in the macro, but the biggest implication is that it should force marketers and business owners to reassess what value they actually provide for customers.
A quick story to illustrate my point. My mother-in-law loves audiobooks. She only speaks Brazilian Portuguese, and the audiobook market is dominated almost entirely by English editions. The built-in text-to-speech on most computers sounds awful and does not return a file that would allow her to save her place. Also, most software that would turn a PDF into an audiobook is paid, and in case you have never met my Brazilian in-laws, to them, the idea that you would pay for a piece of software is hysterically absurd.
Long story short, as a birthday gift to her, I vibe-coded an app for her computer that would turn PDFs and EPUBs into high-quality audio files, with a translation feature that would convert English-language documents into Portuguese-language audio. It took me roughly five hours of work over the course of a week to get the GUI right and work out the bugs that popped up as I transferred and installed it on her old MacBook.
When I presented her with the finished product, the other members of the family were amazed to find out I had made this software from scratch. They insisted that I should sell it. They knew other people who would definitely buy and use something like this.
After my ego returned to its normal size, I considered it. But I knew, in my heart of hearts, that this could never be profitable in the long-term, even if a handful of people did buy. Setting aside the fact that the Brazilians I’ve met do not typically pay for software, I knew that even if I could make the GUI sleek and the functionality smooth, you cannot sell something that is not scarce, differentiated, or attached to a strong enough buying reason.
I tell this story to illustrate an important concept you’ll need to decipher this article: socially necessary labor time.
I’ll keep it simple.
The value of a thing comes from two places: how qualitatively useful it is to a human and how quantitatively exchangeable it is. The most important factor in the first aspect, a thing’s usability, is a kind of ontological and biological precondition set by nature. Many products of nature have value because we can use them. This means nature is the primary generator of value. The most important factor in the second aspect, a thing’s exchangability, is how much labor went into improving a product of nature. Since shoes and apples and cars and computers can all be exchanged for one another, that must mean they all have something in common. Why is a pair of shoes worth 200 apples? Because it takes far more labor to make a pair of shoes and all the materials they require than it takes to plant and harvest a single apple. The cumulative labor of planting 200 apples may begin to approximate the amount of labor that goes into creating a pair of shoes, so the shoemaker accepts 200 apples from the shoeless farmer.
Now, there is a very important distinction I need to make here.
Critics of the labor theory of value are already typing. They’re building impressive thought experiments about digging holes or spending hours constructing castles made of mud.
If only they had continued reading. They might’ve learned that just because they spend a long time writing about “subjective value” or “individual preferences,” does not inherently make what they say valuable.
The value of a commodity is not strictly determined by the amount of time spent laboring on that specific thing. If that were the case, the longer I spent working on something, the more valuable it would be, which is obviously not the case in reality. Slowness is not where value comes from; often, just the opposite.
Rather, value is shaped by the amount of socially necessary labor time that goes into making a thing. The amount of time it takes to make something under average conditions, using standard tools, and applying a normal intensity of labor, is the relative starting measurement in determining that thing’s exchangeability.
So, to address the standard critiques, if you and I both have hole-digging services, and I take ten times as long as what is socially necessary to dig holes, my value does not go up tenfold. It decreases relative to the amount of socially necessary labor time required to dig holes.
In the case of the castle made of mud, assuming said mud is the kind you see on the beach and not, say, adobe, which Indigenous peoples of the Americas used to build durable structures for thousands of years, a habitation made from random beach mud has very low use-value due to being soft and very short-lived. A measurement of a mud-castle’s exchange rate assumes that the thing is useful to a human in the first place. To a child on the beach, they might give up a sweet or two for your castle. But in the aggregate, millions of kids would not likely give up millions of sweets for mud-castles. Very quickly, said children would likely discover that they can make their own mud-castles, and even then, they’re short-lived and not very valuable.
