The SaaS Whiteout: Why No One Can See Your Product
We were promised AGI by the end of ’25. It hasn’t arrived, but the tools at our disposal are sharper than ever before. Claude Code is now more famous than Taylor Swift.
And with this, there has been a definitive trend over the last 12 months. Software is getting easier and easier to build. The barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. A quick look at r/indiehackers in December showed thousands of products being released every day. It got so bad that they changed the rules of the subreddit.
I’m not one to gatekeep, but many of the creators there have no prior product, engineering, or business experience. I’m not going to knock someone for being entrepreneurial. Good on them! But what people find out very quickly is, that building a business is so much more than knocking up a quick prototype in Lovable.
Most of the conversations you see turn into a circle jerk of, ‘let’s share our projects with each other!’ Cue 100 different creators sharing links to their apps, resulting in little to no engagement from anyone. It’s just a shop window. Then you see the inevitable follow-up posts: ‘how many users do you have?’ and ‘how much money have you made?’
I saw a few posts where people were sharing honest revenue and customer numbers. Would it surprise you to hear that barely anyone has any users, and even fewer have actually made money?
The elephant in the room is that most of the ideas are terrible. Most of the people there are only interested in peddling their own solution. The problem was never properly validated; it’s a solution in search of a problem. Hey, I’ve been guilty of this myself.
But validation is not even that hard. Go and ask people about what problems they have, whether they care about what you’re building, and whether they’d pay. You’ll find out pretty quickly whether you have a potential product in your hands, or just another vanity project.
This increased noise in the market has led to founders trying to differentiate themselves however they can. I see lots of inexperienced founders masquerading as gurus who have found a winning formula.
‘If you don’t get 100 people using your product from day 1, it’s worthless.’
‘I made $20k MRR in my first month with this B2C SaaS app.’
‘I created 3 startups in 10 days and then sold all 3 of them a week later.’
Ultimately, these personalities are selling a dream. ‘If you behave like me, you will also be successful.’ As someone who has been building products and tech for the last 15 years, I can tell you that this is complete bollocks.
Building a successful company is much harder than anyone would have you believe. These false messages are damaging. They lead to false expectations. Yet thousands of people continue to lap up this advice, commenting ‘WINNING GUIDE’ as if they're about to receive the holy sacrament through direct message on LinkedIn. In some cases, the original poster never even follows up with a guide!
What does this tell me? Everyone is feeling the struggle of trying to succeed in this market. It’s a gold rush. People want a winning formula, and they’re too blind to see when someone is peddling complete nonsense.
This fluff has actually created a whole new category of products. TrustMRR promises a database of verified startup revenues. Why? Because influencers are lying out of their asses, pretending to be successful in the hope that they build a following.
Much of this behaviour is in pursuit of building an audience. But why?
Well, as I’m quickly realising, if the cost of building technology is diminishing and it’s easier than ever to spin up ideas, the real bottleneck becomes distribution.
When you’re a bootstrapped founder and your amazing product is floating around in a sea of noise, one of the only remaining differentiators is audience.
Consider this: if you have a following of 100,000 people who are generally interested in the topics you talk about, and you create a product that targets them, you only need 1% of them to ‘have a go’ to end up with 1,000 early adopters.
The truth is, that product might well be worse than the alternatives out there. But you have an audience, a distribution channel. People trust what you say, and they’re willing to give your product a try.
It’s not exactly a meritocracy, but it is what it is. And I don’t hate it. I also don’t hate the people with these great audiences; a lot of them create genuinely interesting content and deserve that attention. What I do despise are the ‘influencers’ who post mistruths and garbage just to inflate their numbers.
Anyway, I digress. Building products has become much easier. It’s also getting quicker to validate them. But making a technical solution a viable and sustainable business remains a massive challenge.
It’s hard work to build distribution, but if you have an audience, you at least have a leg up.
In 2026, I’m going to keep building in public, trying to cultivate an authentic audience of interested people in my own way. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll start dropping LinkedIn guides by DM.
Follow along if you want to see the real struggles and wins of running a venture studio that’s trying to create valuable startups in these crazy times.
