Discoveries #31 | The Return of Hard Things
Welcome to Edition 31 of Discoveries where I share inspiration on design, product building, and what's next.
The Return of Hard Things
For most of the last 25 years, software itself was a moat.
If you built something people loved, and you built it well, there was a good chance competitors would spend years trying to catch up.
I’m not sure that’s true anymore.
Today, a small team can build in a weekend what once required months or years. Increasingly, they don’t even need a large engineering team to do it.
That’s an incredible thing for builders. It’s a slightly terrifying thing for incumbents.
Software isn’t becoming less valuable. It’s becoming less scarce. When something becomes abundant, the advantage shifts somewhere else.
The obvious places are:
- Brand
- Distribution
- Proprietary data
- Community
Those have always mattered. They simply matter more now.
But I think something else is happening.
For the last decade, startups were rewarded for removing complexity. Asset-light. Pure software. Minimal headcount. Recurring revenue. The closer your company looked to software, the better.
Now I wonder if we’ve accidentally come full circle.
The businesses that feel most defensible are often the ones that are genuinely hard to build.
Not because the software is difficult. Because everything around the software is.
Any business that requires: complex operations/services, manufacturing, enterprise relationships, real-world logistics, now have a distinct advantage because of their difficulty to replicate.
It’s a strange reversal.
The things investors once avoided because they were messy have become the very things that make companies durable.
As a designer, I find that super exciting.
I started my career working on products that blended software with the physical world. It felt like every project opened up an entirely new design space.
Over time, much of the industry’s energy shifted toward making software more efficient.
AI is reversing that trend.
Not because software matters less. Because software is finally becoming cheap enough that we can spend our energy building everything else.
Product Inspiration
This is my favorite "product launch" of the year. MidJourney is building a medical platform. Their vision is a 60-second, full-body ultrasound that makes health scans as routine as a trip to the spa.
What I'm Reading
🔗 If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good.
The best products don’t try to be everyone’s second favorite. They become someone’s absolute favorite. This post is an oldie but stands up well.
It argues that being extraordinary at one thing creates far more value than being pretty good at twenty. Swiss Army knives are useful, but nobody writes love letters about them.
Other Finds
Already missing the world cup.
Have a great week!
Blake
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