Nucleus Nouns

Nice article Ben! I think the HN crowd would be more familiar by calling those "Entities" but I like the new perspective of all companies only handling two or three of them really well.

I think there is more nuance about it for the SaaS-pocalypse though. I have been talking to hundreds of B2B companies and customers are now vibe coding solutions when they need something that the platform doesn't support: a dashboard, a workflow, or an integration.

And once a B2B customer gets a taste of vibe coding... then it's just a matter of time before they start to think about replacing the entire SaaS completely. I have seen this play over and over again so many times in the last few months, it's honestly shocking.

I am working to find solutions to the SaaSpocalypse but don't want to derail from the main topic, there's more info in my profile if this has been something you're thinking about!

This makes me think of domain models in domain-driven design. Very useful to think about what these models are and how it makes sense to set them up & relate them in your area of work.

Makes me wonder if a similar level of analysis was done in reverse to conceive these, hopefully not word yahtzee. At least they don't end with "ly" - the horror.

Identifying the right taxonomy is not only an exercise in naming things, but also building the appropriate data structures and systems in your programs. I think this exercise is incomplete in the absence of studying how these nouns interact with one another.

I don't think that a loose-hanging 'payment intent' evokes a particular emotion, without its constituents' (credit cards, direct debits, cryptocurrencies) relationship to other nouns (customers, invoices, taxes, countries).

Kinda feels like identifying the key user stories with a bit too much naval gazing at the implementation.

That said, the implementations start to gain their own weight as user expectation grows to meet the implementation. I suppose the noun thinking is not entirely frivolous for an established app with expected core workflows and design language.

Something frustrating is when a company is being _clever_ with their nouns. Sometimes it's relatively innocuous, but spending time remembering what unique name I should be searching for instead of something obvious is not my idea of a good time.

Really cool framing, never saw this broken down this way

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