When we’re talking about why something costs what it does relative to something else or to money, we are asking a question of socially necessary labor time. But if we have arrived at that point, we have already assumed that there is indeed a widespread social use-value. A consideration of the socially necessary labor time needed to make a mud castle is moot if it is not generally, qualitatively useful for humans to begin with. If a thing is not socially useful, its price, however mediated by the market, will struggle to rise.
This is more relevant to this article’s larger topic than it may appear at first.
In a nutshell, my two points today are these. First and foremost, a valuable commodity must have some qualitative use-value for a customer. It must solve some problem they have or fulfill some desire. If it does not, then it does not matter how hard you work on something. Nobody will spend their hard-earned cash on it.
If a commodity does indeed have social use-value, the second point to consider is that if new labor-saving technologies emerge and are widely adopted that decrease the socially necessary labor time required to produce that commodity, then its exchange value relative to other commodities also falls, and therefore its price along with it.
More specifically, if the average amount of time it takes to make software decreases, even if that software has use-value for its users, then the value of that software decreases, too. And that is exactly the situation we’re seeing right now. Software is getting exceptionally easy to create, so the companies that sell software are flailing wildly, trying to add features and complexities that you can’t just replicate in Codex or Claude Code.
If you own a company, what this means for you, especially if your company sells software, is that there needs to be a greater emphasis put on the qualitative use-value your product provides for your customers, not just a rush to add bloatware. It is not enough for your software to be sleek anymore. It needs to really solve a real problem for real people in real life. Otherwise, it is simply a mud castle.
At the end of the day, I’m an Adam Smith fan. That’s why I take the labor theory of value seriously.
An App Is Not a Company
Though perhaps the case could be made that a company can be largely an app, though not 100%.
There is a real difference between buildability and business viability. Just because you build it does not necessarily mean they will come.
Every time a platform adopts an “app store” model, there is a flood of user-generated content. The first generation of that content usually tends to be small, highly sought-after quality-of-life fixes that the platform has yet to implement, sold for low prices. These kinds of utility apps, CRUD tools, simple wrappers, and generic admin dashboards are often as potentially lucrative as they are short-lived.
Often, these “companies” that form around small and simple applications vanish upon the next update of the platform.
I think this illustrates, in the micro, what we are seeing with the SaaS market in the macro. A well-timed piece of software can make you a lot of money, but a lucky, quick-to-make fix lives on borrowed time.
The durable software companies, the ones that have stuck around for decades, are the ones that really and truly solve a problem people face in an innovative way. They solve problems that have not yet been made trivial by a collapse in the socially necessary labor time required to produce the same solution.
I think what we will see in the coming years is a real emphasis on what companies are actually producing: real goods, real services, real relationships, real coordination, and, in some cases, real physical products produced through real industrial systems, rather than digital tools made by digital tools and sold as subscription services.
If this is the case, it has implications for how we define what a “company” is. For instance, if I vibe-code a 99-cent utility app that lowers the brightness of your screen and I make enough money to employ a couple of people, is that really a company? As far as the IRS is concerned, sure, but I’m not talking about the legal definition. I’m talking about the older definition of a company as an agreement between a collective to align labor in pursuit of a common goal.
If a “company” functions essentially like a toll booth on a quality-of-life improvement for someone else’s product, then is it really a company? If it does not solve a meaningful social problem, if it does not save a customer time, money, or resources, if it does not improve their social status or productivity, if it is not truly novel, then it is less of a company and more of a parasite. One that will quickly be eliminated by its host’s autoimmune system.
A company might produce and sell an app, but the app itself is not the company. The app is the product. The arrangement of labor is the company.
The company that sells an app is the coordination of labor and resources aimed at the production and reproduction of that app. If the app solves a real problem in people’s lives, then it is probably a good product to be sold by a company. But a problem I have noticed with many young and hungry entrepreneurs in my life is that they focus so much on the aesthetics and internal logistics of the product that they neglect the social arrangements that make up the company and set themselves up for eventual failure or a rude awakening.
