My prediction for startup founders and indie makers for 2024-2026.
- Exponential growth of quantity.
- Everyone will be a maker.
- Maker labels.
- Monopolies.
- Rip startups. > Influencer+Maker collabs
The exponential growth of quantity
Almost every corporate dev is either building a side project or planning to.
in 2020 there were 10 uptime bots,
in 2021 we got to 20,
in 2022 to 30,
in 2023 to 60,
in 2024 will go to 200+
in 2025 will go to 1000+
We’ve seen the same happening in other spaces. Popular singers act in movies, and commercials, launch their own brands, produce clothes, and more.
Why? Because they have a distribution channel they can pretty much push anything there and it will be bought by their loyal audience.
We’re entering the same world for technology today.
1% of tech is complicated rocket science, but the rest is an easy 2 week project for a good productive developer who uses the right tools.
There is a limit on how perfect can one make a single saas. Eventually, you enter the overengineering phase, when users are happy, but you keep pushing stuff they didn’t ask for.
So most realize this and instead of endless feature releases, they go and build more tools, to the same audience.
Exponential growth of number of products per maker
By the end of 2024, there will be very few makers doing just one product, most will be doing many, some more than 10, and some more than 100.
Corporates will try, but
Corporates will enter this game too. But they won’t launch products within their brand, they will launch new brands, pretending it’s a standalone thing. However I'm totally bearish on corporates in the new world. They got large dev force and little distribution force. In the new world, distribution is 90% of what one needs to win.
RIP VC backed startup world
The old VC-backed startup world will be a thing of the past and it won’t make the comeback. Because money isn’t helping to grow anymore, so nobody needs the VC money in the new world, what everyone needs: is distribution channels. 99% of VC money will be going into "platforms". Which are impossible to build with few devs. But not the tools, sites, saas, apps...Those all gonna go bootstrapped, self-funded or funded by the "maker labels" (see what it means at the end of the post).
We will see 2 new phenomena emerging
1) Collabs of maker+star.
Influencers/artists/stars will do collabs with indie makers and launch products. Influencers with over a million followers don’t really make good money anymore. The value of a single follower has dropped 100x over the last few years because the number of people with over 100k followers has grown 100x. The ads and brands don’t pay much. So influencers will go for collaborations with indie makers to build a product targeted at their audience and split the profits. Those who do it first, gonna make millions. It will be the new “hot thing” in the influencer world.
2) “Maker labels”.
This is the same as music labels, movie studios or agents in the sports world. There is nearly zero famous star, that are on their own. All of them belong to an agent, label, or studio. Most of us don’t know about it, because it’s not being promoted much, because it’s not important for the fans. The job of labels is to do all the groundwork, contracts, negotiations, distribution, and a million things. So that the artists could focus 100% on one thing they do the best: their craft. Be it acting, singing, or playing soccer.
The same thing is going to happen to indie makers. We already see this in the form of alliances, and startup studios. holdCOs and more.
These alliances will give 2 primary benefits to the indie makers: they can focus more on the product and users (not on coding, but on UX on talking to users, on promoting the product in a product-led growth way).
The second benefit, the most important one is the distribution potential. If one alliance has 50 makers in it, all these 50 makers’ audiences will be cross-promoted if that is relevant. This is gonna be a game changer, and most likely the 100% independent makers will have hard times because they will be competing against those in alliances. It’s happening already today.
We know many “groups” in the maker community and “friends”. Who supports each other tweets, PH launches etc. This makes them unable to not go viral or unable to lose PH. It’s not bad, I actually respect those groups and look up to them. We live in a capitalism, and as Peter Tiel said: competition is for the losers, and the winner always makes a monopoly.
My final prediction is that this will lead to several monopolies, taking over most of the audience.
That's it for now.
I will share more for each of the topic I covered here in my future posts here →→→ 100xfounder newsletter or check out my landing page builder
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