THE MICRO APP & MONEY VALUE OF TIME

Two Sundays ago, I wrote an article about how liberating it is to build something as a non-tech founder, completely using natural language commands and syntaxes in Sheets. Eric Pong made a very thought-provoking observation. I reproduce it here.

What are platforms?

Platforms are truly platforms when the businesses they enable to build on top of their product become a bigger economy than the revenue of the product itself. Amazon, Shopify, etc. are testimonies to this rule.

But every rule holds until a plausible alternative explanation arrives.

If AI Models are the platform, the economy they enable will likely to be bigger than the foundational model companies

The app companies consume the power of the mothership and deliver new, niche experiences for their customers, who in turn, deliver it to the end users. In eCommerce, custom carts are a big economy themselves. WooCommerce and other such open-source carts enable custom builds. Headless commerce tools enable custom builds as well. A custom-build is a merchant telling the app company that they need a bespoke experience and they can do it themselves (or by outsourcing to an agency).

The friction to each building their own bespoke experience is in building the skill required in building their own software, maintaining it and continually iterating on it. So most merchants resort to using the platform capabilities or the bolt-on capabilities provided by app companies. They skip the labor development effort, outsource the grunt and the innovation.

Is it different this time?

With AI, assuming micro-app led experiences can be completely coded with natural language interfaces, it removes the need to acquire/rent software labor. But we assume that every organization which is the user of an innovative experience enabled by an app or the mother platform capabilities already knows what they want and can build it themselves with AI.

Let's take an example of an event planner. I know of at least 6 use cases that are not enabled by current software that AI can. I am thinking like a product manager and thinking only about this all the time. The event manger is actually thinking about sound arrangements and speaker arrival schedules.

There are so many crevices in the user experience journey of every workflow in every industry where those crevices are filled by human labor. Approvals, transformations, reviews, decisions are all services that dumb software has outsourced to intelligent beings.

The flip is happening.

Intelligent software (even with the current constraints of LLMs) can fill some of these crevices and in-source it away from human labor.

This is a transformational opportunity for app builders. They may themselves write fewer lines of code. They will be like conductors. Will an event planner write her own AI agent to do a few things or will she hire a vendor? A vendor comes with an SLA. An in-house agent/employee comes with a problem and needs your answer/guidance.

Whether micro apps in AI will exist and thrive is not a question of whether a customer can write code and assemble an agent for themselves. Its a question of whether they know they have a problem, whether they know if AI can solve it for them, and if they will find the time to fix it when it breaks.

Money value of time

Every software purchase is a construct of 'money value of time.' SaaS is at a point where too many companies are trying to put their hands on their customers' wallets touting dubious value propositions. As long as software removes the grunt of a worker and charges less than the hourly rate of the worker time required to do that grunt work, the organization will pay for it.

The platforms may give magical capabilities for you and me to build our apps. But we are an exception. The normal working population likes patients to care for, events to run, and haircuts to do. They will not become software artists replacing micro-app builders.

Action time. Something for you.

If you attend events and sell to or partner with the exhibitors in every event you go to, or if you are running conferences or events, message me. We are looking for design partners for testing some micro-app ideas.