The Era of Personal Software

Sometimes you see something that stops you in your tracks. And it makes you realize how rapidly things are changing.

This is that video for me:

In this 10-minute video, an 8-year old girl uses plain natural language to build a web app that lets her talk to a Harry Potter AI. She comes up with an idea, and simply asks Cursor to build it.

And it…just works.

Now, she’s not necessarily learning to code. But she’s manipulating code to make a digital product—a means to an end. And she’s not bogged down in learning syntax or

She’s just doing it.

The internet is still young

The indie hacking community has really grown in the last decade, in part because the tools to ship and scale software have gotten cheaper, more standardized, and the demand for software is still increasing.

One way in which software can continue to grow is if new tools and tech emerge that create new types of software that weren’t possible before.

For example, let’s imagine if you could have an app specifically built for your life. Maybe it’s a little web app that automates a stupid task you hate doing. Or maybe you love a specific type of software, but only want certain features, or you want it offline (I’d love to build a mini clone of Facebook Workplace for any small business I start).

We’re quickly approaching a world where building software like that for bespoke use cases might become feasible.

Startup Idea: The No-Code Personal App Agency

Now the question we all care about: How can we profit off this?

One way to think about business ideas for emerging tech is to focus on what won’t change.

It’s a pretty safe bet that even as AI tech continues to scale, the average human being in the US won’t be super technologically savvy.

Let’s take web design for example. It’s never been easier to make a website than it is today. There are dozens of no-code website builders out there that let any old joe shmoe cobble together a website without having to write a single line of code.

Yet, most people still don’t want to actually build a site themselves. You still have to learn graphic design, copywriting, responsive web design and development, how to QA and troubleshoot, buying and connecting domains, the list goes on.

It’s still much easier to pay money to someone who is more technically savvy to build a professional-looking site for you.

Humans will always pay for human service

Enter the personal software agency—a service that uses AI to build software, apps, digital experiences that are bespoke to you.

As new AI coding tools emerge and models improve, the cost of building software is going to quickly collapse, just like the cost of publishing in the internet era.

It would operate like a traditional service business—trading your time and expertise to help people with common problems.

In this case, those problems might be something like: “build me a dashboard that tracks all my life stats like in Grand Theft Auto so I can see cool stuff I’ve done.”

Building a product like that for a normal human being might not seem so infeasible for very long.

Perhaps theres a component of education that helps people learn what type of software is even possible. Most people are not trained to think about how to build new things to make their lives easier. But our personal software agency will be the ones to make it happen.

Can it be done today?

You could build a version of this as a B2B No/low-code agency today.

They tend to build simple web apps for businesses. I imagine that as AI models get better and better, we’ll start to see more sophisticated software being built for more personal uses. Or for local SMBs that often have unique workflows.

The next 5-10 years is going to be wild.