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Comment by ijidak | Hacker News Reader

My brother is selling a CRM he developed for his business to others for a couple thousand a month.

There is no way he would have built the CRM as quickly pre-AI.

He built, in a few months, what would have taken maybe one to two years before.

It's probably going to be a while before someone builds the next Instagram with AI. But I think that's more a function of product fit and idea. Less so how fast one person can code.

The first billion-dollar solopreneur likely is going to happen at some point, but it's still a one-in-a-million shot, no matter how fast a person can code.

Look at how many startups fail despite plenty of money for programmers.

But I am seeing friends get to revenue faster with AI on small ideas.

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> The first billion-dollar solopreneur likely is going to happen at some point

I'm pretty sure that this has already happened, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenty_of_Fish

Not quite 1bn (but 575mn in 2015 dollars) and mostly done by one person.

He began hiring in 2018.

Also, "Plenty of Fish uses a Microsoft-based platform for itself, including IIS, ASP.NET, and Microsoft SQL".

> He began hiring in 2018.

2008 I think (from the wikipedia article). I met my now wife on the platform in 2013. I do think it counts, and it's important to note that even pre-AI, software has incredible leverage for small teams/individual people.

Of course it doesn't count. He is not a solopreneur at $500M.

So if I make a website that uses Nginx, Ruby, and Postgres, does that mean that I don't get credit for making it since I use other tools?

No, I just brought attention to the stack because it's not "sexy".

Link to the crm? I'm asking because all tge crms I have encountered so far were vastly more complex than Instagram.

I would actually expect that current coding AIs would create something very close to Instagram when instructed.

Here it is: https://thedefinedcrm.com/

> I would actually expect that current coding AIs would create something very close to Instagram when instructed

Agree 100 percent! I think a lot of us are conflating writing software with building a business. Writing software is not equal to building a business.

Instagram wasn't necessarily hard to code, it was just the right idea at the right time, well executed, combined with some good fortune.

AI is enabling solo founders to launch faster, but those solo founders still need to know how to launch a successful business. Coding is only 10% of launching a business.

My brother has had some success selling software before AI, so he already knows how to launch a business. But, AI helped him take on a more ambitious idea.

I think the other issue is that the leading toolchain to get real work done (claude code) is also lacking multi modality generation, specifically imagegen. This makes design work more nuanced/technical. And in general, theres a lot of end-product UI/UX issues that generally require the operator to know their way around products. So while we are truly in a boom of really useful personalized software toolchains (and a new TUI product comes out every day), it will take a while for truly polished B2C products to ramp up. I guarantee 2026 sees a surge.

> My brother is selling a CRM he developed for his business to others for a couple thousand a month. There is no way he would have built the CRM as quickly pre-AI

The thing is, if AI is what enabled this, there's no long term market for selling something vibe coded for thousands a month. Maybe right at this moment and good for him, but I have my doubts these random saas things have a future.

Do you think you could build craigslist? Why are they worth so much?

I think that's comparing something different. I've seen the one-day vibe code UI tool things which are neat, but it feels like people miss the part that: if it's that easy now, it's not as valuable as it was in the past.

If you can sell it in the meantime, go for it and good for you, but it doesn't feel like that business model will stay around if anyone can prompt it themselves.

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