To reiterate, as software gets easier and easier to produce, focusing solely on making your product or application sleek and shiny, while not focusing enough on its usability for customers or the labor and resource coordination needed to reproduce the product, is setting yourself up to be a flash in the pan rather than a legacy business.
If you have an idea for a product or service, first ask yourself what labor and resources would be required to produce that product or service en masse. Then take an objective look at the people around you. Do they also have the problem you are trying to solve? Is this a widespread issue or specific only to you? Then, check to see if anyone has already tried or is actively trying to solve the same problem. If so, does your attempt improve on theirs?
If you begin from the level of social coordination and use-value, you set yourself up to build a durable company with a valuable product. You also protect against going into debt for an idea that might disappear with the next patch of a platform, or come to market with a lackluster splash, as you realize your product can either be made at home or does not actually solve a real issue in real life.
An app is an object. A company is a relationship. One made between problems, laborers, customers, resources, incentives, and payments.
I recently almost came to blows with a dear friend over this exact point.
Letting Them Down Gently: The Article Impetus in a One-Act Dialogue
The reason I decided to write about this oddly specific topic in this oddly specific way stems from a conversation I had with a friend last week. I love them dearly, so they will remain anonymous. If they end up reading this, I hope they understand that nothing said here is meant to offend, only to structure the conversation we had in person.
New technology has a hypnotic nature to it. When a fantastic new innovation comes to market, our heads get filled with the wildest fantasies. It was only a few short years ago that LLM technology was introduced. The talk of “AGI,” “robot overlords,” and “the end of human labor as we know it” started immediately after and is only now starting to wane.
I’m guilty of this, too. Most damningly, I thought Meta’s announcement of “The Metaverse” would come to represent a famous point in history where “the dystopia truly began.” Now it’s a punch line.
When I first used ChatGPT, it frightened me so much that I began reading every book I could on the history of “AI” development and the philosophy of mind just to confirm for myself whether the thing I was talking to was really a thinking being or just a parlor trick.
If you don’t know where I landed, go back and read my piece on how creatives should really use AI.
Now, this friend I spoke to recently is the true definition of a young and hungry innovator. They are well-connected in the tech and sales world, and they keep their ear to the ground, looking for problems in their own life and the lives of others that could be solved with technology.
So when they told me they were starting a new business, I dropped everything and sat down to listen to their explanation. As I listened, my cheerful smile slowly turned to a worried frown as I realized that my dear friend had mistaken internal innovation for systems building and end-user value.
I apologize in advance for the vagueness of this next section as I try to ride the thin line between pedagogy and leaking IP.
The company was explained to me as one that would improve the lives of suppliers, retailers, and customers alike by integrating scannable technology into the brick-and-mortar shopping experience. The company was embodied in a website. Both visually and functionally, it was very impressive. Fast to load, easy to navigate, engaging in its UX, and deep in its functionality. The backend was equally impressive, able to recall and generate new functionalities on a per-user basis. Obviously, a lot of work had gone into both the design and the internal logistics of the website.
This is the classic B2B story: an application sold to suppliers and distributors that adds new functionality for end users and, therefore, should add value to the suppliers and distributors themselves.
It all sounded great. But my big mouth and I started to feel some very sharp “why” questions boiling up from within me.
I told my friend, “Your method is great. The tool is great. The logistics are great. But why?” The single most important and annoying question in the English language.
They were confused, so I elaborated (not an uncommon occurrence for me).
“If I’m a user walking through a store, what incentives do I have to abandon my old habits and adopt the new one you’re suggesting?”
Again, confusion.
“Why should a customer use your product?”
I was met with incredulity, but I did get an answer.
“Because you would get more information about the product you’re looking at.”
“Right,” I said, trying to be as delicate as I possibly could. “But it is pretty easy to get more info. Usually, I just read the packaging.”
