Interesting. Where is this product located? If I'm looking at your profile correctly, this appears to be Openship[1], which is just a collection of starter templates from something from Nextjs and something called Keystone for each vertical. Is this what it is you are talking about?
I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating.
Yes, it’s built on the shoulders of giants, Next.js[0] and lesser-known Keystone.js[1].
Next is a full stack framework and Keystone is a CMS built on top of Prisma and GraphQL. Keystone was created by this Australian company called Thinkmill. They have used it to help businesses build custom backend systems for more than a decade. But it needed to be deployed separately from Next and they were using emotion css for their dashboard and I wanted to use Tailwind/Shadcn. So first, I had to make the Next Keystone Starter that brought in Keystone into Next so each SaaS is just 1 Next app with a built-in storefront, GraphQL API, and dashboard.
Once that was built (and it took a while tbh), I started to build the Shopify and Toast alternative. But the itch to get these built quickly and autonomously had me working on the harness in the past months and now that is nearly complete.
Here is the e-commerce[2] and restaurant[3] repos. They have a link to deployed demos you can check out as well.
As far as revenue, I don’t feel comfortable relaying that right now. We have other revenue streams like fractional CTO where companies give us equity to manage all their tech and that is quite hard to quantify. Before Openfronts being built, I built Openship, and e-commerce OMS and that has exceeded 5M orders processed since its inception in 2019. That’s not counting orders by businesses running it on-prem.
I actually posted about this vision on HN[4] when I launched Openship and the response is what kept me building.
Second, take this for what it is: your product may not be compelling in its current form. Building it to many different markets will not make it compelling. If you had a stronger revenue, please share it. This sounds incredibly thin.
Third, dont mistake building the same thing 20 times for different verticals for bonifide software skills. When a SWE builds the thing they have built before its usually to learn a language which is the easiest part of software. There is a reason a common adage in software is "9 women cant make a baby in a month". Breath is no replacement for depth.
Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are.
In the end, I built Openship and Openfront for my e-commerce business and then turned them into SaaS. All the revenue for these are just a cherry on top of our existing e-commerce businesses.
And I worked with Next and Keystone long before AI came along. Check my GitHub commits if you need some back story.
And I’m not building these 20 SaaS to prove I have bonafide SWE skills. I’m building them because I plan to have my own gyms, hotels, grocery stores down the line powered by these SaaS. SWE to me a means to an end and that’s to have many different businesses.
> Don’t take my word for it then, ask any terminal agent to dig in and get an idea of how good these apps are.
Okay but, you know this isn't a quality metric right? These models are incredibly biased towards positive confirmation of the prompt. I could give them nearly any repo and they would sing the praises of the best parts, if I asked.
I never told you what prompt to even feed your AI my guy. As far as I know, you can be like rip this repo to shreds and tell me what’s wrong with it and you’ll get your answer.
Crazy how you guys blindly trust proprietary apps where you can’t even read the code but asking you to read open-source code is psychosis?
You say you only use open-source and I’m the same way but I’ve asked agents to evaluate open-source alternatives. How is that psychosis? If it’s typescript or JavaScript, I can read the code but if it’s Rust/Go/etc, yeah I get AI to read it and tell me if it can solve my problem or if it has the features I need.
It’s actually the whole premise of my open source alternative directory called Opensource Builders[0].
That’s the neat part, you can use it headlessly. The built in dashboard and storefront are using the GraphQL API but you can deploy your own external dashboard and storefront using the same API.
We’re also very bullish that the chat interface is the universal UX now. Instead of sifting through the dashboard to change a product price or sell in a new region, you can use the built-in agent and just tell it to do that. Every Openfront comes with an MCP server that interfaces with the API so the agent can literally do anything you can do using the dashboard and API. This is where an agent running the business autonomously comes in.
And even then if you’re not satisfied with the backend API for each vertical, these Next apps can be forked and adapted to tightly fit your business instead of you messing with configs, you can make the app your own.
Having see what terminal vibecoding looks like (to the point where customers say "fix your app" during renewal conversations), I don't think this is likely to happen. There is definitely selection pressure being applied to SaaS companies and I would not expect people not directly responsible (PMs, sales, etc.) to be willing to accept responsibility for technical outcomes; after all they are product, not software experts.
It is possible this leads to a decrease in salary (and positions) but I do not believe the social commentary will pan out in the manner the author proposes. The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.
> The people who most argue for vibe coding will themselves never accept responsibility for the technical outcomes.
This is right, and don’t think this isn’t all partially fueled by spite. I’m not sure if engineers understand how much they’ve been simultaneously reviled/revered by non-technical people. They see this as a Prometheus moment. They would love to vibecode a mess and make the engineers deal with the details.
I guess to use the car analogy, if the tech companies said they've made a robot that can fix your car, a car-ignorant will think the robot is all-capable and works as good as a mechanic.
A lot of people don't know what writing software involves, and believe "AI can do it now!".
