i said the below (scroll down) a year ago. i think the point still stands but the reason why tools are still general purpose right now is because a powerful tool is still hard to make. and if you invest a lot of money into creating a powerful tool it must serve many use cases for you to get a return on that investment.
so right now in order to grow a business a product must be general purpose
the market shift we're waiting for is when tools become much easier to make, i.e needing less people to build a powerful tool. when that happens, creators can make tools fine tuned to each use case, and users will have more options to choose from. this could create a 'builder economy' where builders are akin to 'creators' today
you actually kind of see this dynamic already in no code tools today. they make building easier and reduce the need for collaborative work, so you end up creating an economy of 'experts'. salesforce experts, airtable experts, growth marketers, etc. all serve this purpose. it's much easier to become a nocode expert than a software engineer, so you get a market of nocode experts who use nocode to create tools for the end user
when i first started expressing product opinions at clay i was frustrated by how wide we were trying to be with the product at the sacrifice of usability. this was an accurate sentiment, but i initially made the mistake of thinking that simplicity and breadth were mutually exclusive. what they are instead is inversely correlated, and in order to grow, products must find the balance between them that meets the market where it's at.
we started out much too breadth heavy, and have been slowly moving in the direction of usability, but the current debate/uncertainty is where we ultimately need to end up, what our sweet spot is on the spectrum
(side note: the making software dev accessible to all mission of most of these cos isn't what ends up happening here. open to being wrong here but imo that's kind of a pipe dream of engineers. humans have always fallen into creator/consumer dynamics)
i am anti general purpose tools
designers need figma
but a marketer needs a simple graphic
does everything need to be in one place?
there is so much depth to creating a high ceiling use case specific tool
you shouldn’t need to mold your software you’re software should mold to you
whose backend can be reworked to create other use case specific tools
how to productize that ,
