Ask HN: Is it still worth pursuing a software startup?

You could probably become rich wholesaling gravel in your city. There are plenty of opportunities all around. Execution is key.

no

Build something novel, what has changed?

I would strongly recommend staying away from software startups unless:

- The CEO of some major corporation or a big VC is a close friend or friend of your family.

- You are rich and have a lot of friends who will buy your product.

- You already finished the MVP; which you started building 12 years ago... Might as well try to complete.

- You're a criminal.

The market is insanely saturated and people already have more stuff than they need. Capitalism has been over since 2008. Now it's just feudalism. Product is irrelevant; it's all a social game of selection. You have to be selected. You just need to know someone and have a product with a semi-reasonable narrative that your CEO buddy can use as a justification to give you company money. That's it.

The serious answer:

The value cannot be just the software. E.g. some workflow tool (Salesforce). These tools will continue to exist for awhile but any customer capable of moving off of it to a startup version, can probably make their own startup version, tailored to them.

Now, if you offer something besides the software — logistics, networks, financial instruments, regulatory compliance, physical goods, compute, etc — that has value besides the software.

But the five billionth workflow automation tool has fast diminishing value in 2026.

This is the problem with big concentration of wealth and power. The big tech mega corps can copy your idea easily because they don’t have any budget, they can undercut you or sell at a loss, and they can distribute it to all their current customers with anti competitive bundling.

It has happened over and over many times and American antitrust law is useless. The largest corporations must be broken up, taxed heavily, and regulated in new ways. Otherwise there is no fair competition or level playing field for startups.

Isn't it the opposite? E.g. there is very little moat left and small companies or individuals can copy any product big or small in no time?

Depends on your goal - do you have an idea you care about and want to solve? Probably a good idea. If you "want to be your own boss" or looking for something just to be acquired, hard to say, depends on who you know, etc.

You're gonna get a lot of positive responses here, but frankly only do it if you think you can make meaningful money within a month or two.

Everything is going off the rails this year. You only have to use Claude Code for 10 minutes to realize every job involving a computer is going to get flipped upside down within a year.

Got to get more creative and less funding dependent. People still seem caught up in the old process of ideation, static creation, pitch decks. Ack! Garbage now! I only ever took funding to scale to 3-5 heads, well I have 20 heads for nearly nothing now... Ive created more "startup" ideas in the last 3 years then the last 20 of my career. I just keep cranking out anything remotely interesting, launch, and if it don't "work", move on. I just launched another one this week, feels most promising, but we'll see... I didn't go quitting my day job just yet.

Also, GTFO! My ideas are not just slop from sitting around day dreaming. Every one is from observations made from talking or watching people struggle... cant replace that with AI yet.

You mean the big companies who still haven't moved away from abominations like SAP and Oracle? The ones where you require twenty approvals to get a small pilot done? Instead of moving to saner and cheaper alternatives, they would just say, "hey, why don't we just start making our own software?" Every effort like this—if it had any takers—will fail spectacularly.

I get it people are skeptical about the future. But I can't imagine any scenario where people would like taking responsibility of building and mantaining their own software for everything vs. paying marginal amount of money (relatively speaking) to let someone else take the headache.

There's still plenty of moats frankly, same moats as before. What isn't the moat is the software development time.

In our case, we're building a tool that has a moat from: integrations, multiple parties connecting, and others

It's very sticky once we get in, and has nothing to do with the software so much as legal, company policy and inter party communication

You can get the same output as $500k/year of software engineers for $2.4k/year now. Never been better if you ask me!

Could it be that it's just a wrapper for APIs like OpenAI/Anthropic? I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I'm surprised to find someone else with the same view.

The only software worth writing is tools for agents that contain something hard for them to vibe code in a couple of sessions.

Making someone’s agents 20% better, cheaper or faster will be a measurable and easy sales goal.