#002 The Creator Economy Arrives at Software

The Arc of the Creator Economy

Each wave let individuals do what once required institutions:

Content
YouTube, podcasts, blogs — anyone can broadcast

Courses
Teachable, Kajabi — anyone can educate

Digital Products
Gumroad, Notion templates — anyone can productize

Personalized Software
AI-assisted dev tools — anyone can build software

The pattern: Developers build automations for themselves. Then discover thousands share the same friction. A side project becomes a product. Software creation is now a creator economy vertical.

The Big Shift

Before: Software as Service Built by companies
Serves the "average user"
Enterprise-scale markets
Teams of engineers

Now: Software as Craft Built by individuals
Serves specific niches
Long-tail markets (500-5,000 users)
Solo developers + AI

Three Forces Converged

1

AI Collapsed Build Time

Afternoon vs. two weeks

2

Distribution Matured

Ship Monday, users Wednesday

3

Long Tail Addressable

Niches too small for enterprises

AI Collapsed Build Time

A solo developer now finishes in an afternoon what a team needed two weeks to complete.

How

AI coding assistants architect, debug, and iterate. The cognitive load of building software dropped by an order of magnitude.

AI doesn't replace engineers — it amplifies what one engineer can build and ship.

Distribution Matured

Go-to-market for small tools costs nothing:

GitHub — open source discovery
Browser extension stores — Chrome, Firefox
Slack/Discord marketplaces — where teams live
Plugin ecosystems — Figma, Notion, VSCode

Long Tail Became Addressable

Enterprise software serves the average user. The average user does not exist. Developers building for themselves target niches of 500 or 5,000 people — markets too small for software companies, but right-sized for a creator.

What This Looks Like

The pattern repeats: build for yourself → share it → discover demand → monetize

Browser extensions that automate specific SaaS workflows
CLI tools shared on GitHub that become cult favorites
Zapier templates sold for $20-50
Personal AI agents built for specific job functions
Internal tools rebuilt as products when founders notice outside demand

The Infrastructure Question

When previous waves scaled, infrastructure emerged:

Content Creators YouTube, Spotify

Digital Products Gumroad, Teachable

What serves that role for personalized software?

Part of the answer: AI tooling, LLM APIs, no-code builders.

But a deeper layer remains underappreciated...

The Safety Gap

Millions of developers will ship software independently. Who ensures these tools stay safe?

Creator-built software will need

• Guardrails for AI-generated code
• Trust and verification mechanisms
• Safety infrastructure that scales with fragmentation

Democratization makes building easier. It also distributes risk across a wider surface.

What This Means

For Developers

Every workflow you automate, every friction you solve for yourself — that is potential inventory. The question is whether to be intentional about it.

For Investors

The opportunity extends beyond creation tools. Durable value will accrue to infrastructure that makes fragmented software safe and trustworthy at scale.

For the Market

We are early. Current AI coding tools = version one. As they mature, individually-created software will multiply. Companies that build the trust and safety layer will become quietly essential.

The Bigger Picture

The creator economy removes gatekeepers:

YouTube removed broadcast

Substack removed publishing

Shopify removed retail

AI-assisted development removes the engineering gatekeeper

The result: Developers who think like creators. Building for audiences instead of employers. Shipping artifacts instead of features.

The Opportunity

Software becomes a craft practiced by individuals at scale
The infrastructure to support that — safely — represents the next platform opportunity

"The creator economy removes gatekeepers. AI-assisted development removes the engineering gatekeeper — not by replacing engineers, but by amplifying what one engineer can build and ship."