The Opportunity Ahead of the AI App Builders

Cursor. Replit. Bolt. Loveable. 

To anyone who works in tech, the names of these companies have become immediately recognizable. Their product experiences feel like magic, and their respective growth rates are dizzying. They are democratizing software development in ways that we have not seen before.

And frankly, I’ve felt a bit hesitant to write about them even as we’ve been considering our strategy to working with them. As a relatively non-technical person, there are people better suited to weigh in on how they’ll change software development and topics that like how visual development interfaces should be used alongside prompt-based interfaces.

But as I lay awake in bed last night, two things struck me:

• Very few people have more directly witnessed the growth of non-technical people building increasingly sophisticated web apps than I have.
• All of these companies are currently missing out on a huge opportunity.

Let’s start with a brief history of my experience watching non-technical people build increasingly complex web apps.

A brief history of the emergence of the non-technical builder

When we launched Outseta in 2016, we were building product for software engineers. We noticed that nearly all SaaS products required the same core tools and scaffolding, yet everyone was reinventing the wheel when it came to cobbling together the tablestakes.

• Payments 
• Authentication
• Emails
• CRM
• Help desk 

Tools like Stripe Billing didn’t even exist yet, and the process of integrating basic payment workflows with Stripe’s APIs was a huge pain in the butt.

Our idea was simple; Shopify for SaaS. 

We set out to make it a heck of a lot easier to build a SaaS business.

Then around 2020, we found ourselves getting sucked into the world of “no-code” and "visual development" via Webflow. We quickly learned that visual development interfaces allowed non-coders to build increasingly sophisticated websites and web apps. And not only did this audience require the same core tools as their developer counterparts, but they actually valued what we’d built that much more. Without the technical skill set to integrate a slew of tools well, Outseta enabled them with the critical infrastructure required to build a business.

What we’re seeing right now with these AI building and editing tools represents the next evolution in the very same cycle. These tools are further enabling less technical builders and we’re gawking at what we can now build, and how fast we can build it.

It is incredible.

These tools combine front-end capabilities with back-end capabilities, more easily than ever before. But in all the talk of these front-ends and back-ends, the AI building tools are still missing a glaring opportunity—the “business management layer.”

The opportunity of the missing “business management layer”

I think Pat Walls from Starter Story has this very right—while countless website building tools have come and gone, Shopify became the behemoth that it is by delivering the critical scaffolding and tooling that all e-commerce businesses need in order to make money. And that’s not just payments—it's also the CRM, email, and help desk tooling that are the cogs of an efficient growth engine.

That’s the opportunity ahead for these AI builders, too.

If there’s a criticism of these tools today, you know as well as I do it’s something akin to “Yeah, that little experimental site you spun up quickly is cool but show me one legitimate business built in the same way.” 

Those businesses do exist already, and there are many more to come. But the point is it’s not yet even close to easy enough. The front-end and the back-end is there—the business management layer that ties it all together is not.

Batsirai Chada’s tweet speaks to the opportunity:

It’s not simply a matter of these tools offering a Stripe integration for payments, or an Auth0 integration for authentication. Most of these companies have these types of integrations in place already or they’re under active development.

The true value lies in the workflows that need to be built between these tools. The tools that represent the integration points between the front-ends and the back-ends, and the tools that directly help a business make money.

For example, any developer who has built out the workflows required to connect payments and authentication tools well immediately understands the amount of complexity and custom code required. We learned this very quickly at Outseta when we initially sold to developers—it was those that had struggled through these workflows before that became our initial customers. Why waste time reinventing the wheel?

As we transitioned to selling to less technical builders, we learned an even more important lesson—this group didn’t even realize all of the little workflows that needed to be built. They simply didn't know what they didn't know and that makes sense—they're not trained as software engineers!

It’s stuff like:

• How to prompt a user for payment at login if their account is “Past Due.”
• How to prompt a user for payment if they try to login after their free trial period has ended.
• How to allow users to create multiple accounts associated with the same email.
• How to verify email addresses for new subscribers.
• How to add in password strength requirements to your login up forms.
• How to allow users to re-open an account with a subscription that previously expired.

Yes, the AI app builders of today can slap a sign up and login form onto your site quite quickly, but these workflows become requirements really fast if you’re actually building a business. And sure, you can prompt your way to them… but that’s an awful lot of work and is near impossible when you don’t even know what you should be looking for.

AI app building alone is certainly nice and useful—there’s absolutely a market for building stuff like internal tooling and job boards. But the size of opportunity ahead of these companies expands exponentially when they get serious about the business management layer. I suspect most of them—like Shopify did—really want to enable their customers to build businesses. 

Therein lies the opportunity.

Counterintuitive? Maybe. But we need boilerplates more than ever.

While this may seem like an easy comment to scoff at, if I've learned anything from watching non-technical people build increasingly complex web apps it's that the more guidance you can provide, the more successful they'll be.

