Build Economy Is All about Build and None about Economy

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Build Economy Is All about Build and None about Economy<br>Number of released products goes sharply up, but usage metrics stale or decline. So called "build economy" doesn't do builders any good.

Pawel Brodzinski<br>Jul 16, 2026

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When you read about early-stage product development and product ideation, there are two main approaches. The boomer camp is still strong. They’d keep repeating the old agenda: do your discovery first, validate before you build, all that Lean Startup stuff, yadda, yadda, yadda.<br>That makes me a boomer, I guess. Oh well...<br>The other path is all about “building is cheap now,” so it’s an entirely new game. Working software is but a few prompts (and a boatload of tokens) away, so let’s turn all the ideas into products and see what works. We might have been doing this whole exploration and discovery thing only because development was expensive, but guess what: it’s not anymore.<br>Coming from the boomer camp and bringing way more than a decade of experience in product development, I may have a strong conviction about which one is better. Yet it doesn’t stop us from experimenting with both paths. In fact, that’s what we do for a living at Lunar.<br>So maybe it is the moment when we change our ways or go extinct?

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The Spaghetti Strategy

Amazon has been known for decades for encouraging experiments in production. Engineers could try an idea, see how it affects the KPIs, and if it worked, it would stay in production.<br>That’s spaghetti strategy. Throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. These days, Anthropic—and the Claude Code team especially—exemplifies that culture. They build a ton of stuff, put it out there for people to see, and learn what works. Keep what does, revert or fix what does not.<br>No matter what anyone thinks about Anthropic’s financials in general, it would be absurd to deny that Claude is a wildly successful product. So is Amazon’s storefront. It’s no wonder the spaghetti strategy finds followers now, since one can try it without literal billions in one’s coffers.<br>Better still, we have an entire cohort of AI startups whose ambition is to streamline that kind of work. Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and the like.<br>The Build Economy

The reality Lovables of this world want to create is called the build economy. As the story goes, now anyone can build a product. You don’t even need tech skills. Plain English and a Lovable subscription are enough. The rest will be magically taken care of by AI.<br>Of course, to eventually make a product successful, one needs to build many of them. The promise is there, though.<br>A side note: It’s actually in Lovable’s interest to land a working product in the latest possible attempt, i.e., the very last before someone finally gives up. After all, they get their revenues when people keep trying, not when they make it.

Wicked incentives aside, Lovable et al are on a mission to enable everyone—especially non-technical people—to build their products. If we trust their numbers, they’re damn successful so far. That would mean that the build economy is the future.<br>But is it?<br>The Story Lovable’s Numbers Tell Us

When we look at the self-reported numbers from Lovable’s build economy report, the interesting part goes beyond “annualized ARR” (which is the 2026 version of rose-tinted glasses).<br>According to their own claims, Lovable sees 720 million monthly visits across all the projects created by their tools. Color me impressed.<br>I mean, unless we account for the fact that it’s spread over some 50 million apps. That’s like a single, lone visit every other day per app on average. Sure, it’s better than the 3 pageviews per app they reported last year. Still, how many online businesses can survive with just a handful of visits a month?<br>I speculate that using an average doesn’t tell even half of the story. It would be interesting to know how many monthly visits a median Lovable site gets. And how many of them can you expect if you’re, say, in the 90th percentile?

For all we know, we should expect the averages to be heavily inflated by a small number of popular apps. If so, it makes the long tail really long (and really sad). Put bluntly, there are tens of millions of Lovable apps no one uses.<br>The Products No One Needs

OK, I know, the Lovable visit distribution chart I drew above is entirely speculative. Yet, it’s not like I pulled it out of thin air. We see the same pattern everywhere we look.<br>A recent paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research mirrors this dynamic. We release more applications, but the total number of reviews and downloads is either stale or declining. Do the math.

Steam data paints a painfully similar picture for game dev. About half of the games receive fewer than 10 reviews. If you’re a developer, that’s like not even friends and family caring about your game.

The sad long tail becomes longer. And sadder.<br>These are products (apps, games, websites, SaaS,...