It’s Not Mom-and-Pop SaaS Era - by Pawel Brodzinski
SubscribeSign in
It’s Not Mom-and-Pop SaaS Era<br>The message that now anyone can build their own SaaS is misleading at best and an outright lie at worst.
Pawel Brodzinski<br>Jun 24, 2026
Share
I stumbled upon this neat idea: Mom-and-Pop SaaS . Since AI allows everyone to build a digital product, we will increasingly see non-technical people launching SaaS solutions in their respective niches.<br>“Get ready to start seeing (and hopefully building) more and more products from unexpected places. This will be software built by local experts with limited technical experience, but way more experience in everything else.<br>I call this Mom-and-Pop SaaS!”
Elena Verna coins the term in her recent article. It may not be surprising at all that she serves as (Head of?) Growth at Lovable. Everyone building their own app is precisely what Lovable would love to achieve.<br>The picture she paints, though, is vastly oversimplified.
Subscribe
Generating a SaaS Is Not as Easy as It Sounds
For the sake of this argument, I’d be happy to assume that Lovable’s promise—that we can perfectly vibe-code a production-ready solution—is true. I haven’t checked their capabilities recently, but surely the models behind have become more capable. Also, they work hard on improving the abstraction layer they deliver.<br>Yet, as I said multiple times, code is not a product, and a product is not a startup.<br>A good question is what “product” a non-technical person will prompt. I’ve spent more than a quarter of a century in the software industry, and one pattern does not change. Customers primarily think in terms of function.<br>They want features. They envision what software will do and... well, that’s it. OK, those with their careers in creative industries may also be overly picky about some design aspects (typically the wrong ones). The vast majority of insight and concern goes purely to function alone. And it ends like this ↓↓↓
My family will hopefully forgive me for using the old version of their website to make a point here.<br>The website above served its function to the best of the business owners’ understanding of tech (none, in fact). Obviously, we could beautify it or make it look modern, and it still wouldn’t do any better.<br>Successful software is way more than pure function.<br>Some of Them Will Get It Right
The further argument is that of the numbers. Get enough people flailing around with their ideas for digital products, and some of them will get it right.<br>Meccha Chameleon was built by 2 developers in a couple of months. The game took Steam by storm. It has sold more than 7 million copies in two weeks. Everyone’s in awe. It’s possible! If it was a SaaS instead of a computer game, it would be a poster child of Mom-and-Pop SaaS.
Source: SteamDB.info<br>No one mentions more than 20,000 games released each year on Steam. Half of them get fewer than 10 reviews. That’s literally no one caring beyond developers and their families (and not even the whole families). The message is “You can do it! You should try!”<br>“[Opportunity to build a SaaS] literally didn’t exist for most people, a few years ago. Devs could do this as a side hustle (and a lot of them made bank doing exactly that), but now’s the first time that all of the millions of people like you and me can realistically turn their expertise into products .”
That’s Elena Verna again (emphasis mine). “You can do it! You should try!” Indeed, if “all of the millions of people like you and me” try to build a SaaS with Lovable, a few of us will succeed. By the same token, if we all play the lottery, someone will hit the jackpot.
That’s the message Lovable would want us to believe.<br>A side note: “a lot of developers” hitting a jackpot by building a startup as a side hustle is an outright lie. Many could have tried. And largely they failed. Stories such as Mailchimp’s are few and far between. Startups that do survive are predominantly those where founders have only one gig, and it is the startup.<br>Is Vibe-Coding Sustainable?
My argument against the Mom-and-Pop SaaS considers the long game. Any developer would tell you that getting the first version out is the easy part. No customers, no expectations, no ongoing commitments, no submitted issues to fix, no feature requests, no nothing. When you break something, no one cares. When you remove something, no one complains. Simply, there is no one to care or complain just yet.<br>Once you get the first revenues, the game changes. It is a commitment. If adding a thing breaks an existing feature, it’s suddenly a problem. If people stumble upon a bug, it’s a problem. Heck, if you don’t add things customers want, that’s a problem, too.<br>Even when everything works fine, software requires maintenance. Tech stacks evolve, and old versions are discontinued. Security patches are a thing (and an important one). Every now and then, APIs and integrations need attention. Backward compatibility is (sadly) a 20th-century...