And when they point out the rare exception it’s always ”well, as a UX designer/product manager/etc I spent thousands of hours now working with AI to build products and if I don’t understand something then I ask the AI to teach me” - congratulations you haven’t replaced developers you just became one
Because then the units fall into disrepair (because they no longer make sense to maintain) leading to less supply leading to lower availability of units leading to higher cost of housing.
See what happened in NYC regarding the consolidation of housing units.
Not really. Social security is a defined benefit plan that requires new payors to fund todays expenses. 401ks are a defined contribution plan. Very different.
Set it on fire? I'm confused what your model of Google leadership is. Do you think they're being duped? Or controlled in some way? What is your theory of mind for Sundar's decision making process here. That he's committing fraud?
Because the obvious answer is that he has compelling financial data telling him that this $80B now will produce a positive return on investment in the future. But you of course seem to disagree.
Why? There’s $80B of dilution from new shares issued, so to keep share prices constant market cap would have to increase by $80B. Simultaneously, there $80B in additional assets on the balance sheet, so if the company was previously correctly valued at $N market cap it would now be correctly valued at $N+$80B market cap, right? My intuition is that capital raises, just like stock buybacks, should be first-order (“mechanically”) share price neutral.
In practice there's a lot of issues with asymmetric information. The company knows its own operations and financial position better than random traders on Wall Street. It is rational for it to buy back stock when the market value is lower than the true intrinsic value of the company, and to sell stock when the market value is higher than the true intrinsic value of the company. Therefore, traders often treat buybacks as a signal that the company is "cheap" (at least in the company's own view) and pump up the price accordingly, and treat stock issuances as a sign that company management believes that the stock is "expensive" and push it down accordingly. Company management has more inside information than market participants do, but is usually prohibited from trading on it. Stock issuances and stock buybacks are one of the few cases where insider-initiated trading is legal, because the benefits accrue to the company as a whole rather than a few individuals.
I agree, and traders will also take into account the fact that there is a gold rush going on (into AI) and consequently view this issuance as not as much of a sign that company management believes that the stock is expensive as they would have if no gold rush were going on.
This is true in a "yes but" sense. Typically equities of the mega caps benefitted from debt issuance on the expectation it would accelerate growth. The change to equity value loss is what is interesting: the market no longer sees this as generating growth, at least not like it used to.
Ok but GOOG also has a ~$70B per year stock buyback program for that. It's a little goofy to be buying back and issuing $80B of new shares at the same time.
The company has less cash in the balance sheet, so its market cap decreases. But there are fewer shares, so the share price is the same.
(This allows hypothetical future growth to disproportionately benefit existing shareholders, but does not intrinsically increase stock price.)
In practice, like another poster pointed out, it signals the company’s belief that its own shares are undervalued, so the market usually increases its estimation of value.
You watching all your neighbors sell their beachfront property right before hurricane season: "This isn't really a signal because these transactions are all zero-sum"
Supply and demand of Google equity. The fundamental value of a share doesn't change, but you now need more investor capacity to hold the equity. So you need to sell to investors who weren't quite willing to pay the previous price.
It's not based on the fundamental value of the stock so maybe you wouldn't consider it "first order," but I think you can still call it "mechanical."
Don't forget that the denominator (total number of outstanding shares) will be increased by this as well. So even if the market cap reacted exactly one to one like you're proposing the per share price wouldn't stay constant necessarily.
Sure but people are no longer expecting these kinds of actions to generate equity gains. Before it was expected the growth would outpace the cost of capital, leading to equity appreciation. The directional change is what is interesting.
> You seem to be quite confused about pensions, not only "old people" have pensions. Actually the vast majority of contributions to pensions funds come from people who aren't old at all and are actively employed.
This is exactly how pensions work: newer members to the defined benefits plan pay for older members. This isn't surprising.
> Where would they "scream"? On the internet? And who'd hear them? The answer is nobody in any PE cares about anyone screaming.
At the ballot box. There is a reason that public pensions are exempt from the PBGC reserve ratio requirements. People with pensions aggressively vote their interest.
> This is exactly how pensions work: newer members to the defined benefits plan pay for older members.
No, that's now how they work, if that was the case, there wouldn't be any need for PEs to buy and enshitify the assets we are talking about here. Your current description contradicts your previous comment.
I'm not going to explain it to you, there's enough information about the topic.
> At the ballot box.
We don't vote for PEs. And who we vote for makes no difference to them, these truths are so basic, it's a shame you don't know them.
In practice this is exactly how they work, whether it was intended or not. Otherwise it would look a lot less like a defined benefits plan and more like a defined contribution plan.
Blockbuster actually did try to beat everyone to streaming. Notably, Blockbuster and Enron [1] entered into a 20-year partnership for online video delivery.
Sears was a different story, in that they were a real estate company with a store front and retail real estate took a nosedive due to ecommerce. But that's a different discussion.
I'm very curious how much revenue this is generating.
[1] https://github.com/openshiporg
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