413: We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Moat

Hey. I'm Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. You know that moment when you realize that the ground has kind of shifted beneath your feet? I think I had one of these moments recently and I was watching my AI agents build out a rather complex feature for PodScan in just around like fifteen, twenty minutes. And that was something that would have taken me days to code properly just a year ago. And it hit me that the rules of the game that our software founders are in have fundamentally changed. And I want to talk about that today. So before we get to that, a word from our sponsor, paddle.com, because the way you monetize software as a service applications at mobile apps and stuff has also changed a lot over the last couple years. Not only is there more competition now, but regulations are getting in the way in many many places and that's why I personally choose to charge my customers through a merchant of record. That was a choice I made. I didn't want to deal with all this stuff. I just wanted to use an NMR and that was Paddle for me. They take care of all the taxes, the currencies, tracking decline transactions, updated credit cards, so that I can just focus on dealing with my own competitors, not banks and financial regulators, which are way more powerful and much less interesting to work with. So if you think you would rather just build your own products, check out palo.com as your payment provider. Over the last couple months, my way of building my own product has changed quite a bit. And I've been talking about this on this podcast like forever and I will keep doing it because it's just such a big impact that it had. A lot of the skill of coding solutions effectively has been pretty much surpassed by the AI agents that I use. Like they're better than I am. And don't get me wrong, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm still very capable, capable of specifying extremely correctly what I want and having a system build out code that is well specified and well commented that makes it easy for an agent to implement these things that I wanted to implement. When I started PodScan, I built this all by hand. So the initial constructive foundation of that is still my doing. And that being a collection of smart choices, let's just call it that, now makes it easy for an AI to find its way and build the things that I wanted to build. But the speed at which this is being built, that removes one of the biggest modes for me as an indie hacker and as a software entrepreneur. Because I used to be really good at building stuff. And I think as indie founders, we all create code that works really quickly, right? That advantage …