Anyone Can Build an App Now, but Who Is Going to Pay for It?

With Claude Code or Cursor, a developer can build a booking app for hair salons over a weekend. It can have online booking, reminder texts and payments. Since anyone can build that now, the app on its own is worth very little. It is worth something once salons pay for it each month and keep paying.

Say you show the app to the owner of a salon. The owner says it looks great and they would use it. That means very little. People are polite, and saying yes on a call costs them nothing.

You learn something when the owner moves the salon's appointments from the old booking system to yours. They pay you $30 a month, and the staff use your app each day. Six months later they are still paying. AI can't speed this up. You have to wait a month for the second payment and six months to know they stayed.

Steve Blank teaches a startup class at Stanford. This spring his students came to the first class with finished products built with AI. There was a product for children with sleep apnea, software for freight forwarding and 3D-printed cooling for GPUs. In earlier years Blank would have been happy to see that after ten weeks. But the finished products made the students feel further along than they were. When they showed them to people, people talked about the product. They didn't talk about their own problems. Many students kept their first idea because they had already built it. They kept it even when customers told them something else.

For next year, Blank changed the class. Each group has to find at least one customer who gives them staff time, data and access. That is the same as the salon owner moving the appointments over to your app.

Blank's students also found that many of their future customers were already building their own version with AI. The salon owner can do that too, and another developer can copy your app in a weekend. They can't copy the salons that already pay you each month.

So once the app works, the next weekend is better spent visiting salons than building another app.

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