They agreed, but added, “Right, but the packaging and labels don’t always have the kind or depth of information you’re looking for.”
“That’s true,” I admitted, but delicately added, “And in those cases, I usually just Google the product.”
There was a pregnant silence. After a beat, my friend dove back into an explanation of the functionality of the website as if to suggest I had missed something crucial along the way.
I heard them out, but my questions remained. I took a new tactic.
“Is this tech free to use from a user’s perspective?”
“Yes,” they replied.
Trying, and likely failing, to sound more educational than patronizing, I said, “From a money perspective, sure. But not from a time perspective.”
Pregnant silence again. I continued.
“Your system has the same number of touchpoints as Googling the product in question. So if time is not the incentive for the user, then what is?”
I saw them begin to gesture toward the website again. I headed this off.
“Is there, like, a points or rewards system?”
My friend’s eyes lit up. Finally, he gets it!
“Sort of!” they said. “A user can keep a kind of library of every product they’ve used the tech on. They can collect them.”
They stopped speaking earlier than I expected.
“Maybe a stupid question, but like Pokémon cards?” I asked.
“Exactly!” they replied.
I took a breath. I asked, Socratically, “Have you ever bought Pokémon cards?”
They nodded.
“Why did you buy them?”
“I used to play and trade with my friends as a kid,” they said.
“Right. So you could use them or exchange them.”
I sat back and waited for a moment of revelation that never came.
I sat forward again.
“Be honest,” I said. “Do you care about the products on the shelves of the store as much as you cared about Pokémon as a kid? Would you buy a card from one of your friends today if it contained information about a product you could buy in a store?”
Their brow furrowed as they considered my question. The bomb had been planted. I wanted to push further, but I did not want to seem combative, so I changed the subject slightly.
“Let me ask you a different question. How are you pitching this to the suppliers and retailers?”
After taking a moment to consider the question, my friend said, “Well, because there’d be more…” They trailed off as they reconsidered. My friend is genuinely a very intelligent person, and I could see them applying my rationality in real time. “Because they would be getting info on customer usage.”
“Oh, nice!” I said, beginning to wonder if I had really misunderstood at the outset. “So this is something a customer would need to sign up for and make an account for?”
“No, that’d be annoying!” they quickly replied.
“Right!” I said, starting to slow down in my excitement. “So you’re using cookies?”
My friend tilted their head. “Cookies, like internet browser cookies?”
My “whys” started boiling up again.
“What user data are you collecting?”
My friend raised a finger and said, “Let me show you the dashboard.” Now they were speaking my dorky-ass language.
They picked the laptop up and navigated to the supplier-side portal, clicking a beautifully rendered “Analytics” button.
The dashboard visuals were clear and well-designed. They had accompanying stats in the sidebar and were complete with both x and y axes. Very impressive.
The current page did indeed show counts of customer usage. Now we were getting somewhere.
“Nice! What else you got?” I said, probably too presumptuously.
My friend turned their head and shot me a look as if I had just spoken in some archaic dead language.
“What do you mean?”
Uh oh.
Delicacy reengaged, I said, “Yeah, these are counts of webpage loads. Do you have any demographic data?”
“Oh!” they said quickly and with a touch of relief. “Like, where a user is scanning from? Yeah, we’re logging that.”
“Yeah, nice. That’s useful for you and the suppliers to know what areas and retailers have the most active users, but would that mean a lot to the retailers themselves?”
That damned silence again. The kind that makes you question your own sanity if you were the last person to speak.
“Like, the retailers are all physical stores, right?”
“Right.”
“So the location of the scans is always going to come from their own stores. That means that data is redundant.”
I checked their face. Still confused. I continued.
“What you showed me before is the sum of all the users who have used the tech in a given store, yeah?”
“Right,” they said, slight annoyance in their voice now. Totally justified, in my opinion.
“Would they not already have a better form of that data just by tracking the sales of the products themselves?”
Silence again, but different this time. My bomb finally went off.
