The end of forced sameness
For four decades, software made you change your business to fit the tool. When building costs collapse, specificity becomes the value — not the obstacle.
For four decades, the software industry ran on a single dominant philosophy.
Convince enough organisations that their unique problem is actually the same as everyone else's, then compete on who has the best solution to this now identical problem.
It worked because building software was genuinely expensive. The only way to justify the investment was scale and the only way to get scale was to make every problem look the same. So the customer changed to fit the tool, not the other way around.
CRM told every sales team, regardless of market, cycle or relationship, that selling looks like this: a pipeline, stages, a forecast. Fit your reality into our model. HR systems treated every organisation's people processes as identical. ERP forced every operation into the same structure. Project management tools imposed one workflow on a thousand different kinds of work.
The pitch was always "best practice." The reality was "only economically viable practice."
It meant the truly specific problems, the ones that did not fit any template, just went unsolved. Not because they were not real, and not because people were not losing time and money dealing with them manually every single week, but because nobody could build a business case for a market of 300 people.
That constraint is now gone.
When one person with deep domain knowledge can build a working product in days for almost nothing, the entire logic inverts. You do not need to make the problem generic to justify solving it. You can solve it in all its weird, specific local detail and that specificity becomes the value, not the obstacle.
The grain logistics specialist who has watched people struggle with the same workflow for 20 years can now build the thing that fixes it without a pitch deck, a seed round or an 18-month roadmap. Just deep domain knowledge meeting near-zero friction to build. It does not need 10,000 customers. It needs 200 who will pay properly because it solves their actual problem, not a generalised approximation of it.
We are moving from a world where problems had to be big enough to be worth solving to one where they just have to be real enough.
What is the one problem in your world that has never been worth anyone's time to build for? I would bet it is about to be.
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