The Mom-and-Pop SaaS era has arrived
Entirely new markets and categories are becoming economically viable
So many stories about AI focus on developer productivity or replacing developers altogether. And sure, non-technical teams can launch their own stuff. But that framing misses the bigger shift. The real change is what type of software is now getting built.
For decades, creating software required access to a small, highly specialized group of people concentrated in a handful of tech hubs and funded by venture capital. That meant only ideas large enough to justify those costs ever made it into the world. As the cost and complexity of building collapse, that constraint disappears. The winners won’t just be faster developers. They’ll be teachers, real estate agents, accountants, coaches, consultants, small business owners, and domain experts of every kind solving problems they understand deeply. The future of software won’t be defined by a tiny group of elite builders. The future of software will be defined by everyone else.
Get ready to start seeing (and hopefully building) more and more products from unexpected places. This will be software built by local experts with limited technical experience, but way more experience in everything else.
I call this Mom-and-Pop SaaS!
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For many, software math was not mathing
Software building has been ridiculously expensive in the past. Want a website? That will cost you a few thousand bucks. Want a small app or integration? Get ready for a 5 digit price tag (if you are hiring offshore, otherwise add another 0). And listen, it was warranted. Good software engineers don’t just know multiple coding languages, they also understand all of the complex structures underneath the surface that make it all work. It took time to learn and get good at, so it was v pricey.
And when the cost is high, the price must be high to make the math work. Software developers demanded (and deserved) high salaries, and people that wanted to work with them inevitably drifted toward massive markets and massive opportunities. (What was the number one question in software companies?: ‘WHAT’S YOUR TAM???’ It better have ‘B’ as the first letter haha)
The result is that thousands of perfectly good ideas never got built. Because software math was not mathing for them. There are so many industries, professions, communities, hobbies, and niches that desperately needed software but could never justify the cost of creating it. A local soccer club, a vacation rental operator, an orthodontist, a wedding photographer, a recruiter, a teacher, an artist … The list is infinite.
So, yeah, developers writing code faster is cool. But the really big deal is that when AI dramatically lowers the cost of creating software, entirely new markets and categories become economically viable.
We’ve seen this before
Let’s not forget that this pattern has happened before:
Shopify didn’t create commerce. But it *did* create millions of new merchants.
Airbnb didn’t create hospitality. But it *did* create new properties available for rent & hosts.
YouTube didn’t create entertainment. It *did* create a new type of creators that specialize in niche interests.
Substack didn’t create writers. It *did* create a new wave of independent media businesses.
And by the way, all of these examples did not eliminate the original category offerings - Nike is still in business. So are the Hilton hotels. And movie theaters with blockbuster movies. And magazines are still alive (I think?). The increased economic viability historically expanded the categories, rather than just reshuffling existing demand.
There’s even a fancy economic theory for this, called Jevons Paradox. Essentially, when a new technology makes it more efficient to use a resource… the demand for that resource goes up, not down. This originally came up because this guy (Jevons) noticed that British steam engines got more efficient… which didn’t lead to using less coal. Coal usage 3x’d! Same for fuel-efficient cars that mean people drive further, or LED lights that use less electricity, which means we put ‘em on everything.
So it makes sense that as software creation is becoming crazy cheap, we’ll get more of it, rather than less. And when the economics of creating something disappear, completely new groups of people can enter the market.
And just like Shopify transformed millions of people into merchants, AI-powered software creation is transforming millions of people into software builders.
That’s why I think many people are looking at this moment through the wrong lens. This isn’t primarily a developer productivity story. Instead, it’s an economic participation story.
Data backs it up
At Lovable, we recently studied the people building on our platform. The results were cool to see:
80% of builders come from non-technical backgrounds.
Think about that for a second. This has never been possible before! In the past, software creation was limited to just the people who already had these technical skills. Today, the overwhelming majority of these builders are people with a completely different set of past experiences.
Even more interesting: 55% of builders have >11 years of professional experience.
The future advantage may no longer be technical expertise - it may be domain expertise! People are taking a decade or more of accumulated expertise and packaging it into software. Boom.