My friend sat back.
“I see,” they said in a way that was more pragmatic than defeated.
I think in that moment, my friend realized there was an entire dimension to this project they had not considered. Without being able to define it, they began to intuitively grasp use-value.
“Okay, what would you change?”
If this were a B-movie, I would’ve cracked my knuckles, but since it was real life, I frantically swallowed the coffee I had sipped prematurely, took a second to think, and dove in.
“You’re asking the customers in the store for their time in exchange for some value. Even if you’re not asking them for money, you’re still asking them for something, so you need to give them some kind of value in exchange for that time. Especially if the action you’re asking them to take actually takes longer than the one they usually perform, if they need more information. And for the suppliers and retailers, you’re actually asking more of them because they have to spend their time, labor, and resources implementing your tech with their existing systems, so the value you give to them needs to be even greater.”
I checked in. My audience was captive. I continued.
“The site is amazing. Don’t get me wrong. But there are plenty of amazing things out there that I don’t use because they don’t actually matter to me. The suppliers and retailers only care about the bottom line. Your tech needs to clearly demonstrate how you make them money. If you can’t do that by directly driving more sales, then you need to give them data they can use to drive more sales. And if you can’t save a customer time, then you need to save them money.”
One last check-in. Still captive. For a nanosecond, I considered a career in politics, disregarded the thought, and continued.
“If I were in your shoes, I would find a way to capture more useful user data. The suppliers and retailers don’t really care how nice your website or design is. They want to know the ROI. A supplier is going to adopt whatever works, so you need to start at the retailer level. If the retailers adopt, the suppliers will adopt. Retailers might already know certain things about their customers if they have their own rewards programs, and that’s a big if. Most smaller retailers don’t have rewards programs, so all they’d really know about their customers is that they probably live in the area and what kinds of products they buy. You could sell them analytics, not an app. If you could incentivize users to sign up for your website, maybe through a rewards program or coupon tracking, then you’d be able to capture a lot of information about who they are. Stuff that a retailer might not have access to, like age, gender, preferences, repeat behavior, and category interest. Your real innovation is not only showing retailers what kind of customers shop at their stores, but specifically what those customers are buying and what else they might be persuaded to buy. If you think people would not be willing to sign up, and you wanted to keep the app webpage-driven, then you would still need some form of analytics that gives the retailer or supplier more than scan counts. Raw page loads are not enough.”
I stopped briefly to breathe. My friend was locked in. Self-conscious that I had now been monologuing for a couple of minutes. I figured better to finish the thought than give up now.
Just as they started to relax about what I said, I hit them again. “You’ve also got a problem with potential competitors. Actually, your customers could become your competitors.”
Rather than wait for clarification, I went straight to clarifying. “You used Claude for the site, right?”
“For the front end. I have interns helping me with the back end.”
“And they’re probably using Claude, too, right?”
An understanding nod from them. Eye contact unbroken.
“So what’s to stop the suppliers and customers that you pitch the idea to from just waiting until you leave the room, then describing your app to Claude themselves, and generating your idea without paying you?”
A beat, then my friend replied, “The fact that I would implement it for them. And I'm bringing all my connections together across suppliers and retailers. And because the work is already done! They’d pay me to have me give them the app now rather than having to wait to make it themselves.”
Hell yeah. “Yeah, agreed,” I said. “That’s your company, not the website.”
Then everybody stood and clapped yada yada yada. I embellished a little for the sake of getting my point across, but I swear this conversation went down basically exactly like this.
If you can believe it, my friend actually thanked me at the end of my tirade, and we went on to discuss more specifics that I won’t go into here. If you’re reading this, good luck, my dude.
Customers: They’re Just Like Us
The lesson is this: my friend was convinced that building a website with features that he thought were cool and valuable would automatically transfer value to his direct customers and indirectly to his customers’ customers as well. The ease with which shiny new digital ideas can be made a reality obscured the deeper considerations of what a business actually exists for.