Say all of a sudden, 100 million new people take an interest in bowling. You wouldn't ask them to pick the 18 pound ball, try to apply sidespin, and knock down that corner pin on their first roll of the ball. Of course not—you'd throw some bumpers in the gutters, encouraging them to roll the ball slowly and knowing that those guardrails will help them knock their first pins over.

When an influx of novices are suddenly trying to do something in which they are not trained, the real opportunity lies in giving them tools that get then from A to B as quickly as possible—not in giving them a powerful tool and saying "Have at it!"

Make no mistake about it, we're about to see a historic influx on new people trying to build software and digital products for the first time. And if I've learned anything about start-ups, the name of the game is learning to knock over those first few pins before you start applying sidespin.

Cory Zue, founder of SaaS Pegasus, recently wrote a really great article on the role of boilerplates when it comes to AI and coding. I’m buying his bull case—boilerplate functionality will actually become more important as these tools increasingly serve non-technical builders. And more so again when this functionality extends to the tooling that drives revenue growth.

I saw this first hand at Outseta as we started selling to more non-technical buyers building websites and web apps with Webflow. We saw the same thing with Shopify. It’s all playing out in the same fashion, yet again.

The magic of the AI app builders will be realized far more quickly—by far more people—when boilerplates and templates and tools with built-in best practices can be integrated seamlessly rather than by expecting non-technical users to prompt their way to the promised land.

There's a lot more to software engineering than just writing code

For the last 5 years, I have literally woken up every day and jumped on Zoom calls where I’ve worked with non-technical builders as they’ve built digital products. More often than not, without an understanding of the fundamental concepts really required to build digital products well.

I’ve answered their support tickets. And I’ve had to learn technical concepts that were previously foreign to me so I could explain these concepts to them, too.

My own experience as a Co-founder of Outseta also supports this point. When we started the company, I’d been working in tech for about 7 years and had been part of some hot start-ups. I was a daily user of billing tools, and CRM tools, and email tools. I thought I was well-versed in what we’d come to build.

But through the process of working with my Co-founders Dimitris and Dave—two engineers with about 15 years more experience than me—I came to realize how much I didn’t know. They made critical decisions around the architecture and workflows within our product that I initially thought were crazy, but would prove to be very, very right.

For example, I remember when we introduced the idea of Outseta’s billing stages I was very certain that we should allow our users to edit the billing stages pertaining to their customers freely. Want to move a customer from "Subscribing" to "Past Due?" You should obviously be able to—right?

No! Instead, these stages are not editable—they simply reflect what’s actually occurring with a subscriber based on the payments that have or haven’t been processed successfully in the real world. That seemed wildly inflexible to me, but it’s absolutely “correct.” With editable billing stages, the information in the product could become disconnected from the reality of what's transpired in the real world.

This is one silly example, but the point remains—there’s a lot more that goes into building great software than initially meets the eye. It’s not just about writing code, it’s about software engineering. And that’s where predefined workflows, and best practices, and boilerplates can actually be hugely beneficial—because we're going to have an awful lot of people who are not software engineers building software.

Without proper guidance, a lot of otherwise smart and confident non-technical builders will simply end up building poorly constructed products that do little more than contribute to the world of AI slop and the era of vibe-coded catastrophes. Boilerplates have a huge opportunity to help here.

And when it comes to integrating payments and authentication and CRM and email tools, so many of these workflows not only impact the user experience but also directly impact your ability to make money.

Everything has changed and nothing has changed

As I consider all this my overwhelming conclusion is that once again everything has changed, yet nothing has changed. Everything has changed in terms of:

• Software development is being further democratized
• The speed at which you can build has accelerated
• Prompting represents a new method of writing code

This stuff is new and we all need to adapt and embrace these shifts.

But in so many ways, nothing has changed too. This is just another revolution of the hype-cycle and the pointless tribal squabbles over tools and methods. Yes, there will be more people who can build software more rapidly, but we all have access to the same stuff. I’d argue that the ability to write code was never what held you back from building a successful tech company anyways.

If you couldn’t learn to code or find a way to recruit someone who could, you probably weren’t going to build a successful tech company anyways. Your ability to sell an idea, recruit talent, and learn what you don’t know has always been a much better predictor of success than your ability to write javascript.

A successful company comes from a good idea in a good market. From solid execution on product. From marketing, and customer service, and persistence, and luck. The recipe to build a successful SaaS company remains unchanged.

Otherwise, you’re just pushing out flashy demos and having pointless arguments on Twitter.

For the Cursor’s and the Replit's and the Lovable’s and the Bolt's of the world, making the business management layer dramatically easier is the next step in getting their customers where they actually want to go.

Whoever does this well may just build the next Shopify.

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Vibe coding with Outseta

Benedicte from our team recently experimented with coding an app with Outseta and Lovable. Outseta provides payments, authentication, CRM, and email tools while Supabase is used as the backend database—complete with row level security.

Lots more to come on this front from our team—and please send us your demos!