The middle is getting hollowed out. That might be the point.
Today I watched Sam Parr and Shaan Puri on My First Million. The first section was the one that stayed with me.
They were talking about enthusiasm as a moat: be the only, not the best, and whittle the generic bits off until you are in a market of one.
That sits almost completely opposite what a16z has been saying this year. The easy interface layer is getting eaten: frontend, thin SaaS, anything whose pitch is "we built a nicer UI." A nicer screen used to feel like a moat, and it is worth less every month.
The podcast version is simpler. If you have extreme enthusiasm and actual knowledge in a small niche, you can build a small profitable business. Sometimes you can scale it. Sometimes you can sell it. It does not have to stay a you-shaped job forever.
You build somewhere a bit obscure and unloved, and you find a weird way in: different packaging, a different way of selling.
Their example is Asia Grant in New York, who runs Scent Social Club and takes people on perfume tours through the niche shops.
Before you show up she sends a survey about your personality and what you are into. Then she walks you through a few high-end perfume shops, three to five stores, a few scents each, and tells you why this one is yours. The private tour Sam sat on is about $500. The public Nolita group tour on her site is $155 for two hours, eight people or fewer, and she also does company events. Sam figured she has something like 15,000 Instagram followers and that this is already a full-time living in New York. That is his read, not a filing. She also co-founded Redoux, a fragrance brand that has been in Vogue and the Times, so the tours are not the only thing on the table.
Sam went on the private one. He does not care about perfume, and he still almost bought a $1,200 bottle before asking for the cheaper one. That is the point. She is not selling cologne. She is selling the feeling of having a scent that is you. Shaan called it horoscopes, but better: a cold read, then a product on the back end with ridiculous margins.
The tour is the product, and the tour is also the content, which is how you get the Reels and TikTok loop. Same move they described with Hormozi. His scaling workshops are five grand a seat. The room makes money, and the room is also a clip factory. You have seen the clips.
It is the same shape as Museum Hack. Nick Gray charged for a museum tour that was not lame. Sam remembered it as about $200 a head and "five pieces I would steal today." Gray's own version was cheaper tickets and a simpler pitch: ten cool things he found, and three he wanted to steal. The company did about $2.8 million the year he sold it, hired actors and comedians as guides, and he sold the thing to his leadership team. Real-world experience, then a sellable asset.
Now contrast that with the software side.
a16z's line, in different mouths, has been that the comfortable middle in software is dying: thin frontend products and generic SaaS you could vibe-code, where the moat on "we designed it nicely" is evaporating. What still looks like a company on that side is the deeper bet, ambitious systems and real workflow, a small team covering an enormous surface because the tool layer got cheap. That usually means a long grind or a lot of capital before it looks like a business.
So the middle looks hollowed out.
Simple easy SaaS is harder to turn into a real company. You might still vibe-code something overnight and make $100k if you already have an audience. The version where you grow that to a few million over a few years is getting harder.
What is left sits at the poles.
One pole is in-person, real-life, slightly strange projects, the kind of enthusiasm you cannot fake, where the thing itself becomes the content.
The other is the massive bet: a new kind of software, a new system, something a small team can only cover because the tool layer got so cheap.
I do not think that is a problem. We are losing the loved middle, the nice little software business that used to feel like the default smart move.
Just know which pole you are on. Do not build in the middle and hope it becomes either.