The purpose of a business is to solve a social need. Those social needs are not always life-threatening or generationally important, but a successful business nonetheless solves some kind of problem.
You may not have thought about it constantly, but when you decide where to spend your money, money that likely took a lot of time and effort to obtain, you ask yourself a series of very serious questions before spending any of it.
What do I get from this? Why now? Is this worth the effort? Does this improve my life, save me time, save me money, reduce uncertainty, or increase my social standing?
A cool design is only valuable to the customer if the design helps them do something, feel something, trust something, or signal something. Otherwise, sleek design and cool internal features only serve to make the product valuable to its inventor, not necessarily valuable to its intended users.
This is why I opened this article with a discussion of value. I think this is the crucial element many new entrepreneurs miss. If you want your company to be more than just a flash in the pan, then you need to start from what value your end product provides to your customers, not just the manner in which it provides it. Otherwise, you have just made an extremely fancy mud-castle-making machine.
Once you have found a true social need to fulfill, you need to be mindful of the way in which labor is expended to produce your product society-wide, not just for you specifically. It may take you a long time to vibe-code a new website. That could be because your idea is truly innovative. But it could also be because you are simply inexperienced with software development, and just because something takes a long time for you to make does not necessarily mean it is more valuable. If something is easy and quick to make for the average worker in that industry, then the end result of your labor is not going to fetch a high price because you are going to have a ton of competition.
It’s “if it were easy, everyone would do it” only taken as a macroeconomic axiom.
The best ideas come from lived experience. If you have a problem in your life, someone else probably has that same problem too. It is very human to want to solve those problems. That is where your company should start. But be mindful, if many other people have that problem, many other people have probably tried to solve that problem too. If the problem still exists, it means they’ve failed in some way. How can you bring your unique ideas, experience, network, etc., to come up with a solution to the problem that other people could not easily replicate?
After you have considered that, survey not only what other attempts have been made at solving that problem, but also what tools have been used to do so. If you are using a tool or method that is likely to be made obsolete by new labor-saving technologies, then you need to rethink your strategy. Though, as I explored in A Category of One, positioning can help you here.
It is impossible to truly predict the future and know which methods will be subjected to value collapse, but there are certain hedges we can make on our bets.
Remember this: the only two places that value comes from are nature and human labor. There is a philosophical debate to be made on where “AI”-automated labor fits into this paradigm, but if we see LLM technology simply as labor-saving machinery, then we have been down this road before.
Toyota and Ferrari have different price points because they are made differently, positioned differently, and have different use-values for their patrons. A Toyota is produced through an industrial system optimized for durability, reliability, and scale. Its design is labored over to appeal to those seeking dependable transportation. Its price point reflects that.
A Ferrari relies on a different mix of engineering labor, artisanal labor, brand scarcity, performance, beauty, status, and desire. Its price point reflects that, too.
Ford introduced the moving automobile assembly line more than 110 years ago. This made the automobile an affordable commodity rather than a rare luxury. And yet, Porsche and Ferrari still exist, positioning themselves as the “handcrafted” alternative; scarce in its availability and qualitatively a different beast entirely in its performance.
More interesting still is that cars cannot yet be made at home, so both the “artisanal” and industrially-produced business models still have a place in the market and coexist there peacefully. They both fulfill needs, just different needs in different ways for different people. But real needs nonetheless.
The labor-saving technology used to mass-produce cars created the car market as we see it today. The assembly line was a catalyst for a new market rather than a market destroyer because the decrease it caused in the socially necessary labor time needed to make a car was outweighed quantitatively by the complexity of labor needed in the assembly and the increase in the quantity of the output of the labor process. The “motorcar” was no longer an aristocratic luxury, but a mass-produced commodity. The average car was now less expensive because it required less labor to build, but more cars could be manufactured in a shorter span of time, a more lucrative proposition. Thus, the assembly line was adopted nearly everywhere. Even “handmade” cars like Porsches and Ferraris rely on parts mass-manufactured on assembly lines.