Software development used to work the opposite way. A subject matter expert would explain their world to a developer. The developer would attempt to understand the workflow, requirements, exceptions, edge cases, and user needs before translating all of that into software. That translation layer was always imperfect, which produced (mostly) shitty software. But now the person closest to the problem becomes the person creating the solution. This is a much bigger shift than ‘everyone can code.’ And guess what, there are a lot more domain specialists in the world than software engineers.
Welcome to the era of Mom-and-Pop SaaS
People who aren’t part of the tech industry at all can now create lovable software products:
A recruiter can create recruiting software.
A real estate agent can create real estate software.
A soccer coach can create soccer software.
A property manager can create property management software.
Just like the creator economy taught us that one person can become a media company (Hello Lenny), the builder economy is teaching us that one person can become a software company.
Every profession contains knowledge, decisions, workflows, and expertise that can be transformed into software. We’re just beginning to see what happens when millions of people gain the ability to actually do that.
Plus, check out the monetization data. These aren’t just hobbies, people! 80% of builders are creating something they intend to monetize. 35% are already generating revenue. The most common applications being built are websites and landing pages, business operations software, consumer applications, and dashboards and analytics.
SaaS success is being redefined
I’ve been writing about career optionality for-eh-ver. The safest time to create options is before you need them. The safest time to build a second income stream is before your primary income stream becomes uncertain.
But this particular opportunity literally didn’t exist for most people, a few years ago. Devs could do this as a side hustle (and a lot of them made bank doing exactly that), but now’s the first time that all of the millions of people like you and me can realistically turn their expertise into products.
I’m not saying we’re all going to become billionaire founders. In previous generations of SaaS companies, the founders took on millions (or tens of millions or hundreds of millions) in VC funding to risk their professional lives to build something enormous. Is that what you want? I don’t. Because you absolutely don’t need to make something massive to make a good living. And if you’re just trying to add a bit of extra income or create a bit of a career safety net, the stakes are even lower. The local coffee shop doesn’t need to become Starbucks. The neighborhood restaurant doesn’t need to become McDonald’s. You don’t have to be Salesforce to be a highly profitable software business.
The whole VC-industrial complex trained all of us to believe that every software company should pursue literally world-changing outcomes and 10-figure exits. But there’s a huge middle ground between hobby project and unicorn. And I actually think that space is going to be the best place to build: Who’s your competition, if you’re providing a specific, productized service for a particular audience that you happen to know a lot about? Just above what any individual user finds worth building for themselves, but below what the labs and giant companies can scalably implement… that’s a sweet spot!
Ladies, let’s not leave this to the tech bros
There’s so much opportunity here, but everyone has to step into it.
Only 14% of builders in our study identified as women. That makes me sad. If software creation is becoming accessible to everyone, I would have expected participation to be much broader. Because who builds the software determines whose problems get solved. And when women build, they build for the communities, for the families, for other women… These are such important solutions! One of the big opportunities of this moment is making sure that different types of people get involved in shaping what gets built next. We need more perspectives to get encoded into software.
This is why I’m so proud of the amazing SheBuilds hackathons we’ve been doing at Lovable (season 3 is starting this Sunday!!). They’re not just about teaching people how to build. They’re about helping more people see themselves as builders in the first place.
So ladies… please. Let’s swarm this opportunity in time! And gents - grab a fellow woman and bring her along with you!
But Elena… isn’t SaaS dead?
Not (yet?). What’s dying is the idea that successful software companies need to look like venture-backed Silicon Valley startups. But SaaS was never really about venture capital. It was about turning expertise into a product that could be sold over and over again.
The difference now is that millions more people can do it.
That’s why I don’t think we’re watching the end of software. I think we’re witnessing the beginning of a much larger software economy than the one we’ve had before.
Instead of a world powered by a few thousand software companies, we’ll have a world powered by millions of builders. Millions of experts. Millions of mom and pop SaaS businesses. Millions of people turning what they know into software for personal or external use.
The next generation of software won’t come exclusively from startup incubators in San Francisco. It’ll come from orthodontists, teachers, consultants, coaches, recruiters, accountants, and small business owners solving problems they’ve lived with for years.
Ladies and gentlemen (but especially ladies, pls), the Mom-and-Pop SaaS era has arrived. What are you building?
P.S. if you want to give Lovable a try and see how it feels to be a builder, you can always start for free, but there are additional offers:
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Edited by Jonathan Yagel.