The assembly line represented a boon for the infant automobile market from the perspective of “exchange-value,” the going price for a car relative to how much average labor time it takes to make one. However, there was, and still is, a real danger to that industry from the perspective of “use-value,” how much qualitative use one gets from a car.
What is the use value of a car? The joy of driving, sure. The pride of the collector, perhaps. I personally think a car’s use-value for the vast majority of people, the thing they’ll go into debt for, is the movement it enables. There is a need to get around in places like the United States.
I want to end the article today with a mention of “the dark side” of marketing. Not every need exists within a vacuum; not all demands are so innocent. You may want an apple because you like the taste, but if apples are the only thing to eat in an area, you’re going to love apples regardless of how you feel about them subjectively. If I sell apples, I’m going to do my damndest to make sure nobody can plant some other kind of crop in my area. A neoclassical economist may look at this scenario and conclude that apples have developed a “natural monopoly” by being the superior product and best fulfilling the subjective needs of the individuals in the area. They’d also call you a radical trying to “politicize” economics if you pointed out any salted potato fields.
There are elastic demands and inelastic demands. Understanding the difference requires a holistic view of marketing and economics. Water, healthcare, and transportation are considered “inelastic demands” because no matter how people feel, they’re always going to need them. That gives the seller of these products and services an extreme advantage in the marketplace because demand for their product is infinite.
You cannot sell what is not scarce, and if a commodity with inelastic demand is made scarce, it results in windfalls. Inversely, if a product with inelastic demand is made readily available, it is almost certain that the public will never go back to the “old way” again.
Car companies in the United States lobby heavily against public transportation subsidies and infrastructure plans because widely accessible and affordable public transportation would devastate the automobile market. Anyone who buys a car purely for the use-value of transportation would be given a very compelling alternative. That represents a far greater threat to their industry than a competitor coming up with a shiny new model. A 3D printer that lets you print your own car in your own home would represent less of a threat to the automobile market than cheap and accessible public transportation.
Be mindful of these aspects when examining your own company and the use-values and exchange-values of what you produce. Is your product or service truly innovative? Or are you simply ransoming something that people need to live? If the latter, you likely have far less brand loyalty than you think. Should a viable alternative come along, your customers will abandon you before you even see the headline on the news.
This is true of the automotive industry, the healthcare industry, and to an extent, the generative “AI” industry.
Labor-saving tech adoption is driven primarily by a widespread and mutual need to increase one’s productivity to stay competitive with other laborers in the market.
My advice with new agentic generative “AI” technologies is to use them to try to make yourself more productive or to save operational costs by recreating something you are paying a subscription for. Where I would be cautious is thinking that using them is actually making your work more valuable. They’re likely doing to your industry what Ford (the man) did to the automotive industry: lowering socially necessary labor time and replacing the lost value with increased output. Great for employers, less so for employees.
Be mindful if you start using tools like Codex or Claude Code to build software for the purpose of selling them on the market. You might get some takers, but then again, you could just as easily be living on borrowed time.
Remember, if a dumb-dumb like me can build it too, then you should probably think about what makes your company unique and how it could make something so valuable, and in a sophisticated yet efficient manner, that a dumb-dumb like me would have a much harder time replicating it.
Mud castles do not go for much on the open market, but mud itself is harvested, cleaned, and sold every day. It’s a colossal industry. The difference is use-value, socially necessary labor time, and company organization.
You won’t hear me praise capitalism too much, but if anything positive can be said about it, it is that the profit motive is an excellent incentivizer for creating efficient resource allocation systems for use in large-scale industrial manufacturing. Feudal aristocrats did not have to worry about their bottom line, but your local shopkeeper does, and that is why the shopkeeper will solve more social problems than your average aristocrat ever did.
Credit where credit is due, but people in mud castles should not throw stones.